Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “What ring?”

  “The ring she’s got. Exactly like mine. She said ‘he’ gave it to her. And she talked about weddings. Tony, for God’s sake tell me the truth. I believe I shall go mad if I can’t feel that you’re speaking the truth.”

  “Before God,” he said gravely, “I am speaking nothing but the truth. I know nothing of any ring. But if there is another ring like that it only confirms what I am beginning to believe.”

  He stood a moment looking gloomily at her. Then, in a sudden revulsion of pitying tenderness, he went to her and put his arm round her, and drew her head to his shoulder. “There, there, dear,” he said, “I want to tell you everything, but how can I if — ? Don’t make everything so awful for me just now, just now when I want your help so much; when I can’t do without you.” It was the strongest appeal he could have made. And Rose answered to it “I — I’m rather tired,” she said, taking the comfort of his arm about her, and his shoulder against her face; “I’m sorry. I won’t be silly.” And for the second time in twelve hours she dried her eyes, put away her handkerchief very definitely, and smiled.

  “Now,” she said, “I’m going to have my breakfast, and you must tell me everything that you haven’t told me. And don’t think I’m being horrid if I ask questions. You want me to know everything that you know, don’t you? Cold? Well, it is rather. Is that the saucepan? I’ll warm the coffee, and you must have some too.”

  Thus determinedly did Rose drag into the scene those domestic details which so often qualify drama and blunt the edge of tragedy. She smiled again. And Anthony, in a spasm of gratitude, tried to return her smile.

  “Now,” she said, when two cups of coffee steamed on the table between them; “ I suppose you’ve got used to the idea. But I haven’t. I can’t believe somehow that she got into that cupboard, or whatever it was. I know you say so. And Billy and Wilton saw her there too. But it seems to me as if you must have been deceived. Isn’t there something they call collective hallucination? When a lot of people think they see a ghost or something, or when Indians throw a rope up into the air and it seems to stick fast and they climb up it and vanish and pull the rope up after them and they vanish too?”

  Anthony shook his head. Rose munched flabby toast to show that she was now prepared to consider the subject from a common-sense standpoint.

  “No,” he said. “I think it’s something much more interesting and unusual than that. To begin at the wrong end, because I feel you’re still worried about that though you’re pretending not to mind. Her taking me for her lover. I think her lover was with her when she died. And you know to restore her to life wasn’t just drugs. It was lots more — an enormous spiritual and mental effort — to recall her soul. Or however you like to put it: to make her live again. It took all there was in me, of mind and spirit, every ounce. When I revived that boy I told you of, he seemed extraordinarily attached to me. I didn’t think of that before. It makes things clearer, talking them over with you. He did seem very fond of me — is still. That confirms my theory. It seems to me the only explanation is that in that intense application of all one’s spiritual and mental force one somehow impresses oneself on the patient, who of course is quite helpless, with all the will-power in abeyance. It took a much greater effort to bring her back than it did for that boy. And I think that effort impressed my personality upon her so that when she became conscious she believed that I was her lover. It’s a lame theory, but it’s the only one I can formulate at present.”

  To Rose the theory was infinitely comforting.

  “But will it last?” she said. “You must tell her some time, you know; when she’s stronger, I mean,” she hastened to add, lest he should think her unreasonable.

  “Of course, the moment she is strong enough. But my theory is that this impressing of my personality on her would have been impossible but for her weakness, and that as she gains strength this delusion will fade, especially if she does not see me again.”

  Rose’s heart leapt up.

  “And what I want you to do is to keep her with you till she is quite strong, and then if the delusion’s gone, well and good. If not, I’ll dispel it by telling her the truth.”

  “You’re very much in love with the truth this morning,” she said, but not bitterly. “Of course I’ll keep her, if she’ll stay. Well?”

  “Now to go back to the beginning. How did she get there? Well, I gather from the condition of the secret room and the things I found there that the person who put her there, whoever it was, knew as much as I do about what I’ve called my great discovery. In fact, it’s plain that some one else discovered the secret of life before I did. I’m not sure that there haven’t been two discoverers. And I’ll tell you why in a minute. But first, I think my great-uncle Anthony had discovered it, because that lab at Drelincourt was his, and this room opening out of it had things that belong to this secret, heavy things like mirrors and so on, that couldn’t possibly have been brought in secretly since his time. He must have put them there, and he must have known what he was doing when he put them there. They were all arranged for the working of the — the treatment, the first stages of it, that is. The body of that woman was brought in somehow, by some one who knew of that room, and knew that it was fitted for the early stages of a certain treatment. Who that person was I don’t yet know, but we shall know, because he was the lover of that girl.”

  “You said you didn’t know if she was young or old,” Rose interrupted “Only last night, when I was lying to you.”

  “Sorry,” she said, and put her hand on his.

  “Either she’ll recover her senses and tell us who she was, or he will come to look after her — unless — unless anything’s happened to him. If he’s alive he’ll come.”

  “Well?”

  “How he found out about the place; how he got her in, I can’t begin to make out. But he got her there and he began the treatment. Then he must have left her, intending to return, and not been able to return. Something must have happened. Perhaps a change of servants, one of them may have been abetting him. Perhaps my going to Drelincourt — but no, that wasn’t it.”

  “Then if you — I mean if Bill hadn’t found her, she’d have been dead — I mean really hopelessly dead, like the dead people they bury, in a few days.” Her voice thrilled to the horror of it.

  “No,” he said slowly. “You see, it’s like this. I’ll try to make it plain. My secret isn’t just bringing people to life. It’s much bigger than that. I’m almost afraid, now it’s come to the point, to tell even you. My secret’s the thing the old philosophers were after. It’s the Elixir of Life. Don’t begin to think I’m mad, because really I’m not. Did you give her the second medicine this morning?” he broke off to ask.

  “Yes, at half-past seven, when she woke. She went to sleep again at once. Go on.”

  “You can’t set a limit to the possibilities of science, mental or physical,” he went on. “You can’t estimate the strength or the nature of the forces that are all about us. There’s a hard core of scientific scepticism, and round it — wonders, and the belief in wonders. How do you know what strange actions and interactions follow, when once, ever so little, you pierce the thin veil that divides the material from the spiritual world? Of course I know it’s unusual in a Christian country and an enlightened age to believe in a spiritual world beyond the material one. Yet many have believed in it. Or rather in the not-to-be-separated two-in-one of the material and the spiritual. Rose, you believe in miracles. Well, miracles have been done, and are being done, by the people who see that there isn’t a hard and fast line between the body and the soul, the material and the spiritual; any more than there is between mineral and vegetable, vegetable and animal. There have been men in all ages who have claimed to be able to raise the dead.”

  “Yes,” said Rose patiently, “go on.”

  “Let me think a moment. It’s so difficult,” he said, with a sublime candour that kept her silent, “to remember that you don’t know
anything about anything.”

  It was difficult. It is difficult to realize that to others an idea, a thought is new, inconceivable even, when that idea has lived for long years in one’s heart and mind. All through Anthony’s school days, his days at college, in work and in play, always at the back of his mind had been this one thought: the Elixir of Life. To find that, to succeed in that search wherein so many had failed, to equal Paracelsus and Pythagoras and to excel them, to bring science to the aid of psychology, and to transmute science into what the ignorant call magic. To use “magic” (he never found a better word for the thing he used), to use magic and science side by side, above and below, acting and interacting, and so to achieve. There had been in him from the first that certainty of ultimate achievement without which no great scientific or psychic discoveries are made. No man who does not believe in himself and his work ever discovers anything worth the discovering. The explorer who faces all dangers to get beyond the mountain range that till now has been the limit of the known world, knows that he will succeed, or die. And if he die, in the effort, who shall say that he has failed, since Death does not end all? Anthony Drelincourt sat a moment in silence. Then he said —

  “It’s like this. You can’t put eternal life into a body that’s subject to disease and to the wasting of the tissues and the other things that mean old age. Of course eternal life means eternal youth, or eternal prime, let us say.”

  “Yes.” Rose felt as though she were in a very difficult dream.

  “So,” he went on slowly, “before you can give the life, you have to destroy the tendencies, the liabilities to disease. You have to render the patient immune from all diseases. And you have to — how shall I put it — take from and add to the bodily tissues till they become something different and yet the same. It’s simpler perhaps to say, till they become immune from decay. Now these processes are difficult for this reason, that they cannot be performed on a living body. You follow?”

  “I’m trying to understand,” said Rose humbly; “go on.”

  “The life in the body, for some reason that I can’t quite make out, resists to a degree that makes quite half the process impossible. So that life has to be destroyed, and immediately on death the processes of purification begin; the processes which, in their result, defeat old age, disease, and death. I believe old Anthony knew all that I know, and the Anthony of the sixteenth century knew more of it. It was in that book you gave me, almost all that I had found out. It was a little different in some of the details, but practically the same. It was in cypher, you know. Bats worked it out. He got the clue from one of those Bacon cyphers he’s always at.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Rose, impatient of Bats and his cyphers.

  “And there was a little bit more in my uncle’s writing. That was a cypher too, and Bats got at it. And it was that that put me on the right track. I owe that to you, Rose,” he said, and stopped.

  “Do you see,” he went on in a moment, “you can only — how can I put it — build life on the foundation of death. You can’t build a new life on the old life. Now the person who put that girl in the secret room, put her there because that room was a place he knew somehow of, ready and prepared for what he had to do. He took her there, and when she was dead—”

  “Do you mean that he killed her? “ said Rose, in a voice of horror.

  “If you put it that way. The life went out. Then instantly he began the work, arrested the body’s decay, destroyed the potentialities of disease, treated the tissues so as to render their deterioration impossible. And then, something happened. I don’t know what. He could not get back to her, and she has been lying there, awaiting the last ministrations that should restore conscious life.”

  “It sounds most awful,” said Rose; “suppose you hadn’t come.”

  “That wouldn’t have mattered, so long as some one had come some day. Her body was not dead when we found it, in the ordinary sense of ‘dead.’ It was simply prepared for the new life, decay arrested, and the other ministrations completed. She could have stayed there for years. And,” he hesitated, “you know,” he said quickly, “I think she had been there for some time.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know. It might be a long time. Rose, the veil that covered her was thick with dust.”

  “Her dress,” said Rose, in a very low voice, “fell to pieces when I took it off, Tony. I can’t help it; I don’t like it. It’s horrible.”

  “The idea will be beautiful to you when you get accustomed to it,” he said; “it’s new to you now.

  Think of the wonder of it, the—”

  “Don’t!” she interrupted. “Have you told me everything now?”

  “Not quite,” he said. “You know that my uncle was engaged to be married, and the girl disappeared?”

  “Tony,” she almost screamed, if one can scream in a whisper, “you don’t mean she’s been dead all these years; that she’s that girl that disappeared. I can’t bear it; I can’t!”

  “No, no,” he said soothingly; “of course not. She ran away from my uncle. I expect she was afraid of these things, as you are. Would you run away from me, Rose, because I’ve made the most wonderful discovery a man has ever made?”

  He laid his hand on hers.

  “What I think is this: that girl ran away. She married some one else, and this is her daughter. There’s a portrait of the girl who ran away. This girl is like it. The girl who ran away was working with him in his laboratory. She knew his secrets. She must have told her daughter, that girl we have here. And the girl must have told her lover. He must have known a good deal himself, by the way, or he couldn’t have used what she told him. He and she decided to take the chance of life without possibility of disease or death. They got in somehow, and then he went away and couldn’t get back. That’s what I think.”

  “And the ring?” asked Rose.

  “The beryl and the chrysoprase are part of the treatment,” he said. “You lay them on the patient’s heart at the very beginning.”

  “She said he had put it on her heart,” said Rose, “but it’s exactly like mine.”

  “You see,” said Drelincourt, “your ring most likely belonged to my uncle Anthony; it has his initials on it. The girl who ran away from him may have had its mate, and it would descend to her daughter. It seems to me it all fits on.” He looked at his watch. “Good heavens! why did you let me go on talking like this? She ought to have had food an hour ago. I’ll go and get something — beaten-up eggs, I should think; and you take it in to her, and we’ll clear out and you can take her over to your house. And, Rose, she’ll want clothes.” He was fumbling with his pocket-book.

  “I can’t!” said Rose.

  “But of course,” said Anthony obtusely, and he dragged out some bank notes, “I can’t let you pay for her. Here — if you want any more—”

  “I mean I can’t do it,” said Rose. “I daresay it all seems beautiful and natural to you, but to me — oh, thank God you didn’t tell me last night. I couldn’t have stayed with her. Tony, I’d die for you, gladly. But I can’t do this. I can say I will, but I know I couldn’t stand to it if I did. I can’t have a dead woman to live with me, not even for you. She put her arms round my neck last night.”

  She spoke in extreme agitation.

  “But, Rose,” he said, “you’re too sensible.”

  “I’m not sensible; I’m not, I’m not,” she said, a little wildly. “You must get some one else — the dust of years — and that horrible red dress. What was the name of the girl who ran away?”

  “Eugenia,” he said.

  “That’s her name too! A horrible name. It’s like death, somehow.”

  “You’re talking nonsense,” he said sharply. “Come, Rose, this isn’t like you. My Rose that’s so brave and clever and good.”

  “Don’t!” she said; “that sort of thing’s no use. Have you told Bats all this?”

  “I’ve told no one but you,” he said reproachfully; “and you’re going t
o fail me.”

  “Tony, Tony,” she said in an agony, “I don’t want to fail you. I’d do it if I could. But I can’t. It’s stronger than I am. I daren’t!”

  “At least,” he said coldly, “you’ll carry the girl’s breakfast into her. She’s alive enough to need that.” Rose hung balanced between terror and returning self-control.

  “Yes,” she said, “I’ll go and get it. No, you shan’t go. I won’t stay here alone.”

  He shrugged his shoulders and she went But in the yard, in the sunshine, she turned on herself and hated herself for a shifty fool.

  “He has trusted you completely,” she said. “You wanted him to lean on you; he is leaning on you. And you give way.”

  Bats, anxious-eyed and elaborately cheerful, met her at the door.

  “Anthony’s told me everything,” she said; “more than he’s told you, much more,” and could have laughed as she said it at the pitiful jealous pride that spoke in her words, “and I’ve come for her breakfast. Beaten-up eggs, he said.”

  “Wilton said they’d be needed,” said Bats. “I’ve got them. And milk.”

  Beating up eggs was somehow incredibly soothing; the presence of Bats was soothing; his talk too. Wilton, when he appeared, calm and friendly, was soothing also. Rose began to feel as one supposes a horse may when, having shied at some unspeakable horror, he is led close to it and perceives the unspeakable to be, in the concrete, a wheel-barrow or a post painted white. “I have been a fool,” she said, watching Bats complete the egg-beating. And when he said, “Half of this is for you,” she took it meekly.

  Bats carried the tray across the yard.

  “I wish,” she said, “you’d come in. Tony’s told me how you found her, and all that. And it’s upset me a little. I suppose it’s silly. He wants me to keep her at the little house for a bit till she gets better. And somehow, oh, Billy, it’s awful to be a fool — I told him I simply couldn’t.”

  “I should think not indeed,” said Bats.