Chapter VI

At their places before the magical barrier on the long table they had two daiquiris apiece, followed with melon and prosciutto, chicken marengo with white wine and grapes, avocado salad and spumoni.

"Indeed," Deborah said dimpling, "if this be the food of thy age, Darling Charles, then Belvoir can be but a small miracle to thee."

He shook his head and replied, "We do have what must seem miracles of living to thee--to you, Debby--but Belvoir is years, perhaps centuries, and billions of miles beyond our reach. So marvelous is it, in fact, that I'm becoming once more persuaded this is all a dream.

"Certainly," he went on softly, "I've dreamed for years of having a girl like you, dear--and you're here and seem to show a certain fondness for me."

"Charles," she said simply, "don't jest about that." She regarded him gravely, then said, "Prithee, Charles, if I be thy dream, then how is it that thou art mine? For surely, never in my deepest sleep, have I e'er dreamed of a man like thyself."

He reached out and touched her and the softness of her flesh, beneath the now-limp nightgown, was as real as the touch of his own. Sudden terror struck him as he accepted emotionally for the first time the fact that Belvoir might not be a substance created by his own subconscious. If Belvoir were real, then he would never see her again.

"Charles darling, are you ill?"

He looked down, discovered that he was gripping the dessert spoon in his fingers as if it were a weapon. He unlocked clamped jaws and said, "Sorry, Debby, I'm okay. Now--I'd like to take a look at the arrangements Ortine has made for our return."

She rose quickly and he followed her out.

The gates to and from Belvoir, she showed him, were directly opposite the cubicles, one to each cubicle. Deborah entered the one opposite her own chamber, revealing a featureless room, just large enough to contain her portable bed. At its far end was an opaque wall.

She shivered, said softly, "I like not this place, Charles. Yet it is through these chambers that all of us were brought to Belvoir, through them that we must make our return journeys. Charles, I am afeard."

"You and me both," he told her. "Come on to my place and let's see if we cannot dope something out."

She looked puzzled by his twentieth-century phrases but went with him dutifully. Before entering he tested the portal opposite his own cubicle, found it exactly similar to hers.

Deborah had to pluck at his sleeve to remind him she was there. She said, "Verily thee are far from me much of the time."

"Not so far," he replied, leading her into his cubicle. At once her soft strong young arms went around him, her lips sought hungrily for his. He summoned the strength to thrust her from him, said, "Not now, honey--we've got a lot of thinking to do and we may not have much time to do it in."

She subsided meekly and sat down beside him on the portable cot. She said, "I too have the same feeling, Darling Charles."

"Listen, honey," he told her after a minute. "You say you have never dreamed of a man like me?"

"How could I?" she countered simply. "In my time no man such as thee exists. Perhaps the king in London Town, or the Crown Prince...."

"Listen, honey--the only chance we have to stay together is to go out of here together on the same bed." He gave the couch beneath them a slap.

"Durst we?" Her voice was tiny but there was a compensating blaze of sudden hope in her blue eyes.

"We'll dare anything," Justin retorted, "because the worst thing that could happen to either of us right now is to be separated. We durst--now the question is, who goes back into whose time?"

"I should love to visit thine era, Darling Charles."

"I'd love to have you," he replied. "But for ten years now I've been wanting to see yours. We're going back to your life together."

"But Charles!" Her eyes grew round with fright. "Ye can't! Think on it--we might awaken in bed together and--"

"Would that be bad?" he asked.

"Nay--but there is my mother. She well might--"

"And what about my wife?" he countered quietly.

* * * * *

She seemed to leap a full foot away from him, her eyes blazing. She whispered, "Charles--you never told me you were married!"

"I'd be a pretty poor man if some woman hadn't picked me out," he replied. "Furthermore, I have not been in love with my wife for a good many years--nor she in love with me."

"But this is horrible!" the girl moaned.

Justin scowled at her, utterly taken aback by her reaction. Other hints she had dropped came back to him, Dr. Phillips' pitying words about her problem. He said, "I take it then that you are involved with a married man in your time."

She flared at him, "Nay, I am _not_ involved--though all about me, even my father, aye, even my mother, seem to wish me on my backside with this horrid old man. They say 'tis for the good of this or the welfare of that that I should give myself to him--_me_, who cannot stand the stench of his very breath!"

Justin had slipped from the cot. Facing her he said softly, "All the more reason that I should go with you. _I_ can take care of this unwelcome suitor and at least I shall not have a wife in your time for almost two hundred years to come--unless of course I marry you."

"That would be highly improper, not to say felonious," she retorted but he could sense the softening in her voice.

He said, "No more improper than coming to my world and having my wife catch us in bed together. How would you explain that to your sweet New England conscience? Or perhaps we'd better call off the whole thing."

"Nay, Charles," she said simply and stood up and was briefly in his embrace. After a little, her face puckered with worry, "But Darling Charles, how _am_ I to explain thee? And how will ye survive? Ye'll arrive in midwinter in ye'r outlandish costume without a groat to ye'r name."

"Wait a minute." He thrust her from him again and pondered the problems that would face him should he and Deborah actually be successful in their effort to flee Belvoir together.

"Yes, Charles?" she asked him after awhile.

"It'll be all right," he told her, "if we can just get over the hurdle of your parents. I'll need a little money, some clothes."

"Those I can get ye," she replied promptly. "I have a small savings in my cupboard--'tis not much--just what I've saved from dress-making these two years past. And I can get ye some of father's cast-off garments. But what will ye do then, Darling Charles?"

"I'll have my problems, never fear," he told her. "But you seem to have forgotten one thing in my favor--I have lived two centuries in the future, Debby."

"And prithee, how will't avail thee in my time?" she asked him.

"Just this way," he stated confidently. "I know what the course of great events will be in thy--in your time, honey. Once I have obtained the ear and trust of someone with money to speculate I'll be able to take care of myself, never fear."

"And that is work for a man like yourself?" Deborah looked at him doubtfully. "Somehow it seems to me dishonest," she told him. "Ye'r taking unfair advantage."

"And what is fair in love and war?" he countered.

"'Tis a wicked and foolish saying--or so my mother has told me," the girl replied.

"But you'll do it--you darling!" He pulled her close to him and she made no resistance. They were still locked together when a throat was cleared in the doorway.

Dr. Phillips regarded them benignly. "I must say," he remarked, "that compared to some of the lewd sights I have witnessed here in Belvoir, it is refreshing to see a couple as well-favored as yourselves embracing. But that was not the purpose of my visit. I have come to say farewell."

"Then it's coming soon?" Justin asked him quickly.

"Perhaps you two have been too--er--occupied to hear but the five-minute signal sounded a brief while ago. I wish you both good luck."

Deborah broke from Charles, ran to the elderly don and planted a buss on his cheek. He fluttered like a moth, visibly touched, said, "Thank you, my dear," and added quite irrelevantly, "'Twill be a great relief to return once more to my breeches."

"Come quickly!" Deborah whispered when they were once more alone.

He needed no urging, raced on tiptoe behind her to her cubicle. Hurriedly she scrambled onto her portable bed, reaching for Justin as he climbed on from the other side. There was scarcely room for both of them.

She whispered, "Charles, I'm afeard."

"We're together, darling," he whispered back.

She was silent for a brief while. Then she whispered, "Have ye no children?"

"None," he replied. "Marie has no wish to spoil her figure."

For some reason this seemed to dispel both Deborah's jealousy and guilt. She held him closer still and murmured, "Poor Darling Charles. No wonder ye dreamt of other women."

"No wonder ..." he replied, scarcely knowing what he said. For at that moment sleep crept over him irresistibly.

Once again he was in the extinct odd little train, emerging from the choking tunnel. Miraculously, rumpled nightgown and all, Deborah was with him. Her blue eyes were red with smoke and she was coughing and frightened. She managed to gasp, "What is it--what is this horrid thing?"

He held her close and said, "It's a part of my dream, darling."

Even as he spoke and wondered how and why his dream should be dominant it changed. The rectangular windows of the old wooden coach grew indistinct. The car roof seemed to grow dimmer, finally to vanish altogether.

Against the starlit black of space were outlined the spars and ropes and masts and sails of a full-rigged sailing ship. They stood on its gently rocking poop and forward and below Justin could make out the waist and, beyond, the rise of the forecastle and the sharp lift of the sprit from the bow.

He looked at Deborah, saw how the breeze caught her hair and whipped it like some magnificent pennant of brownish gold and saw that she was speaking to him, crying, "This is _my_ dream, Darling Charles--and I like it far better than thine."

"So do I," he replied, over-whelmed utterly by the miracle.

They floated slowly down until the sky once more was blue above them, first a dark unlikely blue, then lighter and increasingly familiar in hue. Once more Justin saw the earth flatten out and the first white woolly clouds appear.

But from then on all trace of similarity with his own dream ended.

They were entering Boston Harbor and in his excitement Justin held Deborah's hand so tightly that she cried out and he relaxed his grip with a murmur of apology.

"Castle William!" he murmured as they swept past the chief harbor fortification, from which an English ensign flapped gaily in the breeze.

Where the South End now rests was only water and, beyond it, the highlands of Dorchester and Nantasket rose in wooded splendor, innocent of the grime of industrial tenements and factories. They rounded a headland and, slowly, Boston itself swam into view.

Justin let out a cry of sheer delight. There was the old city--little more than a large town by twentieth-century standards with its fewer than twenty thousand inhabitants--its numerous spires and church steeples topping its hills, its houses and buildings crowding the wharves to which were moored fishermen, coasters and ocean ships, their masts making an intricate and fantastic pattern against the sky.

Then darkness whirled briefly about them and they seemed to be plucked from the deck of the white ship by a sort of whirlpool. Justin cried out, involuntarily, again felt the firm softness of Deborah's hand pressed against his lips. He was lying on the edge of a bed whose bottom seemed to be spilling over the side.

"Deborah?" sounded a shrill matronly voice from somewhere beyond a door, closed and invisible in the darkness. "Deborah, are ye all right? I thought I heard ye cry out."

"Just a dream, mama. I'm quite all right," the girl called back. There was a nervous silent wait, the sound of scuffling footsteps growing fainter, then the slam of another door.

"I thought surely ye'r outcry would have them all about us," said the girl reprovingly. "Ye'r really here with me after all and methinks ye'll be a great problem, if not my ruination forever."