Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “How was it found out?” said Mrs. Simpkins eagerly, at once thinking the worst.

  “Oh! I don’t mean what you mean,” Mr. Wilkes assured her; “it was all ong ragle and no scandal, seeing the youthful cousins hadn’t been announced engaged. Miss Delmar was a distant connection of the family’s on one side, and she came on a visit to Miss Cecily, and later on here. Instantly she appeared on the scene, poor Miss Cecily’s goose was cooked. I mean her chances of happiness were at an end.”

  “You mean he jilted her?”

  “I don’t think any of the family would go so low as jilting a lady, Mrs. Simpkins,” Mr. Wilkes reproved; “ but the understanding was entirely at an end. My uncle says he remembers Miss Eugenia, that was Miss Delmar, having a way with her that nobody could resist — even him, a married man, and not of course quite equal in station. He says he would have got her down the moon out of the sky — that was his word — if she’d fancied it, and if he could have. So that shows. She turned everybody’s head that came near her, even females. And Sir Anthony, from the instant he beheld her in cherry-coloured tarlatane at the Hunt Ball, it was all up. Their engagement was announced sharp enough, and poor Miss Cecily to be bridesmaid. It was the talk of the county. The wedding was to be here — all Miss Delmar’s people being foreign on the mother’s side, and her father dead, and Sir Anthony was stopping at the Dower House and coming here every day.”

  “Didn’t she interfere with his Chemistery? “ Mrs. Simpkins asked.

  “Not she. She was deep in it with him. First thing she does is to ask him to teach her how. So they spent days together alone in the labatry he’d fitted up in the little room that had used to be bricked up. My uncle says she was like a rose just cut early in the morning.

  “Sir Anthony fairly worshipped the ground she walked on, as the saying is. And any one would have thought she did the same. They were a beautiful couple, my uncle says, and the admired of all. He furnished that room off the library purposely for her — the latest up-to-date furniture it was then, I believe — though it’s all gone out now. You know, Mrs. Simpkins, the boudior that’s never used. Well, I must cut it short; it’s close on eight, and if Sir Anthony doesn’t turn up, I’m not sure but I ought to let the police know. Where was I?”

  “The wedding.”

  “Yes, of course. Well, there wasn’t any wedding. The day before it was to have been, every one was very busy getting the place decorated, and arches in the park and so forth and so on; and him and her alone together, as usual, among the bottles and the liquors. His mother didn’t approve because they wouldn’t have a chaperone with them; but he said Science couldn’t be chaperoned, and it seems a young lady and gentleman may be alone as long as they like so long as there’s enough bottles and jars and dull books with them. And no one suspected anything. And then he was missing at dinnertime — just like our Sir Anthony’s missing now. And they went to call him, and there he was lying stone dead at the top of the laboratory stairs.”

  “I’m glad it’s bricked up.” Mrs. Simpkins shuddered. “Or else I should be afraid to go and see what might have happened.”

  “It was a dreadful blow, I understand,” Mr. Wilkes said.

  “Poor young thing,” said Mrs. Simpkins, her heart with the bride of fifty years ago; “ how did she bear it?”

  “She didn’t know it,” said Mr. Wilkes; “she wasn’t there. She’d disappeared. At first they thought she’d gone crazy, and run out when he fell dead, and began to scout for her accordingly. But it wasn’t so. Because the doctor said he’d only been dead an hour; and her ladyship, his mother, had been sitting in the library since half-an-hour after luncheon. She used to sit there most of the time when they were down among the bottles; my uncle said it was as near chaperoning as they’d let her get. No, Miss Delmar must have eloped early in the afternoon before her ladyship went to the library. She must have told him all was over, or left a letter or something. And he couldn’t bear it, so he killed himself, though they did bring it in heart.”

  “It was heart,” said Mrs. Simpkins sentimentally, “and then?”

  “Why, then all was horror and despair. Orders to stop building the arches, mounted man for the doctor; and Miss Cecily, who’d come at tea-time to be ready for next day, with a aching heart, no doubt, under her bridesmaid’s exterior, she went nearly mad, they say, put her arms round the body, and they had to tear her away by force. She was very ill after that. A dreadful business it must have been.”

  “I don’t wonder she was upset,” said Mrs. Simpkins, “and that was her ladyship when she was young! To think of that! You’d never think it to look at her now, would you? And what became of the bride, after all? Where had she gone to? Who had she gone to?”

  “Nobody ever knew. My uncle says she vanished as implicitly as though the ground had opened and swallowed her up. Nobody ever heard any more of her.

  Most likely she fled back to her foreign parentage. But it was well managed. Some one must have been waiting with a carriage and driven by the back lanes, and so got away unseen. You wouldn’t have thought she could have been so heartless as it turned out. My uncle said no one would have believed it of her. She was always so kind to every one. But love, Mrs. Simpkins, love laughs at — at all sorts of things, you know; and there’s no doubt there was Another lurking in the background all the time.”

  “Poor young thing,” said Mrs. Simpkins, “I wonder if she’s alive yet, and if she was happy? “You may well wonder,” said Wilkes. “Now if you were me, would you send for the police?”

  “I’d have one more look first,” Mrs. Simpkins advised.

  “There are no young ladies in the case this time,” said Wilkes hopefully.

  “Oh! but didn’t I tell you? “ Mrs. Simpkins asked. “No, of course I didn’t. Everything happening like it did put everything out of my head. Lady Blair told Miss Connolly this morning that Sir Anthony’s engaged, and the lady and quite a house-party he’s invited down. And she won’t bring her maid. And none of the house-party’s bringing their servants. I wonder what sort of people they are?”

  “Now, mind you,” said Mr. Wilkes, “I like Sir Anthony. Speaking as one man about another man, I like him. But you can always tell. He’s been living in London, among a low lot, I shouldn’t wonder. Artists and chemists and people like that. We mustn’t expect too much from his friends, Mrs. Simpkins. He’ll soon drop his low acquaintances as he gets used to the title and the property; and if his young lady is presentable — we shall do, we shall do.”

  “According to Sebastien,” said Mrs. Simpkins, unmoved, “his young lady is something quite out of the common. I understood him to say she was a queen. Of course she can’t be that, but I expect it’s his foreign way of saying that she is a princess.”

  “Titles like that,” said Mr. Wilkes, “are as cheap abroad, I believe, as knighted the year he was mayor is with us.”

  “Sebastien told me,” the housekeeper pursued, “that she was beautiful, like the beautiful day, and good as Madonna herself.”

  “Ah! “ Mr. Wilkes explained, “he meant the Virgin Mary, these Catholics think such a lot of. Well, you take the upstairs and I’ll take the down. We’ll have one more look round, and if we don’t find him I’ll take it on me to send George for the police. If anything had happened to Sir Anthony, such as waylaying by a gang, it would look bad if the police hadn’t been sent for.”

  Then Mr. Wilkes went out and met Anthony coming through the hall after his night of adventure, dusty from head to foot, with cobwebs instead of vine-leaves in his hair.

  * * * * * * *

  The delicate rose-rouge stood up in strong relief on a very white face when Lady Blair heard how Anthony had ended the night. He did not tell her all. The secret of the machinery that the other Anthony had devised, that was the other Anthony’s secret, and the new Anthony would keep it. And the note-book he had brought away with him and laid under lock and key in his room. And he did not tell of that. But he told of the laboratory and its
fifty years’ dust, and how he had broken in on its fifty years’ solitude, and he invited her to come and see everything, before he perceived how pale she was.

  “I wish you hadn’t,” she said; “I wish you wouldn’t. No, nothing would induce me to go near the place. My uncle had the place fastened up again at once after that happened. Everything must be just as he left it. I know nothing good will come of opening it. I wish I could persuade you to have it all locked up again.”

  “I couldn’t,” he said honestly; “but I won’t bother you to come down if you don’t want to. I wrote this morning asking Rose and the others to come on Monday. I hope you’ll like them.”

  “I always like young people,” said Lady Blair, and her skin grew less like old powder-covered wax. “We must do something to amuse them. Would they like a dinner-party; just a few friends; because, of course, we’re still in mourning for your uncle, poor dear. But we could ask a few nice people. Crowds of people have called, besides the ones you’ve seen. What do you say?”

  “I’m a little out of my depth,” he said.

  “But you swim beautifully,” said she.

  “I’m afraid I flounder a good deal. I think I would like to get used to the element before I ask my friends to plunge into it with me. I thought we might ask St. Maur, and that nice chap who collects beetles. I never heard his name. I never do hear people’s names.”

  “Lord Alfriston; yes.”

  “I didn’t know,” said Anthony, a little dashed;” he seemed all right.”

  “That would make ten,” Lady Blair said, “ and only four girls. Wouldn’t you like me to ask a girl or two and one or two more men?”

  “You see,” Anthony said comfortably; “it’s like this. We’re all brought up to think that a man’s a man for all that, and that the rank is but the guinea stamp; and I hope I’m as democratic as the next man, and we’re all equal before the law, and in the sight of, and all that. And, of course, you can read ‘The Manners and Customs of Good Society ‘ by the butler of a duke, but it only tells you not to put your knife in your mouth, which you know before. And there’s no getting over it; the worlds are different.”

  “You are Sir Anthony Drelincourt,” she said.

  “I believe you are right. But I wasn’t always, and this world of yours isn’t my world, and the atmosphere’s different, the standard’s different, the sous entendus, the taken-for-granteds are different, the basis is different. Your lot have always had plenty of money.”

  “If you only knew,” she sighed. “I could tell you stories—”

  “About the distressing poverty of the aristocracy, and how hard it is to make both ends meet on three thousand a year. But the stories I could tell you are about people who have to decide whether they’ll have a book or a breakfast, and whether, if you walk from Chelsea, you wear out more shoe leather than the twopence a ‘bus would cost would pay for. We’re all ‘ Ladies and Gentlemen,’ of course; perish the doubt! but the point of view’s different, so different that when I’m talking to your callers I feel as though I were a South Sea Islander just introduced to the oldest civilization in the world. Or else—”

  “Yes — you must go into Parliament later on. Yes; or else—”

  “Or else,” he ended grimly, “as though I were a civilized man visiting savage tribes, making notes in my superior high-minded way of their curious superstitions, their reverence for their totems, which to me seem such silly odd little things. I find myself scientifically interested in their sacred books; the red-backed ones, you know, where the tribal history’s written with that lofty calm the Initiate uses in writing of sacred things. I study the rites and ceremonies, what the temple slaves do, what the priests do, the high priest bearing coffee on a silver tray, the array of sacred vessels, each with its appointed use; the ceremonial robes of the priestesses, the—”

  “Oh! don’t rag us like that, Anthony,” she interrupted; “ it’s all nonsense. We’re all exactly the same, really.” —

  “I daresay you are right,” he said; “and that it’s all nonsense. At any rate, it hasn’t the seriousness of the other life where the ‘bus fare and the boots loom so large. And if you go among savages, or if you’re a savage and go among the civilized — if you go out of your natural environment, I mean — you’ve no choice but to accept the other people’s convention, or try to make them accept yours. And I’m not at present prepared to do either.”

  “I think you make mountains out of—”

  “The usual material? I think not. The people who go out of my element into yours can only keep afloat by colossal pretences. And those who come from you to us have a brief dip and go back saying how odd the Bohemian life is.”

  “But you and I get on so well,” she urged plaintively. “But then you and I are us,” he said; “I’ll say we, if you like, but us is what I mean. If the others were like you! Anyhow, don’t let’s have any strange girls. Only my friends and St. Maur and the beetle man.”

  Lady Blair was very charming to the three girls. Her tact fought with her natural disinclination to be out of doors without a veil, and tact won. She received them on the terrace, dainty in black muslin over white silk, with a very shady hat of white and black and red carnations at her slender waist. Rose, the most self-possessed of the three, appeared at first the most nervous, for Esther was concealing shyness under a mask of confidence, and was wearing her eye-glasses, which ordinarily she only used for writing, to look superior through. Whatever happened, she was not going to be patronized. Linda was frightened, which gave her an air of frigid disapproval.

  Lady Blair asked kind questions about the journey. Tea was imminent, and a table gleamed white and silver at the terrace end.

  Esther and Linda both wished they hadn’t come, but Rose looked at Anthony, and thought that some day she would paint his portrait with that background of grey stone and ivy with the shoulder of distant Downs curving across the corner of the picture, and a bit of the park showing between the stone urns that brimmed over with trailing blossoms at each side of the gaps that the wide steps made in the line of the balustrade. And she looked out over the quiet beauty of the garden and park, and was glad that it was his. Also she saw herself a ministering angel stooping from this heaven with gracious gifts of coals and blankets and soup to the deserving poor. Then she caught herself at it, and smiled. “We’ll do better than that,” she told herself. But she did not tell herself that this was too big and beautiful a home for one man and one woman in a world where other men and women lived in the mean streets beyond the waste that lies against Malacca Wharf.

  The smile was still on her lips when she turned to answer Lady Blair’s question.

  “Yes, indeed, I like it,” she said; “it’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen. The terraces and the poplars and the fountains and the statues. It’s like the background of a Watteau.”

  “Do you know,” said Lady Blair, some one said exactly that to me once before, just here, one day like this? Fifty years ago.”

  “Then I wasn’t plagiarizing, only quoting a classic,” Rose said, and smiled again.

  “It was a girl, too.”

  “I suppose girls’ minds run on Watteau because of fans,” Rose suggested.

  None of the girls could have explained why they were nervous; in theory, of course, an educated woman is the equal of duchesses, but in practice the change from Soho to Ancestral Halls is disconcerting. Perhaps it is the sense of difference between the lives of those who earn their livings and those who not only don’t earn them, but have never even thought of earning them. Perhaps it was a question of clothes, because William Bats and the doctor seemed quite at ease. As for Mullinger, his money, though made in Insect Powder, had taken him to many such houses as this.

  Tea was not a merry meal, but it was not a social disaster. And after tea, Lady Blair said something about the lake, and they found themselves going down the terrace steps.

  “I’ll just slip away,” Lady Blair told Anthony; “you’ll h
ave so many things to talk about. Don’t be afraid, the old woman won’t be a skeleton at the feast, except at such times as the feast materializes in mutton or tea-cakes. You and your friends are free of me till dinner.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” said Anthony; “though you’re right this time, I shan’t let you do it again. You’ve been a dear to them. By this time to-morrow they’ll all love you almost as much as I do.” He kissed her hand in the shelter of a great white rose bush, and she went back to the house.

  He was a true prophet. When Lady Blair chose to be irresistible, no one could resist her. By the next tea-time she was calling the girls by their Christian names. And by the tea-time after that they had christened her their Fairy Godmother. The intense vitality that had kept her young so long delighted in their vigorous youth. The young men all professed themselves in love with her. She arranged all sorts of pleasures for them — boating, picnics, drives, and there was tennis and croquet, and going on, under and behind everything, the beautiful house and the beautiful weather, for the sun shone every day, and at night the moon was big and silvery over poplar and weeping willow, and lake and little temple, and all the sentimental detailed work of a long-dead landscape gardener.

  Rose loved it all, the house, its pictures and rich restful elegance, the garden, the hills, the luxurious comfort of a perfectly-working household. And yet she was miserable. For here, among these surroundings, Anthony seemed less hers than ever. He was more uniformly affectionate, it is true, but uniform affection is tasteless food to a young woman in love. Rose felt that she would have been contented to be ignored by him for five days of the week, and beaten on the sixth, if, on the seventh, he would have held her in his arms and made her believe that love, resisted for six days, had, on the seventh, proved irresistible. When they two were alone together, which was not conspicuously seldom, he would hold her hand and kiss her lips with a certain air of premeditation infinitely exasperating. His love-making was more than it had been, but less convincing. “ Un peu voulu,” a critic might have said. His lips found love-names for her readily enough now, but none of them had even the force of the earlier declaration that had discontented her. And never once did she see in his eyes the look they had worn when he gazed on her from the crystal.