Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  And Henry was not there. Oh! Nor Vorontzoff, nor Seddon. Well, it couldn’t be helped.

  “We have the hampers,” said Green Eyes, “so if the worst has happened to poor Mr. Seddon we shan’t die of starvation as well as grief.”

  “We ought to wait till two, don’t you think?”

  “Not later, I implore,” said the boy who was finding a tree an imperfect substitute for a wall.

  “We might unpack now,” said Claud, “so as to be ready to fall to the moment the missing links appear in the offing.”

  I do adore your friends,” said Columbine to Daphne under cover of the unpacking of the baskets and the chorus of speculation concerning the fate of the Third Car. “They all look nice — every single one of them. All art-students, you say? My — I wish they could all marry dukes and duchesses.”

  “Are you thinking of marrying a duke?”

  “Why, certainly, said Columbine. “Say, it’s a downright pity that nice boy of yours isn’t a marquis.”

  “Don’t turn his head,” Daphne pleaded.

  “It’s turned, your Majesty,” said Columbine. “He’s told me already that he’s got a secret sorrow, and after lunch we’re going to explore the Castle towers and he’s going to tell it me.”

  “He began like that with me,” Daphne assured her.

  “He won’t end there — with you, though he may: with me. Do you think I’m blind?”

  “Colombe, don’t encourage him.”

  “I’m not. But you must have. You didn’t tell me everything in your letters, fair maid.”

  “Yes, no — I — I wish you would encourage him — for yourself.”

  “There! And it’s not love’s young dream. Well, I do think! And I ready to put my arm round his neck and let him sob out his lovelorn little tale on my sympathetic shoulder. And you don’t really care?”

  “Hush!” Daphne urged—”some one will hear you. No — no — no. Don’t be silly.”

  “Ah,” said Miss Pinsent, complacently, “then there’s some one else. You must tell me all about him, dear, when we’re alone.”

  “And now you’re simply vulgar.”

  Colombe crimsoned. Daphne had been Queen at school, but —

  “I forgot,” said Daphne with clouded brow. “I mustn’t bully you now. You’re grown up. More grown up than I am, I think. I’m sorry.”

  “Another word, and I hug you over the champagne bottles. Do art students always drink champagne?”

  “Invariably,” said Daphne, “when they can get it.”

  The cloud vanished. All the same, under its brief shadow the relative positions of the school friends had been made clear. Colombe would never mould Daphne’s life — she never had moulded it. And Daphne would never again mould Colombe’s.

  Anxious eyes watched the road; motors passed but none stayed. It seemed heartless and ungrateful to begin to eat the glorious lunch provided by the absent Seddon; yet, as Claud said, what were they to do?

  A proposal to explore the Castle met with no response. An energetic young worker in metal proposed games, and in a party weakened by hunger no one was found strong enough to resist him. Games were played. The End of games where you “think of something,” and the others try to find out what you have thought of. The games flagged, the guesses were slower, more inaccurate; the right solution found, with difficulty, was recognized with indifference.

  Columbine thought of plum pudding, the leaning youth of fried potatoes; Daphne thought of geese and Doris of chicken. It was Winston who recognized the inevitable.

  “Jove!” he cried, “you’ve all thought of things to eat, every one of you. And the Dormouse is asleep. It’s half past two. Poor old Seddon must have fallen down in a fit — or else his motor car has. Let’s have lunch. He’ll never forgive me if we don’t. Doris-girl, come and sit longside er me.”

  So they had lunch. It was a beautiful lunch, with lobster salad and chickens and ham, and raspberries and cream and apple-pies and ravishing French pastry and fruits. It was eaten in the courtyard of the Castle where the turf, smooth-shaven, lies like a green sea round the rocks of masonry that time and weather and the guns of the Roundheads have cast from the Castle walls; and all round them the Castle walls stood up like gray cliffs topped with feathery sun-dried grasses, and open arches that framed pictures of blue sky and fleecy cloud.

  Lunch over, every one was only too ready to explore. Eight towers, all with practicable staircases, and the remains of chapel and kitchen, afford scope for the explorer, and solitude in the exploration. The boys and girls paired off. Miss Claringbold declined Claud’s pressing invitation to climb the gate-tower with him, in favour of “a rest.”

  “I have never been in a motor car before,” she said. “The rapid movement has fatigued me — oh, a very pleasant fatigue. No — don’t any one stay with me.

  I shall really like to be left alone. Then no one will know if I go to sleep.”

  Daphne took Madeleine’s arm. It was no part of her programme to climb towers with Claud, who, with one deeply reproachful look at her turned to Columbine, imploring her to console him for Miss Claringbold’s cruelty.

  Madeleine’s draperies unfitted her for active exercise. Daphne had her own reasons for wishing to be near the gate. They wandered on to the bridge and looked down on the lily leaves and talked and laughed, and always Daphne’s eyes strayed to the road by which, if at all, the belated motorists must arrive.

  And at last the motor did come. And in it was one man only — its owner.

  “There’s Mr. Seddon,” said Daphne: “let’s go and meet him.”

  “Go then, you,” Madeleine answered—”An elastic fillet has broken itself in this tunic. I hide myself to arrange it.”

  She disappeared under the portcullis, and Daphne went to meet Mr. Seddon alone.

  “We had lunch,” she said. “I hope that was right?”

  “Right, most right,” said Mr. Seddon, who was hot and anxious looking. “Dearest Miss Carmichael, how sweet of you to come to meet me like this. I owe a thousand apologies. But it was impossible to avoid this delay. And need I say that if to all of you it has been an inconvenience, to me it has been positive agony. To have kept you waiting.”

  “It was a lovely lunch,” said Daphne; her tact had worn a little thin.

  “There was an accident,” he said.

  “Did you break a tire?”

  “Ah, no,” he said gravely. “The accident was rather a serious one — nothing else, believe me, could have detained me so long.”

  “Where are the others?” she asked suddenly.

  “Mr. Vorontzoff and Mr. St. Hilary and—”

  “And our dear Henry. Ah yes” said Mr. Seddon, “you must prepare yourself for a shock, dear Miss Carmichael. It was at Vorontzoff’s studio. I called for them there — with Henry, whom I secured early by a special effort. It was necessary to close the skylight. It seems that cats occasionally fall through it which is of course most undesirable, for every reason.”

  “Yes,” said Daphne, “go on.”

  “The fastening had become disordered. It was necessary to climb on the roof. He stepped carelessly —— his foot slipped, and he fell through the skylight — shattered it to bits, my dear lady, I assure you.”

  “Is he dead?” asked Daphne, steadily. “No of course he can’t be, or you wouldn’t be here. Much hurt?”

  “He is a good deal knocked about,” said Mr. Seddon. “Fortunately his right hand is uninjured, but his left arm is badly cut, and his collar-bone dislocated. Also there is an injury to the ankle, and to the head.”

  “My God!” said Daphne, white as wax, and stopped short in the field path. “My God. Let us go back to town now, now.”

  She caught at his arm. He had stopped, too, and looked at her very keenly with his light prominent eyes. Then he laid his hand on hers.

  “Dear Miss Carmichael,” he said tenderly, “you mistake me. It was not our Henry. It was only poor Vorontzoff,” and gently pressed her ha
nd.

  The blood slowly crept back to her face, pink, carmine, crimson. She tore her hand away.

  “Dearest Miss Carmichael,” he said, standing Prim and trim in his dapperness, and still holding er eyes with his, “why need you mind my knowing? Have I not known from the first that it must be so? Take my arm? You do not need it? Good! Our Henry remained to minister to poor Vorontzoff, and Mr. St. Hilary is at the Inn washing his hands of the blood of our poor friend. We did not notice till we had started that his hands were covered with blood.”

  “And Mr. Vorontzoff,” Daphne found herself asking, in a quite ordinary voice, that surprised and pleased her; “he isn’t very seriously hurt, I suppose.”

  He will need nursing,” said Mr. Seddon. “When he recovered his consciousness — or partly recovered it, he asked first for you and then for Henry. And Henry remained with him. He is a noble heart —— no sacrifice is too great for him.”

  Daphne feverishly hoped that it had been a sacrifice.

  “I suppose Mr. Henry will nurse his friend,” she said, and hated herself for feeling how much she should hate it if Mr. Henry did nurse his friend.

  “Oh no,” said Mr. Seddon, now walking by her with quick, even little steps, “that would be impossible. I called at a nursing home and engaged an attendant on my way here.”

  “I will go and see Mr. Vorontzoff to-morrow,” she said.

  “That will be like you.” Suddenly he stopped and said in a breathless, ardent way, that would nave been funny if it had not been so many other things: “Look — look! What radiant vision is this?” Across the bridge, her dead-leaf draperies floating in the soft breeze, bare-headed, her pale hair a little loosened came Madeleine, serene in her triumph over the “elastic fillet.” She smiled at Daphne.

  “Oh, day of wonders,” murmured Mr. Seddon, his eyes rounder and fuller than ever. “Dearest Miss Carmichael, it is a vision, a heavenly vision! A perfect Botticelli in an English landscape! And she will pass, and I shall never see her again. Ah, for the age of chivalry, when any knight might accost any damsel without these inanities of formal introduction. She will pass. I shall never see her again!”

  “Oh, yes, you will,” said Daphne: “it is my friend, Madeleine Delavigne.”

  And next moment his bow surpassed all bows, in face of the Botticelli’s graceful, dignified, convent-taught courtesy.

  CHAPTER XX. CHAPERONED

  SINCE the night of Henry’s first kiss Daphne had waked each morning with a cloud on the heart, that materialized as a rose of joy when she remembered him, and all he seemed to be to her, and all that she had deeply determined to be to him.

  On the morning after the picnic she awoke as usual to this experience. But almost instantly the rose was obscured by cloud on cloud of remembered happenings. Colombe and Madaleine had come — two more chaperons.

  St. Hilary had been at the picnic, playing the friendship for all it was worth — devoted, observant. Another watch-dog.

  There had been a picnic. He had not been there. The poor Russian had been hurt. He was so kind: much of his time would be given to his hurt friend. Daphne grudged the giving. “Beast that I am,” she said, “what has happened to me?”

  There had been a picnic — pleasant, amid beautiful surroundings. Her eyes were filled even now with factures: gray Norman arches, the crumbling lichened stone of high walls, lilies on still water, the calm dignity of old elm-trees, the everlasting peace of the hills. Claud had quite obviously “tola all” to Columbine. She had enjoyed it. And Madeleine, little Madeleine, who should have been a nun, she had had at her feet the prize parti of the Fitzroy Street crowd. Mr. Seddon had never relented for a moment in that insistent homage which had begun before even she had spoken to him. He had recognized the child as a Botticelli and all was over — as some one had once foretold. Madeleine, shy, angular, attractive, self-conscious, had accepted his homage. How easily things went for some people!

  Every one had been very nappy yesterday. Even Green Eyes, even the boy who leaned against walls. How pleased one would be if one could be pleased so easily. Doris had been pleased, too — delighted, passionately interested, till the little live, eager soul, sated with pleasure, had sunk from pleasure to sleep. Not in her sister’s arms, though. In Cousin Jane’s. Daphne roused herself. Was she going to be jealous now? And of Cousin Jane?

  “Doris,” she called, “come and wake me up!”

  Doris came. But why had she to come? Why was she not there, safe cradled in her sister’s arms? Daphne would not let herself remember how she had acceded to Cousin Jane’s entreaty that the child might sleep with her. At the time Daphne had taken credit for self-denial. Now she knew that she had wished to be alone with her dreams, free to hold them to her heart without the restraining, disturbing influence of little arms that loved her.

  “I shall see him to-morrow anyway. Perhaps to-day — if I got to see Vorontzoff,” was, however, the outcome or her musings.

  But when she announce her intention of visiting the wounded Russian, Cousin Jane experienced one of her rare spasms of conscious conscientious chaperonage.

  “Do you think, dear,” she asked, “that it’s quite the thing for you to go and see a gentleman — in bed, I suppose he is? I don’t want to force my company on you — but won’t you at least take the child?”

  “I don’t really think it’s necessary,” said the girl.

  “I don’t want to go and see horrid gentlemen in bed,” said Doris, her lip drooping. “Lady Green Eyes has got tickets for the Zoo gardens where it’s full of beautiful beasts. She said she’d take me. Green tickets they are, too,” she added as though the colour consummated the proposed outrage.

  “Then — may I come with you, Daphne?” said Cousin Jane, so tenderly, so humbly, that Daphne told herself: “Well, I shall see him to-morrow anyhow” — and agreed, smilingly agreed, to the companionship that would make it impossible for her to see him to-day — alone, even if he were with Vorontzoff. “And of course most likely he isn’t,” she assured her disappointed heart.

  So it was that she and Cousin Jane came together to the East End studio, and stood on the steps outside, and Daphne knocked.

  The door was opened by a prim nurse in blue, with a crackling white apron and an aggravating cap, and an air of feeling herself to be in her own proper person the whole college of physicians and surgeons.

  When she understood their errand, which was not at once, for she was as stupid as she was self-contented, she led them across the studio, smoothed over with a merciless superficial neatness, to the door of the smaller room beyond, where the sick man lay.

  “He’s rather feverish,” the nurse said; “he wanders a good deal. I hardly had any sleep all night. I expected his friend to come and relieve me, but he has not come. I am very tired, and I have had no proper meals since I came.” She flung open a door, and said in loud, distinct accents, such as one might use in speaking to a deaf idiot:

  “Here are some ladies to see you, Mr. Vorontzoff.” And they passed to the bedside where the Russian lay, his heavy hair tossed on a not too clean pillow, and his hands moving restlessly on a sheet turned down and tucked in with neat, relentless tightness. His eyes fastened on Daphne.

  “Ca fait mal,” he said, just as a child might have done, and caught at her hand.

  “I suppose you’ll be staying some time,” the nurse said. I shall go out for my hour’s exercise. Of course you’ll not leave him.”

  She went.

  “Is she gone, that terrible woman?” Vorontzoff asked, clinging to Daphne’s hand. “Yes? Permit her never to return. If she returns I die. I am very ill. I suffer atrociously. If she returns I perish.”

  “Very well,” said Daphne; “she shan’t come back.”

  The Russian’s eyes wandered restlessly about the room.

  “Who is that?” he asked suddenly—”there, in the shadow of the door? Come where I can see you; come into the light.”

  “It is my cousin,” said Daphne; and Mi
ss Claringbold moved forward. “You met her at my rooms, don’t you remember?”

  “How are you?” she said.

  “I am ill, he said pitifully. “I suffer. But — who is this — it is not your cousin. This woman has been in prison — I have been in prison, and this woman also.”

  “Daphne” said Miss Claringbold on a note of horror.

  “Sh!” said Daphne. “Don’t you see how ill he is?”

  “You think I do not know?” said Vorontzoff—”I who have passed so many years shut out from the free sky. I see the look in her eyes. How should I not know it? Do not be afraid, sister,” he said in tones exquisitely tender. “I too have suffered.”

  “My goodness!” said Miss Claringbold, and sat down suddenly on a pile of portmanteaux.

  “Must the sheet remain so fastened across my chest?” Vorontzoff inquired.

  Daphne loosened it.

  “It is good on your part to come to me,” he said—”and of her, your poor cousin who has suffered, it is good too. Ask her not to be afraid. Ask her to sit near to me. I desire much to drink tea. That woman of wood in the white coif cannot make tea.” Daphne looked at Miss Claringbold, who slowly drew near to the bed, sat down on the kitchen chair, and slowly let her hand go into the one that the Russian held out for it.

  “I have been in prison,” he said, “like you — not for any wrong-doing. You have never merited the prison where you suffered so long time. Nor I. It was because I spoke the truth that I suffered the loss of freedom. And you?”

  “I don’t understand,’ said Cousin Jane. “I have never been in prison.”

  “There are prisons that have not locks nor keys, and further, no doors for escaping. My sister, I can see it in your eyes. You have lived in a life where there was no love, no freedom; where no person cared if you should suffer, none were glad of your gladness—”

  “Ah,” said Cousin Jane, on a deep indrawn breath.

  “Where your will was not free; where another will trampled yours; where the good and the right were not me good and the right as you see them. You have borne torture at the pleasure of another. And do you tell me that you have not been in prison?”