Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  What were their names?”

  “She was Princess Fairstar of Primavera, and he was Prince Stefan of Balliol. Then she looked for the fruit, but it wasn’t ripe, so she said she would come again, and he gave her something she didn’t want—”

  “What?”

  “Oh, that’s the secret part of the story.”

  “What was the wonder-fruit like?”

  “Oh, it wasn’t anything very much to look at —— rough and dull, rather like crumpled paper. But the wonder part was that when you opened the rind you found whatever you happened to want inside, candles and cakes and sirop de groseille and—”

  “You’re not making it up properly,” said the child, severely; “that part’s just cribbed out of our feast last night.”

  “I’m sorry. I won’t crib any more. So she went away, and the prince did nothing but think about her and wish the fruit would get ripe quickly. And at last — it was years later, at least it seemed so — all the lower boughs of the tree were hung with ripe fruit, and then the princess came back, and the prince was very, very glad. And he was sorry he ad given her the secret present that she didn’t want and—”

  “Why didn’t he ask her to give it him back again?”

  “You just mustn’t interrupt, my Dormouse,” said the Dormouse’s sister very hurriedly, “or else the story will stop, won’t it, Mr. St. Hilary?”

  “It will stop dead,” he confirmed; “in fact it almost has.”

  “Oh, never mind; go on,” urged the child; “leave out about the secret present.”

  “The princess didn’t want the secret present, but I think she understood why the prince was sorry about it. And it was very beautiful up there in the wonder-tree with the chestnut leaves, and if the princess didn’t think it out-of-the-way beautiful the poor prince did. Because as they talked up there in the green dusk among the chestnut leaves he began to feel that he should very, very much like the Princess Fairstar to be his friend and to talk to him day after day in the wonder-tree, till the chestnut flowers were faded and fallen and the chestnut fans turned brown and gone drifting down to lie, with all the rest of the dead, beautiful things. Because there were so many things for them to talk about — all the interesting things in the world. And then the princess had to go — and — and other things happened, perhaps he saved the princess from a dragon or something — there might have been a, dragon coming after her in the night, and he might have heard it coming and warned her. And then, quite suddenly, the prince thought he ought to go back to his kingdom. So he said to the keeper of the tower, ‘Look here, I want to go to my kingdom for a day or two, and if you won’t let me go — I’ll break out and not live in the tower any more.’ And the tower-keeper didn’t feel that his tower would be anything like so attractive if he hadn’t a prince, however cheap, in it. So he gave the prince a holiday, and the prince set out for his own kingdom. And it happened most beautifully and fortunately that the princess was travelling the same way on the same day, to her own kingdom. And they met, and then they were able to talk about all the things in the world and to grow into real friends, just as the prince wished, and—”

  “You’re telling the story to Daphne and not me at all,” said Doris, “and it’s very dull anyway. Nothing’s happened at all, really, except the wonder-tree. Don’t you know any real stones?”

  “There’s Bluebeard,” said St. Hilary, breaking a quite long pause.

  Oh, yes! said Doris. “Daffy never lets anyone but her tell me that. I’d like to hear if you tell it like her.”

  “No horrors,” whispered Daphne; “let the wives come to life again. I hate her to hear anything that isn’t pretty.”

  But long before the story, artfully drawn out, reached anything that could by any narrator have been rendered “not pretty,” Doris was asleep, a warm comfortable bunch, with its round head in the hollow of Daphne’s arm.

  “She had all the keys, the big keys and the little keys and the middle-sized keys,” said St. Hilary, “and she counted them, and counted them, and counted them, and — The dear’s asleep. Now we can talk — about everything in the world — can’t we?”

  They did talk. Daphne talked as she had never talked before. You can’t pour out a pint of wine, without silly waste, till you find a pint measure to pour it into. Daphne had found the measure, and the measure rejoiced at the pure new wine that filled it.

  The child slept on. When he had told her more of the real stuff of his life, which men call dreams, than he had ever told to any other human being, and when she had told him more than she knew — oh, but far more — there came a pause, only broken by the child’s even breathing. It was a pause that called imperatively for something to fill it. Something new — something that had filled no pause ever before, for her. She was shivering, and yet it was not cold. She looked at him; her eyelids dropped deeply. He looked at her, and his look compelled the answer of lids re-raised. Slowly, across the sleeping child, they leaned together. Then a cloud covered them — and when it lifted she knew that he had kissed her on the lips, and that she had not before known at all what a kiss was like.

  Daphne bent her face over the child.

  “Wake up, my Dormouse,” she said, in a new voice, that trembled. “We shall be at Calais soon, where the sea is and the pretty boat.”

  “I’m not asleep,” said the Dormouse, yawning with shut eyes.

  “Don’t let one moment spoil all the world,” said St. Hilary, quickly and softly.

  “What do you say?” Doris asked, suddenly wide awake. “What a rosy face you’ve got, Daffy.”

  “I was only saying,” answered St. Hilary, “that sensible people can easily forget things if they don’t want to remember them, especially dreams.”

  “I can forget things, even if I want to remember them. Look at seven-times,” said Doris.

  “And I,” said Daphne, “remember things even when I want to forget them.”

  “I remember, and I want to remember,” said he, “but you needn’t.”

  And then the train came into Calais, and they stepped out into gold sunshine and the fresh wind from the sea.

  CHAPTER V. ORPHAN

  THE room seemed crowded with aunts and uncles, though, to be accurate, there was but one of each: but men there were also Cousin Jane Claringbold and Cousin Henrietta Simshall who though cousins, were just like aunts to look at. They were second cousins, and Cousin Henrietta was only a second cousin by marriage, but then she was well off and thus took the full rank of an aunt in any social gathering. Cousin Claringbold was not well off. She was sometimes introduced to visitors as a distant relative of poor mamma’s. More often she was not introduced at all.

  A big fire blazed in the grate; the air was heavy with the scent of old leather bindings and the more insistent odour of roasting crape.

  The windows were all shut. The green Venetian blinds were lowered, and the room was a green twilight shot with red and yellow gleams from the fire. Outside it was April, and somewhere daffodils were dancing to the wind and primroses bathing their little yellow faces in the sunshine that came to them through the budding branches of hazel and hornbeam. Somewhere gardens were scented with wall-flowers, and alight with the dazzle of white rock-cress.

  In the front garden that lay on the other side of those Venetian blinds, however, there were no flowers, only a dejected monkey-puzzle on a blackened lawn, a few clingy spotted laurels and a hearse. On the stairs in the house were heavy, trampling feet. A banister creaked and groaned as some weight pressed against it.

  Uncle Harold left the fire, to stand by the bow-window and peep through the narrow chink between two Venetian blind slats.

  “They’re bringing it out now,” he said.

  “Are they?” said Cousin Henrietta, with brisk interest. “Do you remember, Emily, when poor Mr. Pettigrew died they had to lower the coffin from the first floor window. He was such a fine-built man, they couldn’t get him round the turn of the stairs. Those old-fashioned houses were so incon
venient.”

  “Just so,” said Uncle Harold. “They’ve got it in now. I always think those glass hearses a bit showy. I don’t see your wreath, Emily. Oh, yes —— there it is; some of the flowers have got knocked off against the hearse door.”

  “You remember,” said Cousin Henrietta, “that cottage where Batts lived — he got the shaking palsy and they took him to the Union — there was a panel made to slip out of the staircase to let the coffin through, a coffin hole, they called it. You remember it, Jane?”

  “Yes,” said Cousin Jane, slowly, “it used to make me afraid to go to bed when I was a little girl.”

  “I daresay,” said Aunt Emily, briskly; “you were always weak-minded. These new houses are built so conveniently. I noticed there was hardly a jar as they brought it down. Ah — they’re moving on.” Outside, wheels ground the gravel. Cousin Jane’s hand clenched the black folds of her skirt.

  “Uncle Hamley is getting in,” said Uncle Harold, fidgeting interestedly at the watch-tower; “he’s aged very much, I think.”

  “I don’t wonder,” said Cousin Simpshall; “he hasn’t even got a muffler.”

  “I think I was wise to decide not to go to the cemetery, don’t you, Emily? — with the wind the way it is, and my chest with that nasty raw feeling coming on again?”

  “I should think so indeed,” Aunt Emily snorted. “You coming out at all on a day like this is more than poor James had any right to expect, considering.” Uncle Harold had an annuity. He paid a share of it to Aunt Emily for board and lodging. And for sisterly care and nursing in his often infirmities.

  “The carriage is clear of the gate-post,” he said, and pulled up the blind with a rattle. The flood of new light revealed his sparse hair, his small sloping shoulders and pink mouse-like face. “I think I could do with a glass more sherry, Emily, and a tiddy morsel of seed cake. Perhaps,” he added as an after-thought, “Cousin Simpshall will join me.”

  “We’ll all join you,” said Mrs. Simpshall heartily: and they filled their glasses from the decanters on the green leather-covered writing table —— Aunt Emily, expert in funeral etiquette, had seen to all such details — and drew their chairs around the fire. Cousin Simpshall folded back her crape-trimmed skirt, exposing a gray and brown striped petticoat.

  The fire does turn the colour so,” she said, apologetically.

  “Oh, don t mind me,” Uncle Harold giggled, and tasted sherry in little sips.

  “They’re about there by now,” said Aunt Emily, “it’s only just up the road.”

  “They go very slow, you know,” said Cousin Simpshall.

  “Poor James,” said Uncle Harold. “I sometimes think he wasn’t quite right in the top story — to act the way he did.’

  “What was it exactly?” Mrs. Simpshall asked, spreading her handkerchief on her black silk lap and laying her bitten slice of seed cake on it. “Being so long in India I forget these old family quarrels.”

  She spoke with an air of indolent condescension. “Oh, he just treated his relations like so much dirt under his feet. That was all — wouldn’t listen to advice. We were none of us good enough for him after he wheedled poor mother into sending him to college. Father left us share and share alike, and Harold had the business. Then, before poor father was cold in his grave, what does James do but actually takes all his share out of dear Harold’s business, so that Harold had to sell it and buy an annuity.”

  “What business?” Cousin Simpshall asked languidly.

  “Father’s business, you know — leather. It wasn’t doing very well at the time, owing to father having been ill so long, and Harold coming to it fresh from the wholesale mantles. It was just like James’s meanness to draw his money out at a time like that. He went to live in the country — married Lord knows who — and there was a pretty scandal. But he got rid of her all right. Then he married a perfect stranger none of us had ever seen — he met er at Oxford or some out of the way place, I believe, a finicking, silly fool of a woman, always making jokes or else poetry. Imogen her name was. Well, even when she died he wasn’t contented. Shut himself up with his books and wouldn’t see any of his family, nor yet answer our letters.”

  “But why?” asked Cousin Henrietta from India, who remembered every detail of the quarrel accurately.

  “Because they hadn’t been nice to Imogen,” said Cousin Jane, quickly. “I mean he thought they hadn’t.”

  “We did our duty by the second Mrs. James, the same as we’ve tried to do it by you,” snapped Aunt Emily, “but I never do look for gratitude in this world.”

  “I’m sure I’m grateful enough, Emily,” said Cousin Claringbold, putting her seed cake on the edge of the table and beginning to sniff, “but dear James—”

  “Yes,” interrupted Aunt Emily, with a fierce snigger, “dear James. We know all about dear James, Jane.”

  “Quite an old story now, isn’t it?” was Uncle Harold’s feminine rider.

  “Have some more port, Jane,” said Cousin Simpshall generously.

  “It’ll only go to her head,” said Aunt Emily. “Well, as I was saying when she interrupted, I wrote and offered to adopt the girl. No notice taken — the child was sent to some godless popish school abroad. Sending money out of the country like that!”

  “You’d have done better for her,” said Uncle Harold, “but that’s the way with relations. They don’t stand by each other as they did in my young days.”

  James didn’t, anyway. He mewed himself up writing books nobody wanted to read, and paying for people to print them. But he must have made a bit somehow, to keep on doing nothing. Imogen brought him something, I know; but I expect it died with her.

  “He didn’t seem to have any luck with his wives,” sniggered Uncle Harold.

  “Her little girl’s gone to the same school as her stepsister.”

  Half sister,” ventured Cousin Claringbold. She was an accurate woman and not even the five years she had lived on the charity of Mrs. Veale had been able to teach her not to correct the inaccuracies of her patron.

  “It’s all the same,” said Aunt Emily, impatiently. “And now we’d better decide before they come back and the will’s read whether we shall send them back to school or have them to live with us.”

  “Daphne’s eighteen,” said Cousin Jane, “you can’t—”

  “She could go as a governess, I suppose,” snapped Aunt Emily. Her face was like a horse’s face, and she had large, gaunt, yellow hands and wrists like the legs of hens.

  “It all depends whether she’s got a nincome,” said Uncle Harold, swallowing the last mouthful of seed cake, and pulling down his waistcoat with a jerk so that the crumbs which had lodged in its creases leaped suddenly out at the company, “if she’s got a nincome—”

  “The question is whether we could do with them living with us.”

  “The child could go to school, surely,” said Cousin Simpshall, who had some thoughts of herself living with Aunt Emily.

  “Two pounds a week — I mean guineas; I mean guineas each — you wouldn’t take less than that, Emily—”

  “Not living as you do,” said Cousin Simpshall, suddenly pleasant with port.

  “We could have that pony and trap, Harold,” said Aunt Emily, with an eye to Cousin Simpshall.

  “And the double windows,” said Uncle Harold, with an eye to himself. “I’d as good as ordered them when James withdrew his money.”

  “Ah!” whispered Aunt Emily behind her hand, “he’s never really got over that. After all these years, too. Dear Harold was always so sensitive.”

  “I shouldn’t go out of my way about it, if I were you,” said the widow from India “or she won’t appreciate it. Seem to make a favour of it as it were.”

  “Oh,” said the poor cousin, in a voice a semi-tone above her normal key, “Emily is sure to do that.” Fortunately no one noticed her. People had a way of not noticing Cousin Jane.

  “What’s the girl like?” asked Cousin Simpshall. “Oh, I forgot you’d not
seen her. A bold hard nature I should say. And flighty. Never shed a tear when I told her her poor father had passed away. Just pushed past me on the stairs and said she d put the child to bed first and talk to me afterward.”

  “I don’t think she’d be a nice girl to have in the house,” Uncle Harold said; “never cried at all, Emily tells me.”

  “Oh, you’ll soon teach her better,” said Cousin Jane, and again nobody noticed her.

  “And to-day she wouldn’t go to the funeral even; said she’d stop and keep the child company. As if we weren’t company enough for any child. No manners. No sense of what’s due to her relations. She will be a trial, Harold.”

  “She’ll sober down with us,” he said, thinking of the double windows.

  “Oh, yes,” said Cousin Jane, eagerly. “I should think she’s certain to sober down with you. There’s some one at the door.”

  “Come in,” said Aunt Emily. It was not Cousin Jane’s place to say “Come in” when people knocked at doors.

  The lodging-house servant came in. She held an envelope in her hand — of the floridly decorated stationery that school girls give to each other, in boxes on birthdays. Her hand was superficially clean, but seamed with black just below its surface, as quartz is seamed with gold. And her eyes were red.

  “Miss Daphne said to give you this at four,” she said.

  “Well I never,” Aunt Emily almost snatched the letter. “As if I was a tradesman called and wait for an answer.”

  The letter ran:

  “Dear Aunt: I am taking Doris to Greenwich Park — Ada says it is near here — to try and cheer her. If we are not back in time to hear father’s will read, please don’t wait for us. We’ll be back to tea.

  “DAPHNE CARMICHAEL.”

  “What did you tell her there was a park for?” asked Aunt Emily.

  “I’m not paid to tell lies about parks nor nothing else,” said Ada, “and anyway I’m not paid to tell lies for you, miss!”