The E. Nesbit Megapack: 26 Classic Novels and Stories

by E. Nesbit

This did not surprise him as much as it would surprise you: the world where children live is so full of amazing and incredible-looking things that turn out to be quite real. And if Lot’s wife could be turned into a pillar of salt, why should not a marble child turn into a real one? It was all quite plain to Ernest, but he did not tell any one: because he had a feeling that it might not be easy to make it plain to them.

  “That child doesn’t look quite the thing,” said Aunt Emmeline at breakfast. “A dose of Gregory’s, I think, at eleven.”

  Ernest’s morning was blighted. Did you ever take Gregory’s powder? It is worse than quinine, worse than senna, worse than anything except castor oil.

  But Ernest had to take it—in raspberry jam.

  “And don’t make such faces,” said Aunt Emmeline, rinsing the spoon at the pantry sink. “You know it’s all for your own good.”

  As if the thought that it is for one’s own good ever kept any one from making faces!

  The aunts were kind in their grown-up crinolined way. But Ernest wanted some one to play with. Every night in his dreams he played with the marble child. And at church on Sunday the marble child still held out its hands, farther than before.

  “Come along then,” Ernest said to it, in that voice with which heart speaks to heart; “come and sit with me behind the red curtains. Come!”

  The marble child did not look at him. Its head seemed to be bent farther forward than ever before.

  When it came to the second hymn Ernest had an inspiration. All the rest of the churchful, sleepy and suitable, were singing,—

  “The roseate hues of early dawn,

  The brightness of the day,

  The crimson of the sunset sky,

  How fast they fade away.”

  Ernest turned his head towards the marble child and softly mouthed,—you could hardly call it singing,—

  ‘The rosy tews of early dawn,

  The brightness of the day;

  Come out, come out, come out, come out,

  Come out with me and play.’

  And he pictured the rapture of that moment when the marble child should respond to this appeal, creep out from under the font, and come and sit beside him on the red cushions beyond the red curtains. The aunts would not see, of course. They never saw the things that mattered. No one would see except Ernest. He looked hard at the marble child.

  “You must come out,” he said; and again, “You must come, you must.”

  And the marble child did come. It crept out and came to sit by him, holding his hand. It was a cold hand certainly, but it did not feel like marble.

  And the next thing he knew, an aunt was shaking him and whispering with fierceness tempered by reverence for the sacred edifice,—

  “Wake up, Ernest. How can you be so naughty?”

  And the marble child was back in its place under the font.

  When Ernest looks back on that summer it seems to have thundered every time he went to church. But of course this cannot really have been the case.

  But it was certainly a very lowering purple-skied day which saw him stealthily start on the adventure of his little life. He was weary of aunts—they were kind yet just; they told him so and he believed them. But their justice was exactly like other people’s nagging, and their kindness he did not want at all. He wanted some one to play with.

  “May we walk up to the churchyard?” was a request at first received graciously as showing a serious spirit. But its reiteration was considered morbid, and his walks took the more dusty direction of the County Asylum.

  His longing for the only child he knew, the marble child, exacerbated by denial, drove him to rebellion. He would run away. He would live with the marble child in the big church porch; they would eat berries from the wood near by, just as children did in books, and hide there when people came to church.

  So he watched his opportunity and went quietly out through the French window, skirted the side of the house where all the windows were blank because of the old window-tax, took the narrow strip of lawn at a breathless run, and found safe cover among the rhododendrons.

  The church-door was locked, of course, but he knew where there was a broken pane in the vestry window, and his eye had marked the lop-sided tombstone underneath it. By climbing upon that and getting a knee in the carved water-spout— He did it, got his hand through, turned the catch of the window, and fell through upon the dusty table of the vestry.

  The door was ajar and he passed into the empty church. It seemed very large and gray now that he had it to himself. His feet made a loud echoing noise that was disconcerting. He had meant to call out, “Here I am!” But in the face of these echoes he could not.

  He found the marble child, its head bent more than ever, its hands reaching out quite beyond the edge of the font; and when he was quite close he whispered,—

  “Here I am.—Come and play!”

  But his voice trembled a little. The marble child was so plainly marble. And yet it had not always been marble. He was not sure. Yet—

  “I am sure,” he said. “You did talk to me in the shrubbery, didn’t you?”

  But the marble child did not move or speak.

  “You did come and hold my hand last Sunday,” he said, a little louder.

  And only the empty echoes answered him.

  “Come out,” he said then, almost afraid now of the church’s insistent silence. “I’ve come to live with you altogether. Come out of your marble, do come out!”

  He reached up to stroke the marble cheek. A sound thrilled him, a loud everyday sound. The big key turning in the lock of the south door. The aunts!

  “Now they’ll take me back,” said Ernest; “you might have come.”

  But it was not the aunts. It was the old pew-opener, come to scrub the chancel. She came slowly in with pail and brush; the pail slopped a little water on to the floor close to Ernest as she passed him, not seeing.

  Then the marble child moved, turned toward Ernest with speaking lips and eyes that saw.

  “You can stay with me forever if you like,” it said, “but you’ll have to see things happen. I have seen things happen.”

  “What sort of things?” Ernest asked.

  “Terrible things.”

  “What things shall I have to see?”

  “Her,”—the marble child moved a free arm to point to the old woman on the chancel steps,—“and your aunt who will be here presently, looking for you. Do you hear the thunder? Presently the lightning will strike the church. It won’t hurt us, but it will fall on them.”

  Ernest remembered in a flash how kind Aunt Emmeline had been when he was ill, how Aunt Jessie had given him his chessmen, and Aunt Harriet had taught him how to make paper rosettes for picture-frames.

  “I must go and tell them,” he said.

  “If you go, you’ll never see me again,” said the marble child, and put its arms round his neck.

  “Can’t I come back to you when I’ve told them?” Ernest asked, returning the embrace.

  “There will be no coming back,” said the marble child.

  “But I want you. I love you best of everybody in the world,” Ernest said.

  “I know.”

  “I’ll stay with you,” said Ernest.

  The marble child said nothing.

  “But if I don’t tell them I shall be the same as a murderer,” Ernest whispered. “Oh! let me go, and come back to you.”

  “I shall not be here.”

  “But I must go. I must,” said Ernest, torn between love and duty.

  “Yes.”

  “And I shan’t have you any more?” the living child urged.

  “You’ll have me in your heart,” said the marble child—“that’s where I want to be. That’s my real h
ome.”

  They kissed each other again.

  “It was certainly a direct Providence,” Aunt Emmeline used to say in later years to really sympathetic friends, “that I thought of going up to the church when I did. Otherwise nothing could have saved dear Ernest. He was terrified, quite crazy with fright, poor child, and he rushed out at me from behind our pew shouting, ‘Come away, come away, auntie, come away!’ and dragged me out. Mrs. Meadows providentially followed, to see what it was all about, and the next thing was the catastrophe.”

  “The church was struck by a thunder-bolt was it not?” the sympathetic friend asks.

  “It was indeed—a deafening crash, my dear—and then the church slowly crumbled before our eyes. The south wall broke like a slice of cake when you break it across—and the noise and the dust! Mrs. Meadows never had her hearing again, poor thing, and her mind was a little affected too. I became unconscious, and Ernest—well, it was altogether too much for the child. He lay between life and death for weeks. Shock to the system, the physician said. He had been rather run down before. We had to get a little cousin to come and live with us afterwards. The physicians said that he required young society.”

  “It must indeed have been a shock,” says the sympathetic friend, who knows there is more to come.

  “His intellect was quite changed, my dear,” Aunt Emmeline resumes; “on regaining consciousness he demanded the marble child! Cried and raved, my dear, always about the marble child. It appeared he had had fancies about one of the little angels that supported the old font, not the present font, my dear. We presented that as a token of gratitude to Providence for our escape. Of course we checked his fancifulness as well as we could, but it lasted quite a long time.”

  “What became of the little marble angel?” the friend inquires as in friendship bound.

  “Crushed to powder, dear, in the awful wreck of the church. Not a trace of it could be found. And poor Mrs. Meadows! So dreadful those delusions.”

  “What form did her delusions take?” the friend, anxious to be done with the old story, hastily asks.

  “Well, she always declared that two children ran out to warn me and that one of them was very unusual looking. ‘It wasn’t no flesh and blood, ma’am,’ she used to say in her ungrammatical way; ‘it was a little angel a-taking care of Master Ernest. It ’ad ’old of ’is ’and. And I say it was ’is garden angel, and its face was as bright as a lily in the sun.’”

  The friend glances at the India cabinet, and Aunt Emmeline rises and unlocks it.

  “Ernest must have been behaving in a very naughty and destructive way in the church—but the physician said he was not quite himself probably, for when they got him home and undressed him they found this in his hand.”

  Then the sympathizing friend polishes her glasses and looks, not for the first time, at the relic from the drawer of the India cabinet. It is a white marble finger.

  Thus flow the reminiscences of Aunt Emmeline. The memories of Ernest run as this tale runs.

  THE ENCHANTED CASTLE

  DEDICATION

  To Margaret Ostler with love from E. Nesbit.

  *

  Peggy, you came from the heath and moor,

  And you brought their airs through my open door;

  You brought the blossom of youth to blow

  In the Latin Quarter of Soho.

  For the sake of that magic I send you here

  A tale of enchantments, Peggy dear,

  A bit of my work, and a bit of my heart…

  The bit that you left when we had to part.

  Royalty Chambers, Soho, W. 25

  September 1907

  CHAPTER I

  There were three of them Jerry, Jimmy, and Kathleen. Of course, Jerry’s name was Gerald, and not Jeremiah, whatever you may think; and Jimmy’s name was James; and Kathleen was never called by her name at all, but Cathy, or Catty, or Puss Cat, when her brothers were pleased with her, and Scratch Cat when they were not pleased. And they were at school in a little town in the West of England, the boys at one school, of course, and the girl at another, because the sensible habit of having boys and girls at the same school is not yet as common as I hope it will be some day. They used to see each other on Saturdays and Sundays at the house of a kind maiden lady; but it was one of those houses where it is impossible to play. You know the kind of house, don’t you? There is a sort of a something about that kind of house that makes you hardly able even to talk to each other when you are left alone, and playing seems unnatural and affected. So they looked forward to the holidays, when they should all go home and be together all day long, in a house where playing was natural and conversation possible, and where the Hampshire forests and fields were full of interesting things to do and see. Their Cousin Betty was to be there too, and there were plans.

  Betty’s school broke up before theirs, and so she got to the Hampshire home first, and the moment she got there she began to have measles, so that my three couldn’t go home at all. You may imagine their feelings. The thought of seven weeks at Miss Hervey’s was not to be borne, and all three wrote home and said so. This astonished their parents very much, because they had always thought it was so nice for the children to have dear Miss Hervey’s to go to. However, they were “jolly decent about it,” as Jerry said, and after a lot of letters and telegrams, it was arranged that the boys should go and stay at Kathleen’s school, where there were now no girls left and no mistresses except the French one.

  “It’ll be better than being at Miss Hervey’s,” said Kathleen, when the boys came round to ask Mademoiselle when it would be convenient for them to come; “and, besides, our school’s not half so ugly as yours. We do have tablecloths on the tables and curtains at the windows, and yours is all deal boards, and desks, and inkiness.”

  When they had gone to pack their boxes, Kathleen made all the rooms as pretty as she could with flowers in jam jars—marigolds chiefly, because there was nothing much else in the back garden. There were geraniums in the front garden, and calceolarias and lobelias; of course, the children were not allowed to pick these.

  “We ought to have some sort of play to keep us going through the holidays,” said Kathleen, when tea was over and she had unpacked and arranged the boys clothes in the painted chests of drawers, feeling very grown-up and careful as she neatly laid the different sorts of clothes in tidy little heaps in the drawers. “Suppose we write a book.”

  “You couldn’t,” said Jimmy.

  “I didn’t mean me, of course,” said Kathleen, a little injured; “I meant us.”

  “Too much work,” said Gerald briefly.

  “If we wrote a book,” Kathleen persisted, “about what the insides of schools really are like, people would read it and say how clever we were.”

  “More likely expel us,” said Gerald. “No; we’ll have an out-of-doors game—bandits, or something like that. It wouldn’t be bad if we could get a cave and keep stores in it, and have our meals there.”

  “There aren’t any caves,” said Jimmy, who was fond of contradicting everyone. “And, besides, your precious Mamselle won’t let us go out alone, as likely as not.”

  “Oh, we’ll see about that,” said Gerald. “I’ll go and talk to her like a father.”

  “Like that?” Kathleen pointed the thumb of scorn at him, and he looked in the glass.

  “To brush his hair and his clothes and to wash his face and hands was to our hero but the work of a moment,” said Gerald, and went to suit the action to the word.

  * * * *

  It was a very sleek boy, brown and thin and interesting-looking, that knocked at the door of the parlour where Mademoiselle sat reading a yellow-covered book and wishing vain wishes. Gerald could always make himself look interesting at a moment’s notice, a very useful accomplishment in dealing with strange grown-up
s. It was done by opening his grey eyes rather wide, allowing the corners of his mouth to droop, and assuming a gentle, pleading expression, resembling that of the late little Lord Fauntleroy who must, by the way, be quite old now, and an awful prig.

  “Entrez!” said Mademoiselle, in shrill French accents. So he entered.

  “Eh bien?” she said rather impatiently.

  “I hope I am not disturbing you,” said Gerald, in whose mouth, it seemed, butter would not have melted.

  “But no,” she said, somewhat softened. “What is it that you desire?”

  “I thought I ought to come and say how do you do,” said Gerald, “because of you being the lady of the house.”

  He held out the newly-washed hand, still damp and red. She took it.

  “You are a very polite little boy,” she said.

  “Not at all,” said Gerald, more polite than ever. “I am so sorry for you. It must be dreadful to have us to look after in the holidays.”

  “But not at all,” said Mademoiselle in her turn. “I am sure you will be very good childrens.”

  Gerald’s look assured her that he and the others would be as near angels as children could be without ceasing to be human.

  “We’ll try,” he said earnestly.

  “Can one do anything for you?” asked the French governess kindly.

  “Oh, no, thank you,” said Gerald. “We don’t want to give you any trouble at all. And I was thinking it would be less trouble for you if we were to go out into the woods all day tomorrow and take our dinner with us something cold, you know so as not to be a trouble to the cook.”

  “You are very considerate,” said Mademoiselle coldly. Then Gerald’s eyes smiled; they had a trick of doing this when his lips were quite serious. Mademoiselle caught the twinkle, and she laughed and Gerald laughed too.

  “Little deceiver!” she said. “Why not say at once you want to be free of surveillance, how you say—overwatching—without pretending it is me you wish to please?”