Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  The door banged behind her.

  “Miss,” gasped Aunt Emily. Some sure instinct had taught Ada to use the sharpest arrow in any possible quiver. For Aunt Emily’s respectable and childless marriage had left her looking more a spinster than even Cousin Jane. And Daphne! The coolness of it. “Don’t wait for me. That girl must be taught her place.

  “I’m not sure,” fussed Uncle Harold, “that I shall consent to act as trustee for a flouncing, bouncing young woman like that. And my health in the poor state it is, too.”

  “Upon my word and honour,” said Aunt Emily, “did you ever?”

  The rest asked each other the same searching question.

  The will had been read. The lawyer had gone after handshakes given with a cordiality that was as much part of his stock in trade as his parchments and pink tape. Uncle Hamley had given the tips of cold formal fingers, and gone. The landlady, to whom the dead man had left a hundred pounds, had gone. Once more the parlour seemed to be full merely of aunts and uncles.

  “A hundred pounds to the person under whose roof I die,” said Mrs. Simpshall, as Ada, chin-tilted, came in, with rattling tea-things on a black iron tray. “What a pity nobody knew that!”

  “Good gracious,” she almost screamed as the rusty gate creaked, “who’s this?”

  “It’s them,” said Cousin Jane, bringing her merino nearer to the window.

  “Them?” echoed Cousin Simpshall, “why the child’s all in white, and the girl’s in green!”

  “She would do it. Said it would make the child dismal to wear black. She’s got no common decency.”

  “She’s got poor James’s money, though,” said Cousin Simpshall.

  Daphne and Doris stood in the doorway. Daphne’s hat was very much on one side. The child’s pink, bare hands were covered with dirt and filled with daisies.

  “Here we are,” said the girl, pleasantly. “Are we late for tea? I hope not. What’s the matter?”

  “We were a little surprised,” said Aunt Emily, “at your going out on pleasure excursions on a day of mourning. However, everything went off quite nicely without you, I believe. The only thing was they hadn’t shored up the grave properly and your poor father’s coffin—”

  “Run, Dormouse!” interrupted Daphne, with extreme vivacity, “run and take off its things and wash its paws.’ The child ran.

  “Your manner—” Aunt Emily was beginning, when Daphne interrupted her again:

  “I beg your pardon,” she said, smiling brilliantly. “I’m so sorry, but you see it doesn’t do to talk to a child about graves and all that. She’s quite jolly now. I’ve been telling her all about father being in heaven.”

  “I trust so, I’m sure,” said Uncle Harold, politely.

  “I hope I know the proper treatment of children,” said Aunt Emily, and entered into an offended silence.

  “Your father’s left everything to you,” said Cousin Simpshall, affably.

  “I suppose so.” Daphne was distraite but polite. “Will you pour the tea out, please, aunt? I must just wash my hands. They’re all over daisy juice.”

  “Don’t stop to change into your black,” said Aunt Emily, with intention.

  “Of course not,” said Daphne. “Do you know, really, aunt, I think it will be better for us not to wear black. The things you bought for us don’t fit us in the least. Doris’s frock is down to her heels, and the band of my skirt would go round me twice and a bit over. And you see we neither of us knew father. It feels to me as if he’d died thirteen years ago, when I saw him last. And I don’t think he ever liked me.”

  “I should think not,” said Aunt Emily, as the girl’s feet patted the oilcloth of the stairs.

  “So that’s the heiress,” said Cousin Simpshall.

  “No heart, you see!” said Aunt Emily.

  “Not an atom,” said Uncle Horace, carefully lifting the remains of the seed cake from the mantelpiece to the tea-table. “Not a natom!”

  “Daffy, dear,” said the Dormouse, curling itself comfortably in its white nest, “what’s a coffin, and what was the matter with the unsure grave? And why did father go and have such funny things?”

  CHAPTER VI. NIECE

  DAPHNE had not cried on that first evening when, all aglow from her parting with the man who had kissed her, she had been met at the door by the tidings of death on the cold lips of a fussy woman with a face like the face of a pale horse and wrists like the yellow legs of chickens. There had been too much to do — the cheering and comforting of the weary Dormouse, its supper, the hasty unpacking of its nightgown, its prayers and its bed. Then a tray of uninviting cold food, and cold eyes to watch her as she failed to eat it.

  Then one candle, a locked door, a strange room, and on the other side of the wall against which her bed stood that held the sleeping child, another bed, narrow and black and very still. Mrs. Veale had not spared her niece the sight of the sleeper who lay in that bed, cold and quiet, with thin crossed hands that looked like yellow ivory and a smooth forehead that felt like wax. Daphne had been told to kiss the sleeper, and she had kissed that brow of wax and ice. Afterward she felt that her lips would never be warm again.

  “It’s a pity you hustled the child off to bed in such a flurry,” said Aunt Emily. “It’ll be too late in the morning; they’re coming the first thing to screw him down. She ought to have seen her father, so as to remember him.

  Daphne wondered if she would ever forget. As she lay there in the dark all the blankets seemed too thin to shut out the length of the folded shroud, the sharp white features, the white bandage round the jaw, the death-money upon the eyes.

  I have put the death-money upon your eyes,

  So that you should not wake up in the night.

  She had seen the words somewhere, and now she heard them, over and over again; in the thin darkness that might so easily turn into a light whereby she could see again what lay on the other side of that wall — in the thin silence that would so easily break at the sound of any movement in that other room, next to hers, where two tall candles flared and guttered in the night wind from the open windows.

  To have taken the child in her arms would have helped her. But she would not.

  “I might send something frightening into her dreams if I touched her now, she thought.

  She tried to think of beautiful things fit to be sent into the dreams of a child, but she could not think of anything but that other bed, the narrow black one. She could not even think of the man whom she had met only the day before, in the chestnut tree in the school garden.

  It is not for nothing that girls tell ghost-stories in whispers in dormitories.

  Then she had fallen asleep, and woke — or thought she woke — in the last throes of terror. Something was moving in that room. The dead man was moving. But if he was moving he was not dead. He had come to life again. That thought was more horrible than the other. But if he had come to life again he needed help. She must go.

  Not to him — no, no, no,.no — but to tell some live person.

  Then she found that she was listening, with the key of her door in her hand. And again something moved in the death-chamber, moved stealthily. She does not remember turning the key, but she remembers the sensation of the landing oilcloth, cold and corrugated under her bare feet. And the door of the next room was open. And again something moved in the death-chamber. The terror in her heart reached the point where terror acts the part of courage. She must know what moved in there —— know or go mad. She took two noiseless steps and stood in the bright oblong of the open door. The dead man lay there, still as ever — but leaning over him, her hands clasped under the dead man’s head, her cheek laid against his, was a woman — herself still as death. Only every now and then she sighed, and once she said, “James, oh, James!” in a voice that was hardly more than a sigh — but Daphne heard it.

  The two steps of retreat were noiseless as had been those of advance, and Daphne was in her own room. But not frightened now any more. The dead face
laid against the living one had been released from grave-bandage and death money. It looked only asleep. And the girl had been in the presence of something stronger than the fear of death. She slept soundly, and in the morning the gay April sunshine assured her that she had only dreamed that vision. But she found she could think, now, of Him. Ah, if it had been He lying there, and she leaning over him. Daphne would have cried then, if Doris had not wakened and stretched and hugged her.

  “Oh, dear,” said the Dormouse, its eves still shut. “I dreamed we were in such a horrid house with a lot of nasty ladies that said they were our relations.” The day of the funeral had been spent wholly in preventing Doris from realizing what funerals were, and that this was the day of one.

  “Well, good night,” said Aunt Emily on the night of the funeral. “Your Cousin Jane shall stay the night here again, as you say you’ve gone and unpacked everything. But I can’t think why you did. You must have known you couldn’t go on living here in lodgings. I arranged with your Uncle Hamley that you and the child should come and stay with me for the present; you’d better take a four-wheeled cab the first thing in the morning. Good night.”

  And that night, when Daphne was alone with the sleeping Dormouse, she aid cry. She did not dream of disputing the arrangements made for her by these dreary relatives, but the arrangements were detestable all the same. She wished she had seen Uncle Hamley. He was her mother’s brother — he might be different. And only yesterday she was at school — a queen to the girls, a princess to Stephen St. Hilary. Now she was here — nothing to anybody. That was partly why she cried.

  She cried, too, for her father. Not because she had lost him, but because, in losing him she had lost nothing — had had nothing to lose. That he should be to her now only something that she might have loved, if he would have let her. He had not chosen that she should love him. But she cried for the lost right.

  She cried for herself, too, with the deep generous self-pity of the young. She had had dreams of the day when she should be called home to keep her father’s house, to manage everything, to be all in all to him, of showing him by delicate tact and unselfish devotion how many years of comfort and sympathy he had missed by not sending for her before.

  And then she cried for Stephen St. Hilary. Because, after that wild dream-moment, when her lips and his had met across the sleeping child, he had no longer played at fairy princesses, but had been instructive as a guide-book, dull as a Bradshaw, and as impersonal, though not less useful. Only as the train neared Victoria he had asked for her address. But he had not said that he meant to write. And now this was not going to be her address any more. She could write and send him her new address. But he had not asked her to write. The people of the house would send letters on, no doubt. No doubt — but Daphne felt one. And if letters were sent on, Aunt Emily was quite capable of opening them. But it wouldn’t matter, because there never would be any letters. He had been sorry that he had talked to her, sorry that he had travelled with her, and sorry, most certainly very sorry that he had — She felt the touch of his lips on hers, and the tears stopped. She felt the touch of his hands that held her hands.

  “Oh!” she sighed on a deep note of remembrance.

  She got up from the floor. She had been sitting there with her face pressed against the counterpane.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” she told herself. “Of course he doesn’t care. Why should he? It serves me right for thinking I knew better than the people who tell you not to talk to people you’re not introduced to. He thought I was perfectly horrid, I expect. And so I was. So I am. How could I have let him — ?”

  She stamped her foot. The sting was not that she had “let him” kiss her, but that she too —

  For, in truth, that kiss had been, on both sides, spontaneous, natural, and inevitable. It had seemed the only thing that could, or ought to, happen at that moment.

  “He said, ‘Forget it,’” she said, “and I will — oh, he may be sure I will!”

  Forgetting — or that shutting up of memories behind locked doors which so often is the nearest we can get to forgetfulness — was easier than it would have been, because life now became crowded with incidents — mostly unpleasant, it is true, but still incidents.

  There was the packing, the journey in the four-wheeled cab; then the arrival at the lean, tall house that was to be her home, and, what was worse, the home of the Dormouse. The house was comfortably furnished, the room she shared with Doris had none of the chill shabbiness of that lodging-house room. But the atmosphere almost choked her. It was like a prison, she thought.

  “Nasty, nasty house,” said the Dormouse, as her hands were being washed. “Nasty aunts, nasty uncle. Daffy, let s elope or go back to school.”

  “I wish we could,” said Daphne’s heart. But Daphne said: “It will be all right when we’re used to it, my Dormouse. You see if it isn’t.”

  “Cousin Jane may be,” said the Dormouse, “but not Aunt Emily. She’d never be nice, however used to her you got,”

  “Oh, yes, she will,” said Daphne dutifully and without conviction; “you’ll like her ever so when you get to know her. You see if you don’t.”

  “If I do,” said Doris, undutifully, and with a conviction very profound, “I’ll give you my new paintbox and my card that Guilberte painted for me, with the pansy on it.”

  “And if you don’t like her,” said Daphne, “I shan’t give you anything, except a scolding.”

  “I’ve never heard you scold,” said Doris, with interest.

  Perhaps Daphne might have got to know Cousin Jane, only Aunt Emily’s house was not the sort of place where you ever get to know anyone. Before Daphne had been a day in it she knew that — and many other things. The atmosphere of the house brought home to her what the personality of her relations had failed, in another house, to teach her. She perceived that they were not like her — that they would not understand her, that she would not understand them. She felt like a bird in a case — a dull and ugly cage. The days went by and the weeks — and they were long, and very long.

  The drawing-room was never used except on Sundays, when everyone slumbered there over good books. All the family sat in the dining-room. If Daphne went to her own room to draw a free breath of solitude, Cousin Jane was sent to ask whether she was not well. Daphne found it hard to bring herself to talk of royal weddings and the foundation stones which the King happened to be laying at the moment. And talk was exacted. “Reading,” said Aunt Emily, “is so unsociable.” The others talked of the doings of Really Important People, and of the doings of the abjectly unimportant, their relatives and acquaintances. Letter-writing was discouraged, but Daphne managed to write to the girls all the same. You can buy quite a long candle for a penny, and you can write very fast if you contract the habit of composing your letters under the rain of small-talk in the household sitting-room. It can be done quite easily and without detection as soon as you have learned to recognize the voice inflection of the small-talkers. You get to know with almost unerring accuracy, by the mere tone of the voice, when “Yes is called for, when “No,” and when “Indeed” or “Really” will serve your turn. Sometimes, of course, when the talk touches points vital to yourself you leave your letters uncomposed and address yourself to the matter under discussion. As when it was a question of Doris’s frocks.

  “It is the most horrible house you can imagine,” she wrote. “And I never open my mouth without putting my foot in it. Doris broke a saucer the other day, and I said Helianthemum and the Veale aunt heard. There was a lecture a mile long about profane language. She wouldn’t believe it was in the seed list. And it wasn’t — in hers. I am learning to say “dear me!” and “well I never!” and “gracious,” which I think is much nearer swearing than any of the flower names. It’s all choky, choky, choky. How is a girl to live her own life here, I should like to know. There’s no life of any sort. Your own or anyone else’s. I wish. I could go back to you — or else go and live’ in Bloomsbury. Aunt Emily says Blo
omsbury is where artists and disreputable people like that live. How lovely! And to think that in Bloomsbury hundreds of artists and nice people are living their own lives, like any thing. And I am doing church embroidery for bazaars, and being found fault with for everything I say or do.”

  In this choking atmosphere the sisters clung to each other like children passing through a haunted wood at night. They seemed to themselves to be, in this dull world of conventional commonplace, the only living things — the only real people.

  “I can’t think,” Doris said, “how people can be so nasty. Madame always told me to put in my prayers for me to grow up good. They haven’t grown up good; and they’ve been growing up for hundreds of years, I expect. Oh, they are nasty, nasty!”

  The two were alone, for a wonder. Cousin Simpshall and Aunt Emily had gone out with Uncle Harold in the pony carriage, for there had come to be a weak-springed clattering realization of the uncle’s old dream. And Cousin Jane never worried. So they were in their own room, “tidying up,” which is very amusing, when your adored sister empties the glorious litter of two corner drawers on to the counterpane, and allows you to explore, never once saying “leave that alone, or don’t touch that” — or telling you not to crumple something that you never had the east intention of crumpling.

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep saying it, my pigeon,” said Daphne, “even if you don’t like them. I think it makes it worse. Perhaps if you were to say every day, ‘I like Aunt Emily, I like Cousin Simpshall, I like Uncle Harold,’ you’d get to like them really.”

  “Ah, but it would be a story-lie,” said Doris, virtuously. “I never tell them.”

  She didn’t. She had never been frightened enough.

  “Well, then, you might say ‘I want to like them.’”

  “That would be story-lies, too,” said Doris, pulling at a fascinating end of green ribbon and suddenly tightening into a clumsy bundle the lace, gloves, books, letters, veils, collars, with which the ribbon was entangled.