Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  To him there came Lady Blair, a strange Lady Blair, aged and no longer gay.

  He roused himself from his triumphant musings to go to her.

  “My poor boy,” she said gently.

  “Why poor?” he asked, a sudden terror catching at his heart. That was how people spoke when — , but that fear at least was groundless. Death could not touch his love. And now the thought that he had hated came to him as a friend. “Why poor?” he repeated.

  “Because you’ve got yourself on to a plane where the impossible looks as though it could happen. But it can’t, my dear, it can’t.”

  “You’ve been talking to Bats,” he said, and she told him, “Yes, and he sees it as I do.”

  “But it’s no good,” said Anthony, “seeing things as each other does, and all that. She’s here; I’m here. I shall marry her to-morrow.”

  “She won’t,” said Lady Blair; “she—”

  “You’ve been advising her,” he put in hotly.

  “Yes, advising her to accept the thing quietly, get used to this new world you’ve brought her into, marry you and be happy. She won’t. And she wants to leave Drelincourt.”

  “Then she must marry me. You don’t suppose I can let her out of my sight?”

  “I will go with her,” said Lady Blair. “I am on your side, Anthony. I want you to be happy. Only I know in my soul you never will be.”

  “Ah! don’t croak,” he said almost gaily. “Do you think it’s possible for any one to come through what she has come through and then — nothing?”

  “I don’t think you realize,” said she, sitting down very wearily beside him. “You’ve been telling people. That doctor will talk. He doesn’t believe you. But he’ll talk. And other people; if they don’t believe, they’ll think the worst, as he does. And if they do believe — It seems so odd to be sitting here in the sunshine and talking of things that can’t be true, and yet they are. If people do believe that she’s a woman who died fifty years ago.... Tony, you know how people feel about the dead — the horror, the mystery, the wild unreasonable terror!”

  “We shan’t want — any one else,” he began, but checked at the third word. “But you don’t feel any horror?” he said.

  “I’m an old woman,” said Lady Blair, “and I am too near Death to be afraid of it. And I knew her when she was alive before, Tony. No one else is alive who knew her then. She feels that too. She feels that in time even you will shrink from her. God knows what the rights of it are. She says she’s been dead all those years. You say so. I know it can’t be true, and yet I see it is. My old brain’s muddled.” She put her hand to her head. “She asked me to tell you all this. To tell you that she knows the best thing she can do is to go away. She wants to go away with me. She wants me,” said the old woman, and her voice shook and her hands. It was as though old age, so strongly resisted, had in an hour done the work of half a lifetime. “And,” she added, “I want her. She knows all the people I knew when I was young. There is no one else left but her and me. Let us go away together. Don’t hurry everything. Let her have time to find herself, to see if she can live in this new world you’ve dragged her back into.”

  “She’s got to live,” he said roughly, “whether she likes it or not. Of course what I found out was too fine a thing not to have some damned counterbalancing terror. Just as the rest of us must die, whether we like it or not, she must live, whether she likes it or not.”

  “I hear what you say,” said she, “but it doesn’t seem to mean anything. My head’s going round.”

  “My poor dear,” said Anthony, and came to her and kissed her withered cheek. There was no paint on it now. “Don’t let’s talk about it any more now. Go back to her. Stay quietly with her. I cannot let her go away. I will wait as long as you like. I will not ask to see her till she wants me. But she must stay here. I must get rid of all these people. And I must tell Rose.”

  But Bats had told Rose.

  She was waiting on the terrace when Anthony came out, and she came to him quickly.

  “Don’t,” she said; “I know. Don’t tell me anything. You’ve quite enough to bear without telling me things that’ll break your heart to talk about. I know just how you feel. You’re bracing yourself up to get it over. Billy has told me. He said it was the only thing he could do for either of us.”

  “How splendid you are,” he said; “you don’t reproach me? don’t hate me?”

  “Reproach you?” said she; “oh, my poor boy, it’s bad enough without my reproaches. Even now I can’t believe it’s true. And yet I knew in my heart the moment I saw her that it was true. And nothing’s any use, and everything’s all over, and I shall never be happy again, and you’ve never been happy at all.”

  The remembrance came to him of an hour at Malacca Wharf when he had held, for the first time, his world in his arms.

  “I not happy?” he breathed; “oh, but I have been happy.”

  They stood facing each other with nothing left to say. Rose could not leave him in that empty silence.

  “There’s one little thing I’d like to tell you,” she began quickly, “before I go. Oh yes, of course I’m going. Do you think I want to stay? I had a letter from Abrahamson this morning.” Tony drew a deep breath, as one who begins to recover from a swoon. To talk of Abrahamson and letters was the first step back into the world of everyday, the world where he meant to live. The world in which he had passed the morning was the world he meant to leave, meant Eugenia to leave. He welcomed the commonplace daylight warm world of everyday things. “Yes?” he said.

  “He has found out where those books came from. And, he thinks, the ring. Oh, these Jews have ways of finding out things. I don’t know how he knows, but he does. It was a man who was in your uncle’s service at the time of his death. He must have stolen the books when your uncle died. And the ring. And sold them. He told his landlord once that he had expected the books to be gold and silver to him, and then found they were in some language he couldn’t read. Russian he thought.” So she spoke, almost placidly.

  “The cypher,” said he. “Rose, I think I see, This chap must have taken those books; and my uncle, perhaps he could not remember the formulae, couldn’t revive her, perhaps he only missed them when he had gone too far in the treatment to stop. Perhaps the shock of finding them gone killed him. He had written three words in the laboratory book, ‘Not death — She—’”

  “Yes,” said Rose, “yes.” Then lamely, “I thought I’d tell you. I mayn’t perhaps see you again, you know.”

  “Oh, don’t say that,” he said mechanically. He wanted to stay a little on the low level ground where one felt nothing, to breathe a little and rest. “Where are the others?” he said; “did you all have luncheon?”

  “Yes, Lady Blair sent word not to wait; that Eugenia was ill. The others are all gone. Billy got them off. Lord Alfriston took them to London in his motor. There’s no one here but Billy and me.”

  Anthony gazed at this girl whom, a week ago, he had supposed himself to be about to marry. And he knew, whatever Bats might say, that she had loved him.

  “Oh, Rose,” he said, and “Oh, Rose, Rose!”

  “The house feels as if there’d been a funeral,” she said, and shivered.

  “You are wonderful,” he said; “some women would have made me suffer to the utmost they could inflict. You are an angel.”

  She did not speak for a moment. Then she said: “Tony, perhaps you’ll think some day and be sorry for what you’ve done. About me, I mean. Think you ought to have gone on with it, you know, and things about your honour and all that. I want you always to remember what I’m going to tell you. I didn’t know it then, but I know now that it was all over for me from the moment you told me of your discovery. I could never have married you after that. I should have been afraid of you.” It was bravely said. And he believed her. Perhaps she believed herself. Perhaps, on the other hand, what she said was true, only she did not know it for the truth.

  “Thank you for tell
ing me that,” he said. “And I do love you, Rose. It’s only that I didn’t know that there’s only one sort of love worth offering to a woman.”

  “The stars and roses you used to make fun of?”

  “Yes,” he said, “the stars and roses.”

  * * * * * *

  Drelincourt was emptied of its guests. All had gone, even Rose who wanted to stay and Bats who had decided that she should not. He took her back to Malacca Wharf, got Esther Raven to stay with her and came to see her every day.

  “No, her heart isn’t broken,” said Esther to him one day when Rose was busy with the biscuit boys, “but it’s badly bruised. Poor dear brave splendid Rose. That he should have preferred that little dowdy insignificant relation — I would never have believed it, never.”

  The doctor had told Esther the story that he did not believe and she had not believed it either. Bats had told no one anything. Rose had told no one anything.

  “She bears up wonderfully,” said Esther; “just goes on with her work and the boys and her Mothers’ Meetings and things. I don’t suppose she’ll ever marry. She’ll never get over it. And yet she keeps such a brave front. I love courage.”

  “So do I,” said Bats, “the more by token that it’s my only virtue. No, I have one other. I can keep a secret. Can you?”

  “Yes,” Esther answered alertly.

  “Then I’ll give you one to keep. I mean to marry Rose.”

  “If she’ll have you,” said Esther incredulously.

  “One has instincts,” said Bats. “When I put the revolver to her head Rose will give in.”

  “The revolver — ?”

  “It’s just a way of speaking. When I tell her that I mean her to marry me, Rose will marry me. It’s the only way to manage these strong self-reliant people.”

  “She’ll simply laugh at you,” said Esther. “I don’t see any one bullying Rose into marrying a man she doesn’t love.”

  “Nor do I. Perhaps I forgot to mention that I also intend that Rose shall love me.”

  “She never will,” said Esther with conviction.

  “I don’t know. I sometimes think... Love soaks in, like water into rock, you know. If you go on loving people long enough before they find it out, when they do find it out it’s soaked into their very souls.”

  “Do you mean?”

  “Always. From the first moment I saw her. But you won’t tell her that. I shall tell her, when the time comes. And then you’ll see.”

  “I never shall,” said Miss Raven. But Miss Raven was wrong.

  “I tell you all this,” said Bats, “because I want an ally. Abuse me or praise me, I don’t care which you do. Only I want you to know what you’re doing. And in return I’ll ask you to tea when Lord Alfriston comes. He is coming, by the way, next Wednesday. And Linda and Mullinger. I am becoming a match-maker.”

  “You are brutal,” said Miss Raven, flushing, “and I shall not go to your hateful party.”

  But Miss Raven went.

  A hushed stillness, like the stillness of death, had settled over Drelincourt. Lady Blair and Eugenia kept to Lady Blair’s rooms, and for three days Anthony wandered like a ghost about that quiet house of his and the glorious gardens, thinking, thinking, thinking.

  On the fourth day Lady Blair came to him.

  “Eugenia is happier now,” she said. “She does not cry so much now. And she says she will see you soon. She asks a great many questions about some little boy. She says he was given up for dead and you revived him. She wants you to have the child here. She says that she and the child would understand each other. She is very insistent about it Where is he?”

  “With a clergyman and his wife at Esher. Sebastien shall go for him,” Anthony told her. “But is she more reasonable?” he asked quickly. “Does she see yet that she and I... If she and I keep apart, the whole thing’s been for nothing. Won’t she see me? I have been patient,” he said impatiently. “ Yes, I think I have been very patient. Won’t she see me now?”

  “She will see you when she has seen the boy,” said Lady Blair. “You will send for him to-day, won’t you? I think what she feels most is the horrible loneliness. I am the only one. This child — she feels she has some kinship of common suffering with him. It seems that dying, before it is your time to die, hurts horribly.”

  “I did not know,” said Anthony. “I thought it was rest.”

  “I hope you never will know,” said she. “I must go back to her. She likes the roses you send up. Yes. I’ve implored her to see you, but she says she must get used to her own soul first. I don’t know what she means.” Anthony sent for the child, and Sebastien brought him, a little boy of six or seven. Anthony would have liked to see the meeting of these two beings who, alone, had tasted of the first-fruits of his discovery. But Lady Blair had given orders that the boy was to be brought straight to her rooms. And Anthony, still alone, saw and heard nothing of the meeting. Though alone, he was not lonely. The reaction from the intense emotion left him at peace. Eugenia lived, he lived, and he wandered without restlessness about the gardens whose paths had known her feet.

  Lady Blair came to him sometimes, and from her he heard of Eugenia and of the child, and of the love the two had for each other. And once from his window, he saw her and the boy in the Dutch garden. They looked like mother and child, he thought, with a sudden pang. In this separation of her choosing, he was almost contented. The string of emotion, stretched almost to breaking point, was now all relaxed. That she should be in the same house with him was enough. It would have been almost enough, he felt, that she should be in the same world. He felt like a man who, in a shipwreck, has saved his dearest treasure and himself, and is content to know her safe, and to await quietly and with a solemn gratitude the time when she, rested and restored from that wild fight with death, shall come quietly to his arms.

  And at last she came. He had been cutting roses —— he sent roses to her rooms every day — and his hands were full of them as she came towards him through the flowering bushes. And when they met, he let the roses fall and took her hands across a heap of red and pink and white. There was a wooden seat round the trunk of a weeping ash on the turf at the end of the rose garden, and thither he led her, keeping her hand in his hand. The weeping ash made a green and gold bower for them, and the world was well shut out. There she crept into his arms and they clung together, even as those shipwrecked ones might have done.

  “You have kept me waiting a very long time,” he said.

  And she answered, “A very long time,” and clung to him yet more closely. “Anthony, I have thought and thought, and prayed and prayed. And I have come to see that what I feared from the first is true. It is not possible.”

  “What is not possible?” he asked, sick with a sudden fear.

  “That we should be together. That we should be married. It is not possible. We are not mates. I have been on the other side.”

  “And I? Have I not been on the other side? How else am I here, the man you loved, when the man you loved died years ago?”

  “It is not the same,” she said. “You came and went by the gates of birth and death. But I am not of your kind. I feel as though I were a ghost who loved a mortal. I am afraid.”

  He tried with fond words and the eyes of love to move her from this fear. In vain.

  “I did not know how deep the gulf was, how very deep and wide, until the child came. Then I knew. He and I are of one blood. I am not strange to him as the rest of the world is strange. He is not strange to me. He and I are happy together. You and I would never be happy.”

  Anthony spoke.

  “No,” she answered. “I know you love me, and I thank God for it. But you would not love me long. You would be afraid. You would say to yourself some day, ‘This is a dead woman I hold in my arms,’ and I should feel you shiver and shrink...”

  Again he spoke.

  “And this too,” she said; “have you thought of this? You will grow old, and I shall be always as I am now. Horri
ble, horrible! I look forward. I see our children... do you think I have not thought of that? Your baby to lie at my breast,” she caught her breath; and once more Anthony spoke, a very few words.

  “Yes,” she said, “I know. And when our child grew older, I should be still the same; and when our child was a man, and looked to find a mother faded with a life of love and care for him, like the good mothers of other men, he would find only me with my intolerable fixed unnatural youth!”

  She listened patiently to his passionate pleading, “Do you think I don’t say all that to myself?” she asked. “Over and over and over. And always the answer is the same. We are of different worlds. We must part.”

  “Beloved,” he said. “There is an antidote. It is in that book.”

  She shone and sparkled like a stream that the sun strikes from the edge of a cloud.

  “To make me a real woman again? Oh, Anthony!”

  “It is not a true antidote,” he said. “At least not as I have used it. I tried it — on the bird and on other things — and the answer always was... death.”

  “It might not be so with a human soul,” she said; and he said —

  “Do you think I am going to risk it?”

  “I would,” said she, “to be a real living woman; for your love... oh, I would risk far more than death.”

  Then he talked to her, quietly, reasonably, common-sensibly about the wonders of science and the power of man’s will.

  “You take this too much as a miracle,” he said. “By and by it will seem nothing to you or to the world. Electricity seemed a miracle once, and we send sixpenny telegrams. One comes to take the most wonderful magic as a matter of course. Look at the X-rays, and wireless telegraphy and...”

  “No steps come back,” she said. “I have crossed the threshold of death, and this which has come back belongs to the other side.”

  “Your feet only touched the threshold,” he said.

  “They crossed it,” she said, “and the child, he too has been where I have been. He sleeps in my arms. When he is there I do not dream. I am afraid of my dreams. They are all of you.”