The E. Nesbit Megapack: 26 Classic Novels and Stories

by E. Nesbit

  “Oh, how pretty!” said every one. But no one meant the little French boy, with the velvety short knickerbockers and the velvety short hair.

  What every one admired was a little, little Christmas-tree, very green, and standing in a very red little flower-pot, and hung round with very bright little things made of tinsel and coloured paper. There were tiny candles on the tree, but they were not lighted yet.

  “But yes—is it not that it is genteel?” said the lady. “Sit down you then, and let us see.”

  The children sat down in a row on the stiff chairs against the wall, and the lady lighted a long, slim red taper at the wood flame, and then she drew the curtains and lit the little candles, and when they were all lighted the little French boy suddenly shouted, “Bravo, ma tante! Oh, que c’est gentil,” and the English children shouted “Hooray!”

  Then there was a struggle in the breast of Robert, and out fluttered the Phoenix—spread his gold wings, flew to the top of the Christmas-tree, and perched there.

  “Ah! catch it, then,” cried the lady; “it will itself burn—your genteel parrakeet!”

  “It won’t,” said Robert, “thank you.”

  And the little French boy clapped his clean and tidy hands; but the lady was so anxious that the Phoenix fluttered down and walked up and down on the shiny walnut-wood table.

  “Is it that it talks?” asked the lady.

  And the Phoenix replied in excellent French. It said, “Parfaitement, madame!”

  “Oh, the pretty parrakeet,” said the lady. “Can it say still of other things?”

  And the Phoenix replied, this time in English, “Why are you sad so near Christmas-time?”

  The children looked at it with one gasp of horror and surprise, for the youngest of them knew that it is far from manners to notice that strangers have been crying, and much worse to ask them the reason of their tears. And, of course, the lady began to cry again, very much indeed, after calling the Phoenix a bird without a heart; and she could not find her handkerchief, so Anthea offered hers, which was still very damp and no use at all. She also hugged the lady, and this seemed to be of more use than the handkerchief, so that presently the lady stopped crying, and found her own handkerchief and dried her eyes, and called Anthea a cherished angel.

  “I am sorry we came just when you were so sad,” said Anthea, “but we really only wanted to ask you whose that castle is on the hill.”

  “Oh, my little angel,” said the poor lady, sniffing, “today and for hundreds of years the castle is to us, to our family. Tomorrow it must that I sell it to some strangers—and my little Henri, who ignores all, he will not have never the lands paternal. But what will you? His father, my brother—Mr the Marquis—has spent much of money, and it the must, despite the sentiments of familial respect, that I admit that my sainted father he also—”

  “How would you feel if you found a lot of money—hundreds and thousands of gold pieces?” asked Cyril.

  The lady smiled sadly.

  “Ah! one has already recounted to you the legend?” she said. “It is true that one says that it is long time; oh! but long time, one of our ancestors has hid a treasure—of gold, and of gold, and of gold—enough to enrich my little Henri for the life. But all that, my children, it is but the accounts of fays—”

  “She means fairy stories,” whispered the Phoenix to Robert. “Tell her what you have found.”

  So Robert told, while Anthea and Jane hugged the lady for fear she should faint for joy, like people in books, and they hugged her with the earnest, joyous hugs of unselfish delight.

  “It’s no use explaining how we got in,” said Robert, when he had told of the finding of the treasure, “because you would find it a little difficult to understand, and much more difficult to believe. But we can show you where the gold is and help you to fetch it away.”

  The lady looked doubtfully at Robert as she absently returned the hugs of the girls.

  “No, he’s not making it up,” said Anthea; “it’s true, true, true!—and we are so glad.”

  “You would not be capable to torment an old woman?” she said; “and it is not possible that it be a dream.”

  “It really is true,” said Cyril; “and I congratulate you very much.”

  His tone of studied politeness seemed to convince more than the raptures of the others.

  “If I do not dream,” she said, “Henri come to Manon—and you—you shall come all with me to Mr the Curate. Is it not?”

  Manon was a wrinkled old woman with a red and yellow handkerchief twisted round her head. She took Henri, who was already sleepy with the excitement of his Christmas-tree and his visitors, and when the lady had put on a stiff black cape and a wonderful black silk bonnet and a pair of black wooden clogs over her black cashmere house-boots, the whole party went down the road to a little white house—very like the one they had left—where an old priest, with a good face, welcomed them with a politeness so great that it hid his astonishment.

  The lady, with her French waving hands and her shrugging French shoulders and her trembling French speech, told the story. And now the priest, who knew no English, shrugged his shoulders and waved his hands and spoke also in French.

  “He thinks,” whispered the Phoenix, “that her troubles have turned her brain. What a pity you know no French!”

  “I do know a lot of French,” whispered Robert, indignantly; “but it’s all about the pencil of the gardener’s son and the penknife of the baker’s niece—nothing that anyone ever wants to say.”

  “If I speak,” the bird whispered, “he’ll think he’s mad, too.”

  “Tell me what to say.”

  “Say ‘C’est vrai, monsieur. Venez donc voir,’” said the Phoenix; and then Robert earned the undying respect of everybody by suddenly saying, very loudly and distinctly—

  “Say vray, mossoo; venny dong vwaw.”

  The priest was disappointed when he found that Robert’s French began and ended with these useful words; but, at any rate, he saw that if the lady was mad she was not the only one, and he put on a big beavery hat, and got a candle and matches and a spade, and they all went up the hill to the wayside shrine of St John of Luz.

  “Now,” said Robert, “I will go first and show you where it is.”

  So they prised the stone up with a corner of the spade, and Robert did go first, and they all followed and found the golden treasure exactly as they had left it. And every one was flushed with the joy of performing such a wonderfully kind action.

  Then the lady and the priest clasped hands and wept for joy, as French people do, and knelt down and touched the money, and talked very fast and both together, and the lady embraced all the children three times each, and called them “little garden angels,” and then she and the priest shook each other by both hands again, and talked, and talked, and talked, faster and more Frenchy than you would have believed possible. And the children were struck dumb with joy and pleasure.

  “Get away now,” said the Phoenix softly, breaking in on the radiant dream.

  So the children crept away, and out through the little shrine, and the lady and the priest were so tearfully, talkatively happy that they never noticed that the guardian angels had gone.

  The “garden angels” ran down the hill to the lady’s little house, where they had left the carpet on the veranda, and they spread it out and said “Home,” and no one saw them disappear, except little Henri, who had flattened his nose into a white button against the window-glass, and when he tried to tell his aunt she thought he had been dreaming. So that was all right.

  “It is much the best thing we’ve done,” said Anthea, when they talked it over at tea-time. “In the future we’ll only do kind actions with the carpet.”

  “Ahem!” said the Phoenix.

  “I beg your pardon?” said
Anthea.

  “Oh, nothing,” said the bird. “I was only thinking!”

  CHAPTER 7

  MEWS FROM PERSIA

  When you hear that the four children found themselves at Waterloo Station quite un-taken-care-of, and with no one to meet them, it may make you think that their parents were neither kind nor careful. But if you think this you will be wrong. The fact is, mother arranged with Aunt Emma that she was to meet the children at Waterloo, when they went back from their Christmas holiday at Lyndhurst. The train was fixed, but not the day. Then mother wrote to Aunt Emma, giving her careful instructions about the day and the hour, and about luggage and cabs and things, and gave the letter to Robert to post. But the hounds happened to meet near Rufus Stone that morning, and what is more, on the way to the meet they met Robert, and Robert met them, and instantly forgot all about posting Aunt Emma’s letter, and never thought of it again until he and the others had wandered three times up and down the platform at Waterloo—which makes six in all—and had bumped against old gentlemen, and stared in the faces of ladies, and been shoved by people in a hurry, and “by-your-leaved” by porters with trucks, and were quite, quite sure that Aunt Emma was not there. Then suddenly the true truth of what he had forgotten to do came home to Robert, and he said, “Oh, crikey!” and stood still with his mouth open, and let a porter with a Gladstone bag in each hand and a bundle of umbrellas under one arm blunder heavily into him, and never so much as said, “Where are you shoving to now?” or, “Look out where you’re going, can’t you?” The heavier bag smote him at the knee, and he staggered, but he said nothing.

  When the others understood what was the matter I think they told Robert what they thought of him.

  “We must take the train to Croydon,” said Anthea, “and find Aunt Emma.”

  “Yes,” said Cyril, “and precious pleased those Jevonses would be to see us and our traps.”

  Aunt Emma, indeed, was staying with some Jevonses—very prim people. They were middle-aged and wore very smart blouses, and they were fond of matinees and shopping, and they did not care about children.

  “I know Mother would be pleased to see us if we went back,” said Jane.

  “Yes, she would, but she’d think it was not right to show she was pleased, because it’s Bob’s fault we’re not met. Don’t I know the sort of thing?” said Cyril. “Besides, we’ve no tin. No; we’ve got enough for a growler among us, but not enough for tickets to the New Forest. We must just go home. They won’t be so savage when they find we’ve really got home all right. You know auntie was only going to take us home in a cab.”

  “I believe we ought to go to Croydon,” Anthea insisted.

  “Aunt Emma would be out to a dead cert,” said Robert. “Those Jevonses go to the theatre every afternoon, I believe. Besides, there’s the Phoenix at home, and the carpet. I votes we call a four-wheeled cabman.”

  A four-wheeled cabman was called—his cab was one of the old-fashioned kind with straw in the bottom—and he was asked by Anthea to drive them very carefully to their address. This he did, and the price he asked for doing so was exactly the value of the gold coin grandpapa had given Cyril for Christmas. This cast a gloom; but Cyril would never have stooped to argue about a cab-fare, for fear the cabman should think he was not accustomed to take cabs whenever he wanted them. For a reason that was something like this he told the cabman to put the luggage on the steps, and waited till the wheels of the growler had grittily retired before he rang the bell.

  “You see,” he said, with his hand on the handle, “we don’t want cook and Eliza asking us before him how it is we’ve come home alone, as if we were babies.”

  Here he rang the bell; and the moment its answering clang was heard, every one felt that it would be some time before that bell was answered. The sound of a bell is quite different, somehow, when there is anyone inside the house who hears it. I can’t tell you why that is—but so it is.

  “I expect they’re changing their dresses,” said Jane.

  “Too late,” said Anthea, “it must be past five. I expect Eliza’s gone to post a letter, and cook’s gone to see the time.”

  Cyril rang again. And the bell did its best to inform the listening children that there was really no one human in the house. They rang again and listened intently. The hearts of all sank low. It is a terrible thing to be locked out of your own house, on a dark, muggy January evening.

  “There is no gas on anywhere,” said Jane, in a broken voice.

  “I expect they’ve left the gas on once too often, and the draught blew it out, and they’re suffocated in their beds. Father always said they would some day,” said Robert cheerfully.

  “Let’s go and fetch a policeman,” said Anthea, trembling.

  “And be taken up for trying to be burglars—no, thank you,” said Cyril. “I heard father read out of the paper about a young man who got into his own mother’s house, and they got him made a burglar only the other day.”

  “I only hope the gas hasn’t hurt the Phoenix,” said Anthea. “It said it wanted to stay in the bathroom cupboard, and I thought it would be all right, because the servants never clean that out. But if it’s gone and got out and been choked by gas—And besides, directly we open the door we shall be choked, too. I knew we ought to have gone to Aunt Emma, at Croydon. Oh, Squirrel, I wish we had. Let’s go now.”

  “Shut up,” said her brother, briefly. “There’s some one rattling the latch inside.” Every one listened with all its ears, and every one stood back as far from the door as the steps would allow.

  The latch rattled, and clicked. Then the flap of the letter-box lifted itself—every one saw it by the flickering light of the gas-lamp that shone through the leafless lime-tree by the gate—a golden eye seemed to wink at them through the letter-slit, and a cautious beak whispered—

  “Are you alone?”

  “It’s the Phoenix,” said every one, in a voice so joyous, and so full of relief, as to be a sort of whispered shout.

  “Hush!” said the voice from the letter-box slit. “Your slaves have gone a-merry-making. The latch of this portal is too stiff for my beak. But at the side—the little window above the shelf whereon your bread lies—it is not fastened.”

  “Righto!” said Cyril.

  And Anthea added, “I wish you’d meet us there, dear Phoenix.”

  The children crept round to the pantry window. It is at the side of the house, and there is a green gate labelled “Tradesmen’s Entrance,” which is always kept bolted. But if you get one foot on the fence between you and next door, and one on the handle of the gate, you are over before you know where you are. This, at least, was the experience of Cyril and Robert, and even, if the truth must be told, of Anthea and Jane. So in almost no time all four were in the narrow gravelled passage that runs between that house and the next.

  Then Robert made a back, and Cyril hoisted himself up and got his knicker-bockered knee on the concrete window-sill. He dived into the pantry head first, as one dives into water, and his legs waved in the air as he went, just as your legs do when you are first beginning to learn to dive. The soles of his boots—squarish muddy patches—disappeared.

  “Give me a leg up,” said Robert to his sisters.

  “No, you don’t,” said Jane firmly. “I’m not going to be left outside here with just Anthea, and have something creep up behind us out of the dark. Squirrel can go and open the back door.”

  A light had sprung awake in the pantry. Cyril always said the Phoenix turned the gas on with its beak, and lighted it with a waft of its wing; but he was excited at the time, and perhaps he really did it himself with matches, and then forgot all about it. He let the others in by the back door. And when it had been bolted again the children went all over the house and lighted every single gas-jet they could find. For they couldn’t help feeling that this was just the dark dr
eary winter’s evening when an armed burglar might easily be expected to appear at any moment. There is nothing like light when you are afraid of burglars—or of anything else, for that matter.

  And when all the gas-jets were lighted it was quite clear that the Phoenix had made no mistake, and that Eliza and cook were really out, and that there was no one in the house except the four children, and the Phoenix, and the carpet, and the blackbeetles who lived in the cupboards on each side of the nursery fire-place. These last were very pleased that the children had come home again, especially when Anthea had lighted the nursery fire. But, as usual, the children treated the loving little blackbeetles with coldness and disdain.

  I wonder whether you know how to light a fire? I don’t mean how to strike a match and set fire to the corners of the paper in a fire someone has laid ready, but how to lay and light a fire all by yourself. I will tell you how Anthea did it, and if ever you have to light one yourself you may remember how it is done. First, she raked out the ashes of the fire that had burned there a week ago—for Eliza had actually never done this, though she had had plenty of time. In doing this Anthea knocked her knuckle and made it bleed. Then she laid the largest and handsomest cinders in the bottom of the grate. Then she took a sheet of old newspaper (you ought never to light a fire with today’s newspaper—it will not burn well, and there are other reasons against it), and tore it into four quarters, and screwed each of these into a loose ball, and put them on the cinders; then she got a bundle of wood and broke the string, and stuck the sticks in so that their front ends rested on the bars, and the back ends on the back of the paper balls. In doing this she cut her finger slightly with the string, and when she broke it, two of the sticks jumped up and hit her on the cheek. Then she put more cinders and some bits of coal—no dust. She put most of that on her hands, but there seemed to be enough left for her face. Then she lighted the edges of the paper balls, and waited till she heard the fizz-crack-crack-fizz of the wood as it began to burn. Then she went and washed her hands and face under the tap in the back kitchen.