by Edith Nesbit
“Do you know,” he said, “I can hardly believe that this is the first meal we’ve ever had alone together? It seems as though—”
“It is funny,” she said, smiling hurriedly at him.
He did not smile. He said: “I want you to tell me why you were so angel-good — why did you let me stay? Why did you lay the pretty table for two?”
“Because we’ve never been in the same mood at the same time,” she said desperately; “and somehow I thought we should be this evening.”
“What mood?” he asked inexorably.
“Why — jolly — cheerful,” she said, with the slightest possible hesitation.
“I see.”
There was another silence. Then she said in a voice that fluttered a little —
“My old governess, Miss Pettingill — you remember old Pet? Well, she’s coming by the train that gets in at three. I wired to her from town. She ought to be here by now—”
“Ought she?” he cried, pushing back his chair and coming towards her—”ought she? Then, by heaven! before she comes I’m going to tell you something—”
“No, don’t!” she cried. “You’ll spoil everything. Go and sit down again. You shall! I insist! Let me tell you! I always swore I would some day!”
“Why?” said he, and sat down.
“Because I knew you’d never make up your mind to tell me—”
“To tell you what?”
“Anything — for fear you should have to say it in the same way someone else had said it before!”
“Said what?”
“Anything! Sit still! Now I’m going to tell you.”
She came slowly round the table and knelt on one knee beside him, her elbows on the arm of his chair.
“You’ve never had the courage to make up your mind to anything,” she began.
“Is that what you were going to tell me?” he asked, and looked in her eyes till she dropped their lids.
“No — yes — no! I haven’t anything to tell you really. Good night.”
“Aren’t you going to tell me?”
“There isn’t anything to tell,” she said.
“Then I’ll tell you,” said he.
She started up, and the little brass knocker’s urgent summons resounded through the bungalow.
“Here she is!” she cried.
He also sprang to his feet.
“And we haven’t told each other anything!” he said.
“Haven’t we? Ah, no — don’t! Let me go! There — she’s knocking again. You must let me go!”
He let her slip through his arms.
At the door she paused to flash a soft, queer smile at him.
“It was I who told you, after all!” she said. “Aren’t you glad? Because that wasn’t a bit literary.”
“You didn’t. I told you,” he retorted.
“Not you!” she said scornfully. “That would have been too obvious.”
THE LIE ABSOLUTE
THE tradesmen’s books, orderly spread, lay on the rose-wood writing-table, each adorned by its own just pile of gold and silver coin. The books at the White House were paid weekly, and paid in cash. It had always been so. The brown holland blinds were lowered half-way. The lace curtains almost met across the windows. Thus, while, without, July blazed on lawns and paths and borders, in this room a cool twilight reigned. A leisured quiet, an ordered ease, reigned there too, as they had done for every day of Dorothea’s thirty-five years. The White House was one of those to which no change comes. None but Death, and Death, however he may have wrung the heart or stunted the soul of the living, had been powerless to change outward seemings. Dorothea had worn a black dress for a while, and she best knew what tears she had wept and for what long months the light of life had gone out of all things. But the tears had not blinded her eyes to the need of a mirror-polish on the old mahogany furniture, and all through those months there had been, at least, the light of duty. The house must be kept as her dead mother had kept it. The three prim maids and the gardener had been “in the family” since Dorothea was a girl of twenty — a girl with hopes and dreams and fond imaginings that, spreading bright wings, wandered over a world far other than this dainty, delicate, self-improving, coldly charitable, unchanging existence. Well, the dreams and the hopes and the fond imaginings had come home to roost. He who had set them flying had gone away: he had gone to see the world. He had not come back. He was seeing it still; and all that was left of a girl’s first romance was in certain neat packets of foreign letters in the drawer of the rose-wood table, and in the disciplined soul of the woman who sat before it “doing the books.” Monday was the day for this. Every day had its special duties: every duty its special hour. While the mother had stayed there had been love to give life to this life that was hardly life at all. Now the mother was gone it sometimes seemed to Dorothea that she had not lived for these fifteen years — and that even the life before had been less life than a dream of it. She sighed.
“I’m old,” she said, “and I’m growing silly.”
She put her pen neatly in the inkstand tray: it was an old silver pen, and an old inkstand of Sèvres porcelain. Then she went out into the garden by the French window, muffled in jasmine, and found herself face to face with a stranger, a straight well-set-up man of forty or thereabouts, with iron-grey hair and a white moustache. Before his hand had time to reach the Panama hat she knew him, and her heart leaped up and sank sick and trembling. But she said: —
“To whom have I the pleasure — ?”
The man caught her hands.
“Why, Dolly,” he said, “don’t you know me? I should have known you anywhere.”
A rose-flush deepened on her face.
“It can’t be Robert?”
“Can’t it? And how are you, Dolly? Everything’s just the same — By Jove! the very same heliotropes and pansies in the very same border — and the jasmine and the sundial and everything.”
“They tell me the trees have grown,” she said. “I like to think it’s all the same. Why didn’t you tell me you were coming home? Come in.”
She led him through the hall with the barometer and the silver-faced clock and the cases of stuffed birds.
“I don’t know. I wanted to surprise you — and, by George! I’ve surprised myself. It’s beautiful. It’s all just as it used to be, Dolly.”
The tears came into her eyes. No one had called her Dolly since the mother went, whose going had made everything, for ever, other than it used to be.
“I’ll tell them you’re staying for lunch.”
She got away on that, and stood a moment in the hall, before the stuffed fox with the duck in its mouth, to catch strongly at her lost composure.
If anyone had had the right to ask the reason of her agitation, and had asked it, Dorothea would have said that the sudden happening of anything was enough to upset one in whose life nothing ever happened. But no one had the right.
She went into the kitchen to give the necessary orders.
“Not the mince,” she said; “or, stay. Yes, that would do, too. You must cook the fowl that was for to-night’s dinner — and Jane can go down to the village for something else for to-night. And salad and raspberries. And I will put out some wine. My cousin, Mr. Courtenay, has come home from India. He will lunch with me.”
“Master Bob,” said the cook, as the kitchen door closed, “well, if I ever did! He’s a married man by this time, with young folkses growing up around him, I shouldn’t wonder. He never did look twice the same side of the road where she was. Poor Miss Dolly!”
Most of us are mercifully ignorant of the sympathy that surrounds us.
“It’s wonderful,” he said, when she rejoined him in the drawing-room. “I feel like the Prodigal Son. When I think of the drawing-rooms I’ve seen. The gim-crack trumpery, the curtains and the pictures and the furniture constantly shifted, the silly chatter, the obvious curios, the commonplace rarities, the inartistic art, and the brainless empty chatter, spiteful as often
as not, and all the time this has been going on beautifully, quietly, perfectly. Dolly, you’re a lucky girl!”
To her face the word brought a flush that almost justified it.
They talked: and he told her how all these long years he had wearied for the sight of English fields, and gardens, of an English home like this — till he almost believed that he was speaking the truth.
He looked at Dorothea with long, restful hands quietly folded, as she talked in the darkened drawing-room, at Dorothea with busy, skilful hands among the old silver and the old glass and the old painted china at lunch. He listened through the drowsy afternoon to Dorothea’s gentle, high-bred, low-toned voice, to the music of her soft, rare laugh, as they sat in the wicker-chairs under the weeping ash on the lawn.
And he thought of other women — a crowd of them, with high, shrill tones and constant foolish cackle of meaningless laughter; of the atmosphere of paint, powder, furbelows, flirtation, empty gaiety, feverish flippancy. He thought, too, of women, two and three, whose faces stood out from the crowd and yet were of it. And he looked at Dorothea’s delicate worn face and her honest eyes with the faint lines round them.
As he went through the hush of the evening to his rooms at the “Spotted Dog” the thought of Dorothea, of her house, her garden, her peaceful ordered life stirred him to a passion of appreciation. Out of the waste and desert of his own life, with its memories of the far country and the husks and the swine, he seemed to be looking through a window at the peaceful life — as a hungry, lonely tramp may limp to a lamp-lit window, and peering in, see father and mother and round-faced children, and the table spread whitely, and the good sure food that to these people is a calm certainty, like breathing or sleeping, not a joyous accident, or one of the great things that man was taught to pray for. The tramp turns away with a curse or a groan, according to his nature, and goes on his way cursing or groaning, or, if the pinch be fierce, he tries the back door or the unguarded window. With Robert the pang of longing was keen, and he was minded to try any door — not to beg for the broken meats of cousinly kindness, but to enter as master into that “better place” wherein Dorothea had found so little of Paradise.
It was no matter of worldly gain. The Prodigal had not wasted his material substance on the cheap husks that cost so dear. He had money enough and to spare: it was in peace and the dignity of life that he now found himself to be bankrupt.
As for Dorothea, when she brushed her long pale hair that night she found that her hands were not so steady as usual, and in the morning she was quite shocked to note that she had laid her hair-pins on the left-hand side of the pin-cushion instead of on the right, a thing she had not done for years.
It was at the end of a week, a week of long sunny days and dewy dark evenings spent in the atmosphere that had enslaved him. Dinner was over. Robert had smoked his cigar among the garden’s lengthening shadows. Now he and Dorothea were at the window watching the light of life die beautifully on the changing face of the sky.
They had talked as this week had taught them to talk — with the intimacy of old friends and the mutual interest of new unexplored acquaintances. This is the talk that does not weary — the talk that can only be kept alive by the daring of revelation, and the stronger courage of unconquerable reserve.
Now there came a silence — with it seemed to come the moment. Robert spoke —
“Dorothea,” he said, and her mind pricked its ears suspiciously because he had not called her Dolly.
“Well?”
“I wonder if you understand what these days have been to me? I was so tired of the world and its follies — this is like some calm haven after a stormy sea.”
The words seemed strangely familiar. He had a grating sense of talking like a book, and something within him sneered at the scruple, and said that Dolly would not notice it.
But she said: “I’m sure I’ve read something like that in a school reading book, but it’s very touching, of course.”
“Oh — if you’re going to mock my holiest sentiments,” he said lightly — and withdrew from the attack.
The moment seemed to flutter near again when she said good night to him in the porch where the violet clematis swung against his head as he stood. This time his opening was better inspired.
“Dolly, dear,” he said, “how am I ever to go away?”
Her heart leaped against her side, for his tone was tender. But so may a cousin’s tone be — even a second cousin’s, and when one is thirty-five she has little to fear from the pitying tenderness of her relations.
“I am so glad you have liked being here,” she said sedately. “You must come again some time.”
“I don’t want to go away at all,” he said. “Dolly, won’t you let me stay — won’t you marry me?”
Almost as he took her hand she snatched it from him.
“You must be mad!” she said. “Why on earth should you want to marry me?” Also she said: “I am old and plain, and you don’t love me.” But she said it to herself.
“I do want it,” he said, “and I want it more than I want anything.”
His tone was convincing.
“But why? but why?”
An impulse of truth-telling came to Robert.
“Because it’s all so beautiful,” he said with straightforward enthusiasm. “All your lovely quiet life — and the house, and these old gardens, and the dainty, delicate, firm way you have of managing everything — the whole thing’s my ideal. It’s perfect — I can’t bear any other life.”
“I’m afraid you’ll have to,” she said with bitter decision. “I am not going to marry a man just because he admires my house and garden, and is good enough to appreciate my methods of household management. Good night.”
She had shaken his hand coolly and shut the front door from within before he could find a word. He found one as the latch clicked.
“Fool!” he said to himself, and stamped his foot.
Dorothea ran up the stairs two at a time to say the same word to herself in the stillness of her bedroom.
“Fool — fool — fool!” she said. “Why couldn’t I have said ‘No’ quietly? Why did I let him see I was angry? Why should I be angry? It’s better to be wanted because you’re a good manager than not to be wanted at all. At least, I suppose it is. No — it isn’t! it isn’t! it isn’t! And nothing’s any use now. It’s all gone. If he’d wanted to marry me when I was young and pretty I could have made him love me. And I was pretty — I know I was — I can remember it perfectly well!”
Her quiet years had taken from her no least little touch of girlish sentiment. The longing to be loved was as keen in her as it had been at twenty. She cried herself to sleep, and had a headache the next day. Also her eyes looked smaller than usual and her nose was pink. She went and sat in the black shade of a yew, and trusted that in that deep shadow her eyes and nose would not make Robert feel glad that she had said “No.” She wished him to be sorry. She had put on the prettiest gown she had, in the hope that he would be sorry; then she was ashamed of the impulse; also its pale clear greenness seemed to intensify the pinkness of her nose. So she went back to the trailing grey gown. Her wearing of her best Honiton lace collar seemed pardonable. He would never notice it — or know that real lace is more becoming than anything else. She waited for him in the deep shadow, and it was all the morning that she waited. For he knew the value of suspense, and he had not the generosity that disdains the use of the obvious weapon. He was right so far, that before he came she had had time to wonder whether it was her life’s one chance of happiness that she had thrown away. But he drove the knife home too far, for when at last she heard the click of the gate and saw the gleam of flannels through the shrubbery, the anxious questioning, “Will he come?” “Have I offended him beyond recall?” changed at one heart-beat to an almost perfect understanding of his reasons for delay. She greeted him coldly. That he expected. But he saw — or believed he saw — the relief under the coldness — and he brought up his fo
rces for the attack.
“Dear,” he said — almost at once—”forgive me for last night. It was true, and if I had expressed it better you’d have understood. It isn’t just the house and garden, and the perfect life. It’s you! Don’t you understand what it is to come back from the world to all this, and you — you — you — the very centre of the star?”
“It’s all very well,” she said, “but that wasn’t what you said last night.”
“It’s what I meant,” said he. “Dear, don’t you see how much I want you?”
“But — I’m old — and plain, and—”
She looked at him with eyes still heavy from last night’s tears, and he experienced an unexpected impulse of genuine tenderness.
“My dear,” he said, “when I first remember your mother she was about your age. I used to think she was the most beautiful person in the world. She seemed to shed happiness and peace around her — like — like a lamp sheds light. And you are just like her. Ah — don’t send me away.”
“Thank you,” she said, struggling wildly with the cross currents of emotion set up by his words. “Thank you. I have not lived single all these years to be married at last because I happen to be like my mother.”
The words seemed a treason to the dead, and the tears filled Dorothea’s eyes.
He saw them; he perceived that they ran in worn channels, and the impulse of tenderness grew.
Till this moment he had spoken only the truth. His eyes took in the sunny lawn beyond the yew shadow, the still house: the whir of the lawn-mower was music at once pastoral and patriotic. He heard the break in her voice; he saw the girlish grace of her thin shape, the pathetic charm of her wistful mouth. And he lied with a good heart.
“My dear,” he said, with a tremble in his voice that sounded like passion, “my dear — it’s not for that — I love you, Dolly — I think I must have loved you all my life!”
And at the light that leaped into her eyes he suddenly felt that this lie was nearer truth than he had known.
