Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “It always is,” said Green Eyes abstractedly.

  The other guests were scraping their chairs into place on the moss-green pile of the soft carpet.

  “After all,” Seddon was saying, as the perfect satellite began to revolve in his orbit, laden with choice hors d’œuvres, “perhaps there’s something more delicate, less voulu, in our little dinner as it is. The poignant beauty of the incomplete. Yes? And we know that he is here with us in spirit.”

  Daphne knew, at any rate, in what spirit he had elected to be not with them.

  “All the little plans,” Seddon purred, “all the little nuances, that have occupied me ever since I purchased the masterpiece and conceived the master-idea of this dinner party.... Ah, don’t refuse an anchovy-olive, Miss Carmichael. They’re from a little recipe of my own. We can find the beautiful in all things. Can we not?”

  “Seddon’s got taste, confound him,” Claud was murmuring to Green Eyes.

  “He’s got Miss Carmichael at present. Don’t scowl like a bandit. After all, it’s his dinnerparty.”

  “Well, let him have his beastly dinner — hang it all. Isn’t she ripping to-night?”

  “She always is,” said Green Eyes, “no matter what her name is.”

  “Ah,” said Claud, “but this is the real thing.”

  “I know,” said Green Eyes, “it always is the real thing. I wonder why you all put up with Henry in the way you do? If a man behaved like that to me I should kick him, if I were a man.”

  “What’s he been doing now?”

  “You don’t mean to say you believed that — about the aunt.”

  “Uncle.”

  “It was an aunt last time.”

  “What was?”

  “You don’t see that it was just his way of telling Seddon not to be an ass?”

  “Well,” said Claud, taking much lobster salad, “there comes a point every now and again when some one has to tell him that. He works up to it slowly, that point, but he gets there.”

  “Oh, but it’s not only that,” said Green Eyes in low tones of intense irritation, “it’s everything. And all the time. Look at that night at your place, the first night Daphne came. Snubbed everyone the minute he got into the room and then sat in the corner with an aunt.”

  “An aunt?”

  “He called it a headache that night, I believe; but it was the same thing. A transparent excuse for rudeness that no one would ever stand in anyone else.”

  “You used to be great pals, I thought.”

  ‘I sat for him, if you mean that Yes, and he was different then. You hadn’t all spoiled him.

  He was—”

  “Isn’t she, Winston?” Seddon’s voice broke in. “Isn’t who?”

  “Miss Carmichael.”

  “Don’t — what nonsense,” said Daphne.

  “Isn’t Miss Carmichael what?”

  “Exactly like that splendid St George — you know — in the—”

  “Exactly,” said Winston: “we always remarked it in my cousin from a child.”

  “Miss Carmichael your cousin?” said Seddon, fussily. “I should never, never have believed it — no, no, my dear fellow,” he insisted, through the laughter that broke out all round the table, “you know what I mean. Such a different type, you know. Now Winston’s exactly like Waterhouse’s Hylas.”

  “Sorry you spoke?” Green Eyes murmured’ in the red ear of Claud.

  “And you,” said. Seddon, to Green Eyes, “are exactly like the nymphs.”

  “All of them, Mr. Seddon?”

  “Every single one.”

  “If that chap,” said Claud in a low voice, “ever meets a Botticelli girl, he’ll marry her the next day.”

  “If she’ll have him,” Green Eyes provided.

  “Oh, a Botticelli girl would have him right enough. She’d have anybody. She’d know it was her only chance.”

  It was Daphne’s first dinner-party. And it all seemed very grand to her. The menu, a little unconventional, seemed to her the height of luxurious delicacy. The champagne was good, but not so good as the glass that held it, old Venetian, slender stemmed and opal-tinted. The strawberries, too, were served in Venetian glass, wonderful greens and rose-pinks with threads of gold serpentining through them. The dinner service was Lowestoft; the coffee service Worcester. Daphne was, as Claud had foretold, the guest of the evening. At dessert, after the cloth had been drawn in the old way, and the fruit and decanters and pointed candle-flames were mirrored in the brown mahogany, Mr. Seddon made a little speech, almost all about Henry, and wound up, quite unexpectedly, by asking the company to drink the health — not of Henry, as everyone confidently expected — but of Daphne, to whom he alluded as ‘‘Our Lady of Consolation.”

  “Not very polite to the rest of us,” murmured Green Eyes, as the men rose.

  “Oh, he means well,” said Claud, “but it’s rather horrid for her. It’ll be your turn soon, don’t you worry. He’ll come round and tell you how exactly you resemble Burne-Jones’s Beggar Maid.”

  Which was precisely what the little man did. When the guests dispersed about the large, panelled room he was careful to spend with each a few moments filled generously with compliments inoffensive and impersonal as the words of an oft-repeated ritual. He owed a duty to his guests and this seemed to him to be payment. But it was with a little flutter of haste that he crossed the room to where Daphne stood before Henry’s picture — for an instant alone. Claud had been appealed to to settle some point about a dance that was to happen in the autumn.

  “Ah,” Seddon said, looking reverently up, a little out of breath, at the picture, “I have felt all the evening, dear Miss Carmichael, that yours is the only heart here to-night that really beats in unison with my own.”

  Daphne drew back a step. The little man was amusing. But there were limits.

  “In all this little company,” he went on, “you and I alone really feel the hard hand of Fate laid upon Henry’s uncle. The others — have enjoyed themselves.”

  “I’m sure they have. So have I.”

  “Almost as well as though our Henry had been here. But you and I Why, they have hardly even looked at the picture. But I saw your eyes on it again and again during our little meal.”

  “The others had seen it before, perhaps.”

  “They never will see it — as you and I see it. And they’ll never see Henry as you and I see him.”

  If a Punchinello wagging bells at the end of a stick in a child’s hand had suddenly opened its wide painted lips and discoursed of Destiny and the heart of things Daphne could not, in the face of it, have felt more helpless than she did in the face of this silly, emotional, too astute little nouveau-riche.

  “I — I know Mr. Henry so very slightly,” was all she found to say.

  “Friendship isn’t measured by its length, like crepe-de-Chine,” he said. “I insist, dearest Miss Carmichael, that the fineness of your nature has, in no matter how short a time, pierced to the shrine to which I have won my clumsy way after blundering years misspent before other altars.”

  The absurd little man. The horribly acute clearsighted little man!

  “Every one,” said Miss Carmichael, “must admire Mr. Henry’s genius.”

  “And he is the best of fellows.” Seddon, to Daphne’s breathless relief, got away on this from the associative personal note. “That casual way of his — oh, it hides a heart of gold. I could tell you tales.”

  Daphne wished he would.

  “Tales of unselfishness, of extravagant nobility, of chivalrous courtesy.”

  She thought of the charwoman at whom he swore. Of some one else whom unseen he had welcomed with damnation.

  “Of patient kindness.”

  She thought of the Russian.

  “But,” added Seddon disappointingly, “honour seals my lips.”

  “I really hardly know him at all,” said Daphne again.

  “You will,” said Seddon, his earnest eyes bulging almost unbearably. “You an
d he were made for each other.”

  Daphne cast an agonized glance round the room. No: they were all talking. No one was listening.

  “Made for each other,” he repeated impressively. “He must paint you. Does he want to?’

  “He — he hasn’t said so.”

  “He will. I have the collector’s eye, Miss Carmichael — I can tell a pair. Others may overlook minute differences — tiny discrepancies. I don’t. And I assure you that you and Henry were made for each other. Oh, it may never come to anything. In the old days when I was at the mercy of Mammon I have seen a Chelsea figure in Great Portland Street — another in the Mile End Road. And I have had no skill to bring them together. But they were a pair, none the less — none the less. And Fate, limited no doubt by — by its own — its own — er — limitations — may never bring you two together. But I know. In these things I am a sort of clairvoyant.” He laughed a soft soprano laugh.

  She glanced at him; behind his light, prominent eyes shone the shifting, unearthly light that illumines life to the visionary. He was suddenly no longer absurd.

  “Look at me,” he said, very quietly.

  Her right elbow was on the high mantelpiece, her hand shading her eyes from the gleam of the silver-branched candelabra, and from the other eyes in the room. He had put his elbow also on the mantel-piece, and his eyes, too, were shaded. She turned her blue eyes full on him, and his held them while one might have counted twenty — slowly, as a tall clock counts.

  “Yes,” he said, in a breathless undertone. “I was right. You were made for each other. And you know it.”

  His voice broke the spell of his eyes. Daphne dropped her handkerchief and stooped for it.

  Allow me,” Seddon’s voice was quite normal as he stooped to the shed cambric. “Dear lady, your handkerchief is scented with the dreams of the garden where the flower of your life has grown.”

  “It’s — it’s only lavender,” said she.

  “Exactly,” said he.

  “Mr. Seddon,” she writhed, restive, in a chain of discomfort and unrest, “you really oughtn’t to talk as you do. “It’s—”

  “It is?”

  “It’s — it’s disconcerting. And of course it’s really nonsense.”

  “Is it?” he said, and met her eyes again.

  She found it incredible that she should be in these deep, strange waters with this little man whom she had tenderly despised through a whole evening.

  “Is it really nonsense? Do you really believe that there are truths — immense, penetrating truths —— that are hidden from the wise and revealed to — to people at whom everybody laughs?”

  You know that?”

  “That they laugh? Oh, yes. But who minds being laughed at — if he’s loved, too?”

  “You know that people love you?”

  “How can one help Knowing? And one loves so many people — so intensely. It’s only to-night that I see you — but I love you — you feel that, don’t you? It’s the kind of love that makes life possible. I don’t ask anything of you — I don’t even want anything of you. I only want the assurance of your happiness. That kind of love sets life to music.”

  “I am,” said Daphne, “very happy.”

  “Yes. It radiates from you. I feel it as one feels the beautiful light-heat of a gipsy’s wood fire in a sunlit meadow. But I am afraid for you. When two people are made for each other, like you and “Well?” Daphne asked, breathless.

  “One dreads that one of them may stay forever in Great Portland Street, and the other in the Mile End Road. Don’t resist if East and West seem to draw together.”

  “Mr. Seddon,” said Daphne determinedly, “do you talk like this to everyone?”

  “No,” said he.

  “I mean,” she went on, flat-footed in her resolution to know the worst, “it’s bad enough your talking to me like this. But do you talk about people like this — to other people?”

  . The pale, prominent eyes took on a look like that of a child chidden unjustly.

  “You’re slipping away from me,” he said helplessly. “A moment ago, and we were face to face. Stay here a moment. Do not bury yourself in any of the conventional hiding-places. Ah, stay! I could never talk to any one about any one else. Only when I see, it is laid upon me to speak — I Ah, stay here — don’t take refuge in that outer place where one laughs at these things. I am like the prophets. ‘It shall be given me in that hour what shall speak.’ And this is what I say, You were made for each other — you and Henry. If ever anything in your relations with him is in your hands, use those hands strongly — firmly. Don’t be afraid of blame or shame, or the word of the world, or your own pride — self-respect, you will call it. Go to him with you heart in your hand, and you will save his soul and yours.”

  Through the intense silence that closed round his ceased speech ripples of laughter from the others broke lightly, yet very far off.

  “Wake up, said Daphne, low and strenuous, and without at all meaning to say it. “Wake up. You’re dreaming.”

  He drew his ring-laden hand across those round light eyes, and looked at the hand inquiringly. He drew a long breath.

  “Dear Miss Carmichael,” he said. “I fear I have been very remiss. I fell into a reverie. Do you not know those moments when the whole world recedes — with all that is most precious in it — like a withdrawing tide, and your soul lies alone on some wild shore whose outline you cannot remember when the tide suddenly laps round you again?”

  Next moment he was assuring me gazelle-eyed lady that she was — did not merely resemble, but was, a perfect Murillo, and Daphne, still leaning on the mantelpiece, was asking herself whether it were really possible for a sane person to dream convincing, incredible words that had never been seen or heard.

  Claud was at her elbow.

  “You will walk home with me, won’t you — cousin?” he was saying.

  “Yes, of course,” said Daphne. “That is if you won’t talk to me. My eyes are dropping out of my head.”

  “Where — where?” The student who leaned against walls had strolled up and now scrutinized the carpet with explanatory intensity.

  “With tiredness, Daphne went on. “Can we go now — politely? It’s been a lovely party, but I am so tired.”

  “Has Seddon been asking you to look in the crystal?” asked the leaning student “The very idea of it tires me.”

  “Oh, no,” said Daphne, “he said nothing about crystals.”

  Seddon was making himself laboriously agreeable to Green Eyes and the Gazelle Lady. They could hear his careful allusions to the masterpieces of great artists.

  “Don’t let him mesmerize you,” said the young man with the drooping lock. “I know a girl he did that to — and — really, you know, she’s never been the same since.”

  “I won’t,” said Daphne, still trying to make memory rhyme with the possible. Had he mesmerized her? Was that the explanation of this tumultuous, tortured feeling of having been stripped to the bone, regarded, loved, advised, counselled, at last liberated? “Let’s go — go now,” she added, less calmly than she thought. So, with many elaborate courtesies of farewell, they went.

  “Did you enjoy it?” asked Claud, in Holborn. “It was a nice party, wasn’t it? He always does everything so awfully well. He’s a dear old duffer, isn’t he?

  “Yes,” said Daphne. “I like him.”

  “Take my arm,” said Claud, as though it were more a secret than ever. The others were going the same way, but in discreet twos and threes, dissociated from, yet connected with, this pair. The dress did not matter now. She crushed petticoat and dress into one hand and took the proffered arm.

  “I hoped you wouldn’t loathe him,” said Winston, wishing deeply that he could dare to press that cool limp hand to his side.

  “I didn’t,” said Daphne. “Don’t talk. Do you mind?”

  “Is your head very bad?” — a wild impulse to add “dear.” Resisted.

  “Yes — no — I’m tired. I
like walking at night One gets the most out of it like Claud, conscious, in every fibre, of that hand on his arm, took this as he wished to take it.

  “Yes,” he said, and ventured a pressure so slight as to leave Daphne unconscious of it “Yes, one does.”

  So they walked on in silence — a silence that lent her room to breathe in this new atmosphere of mystery and portent, and wrapped him in the bright light mists of the dawn of a new love.

  “You won’t forget,” he said on the stairs.

  “No — never. What do you mean?” she asked as one suddenly awakened.

  “About our picnic,” said he.

  “Of course not,” she said. “Good night, cousin.” Something in his face, showing in the light of the gas from his room improvidently blazing, drew from her: “I am so glad I met you that night! Where would everything have been if I hadn’t!

  “Where indeed — for me?” said Winston.

  Daphne climbed the last flight of stairs alone. It was late, and Mrs. Delarue would be tired of waiting.

  The trap-door was open. The lamp-light made its resting place a bright square.

  “I’m afraid I’m very late, Mrs. Delarue,” she said to the figure that sat by the bed in the dim light of one candle. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Mrs. Delarue has gone home,” said the figure, rising and coming toward her — a figure in a dream, in a dream that had been Daphne’s nightmare for weeks. For the figure was a ghost from the past — from that too recent past whose setting was Laburnum Villa.

  Daphne caught up the candle and held it so that the light fell full on the ghost’s face. And it was, beyond doubt and without the possibility of mistake, not a ghost at all, but, convincingly in the flesh, pale and trembling exceedingly, Cousin Jane Claringbold!

  CHAPTER XIV. EMANCIPATED

  I HOPE,” said Cousin Jane, so timidly that Daphne grew bolder, “that you don’t mind my having sent away that woman? She seems fond of the child — but do you think she’s quite to be trusted?”

  “Quite,” said Daphne, shortly. “How did you find me out, Cousin Jane, and where are the others?”

  “At home, I suppose,” said Cousin Jane, surprisingly, “that woman: when I came there were steps just in front of me all the way up, and I heard a clank — and I didn’t meet anyone, and when I got up she was here very much out of breath. And said had she left Dons alone? And she said she had only been down to see the time. So I said she needn’t wait.”