Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  Then she went back, had breakfast, was quite kindly and cheerfully interested in Cousin Jane’s little doubts and fears and plans and hopes. When breakfast was over she persuaded Cousin Jane to take a day in the country, to see Doris, and to take her the little embroidered dress, now fortunately finished, saw her off at the street door, and then sat down to wait for the answer to her letter.

  She made herself sew, as she waited, white daisy flowers on another Doris-frock. She has always been very proud that she was able to sew that day, as she waited. For the answer to her letter was long in coming. She had hoped — she saw now that she had believed — that her lover would himself bring the answer, would indeed in his own proper person be the answer. But as the slow minutes grew into hours she knew that she could not at all know what she might presently have to believe. And still she sewed and sewed. Perhaps he was out — had not had her letter. She told herself that, but she knew he was not out. She was to have gone to his studio at ten to help him in the packing of his pictures for that exhibition. He must be there He had had the letter. And still she sewed and sewed. The lights and the shadows changed, and the sun went away from the back window and came round to the front and looked through the front window at Daphne still sewing.

  And then, when the last daisy petal was worked on the last sleeve and she stood up and stretched out her tired hands, the answer came. By post. It was a thick letter, sealed with that big ring of his.

  She had to take it to the window to read it. It might be all right, even now, she told herself. Something might have happened to prevent his coming. This might be only to tell her, as he had done once before, not to be a darling idiot and that he would come for her to-morrow. She read:

  “My darling, you are quite right. I ought not to marry. I do not want to marry, not even you — not even you. You see how I love you when I can tell you that and know that you will understand. I never loved anyone as I love you. I never loved you as I love you now — after reading your letter. If any woman in the world could hold me, dear, you could have done it. But no woman can. You can’t. And I adore you for seeing it before I have had time to spoil your life. Dear, brave, generous, little girl. There is no one like you. You must be happy. You will be happy. You don’t really love me. It’s only romance, isn’t it? You’ll soon forget it. Ah, how wise you are!

  “I daren’t see you. You know what happens when I see you. The impossible pretends that it’s possible — and I pretend it, too, and so do you.

  “Even now — do you know, I’ve written this and torn it up and written it again a dozen times, and walked about the studio, where we’ve been so happy, and cursed and hesitated. But it’s no good. Better end it now than make us both wretched for life. For it wouldn’t last, dear, and then you’d hate me. You’d come between me and my work, and I shouldn’t be able to forgive you for that — not even you. You are the light of my life — but my work is my life. And you understand that. There’s no one like you — no one else would understand.

  “I’m off to Paris to-night. Vorontzoff will have to see to that damned exhibition. You might explain to him which of the Embankment pictures we decided to show, and that your portrait’s not to be in at all. At least I think not. I should like to keep it all to myself. All the same it’s the best thing I ever did. Oh, do what you like — what does it matter? Goodbye, my dear little girl, my own little girl. Make haste and forget me. You’ll marry that interfering chap. He loves you as you deserve. He hasn’t got any work, confound him. No — I won’t tear this up. I’ll send it, because it’s what I really mean.

  Giving you up hurts damnably, Daphne. It won’t hurt you as it hurts me. That’s one comfort. As long as I live I shall honour you for the splendid courage of that letter. You owe your mother that gift anyway.

  “I’ll do something fine one of these days and then you won’t be ashamed of having been in my arms once or twice. I wish — I wish I wasn’t such a fool. But I do love you — more’s the pity. But I wasn’t made to love anybody. I was made to work, and by God I’m going to do what I was made for.

  “H.”

  “Ah,” breathed Daphne softly, “it’s a nicer letter than the other.”

  The room was all dark when Cousin Jane stumbled up the stairs. In the darkness she could hear Daphne sobbing.

  “My dear,” she called through the darkness, “is that you? What is it? Where are you? And oh, where are the matches?”

  “I’m here,” said Daphne, stumbling heavily in the dark. “Where are you? Oh, there isn’t any God; I’ve found that out while you’ve been gone.”

  “My dear,” Cousin Jane held something hot and shivering that clung to her, “my dear, what is it?”

  Then Daphne laughed.

  “Oh, nothing,” she said—”only I’d followed in my mother’s footsteps, and I was going to make a man marry me when he didn’t want to. And I found out in time — that’s all. Oh, hold me, hold me — I’ve been in the dark alone with it for years and years and you’re letting me go. Ah, don’t let me go; there isn’t any floor to the room.”

  There was a silence. Then —

  “Mr. St. Hilary,” said Cousin Jane in a hushed level voice, “would you be so very kind at to strike a lucifer and light the gas. Thank you. No, I can manage perfectly, thank you. She’s very light. If you wouldn’t mind going away — and never let her know I was bringing you in to supper with us to-night?”

  Ten minutes later when a man, in the white heat of passion, asked sternly for Mr. Henry, a lady unspeakably musk-scented informed him that Mr. Henry had gone to Paris. “It’s a gay city, so they say,’ she added, “but Lord, I dare say he’ll be glad of a change the way the English girls run after him.”

  CHAPTER XXV. WOMAN

  IT WAS all over, then. There was nothing to be done. The Fairy Palace was only a Castle in Spain, and Daphne’s own hand had pulled it about her ears. The one clear drop in the nauseous brew poured for her drinking was this — that it had been er hand, and not his.

  It would be pleasant to relate that Daphne, brave as ever, faced the inevitable — fought and overcame her sorrow. It would be pleasant, but not true. On the contrary, once compelled to accept defeat, Daphne accepted it thoroughly. She was never one for half measures. It was all over; there was no more fighting to be done. And all her fighting energy set itself to resolute acceptance of the end of fighting. She gave up, lay down, and let the deep waters go over her. Breathless, at first, she questioned, doubted, agonized. If she had acted differently — had been more patient, had done that, left that undone — would this have been otherwise? Was it all her fault? If she had submitted then, as now she submitted, would things have worked round to something less bitter? If she had not had the silly, superb confidence in her power to organize, to engineer all things — if she had left a little to Chance or Fate — or even to Henry? You know the sort of pattern questions like those can draw on the background of white nights? But quite soon she got her breath:

  The thing was done, and it had to be got over. Some sage has said that the only way to get over sorrow is to go through it. Daphne perceived this truth. So she opened her heart to her sorrow, let it live with her, get up with her, lie down with her; and the deep waters were waters of healing as they are to all who have the desperate courage to lie still and let the waves have their will.

  It was Cousin Jane who “held her hand,” as she said later, through those bitter weeks. Cousin Jane quiet, commonplace, offered no intrusive sympathy or pity that would have been intolerable: instead, an understanding reticence that Daphne herself could not have bettered had she stood in the place of comforter to one suffering as she suffered. And the pain was bitter — love, pride, vanity, passion, self-esteem, all lay wounded and bleeding.

  After that first wild night when agony could not, and did not care to, disguise itself, Daphne, to all outward seeming, took up her life where she had left it, did her best to go back to that parting of the ways where she had turned aside to follow the path
that had promised to lead her to the stars, and had led her — here.

  When the others came back riotous and brown with their long holiday in the sun, they found someone who looked and talked and laughed like the old Daphne. She was a little thinner perhaps, and pale, but what else could one expect who stayed in town all the summer? Only Green Eyes understood, and though she never showed it by word or look, Daphne knew that she understood, and hated her for it. Doris found again the adored playfellow and comrade, who was never too busy to play — a comrade missing from these last months.

  Everything looked as it had been before. Grass grows quickly; especially on graves. That her heart was broken Daphne had now no doubt whatever. But her ideal of herself was not the girl who sits down and cries over milk spilled or hearts broken. There was his exhibition to see to. She had always wanted to do everything for him. Well, she could do this.

  In conjunction with Vorontzoff, that was the worst of it. She would have to face his child-like, frank questionings. How could she meet them? The idea happily came to her of forestalling them by a statement frank as his own questions. She got him alone, in Henry’s studio it was, where they had met to send off the pictures.

  “Mr. Henry has gone to Paris,” she said. “Will you be kind, and not ask me any questions? He has gone, and I shall not write to him, and I shall never see him again. You understand, don’t you?”

  “Yes — no,” said the Russian. “But you will see him again. This world is too small a place to hide oneself from the beloved.”

  “That’s what I mean,” said Daphne—”the way you talk. It isn’t only questions. Please, please be kind, and never speak of him to me.”

  “Poor little sister, said Vorontzoff, “but do not forget how little a place is this great world compared to the world that is in our hearts. Have courage. If he has lost you you have not lost him.”

  “After to-day you won’t talk about it, will you? But I have lost him. And he hasn’t lost me. Now you know everything.”

  “It is what I tell you always,” said the Russian impatiently; “You lose not your love while he is your love. Now your soul can be free from selfish longings for happiness to you. You give him your love — you ask no return. You will give, give, always give.”

  “Indeed I hope I shan’t,” said Daphne, half laughing with sad eyes.

  ‘You see what you can do for him. You look round. Ah, the exhibition. He leaves you that to do for him. And now to make it good for him — that will be your life. He goes away — he thinks of himself, his art: he is afraid to embrace life. It is too great, too fine. And all the while he thinks it is his art that is so fine, so great. He is excommunicate; but you pray for him and he return to the fold. He is on the wrong path, but you think, think, always think of him, desiring not that he may return to you, but that to the good path he may return, and be wise and strong and happy. And your thoughts are strong like prayers. They control him, they move him to there where your good love wishes him to be — to there where he is best, strongest — his real good self, even if that is somewhere where you are not. It is thus that you possess him. Ah no, little sister. You have not lose him. You hold his soul in your hand.”

  “He does not love me,” said Daphne.

  “If he does not, that makes him more yours. For you have nothing to take from him — only to give, to give, to give continually. It is like this that God loves us, and so we are His.”

  “I don’t want him to be mine,” she said. “I want to—”

  “You want to be his. I know. And it is so you will be his.”

  “No. I want to forget him.”

  “Ah,” said the Russian, dropping the ball of string, “it is true. You are a child: the children forget so quick You will forget what you have suffered for him, but not what you have done for him. To the work! Courage! Let us dispatch ourselves to exspeed his pictures to the exposition where the world shall see them and know how he is great.”

  He waved the brown paper, picked up the string and entangled his feet in it.

  “It is well, little sister,” he said, struggling as in a coarse cobweb, and answering the demand of her eyes. “It is well. After this moment I speak no more of him. All is said.”

  It was bitter-sweet work, dragging out from their leaning places in the dark ante-room those canvases which he and she had looked at together, tying them up face to face, with the little woodenpegs between, to keep the paint from possible hurt. To remember the ones he had chosen was easy. Not so easy to make her own choice among the others that were to hang on the wall that was “worth twice as much as any wall in Europe.” She might have known — on that horrible day when he passed her as one passes a stranger, she might have known.

  Over her own portrait she hesitated. Vorontzoff did not hesitate. “We expose it,” he said. “Is it not the chef d’œuvre? We expose it, but on it we place the red sign of sold, and at the end it returns to our Henry.”

  Daphne’s face looked at her from the halo of the Salvation Army bonnet, and now she saw, for the first time, what it was that Henry had painted there.

  “I think,” she said, “I would rather not have it in the exhibition.”

  For she saw written more plainly than in any words it could have been written all the passion and longing of her love for the man who had painted it — the man who had seen how she wanted him and who had not wanted her.

  “You find it tell your secrets,” said Vorontzoff, with the deadly insight of his race. “But I tell you no. To me and you it say it: yes. Because we know, me and you. But to the others who know not it tell nothing but the love of heaven and the hope of the Lord coming in clouds of glory to save the world. Do not be like a woman, my child, to think only of yourself and bide away his best work because you helped him to do it. Be rather the brave comrade, and show the world what it is, this, his great work.”

  “Oh, all right. Never mind. Do what you like,” said Daphne. “I believe he wanted to show it, though he said he didn’t.”

  “See then,” the Russian was triumphant, “how he requires a comrade to help. So often we have the two wishes that contradict almost exactly. One only so little stronger than the other, so that we cannot tell which shall win while they fight like wild bulls in our souls. Then comes the good comrade, and sees what we cannot — the true desire superlative, and translates it for us into the action. We send the picture.”

  It was already framed. There only remained the tying of it up in brown paper ready for its case. Daphne did it, while Vorontzoff achieved incredible entanglements with the ball of string.

  It was all very hard, but quite wonderfully it was helpful. In all the business arrangements for the exhibition — the hanging even — she had to be at Vorontzoff’s elbow, explaining, arguing, insisting. She knew how Henry meant the pictures to be hung. The picture-dealer knew how he meant them to be hung. In the inevitable collisions her fighting strength came out again. She was doing something for rum, and she would do it well. Mr. Berners had no such driving force behind his neat little plans as lent power to Daphne’s. She had her way.

  And the weeks went by — and it was this work, so lightly asked by him, by her so freely given, that seemed to make life possible. She worked harder than she had ever worked at anything in her life — naming the pictures, for Henry never named anything, revising the catalogue, overseeing the advertisements. She knew nothing of any of these things, but she made it her business to know, as she had always made it her business to master the details of any scheme she chose to undertake. And, as usual, she succeeded. Only once in her life had she tried and failed. Only once.

  The naming of the pictures was difficult. She knew how Henry hated what he called literary titles. Yet one could not call everything a nocturne or a symphony. “Nightpiece” did for the embankment picture, but it was difficult to find other names as non-committal. Her own portrait she could not name. “Portrait of Miss Daphne Carmichael” was what it purported to be. “Girl transfigured by longing,” was w
hat it was. Vorontzoff solved the problem and called it “La Vie Eternelle,” which served.

  And Daphne’s organizing, supplementing the merit of the pictures and the name of Vorontzoff achieved the purpose that had served her instead of happiness for those weeks. Parliament was sitting. London was full, the Spirit of the Age was propitious: the show was a success, complete and instantaneous. From the very first there was no doubt about it.

  The critics, heartened by Vorontzoff’s continental reputation, set themselves to praise the less known work of Henry, though some few thought it clever to belittle his work. But the thing was done. Every picture was sold, and sold as Mr. Berners had foretold, at a price that made the 50 per cent, an unimportant loss. The weary faces of great ladies, of courtesans, of ladies’ maids, waiters, footmen — painted with ruthless fidelity and the brush of a master — weary rich folk, sick for a new sensation, crowded to buy them. They were more popular than the brutal East End tragedies on the canvases of Vorontzoff.

  “East and West” had a vogue unprecedented — unforeseen by any save by the girl and the two men who had made it, and Seddon hugged himself on the pictures he had had the luck and the wit to buy before all this gold and fame came to Henry’s door.

  Henry, all the time, was abroad, in Paris, Dresden, Vienna. Vorontzoff wrote to him, sent him little stacks of press notices. But no word came from him.

  And now that there was nothing more to do for him save to read and re-read his press notices and stick them in a book, Daphne grew suddenly very tired.

  Somebody must have seen this, because there came a quite unprovoked gift from Uncle Hamley — a hundred pounds — and the request that Daphne and the child and Jane should go away somewhere for the winter. Vorontzoff was going to Paris. Henry was in Rome. No one, not even oneself, could suspect one of running after him. Why should not they all go to Paris? They went. The big room in Fitzroy Street was shut up. The cisterns gurgled and giggled alone together, telling each other who knows what cold-blooded stories of warm human folly and suffering. The room proclaimed on its windows that it was to be let, furnished or otherwise, but in neither state did it attract a tenant.