Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “You thought of a good deal.”

  “Oh, that wash!” said Lucilla, throwing back her hair. And Jane felt somehow solaced.

  “But what was it that gave me away?” Lucilla asked.

  My son John,’” Jane told her. “He told me one day that his mother always calls him Jack. I gather that she thinks John rather — what’s the word — roturier. So then I knew something was up, and in a flash I saw that you weren’t real. Do you know, that was a horrid moment, when you began to come to pieces in my hands. I almost expected you to be nothing but clothes, like that ghastly nun in ‘Villette.’”

  “I rather expected to be torn to bits myself,” said Lucilla. “You were violent, Jane.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “‘Though she is little, she is very fierce.’ Well, it was a good rag,” said Lucilla contentedly; “only my head doesn’t feel quite safe on my shoulders yet.”

  “I think I was very moderate,” said Jane.

  Next day the cooks came, but none of them suited Mrs. Doveton.

  “I shouldn’t care to trust e’er a one of them to do for you,” she said, and a wonderful tremulous hope sprang up in the breasts of the girls that perhaps Mrs. Doveton herself, always so averse from responsibility, and now so delicately placed as the arbiter of their domestic destiny, might find herself unable to take upon herself the burden of decision; that she might, in fact, rather than risk the selection of an Unsuitable, continue to “do for” them herself.

  The paying guests whose letters had been approved, and who had been asked to call, did call. Lucilla interviewed them.

  “It’s the least you can do,” said Jane. “ I couldn’t face a caller now; I should be afraid it would turn out to be you.”

  “But I shall be there with you, you know.”

  “So you say,” said Jane darkly. “I’m not going to risk it. You’re capable of being yourself and someone else at the same time. You’re quite equivalent, as Gladys would say. I shall sit in our boudoir and boud — or read. And I shall wash my hair. So that it won’t be any use your sending Forbes up to say that, ‘Please ‘m, Miss Craye would like to speak to you a moment in the drawing-room.’ My hair will be wringing wet the whole time they’re here.”

  When it came to the point, Jane did not wash her hair, because a four at tennis had been arranged to take place directly after tea; but she sat with the hair thoroughly down over a kimono with storks on it, and, thus defended, heard three times the resonant ringing voice of the front-door bell, announcing, “There are strangers on your doorstep, who don’t know how I reverberate and clang, and how I keep it up unless you ring me very, very gently.” But only twice did she hear the tinkle of the drawing-room bell — a mincing tinkle, reminding one of the voice of the false Mrs. Rochester, and saying, “There are visitors being shown out of your high-class family mansion by your irreproachable, white-aproned, long-streamer-capped parlourmaid.”

  By a simple arithmetical process she was being led to conjecture that one of the callers might have had to ring twice — though Forbes was so very irreproachable that this was not likely — when she heard Lucilla’s voice in the hall, the voice of one pleasantly elated in the company of congenial spirits.

  “No trouble at all,” she was saying; “of course I’ll go with you to the gate.” And then, “And wouldn’t you like to go round the garden?”

  A woman’s pleasant voice answered her, and men’s voices joined it. Jane ran through to the window of one of the unoccupied rooms that looked over the cedar lawn. Lucilla was crossing it in the company of a very elegant-loo king young woman and two young men, who, if not exactly elegant, were certainly presentable. They disappeared beyond the lawn, and Jane hurried back to her room to do her hair and go down to meet the strangers.

  “Why,” she told herself, “they look quite nice — not like P.G.’s — like real people!”

  And she hastened to exchange the kimono for a frock and her gold-embroidered slippers for sedate suede shoes. But before she had come to the shoes Lucilla burst in upon her.

  “Oh, my dear!” she said. “Such luck! They’ve taken the rooms — the three best bedrooms and a sitting-room; we can easily turn one of the bedrooms into a sitting-room, and that attic where the cistern is for a dark-room. They go in for photography. They’re going to have a tap and sink put in. They pay for it! They’re musicians too: they play at concerts. They’re going to pay three guineas a week each, and three for the sitting-room, and two for the dark-room — that’s fourteen guineas a week, my girl!”

  “We’ll have to be a bit more careful about their references, — a bit more careful than last time, I mean.”

  “They’ve given me three — a clergyman, and their last landlord, and their bank.”

  “We must call on these references. Where have they been living?”

  “In Carlisle.”

  “That’s convenient.’

  “Ah, but their bank’s in Lombard Street, and we’ll go and call on that. No writing. We’ll see with our own eyes whether Barclay’s Bankis a real bank. Oh, Jane, what luck!”

  “They’re nice, then?”

  “I should jolly well think so. Why, Jane, they’re not a bit like P.G.’s. They’re just like people you know.”

  “And Mr. Tombs — what about him?”

  “Oh, he came; and he’s taken the top tower bedroom. He’s not bad either — tall, thin, middle-aged. Nice face, and a nice voice if he’d use it. Blue glasses. He’s got references too. Upper Tooting. We can go there, you know.”

  “And what’s he paying?”

  “Oh, three guineas, the same as the others.”

  “For that horrid, poky little room!”

  “Oh, well, we can’t make these distinctions. He seemed quite satisfied. And if he’s no other good, he’ll do for a chaperone.”

  “Drop it,” said Jane.

  CHAPTER XXIV

  “I FEEL as if we were being whirled along in a — what-do-you-call-it? “ said Jane.

  “Motor-car?” suggested Lucilla, her speech obstructed by pins.

  “No, maelstrom,” said Jane. “Things do keep happening so. Don’t put in so many pins, Luce. I can see how it goes all right.”

  They were occupied in covering two easy-chairs with bright chintz. I am sorry to say that they had cut up a pair of curtains twelve feet long by six feet wide so as to avoid the extravagance of buying new cretonne to brighten the sitting-room which they were arranging for their new guests. The curtains were beautiful, with purple birds and pink peonies and pagodas of just the right shade of yellow to be worthy to associate with the pinks and the purples. The curtains were lined and bordered with faded rose-coloured Chinese silk, and pounds could not have bought their like. Shillings, on the other hand, and not so very many of them either, could have bought the cretonne. Pity, but do not despise these inexperienced housekeepers. They did not know — how should they? Even the most charming girls do not know everything. There was a girl once who cut up a fine hand-woven linen sheet to line a dress with and thought she was being economical, but that is another, and a sadder, story.

  “Well, we want things to happen, don’t we?” said Lucilla. “Wasn’t it rather the idea that we should live a strenuous life full of hard work, and earn our own livings with the sweat of... That pinky silk would look lovely under a bluey purply sort of crepe-de-chine. There’d be plenty of it for us each to have a dress. That would be something happening....”

  “Yes. Your Aunt Lucy did certainly have the loveliest things. These curtains must have come from a much bigger house than the cottage. And I don’t call a new dress ‘things happening.’ Things that you do yourself aren’t ‘things happening.’ It’s things other people do. Those loathsome P.G.’s that didn’t pay, and Mrs. Dadd, and you being Mrs. Rochester.”

  “That doesn’t count — it wasn’t real.”

  “Quite real enough, thank you. And now everything turned upside down to get this room ready for these horrid people
.”

  “They’re nice people,” Lucilla insisted.

  “I don’t care how nice they are — they come upsetting things.”

  “With fourteen pounds a week?”

  “Guineas,” said Jane absently. “Do you know, Luce, I think there’s something to be said for the sheltered life? We had a little taste of it, just that week or two after the Pigs bolted. That’s the life Emmie has, always — no anxieties; just time to be jolly and enjoy herself.”

  “If that’s what you feel, you’d better go and be a seraglio at once.”

  “Nonsense. And I’m not saying what I mean. Did you ever notice how sometimes you don’t? I think what I really mean is that I don’t want strangers about — however nice they are; and I mayn’t think they’re nice either. Hold that corner steady and I’ll stitch it now and have done with it, and we’ll nail up the untidy edges underneath.”

  “I wish you’d rein in your wandering mind and tell me what’s happened.”

  “Oh, nothing,” said Jane, and stopped short suddenly. “Only Forbes says she didn’t understand it was to be a boarding-house, and Mrs. Doveton says we ought to keep accounts, and Mr. Dix says we ought to keep bees, and he wants us to have pigs and a cow; and we haven’t the least idea how much anything costs, or how much it ought to cost — and seventeen guineas a week looks lovely, but if you don’t know how much you’re spending you can’t tell where you are. We may be barging along the road to ruin for anything we can tell. And I don’t suppose these rooms will be ready by the time these people come. And Mrs. Doveton says we ought to have in our sugar by the hundredweight, wholesale; and the drawing-room chimney wants sweeping, and we keep on saying we’ll get the silver up from behind the garden-room stove, and we never do. Did you hear of people biting off more than they can chew?”

  “There’s nothing in all that,” said Lucilla, busy with snipping scissors. “Everything’s going on all right. But I’ll tell you what, Jane. If you begin to turn coward, everything won’t go on all right much longer.”

  “This place is too big,” said Jane. “It eats up all one’s courage.”

  “But we wanted a big place — to earn our living in. And we got it — by a miracle. I know we agreed that we wouldn’t tell each other not to be silly. But really...”

  “Every word you say is true,” said Jane—”every single word — and I am an idiot; but there’s Mr. Dix going on like an intelligent steam-engine, and Mrs. Doveton like — all right, I’ll drop it. Let’s talk of something else. Is that Thornton girl good-looking?”

  “Girl!” returned Lucilla. “She’s married, to one of them — I don’t know which. I must have told you that a dozen times.”

  “Never,” said Jane. “You said the tall one was her brother, but not a word about her being married to the other one. I thought they were all brothers and sisters. Hurry up — let’s get these chairs done and go out and see the fountain. Mr. Rochester’s made it work, but I told him not to turn it on till we came out.”

  She fell to work with renewed courage.

  “What was it you were asking about the Thornton girl — just before I said she wasn’t a girl; what was it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Jane blithely; “it doesn’t matter anyhow. “Now let’s fix our powerful minds on bees. Shall we have them, or shan’t we?”

  “Can we afford it?”

  “Oh yes,” said Jane, “if our Mr. Dix says so. He knows about it all — he knows, he knows. That’ll turn out all right, don’t you worry.”

  “‘And variable as the shade By the light quivering aspen made..” said Lucilla.

  “Yes, I know,” said Jane. “Yes, I was in the dumps, but you’re a splendid comforter, Luce. I see that you’re right, and everything’s all right. And you are right. And I am right. And everything is quite correct.”

  Lucilla’s scissors snipped in a thoughtful silence. But to herself she said, “Oho! “and remained thoughtful in the face of the sudden bright gaiety with which Jane now enlivened their work.

  * * * * *

  The afternoon was fine, the fountain played to admiration and Mr. Rochester received the congratulations of the company. Mr. Dix received permission to buy bees, Jane seemed to have received a new lease of her habitual light-hearted optimism, and Lucilla felt that she had received enlightenment.

  It was Mr. Rochester’s day of triumph, for after the fountain had sprung and sparkled and pretended to be in turn cotton-wool and glass and fine silver, he announced that the library was done, and they trooped along to see it. The too enthusiastic interest of Gladys had led Mr. Rochester to ask leave to keep the door locked, so it was some time since anyone but Rochester had entered the room. Now they all stood in a silence of admiration that followed the first involuntary and unanimous “Oh!”

  For all the mustard-coloured paint was gone and the panels showed in the beautiful grey of their own oak. The books had been dusted and put back on the shelves, and the room had been swept and brushed to a fine bare neatness.

  “Why, it’s the most beautiful room in the house!” said Lucilla.

  “Almost it persuades me to be a book-worm,” said Dix, and took down a book and then another book. Lucilla also began to take down books — large ones with pictures. In a moment she looked round for someone to share the delights of a book of engravings — romantic pictures of castles and monasteries and ruins, with the wonderful trees and skies of the steel-engraver and the little blurred, round, brown footprints of time.

  “Oh, do look at this picture of Lindisfarne — isn’t it lovely?” and Mr. Dix came and looked and said it was.

  “But look at this,” he said, displaying his book—”the lovely little pictures of strange beasts.”

  Jane and Rochester drifted to the window, whose big bow made almost another room. An octagonal table, leather covered, came near to filling it. They squeezed past, and leaned out of the casement among the thick-flowered jasmine and wistaria. When I say they drifted, I do not really mean what I say. To Lucilla and Dix they no doubt appeared to drift. But what really drew her to the window was the action of Mr. Rochester. He too had taken a book from the shelf, and had held it out for Jane’s inspection. And when she looked it wasn’t a rare edition or a picture of a manticora or a ruined abbey that she beheld, but a slip of paper on which was written, “Please come to the window. I have something secret to tell yon.”

  Now you must know that during the last few weeks Jane, by an art so consummate as almost to have deserved from an unkind critic the epithet of artfulness, had succeeded in being very nice indeed to Mr. Rochester in public, and at the same time had most resolutely avoided all occasions of converse with him except public ones.

  Rochester, with equal art but inferior success, had tried his hardest to get a word alone with her — in vain. Always she was with Lucilla, with Mrs. Doveton, with Gladys, with one of the dismal and non-paying guests; and if he did find her alone she was always on her way to keep a most urgent appointment with one or other of her unconscious chaperones. Lucilla, who had herself no desire for tête-à-têtes, had seconded Jane ably, if unconsciously. And this had gone on and on. Now Jane looked at the book and said, “Yes, very pretty,” and very, very slightly shook her head.

  “Oh, but look at this!” said Rochester, turning the pages quickly. She looked. And this is what she read: “ There is a secret door. Let me show it you first.”

  Oh, well — if it was only a secret door... And it was then that she moved slowly towards the window, Rochester following with an admirably simulated air of it’s being a moment, this, like any other moment.

  “That’s very good of you,” he said, in that veiled voice which sounds just like ordinary talking to anyone a couple of yards away until he tries to hear what you’re saying, and finds that he can’t. “And there is a secret door. But first I want to ask whether I may go on using this room. I am writing a book — about my new discovery.”

  “Oh,” said Jane, and her voice was not quite so veiled
as his — but still, she wasn’t exactly shouting, “ have you made a new discovery? What is it?”

  “Well,” he said, “if it’s what I think it is — and I don’t think I’m wrong — it knocks spots off Newton. And as for Einstein — But that’s all dull to you...”

  “You mean I couldn’t understand it?”

  “You could, of course, but you’d have to understand a lot of other dull things first — mathematics, and physics, and dynamics, and things like that.”

  “Can’t you explain in a popular style that the beaver could well understand?”

  “I suppose I could. But it would take a long time and it wouldn’t amuse you. Only may I come and write here? It’s so quiet, and so good. And I wouldn’t be in the way. I’d go in and out through the French window.”

  “And the secret door?”

  “Well, I shall always be here, and when you feel you’d like to see it — well, here it is, you know.”

  “But I can’t have secrets from Luce — about secret doors, you know,” she added hastily.

  “Forgive me for saying that I can. Please let me,” he pleaded. “Let me have just this one little secret with yon.”

  “Oh, very well,” Jane mumbled, anxious to get away from any talk of secrets, especially from the memory of another secret that he had with her — the little secret of their lest interview in that room, when... Jane looked at his coat — it was the same coat — and wondered how any fabric worn by men could be at once so coarse and so comforting. All the same...

  “But I thought,” she said, picking jasmine flowers and laying the stalks together with earnest accuracy, “I thought you were to take care of your uncle’s house till he came back?”