Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “Now should I?” he asked, and began to pick up the plates.

  “Oh, don’t trouble,” she said.

  “But won’t the servants think we must be mad? Having supper on the mat, like cats?”

  She opened her eyes very wide.

  “My dear child,” she said, “life wouldn’t be worth living if one troubled about what they think. Whatever does it matter what they think? We’re not villa-dwellers.”

  When she had gone, he opened the long shutters and threw up the window and looked out on the grey and rose of dawn, above the trees of the park that stood up like fat rocks in a sea of pale mist. Anthony stood there looking out on all this tranquil beauty that was his own, and would be Rose’s. And suddenly he thought of Malacca Wharf and the dreadful waste land where rubbish was shot, and the mean streets beyond, where Rose’s biscuit boys lived in filth and poverty. And he felt what even the meanest worm of a rich man must surely feel at least once in a life, when he looks on his own life-lot and then on the life-lot of the poor. At such moments, one says, not with smug satisfaction, but with bitter shame —

  “Not more than others I deserve,

  But Thou hast given me more.”

  “I must do something for those boys some day,” he said, salving his conscience with charitable designs. But his conscience would not be put off. He turned from the window and looked at the comfortable grandeur of the room, and he thought of those other rooms.

  “Oh, very well then,” he said, as though in answer to the words of Another, “I’ll send Rose a cheque to-day for her boys.”

  But the Other, once roused, was not easy to silence. He remained thoughtful, and presently he shrugged his shoulders impatiently.

  “All right, I tell you,” he told the Other, “all right; I’ll go into the whole question. I’ll talk it over with Rose. All right, I won’t forget.”

  The sun had risen now, and the tops of the trees were golden, though still the park lay in misty shadow. A keeper and two dogs passed across a vista of foreign conifers, and vanished.

  He went back to the library and wrote his invitations, fixing times and trains, and put them in the box in the hall.

  And now the sun was bright and the whole beautiful world awake.

  “The servants will be up presently, I suppose,” he said; “it seems silly to go to bed. Yes, of course. What else?”

  He went back through the library to the boudoir, opening shutters as he went, and windows, to let in the air and light of a new day. In the soft radiance of early morning the Second Empire furniture looked, he thought, more ghostly than ever. The door of the little room had swung open again, and into its darkness from door and clouded skylight came faint revealing light that still, however, left the darkness much to conceal. He went back for candles — tall new candles. Because, of course, what he wanted to see now was the place underneath that had been used as a laboratory.

  And when he had the candles, and knew what he was looking for, which last night he had not known, he found easily enough the panelled door, that was only bolted, and that opened with a crack like a pistol-shot as paint parted from paint that had lain close to it for fifty years. The door moved slowly and complainingly on hinges long unoiled, and disclosed stairs that led down.

  Remembering stories of vaults long closed, whose air was death to breathe, he thrust the candle before him into the darkness. Its flame swirled with his movement, but it burnt brightly, and he went forward. The stairs were of stone and soft with dust. They curved round as the stairs of turrets do. His hand on the wall felt dry stone, and the air, as he descended, was, though chill, not damp.

  At the foot of the stairs was a door, shaped to the arch it filled — a door of heavy oak carved in a sort of rough linen pattern, and grey with age. It stood ajar. He pushed it open, and went through into a strange place.

  A large octagonal room; high up, the walls were pierced by narrow lancets that let in air and no light. Pillars were ranged round it, which had evidently at some time, supported a groined roof, but the groining ceased abruptly a yard above the spring of the arches, and the roof was not of stone but of wood, flat square boards, incongruous and unsightly. The walls, too, were matchboarded, covering the pillars, to a height of seven feet or so. Wood was fitted between the pillars at the top of the matchboarding, forming shelves, and there were other shelves below, and on them many bottles. Benches below bore the chemical apparatus that was “up to date “ in the middle of last century. There was a balance in its glass-house on a table, a baize cloth over it. A book lay open, with a pen on it, and an inkstand near. It looked as though some one had been writing in that book but a moment before, and had thrown down the pen, interrupted in his work by Anthony’s approach. But that ink had been dry years and years before Anthony was born, and the hand that had written in that book had most likely never written anything more after that was written. Anthony blew the fine dust from the page, and read or tried to read. But what was written there was written in a shorthand unknown to him; the chemical formulae, plainly distinguishable as such by their grouping, were written in some cypher, only at the end of all were words in ordinary writing, and not such words as one expects to find in the notebook of a scientist — three words written very hurriedly: ‘Not death. She — Then the pen had rolled across the page, leaving its dark trail. The writer must have felt Death coming to him, and have fled from Death to meet Him at the top of those winding steps. Anthony felt very sorry for that man. Perhaps the news of her flight had come to him suddenly. He had not known at first that her going meant the end of life. He had tried to believe that he could bear it, and had gone back to his work. And then, even as he wrote the cypher-tale of his experiments, the truth came home to him. A man in a laboratory like this had no need to leave it to look for Death elsewhere. Only at the last, perhaps, he felt he did not want to die alone; perhaps he remembered the other girl, who was old Lady Blair now, but who then was young and loved him. Perhaps he had tried to go to her, and met only Death.

  “Poor chap!” he said; “I wonder whether I should kill myself if Rose went off with some one?” — and instantly was ashamed of the question because the answer was so quick and so definite.

  He looked round the room again. There were shelves of books, a mercury barometer in a long mahogany case hung on the wooden wall. There was a carved oak chest, grey like the door, and on tables and benches all a medley of dulled, glass-clouded bottles, papers disordered, retort-stands disconsolate.

  Lamps with reflectors were fixed to the walls, the old Colza lamps that used to have to be wound up like clocks, responding to the winding by gulps and gurglings and tricklings of hidden oil.

  A gaunt structure of chains, wheels, cranks, and pulleys against the wall at one side set Anthony wondering and examining. There was a wheel. He turned it, and with a rattling sound the slack chains stiffened to heavy resistance. There was a creaking sound, a cracking sound, from overhead, and then a sudden shower of dust like rain fell on his face and on the candles. Both candles went out. Anthony, in the dark, calling himself a fool, held on to the wheel and waited. Everything was quiet as death. If he let go the handle the machinery, whatever it was, might run down suddenly, with any sort of result unforeseen and undesired. If, on the other hand, he went on turning — A moment’s reflection convinced him that no one would have set up machinery whose sole end should be to destroy the man who worked it. And curiosity backed reason. He must go on turning the wheel. But he would strike a match first and see what had sent the dust down on him.

  The strong resistance which the wheel still offered warned him not to let it go. So fumblingly, leaning against the handle and still holding it with one hand, he tried with the other to get out a match and strike it. It is not easy to find your match-box, open it, get a match out and strike it, with one hand; but if you are careful you can do it. Anthony did it, and held up the little wax taper. By its light he could see fairly well the roof from which the dust had fallen, but he could not see
what had caused the fall. He made a little torch of wax matches and dropped them carefully to the floor, where they burnt merrily — wax matches have this property. Then, slowly and deliberately, he turned the wheel a little, backwards and forwards. A fresh shower of dust fell, which put out his torch and made his eyes smart, but not before he had seen the effect of his efforts. The roof had moved.

  Pleasantly surprised, he continued his investigations with scientific deliberation. Having let the wheel run very slowly back, until all was as before, he let go the handle, walked over and lighted the candles, made little dust shelters for them with two glass plates and some bottles, took off his coat, and then went back to his winding. And now all was clear. As he laboriously turned the handle, the roof slowly, very slowly, tilted up on one edge, like the lid of a box.

  “This will be a long job,” thought Anthony.

  At the end of five minutes’ hard labour the roof stood up vertically against the wall of the room above, and through the partially-obscured skylight of the roof he could see the vague blue and white of the morning sky. The little door which led to the stairs now opened on a space seven feet above his head.

  Anthony, mopping his brow and thrilled with the enthusiasm of the discoverer, now first began to consider the meaning of it all. He examined the wheels and chains.

  “The main part of the mechanism is quite simple, and merely consists of levers and chain-geared wheels enough to give sufficient mechanical advantage to enable a man’s strength to move the roof. That means a pretty big advantage; hence the operation is of necessity slow.”

  And, “It must be jolly dry here, for all the steel-work to be in such good condition. The chains run quite sweetly.”

  And again, “Why did the other Anthony rig up all this business? He’d want the light, and the extra space would be handy for keeping the air clear of fumes, and the floor lying against the door up there as it does now would ensure privacy all right. He might have had the floor taken out, but I daresay he wanted the place to look unchanged from above. At any rate, it’s all very neat.” And his admiration for the machinery, which certainly was well-planned and carried out, caused him to murmur, “Very neat!” aloud, once or twice.

  A quarter of an hour later his admiration was renewed when he discovered the function of a mass of steel-work high up on the machinery, which had, at first, seemed superfluous. The discovery was a relief, for the subconscious Anthony had for some time been wondering how the material Anthony was going to persuade the roof to return to its original position so that he might get out. He took up the old manuscript book and drew a rough sketch of the machinery with a little programme pencil that lurked in his pocket. With the help of his sketch, it was quite easy to find what should be the release, but, he thought, “I’ll have to hang on to the handle pretty tight, or the thing will run down with noise enough to wake the dead.” Hanging on with the meditated tightness, he cautiously moved with his left hand the releasing lever, and, after a few futile attempts, found the right way to adjust it. But surprisingly, after one jerk the roof began to descend very slowly, and the handle, instead of pulling impatiently on his ready strength, merely turned slowly with well-regulated solemnity. After the first half-minute he let go altogether, and watched the roof slowly settle down with a subdued clanking and grinding.

  “By Jove!” he said; “that affair up there must be a brake, and a very nicely regulated one too, judging by the uniformity of the working. Just push the lever over, and look on in lordly indolence. And when the thing’s cleaned and oiled, it won’t be very hard work to wind it up.” In his delight at finding it all so straightforward, he seized the handle and wound the roof up again, after which he lowered it once more with calm satisfaction.

  Then he looked again, more closely, at the furniture of the room, if benches and apparatus can be called furniture; blew the dust from odd bottles and examined the labels, still clear under their protecting wax; opened drawers full of wire, corks, odd lengths of glass tubing, empty bottles, clamps, and all the odd trifles that are found in all laboratories. Most of the bottles were the ordinary reagents of the organic and physiological chemist; but a few of them bore mere letters and numbers, E II, and such like. The balance, its glass case clean and bright under the dusty protecting leather, looked a little antiquated, but it was a beautiful instrument; two microscope cases of bright mahogany gave, by their polished opulence, promise of fine workmanship within, but they were locked.

  “I expect the lenses are not up to much compared to our modern, stuff,” he murmured; and, condensing his observations; “but things on the whole don’t seem to have altered much in the last fifty years as far as ordinary apparatus is concerned. I shan’t want much to make this place into a very efficient laboratory for the second Anthony.”

  He went back to the book.

  “I must put Bats on to this,” he said, turning page after page of unenlightening symbols, till, as he came once more to the three living words, “Not death — She” — the last convulsions of his second candle threw yellow waves over the old writing.

  “I’d better get out of this before the light goes,” said he, and went up the stairs. “What an adventure! It’s almost worth while being a Drelincourt and having an Ancestral Hall. Hope I don’t meet Wilkes.”

  CHAPTER XII. ANCIENT HISTORY

  AND in the hall he gave “Good morning!” to a startled Wilkes, who had hardly time before meeting his master’s eye to adjust the butlerial mask over the face of a much intrigued and interested man. For Wilkes also, the morning had not been dull. When Sebastien discovered that Sir Anthony’s bed had not been slept in; when others remarked that there were, on the drawing-room hearthrug, the remains of an informal banquet for two; that some one had opened the shutters, and that Sir Anthony himself was missing, the most delicious anxieties and suspenses agitated the servants’ hall.

  The letters in the box were sent off as usual by the morning postman, and it was Wilkes, always a bit of a Sherlock Holmes, who remarked that they had been written that morning. He made the remark in the pleasant housekeeper’s room, where the morning sun was gay on plush and photographs and red geraniums.

  “But how can you tell, Mr. Wilkes?” the housekeeper asked in almost awestruck admiration that yet had no incredulity in it.

  “By the ink, Mrs. Simpkins,” said the butler gravely. “By the ink; the blue-black writing fluid with which I fill the library inkstands with is not blue-black to commence with. It is blue first, and black after some space of time has elapsed — five or six hours, as a point of fact. Now the ink on those envelopes is still blue.

  You take my meaning? I shouldn’t be surprised if something had happened.”

  “Don’t say that, Mr. Wilkes,” Mrs. Simpkins pleaded; “of course I know that in the midst of life — but perhaps he’s only gone for a walk.”

  “In his evening clothes? Ho, no! Mrs. Simpkins.” The butler was positive, with his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat.

  Cook sent an emissary to inquire whether it was any good cooking breakfast, and Wilkes returned the majestic answer that, of course, breakfast would be served as usual.

  “Shut the door — do,” said the housekeeper, as the emissary went. “Now, Mr. Wilkes, just between me and you and the door shut — did you ever hear anything to make you say what you did about suppose something was to happen? Because her ladyship’s maid — you see her ladyship’s getting on, of course, really, and now and then she’s let things drop. You’re so clever, Mr. Wilkes, you ought to write a history of the County Families, telling the parts that the books leave out. You wouldn’t put the real names, of course; just Lord H. and the Honourable Miss P. and a certain well-known Cavalry Major’s lady.”

  Wilkes owned that he had thought of the idea himself sometimes. “But my duties,” he pointed out, “do not leave me much leisure. But about the Family. Well, you and me are the Family, in a manner of speaking, if you take my meaning; and I am sure it won’t go further.”


  “Not a word shall pass my lips,” Mrs. Simpkins assured him, and thought how surprised her elder sister would be when she told her—”do go on.”

  “I have sent Charles and James out to search the park, also Oddling; and Mr. Mackenzie will send, some men round by the home farm. So that all that is humanly active has been done, and I don’t feel that I’m wasting time talking to you,” he admitted handsomely.

  “Thank you,” said the housekeeper with gratitude, “and do sit down, Mr. Wilkes. Take the saddle-back chair; it’s the easiest.”

  “At the same time I will be brief, because Sir Anthony may turn up in time for breakfast, because, Mrs. Simpkins, the gist of the matter is this; this sort of disappearing and turning up again is hereditarary in the family. My uncle fulfilled the office of Butler at Drelincourt before my time, and he told me the facts. It appears there’s a little room that’s been bricked up since, owing to something of a fatalistic nature happening whenever the room was opened to inspection. And my uncle told me when I took the place that room wasn’t to be so much as named. Well, the late Sir Anthony, the last baronet’s elder brother, he had this room opened it seems, and messed about in it with liquors in bottles and chemical scents to a degree that my uncle said was poisonous. He and Miss Cecily — her that’s Lady Blair now, having married Sir Wilson Blair later by her father’s express wish, and not a say of her own about it — him and Miss Cecily were as good as engaged; very thick they were, my uncle says, very thick indeed. Miss Cecily’s father’s place being close by — Battle’s End they had, that the Goldschmids have now — the young couple were thrown much together, and there is no doubt an attachment sprung up between the two.”

  “You ought to write for the papers,” said Mrs. Simpkins, “really you ought.”

  “Not at all,” said Mr. Wilkes, bowing as he sat, and now enjoying himself very much. “The young lady and gentleman appeared, my uncle says, to be all in all to each other; rides and drives and staying at each other’s houses — she here more than him there, because of his chemical smells which she couldn’t wean him from for more than a day or two at a time. And all went merry as a marriage bell till the foreign young lady came to light.”