Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  ‘Yes, it was. At least I am here to put off an engagement; but I don’t know what you know about it,’ said Roland, ‘and I don’t know what you mean by following me about like this. What business have you here? This isn’t Aspinshaw, that you need dog my footsteps.’

  ‘I came here to try and find out whether my father’s son was a scoundrel or not, and you’ve answered the question for me by being here.’

  ‘Upon my word,’ said Roland’s voice, ‘I think you must be out of your mind.’

  It isn’t often that the thought which would restrain comes into one’s mind at the moment when restraint is most needed; but just then Dick did think of his father and his dying wishes, and the remembrance helped him to speak more calmly than he would otherwise have done.

  ‘Once for all, then, will you tell me why you are here, Roland?’

  ‘Yes, I will, though I don’t acknowledge your right to question me. I had an appointment, with that Frenchman we met last night, for this evening, but I’ve lost his address. I knew it was in this court, and I was walking about on the chance of finding him, when I’m almost sure I saw Litvinoff come in here. I made after him, feeling sure he was going to the same place as I was.’

  ‘And where is Litvinoff?’

  ‘He seems to have disappeared, or else I was mistaken. Now, what have you got to say?’

  ‘This. You lie!’

  It sounded hardly like Richard’s voice, so hoarse and choked with passion was it; and so full of insult and scorn that Roland at last lost control of himself.

  ‘Stand back, you raving maniac,’ he said, ‘ and let me pass! The same roof mustn’t cover us two any longer, and don’t speak again to me this side of the grave.’

  The listener, leaning forward eagerly to catch every word, heard Roland’s foot dash down the staircase. There was a moment of perfect silence, and then came a long-drawn sigh from Richard Ferrier.

  ‘Now then, young man, what’s all this to-do about? I should like to know what you mean by quarrelling in places that don’t belong to you, and terrifying respectable married women out of their seven senses.’ It was a shrill woman’s voice that spoke, and a door opened on the landing where young Ferrier stood.

  ‘I’m very sorry, madam,’ said Richard, in tones calm enough now. ‘I didn’t intend to disturb anyone. Will you kindly tell me if anyone lives here named Hatfield?’

  ‘There was a young woman of that name in the front attic, but she left sudden this morning.’

  ‘Do you know where she’s gone?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Does anyone in the house know?’

  ‘No. I’m the landlady, and she’d have told me if she told anyone.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, and turned to pass down the staircase.

  ‘Stay, though,’ he said; ‘have you any Frenchmen lodging here?’

  ‘I don’t want no dratted furriners here, and I haven’t got none, thank God!’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Ferrier to himself, and strode downstairs.

  ‘No foreigners here? Don’t be too sure, my good woman,’ Litvinoff muttered to himself, as he heard the landlady’s door close to a continued accompaniment of reiterated objections in that lady’s shrill treble. ‘I’d better get out of this house of mystery at once. I trust that the outraged female proprietor of this staircase will not demand my blood. Well, whatever happens, I suppose we shall not see the amiable brothers tonight, and that will mean a tête-à-tête,’ he added, as he came out from his dusty retirement, and carefully removed all traces of the same from his clothes. When he found himself once more in the chill, foggy, outside air, he looked up and down the court, and smiled.

  ‘The situation becomes interesting,’ he said to himself, ‘and demands another of these very excellent cigars.’

  CHAPTER IX. AT SPRAY’S BUILDINGS.

  IT seemed a very long walk home to Alice Hatfield, after that Sunday evening lecture. She felt almost as though she could never reach her lodging. It was such weary work to keep putting one tired foot before the other. And somehow she was so much more easily tired now than she used to be in her Derbyshire home, where she had been used to breast the steepest hills without even a quickened breath. She wished she had not gone; she had derived no pleasure from the evening, and had only gained a sharper heartache from the sight of a certain face, which had been, and was still for that matter, the dearest face in the world to her. She felt reawakened too in her a liking for a different life among different surroundings; the life she had given up of her own free will three months ago. She had been much alone in that other life, it is true, and her thoughts had not made solitude sweet; but she had seen him sometimes, and now she was quite alone — always — save for the few slight acquaintances she had made in the house where she lived. In that other life, which now looked brighter than it had ever done when it was hers, she had been racked and tortured by her conscience, which had at last forced her to try and silence it by renouncing what she had sacrificed everything to gain, and by voluntarily adopting this strange, hard way of living. But now that that gloomy monitor was on her side, it failed to give that comfort and support which one is taught to expect from it.

  ‘Be virtuous and you will be happy,’ say the copy-books. A somewhat higher authority (Professor Huxley) thinks otherwise. ‘Virtue is undoubtedly beneficent,’ he says, ‘but the man is to be envied to whom her ways seem in any wise playful; and though she may not talk much about suffering and self-denial, her silence on that topic may be accounted for on the principle ça va sans dire. She is an awful goddess, whose ministers are the furies, and whose highest reward is peace.’

  Alice Hatfield hadn’t read Huxley, but if she had she would have agreed with him in this; and now it seemed as though the furies were driving her along the streets towards that miserable home of hers, where, so far, no dove of peace had folded its wings.

  It is given to all of us, at one time or another, to repent — more or less — of the evil; but many of us also know what it is to look back, with something like remorse, on what we believe to have been the good. And good and evil, get so mixed up sometimes, when we have often heard the world’s ‘right’ skilfully controverted and made to seem wrong, by the tongue whose eloquence once made wrong seem to us right Alice had to collect all her energies to enable her to climb the steep dark stairs which led to her room, and when she had gained it at last, and had lighted her little benzoline lamp, she sank down on her chair bedstead, exhausted and breathless. What a hateful room it was; how cold, and cheerless, and wretched. The few poor articles of furniture did not relieve its bareness in the least. There was no fire, of course, and her little lamp quite failed to light up the dark corners. There must be something wrong with that lamp — it was going out surely — the room was growing so dark; or was it her eyes from which the power of seeing was going? The room seemed to swim before her sight, and a feeling of deadly faintness came over her, a horrible sensation of going through the floor. She staggered to her feet and drank some water, which gave her strength to go unsteadily down to the floor below, and to knock at the landlady’s door.

  ‘Oh, I am so ill — so ill! I think I’m dying,’ she said, holding out both hands as the woman appeared; ‘help me.’ Then she knew no more. Her troubles, her tiredness, her regrets, her very self, all were swallowed up in the horror of great darkness that overwhelmed her.

  ‘Here’s a nice set out,’ grumbled Mrs Fludger, as her lodger fell at her feet; ‘ as if one hadn’t enough troubles o’ one’s own — what with Jenny being out o’ work, and the master on the booze since Friday. Jenny!’

  ‘Here I am.’

  Miss Jenny Fludger, a muscular young woman, with her hair in a long beaded net, responded to the call, and lent her help in carrying Alice back to her room. Then the unsympathetic hands of the two women undressed the girl and laid her in her bed. Then they looked meaningly at each other.

  ‘If she don’t soon come round I’ll send Joe for the doctor,�
�� said the mother. ‘You never knows what may happen.’

  Then Mrs Fludger dashed cold water in the patient’s face, slapped her hands with a vigour that would have brought tears to her eyes had she been conscious, and made a horrible smell with the benzoline lamp and a pigeon’s feather hastily begged from a lodger who had leanings ornithological. Alice showing no signs of being affected by the application of these generally efficacious remedies, Mrs Fludger decided that this was a case of ‘going off’ quite beyond her experience, and feeling the responsibility too much to be borne alone, she despatched her third son in quest of a doctor, regardless of Miss Jenny’s opinion that the lodger was ‘shamming.’ Joe Fludger was not particularly pleased at being sent. He was busy just then shaking up a mangy kitten and a recently-acquired guinea-pig in a box, with a view of getting them to fight, which they showed no signs of doing, and he did not care to relinquish this enthralling pastime until he had compassed his end. He put his two ‘pets’ into one pocket, hoping that that position would urge them to fulfil their destiny and have it out, and as he met several friends, and felt it incumbent on him to exhibit his treasures to each of them, it was some time before he carried out his instructions, and brought medical science, as represented by Dr Moore, to 15 Spray’s Buildings. But even when the doctor did at last stand by her bedside, Alice was still insensible.

  He raised her eyelids, felt her pulse, asked one or two brief questions, and then stood holding her hand till she sighed, and moved slightly.

  ‘She’s coming round,’ he said. ‘Not married, I see,’ he added, glancing at the hand he held, on which shone no golden circle, not even the brass substitute which takes its place occasionally, when times are very hard.

  ‘Not as I ever heard of,’ said Miss Jenny with a toss of the net, which drew down upon her a glance of disapproval from the old doctor, and a sharp recommendation from her mother to go downstairs. ‘Give the girl air; there’s too many of us here a’ready.’

  Miss Fludger withdrew with a gesture expressive of a sovereign contempt for faints in general, and this collapse in particular.

  ‘How does this poor thing get her living?’ asked the doctor; ‘she looks as if she got it honestly.’ He, being an observant man, glanced as he spoke at the roughened forefinger of her left hand, and then round the bare, dreary attic.

  ‘Lord! doctor, how should I know? Do you think I puts all my lodgers through their cataclysm before I takes ’em in?’ said Mrs Fludger, with some general recollection of the days when she went to Sunday school. Mrs Fludger did not always manage to hit on the right word to express the meaning she intended to convey, but she always found a word something like the right one, and a word which really had a place in the English dictionary; she had a rare dexterity in the finding of such words, and a fine confidence in the use of them, which made them answer her purpose admirably.

  ‘You’re better now, aren’t you?’ said the doctor, as Alice opened her eyes. ‘Here’s a shilling, ma’am: can you send for some brandy?’

  Mrs Fludger would go herself. Such an admirable opportunity for having ‘two penn’orth’ at the ‘Hope’ was not to be let slip.

  ‘Don’t be frightened,’ he said, as the landlady left the room. ‘It’s only the doctor. You’ve been overdoing it — working too hard, and eating too little.’

  ‘But I never felt like that before,’ said Alice slowly and faintly. ‘I thought I was going to die.’

  ‘Haven’t you anyone belonging to you? You ought to be with friends just now.’

  ‘No. I’m quite alone, quite alone. Why just now?’

  ‘My dear child, don’t you know why?’

  She did not answer, but looked at him with large, frightened, questioning eyes; and before Mrs Fludger returned with a shrunken shilling’s-worth in a ginger-beer bottle, Alice had learned that that which she had feared, till a sort of hope had grown out of the very intensity of her fear — that which had seemed almost too terrible to be possible — was to be. She now had that certainty which is a spring of secret happiness to so many women, to some only a fresh care and anxiety, and to some, alas! the sign and token of social banishment the warrant of disgrace and despair.

  Doctor Moore spoke kindly, and with no note of censure in his voice. He had a naturally tender heart, and long years of practice in a poor neighbourhood had developed his sympathies, instead of blunting them, as, unfortunately, happens in too many cases. He was an old man now, and this was an old story to him; but his eyes were still sharp enough to see that the girl before him did not belong to that class of patients to whom such an announcement would, have meant little more than a temporary inconvenience and a trifling subsequent expense. He thought to himself that he would look in in the morning and see the girl again. There had been a look in her eyes as she listened to him that made him feel that she wanted looking after.

  ‘Give her some hot brandy-and-water, and let her go to sleep — that’s the best thing for her,’ he said to Mrs Fludger as he came away. The landlady accompanied him downstairs in a halo of apology for having ‘such like’ in her house, and when she had lighted him out she climbed once more, protesting, to the attic, and having administered the brandy as prescribed, came away, after bidding the girl ‘good-night’ not unkindly.

  But, all the same, she made up her mind that Alice must go. If the girl had come there as ‘ Mrs’ Anybody — and worn a ring, no questions would have been asked by Mrs Fludger. There would then have been the alternative of supposing that the Mr in the case was in the seafaring way, or was enjoying a holiday upon the breezy slopes of Dartmoor. But as she had chosen to neglect the payment of that slight tribute to the proprieties which even this neighbourhood demanded, there was no help for it — she must go. Besides, there might be difficulties about rent, and even a want of money for the necessaries of life — and Mrs Fludger was afraid to trust her tender heart. Even forty years of being pinched and ‘druv’ had not quite dried up the milk of human kindness in her bosom, and she felt that she would rather not have a lodger who would excite her sympathy and possibly make demands upon her pocket. This habit of ‘not trusting our tender hearts’ is not confined to the class to which Mrs Fludger belonged. Others who have larger means of meeting probable drafts on their ‘tenderness’ have also a way of pushing misery out of sight, or handing it over to the emollient remedies of a Royal Commission, which, of course, goes thoroughly into the matter. Does it? The Royal Commissioners do not find their shoulders any easier under the burden we have shifted on to them than we found ours, and not being able to shift the weight again, they skilfully dissolve it, and give it us back in the solution of a wordy report. And for Mrs Fludger, who had to look sharp after every halfpenny, and who knew no higher morality than that taught in the precept, ‘Take care of number one,’ which to her meant the number nine, of whom Miss Jenny was the eldest, there was more excuse than there is for the theoretical philanthropists who wear purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously every day.

  But the landlady was not required to make the announcement which she had proposed to herself, for when she went up to Alice’s room the next morning, to say that she wished to have a few words with her (and when people say that, you may be sure the words are not going to be pleasant ones), she found the girl already dressed — with her little belongings arranged as for an immediate departure. So she changed her mind, and instead of that speech about the few words, she said simply, —

  ‘Good morning. You’re better, I see.’

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ said Alice, hurriedly; ‘and I think I would like to leave this morning — and here is a week’s money from last Saturday.’

  Mrs Fludger rubbed her hands together in a little embarrassment.

  ‘I don’t say but you’re in the right to go, and I hope you’ll get on all right, and not let your trouble play upon your mind too much; but as for the money, never mind. It’s only a couple of days, and I don’t grudge that. An’ if you’ll take my advice you’ll go home to your own folk, i
f you’ve got any. God-a’mighty knows it’s hard lions with most of us.’

  Which Alice, listening sadly, interpreted to mean ‘hard lines.’

  And so it happened that her worldly goods were taken away on a hand-barrow, she herself walking beside it — whither Mrs Fludger was careful not to inquire; and Dr Moore, coming at noon, received the comforting intelligence that the girl had gone home to her people; for Mrs Fludger, like so many others, thought that her advice once given could not fail to be taken.

  CHAPTER X. A SOCIALIST.

  IT was a bright, perfectly clear, moonlight night, one of those nights in which there seems to be no atmosphere, in which the smallest architectural details of every building show with even a greater distinctness than in mid-sunshine. The great full moon and the vast unfathomable expanse overhead seemed to have cast a spell of their own peace over even London’s unpeaceful heart. The streets were empty, for the night had worn itself away to the only hour at which they are really deserted.

  The clocks had just expressed their different views on the subject of two A.M. The night was so clear that Alice Hatfield, though her eyes were smarting and aching, thought she could see the hands on the big clock of St Paul’s as she came on to Blackfriars’ Bridge. She walked slowly, and when she reached the second arch she stopped and leaned her elbows on the parapet. How still the night was! The tide was high, and had just started on its journey seawards; it seemed to flow in one unbroken sheet save for the stir and fret that it made round the supports of the bridge. The lights along the Embankment, with their perfect reflections, might have seemed almost Venetian to anyone inclined to take a more rose-coloured view of things than she. To her they only brought a maddening remembrance of the time when she — not alone then — had first seen them from the windows of the Arundel Hotel. The noise of the water against the bridge was very like the sound of the waters rushing round the stones in the Derbyshire streams — only those waters had always made a song that was to be enjoyed, not understood — and this dark tide, as it broke against the stone, seemed to be whispering constantly some message to her, which she as constantly, but vainly, tried to catch.