by Edith Nesbit
‘I will take you to her now, if you like,’ said Petrovitch.
Cora looked at him a little curiously.
‘We had better speak to mamma, I think,’ she said; ‘perhaps we can come with you, Clare.’
The two girls left the room, and Petrovitch, for once, did not take up a book, but stood rapt in thought through the ten minutes that passed before the door opened again.
Clare came in alone. She was still dressed in black, of course, and had a little close crape bonnet that seemed to enhance the prettiness of the face it framed.
‘I am quite ready,’ she said. ‘Mrs Quaid and Cora cannot come. They have some people coming to lunch, and I am not sorry, for poor Mrs Hatfield ought not to be bothered by strangers.’
‘Come, then,’ he said, and they went out together. As soon as they were outside he offered her his arm, as a matter of course, and she took it.
‘How did you know her address?’ asked Clare, as they walked along.
‘Ah! that involves explanations,’ he answered; ‘to begin with, I must tell you that I met Count Litvinoff two days ago. It was from him I had Mrs Hatfield’s address.’
‘ — I remember he and poor Hatfield used to be friends.’
‘He gave me the address for a special reason and for a special purpose. He has married Alice Hatfield, and he wished to let her people know.’
- ‘Alice Hatfield! But — how long ago? How did he know her?’
‘He married her yesterday, and they have gone to Servia together. Miss Stanley, it was with Count Litvinoff that Alice left her home.’
Clare held her peace for a moment. Her bewilderment would not let her find words. Then she went on, ‘But he acted as though he believed Roland had taken her away. Oh, how could he have been so base and—’
‘Do not judge him,’ Petrovitch interrupted; ‘ no one knows how he may have been tempted, and he has repented and atoned for his fault in as far as he could.’
‘There are some things that cannot be atoned for,’ said Clare, compressing her lips. ‘If it had not been for him this tragedy would never have happened. Oh, when I think—’She broke off suddenly.
‘When you think that he would have married you, owing all to Alice Hatfield, you can find no words to speak of his baseness. Is it not so?’
She looked at him in mute inquiry. How did he know so much?
‘Years ago,’ he said, ‘he and I were friends, and I love ‘him still. He has told me much that has happened since last autumn. And I say, judge no man’s actions, for of his temptations you cannot judge.’
Then they were both silent, and when Clare spoke, again it was to inquire how the trains went, and so on.
‘I wish you would tell me—’Clare began, when they were in the train en route for Dartford.
‘There is much I would wish to tell you,’ he interrupted, ‘ — but not to-day, when you are going on an errand of kindness and mercy. You do not want to talk now, you want to think; and besides, I want to see you again. Will you write to me to-night, and tell me when and where I can see you alone to-morrow.’
‘Yes, if you wish it,’ she said. ‘I had so much to ask you; and just now it seems as though I could think of nothing but that man, lying dead far north, and his poor wife here alone.’
‘Then it is a promise. We are comrades, since we serve in the same ranks; and between comrades a special farewell is necessary. Now, we will not talk, since you do not desire it.’
Clare leaned back in her corner, and wondered how she should break the news to that poor widow.
But when they reached Earl’s Terrace, and found out the house where she was, they found, too, that there was no need to break the news to her. She knew it already, as Clare saw in a moment. Petrovitch did not come in, and the two women met alone. What Clare said to her? It is beyond us to write that down; and if the words were set down here, despoiled of the tender tones, the eloquent gesture, the heart-warm tenderness of the young girl, who had herself felt grief, what would they be worth? In the presence of sorrow some women are inspired, but not with words that will bear reporting.
Mrs Hatfield’s grief was not violent. She wept, but not bitterly.
‘It is the Lord’s will, she said, and she believed her words. When she heard of her daughter’s marriage she said simply, ‘Thank God for a’ His mercies! I doubt He’s been ower good to we i’ mony ways, an’ we mun bear what He’s pleased to lay upo’ us.’
Clare would have been more at ease to have seen her weep’ freely, but she seemed crushed. This last blow had mercifully benumbed her senses. Not her gratitude, though, for when Clare rose to go she rose too, and, taking the girl’s hands in, hers, looked at her and said, —
‘An’ thee came a’ th’ way fro’ Lunnon to help an old wife to bear her burdens. Eh! but thee’rt a bonnie lass, and as good as thee’rt comely. Thee’ll be the light o’ some honest lad’s e’en some day, and may thee ha’ as good a man as mine were.’
Clare kissed the faded face. She had not so kissed many faces. She put her young, round, soft arms round the woman’s neck, and said ‘Good-bye.’
‘You’ll see me again, or hear,’ she said.
‘There’s some words as Alice were fond o’ saying time agone, and I’ll say ’em to thee, my lass, for I’ll not see thee agen, m’appen, and they say my meanin’ clearer nor talk o’ mine. “The Lord bless thee and keep thee, the Lord make His face to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee, the Lord lift up the light of His countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”’
Mrs Hatfield opened the gate for Clare to pass out. Petrovitch did not seem to see her, yet when Clare was on his arm again he said, —
‘That woman is marked by Death. She will not live three months. Her heart is broken.’
It was. His words came true.
When the two were once more in the train Clare’s silent mood had passed. She would gladly have talked, but the carriage was full, and her companion’s place being on the opposite side of the carriage, anything but an occasional word was impossible.
She sat gazing out of the window, and he sat in the opposite corner looking at her fixedly. As they were passing over the bridge to the London terminus he leaned forward suddenly, and she, anticipating some words from his movement, withdrew her eyes from the sun-bathed, rippling river and fixed them on his. There she met such a look of passion, and love, and longing as she had never seen in any man’s eyes before; and as she gazed, startled, spell-bound, his voice whispered these words, in a tone too low for any ears but hers, and yet distinct enough for every word to be plainly heard by her, and to make her heart bound responsively. Only these words, —
‘Whatever happens, I shall always love you.’
Then he leaned back again. Clare drew a deep breath, and the train stopped at the Charing Cross platform.
No other word was said between them till he had called a cab and placed her in it. Then he said, ‘ Do not write to me: I will write to you.’ He pressed her hand, drew back, and the cab was driven off.
As Petrovitch walked back to his lodgings the sky grew quickly cloudy. It seemed as though the sunshine had gone away with Clare Stanley. By the time he reached Osnaburgh Street the rain was beginning to fall in big heavy splashes on the dusty pavement. He strode up the stairs to his room, locked the door, and flung himself down in the elbow-chair by the fireless grate. The rising wind blew the rain in gusts against the uncurtained window, and the large drops chased each other down the panes and obscured the view of the high houses opposite. All the sweetness had gone out of the weather. Petrovitch noticed it, and felt glad that it was so. He sat quite still and quite silent, his elbow on the arm of his chair, and his forehead on his hand. Now indeed the dark, hour was upon Saul. For six months his dream, his hope, his ambition had been to return to Russia. Now he was going at last, and the thought of it was maddening.
He had known that he loved Clare, but he had not known, how much he loved her until that moment in the train, an
d then his sudden knowledge of the strength of his own passion, had broken down all his resolutions.
How could he have been such a fool as ever to speak the words which made it impossible for him to see her again? He had not meant to speak them. He could not understand how he had come to speak them. Their utterance was the first unguarded action he had been guilty of for the last tea years. And he had thought with some reason that he could rely on his own cool-headedness and self-restraint. Now it seemed he was mistaken. He was as much the slave of impulse as another — as much as the man who had assumed his name.
It was incomprehensible to him. He quite failed to understand the full force of this new over-mastering emotion. Clare! Clare! The world seemed to mean nothing but Clare. He thought of her apart from all the other facts and circumstances of life, of herself, her face, her eyes, her hair, her voice, her way of holding her head, the movement of her hands when she spoke, and it was a rapture to think of her like this, and to let the thought of her rush over and sweep away all other thoughts, even of his own life’s aim. Then slowly came back to him the remembrance of all the realities of his life, and he cursed what seemed to him his degradation. What sort of patriotism was it that the touch of a girl’s hand could wither? What principles were they that the look in a girl’s eyes could destroy? It was an utterly new experience for him, and he felt as though his patriotism and his faith were dead within him. In that hour he was man first, patriot after. But the hour of weakness was, after all, a brief one. His patriotism was not dead. It had been his master-passion too long for such an easy death to be possible, and as the dusk fell and deepened into night it rose up and met that other passion in the field and vanquished it.
It was late when he rose and lighted his lamp. It shone upon a face white with the struggle he had gone through, but set and determined. He turned to his table and wrote, —
‘I love you! I told you so to-day. I did not mean to tell you, and I cannot account for or excuse the impulse that made me do so.
‘But, having done so, I cannot ask you to meet me again as comrades meet. It would be embarrassing for you, and for me impossible. I know you do not love me. Perhaps you will even despise me when you learn what has been the temptation I have undergone. To give up Russia — the Cause — the Revolution — everything — and to stay at peace in England, and give my whole soul to the effort to win your love. I am glad to think I am not so unworthy of you as I should have been had I yielded to this — the strongest temptation of my life. I shall leave London to-morrow morning; I cannot stay so near you without seeing you.
‘You will think me ungenerous in leaving you without any advice on the subject you desire to be advised on. You shall hear from me before long. Perhaps when I am further from you I shall be better able to write you the sort of letter you will care to have from me. For those who love Liberty, life is made up of renunciations, but no renunciation could be so difficult, so bitter, as is to me the renouncing of this least faint ghost of a chance of winning you.
MICHAEL.’
He went out and posted the letter, and when he came in again did not indulge in any more reflections. He busied himself with packing up his belongings, paying his rent, and making all his arrangements for leaving London the next morning.
But when the next morning came, with a fresh radiance of blue skies and sunlight, all his plans were overturned all his ought unsettled, by this telegram,
‘Clare Stanley, Marlborough Villa, N.W., to Michael Petrovitch, 37, Osnaburgh Street, N.W. — You are not going without good-bye. Please be in the Guildhall at twelve.’
Most men in his position would have been there at eleven at the latest. But the clock was on the first stroke of twelve as he walked through the crowd of fat pigeons, who, as usual, were busily eating more than was good for them in the Guildhall yard. He passed through the arched entrance and stood in the doorway. No one would have guessed by his face that he was keeping an appointment made by the woman he loved. He looked white and haggard, wretched and weary. His glance travelled round the large hall. In front of the statue of the Earl of Chatham stood the graceful black figure he looked for.
He walked across to her. As his footsteps sounded on the stone floor she turned her head, but did not move to meet him. When he was quite close to her she held out her hand in silence. He took it, pressed it, and let it fall at once. He spoke almost sternly.
‘Why did you bring me here? I told you it was impossible for us to meet on the old terms.’
‘I asked you to meet me here,’ she said, ‘ because I had to come into the City on money affairs; and for the other, I have not asked you to do the impossible.’
She, too, was very pale, and spoke with what seemed like an effort at lightness.
‘It is unworthy of you,’ he went on, hardly noticing her answer, ‘to make my renunciation so much harder for me.’
‘There are enough inevitable renunciations in life for us without our making others by misunderstandings,’ she said, her eyelids downcast.
He looked at her silently, as a man might in a dream which he feared to break by a word. At last he spoke, in a very low voice, with his eyes still on her face.
‘This is glory to know,’ he said, ‘but do you think it makes the sacrifice more easy? Before it was only a chance I gave up — now it is your very self I must renounce.’
‘Why?’ Her voice trembled a little now.
‘Because I must return to Russia. My place is there, and where I go—’
‘I, too, will go,’ she interrupted.
He caught her wrist.
‘But if you go with me you go to almost certain death.
‘Does that matter?’ she said, and looked full in his eyes.
His fingers had closed on hers, and so they went out together into the bright English sunshine. Not more serenely, not more gladly, than they would hereafter go, hand in hand, into the black darkness and oblivion that waits to swallow those who dare to set themselves against the bitter tyranny of Russia.
To each of them that day had given the most perfect gift of life, and both were content to offer up that gift — life itself even — for the sake of the Liberty they loved — the Liberty who, though she may not crown their lives — will consecrate their graves.
THE END
THE RED HOUSE
One of E. Nesbit’s best loved novels for adults is The Red House, published by Methuen of London and Harper of New York, in 1902. Nesbit used her experience restoring Well Hall House in Eltham, in having her young newlywed couple Len and Chloe restore an aging and moldering house, apparently complete with a live-in ghost. While The Red House is charming, romantic, light and amusing, the novel also deals with some notions and social commentary radical for its time, especially that of both men and women balancing professional work and household duties. Nesbit includes scenes featuring her famous Bastable children, later rewritten from a child’s perspective, in The New Treasure Seekers, published in 1904.
CONTENTS
I. THE BEGINNING
II. IN THE RED HOUSE
III. THE GHOST
IV. OUR NEW TENANT
V. THE LOAFERY
VI. YOLANDE’S REASONING
VII. THE HOUSE-WARMING
VIII. THE TENANT
IX. MANLY SPORTS
X. THE INVADERS
XI. THE ROOM FOR CONFIDENCES
XII. THE PUSSY-KITTEN
I. THE BEGINNING
CONVENTIONALLY our life-story ended in a shower of rice at the church door, amid the scent of white flowers, with a flutter of white favors all about us. We left behind us those relatives whose presence had been so little desired by us during our brief courtship, and a high-heeled white satin slipper struck the back of the brougham as we drove off. It was like a parting slap on the shoulder from our old life — the old life which we left so gayly, eager to fulfil the destiny set as the end of our wooing’s fairy story, and to “live happy ever after.”
And now all that was six months
ago; and instead of attending to that destiny, the fairy princess and her unworthy prince were plunged over head and ears in their first quarrel — their first serious quarrel — about the real and earnest things of life; for the other little quarrels about matters of sentiment and the affections really did not count. They were only play and make-believe; still, they had got our hands in, so that when we really differed seriously we both knew exactly how to behave — we had played at quarrels so often. This quarrel was very serious, because it was about my shaving-brush and Chloe’s handkerchief-case. There was a cupboard with a window — Chloe called it my dressing-room, and, at first, I humored her pretty fancy about it, and pretended that I could really see to shave in a glass that faced the window, although my shoulders, as I stood, cut off all light. But even then I used really to shave at Chloe’s mirror after she had gone down to make the tea and boil the eggs — only I kept my shaving things in the embroidered vestments which my wife’s affection provided and her fingers worked, and these lived in the “dressing-room.” But the subterfuge presently seemed unworthy, and I found myself, in the ardor of a truthful nature, leaving my soapy brush on her toilet-table. Chloe called this untidiness, and worse, and urged that I had a dressing-room. Then I put the brush away. This had happened more than once.
On this memorable morning I had set up the pretty ivory shaving-brush, clean and pleasant with its white crown of lather, among her hair-brushes. Chloe came up just then to ask me whether I would have two or three eggs. Her entrance startled me. I cut myself slightly, but infuriatingly, and knocked the brush down. It fell on Chloe’s handkerchief-case — pink satin, painted with rose and cupids, a present. Chloe snatched it up.
“You are horrid,” she said. “Why don’t you shave in your own dressing-room?”
“Whatever does it matter?” said I.
“My sachet’s ruined,” she said, dabbing at it with her pocket-handkerchief.