The E. Nesbit Megapack: 26 Classic Novels and Stories

by E. Nesbit

  “It’s no good, you know,” said Jimmy weakly; “you know jolly well you can’t get out of that Temple of Flora door, even if you get to it.”

  “I don’t know,” said Gerald, still brisk and commander-like; “there’s a secret spring inside that door most likely. We hadn’t a lamp last time to look for it, remember.”

  “If there’s one thing I do hate its undergroundness,” said Mabel.

  “You’re not a coward,” said Gerald, with what is known as diplomacy. “You’re brave, Mabel. Don’t I know it!” You hold Jimmy’s hand and I’ll hold Cathy’s. Now then.”

  “I won’t have my hand held,” said Jimmy, of course. “I’m not a kid.”

  “Well, Cathy will. Poor little Cathy! Nice brother Jerry’ll hold poor Cathy’s hand.”

  Gerald’s bitter sarcasm missed fire here, for Cathy gratefully caught the hand he held out in mockery. She was too miserable to read his mood, as she mostly did. “Oh, thank you, Jerry dear,” she said gratefully; “you are a dear, and I will try not to be frightened.” And for quite a minute Gerald shamedly felt that he had not been quite, quite kind.

  So now, leaving the growing goldness of the sunrise, the four went down the stone steps that led to the underground and underwater passage, and everything seemed to grow dark and then to grow into a poor pretence of light again, as the splendour of dawn gave place to the small dogged lighting of the bicycle lamp. The steps did indeed lead to a passage, the beginnings of it choked with the drifted dead leaves of many old autumns. But presently the passage took a turn, there were more steps, down, down, and then the passage was empty and straight—lined above and below and on each side with slabs of marble, very clear and clean. Gerald held Cathy’s hand with more of kindness and less of exasperation than he had supposed possible.

  And Cathy, on her part, was surprised to find it possible to be so much less frightened than she expected.

  The flame of the bull’s-eye threw ahead a soft circle of misty light—the children followed it silently. Till, silently and suddenly, the light of the bull’s-eye behaved as the flame of a candle does when you take it out into the sunlight to light a bonfire, or explode a train of gunpowder, or what not. Because now, with feelings mixed indeed, of wonder, and interest, and awe, but no fear, the children found themselves in a great hail, whose arched roof was held up by two rows of round pillars, and whose every corner was filled with a soft, searching, lovely light, filling every cranny, as water fills the rocky secrecies of hidden sea-caves.

  “How beautiful!” Kathleen whispered, breathing hard into the tickled ear of her brother, and Mabel caught the hand of Jimmy and whispered, “I must hold your hand—I must hold on to something silly, or I shan’t believe it’s real.”

  For this hall in which the children found themselves was the most beautiful place in the world. I won’t describe it, because it does not look the same to any two people, and you wouldn’t understand me if I tried to tell you how it looked to any one of these four. But to each it seemed the most perfect thing possible. I will only say that all round it were great arches. Kathleen saw them as Moorish, Mabel as Tudor, Gerald as Norman, and Jimmy as Churchwarden Gothic. (If you don’t know what these are, ask your uncle who collects brasses, and he will explain, or perhaps Mr. Millar will draw the different kinds of arches for you.) And through these arches one could see many things—oh! but many things. Through one appeared an olive garden, and in it two lovers who held each other’s hands, under an Italian moon; through another a wild sea, and a ship to whom the wild, racing sea was slave. A third showed a king on his throne, his courtiers obsequious about him; and yet a fourth showed a really good hotel, with the respectable Ugly-Wugly sunning himself on the front doorsteps. There was a mother, bending over a wooden cradle. There was an artist gazing entranced on the picture his wet brush seemed to have that moment completed, a general dying on a field where Victory had planted the standard he loved, and these things were not pictures, but the truest truths, alive, and, as anyone could see, immortal.

  Many other pictures there were that these arches framed. And all showed some moment when life had sprung to fire and flower—the best that the soul of man could ask or man’s destiny grant. And the really good hotel had its place here too, because there are some souls that ask no higher thing of life than “a really good hotel.”

  “Oh, I am glad we came; I am, I am!” Kathleen murmured, and held fast to her brother’s hand.

  They went slowly up the hall, the ineffectual bull’s-eye, held by Jimmy, very crooked indeed, showing almost as a shadow in this big, glorious light.

  And then, when the hall’s end was almost reached, the children saw where the light came from. It glowed and spread itself from one place, and in that place stood the one statue that Mabel “did not know where to find”—the statue of Psyche. They went on, slowly, quite happy, quite bewildered. And when they came close to Psyche they saw that on her raised hand the ring showed dark.

  Gerald let go Kathleen’s hand, put his foot on the pediment, his knee on the pedestal. He stood up, dark and human, beside the white girl with the butterfly wings.

  “I do hope you don’t mind,” he said, and drew the ring off very gently. Then, as he dropped to the ground, “Not here,” he said. “I don’t know why, but not here.”

  And they all passed behind the white Psyche, and once more the bicycle lamp seemed suddenly to come to life again as Gerald held it in front of him, to be the pioneer in the dark passage that led from the Hall of—but they did not know, then, what it was the Hall of.

  Then, as the twisting passage shut in on them with a darkness that pressed close against the little light of the bicycle lamp, Kathleen said, “Give me the ring. I know exactly what to say.”

  Gerald gave it with not extreme readiness.

  “I wish,” said Kathleen slowly, “that no one at home may know that we’ve been out tonight, and I wish we were safe in our own beds, undressed, and in our nightgowns, and asleep.”

  And the next thing any of them knew, it was good, strong, ordinary daylight—not just sunrise, but the kind of daylight you are used to being called in, and all were in their own beds. Kathleen had framed the wish most sensibly. The only mistake had been in saying “in our own beds” because, of course, Mabel’s own bed was at Yalding Towers, and to this day Mabel’s drab-haired aunt cannot understand how Mabel, who was staying the night with that child in the town she was so taken up with, hadn’t come home at eleven, when the aunt locked up, and yet she was in her bed in the morning. For though not a clever woman, she was not stupid enough to be able to believe any one of the eleven fancy explanations which the distracted Mabel offered in the course of the morning. The first (which makes twelve) of these explanations was The Truth, and of course the aunt was far too clever to believe That!

  CHAPTER XI

  It was show-day at Yalding Castle, and it seemed good to the children to go and visit Mabel, and, as Gerald put it, to mingle unsuspected with the crowd; to gloat over all the things which they knew and which the crowd didn’t know about the castle and the sliding panels, the magic ring and the statues that came alive. Perhaps one of the pleasantest things about magic happenings is the feeling which they give you of knowing what other people not only don’t know but wouldn’t, so to speak, believe if they did.

  On the white road outside the gates of the castle was a dark spattering of breaks and wagonettes and dogcarts. Three or four waiting motor-cars puffed fatly where they stood, and bicycles sprawled in heaps along the grassy hollow by the red brick wall. And the people who had been brought to the castle by the breaks and wagonettes, and dog-carts and bicycles and motors, as well as those who had walked there on their own unaided feet, were scattered about the grounds, or being shown over those parts of the castle which were, on this one day of the week, thrown open to visitors.

  There were more
visitors than usual today because it had somehow been whispered about that Lord Yalding was down, and that the holland covers were to be taken off the state furniture so that a rich American who wished to rent the castle, to live in, might see the place in all its glory.

  It certainly did look very splendid. The embroidered satin, gilded leather and tapestry of the chairs, which had been hidden by brown holland, gave to the rooms a pleasant air of being lived in. There were flowering plants and pots of roses here and there on tables or window-ledges. Mabel’s aunt prided herself on her tasteful touch in the home, and had studied the arrangement of flowers in a series of articles in Home Drivel called “How to Make Home High-class on Nine-pence a Week.”

  The great crystal chandeliers, released from the bags that at ordinary times shrouded them, gleamed with grey and purple splendour. The brown linen sheets had been taken off the state beds, and the red ropes that usually kept the low crowd in its proper place had been rolled up and hidden away.

  “It’s exactly as if we were calling on the family,” said the grocer’s daughter from Salisbury to her friend who was in the millinery.

  “If the Yankee doesn’t take it, what do you say to you and me setting up here when we get spliced?” the draper’s assistant asked his sweetheart. And she said: “Oh, Reggie, how can you! You are too funny.”

  All the afternoon the crowd in its smart holiday clothes, pink blouses, and light-coloured suits, flowery hats, and scarves beyond description passed through and through the dark hall, the magnificent drawing-rooms and boudoirs and picture-galleries. The chattering crowd was awed into something like quiet by the calm, stately bedchambers, where men had been born, and died; where royal guests had lain in long-ago summer nights, with big bow-pots of elder-flowers set on the hearth to ward off fever and evil spells. The terrace, where in old days dames in ruffs had sniffed the sweet-brier and southern-wood of the borders below, and ladies, bright with rouge and powder and brocade, had walked in the swing of their hooped skirts—the terrace now echoed to the sound of brown boots, and the tap-tap of high-heeled shoes at two and eleven three, and high laughter and chattering voices that said nothing that the children wanted to hear. These spoiled for them the quiet of the enchanted castle, and outraged the peace of the garden of enchantments.

  “It isn’t such a lark after all,” Gerald admitted, as from the window of the stone summer-house at the end of the terrace they watched the loud colours and heard the loud laughter. “I do hate to see all these people in our garden.”

  “I said that to that nice bailiff-man this morning,” said Mabel, setting herself on the stone floor, “and he said it wasn’t much to let them come once a week. He said Lord Yalding ought to let them come when they liked—said he would if he lived there.”

  “That’s all he knows!” said Jimmy. “Did he say anything else?”

  “Lots,” said Mabel. “I do like him! I told him—”

  “You didn’t!”

  “Yes. I told him lots about our adventures. The humble bailiff is a beautiful listener.”

  “We shall be locked up for beautiful lunatics if you let your jaw get the better of you, my Mabel child.”

  “Not us!” said Mabel. “I told it—you know the way—every word true, and yet so that nobody believes any of it. When I’d quite done he said I’d got a real littery talent, and I promised to put his name on the beginning of the first book I write when I grow up.”

  “You don’t know his name,” said Kathleen. “Let’s do something with the ring.”

  “Imposs!” said Gerald. “I forgot to tell you, but I met Mademoiselle when I went back for my garters—and she’s coming to meet us and walk back with us.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said,” said Gerald deliberately, “that it was very kind of her. And so it was. Us not wanting her doesn’t make it not kind her coming—”

  “It may be kind, but it’s sickening too,” said Mabel, “because now I suppose we shall have to stick here and wait for her; and I promised we’d meet the bailiff-man. He’s going to bring things in a basket and have a picnic-tea with us.”

  “Where?”

  “Beyond the dinosaurus. He said he’d tell me all about the anteddy-something animals—it means before Noah’s Ark; there are lots besides the dinosaurus in return for me telling him my agreeable fictions. Yes, he called them that.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as the gates shut. That’s five.”

  “We might take Mademoiselle along,” suggested Gerald.

  “She’d be too proud to have tea with a bailiff, I expect; you never know how grown-ups will take the simplest things.” It was Kathleen who said this.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what,” said Gerald, lazily turning on the stone bench. “You all go along, and meet your bailiff. A picnic’s a picnic. And I’ll wait for Mademoiselle.”

  Mabel remarked joyously that this was jolly decent of Gerald, to which he modestly replied: “Oh, rot!”

  Jimmy added that Gerald rather liked sucking-up to people.

  “Little boys don’t understand diplomacy,” said Gerald calmly; “sucking-up is simply silly. But it’s better to be good than pretty and—”

  “How do you know?” Jimmy asked.

  “And,” his brother went on, “you never know when a grown-up may come in useful. Besides, they like it. You must give them some little pleasures. Think how awful it must be to be old. My hat!”

  “I hope I shan’t be an old maid,” said Kathleen.

  “I don’t mean to be,” said Mabel briskly. “I’d rather marry a travelling tinker.”

  “It would be rather nice,” Kathleen mused, “to marry the Gypsy King and go about in a caravan telling fortunes and hung round with baskets and brooms.”

  “Oh, if I could choose,” said Mabel, “of course I’d marry a brigand, and live in his mountain fastnesses, and be kind to his captives and help them to escape and—”

  “You’ll be a real treasure to your husband,” said Gerald.

  “Yes,” said Kathleen, “or a sailor would be nice. You’d watch for his ship coming home and set the lamp in the dormer window to light him home through the storm; and when he was drowned at sea you’d be most frightfully sorry, and go every day to lay flowers on his daisied grave.”

  “Yes,” Mabel hastened to say, “or a soldier, and then you’d go to the wars with short petticoats and a cocked hat and a barrel round your neck like a St. Bernard dog. There’s a picture of a soldier’s wife on a song auntie’s got. It’s called ‘The Veevandyear.’”

  “When I marry—” Kathleen quickly said.

  “When I marry,” said Gerald, “I’ll marry a dumb girl, or else get the ring to make her so that she can’t speak unless she’s spoken to. Let’s have a squint.

  He applied his eye to the stone lattice.

  “They’re moving off,” he said. “Those pink and purple hats are nodding off in the distant prospect; and the funny little man with the beard like a goat is going a different way from everyone else—the gardeners will have to head him off. I don’t see Mademoiselle, though. The rest of you had better bunk. It doesn’t do to run any risks with picnics. The deserted hero of our tale, alone and unsupported, urged on his brave followers to pursue the commissariat waggons, he himself remaining at the post of danger and difficulty, because he was born to stand on burning decks whence all but he had fled, and to lead forlorn hopes when despaired of by the human race!”

  “I think I’ll marry a dumb husband,” said Mabel, “and there shan’t be any heroes in my books when I write them, only a heroine. Come on, Cathy.”

  Coming out of that cool, shadowy summer-house into the sunshine was like stepping into an oven, and the stone of the terrace was burning to the children’s feet.

  “I know now what a cat on hot bri
cks feels like,” said Jimmy.

  The antediluvian animals are set in a beech-wood on a slope at least half a mile across the park from the castle. The grandfather of the present Lord Yalding had them set there in the middle of last century, in the great days of the late Prince Consort, the Exhibition of 1851, Sir Joseph Paxton, and the Crystal Palace. Their stone flanks, their wide, ungainly wings, their lozenged crocodile-like backs show grey through the trees a long way off.

  Most people think that noon is the hottest time of the day. They are wrong. A cloudless sky gets hotter and hotter all the afternoon, and reaches its very hottest at five. I am sure you must all have noticed this when you are going out to tea anywhere in your best clothes, especially if your clothes are starched and you happen to have a rather long and shadeless walk.

  Kathleen, Mabel, and Jimmy got hotter and hotter, and went more and more slowly. They had almost reached that stage of resentment and discomfort when one “wishes one hadn’t come” before they saw, below the edge of the beech-wood, the white waved handkerchief of the bailiff.

  That banner, eloquent of tea, shade, and being able to sit down, put new heart into them. They mended their pace, and a final desperate run landed them among the drifted coppery leaves and bare grey and green roots of the beech-wood.

  “Oh, glory!” said Jimmy, throwing himself down. “How do you do?”

  The bailiff looked very nice, the girls thought. He was not wearing his velveteens, but a grey flannel suit that an Earl need not have scorned; and his straw hat would have done no discredit to a Duke; and a Prince could not have worn a prettier green tie. He welcomed the children warmly. And there were two baskets dumped heavy and promising among the beech-leaves.

  He was a man of tact. The hot, instructive tour of the stone antediluvians, which had loomed with ever-lessening charm before the children, was not even mentioned.