The E. Nesbit Megapack: 26 Classic Novels and Stories

by E. Nesbit

  Mademoiselle’s was the silence of sheer astonishment. “You do the prophecy, it appears?” she said at last. “Oh no,” said Mabel; “I got that out of a book. I can tell you lots more fatal love-stories any time you like.”

  The French governess gave a little jump, as though she had suddenly remembered something.

  “It is nearly dinner-time,” she said. “Your friend—Mabelle, yes—will be your convivial, and in her honour we will make a little feast. My beautiful flowers—put them to the water, Kathleen. I run to buy the cakes. Wash the hands, all, and be ready when I return.”

  Smiling and nodding to the children, she left them, and ran up the stairs.

  “Just as if she was young,” said Kathleen.

  “She is young,” said Mabel. “Heaps of ladies have offers of marriage when they’re no younger than her. I’ve seen lots of weddings too, with much older brides. And why didn’t you tell me she was so beautiful?”

  “Is she?” asked Kathleen.

  “Of course she is; and what a darling to think of cakes for me, and calling me a convivial!”

  “Look here,” said Gerald, “I call this jolly decent of her. You know, governesses never have more than the meanest pittance, just enough to sustain life, and here she is spending her little all on us. Supposing we just don’t go out today, but play with her instead. I expect she’s most awfully bored really.”

  “Would she really like it?” Kathleen wondered. “Aunt Emily says grown-ups never really like playing. They do it to please us.

  “They little know,” Gerald answered, “how often we do it to please them.”

  “We’ve got to do that dressing-up with the Princess clothes anyhow—we said we would,” said Kathleen. “Let’s treat her to that.”

  “Rather near tea-time,” urged Jimmy, “so that there’ll be a fortunate interruption and the play won’t go on for ever.”

  “I suppose all the things are safe?” Mabel asked.

  “Quite. I told you where I put them. Come on, Jimmy; let’s help lay the table. We’ll get Eliza to put out the best china.”

  They went.

  “It was lucky,” said Gerald, struck by a sudden thought, “that the burglars didn’t go for the diamonds in the treasure-chamber.”

  “They couldn’t,” said Mabel almost in a whisper; “they didn’t know about them. I don’t believe anybody knows about them, except me and you, and you’re sworn to secrecy. This, you will remember, had been done almost at the beginning. I know aunt doesn’t know. I just found out the spring by accident. Lord Yalding’s kept the secret well.”

  “I wish I’d got a secret like that to keep,” said Gerald.

  “If the burglars do know,” said Mabel, “it’ll all come out at the trial. Lawyers make you tell everything you know at trials, and a lot of lies besides.”

  “There won’t be any trial,” said Gerald, kicking the leg of the piano thoughtfully.

  “No trial?”

  “It said in the paper,” Gerald went on slowly, “’The miscreants must have received warning from a confederate, for the admirable preparations to arrest them as they returned for their ill-gotten plunder were unavailing. But the police have a clue.’”

  “What a pity!” said Mabel.

  “You needn’t worry—they haven’t got any old clue,” said Gerald, still attentive to the piano leg.

  “I didn’t mean the clue; I meant the confederate.”

  “It’s a pity you think he’s a pity, because he was me,” said Gerald, standing up and leaving the piano leg alone. He looked straight before him, as the boy on the burning deck may have looked.

  “I couldn’t help it,” he said. “I know you’ll think I’m a criminal, but I couldn’t do it. I don’t know how detectives can. I went over a prison once, with father; and after I’d given the tip to Johnson I remembered that, and I just couldn’t. I know I’m a beast, and not worthy to be a British citizen.”

  “I think it was rather nice of you,” said Mabel kindly. “How did you warn them?”

  “I just shoved a paper under the man’s door—the one that I knew where he lived—to tell him to lie low.”

  “Oh! Do tell me what did you put on it exactly?” Mabel warmed to this new interest.

  “It said: ‘The police know all except your names. Be virtuous and you are safe. But if there’s any more burgling I shall split and you may rely on that—from a friend.’ I know it was wrong, but I couldn’t help it. Don’t tell the others. They wouldn’t understand why I did it. I don’t understand it myself.”

  “I do,” said Mabel; “it’s because you’ve got a kind and noble heart.”

  “Kind fiddlestick, my good child!” said Gerald, suddenly losing the burning boy expression and becoming in a flash entirely himself. “Cut along and wash your hands; you’re as black as ink.”

  “So are you,” said Mabel, “and I’m not. It’s dye with me. Auntie was dyeing a blouse this morning. It told you how in Home Drivel and she’s as black as ink too, and the blouse is all streaky. Pity the ring won’t make just parts of you invisible—the dirt, for instance.”

  “Perhaps,” Gerald said unexpectedly, “it won’t make even all of you invisible again.”

  “Why not? You haven’t been doing anything to it—have you?” Mabel sharply asked.

  “No; but didn’t you notice you were invisible twenty-one hours; I was fourteen hours invisible, and Eliza only seven—that’s seven less each time. And now we’ve come to—”

  “How frightfully good you are at sums!” said Mabel, awe-struck.

  “You see, it’s got seven hours less each time, and seven from seven is nought; it’s got to be something different this time. And then afterwards—it can’t be minus seven, because I don’t see how—unless it made you more visible—thicker, you know.”

  “Don’t!” said Mabel; “you make my head go round.”

  “And there’s another odd thing,” Gerald went on; “when you’re invisible your relations don’t love you. Look at your aunt, and Cathy never turning a hair at me going burgling. We haven’t got to the bottom of that ring yet. Crikey! Here’s Mademoiselle with the cakes. Run, bold bandits—wash for your lives!”

  They ran.

  It was not cakes only; it was plums and grapes and jam tarts and soda-water and raspberry vinegar, and chocolates in pretty boxes and pure, thick, rich cream in brown jugs, also a big bunch of roses. Mademoiselle was strangely merry for a governess. She served out the cakes and tarts with a liberal hand, made wreaths of the flowers for all their heads—she was not eating much herself—drank the health of Mabel, as the guest of the day, in the beautiful pink drink that comes from mixing raspberry vinegar and soda-water, and actually persuaded Jimmy to wear his wreath, on the ground that the Greek gods as well as the goddesses always wore wreaths at a feast.

  There never was such a feast provided by any French governess since French governesses began. There were jokes and stories and laughter. Jimmy showed all those tricks with forks and corks and matches and apples which are so deservedly popular. Mademoiselle told them stories of her own schooldays when she was “a quite little girl with two tight tresses—so,” and when they could not understand the tresses, called for paper and pencil and drew the loveliest little picture of herself when she was a child with two short fat pig-tails sticking out from her head like knitting-needles from a ball of dark worsted. Then she drew pictures of everything they asked for, till Mabel pulled Gerald’s jacket and whispered: “The acting!”

  “Draw us the front of a theatre,” said Gerald tactfully “a French theatre.”

  “They are the same thing as the English theatres,” Mademoiselle told him.

  “Do you like acting—the theatre, I mean?”

  “But yes—I love it.”

  “All right,
” said Gerald briefly. “We’ll act a play for you—now—this afternoon if you like.”

  “Eliza will be washing up,” Cathy whispered, “and she was promised to see it.”

  “Or this evening,” said Gerald “and please, Mademoiselle, may Eliza come in and look on?”

  “But certainly,” said Mademoiselle; “amuse yourselves well, my children.”

  “But it’s you,” said Mabel suddenly, “that we want to amuse. Because we love you very much—don’t we, all of you?”

  “Yes,” the chorus came unhesitatingly. Though the others would never have thought of saying such a thing on their own account. Yet, as Mabel said it, they found to their surprise that it was true.

  “Tiens!” said Mademoiselle, “you love the old French governess? Impossible,” and she spoke rather indistinctly.

  “You’re not old,” said Mabel; “at least not so very,” she added brightly, “and you’re as lovely as a Princess.”

  “Go then, flatteress!” said Mademoiselle, laughing; and Mabel went. The others were already half-way up the stairs.

  Mademoiselle sat in the drawing-room as usual, and it was a good thing that she was not engaged in serious study, for it seemed that the door opened and shut almost ceaselessly all throughout the afternoon. Might they have the embroidered antimacassars and the sofa cushions? Might they have the clothes-line out of the washhouse? Eliza said they mightn’t, but might they? Might they have the sheepskin hearth-rugs? Might they have tea in the garden, because they had almost got the stage ready in the dining-room, and Eliza wanted to set tea? Could Mademoiselle lend them any coloured clothes—scarves or dressing-gowns, or anything bright? Yes, Mademoiselle could, and did—silk things, surprisingly lovely for a governess to have.

  Had Mademoiselle any rouge? They had always heard that French ladies— No. Mademoiselle hadn’t—and to judge by the colour of her face, Mademoiselle didn’t need it. Did Mademoiselle think the chemist sold rouge—or had she any false hair to spare? At this challenge Mademoiselle’s pale fingers pulled out a dozen hairpins, and down came the loveliest blue-black hair, hanging to her knees in straight, heavy lines.

  “No, you terrible infants,” she cried. “I have not the false hair, nor the rouge. And my teeth—you want them also, without doubt?”

  She showed them in a laugh.

  “I said you were a Princess,” said Mabel, “and now I know. You’re Rapunzel. Do always wear your hair like that! May we have the peacock fans, please, off the mantelpiece, and the things that loop back the curtains, and all the handkerchiefs you’ve got?”

  Mademoiselle denied them nothing. They had the fans and the handkerchiefs and some large sheets of expensive drawing-paper out of the school cupboard, and Mademoiselle’s best sable paint-brush and her paint-box.

  “Who would have thought,” murmured Gerald, pensively sucking the brush and gazing at the paper mask he had just painted, “that she was such a brick in disguise? I wonder why crimson lake always tastes just like Liebig’s Extract.”

  Everything was pleasant that day somehow. There are some days like that, you know, when everything goes well from the very beginning; all the things you want are in their places, nobody misunderstands you, and all that you do turns out admirably. How different from those other days which we all know too well, when your shoe-lace breaks, your comb is mislaid, your brush spins on its back on the floor and lands under the bed where you can’t get at it—you drop the soap, your buttons come off, an eyelash gets into your eye, you have used your last clean handkerchief, your collar is frayed at the edge and cuts your neck, and at the very last moment your suspender breaks, and there is no string. On such a day as this you are naturally late for breakfast, and everyone thinks you did it on purpose. And the day goes on and on, getting worse and worse—you mislay your exercise-book, you drop your arithmetic in the mud, your pencil breaks, and when you open your knife to sharpen the pencil you split your nail. On such a day you jam your thumb in doors, and muddle the messages you are sent on by grown-ups. You upset your tea, and your bread-and-butter won’t hold together for a moment. And when at last you get to bed—usually in disgrace—it is no comfort at all to you to know that not a single bit of it is your own fault.

  This day was not one of those days, as you will have noticed. Even the tea in the garden—there was a bricked bit by a rockery that made a steady floor for the tea-table—was most delightful, though the thoughts of four out of the five were busy with the coming play, and the fifth had thoughts of her own that had had nothing to do with tea or acting.

  Then there was an interval of slamming doors, interesting silences, feet that flew up and down stairs.

  It was still good daylight when the dinner-bell rang—the signal had been agreed upon at tea-time, and carefully explained to Eliza. Mademoiselle laid down her book and passed out of the sunset-yellowed hail into the faint yellow gaslight of the dining-room. The giggling Eliza held the door open before her, and followed her in. The shutters had been closed—streaks of daylight showed above and below them. The green-and-black tablecloths of the school dining-tables were supported on the clothes-line from the backyard. The line sagged in a graceful curve, but it answered its purpose of supporting the curtains which concealed that part of the room which was the stage.

  Rows of chairs had been placed across the other end of the room—all the chairs in the house, as it seemed—and Mademoiselle started violently when she saw that fully half a dozen of these chairs were occupied. And by the queerest people, too—an old woman with a poke bonnet tied under her chin with a red handkerchief, a lady in a large straw hat wreathed in flowers and the oddest hands that stuck out over the chair in front of her, several men with strange, clumsy figures, and all with hats on.

  “But,” whispered Mademoiselle, through the chinks of the tablecloths, “you have then invited other friends? You should have asked me, my children.”

  Laughter and something like a “hurrah” answered her from behind the folds of the curtaining tablecloths.

  “All right, Mademoiselle Rapunzel,” cried Mabel; “turn the gas up. It’s only part of the entertainment.”

  Eliza, still giggling, pushed through the lines of chairs, knocking off the hat of one of the visitors as she did so, and turned up the three incandescent burners.

  Mademoiselle looked at the figure seated nearest to her, stooped to look more closely, half laughed, quite screamed, and sat down suddenly.

  “Oh!” she cried, “they are not alive!”

  Eliza, with a much louder scream, had found out the same thing and announced it differently. “They ain’t got no insides,” said she. The seven members of the audience seated among the wilderness of chairs had, indeed, no insides to speak of. Their bodies were bolsters and rolled-up blankets, their spines were broom-handles, and their arm and leg bones were hockey sticks and umbrellas. Their shoulders were the wooden crosspieces that Mademoiselle used for keeping her jackets in shape; their hands were gloves stuffed out with handkerchiefs; and their faces were the paper masks painted in the afternoon by the untutored brush of Gerald, tied on to the round heads made of the ends of stuffed bolster-cases. The faces were really rather dreadful. Gerald had done his best, but even after his best had been done you would hardly have known they were faces, some of them, if they hadn’t been in the positions which faces usually occupy, between the collar and the hat. Their eyebrows were furious with lamp-black frowns—their eyes the size, and almost the shape, of five-shilling pieces, and on their lips and cheeks had been spent much crimson lake and nearly the whole of a half-pan of vermilion.

  “You have made yourself an auditors, yes? Bravo!” cried Mademoiselle, recovering herself and beginning to clap. And to the sound of that clapping the curtain went up—or, rather, apart. A voice said, in a breathless, choked way, “Beauty and the Beast,” and the stage was revealed.

  It
was a real stage too—the dining-tables pushed close together and covered with pink-and-white counterpanes. It was a little unsteady and creaky to walk on, but very imposing to look at. The scene was simple, but convincing. A big sheet of cardboard, bent square, with slits cut in it and a candle behind, represented, quite transparently, the domestic hearth; a round hat-tin of Eliza s, supported on a stool with a night-light under it, could not have been mistaken, save by wilful malice, for anything but a copper. A waste-paper basket with two or three school dusters and an overcoat in it, and a pair of blue pyjamas over the back of a chair, put the finishing touch to the scene. It did not need the announcement from the wings, “The laundry at Beauty’s home.” It was so plainly a laundry and nothing else.

  In the wings: “They look just like a real audience, don’t they?” whispered Mabel. “Go on, Jimmy—don’t forget the Merchant has to be pompous and use long words.”

  Jimmy, enlarged by pillows under Gerald’s best overcoat which had been intentionally bought with a view to his probable growth during the two years which it was intended to last him, a Turkish towel turban on his head and an open umbrella over it, opened the first act in a simple and swift soliloquy:

  “I am the most unlucky merchant that ever was. I was once the richest merchant in Bagdad, but I lost all my ships, and now I live in a poor house that is all to bits; you can see how the rain comes through the roof, and my daughters take in washing. And—”

  The pause might have seemed long, but Gerald rustled in, elegant in Mademoiselle’s pink dressing-gown and the character of the eldest daughter.

  “A nice drying day,” he minced. “Pa dear, put the umbrella the other way up. It’ll save us going out in the rain to fetch water. Come on, sisters, dear father’s got us a new wash-tub. Here’s luxury!”

  Round the umbrella, now held the wrong way up, the three sisters knelt and washed imaginary linen. Kathleen wore a violet skirt of Eliza s, a blue blouse of her own, and a cap of knotted handkerchiefs. A white nightdress girt with a white apron and two red carnations in Mabel’s black hair left no doubt as to which of the three was Beauty.