Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “But the want of heart — in such an hour—”

  “Want of heart? You do not figure to yourself that she knows why she returns to-morrow to the paternal roof?”

  “You have not told her?”

  “Sapristi,” answered Madame, roundly, “she will learn all soon enough. Why should I desolate the pension with emotions? Before all, dear demoiselle, it is important in a pension of young girls to avert the emotions.”

  CHAPTER IV. TRAVELLER

  FOOL that I was,” said St. Hilary, “and always am and always shall be! Why didn’t I talk to the girl like an uncle, and confiscate that little beast Emil’s load of rubbish? Then there’d have been no feast, and no row: it’s a thousand to one that she was caught and that the head-dragon made the little Madonna cry. Oh, hang all the fools!” He sent another cigarette end to join the others on the hearth.

  “There’s one thing I’m thankful for,” he told himself. “After all — as I said, Queens have their hands kissed and are none the worse for it.”

  He leaned out of his window. The chestnut trees in the playground below trembled and shivered in the night wind. He shivered also and reflected gloomily on the destiny that allows one to meet nice people — really nice people, and then whisks them away to unknown addresses in other countries. And she was so pretty, so unworldly, so —

  “Nonsense,” he told himself; “she’s probably not really pretty at all. Only you haven’t spoken to a girl for nine weeks. And didn’t you come away because you’d had jolly well enough of girls?”

  The end of his cigarette had glowed like a fixed star at the window for nearly ten silent minutes before if fell as a star falls.

  “But all the same,” he said, “she’s different.”

  He asked for, and got, a holiday next day. The impulse came to him with the twittering bird-voices and the wind of dawn that whispered among the blossoming fruit-trees of the old convent garden. He had taken no holidays yet; to-day he would have one. If the principal refused he would go — go that very moment. The idea smiled to him alluringly. He could make it up to Ferrars some other way. Yes, if the principal refused — the idea smiled with a still deeper allurement. Thus it was that he asked for his “day off” in so cavalier a fashion that the principal, undesirous of being left in the middle of the term without resident English master, accorded the free day almost with enthusiasm.

  “But perfectly, my good boy,” he said (my boy is not quite the same thing as mon garçon, but the way of translators is hard), “it is that one must amuse oneself. Take if you will two days or three. The children will pass themselves well of three days lessons; they will apply themselves to the English even as your return with an enthusiasm redoubled. You go to England, yes — ?”

  “Yes, monsieur — affairs,” said St. Hilary.

  “Go, then, my boy. But guard to you,” the principal went on, hitting the bull’s eye as only complete ignorance can hit it. “Madame at the pension, she told me last night that she sends one of her young girls to England to-morrow. Beware, my good St. Hilaire, of the English mees. Very blond, very beautiful — she travels alone with her sister who is quite infant.”

  “So it was her sister,” said St. Hilary to himself. “And so, without adieu, good voyage,” said the principal.

  St. Hilary expressed himself in terms as correct as were allowed by his humble French, and went off to pack a bag. Three days. One can go a very long way in the world of geography as in that of psychology in three days.

  I can no longer disguise from the reader that Stephen St. Hilary was a very romantic young man. The passion for romance, for adventure, was as strong in him as in Daphne. But, whereas the passion in her had only lea to school-girl escapades, with him it had led very much further than he wanted to go. And this not once but many times in the crucial space that lies between eighteen and twenty-six. The passion of curiosity that leads a boy to try to see what beetles will do when transfixed by pins leads an — or at any rate led this — imaginative lad to try to find out what girls would or would not do when they were transfixed by the arrows of the Love-god. And along that road are sign-posts — danger signals some call them — labelled “Marriage.” Those danger-posts had driven him from England, his friend’s unstable living serving well as pretext, and now, oh irony of Fate! he found himself asking truculently for holidays, carrying the demand at, as it were, the bayonet’s point, just because a girl — a silly schoolgirl, a perfect stranger — had looked uncommonly pretty in a chestnut tree. But in the bishop’s chair she had looked like Madonna herself. And, any way, he could afford himself a holiday, and the nine something left the town that morning.

  French men of science tell us that love is a microbe, a bacillus, like the busy little beasts who bring us small-pox and typhoid and consumption and all other ill things. It is a comfortable theory, and explains much. The man who is sickening for small-pox does not know, as a rule, why his head feels like some tortured demon’s head and his back like a back that a sportive god has twisted between a playful finger and thumb. He knows that he feels like death, but he does not know why. So St. Hilary knew that he felt like life; was conscious of an odd sensation, new and not wholly pleasant; of a heart whose beats were not the rhythmic beats that the trained athlete knows, but something more disquieting, yet more worth the bearing; but being for the first time in the Presence of the disease, he could not diagnose it.

  He said, “I am interested” — and flattered himself on his scientific attitude. Whereas he should have said, “I am in love,” and abased himself before the commonest of all disorders.

  “Fly,” Daphne had said at the supreme moment, “each take a candle and fly!” She herself had fled, carrying a candle, the sleeping child, and the white rose bouquet in its heavy pot.

  She had carried the bouquet in a hand whose wrist ached as at the touch of red not iron, to the dormitory, and had hidden it behind her bed before she turned to meet the accusing eyes of Madame and to taste the supreme littleness of the utterly found out. The finding out had lacked the completeness she had first dreaded. She came back to the dormitory, shivering in the icy breath of an emotional reaction, and when she crept between the cold, coarse linen of her sheets she held in her hand a chill white rose. Her teeth chattered as she crushed it against her lips.

  “I shall never sleep again, she told herself. And with the word she fell asleep, worn out with the complicated vivid kaleidoscopic emotions of her first day’s womanhood. Colombe had undressed Doris and laid her in her own place. Daphne, for the first time for three years, did not bring the child to her bed. She lay alone, the white rose at her lips. In the pale dawn, when the tall windows showed gaunt and gray, a stumbling little figure groped and trembled at her bedside. She woke instantly, lifted the child into her bed, felt the cold touch of the little limbs against her own warmth. There were no words that matched the emotion which caught her as she held the child to her and flung, far across the dormitory, the crushed white rose. She saw it next morning as she dressed. The edges of its petals were brown. And she picked it up and held it a moment, two powers warring in her. “I’ll burn it as soon as I get to a fire,” she said; “there’ll be fires in England.” And she thrust it between the white of her bodice and the blush rose of her neck.

  In his English-cut tweed suit, with his English height and breadth, his insular calm and swagger, Stephen St. Hilary stood, one plain to be seen, amid the rout of dark-skinned, browbent, hurrying, preoccupied French folk talking with rapid speech and expansive gestures in the salle d’attente at the station.

  “Tiens,” said Madame, in the act of “seeing off” Daphne and Doris, “behold an Englishman. How they are gross! How they are enormous! We will find for thee, my child, a woman serious who voyages to Calais. Look always on the ground, my child, and look not at the gentleman — mais du tout, du tout — never look at them in the face. And if they speak to you reply not at all.”

  Madame explored the train in all its length, with the quickn
ess of a ferret who explores a rabbit warren, and the care of a cat who seeks a nest for its kittens.

  Then suddenly she took Daphne by the arm — with the sudden fierceness of a cat who catches her kitten in her mouth, and bundled her into a close, stuffy, well-filled second-class compartment labelled Dames seules.

  “Madame goes so far as Calais?” she asked of a dun-faced woman in rusty black who carried an umbrella, two paper parcels, a black basket, and a large bottle wrapped in brown paper.

  The lady addressed did in effect go as far as Calais.

  “Permit, then,” said Madame, “that I recommend to your care this young girl and her little sister.” A catalogue of “musts” and “must nots” followed in voluble French, and Daphne was wedged into the crowded carriage. The white roses she carried were crushed by an enormous Frenchwoman on one side, and Doris, lithe and active as any eel, on the other.

  “Adieu, Madame — adieu. I shall never forget you — and the school, and the girls and the mistresses. And for the last night — your goodness.”

  The engine shrieked.

  “Adieu, Madame,” the child shrieked with the shriek of the engine, in shrill discord. “I will write to you when Daphne is married to a duke and tell you what I wore when I was bridesmaid!”

  The heat of the April day, the agitations of departure, the rooting up of her life from the soil where it had grown so long, the loud interest of Doris in everyone’s luggage left Daphne little room to wonder who it was that the English master was meeting or seeing off. As the train hurried on she found enough to do in preventing the infuriation of the whole carriage by Doris, and in protecting her person and her roses from the adipose vivacity of her neighbour. So filled, time flies fleetly. They were at Amiens while yet they seemed to have only just started.

  “If one opened the window,” sighed Daphne, but the obese Frenchwoman, shivering under her cloth cape, repelled the suggestion and spoke with genuine horror of currents of air.

  And then the wonderful thing happened. Not the window opened, but the door.

  “Ah, here you are! Sorry I missed you at the station. Come farther along; I have a jolly cool carriage — make haste. This your umbrella?”

  The tall, broad, tweed-clad Englishman had them out of the carriage as he spoke.

  “But, monsieur,” said the lady with the black basket, as Daphne passed her. “This demoiselle has been recommended to me — since I travel as far as Calais and—”

  “Wee!” said St. Hilary, “say too byang. It’s all right. Celle aye mong sœur.”

  “Who is it?” asked Doris, pulling at Daphne’s collar as she was lifted out.

  “It’s all right,” said Daphne, and thanked Fate that the question was put in English. A little premature, her thanks, for Doris was not used to evasions.

  “Qui est-ce?” she persisted, and then there was nothing for it but to hustle her away, and leave the carriage to say and think what it would.

  It said a good deal.

  “The English are without shame, is it not?” said the stout woman, sympathetically; “but you, madame — you have not to reproach yourself.”

  “You have reason, madame,” replied the black basket “One does what one can. But a young girl badly brought up! I ask you a little!”

  “And the lie — ail ready — only the child spoke the truth. ‘Qui est-ce?’ And he who said himself her brother.”

  “If I had a daughter of such character,” remarked the old maid with the bird cage, “I should hasten myself to marry her — to the first corner — yes, believe me well!”

  “Madame has reason,” agreed the black basket. “I blush for a young girl so wanting in reserve. Let us talk of it no more!” And they talked of it very happily all the way to Calais.

  Daphne and Doris were whisked into a first-class carriage.

  “So you brought the roses!” he said softly, as the train started.

  “I’m very angry,” said Daphne, in a voice as low as his; “you had no right to do that.”

  “To do what?”

  “To make us get out of the other carriage.”

  “Don’t tell me you were comfortable there!”

  “Of course I wasn’t.”

  “Well, then!” said he conclusively.

  “You mean I needn’t have come. But how could I make a fuss before all those tabbies and before the child?”

  “Yes,” he said, and smiled at her, “you won’t be able to quarrel with me before the child.”

  The child was investigating, with the deep and thorough interest of her age, the fittings of the carriage —— the dainty smooth gray cloth, the brown lace-like trimmings, the dainty, fresh, white antimacassars, all the fine details of spacious and delicate luxury which marks the first-class carriage of the Chemin de Fer du Nord.

  “Come,” he said, “forgive me, and I’ll tell you how I came to be here. I’m sure you’re dying to know.”

  “And saying you were my brother, too,” Daphne pursued relentlessly. “It was too bad!”

  “Well, all men are brothers, you know, especially if they’re English; and if a lie is a thing that deceives, that wasn’t a lie — your little sister took care of that? ‘Qui est-ce?’ It was a wonderful moment.”

  “Qui est-ce?” said Doris again. She had explored, and would explore again, but in a whirling rest-moment she had come to lean on Daphne’s knee and pull at her collar with pinky-black fingers.

  “How do you do?” said St. Hilary, gravely, holding out a large hand in which the pinky paw was swat lowed up. “I am an acquaintance of Emil Thibault’s.”

  “Yes,” said Daphne, eagerly clutching at an explanation that had not occurred to her. She had not thought that any part of the truth could serve her in this hour. “If it hadn’t been for this gentleman we shouldn’t have had any feast last night.”

  “Why did you take us out of the other carriage?” asked Doris, with the air of one who has a right to be answered. All children who have not been snubbed give this tone to their millions of questions.

  “Because I knew you’d like to come,” he answered. “You did like to come, didn’t you?”

  “I like it now I am come,” said Doris, cautiously; “the other carriage was so hot. And it smelt of scent — the kind they sell in penny bottles at the Fair — and I wasn’t very comfy. The bird-cage was trying to make a hole in my side. There isn’t a hole, I suppose?” She turned a lean side for inspection.

  “There’s no hole yet,” said St. Hilary, gravely, “but there might have been if I hadn’t fetched you out when I did.”

  “I like you,” Doris announced.

  “And l like you,” said he; “so now we’re all happy.”

  Are you happy? Daffy,” the child inquired anxiously; “do you like him too? Do you like her?” She turned a thin, anxious face from one to the other.

  “Yes, very much,” St. Hilary answered, with a fervency that but half satisfied the questioner, who persisted: “You do like him, Daffy, don’t you?” Daphne had to say that she did.

  “Ah,” said the child, “you don’t very much. But that’s because you don’t know him as well as I do.” After that what was there to do but laugh?

  “Ah,” said St. Hilary, “now the sun shines again.”

  “It’s never stopped,” said Doris.

  “It did for a minute, but I suppose you didn’t notice it,” he said. “Can you read?”

  “Of course I can. Can’t you?” Doris questioned. “Yes, a little. I’ve got a book here. Would you like to read it?” He produced “Sans Famille,” snatched at the last moment from a boy’s desk.

  “Oh,” said Doris, promptly, “I’ve read that, thank you.”

  Again the sun shone.

  “Well, what can I do to amuse you?”

  “Tell me a story,” said Doris, snuggling in between him and Daphne.

  “Do you mind? — you needn’t listen,” he told Daphne. “Well, once upon a time—”

  Oh,” said Doris, wriggling jo
yously, “it’s going to be a fairy story.”

  “Once upon a time there was a prince — at least he wasn’t exactly a prince—”

  “He must be,” said Doris, with conviction, “if it’s a fairy story.”

  “Well, we’ll call him a prince — and he lived in a tower, and he used to look out of his tower to see what he could see. And he saw gardens with flowers in them, and a river and a road.’

  “Like from the terrace?”

  “Yes, just like that. And one day he saw a lot of princesses playing together, and—”

  “What aid they play at?” asked the child.

  “Oh, ball and shuttle-cocks and — all sorts of things.”

  “Didn’t he want to go and play too?”

  “Yes, frightfully; but he wasn’t allowed. And so—”

  “That’s just horrid,” said Doris; “it was like that when I had measles, and I used to look out of the little dormitory window. Go on.”

  “How can Mr. St. Hilary go on if you keep interrupting?” reproved Daphne.

  I didn’t mean; but when I know about things in stories I like to say — you know I do, Daffy.”

  “Well, so he kept on looking out of his tower, and one day his faithful page told him that that day the princess was to come alone and in secret to gather the wonderful fruit of the wonder-tree that grew just under this tower.”

  “Why had she got to come alone and in secretness?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I expect it was a sort of spell —— magic, you know. So he got down out of his tower and on to a big wall that was close to the tree.”

  “What did ne do that for?”

  “He wanted to see if the princess was as nice as she looked a long way off.”

  “And was she?”

  “Quite. And when the princess climbed up the tree he climbed down, and so they met among the new chestnut leaves.”

  “But I thought it was a wonder-tree.”

  “All wonder-trees have chestnut leaves. It’s the fruit that’s different. And he said ‘Hullo,’ and she said, ‘Hullo’ or something like it; and then they told each other their names.”