Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  It made her shiver. She turned and leaned back against the parapet. The other side of the bridge was in the ruthless hands of the paviors, who had literally left no stone unturned in order to produce that utter chaos in which the heart of the contractor delighteth. The large slabs of paving-stones, standing and lying about in all sorts of positions, made the place look — ugh! — like a graveyard, and the displaced earth and heaps of sand looked like half-made graves, in which the spade and pick of the sexton had ceased to clink. There was a bright red spot of fire about a hundred yards from her — someone was comfortable beside it, she supposed — and somehow she hated that patch of red light more than anything else in the whole picture.

  Alice had found a fresh lodging easily enough, and this time she had adopted the badge of marital servitude, and had taken another name. The new room struck her as cheerless and unwelcoming, and her poor possessions looked less friendly than they had done in the old attic at Spray’s Buildings. Her bundle of work had been brought with the rest, but she seemed to have no heart to begin it, nor yet to get herself food, and she sat on there, hour after hour, till the sense of complete isolation grew too much for her. At Spray’s Buildings she had had no friends, and had valued her few acquaintances but slightly, and she did not realise the amount of comfort that could be got out of a chance meeting with Miss Fludger on the stairs until such meetings were things of the past.

  ‘I will go out,’ she had said, rising at last with a feeling that even in strange and unregarding faces there would be companionship of a kind. So she had left her room and had wandered about, passing more than one spot hung thickly round with memories of her short day of sunshine. Then when night fell she felt that she could not go back to that new inhospitable room of hers.

  She pictured it dark, cheerless, and cold, shuddered as she thought of the broad streak of moonlight which would come through the uncurtained window, and lie on that bare floor. How dark the corners of the room would be. So she wandered on, and the people grew scarcer and scarcer, and she grew fainter and fainter. She would have been glad of food now, but all the shops were shut, and when she came to Blackfriars’ Bridge she was too tired to go any further. And as she stood and looked at the river gleaming in the moonlight, the question came into her mind.

  ‘Need she go further? Was not this the fitting end for such as she?’

  A spasm of madness caught her. What an easy way out of all her troubles; what an obvious solution of all her difficulties!

  She walked straight before her, stooping to pass under the protecting pole in the middle of the road, falling once over a block of stone and cutting her hands, she thought. She climbed the tomb-like stones, and in a moment was on her hands and knees partly on the parapet and partly on some stones that leaned against it. She looked over without changing her attitude for quite a minute. It made her giddy to look down. She could not stand up, as she had pictured herself doing when that madness first came upon her.

  She could drop over, though, and she would. Courage! In another minute it would all be over.

  She had made a movement to turn her feet towards the water, when her shoulders were caught by two hands, and she was lifted bodily back on to the bridge.

  ‘You little fool!’ said the owner of the hands, which gave her a little shake before they loosened their hold of her. ‘What do you want to go drinking of that poison for? It ain’t fit to drown a cat in, let alone a human woman female.’

  Alice’s face was in her hands. She had sunk down against the stones on which she had climbed before. She shivered.

  ‘Oh, I am so cold!’ she said, almost in a whisper, without taking her hands away. The madness had died out of her completely.

  ‘You’d have been colder if it hadn’t been for me; and oh, the taste in your mouth would have been something dreadful. Come and have a drop of my missus’s coffee, by my fire; it’s a deal sweeter than wot you was after. The Government ought to take it up,’ he said, sententiously, but whether he meant the river, the coffee, or the fire, he did not explain.

  He helped her to rise, took her by the elbow in a sort of amateur-constable way, and led her over and round the snares and pitfalls which lay between them and that red eye which had seemed to watch them.

  It was a sort of openwork iron pot, full of hot coals, and a species of shelter was contrived round it by means of a judicious arrangement of paving stones and tarpaulin. When he had made her sit down on an inverted basket placed in the warmest corner by the fire, she glanced at him for the first time. He was a big, burly, black-bearded man; he had a kindly expression, and merry eyes, with a sort of cast in one of them which made it difficult to be sure which way he was looking.

  ‘Still cold?’ he asked, with one eye on her and the other apparently on the pole star. ‘Have this coat; I’m warm enough. I had to hurry up so to catch you, young woman.’

  He threw a rough pea-jacket round her as she said, looking down, —

  ‘How did you catch me? Where did you come from?’

  ‘Where did I come from? Why, from here. Directly I saw you cross the road I knew what was up. I never would let anyone go into that ditch if I could help it. It ought to belong to the Commissioners of Sewers,’ he ended, having apparently changed his mind concerning the administrative functions of ‘Government.’

  ‘The question is,’ he went on, ‘where did you come from, and what did you come for?’

  ‘I’ve come from Gray’s Inn Road,’ she said.

  ‘How lucky, now. I live that way. I shall be able to see you home in an hour or two, when my mate comes to take his turn. You’ll just have time to get warm. Here, drink this coffee. Had any tea?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Any dinner?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nor any breakfast neither, I’ll back. I suppose you’re hard up; that’s enough to make anyone go anywhere but into that,’ with a backward jerk of his thumb towards what seemed to be his pet aversion. He was a man whose occupation caused him to pass a good deal of his time on bridges, and he knew the river and the smells thereof.

  ‘No,’ said Alice, ‘I’m not very hard up, and I’m in work, too; but I moved into a new place to-day, and I felt too lonely to bother about dinner or anything, and I expect going without made me a bit wild and soft like.’

  ‘Have some of this,’ was his answer, and soon Alice began to feel a returning sense of physical comfort steal through her, as she sat resting by the cheering fire, drinking the hot coffee from a tin mug, with a slice of bread and cheese on her knee, while her companion kept up a constant ripple of somewhat inconsequent talk, which was his notion of ‘ making conversation’ for his guest. She took her part in the dialogue with an ease which surprised herself. It seems very strange that people should not be more affected than they generally are by having been face to face with death. The fact is, that it is so impossible to realise subjectively what death is, that people feel less awestruck at having been so near it than they do at having been within an ace of having their leg broken, or of being marked with small-pox. Perhaps this is why so many men sleep sound sleeps and eat hearty breakfasts just before execution.

  It was a long time since anyone had thought it worth while to talk so much to Alice, and she felt so interested, and withal so comfortable, that it never occurred to her that this interlude of warmth and companionship must soon be over, and that then she would have to face the desolate streets and that cheerless room. Of seeking again the chill refuge from which her new acquaintance had saved her she certainly never thought. That madness was over.

  Her black-bearded preserver was in the midst of an economic dissertation of a somewhat confused character on the reasons of hard times and bad wages, when a black shadow falling on a moonlit slab of stone close by them made them both look up.

  ‘Why, if it isn’t Mr Peter Hitch,’ said the pavior. ‘So you’re out again, sir? Chilly night, ain’t it? Come and have a warm. This young woman’s had a warm, and she feels better for it
, I’ll be bound.’

  The new-comer sat down on some boards near the fire with a graceful salutation towards Alice.

  ‘It is cold,’ he said, with a distinctly foreign accent. ‘You are the lucky one, Mr Toomey, with your warm fire.’

  Alice glanced furtively at the stranger. He was tall, and was not dressed as she would have expected Mr Toomey’s friends to be. He wore a grey military cloak with a high collar, and a large soft felt hat. The brim was turned up in a rather unusual way in front, and leaving exposed as it did a broad, well-shaped forehead and piercing grey eyes, gave to the whole face a bold and daring look. He did not seem to look at Alice at all, and yet he had hardly been seated a minute before he turned to her and said, —

  ‘Forgive me, but I feel as if you were a sort of acquaintance already. I sat just behind you at a lecture in Soho last night. I am not mistaken — you were there, weren’t you?’

  The introduction of a third person to the enjoyment of the fire and shelter had brought back to Alice the full consciousness of her position, but the new-comer spoke to her so deferentially, and treated her so exactly as if they had met in quite an ordinary way, and there were nothing unusual in the situation, that she felt herself grow a little more at ease again as she answered, ‘Yes; I was there.’

  ‘Why, I’m blest if I wasn’t there, too,’ broke in Toomey, ‘and a rare good ‘un he was as spoke. Countryman o’ yours too, eh, Mr Peter Hitch? By the way,’ he added, as the other nodded assent, ‘I was wanting to have a word or two with you, if miss here will excuse us. It’s on the subject as you knows on,’ he explained, seeing the other’s look of surprise, and embellishing his speech by sundry winks, to which his visual peculiarities imparted an unusually enigmatical character.

  The two men stepped a few paces away, and then Toomey said, —

  ‘I say, mister, I’m in rather a tight place, and perhaps you can tell me a way out of it. That there young woman’ (here he lowered his voice) ‘would have been down somewhere off Greenwich by this time if it hadn’t been for me — the tide was just on the turn. I stopped her going over, and now I feel responsible, like. I did think of taking her home to the missus, but my Mary Jane, though she have the kindest heart, has a sharp tongue, and I don’t know quite how she might take it, nor what she might say in the first surprise, like, before she could be got to listen to reason, and that pore young thing’s in trouble enough, I know, without being jawed at, and I can’t abide jaw myself neither. And yet I don’t like to lose sight of her just yet, and what am I to do?’

  ‘I will charge myself with her,’ said the other, without the slightest hesitation. ‘You can trust her to me, friend Toomey, can you not?’

  ‘I’d trust you with anything, sir,’ said Toomey.

  The other went straight back to the fire where Alice sat, already deep again in her own bitter thoughts.

  ‘I am going home now, and as I go I will see you to your house. Come.’

  She rose at once, and held out her hand to Mr Toomey.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ she said, ‘for all your goodness. Good-bye.’

  ‘Good-bye,’ said Toomey, shaking her hand vigorously. ‘This gentleman will take good care of you.’

  ‘Take my arm,’ said her escort, when they got on to the pavement. ‘ As you go to the Agora, I suppose we are interested in the same subjects, and perhaps know some of the same people. Do any of your friends go there?’

  ‘I don’t know anyone who goes there. I’ve never been there before myself.’

  ‘Did you go by chance?’

  ‘No.’ She hesitated a moment. ‘I wanted to hear the lecture.’

  ‘Then we do take an interest in the same subjects. Which way do you go?’ he asked, as they reached Ludgate Circus.

  ‘Straight on; I am living near Gray’s Inn Road.’

  ‘Are you living with friends?’

  ‘No, I am living alone.’

  ‘Are your parents living?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘ Oh, yes.’

  From anyone else she could and would have resented such questioning, but there was something about this man that compelled her to answer him.

  ‘Were they unkind to you?’

  ‘No, no!’ cried Alice. ‘They have always been the best of the best to me.’

  ‘Kind parents living,’ he said musingly, ‘and you are not with them. Our good friend yonder told me how he met you. Tell me — what does it all mean? It will be to your good to tell me.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Everything.’ He laid his hand on the hand that was on his arm. ‘I know you will tell me.’

  And very much to her own bewilderment, she found herself telling him, not all, but enough for him to be able easily enough to guess all. She laid most stress upon the sense of desolation which had come over her in her new lodgings, and on the resistless impulse that had driven her out into the streets. When once she had begun to speak, she found a quite unexpected relief in the telling of this story which had never passed her lips before.

  ‘It is the loneliness I mind now,’ she ended; ‘not the work, though that is hard enough.’

  ‘The greater part of life is hard,’ said her companion, ‘and the best thing in it for some of us is to be able to make the lives of others a little less hard. I think it possible I may be able to make your life somewhat easier for you. At any rate I think I could manage to get you work which would be better paid for than your tailors’ sewing.’

  ‘Thank you,.’ was all Alice said. ‘You are very kind.’

  ‘I shall do that for you with much pleasure, but in return you must do something for me. I cannot part from you until you have promised me never again to attempt what you were prevented in to-night.’

  I cannot promise never to do it. All I can say is, I do not mean to now.’

  ‘At any rate, promise that you will do nothing till you have seen me again.’

  ‘Yes, I will promise that. I wonder whether the house door will be unlocked. We are close there now. If it is not, I must walk about till morning.’

  ‘I must walk with you in that case, so we will see before I leave you whether it is or not.’

  She looked at him, and for the first time realised that her companion was not of her own class.

  ‘No; don’t come further than here. I only came here to-day, you know, and I must not be seen walking with a — a — gentleman.’

  ‘Am I a gentleman? I am afraid all your countrymen would not give me that title; men call me a Socialist. Ho-la — you’ve heard that name before? Does it frighten you?’

  ‘No, I am not frightened.’

  ‘I will wait here,’ he said, ‘till I see if your house receives you. If not, come back to me, and we will walk together till it can. I will come and see you to-morrow — or rather this — evening, and I hope to bring good news. Do not be downhearted; things will look brighter this time to-morrow.’

  ‘Oh, I must not forget to ask your name. Did Mr Toomey call you right?’

  ‘Ah, no,’ he said, smiling; ‘our good Toomey is not a linguist. My name is Petrovitch. What is yours? I must know that, because of asking for you when I come. I will come in the evening.’

  ‘My name is — Mrs — Mrs Litvinoff. Good-bye.’

  ‘Good-bye,’ he said, with a start and quite a new expression on his face. ‘I will come at noon.’

  CHAPTER XI. COUNT LITVINOFF IS SYMPATHETIC.

  AT the moment when Mrs Fludger’s sense of propriety was being outraged by what she termed, in a subsequent recital of her wrongs to her first-floor front, ‘that shindy on the stairs,’ Miss Stanley was lying on the sofa in the sitting-room at Morley’s Hotel, reading the novel that had taken the last season by storm, and pushed everything else out of sight on the bookstalls. But even the thrilling interest of this work did not keep her from falling fast asleep in the middle of the fourth chapter; and she passed the next half hour in a dreamland more pleasant than Morley’s Hotel; for that hostelry,
especially when her father was, as usual, in the City, seemed to her to be deadly dull. She had just come back to the world of solid furniture and characterless window curtains; her first waking thought was that some tea would be worth anything to her just then — except the trouble of getting up to ring for it — and she wished dreamily that waiters could know by intuition when they were wanted. It almost seemed as if they did, for a tap came at the door, and she had to stop her reflections to say,—’Come in.’

  ‘Mr Richard Ferrier,’ said the waiter who appeared. ‘Are you at home, ma’am?’

  ‘Oh, yes; show him up,’ she said; and to herself, wonderingly, ‘How funny of him to come at this time.’ Then, as he entered, ‘Good afternoon, Mr Ferrier. What a dreadful day! Papa has not come home yet.’

  ‘I am very sorry to say,’ said Richard, as he took her offered hand, ‘ that I shall not be able to come this evening.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’ she said, cheerfully. ‘I hope there’s nothing wrong. Can’t your brother come, either?’

  ‘I don’t know, Miss Stanley,’ he answered, leaning one arm on the mantelpiece, and looking down, but not at her, though she had seated herself in a low chair near the fire, and was quite within easy visual range. ‘I am not likely to know much more about my brother.’

  ‘Not know much more about your brother, Mr Richard?’ she said, opening her eyes very wide. ‘What can you mean? Surely you haven’t quarrelled?’

  ‘I suppose we have quarrelled. At any rate, my brother told me half an hour ago never to speak to him again on this side of the grave.’

  Clare felt that this promised to be several degrees more interesting even than her book. She couldn’t help wondering what they had quarrelled about. Was it perhaps —

  ‘What did you say to him?’