Complete Novels of E Nesbit, page 537
“Why,” he said, “I know well enough you’re miles too good for a chap like me — but if you don’t think so, that’s all right. And I tell you straight, you’re the only girl I ever so much as fancied.”
“Oh,” she breathed, “do you mean—”
“You know well enough what I mean, my pretty,” he said; “but if you want it said out like in books, I’ve got it all on my tongue. I love every inch of you, and your clever ways, and your pretty talk. I haven’t touched a drop these eight months — I shall get on right enough with you to help me — and we’ll be so happy as never was. There ain’t ne’er a man in England’ll set more store by his wife nor I will by you, nor be prouder on her. You shan’t do no hard work — I promise you that. Only just drive out with me and turn the customers round your finger. I don’t ask no questions about you nor your folks. I know you’re an honest girl, and I’d trust you with my head. Come, give me a kiss, love, and call it a bargain.”
She had stood up while he was speaking, but she literally could not find words to stop the flow of his speech. Now she shrank back and said, “No — no!”
“Don’t you be so shy, my dear,” he said. “Come — just one! And then I’ll take you home and interduce you to my sister. You’ll like her. I’ve told her all about you.”
Waves of unthinkable horror seemed to be closing over her head. She struck out bravely, and it seemed as though she were swimming for her life.
“No,” she cried, “it’s impossible! You don’t understand! You don’t know!”
“I know you’ve been keeping company with me these ten days,” he said, and his voice had changed. “What did you do it for if you didn’t mean nothing by it?”
“I didn’t know,” she said wretchedly. “I thought you liked being friends.”
“If it’s what you call ‘friends,’ being all day long with a chap, I don’t so call it,” he said. “But come — you’re playing skittish now, ain’t you? Don’t tease a chap like this. Can’t you see I love you too much to stand it? I know it sounds silly to say it — but I love you before all the world — I do — my word I do!”
He held out his arms.
“I see — I see you do,” she cried, all her tact washed away by this mighty sea that had suddenly swept over her. “But I can’t. I’m — I’m en — I’m promised to another young man.”
“I wonder what he’ll say to this,” he said slowly.
“I’m so — so sorry,” she said; “I’d no idea—”
“I see,” he said, “you was just passing the time with me — and you never wanted me at all. And I thought you did. Get in, miss. I’ll take you back to the town. I’ve just about had enough holiday for one day.”
“I am so sorry,” she kept saying. But he never answered.
“Do forgive me!” she said at last. “Indeed, I didn’t mean—”
“Didn’t mean,” said he, lashing up the brown horse; “no — and it don’t matter to you if I think about you and want you every day and every night so long as I live. It ain’t nothing to you. You’ve had your fun. And you’ve got your sweetheart. God, I wish him joy of you!”
“Ah — don’t,” she said, and her soft voice even here, even now, did not miss its effect. “I do like you very, very much — and—”
She had never failed. She did not fail now. Before they reached the town he had formally forgiven her.
“I don’t suppose you meant no harm,” he said grudgingly; “though coming from Kent you ought to know how it is about walking out with a chap. But you say you didn’t, and I’ll believe you. But I shan’t get over this, this many a long day, so don’t you make no mistake. Why, I ain’t thought o’ nothing else but you ever since I first set eyes on you. There — don’t you cry no more. I can’t abear to see you cry.”
He was blinking himself.
Outside the town he stopped.
“Good-bye,” he said. “I haven’t got nothing agin you — but I wish to Lord above I’d never seen you. I shan’t never fancy no one else after you.”
“Don’t be unhappy,” she said. And then she ought to have said good-bye. But the devil we call the force of habit would not let her leave well alone.
“I want to give you something,” she said; “a keepsake, to show I shall always be your friend. Will you call at the house where I’m staying this evening at eight? I’ll have it ready for you. Don’t think too unkindly of me! Will you come?”
He asked the address, and said “Yes.” He wanted to see her — just once again, and he would certainly like the keepsake.
She went home and looked out a beautiful book of Kentish photographs. It was a wedding present, and she had brought it with her to solace her in her exile by pictures of the home-land. Her unconscious thought was something like this: “Poor fellow; poor, poor fellow! But he behaved like a gentleman about it. I suppose there is something in the influence of a sympathetic woman — I am glad I was a good influence.”
She bathed her burning face, cooled it with soft powder, and slipped into a tea-gown. It was a trousseau one of rich, heavy, yellow silk and old lace and fur. She chose it because it was warm, and she was shivering with agitation and misery. Then she went and sat with the old nurse, and a few minutes before eight she ran out and stood by the front door so as to open it before he should knock. She achieved this.
“Come in,” she said, and led him into the lodging-house parlour and closed the door.
“It was good of you to come,” she said, taking the big, beautiful book from the table. “This is what I want you to take, just to remind you that we’re friends.”
She had forgotten the tea-gown. She was not conscious that the accustomed suavity of line, the soft richness of texture influenced voice, gait, smile, gesture. But they did. Her face was flushed after her tears, and the powder, which she had forgotten to dust off, added the last touch to her beauty.
He took the book, but he never even glanced at the silver and tortoise-shell of its inlaid cover. He was looking at her, and his eyes were covetous and angry.
“Are you an actress, or what?”
“No,” she said, shrinking. “Why?”
“What the hell are you, then?” he snarled furiously.
“I’m — I’m — a—”
The old nurse, scared by the voice raised beyond discretion, had dragged herself to the door of division between her room and the parlour, and now stood clinging to the door handle.
“She’s a lady, young man,” said the nurse severely; “and her aunt’s a lady of title, and don’t you forget it!”
“Forget it,” he cried, with a laugh that Jack’s wife remembers still; “she’s a lady, and she’s fooled me this way? I won’t forget it, nor she shan’t neither! By God, I’ll give her something to forget!”
With that he caught the silken tea-gown and Jack’s trembling wife in his arms and kissed her more than once. They were horrible kisses, and the man smelt of onions and hair-oil.
“And I loved her — curse her!” he cried, flinging her away, so that she fell against the arm of the chair by the fire.
He went out, slamming both doors. She had softened and bewitched him to the forgiving of the outrage that her indifference was to his love. The outrage of her station’s condescension to his was unforgivable.
She went back to her Jack next day. She was passionately glad to see him. “Oh, Jack,” she said, “I’ll never, never go away from you again!”
But the greengrocer from Kent reeled down the street to the nearest public-house. At closing time he was telling, in muffled, muddled speech, the wondrous tale, how his girl was a real lady, awfully gone on him, pretty as paint, and wore silk dresses every day.
“She’s a real lady — she is,” he said.
“Ay!” said the chucker out, “we know all about them sort o’ ladies. Time, please!”
“I tell you she is — her aunt’s a lady of title, and the gal’s that gone on me I expect I’ll have to marry her to keep her quiet.”
“I’ll have to chuck you out to keep you quiet,” returned the other. “Come on — outside!”
THE BRUTE
THE pearl of the dawn was not yet dissolved in the gold cup of the sunshine, but in the northwest the dripping opal waves were ebbing fast to the horizon, and the sun was already half risen from his couch of dull crimson. She leaned out of her window. By fortunate chance it was a jasmine-muffled lattice, as a girl’s window should be, and looked down on the dewy stillness of the garden. The cloudy shadows that had clung in the earliest dawn about the lilac bushes and rhododendrons had faded like grey ghosts, and slowly on lawn and bed and path new black shadows were deepening and intensifying.
She drew a deep breath. What a picture! The green garden, the awakened birds, the roses that still looked asleep, the scented jasmine stars! She saw and loved it all. Nor was she unduly insensible to the charm of the central figure, the girl in the white lace-trimmed gown who leaned her soft arms on the window-sill and looked out on the dawn with large dark eyes. Of course, she knew that her eyes were large and dark, also that her hair was now at its prettiest, rumpled and tumbled from the pillow, and far prettier so than one dared to allow it to be in the daytime. It seemed a pity that there should be no one in the garden save the birds, no one who had awakened thus early just that he might gather a rose and cover it with kisses and throw it up to the window of his pretty sweetheart. She had but recently learned that she was pretty. It was on the evening after the little dance at the Rectory. She had worn red roses at her neck, and when she had let down her hair she had picked up the roses from her dressing-table and stuck them in the loose, rough, brown mass, and stared into the glass till she was half mesmerised by her own dark eyes. She had come to herself with a start, and then she had known quite surely that she was pretty enough to be anyone’s sweetheart. When she was a child a well-meaning aunt had told her that as she would never be pretty or clever she had better try to be good, or no one would love her. She had tried, and she had never till that red-rose day doubted that such goodness as she had achieved must be her only claim to love. Now she knew better, and she looked out of her window at the brightening sky and the deepening shadows. But there was no one to throw her a rose with kisses on it.
“If I were a man,” she said to herself, but in a very secret shadowy corner of her inmost heart, and in a wordless whisper, “if I were a man, I would go out this minute and find a sweetheart. She should have dark eyes, too, and rough brown hair, and pink cheeks.”
In the outer chamber of her mind she said briskly —
“It’s a lovely morning. It’s a shame to waste it indoors. I’ll go out.”
The sun was fully up when she stole down through the still sleeping house and out into the garden, now as awake as a lady in full dress at the court of the King.
The garden gate fell to behind her, and the swing of her white skirts went down the green lane. On such a morning who would not wear white? She walked with the quick grace of her nineteen years, and as she went fragments of the undigested poetry that had been her literary diet of late swirled in her mind —
“With tears and smiles from heaven again,
The maiden spring upon the plain
Came in a sunlit fall of rain,”
and so on, though this was July, and not spring at all. And —
“A man had given all other bliss
And all his worldly work for this,
To waste his whole heart in one kiss
Upon her perfect lips.”
Her own lips were not perfect, yet, as lips went, they were well enough, and, anyway, kisses would not be wasted on them.
She went down the lane, full of the anxious trembling longing that is youth’s unrecognised joy, and at the corner, where the lane meets the high white road, she met him. That is to say, she stopped short, as the whispering silence of the morning was broken by a sudden rattle and a heavy thud, not pleasant to hear. And he and his bicycle fell together, six yards from her feet. The bicycle bounded, and twisted, and settled itself down with bold, resentful clatterings. The man lay without moving.
Her Tennyson quotations were swept away. She ran to help.
“Oh, are you hurt?” she said. He lay quite still. There was blood on his head, and one arm was doubled under his back. What could she do? She tried to lift him from the road to the grass edge of it. He was a big man, but she did succeed in raising his shoulders, and freeing that right arm. As she lifted it, he groaned. She sat down in the dust of the road, and lowered his shoulders till his head lay on her lap. Then she tied her handkerchief round his head, and waited till someone should pass on the way to work. Three men and a boy came after the long half hour in which he lay unconscious, the red patch on her handkerchief spreading slowly, and she looking at him, and getting by heart every line of the pale, worn, handsome face. She spoke to him, she stroked his hair. She touched his white cheek with her finger-tips, and wondered about him, and pitied him, and took possession of him as a new and precious appanage of her life, so that when the labourers appeared, she said —
“He’s very badly hurt. Go and fetch some more men and a hurdle, and the boy might run for the doctor. Tell him to come to the White House. It’s nearest, and it may be dangerous to move him further.”
“The ‘Blue Lion’ ain’t but a furlong further, miss,” said one of the men, touching his cap.
“It’s much more than that,” said she, who had but the vaguest notion of a furlong’s length. “Do go and do what I tell you.”
They went, and, as they went, remorselessly dissected, with the bluntest instruments, her motives and her sentiments. It was not hidden from them, that wordless whisper in the shadowy inner chamber of her heart. “Perhaps the ‘Blue Lion’ isn’t so very much further, but I can’t give him up. No, I can’t.” But it was almost hidden from her. In her mind’s outer hall she said —
“I’m sure I ought to take him home. No girl in a book would hesitate. And I can make it all right with mother. It would be cruel to give him up to strangers.”
Deep in her heart the faint whisper followed —
“I found him; he’s mine. I won’t let him go.”
He stirred a little before they came back with the hurdle, and she took his uninjured hand, and pressed it firmly and kindly, and told him it was “all right,” he would feel better presently.
She did have him carried home, and when the doctor had set the arm and the collar-bone, and had owned that it would be better not to move him at present, she knew that her romance would not be cut short just yet. She did not nurse him, because it is only in books that young girls of the best families act as sick-nurses to gentlemen. But her mother — dear, kind, clever, foolish gentlewoman — did the nursing, and the daughter gathered flowers daily to brighten his room. And when he was better, yet still not well enough to resume the bicycle tour so sharply interrupted by a flawed nut, she read to him, and talked to him, and sat with him in the hushed August garden. Up to this point, observe, her interest had been purely romantic. He was a man of forty-five. Perhaps he had a younger brother, a splendid young man, and the brother would like her because she had been kind. He had lived long abroad, had no relatives in England. He knew her Cousin Reginald at Johannesburg — everyone knew everyone else out there. The brother — there really was a brother — would come some day to thank her mother for all her goodness, and she would be at the window and look down, and he would look up, and the lamp of life would be lighted. She longed, with heart-whole earnestness, to be in love with someone, for as yet she was only in love with love.
But on the evening when there was a full moon — the time of madness as everybody knows — her mother falling asleep after dinner in her cushioned chair in the lamp lit drawing-room, he and she wandered out into the garden. They sat on the seat under the great apple tree. He was talking gently of kindness and gratitude, and of how he would soon be well enough to go away. She listened in silence, and presently he grew silent, too, under the spell of the moonlight. She never knew exactly how it was that he took her hand, but he was holding it gently, strongly, as if he would never let it go. Their shoulders touched. The silence grew deeper and deeper. She sighed involuntarily; not because she was unhappy, but because her heart was beating so fast. Both were looking straight before them into the moonlight. Suddenly he turned, put his other hand on her shoulder, and kissed her on the lips. At that instant her mother called her, and she went into the lamp-light. She said good night at once. She wanted to be alone, to realise the great and wonderful awakening of her nature, its awakening to love — for this was love, the love the poets sang about —
“A kiss, a touch, the charm, was snapped.”
She wanted to be alone to think about him. But she did not think. She hugged to her heart the physical memory of that strong magnetic hand-clasp, the touch of those smooth sensitive lips on hers — held it close to her till she fell asleep, still thrilling with the ecstasy of her first lover’s kiss.
Next day they were formally engaged, and now her life became an intermittent delirium. She longed always to be alone with him, to touch his hands, to feel his cheek against hers. She could not understand the pleasure which he said he felt in just sitting near her and watching her sewing or reading, as he sat talking to her mother of dull things — politics, and the war, and landscape gardening. If she had been a man, she said to herself, always far down in her heart, she would have found a way to sit near the beloved, so that at least hands might meet now and then unseen. But he disliked public demonstrations, and he loved her. She, however, was merely in love with him.
That was why, when he went away, she found it so difficult to write to him. She thought his letters cold, though they told her of all his work, his aims, ambitions, hopes, because not more than half a page was filled with lover’s talk. He could have written very different letters — indeed, he had written such in his time, and to more than one address; but he was wise with the wisdom of forty years, and he was beginning to tremble for her happiness, because he loved her.
