Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  At East Peckham she said: “ Can you get at your watch? I think it must be one-ish. The doctor’s at home between one and two.”

  The hour was propitious.

  “Thank you a thousand times,” he said, and “ Good-bye” he said, too, for indeed he seemed to have come to a point where nothing else was possible to say.

  “Good-bye? Nonsense!” she said. “Do you think I’m going to abandon my only case? I took the First, the Injuries to the Aided course — and you’re the first chance I’ve had of shewing off. Of course I’m coming with you to the doctor. Or if you don’t feel up to it, I’ll fetch him to you here.”

  “Of course I’m up to it,” he said, “but it’s not fair to trouble you.”

  Nothing but the banal rises to the lips at life’s great moments.

  With perfect self-possession she helped him out of the boat and made him lean on her arm. She had turned down the Panama so that it shaded and almost concealed her face. As they passed the Rose and Crown she stopped.

  “Brandy, of course,” she said — coerced him into the hot little sitting-room behind the geraniums, ordered “ Some brandy, please,” and saw that he drank it.

  At the doctor’s she waited by the gate while he went in and had lint and bandages put on his hand and his fingers strapped together. As the doctor untied the blood-stained wrappings, Templar noticed that they were long strips of soft white stuff edged with lace.

  “Won’t your wife come in?” the doctor said, glancing out through the window.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Templar confusedly.

  Presently she had got him back to the boat. They had hardly spoken at all.

  “Now,” she said, “ where do you want to go? Were you trying to get to Tonbridge?”

  “To-morrow would do for Tonbridge,” said Templar deceitfully.

  “Then shall I pull you down the river?

  “I say, you are most awfully good,” he said.

  “Nonsense,” she said impatiently. “Of course I can’t leave you stranded with a boat. Shall I get a man to pull you back to — to wherever you came from?”

  Of course Templar could now quite well have got a man from the Rose and Crown or elsewhere, but he didn’t say so.

  “Come,” she said, “here are the boats. What are you going to do?”

  Then he became suddenly brave, “What are you going to do?”

  “Find a shady place by the river and have lunch. But there’s plenty of time for that.”

  “I was going to have lunch by the river, too.”

  She looked at him, appraising him. Already he was endeared to her by the fact that she had done quite a lot of things for him. Among others, she had touched blood, which she feared and hated.

  The day was fair — and life was dull in the Tower with the Dragon, the Eagle, and the Lion. And was one never to exchange two words with anyone but those three? A steadfast purpose is all very well, but one must have a holiday sometimes. She had never had just this sort of holiday. He was looking as imploring as he dared. And she decided that he looked rather nice.

  “You’ve been so kind,” he said. “And I’ve been such an idiot.”

  She understood that he was asking for time to shew her that he was not always dropping crowbars and pinching his fingers and saying damn and fainting. And she felt that she herself would have wanted the same chance had she perpetrated the same follies.

  So she laughed. “Oh, very well — come along, then,” she said. “I’ll pull you up to Oak Weir again — if you can stand the tragic associations. And you shall tell me your name and station, and we’ll pretend we’ve met at a dinner party and been properly introduced.”

  That was how it all began.

  They had lunch together in that big meadow away to the left by Oak Weir, among the roots of the great trees that reach down to the backwater where the water lilies are. And he told her his name, and she told him the names of the water plants and the riverside flowers, but her own name she did not tell him. Nor did he ask it.

  She quite plainly thought herself safe in a complete anonymity. He told her, quite early in the game, that he was just back from eight long African years. Therefore, he could not have seen her at the Hilarity. Therefore, she was just like any other girl to him. She revelled in the resemblance. “ Just like any other girl” was just what she had never had a chance of being — to any man. And he found that he was telling himself that she was a jolly little girl, with no sentimental nonsense about her, and that he liked her very much. So far was he, by now, from the Templar who had employed detectives to hunt down such a very different sort of woman.

  I do not know how he managed it. Such things are done by the expert. Certain it is that there was no word of love, of flirtation, of sentiment. And equally certain that when, at the long day’s end, they parted, it was on the straightforward, sensible understanding that they were to meet next morning by Stoneham Lock, each with a luncheon basket, at ten sharp, and spend the day together.

  He went back to the Anchor to review and revise his impressions of women, and to bear the pain, which increased, of his hurt hand.

  She went home.

  Home was the Wood House, not fifty yards from East Lock, where Miss Alexandra Mundy lived with her aunt and cousin. The cousin was unfortunately deformed, so they received no company and returned no calls. They spent a good deal of time in town, going to the theatre and so on, local drawing-room gossip understood. Very quiet people, quite respectable. Rich, too, but kept themselves to themselves. The cousin’s affliction, no doubt. But the girl was odd, too — about alone all day long on the river. Probably half-witted, like the boy. One or other of them played the flute or the violin. You could hear it over the high wall of their garden. In brief, very queer people, my dear; something mentally defective, you may depend. The people in the poor, scattered cottages knew better. To them, as to the Dragon, the Eagle, and the Lion, Sandra was a Princess.

  * * * * *

  “Well, are you rested, love?” the aunt, who was also the Dragon, asked when supper was over, and Denny had wandered out into the starlight. “You’ve had four days, alone all day.”

  “I must have four days more,” said Sandra happily. “ Has anything happened?”

  “Nothing. We had been in the garden and Denny played.”

  “Something has happened,” said Sandra with sudden conviction. “ You look so queer. You’d better tell me now.”

  “It’s nothing much, dear.”

  “Tell me at once.”

  “It’s only — it’s what I’ve always been afraid of.”

  “Not?”

  “Yes, dearest. It’s that man. He’s found us out, just as I always said he would. And he wants money. I knew he would someday.”

  “You didn’t. You said you were certain he was dead,” said Sandra, white and fierce.

  “Oh, what does it matter what I said? He isn’t, and now everything’s spoiled.”

  “Tell me all about it,” said the girl, quite gentle now.

  “He came here this morning. I opened the door. He asked for you. And then I recognised him and told him you didn’t live here. — But fie recognised me, too. And besides, he knew, he knew! I said you’d send him a hundred pounds. It’s the only way, love. When you’ve made your money we’ll go right away and hide somewhere where he can’t find us.”

  “There isn’t anywhere where he can’t find us,” said Sandra dully. “ I’ve always known that.” Suddenly she caught the Dragon’s arms above the elbows.

  “He can’t make me live with him, can he? He can’t, can he?”

  “No — no, my chickie dear, of course he can’t.”

  “I might have known he’d turn up,” said the girl bitterly, and dropped the arms she held. “But I thought you knew he was dead, and had promised grandfather not to tell me for fear I should go and be a fool about some other beast. As if I hadn’t had enough of beasts to last me all my life.”

  She clung to the Dragon now lik
e a frightened child.

  “We mustn’t come here anymore,” she said; “he can’t get at me at the other house. You won’t let him get at me — will you, Aunt Dusa? You won’t.”

  “No, no, my pigeon. I’ll take care of that,” soothed the woman, holding her.

  “And I’ve been so happy — oh, auntie, I’ve never been so happy as I’ve been to-night.” She had lost control of herself at last, and sobbed wildly against the other woman’s neck. And, as she clung, sure, unmistakable as a knife thrust, the knowledge of the full measure of that day’s disaster came to the nurse.

  “My love,” she said quietly, “ there’s someone else. You’ve met someone — there is someone?”

  “No, there isn’t,” cried Sandra still more wildly. “ I only thought there was. But there isn’t, there isn’t: there never will be while that man’s alive. There never will be anything — never anything for me. What’s that?”

  It was a sound from the garden, heard plainly through the open window.

  “It’s all right, my pet,” said Dusa, holding her more closely. “Ah, have your cry out, my poor, my pretty. It’s all right. It’s only Denny.”

  It was only Denny, stuffing his thumbs into his ears, and twisting his long fingers in his hair as he went blindly away among the shadows of the starlit garden.

  CHAPTER VI. JADIS.

  Having now displayed to your sympathising eyes poor Sandra in the worst possible emotional fix, I cannot do less than shew you how she got there.

  It all happened when she was a slip of a girl, running wild in the New Forest. Her grandfather, always a perfect Providence to anyone who did not happen to be related to him, had arranged that Denis was to have lessons — lessons in the three R’s from the national schoolmaster, lessons in Latin and English from the vicar, and lessons in music from the organist of that little church at the edge of the Forest, that church which tourists love — the church whose graveyard bristles with bicycles during the hours of divine service.

  This organist, by name Saccage, was the wet retriever of the aunt’s narrative. He was oily in face and hair, his hands were podgy, his legs short. He had almost every physical characteristic calculated to repel a girl. But he was an artist. He was a skilled musician, and could draw dreams down from heaven with his organ-playing, or, with the fiddle jerk up devils from hell. Also, he could recognise genius in arts other than his own.

  Prowling about in the forest, thinking out the Andante of his concerto, he came, as another man had done, on the Sylvan stage — and, laid as close against an oak as his shape permitted, watched through green branches the dancing of Sylvia — heard the music of Pan.

  It may he counted to him for what it is worth that he was the first to see the financial possibilities of Sandra’s dancing.

  He withdrew unseen, and went home, knowing that he held the chance of his life in his hands. If he could get that girl and that boy on to the boards of a London theatre — having first established a claim to tax their earnings to the last bearable point — his future was made.

  But how to establish the claim?

  Teach her music — for nothing — for love?

  Gratitude?

  Gratitude would only confer on him the power to tax for crumbs and broken meats — the tax a dog levies who has saved your house from burglars. He did not want to be a dog; he wanted to be master.

  Teach the violin — for love.

  Yes — love was the way.

  It was easy to make Sandra’s acquaintance in those days. She had no friend but her old nurse, Mrs. Mosenthal, now promoted to be housekeeper. And Mrs. Mosenthal did not love the forest, or tread its green ways.

  He taught the child music, and was confident that later he could teach love to her. For all his physical repulsiveness he had not been unsuccessful in that art which he called love. The artist in him gave him a power over weak and coarse natures. But it gave him none over Sandra, save the power of one who tells dream-stories of a great future, and who seems disinterestedly anxious to make those dreams come true.

  He talked to her, really quite cleverly, about genius — its responsibilities, its claims. He won Her confidence — got her to dance for him — and with astonishment and awe, proclaimed that, little as he had suspected it, all which he had said about genius applied to Tier. That dancing of hers was genius. How could she reconcile it to her artistic conscience to hide such a light under a bushel? She ought to go to London — to take a concert hall — not a vulgar theatre — and just dance for the elect, who would watch her with reverent wonder, and pay well for the privilege.

  “But my grandfather would never agree,” the girl told him one day after a music lesson.

  “I would help you,” he said; “all artists are of one brotherhood and bound to help each’ other. Your grandfather has no right to prevent you from giving your wonderful gift to the world. You ought to take the matter into your own hands.”

  This meant run away, when Sandra understood.

  “He’d fetch me hack,” she said dismally. “By the ear,” she added.

  It was after some such talk that Saccage unfolded his plan. There was so sacrifice he would not make in the cause of Art. There were means to prevent her grandfather from taking her back. A marriage ceremony ....

  “Who with?” said Sandra.

  “With me,” he answered impressively. And Sandra laughed.

  After that he hated her. Before he had desired her beauty and the money that it and her talent should make, and had been indifferent to herself. Now he hated her, and he hated her to the end. But he only smiled.

  “You misunderstand me. I said a ceremony. I could never trammel my art with the absurd outworn fetters of marriage. But I would lend you my name. There is no sacrifice . . . .”

  And so on, till the girl asked him bluntly what it was that he did mean.

  “I have a friend,” he said, “ who used to be a registrar of marriages. He has some of the old certificate forms by him. To oblige me, and for the sake of art — he has a fine, untrained baritone — he will fill in one for us. And to obtain proper witnesses we must pretend to go through the marriage ceremony. Then you can show the certificate to your grandfather, and he will think you are my wife and that he has no power to take you back.”

  It was a beautiful, romantic plan, and it was carried out to the last detail.

  Sandra went out alone for the day, as she had been used to do, now and again when the desire seized her, and came back with a marriage certificate tucked into the front of her loose girl’s blouse.

  It is impossible, you think, that any girl, however untaught and neglected, could have been so silly? My dear madam, I beg you to remember what a goose of a girl you were at seventeen. And you, my good sir, has no girl, for your dear sake, ever consented to things even more foolish than this mock marriage?

  Sandra returned to Ringwood — she was to pack her clothes to be sent after her: to put all her valuables and money in a hand-bag, and to meet Saccage at the railway-station and go with him to London.

  “I have a dear sister,” He said, “ most musical she is, who will make you welcome to her unpretending flat. We .will interest a few wealthy friends in your career, and then .... Fame, my child, Fame, and the fulfilment of your genius.”

  So poor Sandra packs up her belongings — the books and scarves she likes best, and the theatrical paste jewels that were her mother’s — old Nurse had found them somewhere, and given them to her to play with, — packs up, breathless with excitement and expectation.

  “Not a word to your nurse,” Saccage had told her, “Nor to Denis. As soon as we’re settled we’ll send for them both.”

  So she packs in secret.

  What a situation for the child! One would think now that nothing could save her. Yet she was saved. That snake in the grass, the anonymous letter, so justly reviled in all respectable fiction, proved her salvation.

  Her growing intimacy with the organist had not, you may be sure, escaped local atten
tion. Someone, brave enough to write a letter to save a child, but not brave enough to sign it, had written to her grandfather. I shall always believe that the courageous, cowardly writer was Mr. Templar’s aunt.

  And the grandfather came back, just too late .... and just in time. For he met them at the station — the two first-class tickets taken but not clipped, and the bag already in the corner of an empty compartment.

  “Where are you going?” said the grandfather, hoarse with fury.

  “To London,” said Sandra, pale and desperate.

  “With her husband,” said Saccage dramatically. He also was pale, but resolved to assert himself. He had not looked to have to do it

  so soon.

  We were married this morning,” said Sandra. “ You always hated me. You ought to be glad I’m going.”

  “You are not going,” he said, and caught her wrist. A crowd began to gather. He dragged her into the waiting-room and the train went without them.

  The old man looked at the certificate, and then at the two whose names were on it. Also he asked certain straightforward questions of the organist that did more to frighten Sandra into submission than all his bullying.

  “Miss Mundy is a ward in Chancery,” he said, “ under her grandmother’s will. Do you know the penalty for marrying a ward without permission of the court, you cur? It’s pretty severe. Imprisonment’s not a thing you’ll care for, perhaps.”

  “I want my wife,” said Saccage, nobly, as it seemed to Sandra, keeping up the farce they had agreed upon.

  “You will not get your wife,” said the old man, “but you will get your trial and your sentence. And Miss Mundy will come home with me.”

  “Mrs. Saccage, if you please,” said Saccage. “ If you choose to bring an action I can’t prevent it. But if you do, your cruel neglect of your granddaughter will come out. I will send you the address of my solicitor — Meantime I claim my wife.”

  “Will they really send him to prison?” Sandra asked, breathless.