She turned upon me abruptly when she thought her step-mother was beyond ear-shot.
"But how did you get here?" she asked.
"Here?"
"All this." She indicated space and leisure by a wave of the hand at hall and tall windows and sunlit terrace. "Weren't you the housekeeper's son?"
"I've adventured. My uncle has become--a great financier. He used to be a little chemist about twenty miles from Bladesover.
We're promoters now, amalgamators, big people on the new model."
"I understand." She regarded me with interested eyes, visibly thinking me out.
"And you recognised me?" I asked.
"After a second or so. I saw you recognised me. I couldn't place you, but I knew I knew you. Then Archie being there helped me to remember."
"I'm glad to meet again," I ventured. "I'd never forgotten you."
"One doesn't forget those childish things."
We regarded one another for a moment with a curiously easy and confident satisfaction in coming together again. I can't explain our ready zest in one another. The thing was so. We pleased each other, we had no doubt in our minds that we pleased each other.
From the first we were at our ease with one another. "So picturesque, so very picturesque," came a voice from above, and then: "Bee-atrice!"
"I've a hundred things I want to know about you," she said with an easy intimacy, as we went up the winding steps....
As the four of us sat at tea together under the cedar on the terrace she asked questions about my aeronautics. My aunt helped with a word or so about my broken ribs. Lady Osprey evidently regarded flying as a most indesirable and improper topic--a blasphemous intrusion upon the angels. "It isn't flying," I explained. "We don't fly yet."
"You never will," she said compactly. "You never will."
"Well," I said, "we do what we can."
The little lady lifted a small gloved hand and indicated a height of about four feet from the ground. "Thus far," she said, "thus far--AND NO FARTHER! No!"
She became emphatically pink. "NO," she said again quite conclusively, and coughed shortly. "Thank you," she said to her ninth or tenth cake. Beatrice burst into cheerful laughter with her eye on me. I was lying on the turf, and this perhaps caused a slight confusion about the primordial curse in Lady Osprey's mind.
"Upon his belly shall he go," she said with quiet distinctness, "all the days of his life."
After which we talked no more of aeronautics.
Beatrice sat bunched together in a chair and regarded me with exactly the same scrutiny, I thought, the same adventurous aggression, that I had faced long ago at the tea-table in my mother's room. She was amazingly like that little Princess of my Bladesover memories, the wilful misbehaviours of her hair seemed the same--her voice; things one would have expected to be changed altogether. She formed her plans in the same quick way, and acted with the same irresponsible decision.
She stood up abruptly.
"What is there beyond the terrace?" she said, and found me promptly beside her.
I invented a view for her.
At the further corner from the cedar she perched herself up upon the parapet and achieved an air of comfort among the lichenous stones. "Now tell me," she said, "all about yourself. Tell me about yourself; I know such duffers of men! They all do the same things. How did you get--here? All my men WERE here. They couldn't have got here if they hadn't been here always. They wouldn't have thought it right. You've climbed."
"If it's climbing," I said.
She went off at a tangent. "It's--I don't know if you'll understand--interesting to meet you again. I've remembered you.
I don't know why, but I have. I've used you as a sort of lay figure--when I've told myself stories. But you've always been rather stiff and difficult in my stories--in ready-made clothes--a Labour Member or a Bradlaugh, or something like that.
You're not like that a bit. And yet you ARE!"
She looked at me. "Was it much of a fight? They make out it is.
I don't know why."
"I was shot up here by an accident," I said. "There was no fight at all. Except to keep honest, perhaps and I made no great figure in that. I and my uncle mixed a medicine and it blew us up. No merit in that! But you've been here all the time. Tell me what you have done first."
"One thing we didn't do." She meditated for a moment.
"What?" said I.
"Produce a little half-brother for Bladesover. So it went to the Phillbrick gang. And they let it! And I and my step-mother--we let, too. And live in a little house."
She nodded her head vaguely over her shoulder and turned to me again. "Well, suppose it was an accident. Here you are! Now you're here, what are you going to do? You're young. Is it to be Parliament? heard some men the other day talking about you.
Before I knew you were you. They said that was what you ought to do."...
She put me through my intentions with a close and vital curiosity. It was just as she had tried to imagine me a soldier and place me years ago. She made me feel more planless and incidental than ever. "You want to make a flying-machine," she pursued, "and when you fly? What then? Would it be for fighting?
I told her something of my experimental work. She had never heard of the soaring aeroplane, and was excited by the thought, and keen to hear about it. She had thought all the work so far had been a mere projecting of impossible machines. For her Pilcher and Lilienthal had died in vain. She did not know such men had lived in the world.
"But that's dangerous!" she said, with a note of discovery.
"Oh!--it's dangerous."
"Bee-atrice!" Lady Osprey called.
Beatrice dropped from the wall to her feet.
"Where do you do this soaring?"
"Beyond the high Barrows. East of Crest Hill and the wood."
"Do you mind people coming to see?"
"Whenever you please. Only let me know"
"I'll take my chance some day. Some day soon." She looked at me thoughtfully, smiled, and our talk was at an end.
IV
All my later work in aeronautics is associated in my memory with the quality of Beatrice, with her incidenta] presence, with things she said and did and things I thought of that had reference to her.
