by E. Nesbit
“I am afraid you are right,” said Selina; “and where are they now?”
“Downstairs, no doubt, collecting the silver milk-jug and sugar-basin and the punch-ladle that was Uncle Joe’s, and Aunt Jerusha’s teaspoons. I shall go down.”
“Oh, don’t be so rash and heroic,” said Selina. “Amelia, we must call the police from the window. Lock the door. I will—I will—”
The words ended in a yell as Selina, rushing to the window, came face to face with the hidden children.
“Oh, don’t!” said Jane; “how can you be so unkind? We aren’t burglars, and we haven’t any gang, and we didn’t open your missionary-box. We opened our own once, but we didn’t have to use the money, so our consciences made us put it back and—don’t! Oh, I wish you wouldn’t—”
Miss Selina had seized Jane and Miss Amelia captured Robert. The children found themselves held fast by strong, slim hands, pink at the wrists and white at the knuckles.
“We’ve got you, at any rate,” said Miss Amelia. “Selina, your captive is smaller than mine. You open the window at once and call ‘Murder!’ as loud as you can.
Selina obeyed; but when she had opened the window, instead of calling, “Murder!” she called, “Septimus!” because at that very moment she saw her nephew coming in at the gate.
In another minute he had let himself in with his latch-key and had mounted the stairs. As he came into the room Jane and Robert each uttered a shriek of joy so loud and so sudden that the ladies leaped with surprise, and nearly let them go.
“It’s our own clergyman,” cried Jane.
“Don’t you remember us?” asked Robert. “You married our burglar for us—don’t you remember?”
“I knew it was a gang,” said Amelia. “Septimus, these abandoned children are members of a desperate burgling gang who are robbing the house. They have already forced the missionary-box and purloined its contents.”
The Reverend Septimus passed his hand wearily over his brow.
“I feel a little faint,” he said, “running upstairs so quickly.”
“We never touched the beastly box,” said Robert.
“Then your confederates did,” said Miss Selina.
“No, no,” said the curate, hastily. “I opened the box myself. This morning I found I had not enough small change for the Mothers’ Independent Unity Measles and Croup Insurance payments. I suppose this is not a dream, is it?”
“Dream? No, indeed. Search the house. I insist upon it.”
The curate, still pale and trembling, searched the house, which, of course, was blamelessly free of burglars.
When he came back he sank wearily into his chair.
“Aren’t you going to let us go?” asked Robert, with furious indignation, for there is something in being held by a strong lady that sets the blood of a boy boiling in his veins with anger and despair. “We’ve never done anything to you. It’s all the carpet. It dropped us on the leads. We couldn’t help it. You know how it carried you over to the island, and you had to marry the burglar to the cook.”
“Oh, my head!” said the curate.
“Never mind your head just now,” said Robert; “try to be honest and honourable, and do your duty in that state of life!”
“This is a judgement on me for something, I suppose,” said the Reverend Septimus, wearily, “but I really cannot at the moment remember what.”
“Send for the police,” said Miss Selina.
“Send for a doctor,” said the curate.
“Do you think they are mad, then,” said Miss Amelia.
“I think I am,” said the curate.
Jane had been crying ever since her capture. Now she said— “You aren’t now, but perhaps you will be, if—And it would serve you jolly well right, too.”
“Aunt Selina,” said the curate, “and Aunt Amelia, believe me, this is only an insane dream. You will realize it soon. It has happened to me before. But do not let us be unjust, even in a dream. Do not hold the children; they have done no harm. As I said before, it was I who opened the box.”
The strong, bony hands unwillingly loosened their grasp. Robert shook himself and stood in sulky resentment. But Jane ran to the curate and embraced him so suddenly that he had not time to defend himself.
“You’re a dear,” she said. “It is like a dream just at first, but you get used to it. Now do let us go. There’s a good, kind, honourable clergyman.”
“I don’t know,” said the Reverend Septimus; “it’s a difficult problem. It is such a very unusual dream. Perhaps it’s only a sort of other life—quite real enough for you to be mad in. And if you’re mad, there might be a dream-asylum where you’d be kindly treated, and in time restored, cured, to your sorrowing relatives. It is very hard to see your duty plainly, even in ordinary life, and these dream-circumstances are so complicated—”
“If it’s a dream,” said Robert, “you will wake up directly, and then you’d be sorry if you’d sent us into a dream-asylum, because you might never get into the same dream again and let us out, and so we might stay there for ever, and then what about our sorrowing relatives who aren’t in the dreams at all?”
But all the curate could now say was, “Oh, my head!”
And Jane and Robert felt quite ill with helplessness and hopelessness. A really conscientious curate is a very difficult thing to manage.
And then, just as the hopelessness and the helplessness were getting to be almost more than they could bear, the two children suddenly felt that extraordinary shrinking feeling that you always have when you are just going to vanish. And the next moment they had vanished, and the Reverend Septimus was left alone with his aunts.
“I knew it was a dream,” he cried, wildly. “I’ve had something like it before. Did you dream it too, Aunt Selina, and you, Aunt Amelia? I dreamed that you did, you know.”
Aunt Selina looked at him and then at Aunt Amelia. Then she said boldly—
“What do you mean? We haven’t been dreaming anything. You must have dropped off in your chair.”
The curate heaved a sigh of relief.
“Oh, if it’s only I,” he said; “if we’d all dreamed it I could never have believed it, never!”
Afterwards Aunt Selina said to the other aunt—
“Yes, I know it was an untruth, and I shall doubtless be punished for it in due course. But I could see the poor dear fellow’s brain giving way before my very eyes. He couldn’t have stood the strain of three dreams. It was odd, wasn’t it? All three of us dreaming the same thing at the same moment. We must never tell dear Seppy. But I shall send an account of it to the Psychical Society, with stars instead of names, you know.”
And she did. And you can read all about it in one of the society’s fat Blue-books.
Of course, you understand what had happened? The intelligent Phoenix had simply gone straight off to the Psammead, and had wished Robert and Jane at home. And, of course, they were at home at once. Cyril and Anthea had not half finished mending the carpet.
When the joyful emotions of reunion had calmed down a little, they all went out and spent what was left of Uncle Reginald’s sovereign in presents for mother. They bought her a pink silk handkerchief, a pair of blue and white vases, a bottle of scent, a packet of Christmas candles, and a cake of soap shaped and coloured like a tomato, and one that was so like an orange that almost any one you had given it to would have tried to peel it—if they liked oranges, of course. Also they bought a cake with icing on, and the rest of the money they spent on flowers to put in the vases.
When they had arranged all the things on a table, with the candles stuck up on a plate ready to light the moment mother’s cab was heard, they washed themselves thoroughly and put on tidier clothes.
Then Robert said, “Good old Psammead,” and the others said so too.<
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“But, really, it’s just as much good old Phoenix,” said Robert. “Suppose it hadn’t thought of getting the wish!”
“Ah!” said the Phoenix, “it is perhaps fortunate for you that I am such a competent bird.”
“There’s mother’s cab,” cried Anthea, and the Phoenix hid and they lighted the candles, and next moment mother was home again.
She liked her presents very much, and found their story of Uncle Reginald and the sovereign easy and even pleasant to believe.
“Good old carpet,” were Cyril’s last sleepy words.
“What there is of it,” said the Phoenix, from the cornice-pole.
CHAPTER 11
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
“Well, I must say,” mother said, looking at the wishing carpet as it lay, all darned and mended and backed with shiny American cloth, on the floor of the nursery—“I must say I’ve never in my life bought such a bad bargain as that carpet.”
A soft “Oh!” of contradiction sprang to the lips of Cyril, Robert, Jane, and Anthea. Mother looked at them quickly, and said—
“Well, of course, I see you’ve mended it very nicely, and that was sweet of you, dears.”
“The boys helped too,” said the dears, honourably.
“But, still—twenty-two and ninepence! It ought to have lasted for years. It’s simply dreadful now. Well, never mind, darlings, you’ve done your best. I think we’ll have coconut matting next time. A carpet doesn’t have an easy life of it in this room, does it?”
“It’s not our fault, mother, is it, that our boots are the really reliable kind?” Robert asked the question more in sorrow than in anger.
“No, dear, we can’t help our boots,” said mother, cheerfully, “but we might change them when we come in, perhaps. It’s just an idea of mine. I wouldn’t dream of scolding on the very first morning after I’ve come home. Oh, my Lamb, how could you?”
This conversation was at breakfast, and the Lamb had been beautifully good until every one was looking at the carpet, and then it was for him but the work of a moment to turn a glass dish of syrupy blackberry jam upside down on his young head. It was the work of a good many minutes and several persons to get the jam off him again, and this interesting work took people’s minds off the carpet, and nothing more was said just then about its badness as a bargain and about what mother hoped for from coconut matting.
When the Lamb was clean again he had to be taken care of while mother rumpled her hair and inked her fingers and made her head ache over the difficult and twisted house-keeping accounts which cook gave her on dirty bits of paper, and which were supposed to explain how it was that cook had only fivepence-half-penny and a lot of unpaid bills left out of all the money mother had sent her for house-keeping. Mother was very clever, but even she could not quite understand the cook’s accounts.
The Lamb was very glad to have his brothers and sisters to play with him. He had not forgotten them a bit, and he made them play all the old exhausting games: “Whirling Worlds,” where you swing the baby round and round by his hands; and “Leg and Wing,” where you swing him from side to side by one ankle and one wrist. There was also climbing Vesuvius. In this game the baby walks up you, and when he is standing on your shoulders, you shout as loud as you can, which is the rumbling of the burning mountain, and then tumble him gently on to the floor, and roll him there, which is the destruction of Pompeii.
“All the same, I wish we could decide what we’d better say next time mother says anything about the carpet,” said Cyril, breathlessly ceasing to be a burning mountain.
“Well, you talk and decide,” said Anthea; “here, you lovely ducky Lamb. Come to Panther and play Noah’s Ark.”
The Lamb came with his pretty hair all tumbled and his face all dusty from the destruction of Pompeii, and instantly became a baby snake, hissing and wriggling and creeping in Anthea’s arms, as she said—
“I love my little baby snake,
He hisses when he is awake,
He creeps with such a wriggly creep,
He wriggles even in his sleep.”
“Crocky,” said the Lamb, and showed all his little teeth. So Anthea went on—
“I love my little crocodile,
I love his truthful toothful smile;
It is so wonderful and wide,
I like to see it—from outside.”
“Well, you see,” Cyril was saying; “it’s just the old bother. Mother can’t believe the real true truth about the carpet, and—”
“You speak sooth, O Cyril,” remarked the Phoenix, coming out from the cupboard where the blackbeetles lived, and the torn books, and the broken slates, and odd pieces of toys that had lost the rest of themselves. “Now hear the wisdom of Phoenix, the son of the Phoenix—”
“There is a society called that,” said Cyril.
“Where is it? And what is a society?” asked the bird.
“It’s a sort of joined-together lot of people—a sort of brotherhood—a kind of—well, something very like your temple, you know, only quite different.”
“I take your meaning,” said the Phoenix. “I would fain see these calling themselves Sons of the Phoenix.”
“But what about your words of wisdom?”
“Wisdom is always welcome,” said the Phoenix.
“Pretty Polly!” remarked the Lamb, reaching his hands towards the golden speaker.
The Phoenix modestly retreated behind Robert, and Anthea hastened to distract the attention of the Lamb by murmuring—
“I love my little baby rabbit;
But oh! he has a dreadful habit
Of paddling out among the rocks
And soaking both his bunny socks.”
“I don’t think you’d care about the sons of the Phoenix, really,” said Robert. “I have heard that they don’t do anything fiery. They only drink a great deal. Much more than other people, because they drink lemonade and fizzy things, and the more you drink of those the more good you get.”
“In your mind, perhaps,” said Jane; “but it wouldn’t be good in your body. You’d get too balloony.”
The Phoenix yawned.
“Look here,” said Anthea; “I really have an idea. This isn’t like a common carpet. It’s very magic indeed. Don’t you think, if we put Tatcho on it, and then gave it a rest, the magic part of it might grow, like hair is supposed to do?”
“It might,” said Robert; “but I should think paraffin would do as well—at any rate as far as the smell goes, and that seems to be the great thing about Tatcho.”
But with all its faults Anthea’s idea was something to do, and they did it.
It was Cyril who fetched the Tatcho bottle from father’s washhand-stand. But the bottle had not much in it.
“We mustn’t take it all,” Jane said, “in case father’s hair began to come off suddenly. If he hadn’t anything to put on it, it might all drop off before Eliza had time to get round to the chemist’s for another bottle. It would be dreadful to have a bald father, and it would all be our fault.”
“And wigs are very expensive, I believe,” said Anthea. “Look here, leave enough in the bottle to wet father’s head all over with in case any emergency emerges—and let’s make up with paraffin. I expect it’s the smell that does the good really—and the smell’s exactly the same.”
So a small teaspoonful of the Tatcho was put on the edges of the worst darn in the carpet and rubbed carefully into the roots of the hairs of it, and all the parts that there was not enough Tatcho for had paraffin rubbed into them with a piece of flannel. Then the flannel was burned. It made a gay flame, which delighted the Phoenix and the Lamb.
“How often,” said mother, opening the door—“how often am I to tell you that you are not to play with paraffin? What have you been doing?”
“We have burnt a paraffiny rag,” Anthea answered.
It was no use telling mother what they had done to the carpet. She did not know it was a magic carpet, and no one wants to be laughed at for trying to mend an ordinary carpet with lamp-oil.
“Well, don’t do it again,” said mother. “And now, away with melancholy! Father has sent a telegram. Look!” She held it out, and the children, holding it by its yielding corners, read—
“Box for kiddies at Garrick. Stalls for us, Haymarket. Meet Charing Cross, 6.30.”
“That means,” said mother, “that you’re going to see “The Water Babies” all by your happy selves, and father and I will take you and fetch you. Give me the Lamb, dear, and you and Jane put clean lace in your red evening frocks, and I shouldn’t wonder if you found they wanted ironing. This paraffin smell is ghastly. Run and get out your frocks.”
The frocks did want ironing—wanted it rather badly, as it happened; for, being of tomato-Coloured Liberty silk, they had been found very useful for tableaux vivants when a red dress was required for Cardinal Richelieu. They were very nice tableaux, these, and I wish I could tell you about them; but one cannot tell everything in a story. You would have been specially interested in hearing about the tableau of the Princes in the Tower, when one of the pillows burst, and the youthful Princes were so covered with feathers that the picture might very well have been called “Michaelmas Eve; or, Plucking the Geese.”
Ironing the dresses and sewing the lace in occupied some time, and no one was dull, because there was the theatre to look forward to, and also the possible growth of hairs on the carpet, for which every one kept looking anxiously. By four o’clock Jane was almost sure that several hairs were beginning to grow.
The Phoenix perched on the fender, and its conversation, as usual, was entertaining and instructive—like school prizes are said to be. But it seemed a little absent-minded, and even a little sad.
