Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  ‘You must make allowances for the hopeful faith of a new convert. Perhaps when I’ve held my new belief a little longer I shall be less en r air. But I must say I hope not.’

  ‘Your new beliefs make you very happy, then?’

  ‘They make me want very much to live to see what will happen. It would be terrible to die now before anything is accomplished. You see, I can’t help believing that we shall accomplish something, although I know you think me very high-flown and absurd.’

  ‘You know I think you perfect,’ he said, in a very low voice, and went on hurriedly: ‘ But, for Heaven’s sake, don’t talk about dying; the idea is too horrible. Can’t you guess why I have seemed not sympathetic with your new religion? I have known what it is to believe strongly, to work unceasingly, never to leave off hoping, and trying to show others my hope. I have known what it is to have no life but the life of the cause; to go through year after year still hoping and striving. I have known all this, and more. I have known the heart-sickness of waiting for a dawn that never comes. I know how one may strain every nerve, tax every power, kill one’s body, wear out one’s brain, break one’s heart against the iron of things as they are, and when all is sacrificed, all is gone, all is suffered, have achieved nothing. It is from this I would save you. That you should suffer is a worse evil than any your suffering could remedy. The cause will have martyrs enough without you.’

  ‘Martyrs, yes; but how can it have too many workers?’ she asked, not looking at him.

  ‘To be a worker is to be a martyr,’ he answered, rising and standing near her; ‘and that is the reason why you are the only convert I have never rejoiced over.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she was beginning when he interrupted her. ‘Don’t say that.’ he said. ‘Don’t say you don’t know why I can’t endure the thought of your ever knowing anything but peace and happiness. You know it is because I love you, and my love for you has eaten up all my other loves. Freedom, the Revolution, my country, my own ambition, are all nothing to me. But if you care for the cause I can still work in it, and with a thousand times more enthusiasm than it ever inspired me with before, for you. That can be your way of helping it. Use me as your instrument Make any use you will of me, if only you are safe and happy, and mine.’

  His voice was low with the passion which for the moment thrilling through him made him quite believe his own words.

  Clare had listened silently, her eyes cast down, and her nervous fingers diligently tearing an envelope into little bits, and when he had ended she still did not speak, but her breath came and went quickly.

  ‘You,’ he was beginning again, when she stretched out her hand to silence him.

  ‘No, no,’ she said; ‘don’t say any more — I can’t bear it.’

  ‘Does that mean that you care?’

  ‘It means that this seems the most terrible thing that could have happened to me. That it should be through me that you give up the right.’

  ‘But through you, for you, I will become anything you choose.’

  ‘And that is the worst of all,’ she said, with very real distress. ‘I can ask you to do nothing for my sake.’

  ‘You cannot love me, then?’ he asked, as earnestly as though his happiness hung on her answer.

  ‘ — No,’ she said steadily, ‘I cannot love you. I am very, very sorry—’

  ‘Spare me your pity, at least,’ he said. ‘ But one thing I must ask. Why did you let me see you again after New Tear’s Day? For I told you the same thing then, and you knew then that I loved you.’

  It was true — but Clare hated him for saying it.

  ‘I have changed so much since then,’ she said slowly.

  Several things both bitter and true rose to his lips. He did not give them voice, however. He had never in his life said an unkind thing to a woman. It occurred to him that he was accepting his defeat rather easily, and he looked at her to measure the chances for and against the possible success of another appeal. But in her face was a decision against which he knew there could be no appeal. He felt angry with her for refusing him — angry and unreasonably surprised; and then, in one of the flashes of light that made it so hard for him to understand himself, he saw that if she was to blame for refusing his love, he was ten thousand times more to blame for having sought hers, and this truth brought others with it. His real feeling, he knew, was not anger but relief. He made a step forward.

  ‘You are right,’ he said. ‘I congratulate you on your decision. You were talking of dying just now. You will live long enough to know how much congratulation you merit for having to-day refused to give yourself to a traitor and a villain.’

  ‘A traitor — no, no,’ she said, holding out her hand.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I am not worthy. Some day you will know that I ought never to have touched that hand of yours. Good-bye.’

  And the door shut behind him, and Clare was left standing in the middle of the room with her eyes widely opened, and her hand still outstretched. She stood there till she heard the front door closed, and then sank into a chair. She didn’t want to go on making notes about ‘ The Prophetic Vision’ any more.

  The interview had not been a pleasant one, and it was not pleasant to think over. One of the least pleasant things in this world is a granted wish, granted after it has ceased to be wished. And Clare could not forget that she had desired to win this man’s admiration, at least. She could not forget that he had saved her father’s life — that he had been the first to speak to her of many things once unknown or unconsidered, but now a part of her very life — and she could not forget that when she had first thought of the possibility of his asking her to marry him she had not meant to refuse him. There had been much about him to attract her, and if she had never met Petrovitch she might have given Litvinoff, even now, a different answer. But in Petrovitch she found all the qualities that had fascinated her in Litvinoff, and all on a larger scale, and with a finer development. Litvinoff now seemed to her like a dissolving view of Petrovitch seen through the wrong end of a telescope. He lacked the definiteness of outline, the depth of tone, the intense reality of the other man. Perhaps he seemed more brilliant and dashing; but Hirsch’s story had shown what Petrovitch was. Added to all this was one significant, fact. She had admired in Litvinoff one quality or another, and had desired to attract him. To Petrovitch she herself had been attracted, not by any specific quality or qualities, but by himself — by the man as he was — and this attraction grew stronger with each meeting.

  A fortnight had now passed since the second time she had seen him, and somehow or other she had seen him very often in that time. She knew well enough that neither Litvinoff nor Petrovitch had come to Marlborough Villa to see its mistress.

  And she had been sufficiently certain about the Count’s motives for his visit, but could she be certain about the motive -which brought the elder man there so constantly? Of any effort to make him care for her she was not guilty. In her new frame of mind she would have felt any such attempt to be degrading, alike to herself and to him. And though she knew he came to see her, she could not be sure why he came. Was his evident interest in her only the interest of an apostle in a convert? A certain humility had sprung up in her, along with many other flowers of the heart, and she did not admit to herself that there was a chance of his interest being of another nature. Only, she thought, it would be the highest honour in the world and the deepest happiness to be the woman whom he loved. Not the less because she knew well enough that the woman he loved would hold the second place in his heart, and that he would not wish to hold the first place in hers. That, for both of them, must be filled by the goddess whom Litvinoff had once said he worshipped, and whom he had abjured and abandoned for her sake. She thought of this without a single thrill of gratified pride.

  Miss Stanley sat silent for half an hour, and in that time got through more thinking than we could record if we wrote steadily for half a year. At the end of that time Miss Quaid came home.

  ‘
I hear Count Litvinoff has been here,’ she said, when she entered the study. ‘What is it to be? Am I to have a Countess Litvinoff for a friend?’

  ‘No,’ said Clare, rising and shaking off her reverie; ‘I shall never be anything to Count Litvinoff.’

  Which was, perhaps, a too hasty conclusion.

  * * * * *

  To the reader who has followed the fortunes of Count Litvinoff so far we need hardly mention the fact that as soon as he was clear of Marlborough Villa he pulled out his cigar-case. It had always been a favourite theory of his that a cigar and not a mill-pond was the appropriate sequel to an unsuccessful love affair. Not that it had ever occurred to him as even remotely possible that such an experience could ever be his. Here it was, however, and he had one of those opportunities which always charm the thinker — that of being able to apply to his own case a theory invented for other people. He took a meditative turn round Regent’s Park. It is a strange fact which we do not remember to have seen commented on by any other writer — that when a man comes away from an interview with a girl to whom he has been making love he is inevitably driven to think, not of her alone, but also of one two, three or more of the other girls to whom he has from time to time made love in the remote or recent past Such is the depravity of the ‘natural man’ that these thoughts are not generally sad ones. But Litvinoff s thoughts were genuinely sad. He had said to Miss Stanley that he was a traitor and a villain, and it had not been said for dramatic effect He meant it. He would have given a good many years of any life that might lie before him to undo a few of the years that lay behind.

  ‘I am not consistent enough for a villain,’ he said to himself. ‘I have failed in that part, and now I will go in for my natural rôle of a fool, and I’ve a sort of idea that I shall get on better. And the first thing to be done is to find my little one. Fool as I am, I’ve generally been able to do anything I’ve really set my mind on. The reason I’ve failed in my “deep-laid schemes” has been that I didn’t always care whether I won or not. I can be in the same mind about this matter, however, for a long enough time to achieve what I want. As for principles, they bore me. If it hadn’t been for my principles I shouldn’t have got into half this trouble. What shall I do with myself till my mysterious friend turns up?’

  After a minute’s hesitation he turned into the Zoological Gardens, where he spent some thought on the wasting of an hour or so among the beasts, incurred the undying hatred of an alligator by stirring him up with the ferule of his stick, irritated the llama to the point of expectoration, and grossly insulted the oldest inhabitant of the monkey-house.

  His luncheon was a bath bun and a glass of milk.

  ‘A fourpenny luncheon,’ he said to himself, ‘is the first step in the path of virtue.’

  At half-past three he got back to his lodgings, and sat down with the resolution of going thoroughly into his financial affairs. To that he thought he would devote an hour or two, and in the evening he would try to find the lost clue in Spray’s Buildings. This looking into his finances struck him as being a business-like sort of thing to do, and quite in harmony with his present frame of mind.

  He was soon busy at his light writing-table. Presently he drew from a drawer his banker’s pass-book, made bulky with cancelled cheques. He groaned earnestly.

  ‘Alas!’ he said to himself, ‘how sadly simple and easy it is to sign one’s name on this nice smooth coloured paper. I suppose it’s best to check these off — bankers’ clerks are so dreadfully careless.’

  A most unfounded statement, born of ignorance of business, and a desire to seem to himself as one who understood it. Suddenly he started, and singled out the cheque he had given to Hirsch in the autumn. It bore on it, as endorsement, in a bold, free handwriting, the name, ‘Michael Petrovitch.’

  ‘Hola!’ he said; ‘a namesake of mine. Stay, though. This apostle of our cause does not keep to one hand-writing.’ He walked to the mantelpiece, and taking thence the letter he had received in the morning, he compared the writing.

  ‘H’m — wonder what this means?’ he said, returning to his seat ‘The two writings are not the same, and yet there is something in this writing on the cheque which I seem to have seen before. We’ll try for an explanation before he leaves this room.’

  He went on steadily with his self-imposed task of comparing each cheque with the entry in the book. He had half done them when a ring at the front door bell made him look up.

  ‘Aha! the mysterious Petrovitch is punctual,’ he said to himself.

  It was Petrovitch, though perhaps those who had seen most of him in the last few months would have failed to recognise him. He looked at least ten years younger. The handsome long light beard was gone, and he was close shaved save for a heavy drooping blond moustache.

  As Count Litvinoff heard his visitor’s steps upon the stairs he settled himself back in his chair, with an assumption of a business air, much like that of a very young lawyer about to receive a new client.

  There was a sharp rap at the room door.

  ‘Come in,’ he said.

  The door opened. He sprang to his feet, stood one moment clutching at the table before him, his eyes wide with something that seemed almost terror, and his whole frame rigid with astonishment. Then his expression changed to one of deepest love and delight. There was a crash of furniture, as he flung the little writing-table from him, and it fell shattered against the opposite wall. With a hysterical cry of ‘ Ah, ah, ah, Litvinoff! back from the dead!’ he sprang across the room, threw his arms round the other’s neck, and fell sobbing on his breast.

  CHAPTER XXX. TALKING THINGS OVER.

  BEFORE the echo of that cry had died away, the man who had uttered it swayed sideways, his face grew deadly white, the clasp of his arms loosened, and only the sudden firm grip of the other saved him from falling. Petrovitch laid him on the sofa. Then he passed into the adjoining bedroom, and came back with a wet sponge.

  ‘What a fellow it is,’ he said to himself, as he applied it to the hands and face of the insensible man. ‘As brave as a lion, and as hysterical as a schoolgirl.’ But he looked very kindly on the pale face as he administered his remedies.

  In a little while the eyes opened, and the younger man struggled into a sitting position, and looked into the face that bent over him.

  ‘ — Litvinoff, it is you, then?’ he said in a low voice, and covered his face with his hands. The joy of seeing once more the man he had loved seemed to be swallowed up in the shame of meeting the man he had wronged.

  ‘Yes, Percival, it is I,’ said Petrovitch; ‘but let this be the last time you call me Litvinoff, and I must not call you Percival either. I think I have a right to ask that. You have chosen to put on the Prophet’s Mantle, and for all our sakes you must wear it a little longer.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean simply that you must still be Count Litvinoff, and I must still be Petrovitch.’

  ‘Then you are Petrovitch! Why did you take a false name to mislead me?’ he groaned. ‘Why did you let me go on wearing your name, and spending your money? Why not have let me know at once, when every day made things worse? I would have gone out of life long ago rather than face this meeting.’

  ‘And yet you seemed glad to see me, too?’ said Petrovitch, looking at him curiously. ‘But I took no false name; my name is really Petrovitch. My father’s name was Peter, you know. You ought to remember that. You have heard me called by it often enough.’

  ‘ — I never thought of you by it, though; and besides, I thought you were dead. You know that I thought you were dead?’ with a sudden, quick doubt in his voice.

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘You know, don’t you,’ he went on eagerly, ‘that I would gladly have given my life for yours, and that I never hoped for anything so good in this world as to see you alive? Yes, in spite of everything, though I can’t expect you to believe it,’ he ended bitterly.

  ‘I have never doubted it,’ Petrovitch answered; and with a su
dden thrill of pity for the despair, the remorse, the longing, and the wretchedness in the other’s face, he added, ‘Come, old friend, don’t take this so much to heart. It is nothing that cannot be put right. You will see when we come to talk it over quietly. Can’t we have some tea?’

  Petrovitch knew well enough that when the heart’s cords are stretched almost unbearably by the strain of an intense emotion, it sometimes seems as though they could only be saved from giving way altogether by the direction of the mind to some utterly trivial detail of everyday life. Many a woman’s heart has been saved from breaking by the necessity of getting the children’s dinner, and many a tragedy has been averted by the chief actor’s having to take in the afternoon’s milk.

  Petrovitch repeated the question, ‘Can’t we have some tea?’ The other rose mechanically, went to a cupboard, and brought out a plated kettle and spirit-lamp, a small china tea set, and a plate of lemons, with a silver knife. He put these appliances on the table in an unmethodical, untidy sort of way, and was proceeding to light the spirit-lamp, when Petrovitch, who had been watching him with a smile, took the match-box out of his hand.

  ‘ — Here, let me make tea. I see you are just as unsystematic as ever.’ He lighted the lamp, and with a few deft touches put the rest of the tea-things in order, as the other, leaving the matter in his hands, strode up and down the room.

  ‘ — Oh, what is to be the end of all this?’ he said at length; ‘ — how long am I to go on bearing your name?’

  ‘ — All this will soon be at an end, as far as I am concerned. I have nearly completed my arrangements for getting back to Russia, and when I’m there you may guess it won’t matter to me who bears my name. I shall not wish to use it. But while I am here I wish to be Petrovitch. Indeed, you can serve me best by letting it be as widely known as possible that Count Litvinoff is — well, where you are and not where I am, and after all it’s nobody’s business but yours and mine.’