Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  It was the Management, almost too definitely in evening dress.

  It craved the indulgence of the audience. This tribute of their admiration would delight Madame Sylvia when it was able to report it. But it must ask them to excuse her from reappearing to receive their kind approval.

  “Our beautiful Sylvia,” it said, “is overcome by her exertions. She has surpassed herself to-night. And she pays the penalty. She is quite knocked up,” it added, with an inspiration of colloquial appeal. “ I’m sure you’ll understand, and not expect her to appear. It’s really only because she was so splendid tonight. She was good — wasn’t she?” it added, following the star of colloquial inspiration. It paused, bowed, and withdrew to a thunder of sympathetic noise.

  “Well!” said the aunt, “I never saw anything like it. Never! The young woman’s quite out of her mind, I should think. Don’t you, Henry? Don’t you, Edmund?”

  “Edmund’s gone,” said her husband; “he asked me to say good-night for him. He suddenly remembered that he’d asked a man to look in about eleven. And it’s long past that. Come along, my dear. You must be tired out.”

  Men are loyal to each other, and respond to the appeal of sex-loyalty even when they are uncles.

  Templar was only one of a crowd: the crowd was inquiring1 at the stage-door — insisting, among a hundred others, on knowing how she was, whether she was better, what was the matter with her, whether a doctor had been sent for, what he said, whether they could fetch anything, do anything

  The police had to move them on at last. Sympathetic admiration or drunken pugnacity — neither can be tolerated in its fuller manifestation on a London pavement.

  Templar had detached himself from the crowd, and taken up a place on the other side of the road.

  Therefore he was not moved on, and when her motor drew up he was there.

  When she came out, hideously muffled, on the arm of the Management itself, and followed by quite half a dozen sympathisers, he was lighting a cigarette close by the other door of her motor.

  “No, I’m perfectly all right, I don’t want seeing home — I’m as well as ever. No, thank you — I’ll see after the new head myself. Or Mr. Denis will. You see, I know exactly what I want. Oh, dear Mr. Management, please don’t bother. I’ve got everything and everyone I want at home. Thank you, yes — yes — quite comfortable — everything I want, thank you. Yes — of course I shall be all right next week. Oh, do please tell him to drive on. Yes, of course he knows where to go. Say home. Thank you all so much. Good night.”

  In the next street a block of carriages delayed the motor.

  “Sandra,” said a voice at the window. “ Sandra, darling.” The motor was already moving.

  “Get in,” she whispered. “ Quick, quick — Oh, be careful!”

  He had opened the door, entered the motor, and shut its door gently.

  “My own, my treasure,” he breathed, with other follies, as he sank to the seat beside her — and on the instant found her arms round his neck. “ Don’t agitate yourself. You’ll be ill again. It’s all right — oh, my love!”

  The motor swirled round two corners into an empty street.

  “Pardon, madam,” said the voice of the chauffeur, and the car slackened to a snail’s pace to give his voice leave to penetrate the scented darkness of the brougham. The two sprang apart. “Pardon, but is it all right?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Sandra in the scented darkness. “ Oh, yes, it’s all right. Drive on, please. Drive home. Yes, the usual way.”

  “It’s all right,” Templar said, and took his world into his arms, “it’s all right. Oh, my dear!” He strove for words, but silence served best, and among her disguising and disfiguring shawls and wraps they clung to each other as people cling who have escaped shipwreck and come to land on some wonderful island of tropic green and sands iridescent, where soft streams flow and the thicket is ablaze with blossoms and the air alight with smooth, coloured birds.

  The chauffeur always made a four-mile drive of the five minutes that lay between the Hilarity and Home.

  To-night this round included Hampstead and Haverstock Hill. He need not have troubled. When he drew up at last in Portland Place and asked, “ Where would the gentleman like to be set down?” he got for answer:

  “He is coming home with me. Yes, the usual way — I told you that before.”

  The motor devoured a street and half a street, and glided into its garage.

  “Put out the lights,” said Sylvia through the speaking tube, “ and be careful that there’s no one about. Yes, I know you always are careful, but be extra careful to-night, please, Forrester.”

  “Yes, madam,” said Forrester — got down and put out the lamps.

  “Now,” said Sandra, holding her lover’s hands in the dark, “don’t say ‘Oh!’ to anything. It’s all right!”

  CHAPTER XI. THE LOVE NIGHT

  It was quite dark in the brougham. Sylvia released her lover’s hands and reached down to the floor of the carriage. Templar heard a click and suddenly experienced the descending lift sensation.

  “It’s all right, I tell you,” said Sylvia, her hands on his arms; “we’re just going down.”

  They were. Very slowly and gently, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, the whole of the inside of the motor began to sink through the floor.

  It was an ingenious arrangement, as Templar perceived later. Once in the garage, the pressure of a spring released the catch of a trap-door, which fell down at the side of what appeared to be a motor pit. Then the floor of this pit rose to meet the underside of the brougham. Another lever controlled and removed two steel rods which supported the carriage in place, and a third lever, worked from within the brougham, started the little lift on its way. They went down into darkness, and stopped with a jerk.

  “Open the door,” said Sylvia, “or shall I? Can you feel the handle? Now get out.”

  He got out, on to a smooth floor, and her hands came fluttering to him through the dark. They stood together outside the motor brougham.

  “Stand well back,” she said, and something moved in the darkness. It was the inside of the brougham returning to its natural place in the garage above. They heard it come into position with a soft click.

  “Now,” she said, “ it’s all safe, and we can turn on the light. Let me.”

  Her touch on the electric switch brought the light round them. He looked up at the gleam of the steel shaft that stood up from floor to ceiling of the narrow passage in which he found himself.

  “How beautifully simple,” he said. “So that was how you vanished the night that I saw you home? That’s a confession, Sandra — I tried to find out where you lived long before I met you on the river.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Forrester told me. I was horribly frightened at the time. Come, let’s get out of this place. It always seems to me like a crypt. I believe it’s haunted.”

  It was rather like a crypt — its roof, except for the square space in which the lift worked, was of old, dark brick, with grey-green stone groining and pillars.

  “What is it?” he asked, as they went. Both experienced the need to assure themselves that the solid earth still went round in the orthodox way, the need which comes to us all after great crises of life — which makes us shrink at first from vital explanations and enlightenments and talk about the weather or the Government — anything trivial rather than about that which has thrilled our souls to the very centres of life.

  “It’s an underground passage.”

  “Well, yes,” said he, and they laughed.

  “There used to be a monastery here — it’s part of it. The old Duke of Pentland found it when he made our house. He was always fond of underground, you know — and he kept it. He made our house, too — mind your head.”

  They passed through a low arch into a kitchen, a quite ordinary kitchen: then up a flight of stairs and into the room of middle Victorian souvenirs, she turning up the lights as she went.

&nb
sp; “There,” she said, dropping her wraps and looking at him, “now we’re at home — this is where I live. It’s The House With No Address.”

  “I see,” he said. And did, in a measure.

  “It’s a wonderful place, isn’t it? I’ll show you all over it.”

  “Presently,” he said, “you ought to rest now. Can’t I ring for some wine?”

  “There’s some in the cabinet,” she said — and laughed. “ I hope this isn’t a dream.”

  “It’s very like one,” he said, and got the wine. Tall Venice glasses were beside it in the cabinet — and food on fine china covered with fine damask.

  “We’ll have supper presently,” she said, taking the glass from his hand. “ You, too — we’ll drink each other’s healths.”

  But he was, after all, too conventional a lover to do otherwise than drink from her glass, ostentatiously turning it so that his lips should rest where hers had been.

  Then they stood an instant looking at each other.

  “How quiet it is here,” he said.

  “Yes,” said she.

  Then there was silence again.

  “Come,” he said briskly, “ you must sit down and rest — and let me sit beside you and hold your hand and look at you and get used to the dream. Tell me things. Tell me all about this wonderful house, and how you found it.”

  She, too, still wanted the relief of words that did not touch the truth that lay between them — the truth that had divided and did now unite.

  “It was Uncle Mosenthal,” she said, and told him of their coming to town.

  “His grandfather bought the house a long time ago. He owns the whole of this block. It was that old Duke of Pentland who built ours. He sort of dug out the insides of two of these houses and made our house in the middle, diamond shape, you know — so that nothing shews from the outside. All the windows open into the garden in the middle.

  “I don’t understand in the least,” he said.

  “It is difficult: I’ll draw it for you, if you’ve got a bit of paper and a pencil.”

  She reached for the pâpier maché blotting-book and, his chin on her shoulder as he looked on, drew on a letter from his pocket something like this:

  “I see, — but surely people must know of this place — the men who mend the roofs and put up telephone wires ...?”

  “The telephone men don’t notice the shapes of roofs, I suppose — and he has all the repairs done by workmen from his place in the country — brings them up by motor and takes them back every night — the gardener, too — and the woman who does our housework. She’s deaf and dumb and very stupid, but she works all right. Oh, it’s a wonderful scheme! No one but Uncle Mosenthal could have invented it.”

  “He must be a wonderful man.”

  “He is. He is frightfully nice, and he’s in all sorts of things. He half owns the Theatre — and all sorts of companies and things. He calls himself a house-agent . . . but I know the King has sent for him . . . for some secret reason or other, and he had to start for Germany last night. He’s a wonderful person — and kind! The world’s full of people he’s been kind to. That deaf and dumb woman, he saved her life in a fire — his own self.”

  “And your chauffeur — how did you square him?”

  “Oh — he was one of the village boys I used to know at home — and he went into a motor works, and when Uncle Moses had invented the lift and motor scheme, I thought of him. He made the motor. And he put in the electric light. He is much too fond of me to give away our secret. . . .”

  “But I don’t understand how it is that a full account of all this isn’t in the illustrated papers every week. The Hydraulic Power people must be interested in that lift.”

  “It isn’t the Hydraulic. It’s the American Elevator — there’s a tank on the roof of the house the garage is under, and . . .”

  “I see.”

  “In the wicked Lord Pentland’s time there was just a trap-door under the stable and a ladder down. They kept straw there to hide the trap-door. It has been such fun. And I always feel so safe here. You see, Uncle Moses is next door — I’ve only got to press that button if anything went wrong — he’d be here in half a minute.”

  “But he’s in Germany ...?”

  “Ah, but when he’s at home!”

  “The rooms in the houses next door must be a funny shape.”

  “Oh, he has the cornery bits boarded off . . . calls them storerooms. That makes it look all right, and of course all the storerooms have windows on the street. — And — Oh!”

  He had caught her in his arms — almost roughly.

  “Why are we wasting our time like this?” he said, holding her. “ You could have told me all this when the others were here. Where are they? When will they come in?”

  “It’s all right,” she said soothingly; “ they’re at Wood House. Uncle Moses sends his motor down with us sometimes after the performance. At first I thought I’d give up the Wood House altogether — and then I couldn’t bear to, after all. But I haven’t cared to go since. .... But it’s good for them, and I insist on their going.”

  “When will they get back?”

  “Oh — in two or three days.”

  “Do you mean,” he said slowly, “that there’s no one else in this house but you . . . but Ms? That there won’t be?”

  “No,” she said, “ not anyone else. It’s home, dear — only you and me.”

  Through her thin bodice he could feel the sweet warmth of her body. Her breast heaved quietly against his breast. She put up her arms to his neck and drew his lips to hers. They stood so, till it seemed to him that the beating of his heart was so loud that she must hear it, even through the self-righteous tick of the carriage-clock on the mantel-piece.

  They were alone — they were alone in that quiet house, safe shut in — no one else anywhere, in any of the rooms. They were betrothed lovers; in a few days — to-morrow if he chose — they would be man and wife. And her arms were round his neck, their faces touched, and against his breast her breast rose and fell.

  “Sandra,” he said hoarsely, “ Sandra, Sandra.”

  “My love,” she answered. “Oh, my love! I have prayed God to give you back to me — and now He has. I didn’t think He would. I didn’t really believe in prayer. Oh, my love — I believe in it now.”

  He kissed her lips, her forehead, undid the clasp of her arms about his neck and kissed her hands.

  “Dear — dear, dear one,” he said, “this is our magic palace. We aren’t man and woman: you’re an enchanted Princess, and I’m your slave.”

  “You’re my Prince,” she said, and drew up his hands to lie under her chin.

  Templar took some credit to himself for being able to say, in quite a natural and hearty manner:

  “Princess, your Prince is at death’s door. He has had nothing to eat since breakfast.”

  You know the pretty moan of pity for your sufferings — remorse for her neglected hostess duties — resolution to ease your pangs instantly, at whatever cost to herself or the world, with which the woman who loves you receives your announcement that you are hungry? If you do not know it you have never been whole-heartedly loved by a woman.

  She flew to a drawer for napery, flew to the cabinet for food.

  “There — the spoons and things are in that big inlaid box on the sofa-table. Yes, the bread here. There are some chocolates over there — on that silver box — yes. Let’s have the lily in the middle of the table. Isn’t it wonderful for us to have a table with a lily in the middle of it? We’ve always eaten out of doors before, sitting with our feet in wet ditches, like tramps!”

  The emotion that had shaken him to the soul, had just touched hers with the tips of light fingers, almost unfelt, wholly unrealised. And it was that touch that changed her mood from desperate clinging tenderness to a wild childlike gaiety.

  “The big arm-chair for you — that’s where the master of the house sits. The little Eugenie one for me, so that I can be a humble
mouse and catch all the crumbs. Very well — one glass is enough. What a good thing we haven’t got a butler. He wouldn’t approve. When we engage our butler we’ll make it a condition that he shall always let us drink out of the same glass.”

  The worst of saying you are hungry when you are not, or of telling any other lie, for that matter, is that you have to live up to it. Sandra heaped chicken on his plate — like all women, Sandra adored chicken — and it was not the chicken’s fault if it tasted to him like sawdust. But there was a satisfaction in waiting on her; and the gentle intimacy of the meal eaten together helped him in more ways than one.

  They cleared the table, and the carriage clock announced with some asperity that it was one o’clock.

  “Ought I to go?” he made himself say.

  She opened reproachful eyes.

  “Oh, no,” she said, “unless you’re frightfully tired. Do you want to go?”

  His eyes answered her.

  “Then don’t. Indeed, you mustn’t go. There are so many things to say.”

  She curled herself in the corner of the sofa and held out a hand to him. He took it, and leaned back in the sofa’s other corner, their locked hands at long arms’ length between them.

  “You saw it in the papers,” he said.

  “No — it was a letter — I’ll shew it to you.”

  She drew it warm from her bosom.

  “How could you carry it there?” he said, without meaning to.

  “It was the only safe place,” she said simply—”and it’s not from him, you know. It’s from a woman.!’

  Written on cheap, dull, black-edged paper, the letter said:

  “13, Andover Terrace,

  “ Stoke Newington.

  “Madam, I regret to inform you of the death of Mr. Saccage, who has lodged with me for some years. He was taken ill about ten days ago, double pneumonia, and from the first the doctor said no hope. He suffered a great deal, but mostly in his mind. When delirious he talked constantly of you and seemed a prey to regret the way he had treated you. He exacted a promise from me to write and tell you he died repenting his sins and begging your forgiveness. Again and again he said, And I hope she will marry at once — why should she delay an hour? I have stood in her way too long. Of course it is none of my business, but he said over and over he would not lie quiet in his grave till you were happy and married to the gentleman of your choice. Excuse me mixing myself up in your affairs, but it is not my choice, and I am sure his words when unconscious would have touched any heart. He desired me to send you a packet of letters which I will send registered as soon as I can find them. Your photo is to be buried on his heart. He said he always loved you, though treating you so harsh on account of his jealousy and you being so cold to him. I do not pretend to understand what it is all about, but no doubt you will know.