Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “Oh, Marguerite,” I cried, “poor Mimi!” I had to pull at the pig-tail as though it was a bell-rope, and I had pulled three times before I could get Marguerite to understand what was the matter with me. Then she sat up in bed rigid with a great purpose. “We must go down and fetch her,” she said.

  It was winter; the snow was on the ground. Marguerite thoughtfully put on her shoes and her dressing-gown, but I, with some vague recollection of bare-footed pilgrims, and some wild desire to make expiation for my crime, went down bare-footed, in my night-gown. The crime of forgetting a cat for three days was well paid for by that expedition. We crept through the house like little shivering mice across the courtyard, thinly sprinkled with snow, and into that awful black yawning cellar where nameless horrors lurked behind each bit of shapeless lumber, ready to leap out upon us as we passed. Marguerite did not share my terrors. She only remarked that it was very cold and that we must make haste. We opened the hamper fully expecting to find the captive dead, and my heart gave a leap of delight when, as we raised the lid, the large white Mimi crept out and began to rub herself against us with joyous purrings. I remember so well the feeling of her soft warm fur against my cold little legs. I caught the cat in my arms, and as I turned to go back to the house my half-frozen foot struck against something on the floor. It felt silky, I picked it up. It was Rénee. She also had been a captive princess in our game of bandits. She also had been shut up here all this time, and I had never missed her!

  We took the cat and the doll back to bed with us and tried to get warm again. Marguerite was soon asleep, but I lay awake for a long time kissing and crying over the ill-used cat.

  I didn’t get up again for a fortnight. My bare-footed pilgrimage cost me a frightful cold and the loss of several children’s parties to which we had been invited. Marguerite, throughout my illness, behaved like an angel.

  I only remember one occasion on which I quarrelled with her —— it was on the subject of dress. We were going to a children’s party, and my best blue silk was put out for me to wear.

  “I wish you wouldn’t near that,” said Marguerite hesitatingly, “it makes my grey cashmere look so old.”

  Now I had nothing else to wear but a brown frock which I hated.

  “Never mind,” I said hypocritically, “it’s better to be good than smart, everybody says so,” and I put on my blue silk. When I was dressed, I pranced off to the kitchen to show my finery to the cook, and under her admiring eyes executed my best curtsey. It began, of course, by drawing the right foot back; it ended in a tub of clothes and water that was standing just behind me. I floundered out somehow, and my first thought was how funny I must have looked, and in another moment I should hove burst out laughing, but as I scrambled out, I saw Marguerite in the doorway smiling triumphantly, and heard her thin little voice say, “The blue silk can’t mock the poor grey cashmere now!”

  An impulse of blind fury came upon me. I caught Marguerite by her little shoulders, and before the cook could interfere I had ducked her head-first into the tub of linen. Madame Lourdes behaved beautifully; she appeared on the scene at this moment, and, impartial as ever, she slapped us both, but when she heard from the cools the rights of the story, my sentence was “bed.” “But Marguerite,” said her mother, “has been punished enough for an unkind word.”

  And Marguerite was indeed sobbing bitterly, while I was dry-eyed and still furious. “She can’t go,” I cried, “she hasn’t got a dress!”

  “You have spoilt her dress,” said Madame Lourdes coolly, “the least you can do is to lend her your brown one.” And that excellent woman actually had the courage to send her own daughter to a party, in my dress, an exquisite punishment to us both.

  Marguerite came to my bedside that night; she had taken off the brown dress and wore her little flannel dressing-gown.

  “ You’re not cross now, are you?” she said. “I did beg mother to let you come, and I’ve not enjoyed myself a bit, and I’ve brought you this from the party.”

  It was a beautiful little model of a coffeemill made in sugar. My resentment could not withstand this peace-offering. I never quarrelled with Marguerite again, and when my mother sent for me to join her at Bagneres I wept as bitterly at leaving Madame Lourdes as I had done at being left with her.

  “Cheer up my darling, my cabbage,” said the dear woman as the tears stood in her own little grey eyes. “I have an instinct, a presentiment, which tells me we shall meet again.”

  But we never have.

  PART VII. — DISILLUSION.

  I was sent with a servant from Pau to Bagnères. She soon dried my tears by reminding me of the hideous blue and white knitted cuffs which my hot and rebellious fingers had for weeks been busy in knitting for my mother, and which I should now be able to present personally. They were of a size suitable to the wrist of a man of about eight feet, and the irregularities at the edge where I had forgotten to slip the stitch were concealed by stiff little ruchings of blue satin ribbon. I thought of them with unspeakable pride.

  We reached Bagnères after dark, and my passion of joy at seeing my mother again was heightened by the knowledge that I had so rich a gift to bestow upon her. We had late dinner, in itself an event to me, and then I tasted for the first time the delicious chemin de fen, a kind of open tart made of almond paste and oranges covered with a crisp icing or caramel. I have never tasted this anywhere else, and though I have tried again and again to reproduce it in my own kitchen, I have never obtained even a measure of success. Even to this delicacy the thought of those blue and white cuffs added flavour.

  After dinner I slipped away and made hay of the contents of my box till I found the precious treasures. I returned solemnly to the room where my mother was sitting by the bright wood fire, with the wax candles on the polished table.

  “Mamma,” I said (we called our mothers “mamma” in the sixties), “I have made you a present all my very own self, and it’s in here.”

  “Whatever can it be?” said my mother, affecting an earnest interest. She undid the paper slowly. “Oh, what beautiful cuffs! Thank you, dear. And did you make them all your very own self?”

  My sisters also looked at and praised the cuffs, and I went happy to bed. When I was lying between the sheets I heard one of my sisters laughing in the next room. She was talking, and I knew she was speaking of my precious cuffs. “ They would just fit a coal-heaver” she said.

  She never knew that I heard her, but it was years before I forgave that unconscious outrage to my feelings.

  Bagnères de Bigorre is built in the midst of mountain streams. Streams cross the roads, streams run between the houses, under the houses, not quiet, placid little streams, such as meander through our English meadows, but violent, angry, rushing, boiling little mountain torrents that thunder along their rocky beds. Sometimes one of these streams is spanned by a dark arch, and a house built over it. What good fortune that one of these houses should have been the one selected by my mother — on quite other grounds, of course — and, oh! the double good fortune I, even I, was to sleep in the little bedroom actually built on the arch itself that spanned the mountain stream! It was delightful, it was romantic, it was fascinating. I could fancy myself a princess in a tower by the rushing Rhine as I heard the four-foot torrent go thundering along with a noise that would not have disgraced a full-grown river. It had every charm the imagination could desire, but it kept me awake till the small hours of the morning. It was humiliating to have to confess that even romance and a rushing torrent did not compensate for the loss of humdrum, commonplace sleep, but I accepted that humiliation and slept no more in the little room overhanging the torrent.

  The next day was, I confess, tiresome to me, and I in consequence tiresome to other people; the excitement of coming back to my mother had quickly worn off. My mother was busy letter-writing, so were my sisters. I missed Marguerite, Mimi, even my lessons. There was something terribly unhomelike about the polished floor, the polished wooden furniture, the marble-topp
ed chest: of drawers with glass handles, and the cold greyness, of the stone-built houses outside. I wandered about the suite of apartments, every now and then rubbing myself like a kitten against my, mother’s shoulder and murmuring, “I don’t know what to do.” I tried drawing, but the pencil was bad and the paper greasy. I thought of reading, but there was no book there I cared for. It was one of the longest days I ever spent. That evening my sister said to me —

  “Daisy, would you like to see a shepherdess, a real live shepherdess?”

  Now I had read of shepherdesses in my Contes de Fées. I knew that they wore rose-wreathed Watteau hats, short satin shirts, and flowered sills overdresses, that spinning was part of their daily toil, and that they danced in village festivals, generally at moments when the king’s son was riding by to the hunt.

  “Oh, I should like to see a shepherdess,” I said. “But do you mean a real one who keeps sheep and spins and everything?”

  “Oh, yes; she stands at her cottage door and spins while she watches her sheep, and eats a beautiful kind of yellow bread made of maize, that looks and tastes like cake. I daresay she would give you some if you asked her.”

  The mention of the shepherdess dissipated my boredom. I climbed on my sister’s knee and begged for a fairy story “ And let it be about shepherdesses,” I said.

  My sister had a genius for telling fairystories. If she would only write them now as she told them then, all the children in England would insist on having her fairy-stories, and none others. She told me a story that had a shepherdess in it and a king’s son, of course; a wicked fairy, a dragon and a coach and many other interesting and delightful characters. I went to bed happy in the knowledge that the fairy-world was stooping to earth, and that the fairy-world and this world of ours would touch to-morrow, and touch at the point where I should behold the shepherdess.

  I spent the next morning happily enough in drawing fancy portraits of the shepherdess, the king’s son, and the wicked fairy. My sister lent me her paint, and her best sable brush, and life blossomed anew under the influence of a good night’s rest.

  In the afternoon we started out to see the shepherdess. Over the cobble stones of the streets, among the little mountain torrents, we picked our way, and came at last to green pastures at the foot of the mountains. The Pyrenees were so bright in their snow coats touched by the sun that our eyes could not bear to look at them.

  “We shall soon come to the shepherdess,” said my sister, cheerfully. “You must not expect her to be like the ones in fairy-tales, you know.”

  “Of course not,” said I; but in my heart I did.

  We came presently to a sloping pasture, strewn with fragments of rock.

  “There she is,” said my sister, “sitting on a stone spinning with her sheep round her.”

  I looked; but could see no one save one old woman, the witch probably.

  “Where? I don’t see her,” I said. By, this time we were close to the old woman.

  “There’s your shepherdess,” said my sister in English, “look at her nice quaint dress and the spindle and distaff.

  I looked, but such a sight had no charms for me. Where was my flowered-silk, Watteau-hatted maiden? Where was her crook with the pink ribbons on it ? And as for the king’s son, his horse could never have ridden up this steep hillside. It was a disenchanted world where I stood gazing sadly, at a wrinkled faced old woman in a blue woollen petticoat and coarse linen apron, a gay-coloured shawl crossed on her breast, a gay-coloured handkerchief knotted round her head. She had wooden shoes, and her crook was a common wooden one with a bit of iron at the end, and not a ribbon nor a flower on it. But she was very kind. She took us up to her little hut among the rocks and gave us milk and maize bread at my sister’s request. The maize bread was like sawdust, or a Bath bun of the week before last; but had it been ambrosia, 1 could not have tasted a second mouthful — my heart was too full. I came home in silence. My sister was sad because the little treat had not pleased me. I did not mean to be ungrateful; I was only struggling savagely with the misery of my first disillusion. Like Mrs. Over-the-way, I had looked for pink roses, and found only feuilles mortes.

  PART VIII. — IN AUVERGNE.

  We were to leave Bagnères. Imagine my delight when I found we were to travel not by train, but in an open carriage. In this we were to drive through the mountains, the mysterious snow-clad mountains, into Spain, where the Alhambra was, and oranges and Spanish nuts, and all sorts of delightful things. But alas for my hopes! My brother at home in England chose to have whooping-cough, and so our horses’ heads were turned north, and farewell for ever to my visions of Spain.

  We drove through lovely country to the other Bagnères, Bagnères de Luchon. On the way we passed a large yellow-stone castle on a hill. Most of the castle was in ruins, but a great square tower, without door or window, still stood as strong and firm as on the day when the last stone was patted into place with the trowel. We wandered round this tower in vain, trying to find a door.

  “ But it is that there is no door.” said our driver at last; “within that tower is buried a treasure; some day a great wind will blow, and then that tower will fall to the ground, and then the folks of the village will divide the treasure, and become kings of France. It is an old prophecy.”

  “But,” suggested my mother, “has no one tried to get in and see if there really is a treasure?”

  The driver crossed himself. “The saints forbid!” be said; “who are we that we should interfere with the holy prophecy? Besides, the tower is haunted.”

  We could not help wondering how far the ghost and prophecy would have protected that tower from English village boys.

  We drove on; presently we stopped at a little wayside shrine, with a painted image of St. John in it, and a little shell of holy water. At the side of that shrine was a stone with an iron ring in it. Nothing more was needed to convince me that this was the entrance to a subterranean passage, leading to the tower where the treasure was. Imagine the dreams that occupied me for the rest of the drive! If I could creep back at the dead of night to the shrine — a thing which as a matter of fact I would much rather have died than have attempted — if I should pull up that heavy stone and go down the damp subterranean passage and find the treasure in iron boxes — rubies and diamonds and emeralds, and beautiful gold and silver dishes! Then we should all be very rich for the rest of our lives, and I could send Marguerite a talking doll, that opened and shut its eyes, and a pony-carriage, and each of the boys should have a new paint-box, with real moist colours and as many sable brushes as they liked — twenty each if they wanted them, and I should have a chariot drawn by four tame zebras in red and silver harness, and my mother should have a gold crown, with diamonds, for Sundays, and a silver one, with rubies and emeralds, for every day, and —

  I imagine I fell asleep at this point, and awoke to find myself lifted out of the carriage at Bagnères de Luchon.

  I didn’t go back and lift up the stone with the iron ring, but the dream was a serviceable one, and did duty nobly in idle hours for many a long year; in fact, I come across it unexpectedly sometimes even now.

  We spent a day or two at Bagnères de Lnchon, and I believe it rained all the time. We drove in a drizzling rain across a rather gloomy country, to see the Cascade d’Enfer.

  As my memory serves me, we crossed a dreary plain and entered a sort of theatre, or semi-circle of high black rocks. In the centre of the horse-shoe, down the face of the rock, ran a thin silver line. This was the Cascade d’Enfer, eminently unimpressive on first view, but when we got out of our carriage and walked across the rough ground, and stood under the heavy shadow of the black cliffs, the thin white line had changed, and grown to a dense body of smoothly-falling water that fell over the cliff’s sheer edge, and disappeared like a column of green glass into a circular hole at the foot of the cliff.

  “That hole goes down, down,” said our guide, “no one knows how far, except the good God who made it.”

  T
he water did not fill up the hole, an empty black space, some yards wide, was between us and the falling water. Our guide heaved a lump of rock over the edge.

  “You not hear it strike water,” he said, and though we listened for some time, we did not hear it strike anything. That was the horror of it.

  We drove on the next day to St. Bertrand de Comminges, a little town on a hill with many steeples, whose bells answered each other with sweet jangling voices as we reached its gates in the peace of the evening.

  Most of this driving-tour has faded from my mind, but I shall never forget the drive from Aurillac to Murat. We started late in the afternoon, because my sisters wished to see the Auvergnes mountains by moonlight. We had a large open carriage, with a sort of rumble behind and a wide box-seat in front. The driver, a blue-bloused ruffian of plausible manners, agreed to take us and our luggage to Murat for a certain price, which I have forgotten. All our luggage was packed upon his carriage; we, too were packed in it, and we started. About five miles from the town the driver halted, and came to the door of the carriage.

  “Mesdames,” be said “a young relative of mine will join us here, he will sit on the box with me.”

  My mother objected, that as we were paying for the carriage, we had a right to refuse to allow his friend to enter it.

  “As you will, madame,” he said calmly, “but if you refuse to accommodate my stepson, a young man of the most high distinction, I shall place you and your boxes in the middle of the road, and leave you planted there.”

  Three English ladies and a little girl alone in a strange country, five miles from any town, what could we do? My mother consented. A mile or two further on two blue-bloused figures got up suddenly from their seat by the roadside.

  “My father and brother-in-law,” said our driver.