Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  There was a murmur, inarticulate, congratulatory.

  “Say you’re pleased,” Anthony urged. “Say it right out.”

  More murmurs — louder.

  “Of course we are,” said Bats; “but you must allow for our struck-all-of-a-heapness. Look here, we really are all of a heap. Mayn’t we fill up, and drink, all of us — you too — to your great discovery?”

  “To the great discovery!” shouted every one.

  “To the great discovery! “ cried Anthony. “I really have done it this time.”

  “The great discovery! “ shouted the six again, raising their beakers.

  “And I wonder,” five out of the six told themselves as they drank, “whether this time he really has — this time, really, at last, discovered anything.?”

  The sixth was Rose. As her lips touched the thin glass, she said to her heart: “ Yes. It’s true. This time he really has done it. And he won’t want me any more.”

  Aloud she said, setting down the beaker: “Aren’t we to hear what it is?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” said the hero of the hour, setting down his glass with his left hand; “it’s nothing much,” he repeated lamely.

  “Only it’s everything,” said Rose below her breath, standing by him.

  “Yes. But really it’s only — No, I really can’t. You wouldn’t be interested. It would take too long to explain.”

  “Isn’t it unlucky,” Linda asked tactfully, breaking a silence near its beginning, “to drink from your left hand?”

  “You were all shaking the other,” said the discoverer; “and, besides, I can afford a little ill-luck to-night.”

  “That’s the one thing that the richest man can’t afford,” said Esther Raven.

  “Don’t croak,” said Drelincourt; “let’s get your guitar, Rose, and you can all sing about love and roses and wine.”

  “If you’ve discovered anything new about them,” said Bats, “you are indeed the greatest birth of time. What price Anacreon?”

  “Bother Anacreon,” said Drelincourt contentedly. “I’ll get the guitar.”

  CHAPTER X. THE MISSING WINDOW

  IN the moment when Anthony Drelincourt knew that the secret was his — the secret for which he had striven so long, so strongly with such a delicate fervour, such an ardour of patience — he ceased to desire more. All the uses to which he had intended to put his discovery seemed now unimportant, puerile. He had attained! That was the one thing that mattered. As one in a dream, he locked the door of that underground room where the knowledge of his triumph had come to him, staggered up the damp, stone steps, and threw himself in the easy-chair in his laboratory. There, for awhile, he lay, every muscle relaxed, every nerve quiescent, as a man might lie who has long struggled in deep wild waters, and has been suddenly thrown up by a wave, greater than he had believed any wave to be, on to a shore more tranquil than any shore of which he had ever dreamed. He had attained to a knowledge that had been hidden since the beginning of time, except for glimpses vague or brief caught by people who had been called mad, and imprisoned — or called wizards, and burned at the stake. He had wedded the “philosophy of the ancients” to modern science. It was as though he had been labouring to bring together the mystic soul of the one and the splendid body of the other. And now here, suddenly, when he had been distracted by weaker and baser adventures, he returned disheartened to his workshop to find that the forces he had set in motion had, in his absence, done that which in his presence they had never done. The result was achieved; the two were at last made one. The horizon of thought receded. Yet there was no longer room in his world for thought. The glory of his triumph overpowered all else and wrapped him in a warm glow, mellow as midsummer, radiant as sunlight. And the glory slowly ceased, or rather merged in that other, closer, more intimate enfolding of content, which held him as in a predestined nest, soft, warm, and grey as the down of the eider.

  And from this he was roused by the voices on the river singing of romance and true love.

  “Of course, I must tell Rose at once.” He thought of himself sitting there, folding the content and the glory round him, with never a thought of Rose or for her. He clenched his fist, and hit his open left hand with it. He stumbled down his stairs and out across the wharf. The boat was receding.

  “You fool,” he said, “can’t you at least try to behave like other men? How would Mullinger act if he’d found out anything? Well — no — not that exactly, but — Well, anyhow, he’d stand champagne.”

  He started off across the waste, and came back with the brown paper parcel, took it to the laboratory, lighted fire, and drew curtains. Then he went down to the wharf again. The boat was coming back now. Anthony struck the key to which he felt a successful discoverer and lover should, if he were like other men, seek to attune himself, when he cried aloud —

  “Hullo, you strayed revellers!” and hugged himself on his close resemblance to the normal.

  It is not necessary to explain definitely the nature of Anthony’s discovery; at this point of the tale it would not even be interesting. He was to use it later. But the need for its use is not yet. For the present, you see him contentedly returning to Drelincourt to prepare the way for his house-party.

  Lady Blair met him at the station, wonderfully upright in a very high dog-cart. As he smiled into her old eyes, and pressed her little thick-gloved hand, and thanked her for coming, and climbed up beside her, and watched the groom tuck the driving rug round their knees, he felt that old thrill of pride at the successful way in which he was acting his charade.

  “Really, any one would think it was real, almost,” he told himself; “it is so very like real life as one has read about it. And yet one knows it’s all illusion. No, thank you,” he added aloud, to Lady Blair, who, wonderfully girlish in a large hat and white veil, was offering the reins. “I like to see you do it. You do it so beautifully.”

  “Drive, do you mean?” she asked, flicking a chestnut ear with a very smart whip.

  “No, everything,” said Anthony, almost expecting the applause of a large audience.

  “But you do drive, don’t you?” she asked. And he answered soberly —

  “No. I have never had the opportunity of acquiring the accomplishment.”

  “You will enjoy it,” she said, smiling and gazing in his eyes at the dangerous crisis of cross roads, a motor, a wood-cart, and a tramp wheeling an old perambulator; “ riding too; I am sure you will find that it is what you have longed for always — unconsciously, I mean.”

  “If these things were heritable, I ought to be an accomplished horseman,” he said.

  “Of course. And no doubt you will find that it comes naturally to you. Your father—”

  “I was thinking of my grandfather,” he said, suddenly coming out of the charade. “He broke his neck in the hunting field, you know. Worse luck for me!”

  If Lady Blair did not say, “Tut, tut; why drag in your maternal grandfather?” Anthony heard it in her silence.

  “You see,” he went on suavely, “I owe it to my maternal grandfather that I was not brought up in the workhouse school. My father’s people seem to have had no anxieties in that regard.”

  “My dear Anthony,” she said, urging the horse to increased speed by what to Drelincourt seemed occult powers, “if an old woman might venture to advise—”

  “But of course,” he said, “if there were one,” and felt himself in the charade once more.

  “Let the dead past bury its dead.

  “Let dead dogs lie,” he emended between his teeth.

  “No, let bygones be bygones. When you are married, when you have sons, you will understand better the feelings of a father whose son — of course I know that your dear mother must have been the sweetest thing, the best of women; and your grandfather was prejudiced, no doubt. But it’s all over now. Why rake up old grievances? You have Drelincourt, and I know you will be worthy of the Drelincourt tradition. It was your paternal grandfather’s misfortune that he
could not know this.”

  “Humph! “ said Anthony. And he said it as it is spelt, which is unusual and startling.

  “What did you say?” Lady Blair inquired.

  “I said, ‘ Humph! ‘ “ Anthony replied. “And I meant Humph! Let me illustrate — Once, when I was travelling abroad, I engaged a sleeping-car. It was very extravagant, but I was mad with overwork.”

  She frowned ever so slightly, and he laughed with ever so slight a bitterness.

  “I apologise for the sordid detail, so unfamiliar to you. But it belongs to the story. I undressed and went to sleep. At Lyons the train stopped — stopped going for good, I mean. It was ‘All change.’ A very wet night. I got into my clothes as well as I could. But before I was dressed, the officials turned the lights out, and dragged me and my odds and ends on to a swimming black platform. Then the train went away. And I found I had lost my watch and my purse. I carry a purse. I learned from Mr. St. Maur that gentlemen carry their money loose.”

  “How can you be so silly?” she said; “go on with the story.”

  “Infuriated by my personal discomfort and pecuniary losses,” Anthony went on, warming to his narrative, “I called for those highest in office at the station of Lyons, and I reproached them calmly but firmly. ‘I was told,’ I said, ‘that this train went to Marseilles. I was told three times by three officials of different ranks,’ I said, ‘ that this train went to Marseilles, and, confident of the honour and probity of these officials, I went to bed. Now I find that the train doesn’t go to Marseilles. I am turned out on your — I leave the adjective to you — platform. I have lost my watch and my purse, and I feel that I have caught the cold of my life.’ They told me that I was mistaken, that no French railway official could have been so lost to all sense of personal honour as to deceive a traveller, especially a Monsieur so incontrovertibly comme il faut as this one. I replied, ‘ I have a cold in my head, and your statements are false. Who is the head man, the very top of you all? I will complain to him.’ And then they said the thing that makes this tale d propos in this moment’s crisis. They said —

  “‘Oh, Monsieur, reflect. Do not complain to the Bureau. Rather put yourself in the place of those unfortunates, those poor deceived officials, who, themselves trompés, informed you that your train did not stop till it arrived at Marseilles. Think, Monsieur,’ they said, with what practically amounted to tears of emotion, ‘ think what must now be the feelings of those officials of varyingly important position — think of them, Monsieur; imagine their chagrin, their dolour, their despair, when they discover that they had deceived themselves in renseinger-ing a Monsieur so amiable, so distinguished, so entirely as it must! ‘ Well! that’s just it. What I felt then was just what I feel now when I hear you pitying my father’s father for having been a mean fool.” The cart swung in at the lodge gates, and a woman, two boy children, and a girl child bobbed curtseys and touched forelocks.

  “Don’t vituperate! “ Lady Blair said, managing reins and whip incredibly with one hand while she laid the other on his arm. “ Of course, I understand. But one doesn’t say those things, you know. All the same, you’re wonderful. I didn’t at all realize you till now. You have been so mousy, so polite. Do you know, I have always had a haunting feeling that you might perhaps, somehow, at some time, just by accident, as it were, be too polite. You don’t mind my saying that, do you?”

  “I adore your saying that.” Anthony was already almost again in the charade.

  “I knew you would,” she said. “ Well, you see, up to now I haven’t seen the real YOU at all. You’ve been more like a character in a book, you know. Not at all like a real person. Or perhaps more like some one who was a real person, trying to pretend that he was a real person of quite a different quality. And now—”

  “And now? “ Anthony repeated, watching his park unfolding itself like a beautiful and extraordinarily realistic map; “and now—”

  “Well — now. I’m sure (which I shouldn’t have been yesterday), I’m sure that you’ll understand me when I say — there is an infectious quality about your candour, my dear Anthony — when I say that you have originality, strength, personality. You’ll do, my dear child, you’ll do.”

  “Shall I?” he threw back. “Shall I? Thank you so much! I did, you know, so dreadfully desire to ‘do.’”

  “Don’t play the Henry James trump,” she said surprisingly; “the trick’s yours without that.”

  “Then don’t you play the queen of Snubs. Let my mother’s father alone,” he said.

  “I didn’t,” Lady Blair answered. “Oh, Anthony, I do wish—”

  “What?” he asked. “If it’s in my power to grant, it’s yours, even to the half of my kingdom.”

  “What I wish,” she told him, “ is more than the whole of your kingdom. It’s in another dimension.”

  “Tell me what you wish,” he commanded, his eyes on the budding beauty of his new kingdom.

  “Shall I?” she asked, and again the bright bay, responding to a signal quite imperceptible to Anthony, bounded forward. “Well, I will. I’m more than seventy. I whisper it because of Oddling sitting there all ears in his top-boots behind us. Because what I’m now going to say is rather in the nature of a love declaration. I wish that I were twenty so that I might marry you.”

  The charade feeling was overpowering as Anthony answered —

  “I wish you were.”

  “But that’s past praying for,” said Lady Blair; “however, there are gleanings left. We might try friendship. Halves, and no secrets. I should like to be friends with you. Will you?”

  “You’re very nice to me to-day,” Anthony said, and the chimneys of Drelincourt shot up through the trees; “let us be friends — to the death.”

  “Halves, and no secrets,” repeated Lady Blair brightly. “Halves, and no secrets?” he answered. “Right O! Then you’ll tell me what the room was that was bricked up. What that boarded-up window belonged to.”

  The house’s face was now plain to see in the gay spring sunshine. And he heard the horse’s hoofs plash, plash on the damp gravel, in the little silence that hardly had time to settle before it took flight at her answer.

  “Of course, I’ll tell you anything. Only in return you must tell me things. About your fair lady, and your dreams and ambitions, and what you feel and what you think you ought to feel.”

  Anthony suddenly experienced the sensation that a man may know who walks on to a green lawn that looks firm and finds it a quaking morass. He caught at the staff of the Lie Absolute — the staff which looks so firm and which, in the moment of stress, so suddenly desperately betrays.

  “I will tell you everything,” he said, “everything. You shall be my sole confidant.”

  “Since that is all I can be to you,” the wonderful old lady replied, “that is what I want to be. Perhaps it will save trouble if I explain at once that I have fallen in love with you — deep!”

  “I, too,” he said, once more lost in the charade, “over heads and ears. I will tell you all the secrets of my soul. And you,” he added quite firmly, “you will tell me where that missing room is, and why it was boarded up.”

  “Of course I will tell you anything. But as for windows. If there was one it must have been when there was the window-tax. All old houses shut some of their eyes in those days.”

  “Not with boards,” he said; “the taxed windows were bricked up, not boarded.”

  They drew up in front of the beautiful grey face of Drelincourt. And a pause came like a full stop in their talk.

  “Oh, well! Of course you know best,” she said, and the groom took the reins.

  “After dinner,” he said, in the instant before he alighted, “you will tell me the truth then.”

  “There isn’t anything really,” Lady Blair said; “but if we are to be friends, we are.”

  “And after all, it is my own house,” he said, and wondered if he were being ungentlemanly.

  “It’s our own house,” she said, and
smiled at him like sweet-and-twenty. “I am a Drelincourt, too, you know.”

  * * * * *

  Sebastien greeted his master with something approaching enthusiasm, instantly and fervently demanding news of Mademoiselle, which they tell me a perfectly trained and newly engaged valet would not have done, nor a master accustomed to valets have tolerated. But Anthony was pleased. He went down to dinner full of interest in Lady Blair and in what she was to tell him. And a very silent-footed man came to him across soft carpets, and told him in a low voice that her ladyship had a slight headache, and begged Sir Anthony to excuse her. So he dined alone — and wondered.

  And then he sat down in the library and reflected that Lady Blair was probably making up her mind what to tell him, and that the chance of her telling him what he wanted to know was remote. He had a feeling that she would try not to tell him anything that he could use. That she did not want him to know what he wanted to know — ought to know, since it was, after all, his house. It was now perfectly plain to him that there was a space not accounted for between the library where he sat and the outer wall where the boarded-up window lay, blind under the ivy. Also it was perfectly plain to him that that window had been boarded up for a reason, and that Lady Blair knew that reason and did not want to tell it.

  “But she shall,” he told himself.

  The room was very quiet. No sound from the rest of the house could pass those panelled oak doors and the stiff curtains of gilded Spanish leather that hung in front of them. Only through the open window came the late talk of birds making their arrangements for the night, and the soft rustling of young leaves as the breeze ruffled the trees.

  Anthony liked this room better than any room at Drelincourt. Not merely its noble proportions, the carved panelling of ceiling and chimney-piece, the subdued richness of its brown and crimson and gold, its chandeliers of antique brass and faintly purple copper, spoil of some old church rifled long ago. Not even the books themselves, shelf upon shelf of them, rising brown and ribbed with their gleams of gilding and warmth of red and green labels, nor the scent of the books, warm and mysterious and like no other scent in the world. Not the comfort of the chairs, nor the splendid daring incongruity of the vast Buhl writing-table. All these possessed charm, but they were not the charm of charms.