Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “Why, where is he?”

  “He wrote his letter and stamped it, and took it and went ten minutes ago,” said Mr. Bats, “only you were all so busy you never noticed him.”

  Miss Royal opened her lips, and shut them again without speaking, and Mr. Bats said, also without speaking, “Yes, I know you saw him go.”

  “He whispered a parting word in my ear,” Mr. Bats went on; “two in fact. ‘Blazing headache’ was what he said.”

  “I’m afraid the advertisement game bored him,” said Miss Raven, “but I really couldn’t think of anything else.”

  “He’s been looking ill for a long time,” said Linda Smith; “he ought to see a doctor.”

  “He’s seen me,” said Wilton, “and I’ve seen him. What he wants is what we all want.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A settled income,” said the doctor.

  “Yes, isn’t it a shame?” Miss Raven said; “here’s a man, really a genius in his own line, they say, hung up every half minute for want of money — money for chemicals and instruments and things. It’s enough to give any one a headache.”

  “He can work at the College Lab., you know,” Wilton reminded her.

  “Not his sort of work,” said the Outsider. “The things he’s got at Malacca must have cost pounds and pounds.”

  “I only wish some one would leave one of us a fortune; we’d make it all right for him then,” said Linda. “You know very well he wouldn’t let you,” said Rose. “No, indeed,” said Mullinger in a heartfelt tone, so that every one looked kindly at him.

  “One never knows whether he means what he says,” said Linda thoughtfully. “He told me the other day that, if he couldn’t soon pull off some experiment, or other — you know, the one he’s always just going to pull off, and then he doesn’t — if he couldn’t pull that off he should join an Arctic expedition and become a naturalized Eskimo.”

  “Of course he didn’t mean it,” said Miss Royal a little sharply.

  “You never know,” said Linda perseveringly.

  “Well, don’t let his absence cast a blight,” said Bats. “Esther, have some more cigarettes. Take a lot, take two; and let’s enjoy ourselves. Wilton, just buttle a little, will you? There’s some claret left on the dresser. And I’ll get out the cherry brandy. Let us drink Mr. Anthony Drelincourt’s health again. Begone, dull care!”

  “Yes, let’s,” said every one. But all the same every one had left before eleven, and in rather low spirits.

  “Some evenings are like that, you know. All flat, somehow,” said Linda at the corner of the Tottenham Court Road where you wait for omnibuses.

  “Oh! do you think so?” Rose roused herself to say gaily. “Why, I’ve enjoyed myself most awfully. Good night, dear.”

  Still smiling, she sprang to the step of her moving omnibus, and found a seat. A grizzled South Sea missionary opposite her thought he had never seen so gay and beautiful a face. He turned his eyes away because one must not stare — at white people anyhow. The next time he ventured to look at her he knew, with a sudden shock, that he had never seen a face so beautiful and so sad.

  Mr. William Bats, left alone, was re-reading the inscription on a slip of paper which Anthony Drelincourt had silently laid before him at the moment of whispering in his ear that lie about the headache.

  “Come straight on to me as soon as the others go,” it said. “ Something very odd has happened. I want to tell you. Don’t let anything stop your coming. — A. D.”

  CHAPTER IV. THE ADVERTISEMENT

  “COME along in, do,” said Anthony, holding the door open at the top of the stairs; “I thought you were never coining. Did you lock the gate and the front door?”

  “Yes,” said William Bats, “I did. And I’m tired and cross, and it’s late, and this is a hell of a place to get to, Tony. It’s not many chaps—”

  “No, I know. The fire’s burning up. Make yourself comfortable.” He set the bottle and glasses on the work-table. “Because I propose to tell you things, and it may take some time.”

  Bats was sniffing at a couple of limp red roses that lay beside a contented-looking pot of violets on the table.

  “Yes,” said Drelincourt, “and that’s another thing. She put them there — my wretched birthday, you know — I wrote my name in some idiotic little book — jolly kind of her, and all that. She’s always doing nice things. And I wish she wouldn’t.”

  “Makes you feel small, eh? Considering how little you do for other people.”

  “Makes me feel helpless and resentful,” Drelincourt answered; “mother’s-little-boy feeling, don’t you know? You feel she’ll know it if you get your feet wet.”

  “You don’t know it when you’re well off,” said the other. “You don’t deserve—”

  “Well, I said it was jolly kind of her, didn’t I? And if there was anything I could do for her, I would. But there isn’t. And that’s what makes it so hateful.”

  “If,” said William Bats, beginning to light his pipe, “you brought me to this beastly hole to tell me that Rose Royal was jolly kind, and you were jolly ungrateful, you needn’t have troubled. I could have been trusted to find out a little thing like that for myself.”

  “But she is,” said Drelincourt with a sort of wilful stupidness. “It’s not only me. She’s looking after all the brutes who are in those houses she owns, as well as the biscuit boys. She’s lowered their rents, and given each house a fireguard because of the kids, and a brass paraffin lamp because glass receivers are dangerous. She’s started a sewing class and a competitive baby exam on Saturdays. She’s jolly kind.”

  “Now, I wonder,” Mr. Bats asked himself, “whether this is because she really does fill his mind so that he must talk about her, or whether he’s just doing it because he must talk about anything rather than the thing his mind is full of?” Aloud he said —

  “Carried unanimously. And then—”

  “Look here,” said Drelincourt, laying down the pipe he had been pretending to light; “we’ve always got on pretty well together.”

  “Ever since we was boys,” said the other. “I have nine pounds seventeen in the bank, if that’s any good.”

  “It isn’t, thanks,” said Drelincourt. “Look here,” he said again, and took up the pipe. “I must talk about it to some one, and I can’t think of any one but you.”

  “Flattered, and all that,” said Bats.

  And again everything hung fire. It is like that sometimes, you know. One wants to talk, the other wants to listen, and yet it’s impossible. The atmosphere is wrong, somehow. Vague remembrances came to Bats of things he had heard about the methods of priests at the confessions of shy penitents.

  “Look here,” he said; “it’s not money, you say?”

  “Not more than it always is. My mother left me a little money, you know. I’ve been spending the capital, and there’s precious little left, but it’s not that. No.”

  “It’s not Rose?”

  “ — Not more than usual.”

  “Some other girl. Some woman?”

  “No,” said Drelincourt. “Good Lord, no!”

  The Father Confessor would probably have been able to think of other things that it might be, but William Bats could not; he had not been trained to the profession of confessor.

  “Oh, spit it out,” he said wearily. “I never guessed a riddle in my life.”

  “You see,” said Drelincourt, “there’s rather a lot in it. I don’t know where to begin.”

  “Begin in the middle,” said his friend.

  “All right, I will. You know that silly answering advertisements? Well, I was looking for one to answer, and I found one, by Jove!”

  He took the folded paper from the pocket of his great-coat, peered at it a moment, and handed it to Bats, who read —

  “If Anthony Drelincourt, son of Bartholomew Drelincourt, will communicate with Messrs. Wigram and Bucks, Solicitors, Lewes, he will hear of something to his advantage.”

  �
��Well?” he said, “it looks like the long-lost heir possibility cropping up again. You’ll apply in person to-morrow, of course.”

  “Shall I? “ said Drelincourt slowly, “shall I? That’s just it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, I don’t know whether they mean me. And if they do mean me, I don’t know what they want me for.”

  “For your advantage, of course. And you are the son of Bartholomew Drelincourt, aren’t you?”

  “Suppose I am; suppose it was to my advantage; suppose it was money — lots of it; that would be all right. But suppose it meant perhaps just a little money, and being bothered with relations I’ve never seen. It would play the deuce with my work. And you know, Bill, I’m on the edge of something big this time. Yes — I know I’ve said that before, but this time there’s something different. I wouldn’t have that interfered with, for all the advantages that all the solicitors in England could offer.”

  “You’re sure this time?”

  “Hang it, man! “ — Drelincourt stretched his feet to the fire which had grown red and comforting—”don’t throw my failures in my face. I know you think it’s rubbish, but those old alchemists weren’t such fools as you think.”

  “True,” said Bats; “how do we know there isn’t an elixir of life and a philosopher’s stone into the bargain?”

  “Laugh if you like, if it amuses you, but I couldn’t have my work interfered with. On the other hand, perhaps I’m not the man that the advantages are for. I’ve never told any one what I’m going to tell you, but I want to tell you.”

  “Fire ahead.”

  “I’ve never had any relations but my mother. We lived very quietly at Lewisham, you know. Her father left her a little — the interest was just enough to keep us. He was killed out hunting when I was quite a baby. He was a farmer. My own father was killed in the Zulu war in 1885, so I don’t remember him. My mother used to talk about him to me when I was quite a kiddie, but after I began to go to school she would not talk about him any more. But once she told me that she hated all his relations. There was no portrait of him about the house. But after my mother died — I was fifteen then — I found a portrait of him in her desk, and a snuff-box that I remembered I had seen when I was a little chap, and she’d told me it was my grandfather’s. It had a coat-of-arms on it, and I found out that it was the coat of the Drelincourts, and I looked them up in Burke, and there was a Bartholomew Drelincourt, younger son of the Baronet, who died in 1885.”

  “Well, that’s all right.”

  “Is it? You see, Burke says he died unmarried.”

  There was a silence. Then —

  “I see,” said Bats.

  “You see,” Drelincourt repeated, his eyes on the fire, “ if it wasn’t all right about my mother, I’d rather not know it. Because if she’d wanted me to know it she’d have told me. I don’t want to find out things she didn’t want me to know. For myself, of course, nothing could make any difference. I knew her. She was the best—”he stopped. “All the same, it would be pleasant to be quite sure that one’s father wasn’t a scoundrel.”

  “I see,” said Bats again.

  “I’ve been thinking it over for the last two or three hours,” said Drelincourt. “And I see that I can’t write. Don’t you think I could sort of go disguised, you know — no, I don’t mean a false beard and glasses; I mean just not giving my real name till I saw what was up. I thought if you’d give me one of your cards — would you mind? Then I’d go down to Lewes and see.”

  “I see.”

  “But there’s another difficulty. I feel in my bones that if I went away for more than a day — and if I once get caught in the machinery — law business and so on, I might not be able to get back at once. If I went away for more than a day, that girl would tidy up this place and have it cleaned out.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, I shouldn’t mind so much about this floor. But the ground floor. You know one has to make experiments if one is ever to find out anything. And if she got into the downstairs rooms and found a dead guinea-pig or a dissecting-knife — well, you know what girls are.”

  “Lock it up,” suggested Bats.

  “I lock this up. But she got in with those roses.

  I suppose she has duplicate keys or something. No, the only thing is, could you come and stay here while I’m away. I might only be away a few hours. But would you come?”

  “Of course,” said Bats, and a soft warmth that was not that of the coal-fire crept to neck and cheek, “certainly I would.”

  “You know I’ve got all sorts of things going on. There are one or two things I should have to ask you to do for me, and things to attend to. There’s a monkey that has to be fed. Oh no “ — in answer to a little shrug of the other’s shoulders—”he’s all right — jolly as a sandboy. You aren’t going to begin believing those Brown Dog stories at this time of day, Bill?”

  “All right,” said Bats, “just show me what to do. I’ll be here by ten to-morrow if that’s all right.”

  “You don’t think I’m a fool not to just write a letter and jump at the ‘advantage’ whatever it is? “ Drelincourt asked a little wistfully.

  “On the contrary,” said Bats, rousing himself from his thoughts, “I’m lost in admiration of a caution and foresight hitherto quite foreign to your character. Yes, thanks. Two fingers, and half the soda — oh — well, water, then.”

  “And you won’t let any one in while I’m away. Not even Rose?”

  “Not even Rose,” said William Bats, picking up his great-coat.

  Drelincourt turned to feel in the pocket of his.

  “By the way,” he said, “before you go; I found this in my pocket, coming home. It’s from Rose, a birthday present. It looks interesting, only I can’t make anything out of it. And it’s got the Drelincourt arms in.”

  Bats took the book.

  “Yes, she showed it to me. About the properties of precious stones. And the manuscript pages at the end? They’re in cypher, of course.”

  “Well, I’ll leave it for you to look at. Perhaps some of your Bacon-Shakespeare cypher will fit it.”

  “It’s probably about your sort of subject,” said Bats. “All right, I’ll see if I can make anything out of it. And I say, old chap,” he added, pausing by the door; “of course, if it is a piece of luck — well, I’m jolly glad and all that, don’t you know?”

  And on that he went. When he got home the fire was nearly out. But he roused it cunningly, and when its heart was red again, he burned in it two soft fading red roses.

  CHAPTER V. FAMILY SECRETS

  TOY-SHOPS look innocent enough. But you never know. It was from a toy-shop that came the guiding inspiration of Anthony Drelincourt’s life. Bookshops are dangerous, of course; they are full of ideas, and ideas are explosive. And the bookshops came in later, and did their part. But the very beginning of all was the toy-shop.

  Looking back into the past, as one looks at things through the wrong end of a telescope, Anthony could see himself a little boy in a little bed in a little room in a little house in Lewisham. The little boy was cool and comfortable now, but there had been days and nights when everything had been otherwise. In a word, he had had the measles. And now he was what his mother called “nicely better,” and to-morrow was his birthday, and Mother had been to London on purpose to buy him a present; and there it was, large and rectilinear on the chest of drawers, between the medicine bottle and the embossed green plate with grapes on it.

  “I won’t see it till to-morrow, shall I, Mother?” he asked.

  “No, dearest,” said his mother; “to-morrow’s your birthday, you know.”

  “Yes,” said little Tony, deliberate and thoughtful.

  “I do hope you’ll like it,” said she wistfully.

  It is dreadful when you save up to buy a present for your little boy, go without a few things that you want rather badly, so as to have enough money to buy it; spend an hour of agonized indecision among the bewildering temp
tations of Hamley’s; and then, after all, your little boy rewards you with a lifeless “Thank you,” and you perceive that he is disappointed, and would much rather have tin soldiers for his birthday present.

  “Mother,” said Anthony, “I’ve thought of a new game. You think of something, and I’ll try to guess what it is. Like ‘Twenty Questions,’ you know.”

  “Very well; I’ve thought of something.”

  “Is it my present?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, but it must be! I don’t want to play unless it’s my present you’re thinking of. Now you are, aren’t you?”

  And she was, of course.

  “Is it wood?”

  “Partly.”

  “But you ought to say just only Yes or No.”

  “I can’t when it isn’t.”

  “Well, then, is it blocks?”

  “No; you’ve got lots of blocks, Tony.”

  “Bricks?”

  “They’re all wood, and you’ve got lots of them too.”

  “No, they aren’t. There’s little bits of glass in the windows.”

  “Well, it isn’t bricks, dear.”

  “It it puzzle maps?”

  “No; you’ve got all the nice ones.”

  And indeed he had; for this denying oneself to get presents for the child was no new game to the child’s mother.

  “Is it metal?”

  “Partly.”

  “Not tops?”

  “No.”

  “Railways?”

  “No.”

  “A paint-box? No, it’s too big. There couldn’t be a paint-box so beautiful big as all that, could there, Mother?”

  “I don’t know,” she laughed; “there might be. Only there isn’t this time. You’ll never guess. I will make you comfy now, and then you’ll go to sleep, and it’ll be morning before you know where you are.”

  “Will it?” he asked doubtfully. “Sometimes I know where I am long before it’s morning, and I keep knowing it for ages and ages.”

  “Well, I’m going to wash you and make you all comfy for the night. We can go on playing just the same. It’s all sorts of different things,” she said, bringing the basin and the warm water with the seven drops of sweet scent in it. “Shut your eyes, or the soap will get into them.”