Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “The day before our wedding. You remember. We wished to make sure that we should never part. You arranged the altar and the lambskin and gave me the drug and you kissed me and I surrendered my will to yours. Oh, Anthony! You told me it would not hurt. It hurt like death. But you were there, holding my hand, and I did not call out, did I? I was brave, yes? And then you kissed me through the beginnings of a dream, and then I slept till you woke me in a strange place and told me that I had been asleep longer than the three hours that were to have seen the new life made. How long had I been asleep?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean what day was it?”

  “The twenty-first of June, of course,” she said wonderingly.

  “And the year?”

  “Why, this year, of course.”

  “What year is this?”

  “You forget even that? My poor boy! But I will take care of you. It is the year eighteen hundred and sixty-six,” she explained gently.

  “In the year eighteen hundred and sixty-six you were put to sleep?”

  “Yes, dear, yes. Don’t agitate yourself.”

  “You have slept a long time,” he said difficultly. “I am afraid to tell you how long.”

  “Days?”

  “More than days. More than weeks.”

  “But it is summer still,” she said, touching the rose at her breast.

  “More than months. Eugenia, it’s possible, but I can’t believe it. Tell me more. Who was in the house when you were put to sleep?”

  “Your brother Bartholomew and your mother. She was sitting in the library. And Cecily Drelincourt, your cousin, you know, that was to have been our bridesmaid.”

  “All that,” he said, “I knew. I might have transferred my thought to you. Tell me more.”

  “I knew your secret; how the floor was raised to barricade the door. And I know all the ways of the house and the garden. Blindfold me and I will show you that I know. Or send for your brother or Cecily. They will persuade you. It is terrible to have forgotten, but I will remind you of everything, and presently you will remember.”

  He found himself kneeling before her, holding her hands, gazing into her eyes.

  “Oh, my God,” he said, “if it were only as you think. Be brave and listen. I must tell you. I wish to God I could take you away somewhere where you need never know. Even now, perhaps—”His hand tightened on hers. What was Rose? What was a promise of marriage? What was anything, weighed in the balance against this love that life suddenly offered? He could take her away. What was money for but to buy happiness? Take her away to some distant place, some island in the far seas, and she need never know.

  “Tell me what?” she said, stroking his hair with hands that thrilled.

  “I will tell you nothing but that I love you,” he said. “Whatever’s true, or isn’t true, I love you. I know what love is now. I didn’t before. Kiss me, my love, and tell me that nothing shall ever come between us, nothing, nothing.”

  She told him what he asked, crushed in his arms, her heart against his.

  “You’ll marry me to-morrow?” he said at last, releasing her and drawing back to let his eyes drink in the beauty and the love of her face.

  “But yes,” she said, “and then you will remember. And I will do for you what must be done so that we live for ever, together.”

  Both had risen and were standing face to face, his hands on her shoulders and hers on his breast.

  “I’ve been a fool,” he said, “forgive me. But I’m sane now. There’s nothing in the world but you.”

  She laughed softly, gladly, and raised her innocent lips to his.

  And the door opened suddenly. And Lady Blair came in, saw them, and the light word of apology on her lips froze there. She looked again, closed the door and came towards them.

  “So this is the new relative?” she said contemptuously. “You lose no time, Miss Delmar.”

  “Who is this person?” Eugenia asked coldly.

  “Present your new friend by all means,” said Lady Blair.

  “This is Miss Delmar, my promised wife,” Anthony said “Eugenia, this is Lady Blair.”

  He was trying to catch Lady Blair’s eyes, but she had no eyes for any but Eugenia. And Eugenia was saying in tones of ice, “To what are we indebted for the pleasure of Lady Blair’s company?”

  “You are very like your mother,” said Lady Blair. “I congratulate you on carrying on the family tradition. Your mother also came to this house. She also broke another girl’s heart, as you are doing. Does Rose know of her good fortune yet?” she asked Anthony, and stood there, her poor old face white under the rouge, and the roses in her muslin hat nodding to her trembling.

  “You don’t understand,” he said, “dear Lady Blair, leave us. I’ll explain later.”

  “No explanation is needed,” she said; “the situation explains itself. Yes, I will leave you. I will leave your house and take your poor broken-hearted Rose with me.”

  “Who?” said Eugenia to Anthony, “is Rose?”

  “You know Rose.”

  “But why should she — ? Is that what you have to tell me? Tell me then later when this lady shall have left us.”

  “I will tell you,” said Lady Blair. “Forty-six years ago your mother came to this house. Anthony Drelincourt had loved, or almost loved another girl who would have died for him. As soon as he saw your mother... faith, honesty, honour... he forgot them all. He threw everything away, for your mother. And she — she amused herself by breaking my heart, and his.

  And then she left him on the eve of their wedding, and he died of it. That’s your mother’s record. And she is like her, Anthony,” she went on; “so like her that I can see the old Eugenia in her as if she were a looking-glass. Even the dress — how did you get that dress?” she asked.

  “It is my own dress,” said Eugenia composedly, kindly even, and in a low voice she said: “Anthony, I am sorry. Why did you not tell me she was deranged? My mother died in the Madeiras. She was never in England.”

  “That was your grandmother,” the old lady said; “your mother — Anthony, I will tell you, so that you may know what it is that you are sacrificing Rose for. The night before this girl’s mother ran away, I went to her room. I humbled myself. I told her how I had always loved Anthony, and how he would have been happy with me, and I begged her — oh, it’s too long ago for me to have any shame about it — I implored her to go, to leave him, to give him up to me. She never loved him as I did. And she listened, smiling to herself, the Jezebel, and making a hairpin red-hot in the candle-flame and making little holes in the wax with it; and when I could say no more, she laughed and said she was sorry for me. And then she said: ‘Give him up! I would throw you and all the rest of the world into hell and cross over your burning bodies to get to him. That’s what love means. Take your milk and water to another market.’”

  “Cecily told you that,” Eugenia said, looking down; “I have been very sorry for that.”

  “Told me? “ Lady Blair echoed, and drowned Eugenia’s later words. “I was that Cecily Drelincourt. I have carried the mark of those words for fifty years or near it. And your mother told you, I suppose? And now you come here to break another girl’s heart as your mother broke mine. Now you know what’s in her blood, Anthony; and I’ve warned you.”

  “You told me all this before,” said he. “Dear Lady Blair, please, please be calm. You don’t understand.”

  “And I,” said Eugenia, “do not understand either. Is this Cecily’s grandmother?”

  “I tell you I am Cecily,” said Lady Blair, and stamped her foot.

  A faint shadow of some horror not yet apprehended crossed Eugenia’s face. She moved her lips, but her opening “But “ was lost in Lady Blair’s next words.

  “The mother took my love, and the daughter takes you. Oh, Anthony! all the nonsense I’ve talked! You understood, didn’t you, that to me you’re the son I’ve never had, the son I should have had if that woman had not come between my lov
er and me?”

  “I understood,” said Anthony, and Eugenia said a little faintly —

  “Stop; don’t say any more. I’m sorry you’re unhappy. But I don’t understand. You don’t mean to say that you were Cecily Drelincourt, the same Cecily that was to have been my bridesmaid, that asked — I didn’t hear you right, did I?”

  “Give him up,” said Lady Blair, clasping her hands on which the veins stood out blue; “forgive anything I’ve said and give him up. Don’t take him away from me.” She began to cry the tremulous quick tears of age.

  “Don’t,” said Eugenia with deathly quiet. “What was it you said, Anthony? About my having been asleep for more than weeks? Was it years? Not years, Anthony; not years! “ She clung to him with the terror of a child lost in the dark. “It’s not true. It can’t be. But when she said, ‘Don’t take him away,’ her voice was like... Anthony, I can’t bear it; I can’t! Tell me was it years? What year is this?”

  It was Lady Blair who answered: “Nineteen hundred and eleven.” Her mouth hung slackly, the tears had dabbled the rouge, and her figure seemed to have shrunk, fallen in upon itself.

  “Is it true? “ Eugenia asked, in a whisper.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “I’ve been asleep for fifty years, and Cecily, that’s Cecily. Am I like that?” she ran to a mirror, “but of course I saw this morning. I am myself. But every one else has gone. Oh, horrible, horrible! Why did you wake me?”

  She was coming back to him, hands outstretched, but she stopped short.

  “You’re not old. Did you sleep too?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then you — then you — who are you?”

  “Your lover, dear,” he said, and moved towards her. But she drew back.

  “No, no,” she cried; “you are some one else. You didn’t know me. You don’t know me. Don’t come near me. I’m a ghost. I’m not real. I’ve been dead for fifty years. Cecily, if you are Cecily, you know me. You’re real. Oh, help me, help me!”

  Lady Blair only stared and shook her head and wept. Anthony, at his wits’ end, stood between them.

  “It is true,” he said to Lady Blair; “she is the Eugenia who wronged you. She has been in a trance for a long time. She never ran away.” He told her very plainly and quietly, with a purposeful choice of commonplace words, all that had happened. He could not be sure that she understood. But when he ended she said—”If you and she are not mad, and this is true, she should have a scar on her hand, and she can tell me how she came by it.”

  “You picked up a stiletto from my dressing-table,” Eugenia said slowly, “and tried to stab me with it. It went into my hand and you were sorry.” She held out her hand, palm uppermost. There was on it a little scar, not quite healed.

  “You see,” she said, “it’s fifty years ago to you. To me it’s three days ago. Oh, you loved me when I first came, before Anthony did; help me now. I’ve nobody but you.”

  Lady Blair seemed to awaken; the tottering, shrunken old woman seemed to expand, to straighten to something that was, quite recognizably, Lady Blair.

  “I found a bit of her dress,” she said, “among the straw. I wondered. But I never thought. Fifty years. Your Anthony’s dead.”

  “No!” the girl almost shrieked “Yes, that is his nephew. You belong to my time, not his.”

  “No, no, no!” a wail of anguish ran through the house.

  “I am not dead,” he said. “Whatever else has changed, I have not changed. I am Anthony who loves you. I have always loved you. I always shall.”

  She looked at him and spoke softly.

  “It is you,” she said; “you may have died as she says, but you have come into the world again to wake me. Don’t I know you? It is you — but — it’s all in vain. I know it.”

  She shrank from him. Lady Blair came forward with outstretched hands.

  “Oh, my poor dear,” she said, and enfolded Eugenia with a tragic tenderness. “ I can forgive you anything now I know you didn’t desert my Anthony.”

  Eugenia clung to her. Anthony left them together.

  * * * * * *

  He went out into the garden and, shaken out of all self-control, told his story to the first person he met. It was the doctor. Anthony fought the other’s unbelief, beat down his rational distrusts, till he felt that he had overpowered him, convinced him.

  “And I love her,” Anthony ended. “ I didn’t know what love was like before. What am I to do? I must tell Rose.”

  “You never loved Rose,” said the doctor slowly.

  “No. I know that now. But I thought I did. And to have to hurt her like this — oh, my God! — but I can’t do anything else.”

  “I have the honour to wish you good morning,” said the doctor.

  “You mean,” Anthony looked at him in wonder; “ you mean that you don’t believe “I mean that I believe that at last you have fallen in love, and that you’ve arranged all this elaborate melodrama to cover your breaking with Rose. But you might have spared yourself the trouble. She won’t believe your twaddling fairy stories about Sleeping Beauties. And I think Rose is jolly well rid of you, at any price. If you want to know what I believe, it’s that. So now you know.”

  He turned away and left Anthony standing there.

  To him presently came Bats. And to him Anthony told, in far fewer words, what he had told the doctor. Bats listened, nodded now and then. “And Rose,”

  Anthony ended; “my poor Rose. I do love Rose too, Billy. I thought I loved her as men do love. I didn’t know.”

  “It may help you a little,” Bats said slowly, “if I tell you that I’m certain Rose never loved you either — not as you and I mean when we say ‘love.’ You piqued her; you were indifferent. The rest of us were at her feet. Oh yes, I’m there with the rest, if you care to know. That sort of pique has passed for love with many a woman before Rose. And as for the other; Drelincourt, I’ve told you many a time that it was dangerous.

  I tell it you again now. You’ve done what you set out to do, and you’ve found — her. But there are some things that are... not allowed. I don’t know how the judgment will come on you. But it will come. You’ve got beyond the line that we’re not allowed to go beyond. These things can’t be.”

  “I mean to marry Eugenia,” he said. “I’ve won, all along the line. If I’ve not got to hurt Rose, there’s nothing in the world but splendid happiness.”

  But Bats shook his head.

  “We’re not at the end yet,” he said.

  CHAPTER XXI. THE OLD LOVE

  ANTHONY went slowly back to the Empire room. It was empty. He sat down on the window seat where so little a while ago he had held his world in his arms. His world. Deliberately he repeated the words. For they were true. Science, psychology, the great mysteries, honour, fame, friendship, nothing mattered but this.

  “I must have loved her in some other life,” he said, as so many have said before him, so many suddenly realizing the strength of the unknown god, blindingly made manifest. “There must have been another life, when she and I were together. She could not otherwise, in the very first moment of my seeing her, have become the heart of my heart.”

  For he perceived now what before he had not realized, that at the very first sight of her pale face lying so still in that still and hidden chamber, he had, as it were, become alive. Lines he had never understood sang themselves just past his hearing. How did the thing go?

  “Hair in heaps lay heavily

  Over a pale brow spirit pure.

  And lo, a blade for a knight’s emprise

  Filled the empty sheath of a man.

  He looked at her as a lover can,

  She looked at him as one who awakes,

  The past was asleep, and their life began.”

  Yes, that was it, or near it; “a blade for a knight’s emprise.” How foolish to think that work and fame were worth nothing. They were worth everything, since he could give them to her.

  “She belongs to my ti
me, not yours,” Lady Blair had said. A saying meaningless. She belonged to him, and what had time to do with love? “Love’s not Time’s fool,” he said, and realized with almost a smile that for him, as for the other lovers at whom he had mocked, the only language was the language of lovers and poets.

  “And all the time I was mocking at Love, here it was in me, my very self, waiting to come to life, just dormant like some live thing that waits for the spring sunshine to awaken it; like her, who waited to be awakened.” Again he almost smiled as he saw to what a bathos of egoism his metaphor was leading him. His fancy busied itself with his future — their future — drinking in the dream of a long life spent together, of youth’s rose-crowned banquet, of a prime, vigorous and splendid, and of the gentle tender peace of an old age side by side.

  Then the thought struck him with a sudden buffet. She would not grow old. She had been down into the valley of the shadow of death and had come back having conquered death and broken the arrows of old age. She would be always young. And he — he would grow old and grey; and all this life that he looked to to draw them closer through a growing twilight till death’s kind darkness enfolded them — all this life in the dream of which he had gloried, this life would be like a wedge mercilessly struck home by the years, driving him and her further and further apart. In this new enlightenment, Death, whom he had sought to conquer, appeared to him as a friend outraged and for ever estranged. He did not want to live for ever on this earth. He wanted to live the allotted time, as other lovers lived it, to see her children grow up, and know the tenderness that grows with the waning of youth and beauty. He had been wrong. His discovery was a useless one: who wanted to live for ever? Yet had he not made it, he had never found her, who alone made life worth the living.

  The voices of Esther and Linda and the others came to him through the open window like the voices of actors in a play in which he, far off in the gallery, had ceased to be interested. He sat there a long time, thinking, dreaming, musing. And in and through the web of musings, dreams and thoughts, ran the golden thread of this new magic of love, now at last discovered. What were any of his discoveries compared with that? So he thought, sitting there very still.