Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  As Litvinoff walked up the hill to Chislehurst Common, he tried to think what he should say to Alice, how she would look, how she would speak to him. With a touch of ingrained cynicism, he laughed at himself to find that his heart was beating tumultuously, and that his hands were trembling.

  ‘And this is the man,’ he said contemptuously to himself, ‘ — who walked behind her for half-an-hour last autumn, and never spoke to her! No, not the same man,’ he added, after a pause, ‘I am purged of a crime since then.’

  The house where he was to seek Alice was a little yellow-brick building near the church.

  He looked at the pretty old-fashioned churchyard as he passed, and then at the building itself.

  ‘I suppose,’ he said to it, ‘you will be the balm the child will choose to ease her sorrow — and you will bring comfort to her, as you have to thousands of others. I don’t grudge them their comfort, but I do grudge you your influence. However, you won’t keep it much longer. Tant mieux’

  His hand was on the garden gate — he unlatched it, and walked up to the smallest detached house he had ever beheld. He raised the diminutive knocker, and assaulted therewith the tiny brown door. Would she open it? She did not. It opened — and Litvinoff at first really thought it opened of its own accord. At any rate it opened by some agency invisible to him. He stood and looked; but when the door slowly began to close again, he thought it was time for action. He came a step forward, and addressing nothing, said, —

  ‘Is Mrs Litvinoff in?’

  Then a very small girl in a yellow pinafore and a lilac frock showed herself from behind the door; but shyness and an incomplete knowledge of her native tongue combined to render her speechless. Litvinoff, with an impatient but perfectly gentle movement, lifted her bodily from her position as guard, and placed her outside the door.

  ‘The air will brighten your wits, mon petit chou’ he said.

  Then he walked straight into the house, and looked round the two rooms on the ground floor. Empty. He passed through the kitchen, whose proportions would have served for those of the corresponding apartment in a good-sized doll’s house, and found himself in a brick-paved back yard, where there were a water-butt, a basket of wet linen, some clotheslines, and the lady of the house. Regardless of her astonishment, he addressed himself to her.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Litvinoff?’ she answered curiously, ‘she is out; she has gone to Orpington for some butter for me, sir, and she won’t be long.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Perhaps an hour.’

  ‘Is she alone?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘If you’ll be kind enough to tell me the way, I think I’ll go and meet her.’

  ‘And who shall I say called if you should miss her, and she comes back first?’

  ‘Say her husband,’ answered Litvinoff.

  The woman gave him profuse directions, for which he thanked her with his usual empressement, and turned at the gate to raise his hat in farewell.

  ‘My stars!’ said Mrs Bowen, as she watched him out of sight, ‘he’s a real gentleman, and no mistake. Poor little Mrs Litvinoff,’ she added, with a woman’s instinctive interest in a romance, ‘I hope they’ll make it up and live happy ever after, that I do!’

  Litvinoff walked along. His heart was lighter than it had been for many a long day. On these delicious fresh spring mornings —

  When March makes sweet the weather With daffodil, and starling, And hours of fruitful breath, just to be alive is a rapture. Of course it may be cancelled by care like any other joy. But Litvinoff felt as if he had no cares. He was going to meet the woman he loved, and the nearer he got to her the more he loved her. In love, as in friendship, nearness was everything to him.

  Every figure in the distance he thought was her figure. If you have ever gone to meet a person whom you very intensely wished to meet, you will remember how constantly recurring is that illusion. You will remember the spasm of vindictive hate which seizes on you when the figure in the distance is neared, and dispels your illusion by being itself and not the one you wanted it to be.

  Paul’s Cray Common seemed a paradise to him. It does make a fairly good one under favourable circumstances, with its heather, and gorse, and larch, and oak saplings, and, fairest of all, its graceful swaying silver birches. The birds were singing madly, and as he felt the springy turf under his feet, and the warm spring sun on his shoulders, he began to sing, too, a tender little French song, ‘all about green woodland paths, and youth, and love, and happiness.

  Alice Hatfield’s heart was very sad, but it was a quiet sadness, that did not shut out the charm of the spring. Under the influence of the young life blood of the year that seemed to be throbbing through that perfect day, she had felt strong, and had walked with more swiftness than usual, and now, as she was returning with a basket, in which her butter lay, under cool green leaves, she began to walk more slowly and to consider two pounds of butter heavier than she had thought it before. She had been revelling among the primroses and dog violets, and had filled up her basket with the pale, yellow primrose stars and the delicate pink and white wind-flowers. She was tired, certainly, and she turned aside and sat down on a felled tree, in a certain little pine copse that runs along by the roadside. The pine needles lay brown, and soft, and thick under her feet. A little bright-eyed, red-brown squirrel came halfway down one of the trees to look at her, but seemed to find her not quite as nice as he had expected, for he whisked his tail with undisguised contempt, and went back to his home with a lightning-like spiral scramble. He must have been a squirrel hard to please, for it is a fact that, in spite of illness and trouble, Alice was far prettier now than when her sweet face had first caught Count Litvinoff’s eyes on the Birkenhead Ferry.

  She sat quietly gazing through the pine trees, with her head turned from the road. Presently she stooped to attempt the capture of a very young and very yellow frog which had hopped close to her feet, regardless of the pine needles. As she did so her heart stood still, for her ears caught the tramp, tramp of a man’s footstep, and the ringing sound of a man’s voice, a voice she knew, —

  ‘Viens, suivons les sentiers ombreux,

  Ou s’égarent les amoureux

  Le printemps nous appelle,

  Viens! Soyons heureux!’

  She rose to her feet, and involuntarily uttered a low cry. She dared not turn her head. The singing stopped abruptly, there was a crash through the brambles, and in a moment a pair of strong arms were round her, and lips close to her ear murmured, —

  ‘My little girl!’

  She rested on his arm for one moment. Then she said, in a choked sort of voice, as she tried to release herself, —

  ‘It’s no use, I cannot come back. You have not come here to ask me back. Do, do leave me alone!’

  He held her fast.

  ‘My darling,’ he whispered, ‘do you think I could leave you now I have found you? I have come to ask you to come back to me. I have come to ask you to marry me. You will not send me away. I cannot do without my little one any longer. You love me still?’ he added, a sudden doubt striking him at her continued silence, and he raised her chin with his hand till he could look in her face. She shrank from his hand, and hid her face against his neck.

  ‘You know,’ she answered, ‘ you know.’

  So it came about that Alice married her love who had not been true, and forgave him with all her heart; when she was leaving the church, leaning on her husband’s arm, with a new world of love and joy opening before her, and Litvinoff was looking down at her with eyes in which love deepened every moment, her father lay dead at the bottom of the tank in Thornsett Mill. The Litvinoffs left England at once, and to this day Alice does not know of her father’s death, and her husband does not know of the dire disaster that followed on his double dealing. I doubt if they will ever learn it now. There is a good deal more that Alice does not know. It is perhaps as well. Wives are none the happier for knowing too much of their husbands’ past. As it is, Ali
ce will follow him to the world’s end, believing in him unquestioningly.

  CHAPTER XXXII. ‘HAND IN HAND.’

  ‘Cannon Street Hotel, 9.30p m.

  ‘DEAR MR PETROVITCH, — We were married this morning at St Nicholas Cole Abbey, and we are leaving London by the night mail. I cannot go without thanking you with my whole heart for all you have done for me — for both of us. No words can ever tell you how much I feel what we owe to you. My husband says he owes more to you than I do, but I cannot think that. Goodbye until we see you in Russia. Oh! Heaven bless you, Mr Petrovitch, for all you have done for us. — Yours always gratefully, —

  Alice Litvinoff.’

  In the same envelope was a letter from Alice’s husband, and it did not begin in the same way as hers. It ran thus, —

  ‘My dear Litvinoff, — I can’t write to you under any but your own name, nor can I sign any other than my own. I kept yours as you wished, and Alice believes herself to be Countess Litvinoff. I shall tell her all that part of my story later, but I shall never tell her of my villainous and insensate desire for a rich wife, and for a life of ease which would have driven me mad in three months. Alice and a life of adventure are worth all the broad acres in creation. Nor shall I tell her that I knew her father. One thing more I must ask you to do for me. Write to Richard Ferrier and let him know that we are married. I think I’ve used him rather badly. Alice wishes you to say good-bye for her to her good friends Mr and Mrs Toomey. Some kind fate certainly kept watch over my wife while I was playing the fool and dangling after another woman. And Fate has been a thousand times better to me than I deserve. With my dear wife, and the prospect of meeting you soon in Russia, I feel all the old enthusiasm re-awakening. Vive la Revolution! — Your old secretary and friend,

  Armand Percival.

  ‘In signing that name I feel as though I were writing with my left hand, it is so awkward to me after all these years.’

  Petrovitch sighed as he replaced the letters in their envelope. He had given himself up wholly to the cause he served, and he had suffered for it, and was prepared to suffer more, and generally he was contented, even glad, that it should be so. But sometimes a sudden sense of the utter loneliness of his life came over him, saddening and oppressing him. Then he seemed to himself to be not a man with a life of his own to live and hopes of his own to cherish, but a power passing through the lives of others, helping, guiding, saving, and always after a while fading out of those lives. He had brought these two together, and they were all in all to each other, and he was much to them perhaps, but mainly because he had brought them together. Now he felt that they were lost to him, and he had loved them both — Alice with the love of a strong man for a child, and the other with a deep attachment which dated from the first moment of their meeting, and which had unaccountably withstood all the other’s shortcomings. Unaccountably? No; the essence of love is its boundless capacity for pardon; the unaccountable part of it was that he should ever have loved him at all. And they were gone; and gone, as Petrovitch knew well enough, to begin a life whose end, sooner or later, must be the scaffold or the death-in-life of perpetual imprisonment. He had led many a man and many a woman into that path, knowing all that it meant, and he was not sorry. Was it not the path he had himself chosen as being the noblest that any man’s feet could tread — the path of utter self-renunciation? But though he was never sorry he was often sad, and sadder than usual on the day when his two friends bade farewell to safety and English soil. He felt lonely and desolate. But Michael Petrovitch never felt his own moral pulse for more than half a minute at a time. He sighed, raised his hand to his chin, and smiled at finding himself reminded that the gesture of passing his hand over his beard, which had grown into a settled habit with him in moments of annoyance or excitement, was no longer possible.

  He turned to his table and wrote half-a-dozen letters. There were many arrangements still to make for his journey. Then he rose, put on his hat, and started for’ Marlborough Villa.

  He had not cared to face that dinner where he was to have met his fellow revolutionist. He had written a hasty note of excuse, and had spent the evening and the best part of the night in conference with his morose friend Hirsch, who was a little more morose even than usual on this occasion, owing to what he thought the absurd and unjust leniency with which the pseudo Litvinoff had been treated. He would have been much better satisfied had some sudden and awful judgment overtaken the adventurer who had dared to personate his hero — even had that judgment come in the form of a trial for forgery at the Old Bailey; which fact showed that he was but a weaker brother in the faith that teaches that crime is a disease to be cured, not an offence to be punished. In that conversation with Hirsch the date of Petrovitch’s departure had been finally settled, and now he had a few farewell visits to pay. One must certainly be to Mrs Quaid — he had a fancy that he would try to make his parting with Miss Stanley something more than it could be in the presence of that estimable lady. He thought that Clare would not hesitate to say good-bye to him without her hostess’s surveillance. At any rate, a chance of being alone with her to say his farewell was what he was bent on trying for. At Marlborough Villa he was shown into the morning-room. It was empty, but in a moment Clare came in.

  He was standing with his back to the window. When she saw him she started visibly, and, with an unmistakable gesture of annoyance, was turning to leave the room, when he made a step forward, and she paused and looked at him, and, turning with a complete change of expression, held out her hand.

  ‘ — How could I have been so absurd?’ she said. ‘Do you know for the moment I really thought it was Count Litvinoff.’

  ‘I don’t wonder at your not quite recognising me. You see I had to sacrifice my beard. I am going back to Russia next week. Disguise will be de rigeur, and beards and disguises are incompatible.’

  ‘Going back to Russia next week?’ she repeated slowly, ‘and I had so much to say — to ask—’

  ‘Do you still need advice?’ he said, smiling.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, speaking quickly and eagerly, ‘more than ever, for now I have made up my mind. I am quite certain that my money ought to go — not to simply alleviating the miseries that wring one’s heart, but to helping to overthrow the system that causes them. I have felt it a strong temptation to help first the individual sorrows that I know of; but I know that the right thing to do is to help not those, but the revolution that will render them impossible. I am right, am I not?’

  ‘Yes,’ he answered. They were standing by the window. This was not the sort of thing that one settles comfortably into chairs to ‘talk over.’

  ‘But now you are going,’ she said, with a saddened falling cadence in her voice, that made music for the man at her side, ‘and I shall have no one to tell me what to do. Why need you go? Is there nothing for you to do here? Is Russia so dear that it pushes all other claims out of sight?’

  ‘It is not that I am a patriot. I love Russia, I love my people, but I love England and her people too. But better than either do I love Liberty, and I must be where her enemies are strongest, where the battle is hottest.’

  ‘If that is so,’ she said, reflectively, with her eyes downcast, ‘everyone who loves Liberty best should be in front of the battle too?’

  ‘I think so; but each must think for himself,’ he was beginning, when they both turned at the sudden opening of the door. Cora Quaid came in; her fresh face quite pale; a newspaper in her hands.

  ‘Oh, how do you do, Mr Petrovitch. I did not know you were here. Clare, such a terrible thing has happened, dear; mamma has just seen it in the paper.’ She held out the sheet and pointed to a paragraph headed, ‘Shocking accident at Firth Vale.’

  The paragraph told briefly of the death of Richard Ferrier, and of the discovery of Hatfield’s body in the great tank, and concluded thus: ‘The brother of the deceased, Mr Richard Ferrier, states that his brother went out for a stroll on the previous night in his usual spirits. There is no clue to an
y explanation of the catastrophe, save that the man Hatfield was formerly employed in this mill, and had been heard to say that he considered himself personally aggrieved at the closing of it. He was supposed to be in the south of England, and it is rumoured that he secretly returned to wreak vengeance on the young masters of the mill for the part they had taken in closing it’

  Clare read it through; her face grew white, and she passed it to Petrovitch. He read it silently, his brow contracting. When he laid the paper down he looked at Clare. She had sunk into a chair, her arms stretched out over her knees to their full length, and her hands clasped.

  ‘Poor fellow! poor Dick!’ she said; ‘but, oh, Cora! poor Mrs Hatfield! How will she bear it? Oh! how cruel life is to some people. First her daughter, and now her husband, and she is alone in some strange place, where no one can get to her to help her to bear it!’

  ‘How could you help her if you knew where she was?’ asked Petrovitch.

  ‘I could tell her myself. I have had grief to bear — I know,’ she answered. ‘I would save her from hearing it from some careless stranger. I could go to her—’

  She broke off. Her hazel eyes were full of tears.

  Cora laid her hand on her friend’s shoulder with a sympathetic touch.

  ‘I happen to know where this Mrs Hatfield is,’ said Petrovitch, reflectively, ‘and I agree with you, Miss Stanley, that it would be right for you to go to her.’

  Clare rose instantly. As she did so the tears brimmed over, and two fell from her long lashes.

  ‘I will go now,’ she said, ‘if you will tell me where she is.’