Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  What the gardener called the gravel path was black earth, moss-grown. Very pretty, but Betty thought it shabby.

  It was soft and cool, though, to the feet, and the dust of the white road sparkled like diamond dust in the sunlight.

  She crossed the road and passed through the swing gate into the park, where the grass was up for hay, with red sorrel and buttercups and tall daisies and feathery flowered grasses, their colours all tangled and blended together like ravelled ends of silk on the wrong side of some great square of tapestry. Here and there in the wide sweep of tall growing things stood a tree — a may-tree shining like silver, a laburnum like fine gold. There were horse-chestnuts whose spires of blossom shewed like fat candles on a Christmas tree for giant children. And the sun was warm and the tree shadows black on the grass.

  Betty told herself that she hated it all. She took the narrow path — the grasses met above her feet — crossed the park, and reached the rabbit warren, where the chalk breaks through the thin dry turf, and the wild thyme grows thick.

  A may bush, overhanging a little precipice of chalk, caught her eye. A wild rose was tangled round it. It was, without doubt, the most difficult composition within sight.

  “I will sketch that,” said Eighteen, confidently.

  For half an hour she busily blotted and washed and niggled. Then she became aware that she no longer had the rabbit warren to herself.

  “And he’s an artist, too!” said Betty. “How awfully interesting! I wish I could see his face.”

  But this his slouched Panama forbade. He was in white, the sleeve and breast of his painting jacket smeared with many colours; he had a camp-stool and an easel and looked, she could not help feeling, much more like a real artist than she did, hunched up as she was on a little mound of turf, in her shabby pink gown and that hateful garden hat with last year’s dusty flattened roses in it.

  She went on sketching with feverish unskilled fingers, and a pulse that had actually quickened its beat.

  She cast little glances at him as often as she dared. He was certainly a real artist. She could tell that by the very way he held his palette. Was he staying with people about there? Should she meet him? Would they ever be introduced to each other?

  “Oh, what a pity,” said Betty from the heart, “that we aren’t introduced now!”

  Her sketch grew worse and worse.

  “It’s no good,” she said. “I can’t do anything with it.”

  She glanced at him. He had pushed back the hat. She saw quite plainly that he was smiling — a very little, but he was smiling. Also he was looking at her, and across the fifteen yards of gray turf their eyes met. And she knew that he knew that this was not her first glance at him.

  She paled with fury.

  “He has been watching me all the time! He is making fun of me. He knows I can’t sketch. Of course he can see it by the silly way I hold everything.” She ran her knife around her sketch, detached it, and tore it across and across.

  The stranger raised his hat and called eagerly.

  “I say — please don’t move for a minute. Do you mind? I’ve just got your pink gown. It’s coming beautifully. Between brother artists — Do, please! Do sit still and go on sketching — Ah, do!”

  Betty’s attitude petrified instantly. She held a brush in her hand, and she looked down at her block. But she did not go on sketching. She sat rigid and three delicious words rang in her ears: “Between brother artists!” How very nice of him! He hadn’t been making fun, after all. But wasn’t it rather impertinent of him to put her in his picture without asking her? Well, it wasn’t she but her pink gown he wanted. And “between brother artists!” Betty drew a long breath.

  “It’s no use,” he called; “don’t bother any more. The pose is gone.”

  She rose to her feet and he came towards her.

  “Let me see the sketch,” he said. “Why did you tear it up?” He fitted the pieces together. “Why, it’s quite good. You ought to study in Paris,” he added idly.

  She took the torn papers from his hand with a bow, and turned to go.

  “Don’t go,” he said. “You’re not going? Don’t you want to look at my picture?”

  Now Betty knew as well as you do that you musn’t speak to people unless you’ve been introduced to them. But the phrase “brother artists” had played ninepins with her little conventions.

  “Thank you. I should like to very much,” said Betty. “I don’t care,” she said to herself, “and besides, it’s not as if he were a young man, or a tourist, or anything. He must be ever so old — thirty; I shouldn’t wonder if he was thirty-five.”

  When she saw the picture she merely said, “Oh,” and stood at gaze. For it was a picture — a picture that, seen in foreign lands, might well make one sick with longing for the dry turf and the pale dog violets that love the chalk, for the hum of the bees and the scent of the thyme. He had chosen the bold sweep of the brown upland against the sky, and low to the left, where the line broke, the dim violet of the Kentish hills. In the green foreground the pink figure, just roughly blocked in, was blocked in by a hand that knew its trade, and was artist to the tips of its fingers.

  “Oh!” said Betty again.

  “Yes,” said he, “I think I’ve got it this time. I think it’ll make a hole in the wall, eh? Yes; it is good!”

  “Yes,” said Betty; “oh, yes.”

  “Do you often go a-sketching?” he asked.

  “How modest he is,” thought Betty; “he changes the subject so as not to seem to want to be praised.”

  Aloud she answered with shy fluttered earnestness: “Yes — no. I don’t know. Sometimes.”

  His lips were grave, but there was the light behind his eyes that goes with a smile.

  “What unnecessary agitation!” he was thinking. “Poor little thing, I suppose she’s never seen a man before. Oh, these country girls!” Aloud he was saying: “This is such a perfect country. You ought to sketch every day.”

  “I’ve no one to teach me,” said Betty, innocently phrasing a long-felt want.

  The man raised his eyebrows. “Well, after that, here goes!” he said to himself. “I wish you’d let me teach you,” he said to her, beginning to put his traps together.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean that,” said Betty in real distress. What would he think of her? How greedy and grasping she must seem! “I didn’t mean that at all!”

  “No; but I do,” he said.

  “But you’re a great artist,” said Betty, watching him with clasped hands. “I suppose it would be — I mean — don’t you know, we’re not rich, and I suppose your lessons are worth pounds and pounds.”

  “I don’t give lessons for money,” his lips tightened—”only for love.”

  “That means nothing, doesn’t it?” she said, and flushed to find herself on the defensive feebly against — nothing.

  “At tennis, yes,” he said, and to himself he added: “Vieux jeu, my dear, but you did it very prettily.”

  “But I couldn’t let you give me lessons for nothing.”

  “Why not?” he asked. And his calmness made Betty feel ashamed and sordid.

  “I don’t know,” she answered tremulously, “but I don’t think my step-father would want me to.”

  “You think it would annoy him?”

  “I’m sure it would, if he knew about it.”

  Betty was thinking how little her step-father had ever cared to know of her and her interests. But the man caught the ball as he saw it.

  “Then why let him know?” was the next move; and it seemed to him that Betty’s move of rejoinder came with a readiness born of some practice at the game.

  “Oh,” she said innocently, “I never thought of that! But wouldn’t it be wrong?”

  “She’s got the whole thing stereotyped. But it’s dainty type anyhow,” he thought. “Of course it wouldn’t be wrong,” he said. “It wouldn’t hurt him. Don’t you know that nothing’s wrong unless it hurts somebody?”

  “Yes,
” she said eagerly, “that’s what I think. But all the same it doesn’t seem fair that you should take all that trouble for me and get nothing in return.”

  “Well played! We’re getting on!” he thought, and added aloud: “But perhaps I shan’t get nothing in return?”

  Her eyes dropped over the wonderful thought that perhaps she might do something for him. But what? She looked straight at him, and the innocent appeal sent a tiny thorn of doubt through his armour of complacency. Was she — after all? No, no novice could play the game so well. And yet —

  “I would do anything I could, you know,” she said eagerly, “because it is so awfully kind of you, and I do so want to be able to paint. What can I do?”

  “What can you do?” he asked, and brought his face a little nearer to the pretty flushed freckled face under the shabby hat. Her eyes met his. He felt a quick relenting, and drew back.

  “Well, for one thing you could let me paint your portrait.”

  Betty was silent.

  “Come, play up, you little duffer,” he urged inwardly.

  When she spoke her voice trembled.

  “I don’t know how to thank you,” she said.

  “And you will?”

  “Oh, I will; indeed I will!”

  “How good and sweet you are,” he said. Then there was a silence.

  Betty tightened the strap of her sketching things and said:

  “I think I ought to go home now.”

  He had the appropriate counter ready.

  “Ah, don’t go yet!” he said; “let us sit down; see, that bank is quite in the shade now, and tell me—”

  “Tell you what?” she asked, for he had made the artistic pause.

  “Oh, anything — anything about yourself.”

  Betty was as incapable of flight as any bird on a limed twig.

  She walked beside him to the bank, and sat down at his bidding, and he lay at her feet, looking up into her eyes. He asked idle questions: she answered them with a conscientious tremulous truthfulness that showed to him as the most finished art. And it seemed to him a very fortunate accident that he should have found here, in this unlikely spot, so accomplished a player at his favorite game. Yet it was the variety of his game for which he cared least. He did not greatly relish a skilled adversary. Betty told him nervously and in words ill-chosen everything that he asked to know, but all the while the undercurrent of questions rang strong within her—”When is he to teach me? Where? How?” — so that when at last there was left but the bare fifteen minutes needed to get one home in time for the midday dinner she said abruptly:

  “And when shall I see you again?”

  “You take the words out of my mouth,” said he. And indeed she had. “She has no finesse yet,” he told himself. “She might have left that move to me.”

  “The lessons, you know,” said Betty, “and, and the picture, if you really do want to do it.”

  “If I want to do it! — You know I want to do it. Yes. It’s like the nursery game. How, when and where? Well, as to the how — I can paint and you can learn. The where — there’s a circle of pines in the wood here. You know it? A sort of giant fairy ring?”

  She did know it.

  “Now for the when — and that’s the most important. I should like to paint you in the early morning when the day is young and innocent and beautiful — like — like—” He was careful to break off in a most natural seeming embarrassment. “That’s a bit thick, but she’ll swallow it all right. Gone down? Right!” he told himself.

  “I could come out at six if you liked, or — or five,” said Betty, humbly anxious to do her part.

  He was almost shocked. “My good child,” he told her silently, “someone really ought to teach you not to do all the running. You don’t give a man a chance.”

  “Then will you meet me here to-morrow at six?” he said. “You won’t disappoint me, will you?” he added tenderly.

  “No,” said downright Betty, “I’ll be sure to come. But not to-morrow,” she added with undisguised regret; “to-morrow’s Sunday.”

  “Monday then,” said he, “and good-bye.”

  “Good-bye, and — oh, I don’t know how to thank you!”

  “I’m very much mistaken if you don’t,” he said as he stood bareheaded, watching the pink gown out of sight.

  “Well, adventures to the adventurous! A clergyman’s daughter, too! I might have known it.”

  CHAPTER II. THE IRRESISTIBLE.

  Betty had to run all the way home, and then she was late for dinner. Her step-father’s dry face and dusty clothes, the solid comfort of the mahogany furnished dining room, the warm wet scent of mutton, — these seemed needed to wake her from what was, when she had awakened, a dream — the open sky, the sweet air of the May fields and Him. Already the stranger was Him to Betty. But, then, she did not know his name.

  She slipped into her place at the foot of the long white dining table, a table built to serve a dozen guests, and where no guests ever sat, save rarely a curate or two, and more rarely even, an aunt.

  “You are late again, Lizzie,” said her step-father.

  “Yes, Father,” said she, trying to hide her hands and the fact that she had not had time to wash them. A long streak of burnt sienna marked one finger, and her nails had little slices of various colours in them. Her paint-box was always hard to open.

  Usually Mr. Underwood saw nothing. But when he saw anything he saw everything. His eye was caught by the green smudge on her pink sleeve.

  “I wish you would contrive to keep yourself clean, or else wear a pinafore,” he said.

  Betty flushed scarlet.

  “I’m very sorry,” she said, “but it’s only water colour. It will wash out.”

  “You are nearly twenty, are you not?” the Vicar inquired with the dry smile that always infuriated his step-daughter. How was she to know that it was the only smile he knew, and that smiles of any sort had long grown difficult to him?

  “Eighteen,” she said.

  “It is almost time you began to think about being a lady.”

  This was badinage. No failures had taught the Reverend Cecil that his step-daughter had an ideal of him in which badinage had no place. She merely supposed that he wished to be disagreeable.

  She kept a mutinous silence. The old man sighed. It is one’s duty to correct the faults of one’s child, but it is not pleasant. The Reverend Cecil had not the habit of shirking any duty because he happened to dislike it.

  The mutton was taken away.

  Betty, her whole being transfigured by the emotions of the morning, stirred the stewed rhubarb on her plate. She felt rising in her a sort of wild forlorn courage. Why shouldn’t she speak out? Her step-father couldn’t hate her more than he did, whatever she said. He might even be glad to be rid of her. She spoke suddenly and rather loudly before she knew that she had meant to speak at all.

  “Father,” she said, “I wish you’d let me go to Paris and study art. Not now,” she hurriedly explained with a sudden vision of being taken at her word and packed off to France before six o’clock on Monday morning, “not now, but later. In the autumn perhaps. I would work very hard. I wish you’d let me.”

  He put on his spectacles and looked at her with wistful kindness. She read in his glance only a frozen contempt.

  “No, my child,” he said. “Paris is a sink of iniquity. I passed a week there once, many years ago. It was at the time of the Great Exhibition. You are growing discontented, Lizzie. Work is the cure for that. Mrs. Symes tells me that the chemises for the Mother’s sewing meetings are not cut out yet.”

  “I’ll cut them out to-day. They haven’t finished the shirts yet, anyway,” said Betty; “but I do wish you’d just think about Paris, or even London.”

  “You can have lessons at home if you like. I believe there are excellent drawing-mistresses in Sevenoaks. Mrs. Symes was recommending one of them to me only the other day. With certificates from the High School I seem to remember her saying.”
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  “But that’s not what I want,” said Betty with a courage that surprised her as much as it surprised him. “Don’t you see, Father? One gets older every day, and presently I shall be quite old, and I shan’t have been anywhere or seen anything.”

  He thought he laughed indulgently at the folly of youth. She thought his laugh the most contemptuous, the cruelest sound in the world. “He doesn’t deserve that I should tell him about Him,” she thought, “and I won’t. I don’t care!”

  “No, no,” he said, “no, no, no. The home is the place for girls. The safe quiet shelter of the home. Perhaps some day your husband will take you abroad for a fortnight now and then. If you manage to get a husband, that is.”

  He had seen, through his spectacles, her flushed prettiness, and old as he was he remembered well enough how a face like hers would seem to a young man’s eyes. Of course she would get a husband? So he spoke in kindly irony. And she hated him for a wanton insult.

  “Try to do your duty in that state of life to which you are called,” he went on: “occupy yourself with music and books and the details of housekeeping. No, don’t have my study turned out,” he added in haste, remembering how his advice about household details had been followed when last he gave it. “Don’t be a discontented child. Go and cut out the nice little chemises.” This seemed to him almost a touch of kindly humour, and he went back to Augustine, pleased with himself.

  Betty set her teeth and went, black rage in her heart, to cut out the hateful little chemises.

  She dragged the great roll of evil smelling grayish unbleached calico from the schoolroom cupboard and heaved it on to the table. It was very heavy. The scissors were blunt and left deep red-blue indentations on finger and thumb. She was rather pleased that the scissors hurt so much.

  “Father doesn’t care a single bit, he hates me,” she said, “and I hate him. Oh, I do.”