Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “Perfectly,” said Bats. And Wilton carefully said nothing. He would have gone out and left Bats to invent explanations, but Rose’s hand was on the door.

  “Don’t behave like babies,” said Rose. “Wilfred must have had some reason for wiring to you.”

  “It’s Anthony’s experiment,” said Wilton feebly.

  “Very well,” said Rose; “it seems I can’t get any sense out of either of you. I shall go to Anthony for an explanation.”

  She was turning the handle when Bats’ hand closed over hers.

  “No,” said Bats; “that’s impossible. Look here, Rose. If Anthony’s interrupted now it will be very bad for him, wreck everything. He’s got an idea. I don’t think it’s a correct one, but if he’s not allowed to prove that it’s incorrect, he’ll always think that it was right and that we made him muff it. And all his life he’d go on hating any one who interfered at this moment. Don’t you see?”

  “A wrong idea? He told you what it was then?” she said, like lightning, and shook her hand from his.

  “No, I happened to find out.”

  “And Wilfred, too; did he find out?”

  “Don’t,” said Bats evenly. “Let Wilton tell Sebastien to get you some tea or something.”

  She looked blankly at him. Then —

  “Yes,” she said, “please. Would you mind?”

  She took her hand from the door and stepped back. Wilton, without a glance at either of them, went out.

  “Rose,” said Bats, the moment they were alone, “don’t! How can you expect to make Anthony happy, if you’re going to spy and bother every time he has an idea? You know he always rushes off after a new idea. Life with him will be impossible if you’re going to behave like a baby and whimper and go on saying: ‘You might let me look! Oh, do let me look!’ No man could work with a woman like that hanging on to him,”

  “You’re trying to brace me up, as they call it, by being rude. What are you doing it for? What is it I’ve got to bear or got to hear? What has happened to him?”

  “Nothing whatever,” said Bats, and once more hoping he spoke the truth. “But I’m very fond of him and I’m very fond of you, and I don’t want you to make a mess of everything.” He led from any suit; the game seemed lost in any event. Afterwards he asked himself why it should have seemed to him that winning the game meant deceiving Rose; keeping her in ignorance about the dead girl. If the dead girl had been a living rival he could not have felt more tensely the need to keep Rose from any knowledge of the dead girl’s existence.

  Rose had pulled off her hat and thrown it on the table: quite automatically she ran her fingers through her hair, to make it take on those loose waves that suited her face so well. She always did that when she took off her hat, and she did it now. Suddenly her hands dropped.

  “Billy,” she said, and it seemed to Bats that she almost fawned upon him, “I know I’m behaving like an hysterical school-girl. But it’s that crystal. There was something strange and terrible to happen after he’d got his money. And when I got that telegram from Sebastien — oh! why did he send it if there was nothing wrong? — when I got it, I felt the thing had come now. And I wanted to help Anthony.”

  “When a man wants a woman’s help, he asks for it,” said Bats, blessing Wilton for Wilton’s absence.

  “Does he? Always? I feel that if I went to him now, I could save him.”

  “‘Dangerous guides, the feelings,’ “ quoted Bats. “Rose, don’t be womanly. Not now. You’re right so far: this is a crisis in Anthony’s work. You can make him muff the whole thing. Be reasonable. Have some tea and laugh at the whole thing with Anthony to-morrow. You can’t believe in that crystal nonsense. Not you, Rose, you can’t!”

  “I know I can’t,” she said, “only I do. All sorts of horrid things happen, explosions and blood poisonings and—”

  She looked at him a moment, frowned, bit her lips and covered her face with her hands.

  “Thank God! “ said Mr. Bats silently; “you can always manage a woman if only she’ll begin to cry.”

  Rose went blindly towards the table and sank into a chair beside it, her elbows on the table and her head in her hands. He came and stood beside her.

  “Don’t,” he said; “don’t, dear! “ and touched her hand. She caught his and laid her forehead on it, and he felt her tears warm upon his palm. “Now I wonder,” he said to himself, “what particular sin I’m paying for now? Whatever it is, the price seems excessive.” And Wilton might come in at any moment.

  “You’re overwrought,” he said; “you’ve been worrying and fancying. Everything’s all right.”

  She clung to his hand convulsively.

  “Oh! how I wish you’d say something I could believe,” she sobbed.

  Bats racked his soul to grant her wish. In vain. So he stood there in an awkward silence, and felt that Wilton’s tact in keeping away was becoming almost tactless. Then he found himself saying: “Give Anthony a chance. If he doesn’t tell you to-morrow, I will. I promise you that. Only he wanted to tell you himself. He’s going to ring us up the moment he knows whether it’s all right. I always thought you were so brave. And here you are making yourself ill about an old fortune-teller’s foolishness. Cheer up! Everything’s all right, believe me.”

  Through his last words something else spoke.

  “Oh!” she cried, and jumped up, almost throwing his hand from her, “there’s the telephone!”

  It was, in fact, the telephone which had spoken. And before Bats could think of anything sensible to say or do, the receiver was at Rose’s ear and she was saying, “Yes?” hoarsely.

  “It’s Drelincourt,” said her lover’s voice; “is that Wilton? Come over at once, there’s a good chap. It’s all) right. She’s moved. She’s breathing. She’s alive!”

  So much she heard before Bats, by sudden force, tore the receiver from her and held her away from the machine while he put the receiver to his own ear.

  “What’s that?” he said, and heard in a tone of inexpressible joy and triumph —

  “She’s alive. She’s breathing. That you, Bill? Send Wilton. I was right. I must go back to her. Make Wilton come. He’ll forgive all that silliness. Send him now.”

  Bats hung up the receiver, still holding Rose from it with his other arm.

  “Be quiet,” he said to her, in a voice she had never heard, and shouted, “Wilton! he says it’s all right.” Wilton put his head in at the door.

  “All right, I tell you,” said Bats, answering the other’s look and tightening his grasp of Rose, “ go over at once. It’s life.”

  Wilton went.

  “Now,” said Bats. He loosed Rose, but he stood between her and the telephone. “I hope you’re satisfied.”

  “She?” said Rose gasping. “She? I knew it. I knew it.”

  “I suppose I must tell you now that you’ve eavesdropped into the middle of the whole story,” said Bats, at his wits’ end. “It’s a poor woman they thought was dead, and Anthony’s succeeded in reviving her by some new process. Now are you satisfied?”

  “But — why wasn’t I to be told?”

  “I thought you didn’t like dissecting-room stories,” said Bats brutally.

  And Sebastien came in with the tea.

  “I’m sorry,” said Rose flatly, when he had gone out; “but I suppose you can’t understand. If you were as fond of any one as I am of Anthony, you’d understand then.”

  “If being fond of people makes one want to interfere at every crisis of their work, I hope to Heaven no one will ever be fond of me,” said Bats tartly.

  Then Rose deliberately blew her nose, wiped her eyes, put her handkerchief in her pocket and smiled at him. The smile was beautiful. She was not one of those women who are disfigured almost unrecognizably by tears.

  “Pax!” she said. “Let me give you some tea. I’m sorry I made a fuss. I’m going to be a perfect Griselda for ever and ever. And,” she added, smiling still more brilliantly, “you won’t tell Tony w
hat a fool I’ve been, will you?”

  “That’s a false move, Rose,” he said. “You should never ask people not to tell. It puts the idea into their heads.”

  “But you won’t,” she persisted, and her eyes, he saw, were still full of tears.

  “No,” he said, “this once I won’t. I don’t want to worry the man’s life out by letting him know what he’s got to look forward to.”

  She laughed, not quite steadily, but still she laughed. “I said Pax,” she said.

  When the door had closed and latch and lock clicked home; when the departing feet of his two friends and his servant had, echoing, died away on stairway and flagstone, Anthony Drelincourt stood a moment, breathing hard. The enthusiasm of the experimenter, thwarted by the conscientious tiresomeness of the doctor, the half admitted hopes, the half-resisted fears, anxiety, curiosity, and a thousand little undefined impulses, attractions and repulsions, all these swimming in an overwhelming ocean of something new, something unknown, something which he strove in vain to understand and to reckon with, all these had driven him to a condition nearer frenzy than it pleased him to remember. He stood there disconcerted, ashamed, and bitterly conscious that he was now in no condition to attempt the control of the forces which he believed to exist, and believed himself to be, at his best, able to master.

  There were certain things that could be done now, even by one whose self-control had been shaken and whose hand, though trembling, could be schooled to steadiness; another injection, the ignition of certain resinous gums and spices, the lighting of certain tapers. These things he did without removing the sheet from the face of the body.

  Then he retreated to the far end of the room and sank into his chair, every muscle relaxed, and stayed there seeking to relax his mind also, to wash from it all traces of the agitation and anger that had distorted and enfeebled it in his encounter with Wilton. It was a long time before he succeeded, but at last he rose, made certain preparations, drew back the veil from the dead girl’s face, and, without ever touching her, began the “treatment” which, succeeding the hypodermic injections, the strokings of the forehead, the application to nostrils and ears and lips of strange, strong, sweet-scented liquids, must, if his faith were to be justified, restore to life this pallid, death-still body.

  The extremest mental tension was of the essence of the treatment, a tension so great as to obliterate all bodily consciousness. Yet that kind of mental tension is physical also, and, as he stood gazing at the dead face, the sweat poured off his forehead, and every now and then he brushed it from his eyes with the back of his hand. But presently this ceased, the mind took full possession of the field, and his body ceased to protest its weakness. The consciousness of power awakened in him, doubt and fear shrivelled and vanished like dead flowers in a glowing furnace, confidence of triumph possessed him, growing, growing, till it seemed to fill his being. If ever a man felt like a god, it was Anthony Drelincourt in that hour. And he might have been a god, a god carved in some transfigured splendour of marble, as he stood at last, all the prescribed gestures and passes made, motionless with hands outstretched over the body of the girl.

  When the moment had come he spoke, strange words, slow and intense. His voice shaped itself to something like a low toneless chant, words indeed, but words of no language that is taught in the schools. Words that have been handed down from Mage to Initiate through generation after generation, since days before great Babylon was a little village, before Nineveh reared her towers to the stars, before the Hittites set the first stone of the first city of their mysterious civilization, the civilization which time has wiped away as a child wipes from a slate a little sum done wrong.

  The chant, in an invocation that was almost a cry, ceased. Silence filled the room.

  Now — now — now! Here was the moment. If not now, all was in vain; the faith of the man’s life a worthless trifle trampled in the dust. Now — now — now!

  His eyes fixed on the dead face, wavered for the first time. Something fiery yet enervating, like chloroform and sunshine mingled, flushed through his veins. “No more,” he told himself; “I can do no more.”

  And as he told it, a sound broke the throbbing silence, a little light sigh. And he had not sighed.

  “Now,” he said again, concentrating all his soul and spirit in the command. “Now!”

  And the dead woman’s eyelids fluttered, opened an instant and closed again.

  The thing needed was at hand. He had seen to all that. A phial and a glass. He filled the glass, raised her head and held the glass to her lips. Her lips accepted the brim of the beaker. She drank. Her eyes closed again.

  Rigid with an inconceivable joy and triumph, he turned away, left her there lying still, living, with eyes closed and quiet hands. There were certain ceremonial washings of his hands and face. Anthony performed them duly and came back to where she lay. Kneeling by her he set cold fingers on her brow and spoke, this time in no strange tongue.

  “Awake,” he said, “it is time.”

  And the body that had been dead, moved; the hands fluttered, the eyes opened, gazed a moment wildly, unseeing. Then she raised herself on her elbow and her eyes met his.

  “Is it all over?” she asked, and her voice seemed to him to be like no voice his ears had ever heard, and yet to be a voice whose echoes had been always in his heart.

  “Yes, it is all over,” he said.

  She put one little hand on the floor and raised herself by it till she was sitting on the floor, her face looking up to his as he knelt beside her.

  “I do feel different,” she said. “I feel more alive, a thousand times. I did not think it would be so. But you knew — you. And it is truly a fact accomplished?”

  “Yes,” he said, trembling now in every nerve, but resolute to show nothing but strength, calmness, trustworthiness.

  “And now,” she said, “I live for ever?”

  “Yes,” he said soothingly, “yes.”

  Then the unexpected, the not by any chance to have been foreseen, happened. She smiled full into his dazzled eyes — oh! she was a thousand times more beautiful than he had thought her, a thousand times more beautiful than he had thought any one could be — laughed a low laugh of perfect contentment and happiness, flung her soft arms round his neck, and, laying her soft cheek to his, breathed softly —

  “Oh, my love!”

  His heart checked and stumbled, but his arms went round her. What else could they do when hers round his neck seemed to know themselves in their natural home? He held her a moment thus, and the world seemed to spin among a sea of stars and roses. Quite as mixed as that were Anthony’s thoughts. Or had he any thoughts at all? Perhaps not. He knelt there, holding her to his heart that beat as it had never beaten in all his life. Her face lay against his; her shape, slender and delicately warm, nestled in the curve of his arm. She tightened the clasp of her arm round his neck, moved her face a little, and smooth warm soft lips sought his and found them. Stars and flowers and all the world whirling to a wild wonderful music unimaginably beautiful, just not heard, but imminent.

  “Oh, my love!” she said again; “oh, my love!” She caught her breath, and he felt her tears hot on his cheek.

  As one picks up with tongs a red-hot cinder that has fallen on the hearth, Anthony’s brain caught hold of Anthony’s heart, lifted it, sought to set it back where it should be. Not with Rose. He never thought of Rose, did not so much as remember that a human being named Rose existed in this same wonderful world with him. What his brain told him was that She, — there was only one, — must rest, must not agitate herself with emotion, must be calm. Yet how answer these words of hers with words of less worth? That was impossible, and he did not even try. Yet what he felt was surprise when he found himself saying —

  “My love, you mustn’t. Be good. Be quiet. You’re not out of danger yet.” And then he said, just as Bats was, even then, saying to Rose, “Don’t! please don’t! “ and “You mustn’t cry. It’s bad for you.”
r />   “It’s only joy,” she said, and clung to him.

  A sudden wild fear assailed him. What if, after all, having brought her back from the dead, he should be powerless to keep her? What if, weeping and clinging to him, the new life he had given her should wane, sink, fade out? Up to this point he had known what to do. Now he did not know any longer. Wilton; why had he driven Wilton away? Of course; Wilton was at the other end of the telephone. He came back to the old life, the old self, with a sickening, bewildering half-turn. Yes; he had done it: he had raised the dead. Her breast pressed to his, softly palpitating with life, witnessed to his triumph. He had brought her back. She had been dead. He knew it. He had known it from the beginning, though he had told these fellows that she was not dead, because it was the simplest way of getting them to understand what he wanted to get understood. She had been dead. And he had gone down into unknown deeps for her, like a second Orpheus, and brought back an Eurydice, not his. But she thought herself his. He trembled and clasped her closer.

  “Don’t cry,” he said; “ah, don’t!”

  In the bringing of her back he must somehow have impressed his personality, himself, on her mind, so that when she clasped life again, she, with life, clasped him. He had done what he knew how to do. He had brought her back. But now? He was adrift on a sea of wild possibilities, impossibilities; and her arms were round his neck. He put his hands up and loosed those clinging hands.

  “Listen!” he said, in a new voice of authority; “listen. You must listen. And you must do what I say.”

  “Have I not, always?” she asked. And her pale face met him appealing over their clasped hands as he knelt and looked at her.

  “Collect yourself and listen,” he said; “it — it has taken longer than was expected. Things have changed.”

  He saw by her eyes that she hardly heard his words. But hers showed that she had heard his tone.

  “What is it?” she said. “Are you angry? What have I done? Did I not submit? Did I not do all that you say, though you know how I was afraid.”