Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “It isn’t nothing,” said Denis.

  “Eh?” said the Jew.

  “It’s the chance of thinking that perhaps they’re not giving it for nothing,” he said very low, picked up his crutch and limped away. The crutch made dots of sound in a dejected silence.

  “Uncouraged, my girl?” said the Jew.

  “No,” said Sylvia, “but”

  “They tell you, you do wrong? I know. This fool-boy who adores you — Oh, I think only of him for it the better. Or my sister-in-law — she think it not quite nice, eh? Pah! What know they? Of the world what know they?” He snapped his fingers. “Not that. So hear what they say, and give it that of value. But me, old Moses, who knows the world, I say you are right. I say you do well. You are a brave maiden, like Deborah — like Miriam. Spoil the Egyptians, my maiden — Spoil the Egyptians! Take all and give nothing. Take from these that only wish you ill, and presently you shall give to those who need it. Thus says old Moses to you. And he knows—”

  “Yes,” said the girl, but her tone was flat.

  “Courage, courage, courage,” he went on, “de 1’audace et de 1’audace, et puis encore de 1’audace. Never a girl has had the courage of you — never a girl has had the luck of you. The Fates are for you. I am myself one who can read the stars, my child, and I say to you, ‘All goes well if you love not.’ Once you love, the misfortune begins to remember you. Earnest-working to one end that is not the love-goal you pass unnoticed in your work-dress. But if you shall put on the red love-roses then Fate say: ‘Ha, ha! here is a beautiful one that I have overlooked,’ and straightway down come the thumb — so!”

  He ended a semi-circular movement of widespread fingers by the planting of a thumb heavily downward on the table.

  “I’m not likely to have anything to do with that sort of silliness,” the girl said rather bitterly. “ For one thing, I never see any one.”

  “Ah! and that is so good,” said the German simply. “ Keep so, my child. Keep so. And now, business. The emeralds I myself send — to encourage the others. The jewellers, they tell these things. And I like it to keep to look at. It is old, and good. See, here is the bill. For the rest — the pearls are good — also the opals. It will be three hundred at the least, my pigeon. Now I go to make the inventory. You write? Good! So!”

  She kneeled at the table and wrote at his dictation a list of the gay uselessness lying heaped there, the Jew touching and replacing them with deft fingers, at home among such costly trifles.

  “At the least three hundred,” he said—”it may be more. The diamonds and the pearls I take — so, also the emeralds — and the pendant — the bangle, too — with the garnet heart, so bloody-full of Schwärmerei. The rest the good Denis bring in the morning to Miss Steinhart’s, the useful Gertrude. And now — business is far. To the family joy!”

  The family joy was a white spread table, where the dancer, Pan, the aunt and the Jew made merry over white bread, grapes, chocolate, little French cakes, and a sloping-shouldered bottle of Rhein-wine.

  “To the achievement!” Mr. Mosenthal cried, raising the glass topaz-shiny with wine; and the others, echoing the toast, raised blue Chinese basins of chocolate.

  “While the sun do shine

  Make the hay thine,”

  he went on. “ There is no Princess like our Princess, and we three are her prophets, and if there was in this world a prophet to play the violin like the Archangel Gabriel his trumpet, thou art that prophet, my Denis.”

  “I want to drink to Uncle Moses,” said Sylvia, turning her eyes on the eyes of three adorers in turn. “ To Uncle Moses, who has done everything for us! And to Aunt Dusa, who has done all the rest. And to Denis, who has done everything they couldn’t do.”

  “And then she says she’s not Irish!” Aunt Dusa laughed.

  * * * * *

  “And you think it’s all safe? No one knows?” Sylvia asked softly of Uncle Moses, as she opened the door for his departure.

  “Not a soul in all this great foolish world,” he answered; “not a soul but us four. And Forrester, who is close as a door shut. And Agar, who tells nothing. Never was a secret so kept. And never was such a secret to keep. In the Märchen the Princess in her tower was not better guarded than thou. The Dragon, that is Dusa — the Eagle, that is Denis — and the Lion, that is the old Uncle Moses. God bless thee, thou dear child.”

  The three that were left sat yet a little while over the white disordered table. Sylvia was very merry. She laughed a great deal, and made the others laugh more. When Sylvia laughs you have to laugh with her. It is a glorious compulsion.

  Yet when Dusa was alone with the girl, brushing out her long hair, straight as lengths of black silk, she paused, brush in hand, to say, “You are sad to-night, dear. Why?”

  “Am I?” the girl asked, pleating the lace of her dressing-gown. “Well, you know best, dear Dragon.”

  “Tell old nurse, dearie,” said the Dragon, just as she would have said ten years before when some childish adventure had ended in tears, bruises, and hands bramble-torn.

  “It’s nothing. I mean it’s everything,” said Sylvia. “ I mean I wish I knew where he was. What’s the good of anything if I don’t know that?”

  “He’s dead long ago, you may depend,” said the Dragon comfortably, “else he’d a-come pestering you as soon as you’d got two penny pieces to rub one against the other. He’s dead and buried and gone where he ought to go — you may be sure of that, my dear.”

  “I wish I might be sure,” said Sylvia, in her blue dressing-gown.

  “Well, I’m sure,” said the woman, “and good riddance is what I say. But why do you want to be so sure just now?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sylvia. “That’ll do: don’t brush anymore,” and as she quickly pleated the black hair she said: “I’m glad I’m not likely to fall in love. That would be awful, wouldn’t it?”

  “When you think you’re going to fall in love you tell old nurse, and we’ll look him up in the registry,” was the comforting answer. “ I say we find him dead and buried at Somerset House for a shilling.”

  “I wish we could,” said Sylvia. “ Oh, what a beast I am! But the worst of it is we can’t know and we don’t know. Good night, Dusa darling. — No, I’ll do all the rest for myself. Do go. Good night. Oh, there are so many things we don’t know!”

  Dusa darling slept in the adjoining room, and Sylvia locked the door between them. She lay awake a long time, but the Dragon did not know it.

  Another of the things that neither of them knew was that Denis slept on the other side of Sylvia’s door — lying across it as some faithful dog might have lain. A crutch makes a noise on stairs and passage-floors, but a crippled man can quite quietly creep up and along them, in the dark, with no one to see how funny he looks pulling himself along on hands and one knee, with the helpless, misshapen foot dragging noiselessly behind him. In the dark even, it is not difficult: and in the early morning light it is ridiculously easy for the crippled man to get back to the comfortable room where people think he spends his nights.

  Decidedly, if Mr. Templar could have gone home with Sylvia, and could have had the run of the stairs and passages when she was asleep, he would have found much to interest and intrigue him.

  But then he did not go home with Sylvia. Nor did anyone else, man, woman or child, save only the Dragon, the Eagle, and the Lion, who was Moses Mosenthal.

  CHAPTER IV. THE FALSE MOUSTACHE

  Mr. Templar was not the only man in London with the wit to combine the three ideas — money, detectives, Salome — but in no other case did the equation work out to anything at all resembling the desired result. Because no one else had the idea of substituting for the most interesting term of the equation another less charming but more amenable. In other words, while the other mathematicians sought Salome — by means of money and detectives — Templar, quite early in the game, addressed his researches, not to Salome, but to Pan the flute-player. He felt, quite unreasonably and qui
te certainly, that if he found Pan he would find the nymph.

  The first report was that Pan lived at a house near Portland Place, the ground floor of which was occupied by Mosenthal and Mosenthal, House Agents. The second, that he spent his week-ends, as well as certain weeks, at an old house near the river Medway — its name, The Wood House.

  Templar pigeon-holed this information, dismissed his detective, and bought a false moustache. He was warming to the game. The spirit of the chase fired his blood. He could not believe, now that he came to think of it, that it was impossible to trace two women in a motor-car in London. So he chartered a taxi-cab, with a driver whose manners and speech were at least as good as his own. (Are half the drivers of London taxi-cabs young men from the Universities? The question justifies itself on three-fifths of the occasions on which one rides in the public motors. Or perhaps it is the County Council Schools?) He explained what he wanted at quite needless length, and the chauffeur of the taxi-cab understood at least twice as much as there was to understand.

  So that when the Eagle and the Dragon and Salome (all bundled up Salome was) entered their motor at the stage door, and it glided away, the unobtrusive taxi-cab glided after it, and, as snake might glide after snake in the dark labyrinths of the jungle, so serpentined in pursuit through London’s lit streets. The chase, delayed for a moment at the door of a West End house-agent, where a lame man got out of the motor and let himself in with a latchkey, ended in a West End mews.

  The motor ran itself between the waiting open doors of a coach-house — garage is the correct jargon, I am told — and — stayed there. The chauffeur put out the staring eyes of the motor and proceeded with calm deliberation to strike a match and light a gas-jet and do something, something which made a metallic sound, to his infernal machinery. Templar, his coat collar turned up, and wearing, with incredible self-consciousness, the false moustache, left his taxi-cab in the street and went up the mews to lounge opposite the garage door. The gaslight shone full into the motor brougham. It was empty.

  But it couldn’t be empty. Two women and a lot of bundles might conceivably contrive to get out of a growler going at the snail’s pace possible only to those decaying vehicles — but to get out of a going — a rapidly going motor — in crowded London streets, unobserved! It was impossible.

  Yet it was possible. For it had been done. The motor was empty. There was no one there.

  “And what do you want?” the electric brougham’s driver was asking, and Templar, disclaiming with hurried politeness all possible wants, hastened back to his motor.

  “Follow the chauffeur,” he said. “ Wait till he comes out, and then follow him.” And the chauffeur was run to earth in Lloyd Square, King’s Cross.

  Templar, inexperienced detective that he was, sprang from his docile taxi-cab and addressed the chauffeur at the moment when latch-key met key-hole.

  “I say,” he said, and then found that there was nothing more that he could say.

  “What do you say?” said the chauffeur in a tone that made the immediate saying of something a matter of life or death.

  “I say “ — Templar had never felt so inadequate—”I say. I’m not asking out of idle curiosity.”

  “I’m glad of that,” said the chauffeur, arrested on the half turn, his key paralysed in the lock.

  “I say” — said Templar again, and never had he felt such a fool. “ That lady you were driving to-night . . .”

  “Oh, go to hell!” said the chauffeur, turning his convalescent key. “ You make the seventy-second since she came on the boards. Go to hell — you and your false moustache.”

  With that he took a step forward into darkness, and the door slammed in Templar’s disconcerted face.

  “I’m extremely sorry, sir,” said the taxi-cab chauffeur, “ that you haven’t had better luck.”

  “Oh—’ go to hell,’” quoted Templar on the pavement.

  “Certainly, sir,” said the chauffeur; “any particular number?”

  “I beg your pardon,” said Templar, when he had laughed.

  “Il n’y a pas de quoi,” said the driver of the taxi-cab, with an accent almost too perfect. “ Sixty-four Curzon Street. Yes, sir.”

  When Templar stood on the pavement, feeling in his pocket for the silver demanded by the bald-faced taximeter dial, the chauffeur looked at him, raised his eyebrows, and said:

  “If I might venture a suggestion, sir?”

  “Fire ahead.”

  “I’ve seen the lady dance. Excuse my saying so: it’s no go.”

  “Confound you,” said Templar.

  “Not at all,” said the chauffeur blandly. “ I am only speaking as one man to another. She’s straight.”

  “Damn you,” said Templar.

  “By all means,” said the chauffeur. “ Am I to understand . . .?”

  Templar handed him silver.

  “Thank you, sir. I suppose I’m not mistaken. It isn’t possible that you’re pursuing the lady pour le lion motif?”

  “I knew her when she was a child,” Templar was surprised to find himself saying.

  The man detached one of the lamps of his cab and flashed its light suddenly on Templar’s face.

  “Right,” he said, satisfied by what the light shewed him. “ Then I’ll tell you something. That moustache is false as lover’s vows. It simply asks to be plucked off. It tempts the hand like a peach. You’ll find crape hair and spirit gum more convincing, as well as more secure. And I’ll tell you something else.”

  “Well,” said Templar, furtively tearing off the too profuse disguise.

  “You’re not the only one that knew her when she was a child. There’s another.”

  “Who’s the other?” Templar flashed back at him.

  “Black — oily. I’d sooner you found her than he. So I’ll give you a tip. Where does she go for week-ends? And the week off she takes in every three? That’s all. No, thank you, sir, if it’s all the same to you. Just the bare fare, please. And if I were you I’d follow that trail. Never mind where she lodges in London. Try her country address — if you can get it. She goes for her week off next Saturday.”

  “You seem to know a great deal about her,” said Templar weakly.

  “I’ve seen her dance. And I’ve driven her three times, when she first came to London. Once to Charing Cross,” said the chauffeur. “ If I wasn’t a poor devil that hasn’t a chance left I wouldn’t give you the chance I’m giving you now.”

  “You’ve been drinking,” said Templar.

  “Of course I have,” said the chauffeur contemptuously. “What else do you expect? But I can drive straight all the same. No doubt to-morrow, when I’ve not been drinking, I shall wish I’d cut my tongue out before I’d told you what I have told you. But at present you appear to me to be honest. Illusive effect of mixed liquors, no doubt. Good night, sir, thank you.”

  He went to the front of the machine, and agitated its vitals.

  “But I say,” said Templar, “tell me how you know”

  “How I know she’s straight? I’m not a Yahoo”

  “No — no, no. How you know about her country house?”

  “Common sense — common barn-door sense. And the oily one doesn’t know — yet. Good night, sir. Yes, I know I shall be sorry for this in the morning.”

  Templar was sorry already. As a man is sorry who has made a fool of himself, to no purpose. To no purpose? Not wholly. The suggestion of the country house stayed and stuck. He had no chance of finding her country house. But he did know the country house of Pan. Pan was a bumpkin — a Cockney bumpkin, if such a thing could be. He would be amenable, malleable. The nymph In the forest had twisted him round her little finger. Mr. Templar as yet knew no difference between his little finger and the little finger of Salome.

  The upshot of it all was that he took train for Yalding on the Friday. He had spent a week in researches: and four evenings of that week he had, from his stall, seen her dance her forest dance to Pan’s piping. But he had not se
en her dance the Salome dance. The idea of it revolted him — seemed vulgar, common, profane.

  He had called on Mr. Mosenthal, the house-agent — on a pretence which he hoped was not altogether transparent, of wanting a flat of four rooms with kitchen and bathroom, hot and cold water laid on, in an old house in a good neighbourhood, for £30 a year. He saw Mr. Mosenthal’s clerk, and made cautious inquiries as to the tenants of the house. He was told that the first floor was let to the well-known tailor Mr. X., that Miss Gertrude Steinhart, a palmist, had the second floor, that a typewriting office had the basement, while the attics were used as warerooms by Mr. X.

  “Which floor does the lame gentleman live on?” Templar asked.

  “Lame gentleman? There’s nobody lame here,” said the clerk, with the proper pride of one who stands up to life on two straight if slender legs. “ A lame gentleman who plays the flute? Oh, no, sir — that wouldn’t be at all the class of tenant Mr. Mosenthal would entertain the idea of for a moment. You must have got the wrong number, sir. What name did you say?”

  Templar said it didn’t matter at all, thank you, and got away.

  “What was that gentleman’s name?” asked Mr. Mosenthal, coming out of a door with his name on it.

  “Templar, sir — 64, Curzon Street. Double-you.”

  “What’s the rent of that flat of ours at the corner?”

  “Eighty-five, sir.”

  “Offer it him for fifty if he calls again. Make it ninety-five to anyone else. And keep your mouth shut.”

  “Certainly, sir,” said the clerk blandly. He, too, was of The People, and Moses Mosenthal had his race’s instinct as to the man who can be trusted.

  Templar on the pavement of Oxford Street told himself what a callow innocent he had been to be taken in by such an obvious trick. Of course the man had just dodged into that door — with some old latch-key that happened to fit — no doubt he’d played that game before — waited till the watchful taxi-cab had slithered away, and then limped home to his lodgings. But how had the women got out of the car? And when?