Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  And behind drawn curtains in the flower-scented, flower-bright room Charles stirred restlessly, and Edward, also restless, was saying, “I could almost believe that she would come to-night, now. All the rest of the time I have known in my heart that she would not come, but now, for the first time, it seems possible.”

  But the hours wore on and still he and the flowers and Charles were alone together.

  XIX. HURSTMONCEAUX

  THE sky was gray; gray mists veiled the sea and wisps of sea-fog lay in the hollows of the downs. The young morning had not yet decided whether it meant to be, when it was a grown-up day, a very wet day, when your umbrella is useless and you give it up and make up your mind to be wet through and change as soon as you get home; or a very fine day, one of those radiant, blazing days that are golden to the very end, days when you almost forget it ever has rained, and find it hard to believe that it will ever rain again. It was one of those mornings whose development is as darkly hid as the future of any babe smiling at you from its cradle and defying you to foresee whether it will grow up to be a great criminal or a great saint. If you love the baby, and trim its cradle with hopes and dreams, you will find it hard to believe that the darling can grow up just nobody in particular, like the rest of us.

  To Edward, lying at his long length on the short turf and looking out to the opalescent mist that hid the sea, it was not possible to believe that this day of all days could be anything but very good or very bad. The elements must be for him or against him, must help or hinder. That they could be indifferent was unthinkable.

  For this was the day of days, come, at last, after weeks of a waiting that had not been patient, the day when he should, indeed, and not in dreams, see her again.

  This was the thought, insistent, even in his sleep, that had at last broken up that sleep, as a trickle of water breaks up the embankment of a reservoir, letting out the deep floods inclosed by that barrier, the deep flood of pent-up longing which sleep could no longer restrain from consciousness.

  So he had got up and come out to look over the sea and think of her.

  Her letters made a bulge in his coat pocket; he pulled them out — a fat little bundle secured by an elastic band — and he read:

  It is strange that you should have been expecting to see me just then, because just then I really had come as far as the door of your house — only everything was dark except for a murky star of gas that had been turned down in the hall. So I told myself that you weren’t there, and I didn’t want to be told so by any one else, and I went home. I like your letter; I like it very, very much, but it makes me see how stupid and selfish I have been to let you stay in London in the summer-time, waiting all the time for some one who never comes. And I want you to go away, right into the country, and I’ll write to you as soon as Aunt Alice goes abroad. She is very, very much better. It won’t be long now. A week, perhaps? Two weeks? Go away where it is green and glorious, and I shall think of you all the time and wish myself where you are.

  At first when I read your letter I thought that I must see you just once before you go away. But now I see that I won’t see you. If I were to see you it would not really make anything any easier. And nothing is very easy, as it is. You understand, don’t you?

  He hoped he did understand. If he understood, her letter meant the beginning of the end of the incredible honeymoon. For he dared to read the letter as he desired to read it, and where she had written, “If I were to see you it would not really make anything easier, and nothing is very easy,” he had read, “If I were to see you I should find it too hard to part from you again,” and next moment cursed himself for a presumptuous fool. What was he that the gods should now and thus renew to him an assurance that had once been his for a few magic hours, in the wild night-rush of a London-bound train, when the air was scented with the roses of dreams and the lady of all dreams slept upon his shoulder? For in those long and lonely days, in his London lodging, that assurance had dwindled, shriveled, faded to a maddening incertitude; the whole splendid pageant of his days had faded and shrunk to the pale substance of a vision.

  Presumptuous or not, foolish or wise, the meaning which her letter might have revived his spirit, as the sweet air of dawn revives a man who comes out of a darkened prison to meet the waxing light and the first twitter of the newly awakened birds.

  He had written:

  I will go away — I will go away to the sea and wait there for you. You are right, as always. If I am not to see you it is less intolerable not to be near you. I hardly dare to read in your letter what I wish you could have meant me to read. But I warn you that when once I have you again I shall never let you go.

  She had not answered that, though she had written every day, little, friendly, intimate notes, telling him of every day’s little happenings and what were to be the happenings of the morrow. She told him, at last, that the aunt was really going, and when. She wrote:

  The aunts are going to Scotland and I shall be left to see Aunt Alice off, and then, when she is gone, I will write and make an assignation with my friend and comrade, and we will go back to the good, green country. It won’t be all different, will it? People meet again after years and don’t recognize each other. I suppose they have been changing, changing a little bit every day. Do you think we shall have changed — contrariwise? You one way and I the other, I mean, so that when we do meet we sha’n’t be the same?

  The last letter of all was the shortest. “Monday,” it said at the top of its page, and then:

  Auntie leaves Folkestone to-morrow by the morning boat. I will let you know where to find me. Would Thursday suit you, in the afternoon?

  He had felt no doubt as to that. Thursday would not suit him — but Tuesday would — and not the afternoon, but the morning. Had she really thought that he would wait two days?

  And now, lying on the turf, he read her letters through and laid his face down on the last and dreamed a little, with closed eyes; and when he lifted his head again the mist had grown thin as a bridal veil and the sun was plain to be seen, showing a golden face above the sea, where a million points of light gleamed like tinsel through a curtain of gossamer. The air was warmer, the scent of the wild thyme sweeter and stronger, and overhead, in the gray that was growing every moment clearer and bluer, the skylarks were singing again.

  “I knew,” said Edward, as he went down toward the town where the smoke of the newly lighted fires rose straight from the chimneys—”I knew it couldn’t have the heart not to be fine, on this day of all days.”

  He went back to his hotel and inspected once more certain of the purchases he had made since her decree had banished him from London. Resisting a momentary impulse toward asceticism in the matter of breakfast, as an outward and visible testimony to the unimportance of material things at such a time as this, he found himself at the other end of the pendulum’s swing, ordering just such a meal as he would have ordered had she been with him, and ate his grape-fruit and omelette and delicately browned fish with thoughtful appreciation, making of them a banquet in her honor. He toasted her in the coffee, and, as he ate, romance insisted that it was not himself, but her man, whom he was treating to that perfectly served breakfast; and common sense added, “Yes, and no man’s at his best if he’s hungry.” Before he reached the marmalade he had come to regard that impulse to tea and toast as a man might regard a vanished temptation to alcoholic excess.

  “A hungry man’s only half a man — the bad-tempered half,” he said, lighting his first cigarette, and strolling out into the sunny inn-yard, where a hostler with a straw in his mouth was busy with a bucket of water and a horse’s legs; a pleasanter man, Edward thought, than the other man there, busy with oil and petrol and cotton-waste and a very new motor-car.

  “I wish motors had never been invented,” he told himself.

  All the same, when the hour-glass of time had let through the last grain of the space of their separation, and a pale girl withdrew her eyes from the speck of a boat growing smaller
and smaller on a sea that sparkled so brilliantly that you could hardly look at it, and almost listlessly turned to walk back alone to her hotel, she was confronted with a very pale young man standing beside a very new motor-car.

  “You!” she said, and, as once before, the blood rushed to her face, and his to his, answering.

  This was the moment for which he had lived for weeks — and they shook hands like strangers! She was grave and cold. What would her first words be?

  “But I said Thursday,” she said.

  He looked like a criminal detected in a larceny.

  “I said Tuesday,” he told her. “Do you mind?”

  In his anticipations of this moment he had always counted on a mutual wave of gladness in their reunion, in which all doubts should be resolved and all explanations be easy. Now, he himself felt awkward as a school-boy. And he noted in her a quite inexplicable restraint and embarrassment, although she was certainly saying that she did not mind, and that it did not matter at all.

  “Where were you going?” he asked, mechanically, just for something to say as they stood there by the motor, jostled by all the people who had been seeing other people off.

  “To my hotel, to pack and to write to you, as I said I would.”

  “Shall I go away and wait for the letter?” he asked, feeling that tea and toast would have done well enough.

  “No. Don’t be silly!” she said.

  Now that the flush had died from her face he saw that it was paler and thinner. She saw in him a curious hardness. It was one of those moments when the light of life has gone out and there is nothing to be said that is not futile and nothing to be done that is of any use.

  “It’s a new car!” she said. “Yours?”

  “Yes,” he answered.

  She wore a silky, soft-brown, holland-colored dress and a white hat with some black velvet about it and a dark rose. A wine-colored scarf fluttered about her, and in spite of her paleness and thinness she was more beautiful than ever and far more dear.

  “Do you like the car?” he added, stupidly.

  “Very much,” she said, without so much as glancing at it. She looked up. “Well, what are we going to do?” she asked, almost crossly.

  “Whatever you like.”

  “Oh, dear!” her voice was plaintive. “You must have had some idea or you wouldn’t have come to-day instead of Thursday. Hadn’t you any idea, any scheme, any plan?”

  “Yes,” he said, “but it does not matter; I’ll do anything you say.”

  “Oh, well,” she said, “if you won’t tell me your plans—” and she sketched the gesture of one who turns away and goes on her way alone.

  “But I will,” he said, quickly. Yet still he spoke like a very stupid child saying a lesson which it does not quite know. “I will tell you — I thought if you liked the car we might just get in and drive off—”

  “Where?”

  “Oh, just anywhere,” he said, and hastened to add, “but I see now how silly it was. Of course I ought to have written and explained. Surprises are always silly, aren’t they?”

  And he felt as one who sits forlorn and feels the cold winds blow through the ruined arches of a castle in Spain. He had not read her letter as she had meant him to read it. Everything was different. Perhaps, after all, she did not — never had — he had deceived himself, like the fatuous fool he was.

  “I ought to have thought,” he blundered. “Of course you would not care to go motoring in that beautiful gown — and that hat — that makes you look like the Gardener’s Daughter—’a sight to make an old man young’” — he added, recovering a very little—”and no coat! But I did buy a coat.”

  He leaned over and pulled out of the car a mass of soft brown fur lined with ermine. “Though, of course, it would have been better to ask you to choose one — I expect it’s all wrong,” and he heaved up the furry folds half-heartedly, without looking at her. “I just thought you might not have thought of getting one . . .” and his voice trailed away into silence, a silence that hers did not break.

  Slowly she put out her hand and touched the fur, still without speaking. Then he did look at her, and suddenly the light of life sprang up again and the world was illumined from end to end. For her face that had been pale was pink as the wild rose is pink, and her mouth that had been sad was smiling; in her eyes was all, or almost all, that he had hoped to see there when, at last, after this long parting they should meet; and her hand was stroking the fur as if she loved it.

  “It’s the most beautiful coat in the world,” she said, and her voice, like her face, was transfigured. She turned her shoulders to him that he might lay the coat on them, slipped her arms into the sleeves, and wheeled to confront him, her face alight with a mingled tenderness and gaiety that turned him, for a moment, faint and giddy.

  “You really like it, Princess?” he faltered.

  “I love it,” she made answer; “and now, my lord, will you take me in your nice new motor-car to my unworthy hotel, that I may pay my miserable bill and secure my despicable luggage? Even a princess, you know, can’t go to the world’s end without a pair of slippers, a comb, and a clean pocket-handkerchief.”

  With that she was in the car, and he followed, gasping, in the sudden wave of enchantment that had changed the world. What had happened? Why had she suddenly changed? How had the cloud vanished? Whence had the cloud arisen?

  His heart, or his vanity, or both, had been too bruised by the sudden blow to recover all in a minute. His brain, too, was stunned by the lack of any reason in what had happened. Why had she not been glad to see him? Why had she so suddenly turned from a cold stranger to her very self? What had worked the bad magic? Not, surely, the sight of a friend two days before she expected that sight? What had worked the good magic? It was not thinkable that any magic at all could be worked by a fur coat or even by the foresight that had provided it. His mind busied itself with such questions and felt no pain in them because it knew that his heart held in reserve, to be contemplated presently, the glorious fact that the good magic had, somehow, been wrought. But he would not call his heart into court yet. So that it was in silence that he drove through the steep streets. His own slight luggage was already at the back of the car, and when hers was added to it and they had left the town behind he still said nothing but the few words needed to such little matters as the disposing of the luggage and the satisfying of the hotel porter.

  And when all the tall, stuccoed houses were left behind and they were rushing smoothly through the fresh morning, with the green sea on one side and the green marshland on the other, still he did not speak and kept his eyes on the white ribbon of road unrolling itself before him. It was just as they passed the third Martello tower that her hand crept under his arm. He took his from the steering-wheel for a moment to lay it on hers, and after that his heart had its way, and the silence, though still unbroken, was no longer the cloak for anxious questionings, but the splendid robe of a tender, tremulous joy.

  They sped on; through Dymchurch, where the great sea-wall is, and where the houses are built lower than the sea, so that the high tide laps against the sea-wall level with the bedroom windows of the little houses that nestle behind its strong shelter.

  It was she who spoke then. “Isn’t it a dear little place?” she said. “Wouldn’t you like to live in a Martello tower? They have one beautiful big room with a Norman-looking pillar in the middle, and a down-stairs part for kitchens, and an up-stairs, where the big gun is, that you could roof in for bedrooms. I should like a Martello! Don’t you want to buy one? You know they built them to keep out Napoleon — and the canal as well — but no one uses them now. They just keep fishing-nets in them and wheelbarrows and eel-spears.”

  “Let’s buy the haunted one,” he said, and hoped that his voice was steady, for it was not of haunted towers that he desired to speak. “A soldier’s ghost walks there; the village people say ‘it’s one of them there Roman soldiers that lived here when them towers was built in old ancient
Roman times.’”

  She laughed. “You know Dymchurch, then? Isn’t it nice when people know the same places? Almost as nice as it is when they’ve read the same books.”

  But the silence was not broken, only lifted. Her hand crept a little farther into the crook of his arm.

  It was as they passed the spick-and-span white-painted windmill at New Romney that he said: “Don’t you think it would be nicer to buy a windmill? There are four stories to that, and you can shift the top one around so that your window’s always away from the wind.”

  “Yes,” she said, “we really ought to buy a windmill.”

  The “we” lay warm at his heart until they came near Rye that stands upon its hill, looking over the marshes to the sea that deserted it so many years ago.

  “There’s a clock in Rye church that Sir Walter Raleigh presented to the town,” he said, instructively.

  “And Henry James lived there,” said she.

  “Shall we have lunch at the Mermaid Tavern? Or would you rather have a picnic? I’ve got a basket.”

  “How clever of you! Of course we’ll have the picnic. And it’s quite early. How beautifully the car is going!”

  “Yes, isn’t she?”

  “Has she a name yet?”

  “No. You must christen her.”

  “I should call her Time, because she flies so fast.”

  “You’d have to particularize. All time doesn’t fly.”

  “No,” she said, “ah, no! And she ought to have a splendid sort of name, she is so magnificently triumphant over space and time. Raleigh would have called her the ‘Gloriana.’”

  “So will we,” said he. And they left Rye behind, and again the silence folded them round, and still her hand lay close in the crook of his arm.