Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  “What’s the good of your taking prizes,” he said, “if you’re such an idiot in the field? — might as well have a greyhound.”

  “I wish you had,” I said under my breath.

  I spent a week in torment, and then it occurred to me that this low-born, gaitered person would have been better pleased with my brother. So I tried to recall the tricks with which my brother had particularly aggravated me; and, the next time I smelt a partridge, I lay down, as I had seen my brother do, and lifted a foolish foot. I was rewarded with a pat and encouragement.

  I have now sunk entirely to my brother’s level. My master pronounces me to be a most excellent sporting dog. But I shall never forget the blows and angry words that were necessary to make me renounce my ideal of what a setter should be; and deep in my heart I still cherish, with passionate devotion, my views on duty, and my honourable family pride.

  IN HOMESPUN

  CONTENTS

  THE BRISTOL BOWL

  BARRING THE WAY

  GRANDSIRE TRIPLES

  A DEATH-BED CONFESSION

  ACTING FOR THE BEST

  GUILTY

  SON AND HEIR

  ONE WAY OF LOVE

  COALS OF FIRE

  LONDON 1896

  THESE tales are written in an English dialect — none the less a dialect for that it lacks uniformity in the misplacement of aspirates, and lacks, too, strange words misunderstanded of the reader.

  In South Kent villages with names ending in ‘den,’ and out away on the Sussex downs where villages end in ‘hurst,’ live the plain people who talk this plain speech — a speech that should be sweeter in English ears than the implacable consonants of a northern kail-yard, or the soft one-vowelled talk of western hillsides.

  All through the summer nights the market carts creak along the London road; to London go the wild young man and the steady young man who ‘betters’ himself. To London goes the girl seeking a ‘place.’ The ‘beano’ comes very near to this land — so near that across its marches you may hear the sackbut and shawm from the breaks. Once a year come the hoppers. And so the cup of the hills holds no untroubled pool of pastoral speech. This book therefore is of no value to a Middle English scholar, and needs no glossary.

  E. NESBIT.

  KENT, March 1896.

  THE BRISTOL BOWL

  MY cousin Sarah and me had only one aunt between us, and that was my Aunt Maria, who lived in the little cottage up by the church.

  Now my aunt had a tidy little bit of money laid by, which she couldn’t in reason expect to carry with her when her time came to go, wherever it was she might go to, and a houseful of furniture, old-fashioned, but strong and good still. So of course Sarah and I were not behindhand in going up to see the old lady, and taking her a pot or so of jam in fruiting season, or a turnover, maybe, on a baking-day, if the oven had been steady and the baking turned out well. And you couldn’t have told from aunt’s manner which of us she liked best; and there were some folks who thought she might leave half to me and half to Sarah, for she hadn’t chick nor child of her own.

  But aunt was of a having nature, and what she had once got together she couldn’t bear to see scattered. Even if it was only what she had got in her rag-bag, she would give it to one person to make a big quilt of, rather than give it to two persons to make two little quilts.

  So Sarah and me, we knew that the money might come to either or neither of us, but go to both it wouldn’t.

  Now, some people don’t believe in special mercies, but I have always thought there must have been something out of the common way for things to happen as they did the day Aunt Maria sprained her ankle. She sent over to the farm where we were living with my mother (who was a sensible woman, and carried on the farm much better than most men would have done, though that’s neither here nor there) to ask if Sarah or me could be spared to go and look after her a bit, for the doctor said she couldn’t put her foot to the ground for a week or more.

  Now, the minister I sit under always warns us against superstition, which, I take it, means believing more than you have any occasion to. And I’m not more given to it than most folks, but still I always have said, and I always shall say, that there’s a special Providence above us, and it wasn’t for nothing that Sarah was laid up with a quinsy that very morning. So I put a few things together — in Sarah’s hat-tin, I remember, which was handier to carry than my own — and I went up to the cottage.

  Aunt was in bed, and whether it was the sprained ankle or the hot weather I don’t know, but the old lady was cantankerous past all believing.

  ‘Good-morning, aunt,’ I said, when I went in, ‘and however did this happen?’

  ‘Oh, you’ve come, have you?’ she said, without answering my question, ‘and brought enough luggage to last you a year, I’ll be bound. When I was young, a girl could go to spend a week without nonsense of boxes or the like. A clean shift and a change of stockings done up in a cotton handkerchief — that was good enough for us. But now, you girls must all be young ladies. I’ve no patience with you.’

  I didn’t answer back, for answering back is a poor sort of business when the other person is able to make you pay for every idle word. Of course, it’s different if you haven’t anything to lose by it. So I just said —

  ‘Never mind, aunt dear. I really haven’t brought much; and what would you like me to do first?’

  ‘I should think you’d see for yourself,’ says she, thumping her pillows, ‘that there’s not a stick in the house been dusted yet — no, nor a stair swep’.’

  So I set to to clean the house, which was cleaner than most people’s already, and I got a nice bit of dinner and took it up on a tray. But no, that wasn’t right, for I’d put the best instead of the second-best cloth on the tray.

  ‘The workhouse is where you’ll end,’ says aunt.

  But she ate up all the dinner, and after that she seemed to get a little easier in her temper, and by-and-by fell off to sleep.

  I finished the stairs and tidied up the kitchen, and then I went to dust the parlour.

  Now, my aunt’s parlour was a perfect moral. I have never seen its like before or since. The mantelpiece and the corner cupboard, and the shelves behind the door, and the top of the chest of drawers and the bureau were all covered up with a perfect litter and lurry of old china. Not sets of anything, but different basins and jugs and cups and plates and china spoons and the bust of John Wesley and Elijah feeding the ravens in a red gown and standing on a green crockery grass plot.

  There was every kind of china uselessness that you could think of; and Sarah and I used to think it hard that a girl had no chance of getting on in life without she dusted all this rubbish once a week at the least.

  ‘Well, the sooner begun the sooner ended,’ says I to myself So I took the silk handkerchief that aunt kep’ a purpose — an old one it was that had belonged to uncle, and hemmed with aunt’s own hair and marked with his name in the corner. (Folks must have had a deal of time in those days, I often think.) And I began to dust the things, beginning with the big bowl on the chest of drawers, for aunt always would have everything done just one way and no other.

  You think, perhaps, that I might as well have sat down in the arm-chair and had a quiet nap and told aunt afterwards that I had dusted everything; but you must know she was quite equivalent to asking any of the neighbours who might drop in whether that dratted china of hers was dusted properly.

  It was a hot afternoon, and I was tired and a bit cross.

  ‘Aunts, and uncles, and grandmothers,’ thinks I to myself. ‘O what a stupid old lot they must have been to have set such store by all this gimcrackery! Oh, if only a bull or something could get in here for five minutes and smash every precious — oh, my cats alive!’

  I don’t know how I did it, but just as I was saying that about the bull, the big bowl slipped from my hands and broke in three pieces on the floor at my feet, and at the same moment I heard aunt thump, thump, thumping with the heel of her boot
on the floor for me to go up and tell her what I had broken. I tell you I wished from my heart at that moment that it was me that had had the quinsy instead of Sarah.

  I was so knocked all of a heap that I couldn’t move, and the boot went on thump, thump, thumping overhead. I had to go, but I was flustered to that degree that as I went up the stairs I couldn’t for the life of me think what I should say.

  Aunt was sitting up in bed, and she shook her fist at me when I went in.

  ‘Out with it!’ she said. ‘Speak the truth. Which of them is it? The yallar china dish, or the big teapot, or the Wedgwood tobaccojar that belonged to your grandfather?’

  And then all in a minute I knew what to say. The words seemed to be put into my mouth, like they were into the prophets of old.

  ‘Lord, aunt!’ I said, ‘you give me quite a turn, battering on the floor that way. What do you want? What is it?’

  ‘What have you broken, you wicked, heartless girl? Out with it, quick!’

  ‘Broken?’ I says. ‘Well, I hope you won’t mind much, aunt, but I have had a misfortune with the little cracked pie-dish that the potatopie was baked in; but I can easy get you another down at Wilkins.’

  Aunt fell back on her pillows with a sort of groan.

  ‘Thank them as be!’ she said, and then she sat up again, bolt upright all in a minute.

  ‘You fetch me the pieces,’ she says, short and sharp.

  I hope it isn’t boastful to say that I don’t think many girls would have had the sense to bring up that dish in their apron and to break it on their knee as they came up the stairs, and take it in and show it to her.

  ‘Don’t say another word about it,’ says my aunt, as kind and hearty as you please.

  Things not being as bad as she expected, it made her quite willing to put up with things being a bit worse than they had been five minutes before. I’ve often noticed it is this way with people.

  ‘You’re a good girl, Jane,’ she says, ‘a very good girl, and I shan’t forget it, my dear. Go on down, now, and make haste with your washing up, and get to work dusting the china.’

  And it was such a weight off my mind to feel that she didn’t know, that I felt as if everything was all right until I got downstairs and see those three pieces of that red and yellow and green and blue basin lying on the carpet as I had left them. My heart beat fit to knock me down, but I kept my wits about me, and I stuck it together with white of egg, and put it back in its place on the wool mat with the little teapot on top of it so that no one could have noticed that there was anything wrong with it unless they took the thing up in their hands.

  The next three days I waited on aunt hand and foot, and did everything she asked, and she was as pleased as pleased, till I felt that Sarah hadn’t a chance.

  On the third day I told aunt that mother would want me, it being Saturday, and she was quite willing for the Widow Gladish to come in and do for her while I was away. I chose a Saturday because that and Sunday were the only days the china wasn’t dusted.

  I went home as quick as I could, and I told mother all about it.

  ‘And don’t you, for any sake, tell Sarah a word about it, or quinsy or no quinsy, she’ll be up at aunt’s before we know where we are, to let the cat out of the bag.’

  I took all the money out of my money-box that I had saved up for starting housekeeping with in case aunt should leave her money to

  Sarah, and I put it in my pocket, and I took the first train to London.

  I asked the porter at the station to tell me the way to the best china-shop in London; and he told me there was one in Queen Victoria Street. So I went there.

  It was a beautiful place, with velvet sofas for people to sit down on while they looked at the china and glass and chose which pattern they would have; and there were thousands of basins far more beautiful than aunt’s, but not one like hers, and when I had looked over some fifty of them, the gentleman who was showing them to me said —

  ‘Perhaps you could give me some idea of what it is you do want?’

  Now, I had brought one of the pieces of the bowl up with me, the piece at the back where it didn’t show, and I pulled it out and showed it to him.

  ‘I want one like this,’ I said.

  ‘Oh!’ said he, ‘why didn’t you say so at first? We don’t keep that sort of thing here, and it’s a chance if you get it at all. You might in Wardour Street, or at Mr. Aked’s in Green Street, Leicester Square.’

  Well, time was getting on and I did a thing I had never done before, though I had often read of it in the novelettes. I waved my umbrella and I got into a hansom cab.

  ‘Young man,’ I said, ‘will you please drive to Mr. Aked’s in Green Street, Leicester Square? and drive careful, young man, for I have a piece of china in my hands that’s worth a fortune to me.’

  So he grinned and I got in and the cab started. A hansom cab is better than any carriage you ever rode in, with soft cushions to lean against and little looking-glasses to look at yourself in, and, somehow, you don’t hear the wheels. I leaned back and looked at myself and felt like a duchess, for I had my new hat and mantle on, and I knew I looked nice by the way the young men on the tops of the omnibuses looked at me and smiled. It was a lovely drive. When we got to Mr. Aked’s, which looked to me more like a rag-and-bone shop than anything else, and very poor after the beautiful place in Queen Victoria Street, I got out and went in.

  An old gentleman came towards me and asked what he could do for me, and he looked surprised, as though he wasn’t used to see such smart girls in his pokey old shop.

  ‘Please, sir,’ I said, ‘I want a bowl like this, if you have got such a thing among your old odds and ends.’

  He took the piece of china and looked at it through his glasses for a minute. Then he gave it back to me very carefully.

  ‘There’s not a piece of this ware in the market. The few specimens extant are in private collections.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said; ‘and can’t I get another like it?’

  ‘Not if you were to offer me a hundred pounds down,’ said the old man.

  I couldn’t help it. I sat down on the nearest chair and began to cry, for it seemed as if all my hopes of Aunt Maria’s money were fading away like the ‘roseate hues of early dawn’ in the hymn.

  ‘Come, come,’ said he, ‘what’s the matter? Cheer up. I suppose you’re in service and you’ve broken this bowl. Isn’t that it? But never mind — your mistress can’t do anything to you. Servants can’t be made to replace valuable bowls like this.’

  That dried my eyes pretty quick, I can tell you.

  ‘Me in service!’ I said. ‘And my grandfather farming his own land before you were picked out of the gutter, I’ll be bound’ — God forgive me that I should say such a thing to an old man—’and my own aunt with a better lot of fal-lals and trumpery in her parlour than you’ve got in all your shop.’

  With that he laughed, and I flounced out of the shop, my cheeks flaming and my heart going like an eight-day clock. I was so flustered I didn’t notice that some one came out of the shop after me, and I had walked a dozen yards down the street before I saw that some one was alongside of me and saying something to me.

  It was another old gentleman — at least, not so old as Mr. Aked, — and I remembered now having seen him at the back of the shop. He was taking off his hat, as polite as you please.

  ‘You’re quite overcome,’ he said, ‘and no wonder. Come and have a little dinner with me quietly somewhere, and tell me all about it.’

  ‘I don’t want any dinner,’ I said; ‘I want to go and drown myself, for it’s all over, and I’ve nothing more to look for. My brother Harry will have the farm, and I shan’t get a penny of aunt’s money. Why couldn’t they have made plenty of the ugly old basins while they were about it?’

  ‘Come and have some dinner,’ the old gentleman said again, ‘and perhaps I can help you. I have a basin just like that.’

  So I did. We went to some place where there were a
lot of little tables and waiters in black clothes; and we had a nice dinner, and I did feel better for it, and when we had come to the cheese, I told him exactly what had happened; and he leaned his head on his hands, and he thought, and thought, and presently he said —

  ‘Do you think your aunt would sell any of her china?’

  ‘That I’m downright sure she wouldn’t,’ I said; ‘so it’s no good your asking.’

  ‘Well, you see, your aunt won’t be down for three or four days yet. You give me your address, and I’ll write and tell you if I think of anything.’

  And with that he paid the bill and had a cab called, and put me in it and paid the driver, and I went along home.

  I didn’t sleep much that night, and next day I was thinking all sermon-time of whatever I could do, for it wasn’t in nature that my aunt would not find me out before another two days was over my head; and she had never been so nice and kind, and had even gone so far as to say —

  ‘Whoever my money’s left to, Jane, will be bound not to part with my china, nor my old chairs and presses. Don’t you forget, my child. It’s all written in black and white, and if the person my money’s left to sells these old things, my money goes along too.’

  There was no letter on Monday morning, and I was up to my elbows in the suds, doing aunt’s bit of washing for her, when I heard a step on the brick path, and there was that old gentleman coming round by the water-butt to the back-door.

  ‘Well?’ says he. ‘Anything fresh happened?

  ‘For any sake,’ says I in a whisper, ‘get out of this. She’ll hear if I say more than two words to you. If you’ve thought of anything that’s to be of any use, get along to the church porch, and I’ll be with you as soon as I can get these things through the rinse-water and out on the line.’