Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  Jane was in a somewhat chastened mood; one cannot recover all in a moment, as she explained to Lucilla, from the crowning imbecility of a lifetime; the dark stain of ignominy takes some time to clean off.

  “Tears ought to lay the dust, anyhow,” said Lucilla.

  “Don’t let’s throw up tears at each other,” said Jane.

  “No,” said the other, with laboured conciliation, “but I really mean it. And besides, look how the rain last night has washed the world clean and bright as a new pin. I do think when you’ve done anything wrong or silly, and been really and truly sorry, you ought to try and forget it. Wipe it out.”

  “Ah,” said Jane, “you got that from Miss Whatever-was-her-name; you know, that used to read Ibsen to us and talk about sickly consciences. She wore aesthetic gowns till Jamesie stopped it and put her into a blouse and skirt. I liked her — and I don’t mean to have a sickly conscience. But don’t you think one ought to dwell a little on one’s croppers, so as not to do the same thing again?”

  “Miss Prynne — yes, that’s her name — used to say that you shouldn’t look back, but look forward. Don’t go on regretting what you’ve done that’s bad, but try to cancel it out by doing something good. Cheer up, old Jane; don’t forget that life is a lark!”

  “I know it is,” said Jane, “but it’s a lot of other things too. I sometimes think life isn’t so simple as they make out at school. For instance, do you think Mr. Rochester and Mr. Dix will like each other? Because I don’t.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Doesn’t it? How can we have any peace and quiet, let alone joy, in life if our kind friend and protector, Mr. John Rochester, growls at the thought of our protecting a stray dog. You know how I hate tact..

  “Yes,” said Lucilla, with emphasis.

  “... But I’ve always been told that it’s useful sometimes, and I almost think that this is one of the times. Only I’ve had so little practice in being tactful — I don’t know how to begin.”

  “You did pretty well with Uncle James. Don’t be mock modest.”

  “Exactly. Uncle James. He may turn up again this morning — In fact I’m certain he will — and I have a sort of feeling that Uncle James’s ideal young ladies would never have got themselves mixed up with young men in dark summerhouses and midnight tea-parties.”

  Lucilla pointed out that they needn’t, after all, tell Uncle James.

  “No, but Mr. Dix will. That fatal frankness of his —

  Do you know, I rather like him for that. Suppose we hurry and find spades and forks for him, and rakes and hoes; it will be easier to explain a gardener in the act of gardening than an unoccupied young man who has never been introduced to us.”

  “I wonder why Gravy always made out that it was so awful to talk to young men that weren’t introduced to you? It doesn’t feel awful, does it? It feels perfectly natural.”

  The gardens at Cedar Court looked lovelier than ever. The morning sunlight glittered on the wet leaves, and against a blue sky trimmed with rolling white clouds the trees stood up in their green-rounded perfection — all the leaves new and not yet a leaf fallen. The chestnut tree by the gate towered against the blue, its pointed white cones standing up like fat candles on a Christmas-tree for some fortunate and giant child. All the roads and paths were clear and bright.

  “The world really does look like a little girl that means to be good now, please, and has had her face washed and her curls combed out,” said Jane as they went up to the door of the garden house.

  “With a green frock embroidered with daisies,” said Lucilla. And with that they came to the door. And even then, seeing Mr. Dix come to meet them and trying not to look at his new boots seemed to be the chief event of the day.

  “I’ve sold eighteen penny-worth of flowers,” he announced joyously. “A woman who was going to a hospital. I couldn’t leave the place, so I let her have the flowers out of the vase here — was that right?”

  “Splendid! “ said Jane. “ Why, we hardly ever take anything on Monday — it’s a glorious beginning!”

  “You didn’t either of you catch cold last night?” he hoped.

  “More likely you,” said Jane. “I’m afraid you were awfully uncomfortable here. No, don’t be polite about it — because, of course, the truth’s the truth. Have you been into the garden yet — by daylight, I mean?”

  “Rather! It’s a beautiful place — but... well... the sooner I get to work the better. Is there a scythe? Nothing short of that will make any sort of successful attack on your armies of docks and nettles.”

  “Those sort of things are in the toolshed among the lilacs beyond the summer-house. Of course, there might be a scythe there, but I’ve never seen one.”

  “Yes,” he said, but still he lingered.

  “Look here,” he said quickly, looking out of the window over the cedar lawn, “you must just let me say ‘thank you’ once — I won’t keep on saying it. I’ve been in London for months — all grey and black and grimy — everything greasy with being rubbed up against by the bent shoulders of unhappy people. And all the faces — anxious, worried, sad. And the noises — the screaming machines rushing about. The motor-vans begin at three in the morning. This morning the birds woke me. I was out in the garden by five. I’d almost forgotten what dawn was like in a green place.”

  He went out abruptly without looking at them. And they very carefully avoided looking at each other.

  The morning seemed unusually long; there were no more sales. When they had swept and dusted the garden room there was nothing more to do but to wonder whether their landlord would come again to-day, to-morrow, every day, every other day.

  “You know,” said Jane, “if dear Uncle James is going to live next door, so to speak, and if we’re liable to be dropped down on at any hour of the day or night—”

  “He didn’t drop down exactly,” said Lucilla.

  “Oh, didn’t he? Liable to be dropped in on, then — we shall never feel safe. I do like him, too — but he’s so sudden.” And it was then that she explained how exactly the elder Mr. Rochester had resembled the eldest of the three bears.

  To Mr. Dix, sweltering in mid-day sunshine, amid swathes of mown grass and groundsel, dock and comfrey, nettles and thistle and willow herb, came a bright vision of basket-bearing maidens in flowered gowns, all pink and green and blue and purple.

  “Dinner,” said one of them.

  And, “ You’ll want to wash,” said the other; “lock up the garden room when you’ve done, won’t you? And when you come you might bring the plates and glasses off the table — and the jug of lemonade.”

  They spread the cloth by the fishpond — dry now and overgrown with the thorny arrogance of rambler roses all thick with the promise of countless little pointed buds.

  It was a very nice dinner — the cold lamb from yesterday, and what was left of the gooseberry-pie, and lettuces and radishes, and what sounds so nice when you call it (fair white bread). The sun shone, the green leaves flickered and shivered in the soft airs of May. The peonies shone like crimson cannon-balls, and the flags stood up like spears; the birds sang, and three very contented people ate and talked and laughed together. It is idle to pretend that three is not sometimes a much better number than two. Jane realised this.

  “So long as it’s not four,” she told herself, and ever and again her eye scanned the shadowy shrubbery beyond which lay the gates by which, if at all, the fourth must come. And the more she liked Mr. Dix — and she did go on liking him more and more — the more certain she felt that the fourth, if that fourth should be Mr. John Rochester, would not like Mr. Dix so much as she did.

  There was a breathless feeling of being on the edge of tilings.

  They made conversation:

  “I wish Shelley hadn’t said that about the lamb that looks you in the face,” said Lucilla. And that kept them going for a while.

  Then: “This gooseberry-pie ought to have cream with it,” said Jane; “but the cream here d
oesn’t seem real somehow. Let’s write to Gladys to post us some from Mutton’s, shall we? Gladys was one of the maids at school.”

  Then they told Mr. Dix about Gladys.

  They all laughed a great deal and ate up everything that there was to eat.

  When the meal was over, Lucilla produced with an air of conscious pride a crumpled packet of cigarettes.

  “You’d like to smoke?” she said, offering also matches.

  The cigarette which Mr. Dix extracted from the packet was bent but not broken. He straightened it and lit it. Not for worlds would he have produced the new crisp cigarettes that he had bought that morning. Something about that timeworn little packet of Lucilla’s convinced him that neither of the ladies smoked. Still, he put the question.

  “But you? “ he asked. “What am I thinking of?” and he proffered the broken-backed case.

  “We don’t,” said Jane. “I believe everyone else does, so we tried. But we don’t like it.”

  “Gladys smokes,” said Lucilla. “It was Gladys who got us the cigarettes to try; we only tried one each. They didn’t make us ill..... Gladys said they did some people — but they don’t really taste nice, and we couldn’t smell the flowers or the wet grass or pine-woods nearly so well afterwards. So we didn’t go on with it.”

  “You don’t dislike my smoking? Doesn’t it poison the air for you?” he asked, laying down the cigarette.

  “Oh no I” said both together.

  “It smells all right here,” Lucilla explained, and Jane added:

  “It makes you feel that this is the great world: so different from school. Do go on.” And he did.

  “It was jolly clever of you to think of those cigarettes,” Jane said later; “it was a score to you. But I expect he’d really bought some already. No, I don’t really — don’t look so dismal; it was a splendid thought. If he’d been the snub-nosed charwoman you couldn’t have made him happy with cigarettes. I say, Luce, we never offered Uncle James his share of the money.”

  “No more we did. Now we shall have to calculate what ten per cent, of all our shop money comes to. What a way to spend a bright day in May!”

  “You’d rather spend it sitting by the edge of the fishpond watching our gardener smoke.”

  “Yes — and so would you! Instead of which we’ll mind the shop — and let Uncle James jolly well find us minding it if he drops down — I mean in — on us this afternoon.”

  But it was Mr. John Rochester who dropped in.

  “I thought perhaps you would,” said Lucilla, rather out of politeness than as a statement of fact, “because of the stables, you know.”

  “Ah — the stables! “ said Mr. John Rochester. “ I kept the stables dark yesterday because I didn’t know exactly how we stood with Uncle. I wasn’t sure that there mightn’t be a recurrence of grumpiness on the part of Uncle. About the crocks and the sticks, you know.”

  “And was there?”

  “No — on the contrary. I have never known him so amiable. Our noble work in cleaning off the gas-green paint has gone straight to his heart. He could talk of very little else.”

  “We were just wondering how to find out how much ten per cent, of all our shop money would come to. You know that was what we settled to pay your uncle — as rent for the garden room, you know.”

  “I didn’t know,” said Mr. Rochester, “but I don’t think you need bother about that. He’s changed his mind.”

  The girls looked at each other in dumb horror. Mr. Rochester was getting some keys out of his pocket, and did not see their faces. The keys of the stable, no doubt. But what did stable or cottages or tennis-lawn matter if their landlord changed his mind? Somehow they had never thought of his doing that.

  Jane was the first to find words.

  “He doesn’t want us to go on with the garden and the garden room? He doesn’t want us to go on as we are?”

  “No,” answered John Rochester absently, and still busy with the keys. “He doesn’t want you to go on as you are. You see, he’s decided not to keep the house empty any longer.” An end, then, to everything!

  I think it is to the credit of my Jane and Lucilla that the first thought of each as they caught breath under the assault of this wave of misfortune was:

  “And we’ve just engaged a gardener! Oh, poor Mr. Dix!”

  CHAPTER XVI

  “I THINK,” said Jane, in a small, flat voice, “that I would rather go before he comes.”

  “Before who comes?” Mr. Rochester was laying the keys out on the table, one by one, in a row.

  “Your uncle.”

  “But he isn’t coming,” said Mr. Rochester, still intent on the keys. “Why can’t people use key-rings? These were on a cord, and it’s broken. They were all in a certain order. Only two labelled A and B — the rest en suite. A silly game. No — he’s not coming. He’s gone to Thibet. There’s a Buddhist manuscript there that he must see, or perish. So he’s gone to see it. But I’ve got a letter for you from him.”

  “You can post it to us,” said Lucilla, in a voice smaller and flatter than Jane’s.

  “No need for that — I’ll give it you in half a minute. I’m only trying to remember how these things go. My dear girl,” he ended, in a quite changed voice, “whatever is the matter?”

  “Oh, nothing,” said Jane, now sufficiently recovered to bristle defensively. “Everything’s for the best in the best of all possible worlds, as Marcus Aurelius said, didn’t he? Only those unexpected things do rather take your breath away. I daresay our new gardener can take down the board. I don’t mind in the least,” she went on, and she was now, indeed, a little breathless; “but I must say I think it would have been better to have let us alone, and not let us begin to work here and hope and plan things, and then spring this on us.” She walked to the window and stood looking out at the cedars, which looked, to her eyes, twisted and rainbow-rimmed.

  “Springing what?” asked Rochester in complete bewilderment. “Tell me — what?” But Jane could find no voice to tell him what.

  “Springing what? “ he asked again.

  “What you told us,” said Lucilla, in a sort of faint, timid growl, and then she too became speechless, and turned to the other window and gazed out at the gates and the board, also, to her, prismatically coloured.

  “But I haven’t told you anything yet,” Rochester protested. Four eyes bright with unconcealable tears turned on him astonished reproach.

  The bewildered young man was quite overcome. He gazed from Lucilla to Jane; his heart experienced a twinge at sight of Lucilla’s brimming eyes, but when he saw the dejected droop of Jane’s head he lost his own.

  “Ah, don’t!” he said, in a voice of extreme tenderness, and he took two steps and put his hand over Jane’s hand, which lay on the window-ledge. “ Please, please don’t. I must have been incredibly stupid — I don’t know what I’ve done, but...”

  Will it be believed that Mr. Dix chose this exact moment to appear at the glass door and ask cheerfully where the wheelbarrow was kept? He looked very handsome though; his classic brow was dotted with beads of sweat, and his blue shirt, open at the neck and rolled up as to the sleeves, accentuated the blue of his eyes. He spoke with perfect respect, of course, but it was the respect of the young man to the woman who is his social equal, not the respect of the gardener to his employer.

  “I can’t find the wheelbarrow anywhere,” he said.

  “We hid it behind the laurels,” said Lucilla, “in case °f burglars. We couldn’t get it into the shed. I’ll show you,” and felt herself being tactful. The spectacle of Mr. Rochester laying his hand on Jane’s, and Jane not whisking her hand abruptly from this unusual contact until Mr. Dix’s voice was heard at the door, made Lucilla extremely anxious to get away, somehow, from the garden room. But Jane also appeared anxious for flight.

  “No — I’ll go,” she said, and was out of the door like a flash.

  “Who’s that?” asked Mr. Rochester, when she was gone.

 
“Mr. Dix. He was going to be our gardener.”

  “Oh,” said Mr. Rochester coldly; “why only ‘was ‘?”

  “Well — we don’t need a gardener at Hope Cottage, and since we’re not going to go on here...”

  “Oh,” said Mr. Rochester slowly, “I begin to see. Well, it’s no use my trying to remember what I said — something more than usually idiotic, I suppose — but what I came down to say was this: my uncle is so charmed with the panelling, and the tea, and you, and Miss Quested, and everything, that he’s changed his mind completely; he says you can have the whole of Cedar Court to do exactly as you like with — no restrictions. Only in return he wants to have Hope Cottage kept exactly as it is — not let — but kept as it is.”

  “Just as it is? No one to live in it? Like a museum?”

  “More like a sacred relic of the past.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Lucilla; “but then I don’t understand anything this morning. Let me go and tell Jane.”

  “Just a minute,” said Mr. Rochester. “Who is this Mr. Dix?”

  “A friend of ours,” said Lucilla cautiously.

  “Known him long? “asked Mr. Rochester—”though, of course, I’ve no earthly right to ask.”

  “No,” said Lucilla, with some spirit, “I don’t think you have — any earthly.”

  And a gloomy silence fell between them. The young man broke it by a laugh that was not very merry.

  “Why,” he said, “this is like a nightmare! I couldn’t sleep last night — literally and actually I couldn’t sleep — for thinking how frightfully pleased you’d both be. And now you’re quarrelling with me, and she’s gone off crying with that Dixy fellow, and everything’s about as damnable — I beg your pardon, but it really is — as it can possibly be.”

  “Well,” said Lucilla, “it’s no use making it worse by being silly; of course Jane and I both wanted to go off and look for the wheelbarrow — anything to get away from you. You don’t suppose we enjoyed standing and snivelling at you like silly, hysterical schoolgirls, do you?”