by Edith Nesbit
‘‘Look here,” said Daphne, “I’ll tidy all that. You shall tidy my jewel box, and look at all my pretties. No, not these; they belonged to mother. I’ll show you them some other time.
Doris reverently opened the old-fashioned mahogany dressing-case, its bright-topped bottles and blue velvet lining always made her think of the thrones of princesses.
“Now I’ll pull the secret knob — and the secret drawer’ll jump out at me, and won’t I be surprised.” It did, and she was, quite patently, very much surprised.
‘If all these pretties was mine,” she said, handling brooch and bracelet, “I’d wear all of them always — yes, even out of doors. Over my gloves I’d put on the rings — the turquoise on this finger and the garnet on this, and the little one with two hands — that’s your hand and Colombe’s — on my thumb, and — oh, Daphne!”
“What, my pigeon?” said Daphne, swiftly disentangling lace from hair-pins and handkerchiefs, letters and veils.
“I — I forgot,” said the child, quite pale, and with drooping mouth, “and now it’s lost, “What s lost?”
“Colombe’s present what I got given me to give you in the train. Because then you couldn’t have the heart to send it back, she said. You’d have the heart to keep. Oh, dear!”
“You must have left it in the train,” said Daphne. “Never mind, Dormouse; I don’t mind. Don’t cry. It isn’t worth it.”
“Oh, you don’t know,” the child winked back the tears. “I expect it’s worth ever so much more than a crying. It was fairy-lovely, and shiny, like Colombe’s birthday ring.”
“Diamonds? Nonsense! I told her I wouldn’t have anything that cost more than two francs.”
“It didn’t cost anything; and it was all written in the letter that’s tied round it. But I know it was worth ever so much, ‘cause she safety pinned it into my pocket three time so’s I shouldn’t lose it.”
“And when did you take out the pins?”
“I didn’t never.”
“You had your green, woolly dress that day?” Yes — and that was the one I spilled the soup over, the day the monkey came with the organ and the man — and Aunt Emily said it was only fit for rag-bags, and she would give it to a Deserving Poor.”
“It’ll be a nice little surprise for the Deserving Poor.” Daphne could not take the loss seriously. Still, there was Colombe’s letter. That, at any rate, was worth taking a little trouble for.
Cousin Jane appealed to, produced the rag-bag. Neat rolls of stun, remains of all the dresses and petticoats that had been made in that house for the last twenty years. A little roll of yellowed tarlatan with a pink silk-and-tinsel stripe caught Doris’s eye.
“Oh, Cousin Jane, I may have it for dollies — I may, mayn’t I? There’s lots of lovely pieces, but that’s the very loveliest. Diane-Marguerite will look gracious like an angel in it, won’t she, Daffy? And I’d like this blue velvet to make her a suit for when I pretend she was twins and it’s César Adolphe’s turn.”
“I can’t give you the blue,” said Cousin Jane. “It was part of a tuck cut on the bias that your Aunt Emily had with a gray cashmere. But the pink and white is mine — I don’t know how it got in here. It was a dress I wore at a party we went to with your father, Daphne. “He said I was like a convolvulus flower. But, of course, that was just his notion. We wore camellias in our hair at that time. Every nice girl used to wear camellias. Cousin Henrietta’s camellia was white, I remember, and your Aunt Emily’s was red — and mine was pink and white striped, and your father gave me a bouquet of the same flower. Everyone said it was most elegant.”
It was the longest speech Cousin Jane had ever made in Daphne’s hearing.
“You must have looked lovely,” the girl said, wondering what that fine-lined, clay-coloured face, those wrinkled eyelids and faded eyes, had really looked like in the days when Cousin Jane was young and went to parties in striped tarlatan, with pink camellias in the hair that was now so pale and fiat and dead-looking.
“Your Aunt Emily thought it was too smart,” Cousin Jane went on. “She wore white muslin and blue ribbons, I recollect. But my father gave me the dress himself. He brought it home from the City for a surprise. He was very well off — much better off than your Aunt Emily’s father.”
“Then you have money of your own,” said Daphne—”put the little bundles back in the bag, below — how jolly!” But she wondered why anyone with money and years of discretion should endure Laburnum Villa for an instant.
“Oh, no, my dear father — when he died, it was found he had lived far beyond his means. He was so generous; he liked to have young people around him and to see them enjoy themselves. Your Aunt Emily and Cousin Henrietta almost lived at The Beeches. That was our house — in Sydenham. Sydenham was very fashionable then. And since his death your Aunt Emily has been good enough to allow me to live here.”
“You pay for it,” said Daphne.
“Oh, ho, dear, I”
“I mean she pays herself — in the work she gets out of you, and the nasty things she’s always saying, and the way she treats you.”
Miss Claringbold cast a frightened glance at Daphne, and men at the child, who cried, triumphantly: “Aha! Daffy, you do hate her — just like “Hush,” said both the elders together; and Daphne added: “Isn’t there anywhere else where the frock could be?”
“We might look in the bottom drawer of the bureau,” said Cousin Jane. As they went out of the room the thought of the pink tarlatan and the camellias came over Daphne and she passed her arm round the narrow flat waist, almost as she might have passed it round the slender roundness of Columbine.
“Ah, my dear,” said Cousin Jane, with a sigh, “you do make a difference to the house.”
The green frock was in the bureau’s bottom drawer. Doris dragged it out with a squeak of joy. “There is something lumpety in the pocket; I can feel it,” she cried.
And the something lumpety was a little green velvet case lined with white satin, and in it lay a little heart, encrusted with white shining stones that betrayed their hearts of coloured fire as Daphne lifted it from its bed, and put it into the hand of Cousin Jane, who held it gingerly and said: “How exquisite!” And Doris said, ‘My!” an expression learned from the giver of the heart.
“I’ll read the letter. May I?” Daphne opened it.
“Best and dearest and loveliest,” said the thin blue-squared sheet, “it is the parting hour, and here is your Colombe’s heart — broken, as you see, into little shining bits. You forbade me ever to spend more than two francs on your birthday presents. Well, I guess this isn’t your birthday, and this didn’t cost two francs. It cost just nothing, because papa gave it me — and he’ll give me another when he knows who’s got it. You know he said you were fine.” (The pork king had indeed said this, and more, when he had come to the convent to see his daughter and had taken her and Daphne — in charge of the pork queen, of course — to Paris for three never-to-be-forgotten days.) “And if you refuse it I shall know what to think. And if you send it back I’ll put it in the kitchen fire. Don’t be a duffer, my radiant fair star. Anyhow, keep it till I see you again. Then we can wrangle about it. It will be something to talk about. We shan’t have much to talk about when we meet (Query). And remember that the minute I leave school I shall come on the wings of love and the amiable Chemin de Fer du Nord, and the darling South-eastern that runs slap through the garden of England, to my dear lovely flower of flowers, the sweetest that grows in any garden in all the wide world. You’ll sniff when you read this, and say: ‘Sentimental nincompoop.’ I wonder whether people eve say nincompoop anywhere except in books. I dare not think of to-morrow. What will school be without its queen? Good-bye, Queen Daphne. A tantôt! When I leave school! Then ‘loot out for larks!’ I wonder whether your father’ll read Dickens aloud to you in the evenings. That’s what they do in England, in books. With the ‘red curtains drawn, and the dancing firelight and the softly shaded lamp.’ I do envy you your beautiful
home-life that you’re going to! And your father so proud of you, and you so devoted to him. I know you. You’ll be an angel of a daughter.
“Yours indescribably,
“COLOMBE.
“P. S. Don’t sniff!”
But Daphne did sniff. This breath of sweet fresh incense, coming in the midst of the Laburnum Villa “home life” — the contrast between Colombe’s ideal, and the reality that enmeshed Daphne, it all came over her like a wave whose foam broke on her eyelids in tears. Reading aloud! In Laburnum villa only the Court Circular was read aloud.
The evenings; in them, at Laburnum Villa, was concentrated and condensed the whole insufferable tedium of the day.
Her father — !
“Thank you — yes — it is lovely,” said Daphne, receiving the diamond heart from Cousin Jane’s anxious Knotted, fingers. “I’m so glad we found it.”
“Now I’m not a guilty outcast, am I?” Doris demanded joyfully. ‘I’m just a poor little Dormouse that went and forgot.
It is, of course, pleasant to possess a diamond star and the slavish devotion of a distant friend, but it does not compensate for the daily drab of a suburban frame, not made or measured for the picture that has to fill it. The life was detestable.
But it had a specious appearance of calm. The first seismic disturbance came at the end of three gloomy weeks. It was May, the small front garden was edged with laburnum. “It looks,” wrote Daphne to Colombe, “like a golden wig on a wicked old witch.” The family sat in the dining-room, and the double windows were closed, partly because to Uncle Harold exhausted air was synonymous with comfort, and partly because when you have double windows it seems wasteful not to use them, and a double window, open, might just as well be a single one. Daphne was busy with her embroidery frame, the delicate art learned at the school where she had been a queen commanded the respect of aunts and uncle, and the necessity of application at difficult points excused the rare lapses from appropriateness of her “Yes” and “No” and “Really” and Indeed.”
Doris was absent. These family parties were to her intolerable, and she found more congenial company in the kitchen, where there were sympathetic maids and a cook who had a pack of cards and a soprano voice, well-scrubbed tables good for building card-houses on, and baize-doors that shut out from the family the flippant items of the soprano repertoire. Also there was love for the child in the basement-kitchen, and life — and to a child all life is interesting, even that of the blackbeetles under the copper in the scullery.
In the parlour there was no love for her save Daphne’s, and that was stricken dumb in the presence of people who seemed not to know what love meant. And as for life — there was not even a fly on the panes. Damp fly-papers in plates on the sideboard saw to that.
But to-day the kitchen was being thoroughly cleaned. So Doris had collected a few objects of interest and taken them on to the stairs — a pair of scales, a nutmeg grater, a bundle of wood, excellent for building, a quantity of excellent string, and a large tin tea-tray. The scales were useful for weighing the other objects; the nutmeg-grater made marks of a most attractive nature on the polished mahogany of the bannister rail and the drab paint at the side of the stair-carpet. The wood and the string made a wonder-palace with the help of the bannisters and the catches of the landing window. And the tea-tray — if one sat on it and balanced it on the top step, it swung backward and forward entrancingly.
Daphne was picking up gold beads on a needle threaded with yellow silk. Uncle Harold was concealing his slumber with a newspaper, Aunt Emily with red and blue wool and a bone hook was crocheting something for a bazaar; Cousin Jane was marking the new pillow-cases, and Cousin Henrietta was frankly asleep opposite Uncle Harold. A domestic interior full of peace and the calm of the really-respectable.
A bang, a rattle prolonged and inexplicable, ending in a thump and a sound as of tin kettles tied to the tail of a dog wildly alive, and then suddenly dead.
“Goodness gracious!” broke from several lips.
And all rushed to the door. But Daphne was first.
At the foot of the stairs, on the dyed red wool mat lay Doris, a tea-tray, a pair of scales, and a miniature timber-yard of firewood.
“That child again,” said Aunt Emily, sourly.
“It gave me a dreadful turn,” Uncle Harold, his hand on his waistcoat, assured the world. “The child ought to be whipped, thoroughly whipped,” he added, with unction.
But Daphne was kneeling by the child who thus embraced a sympathizer of something about her own height.
“It was the nasty tea-tray,” she gasped — and she was very pale. There was a quickly purpling knob on her forehead. “I was just sitting on it, playing it was a see-saw, and it was so nice I thought the scales would like it too. And then the tray started off, like the pony does when Uncle Harold is so cruel with the whip, but I hadn’t hit it once — and the scales hit my elbow, and the floor hit my head, but I just held on and I never screamed, did I? And I’m not crying now, am I?”
“You’re a dear, brave little Dormouse,” said Daphne, very pale herself. “She is brave, isn’t she?” The appeal was to all beholders. And none answered it. Only Cousin Jane said:
“Vinegar and brown paper perhaps — for that bump. I remember poor Alfred Pettigrew—”
“Put the child to bed,” said Aunt Emily, in an awful voice, “and come back into the parlour.”
“But I’m not hurt,” said Doris, gaily. “I don’t want to go to bed, thank you, Aunt Emily.”
“You’re a very naughty, disobedient little girl,” said Aunt Emily. “Put her to bed at once, Daphne.” Doris’s pale face turned very red.
“I’m not naughty. I’m as brave as King George that killed the dragon. I wish I was King George,” she added, with a look at her aunt whose meaning even she could hardly misunderstand.
“Will you put the child to bed, Daphne?” she asked, setting the dyed rug straight, and picking up the four-ounce weight which had rolled under the hat-stand, “or must I do it myself?”
Daphne caught up the child and went up the stairs.
“When I grow up I’m going to be a murderer by trade,” the child called over her shoulder, “so you just look out. They won’t be all dead of oldness before then, will they, Daffy?”
“Don’t.” Daphne put her hand over the child’s mouth, but the mouth wriggled itself away to shout: “You are nasty, all of you. Cats! And Uncle Harold is the cattiest cat of all!”
“Don’t cry,” said Daphne, setting the Dormouse down on the bed; “its own Daffy will come back almost directly, and you shall have all the pretty pretties to play with. Don’t cry!”
“I’m not,” said Doris, winking hard. “I’d scorn to. But you’ll come back soon. Oh, no! Not real undressing — just my nightie over my petticoats in case of cats coming in.”
Daphne yielded, and a bunchy white-nightgowned figure sat very upright between the sheets. All the little boxes that held Daphne’s trinkets were hastily ranged on the turned-down sheet. Daphne added the box of her mother’s jewellery which her father had sent to her when she was seventeen.
“Oh, I’m glad I tumbled down,” cried the Dormouse, squirming with delight. “You’ve never let me have these before. Oh, glory!” She did not notice that her sister hastily took from the box a folded paper that had the dead body of a white rose in it.
“There, my heart; you’re a jeweller in the great bazaar, and I shall come up and buy things from you in less than no time.”
“Buy now,” said Doris. “Here’s a ruby necklace fit for a Turk’s bride — very cheap, lady; only five shillings!”
I’ll think it over and see if I can afford it. Now stay quite quiet and you’ll hardly know I’m gone before I’m back again.”
Daphne had got to the door when a small voice from the bed called to her.
“Daffy,” it said, “you wouldn’t let them?”
“Let them what?”
“Whip me — like he said?”
/> Daphne had to go back.
“Never, never, never,” she whispered in the hot little red ear. “Don’t you be afraid, my Dor-y-mouse. You Daffy will elope with you sooner.”
“Elope with me!” Doris was charmed with the idea. ‘Oh, do let’s! Don’t let’s wait for any more horrid things to happen. Couldn’t we elope with that kind Bluebeard man in the train?”
“It would be nicer with lust us two, don’t you think? Beloved, I must go.
“Give them my unlove, Daffy, and tell them just what cats they are.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Daphne, and went.
Her full vitality, her strong initiative, her power of putting her case — all the qualities that had served her at school, had made her queen of the girls and the model pupil of the teachers — she still had these. Yet she felt that she had nothing. At school she had carried all before her, and now she felt helpless as a bird in a trap. There was a wall of ice between her and these horrible relations. None of the powers that had aided her all her life would help her here. Nothing she could say or do would make any difference. Yet she must face and fight them. One thing at least she must fight for, even calling up the reserve of a threat to write to Uncle Hamley.
Doris must go to school.
Daphne clenched her hands outside the sitting-room door.
There was no time to think, no way of evading the only great sacrifice she had ever been called upon to make. For the child’s own sake she must go to school.
In an illuminating flash Daphne saw her life without the child, in this horrible house.
Then she straightened her back, braced her muscles, drew a deep breath, turned the door handle and went in.
“Oh, here you are at last,” said Uncle Harold. “We thought you’d put yourself to bed too.”
He giggled pleasantly.
CHAPTER VII. RUNAWAY
THE cousins had retired. Cousin Simpshall disliked scenes, because they upset her digestion; and Cousin Jane never, if she could help it, assisted at the orgies of authority which Uncle Harold and Aunt Emily called “a good talking to.”