by E. Nesbit
Oswald did not do things like these, but then he is older than his brothers. The only thing he did just about then was making a booby-trap for Mrs Pettigrew when she had locked H. O. up in the dairy, and unfortunately it was the day she was going out in her best things, and part of the trap was a can of water. Oswald was not willingly vicious; it was but a light and thoughtless act which he had every reason to be sorry for afterwards. And he is sorry even without those reasons, because he knows it is ungentlemanly to play tricks on women.
I remember Mother telling Dora and me when we were little that you ought to be very kind and polite to servants, because they have to work very hard, and do not have so many good times as we do. I used to think about Mother more at the Moat House than I did at Blackheath, especially in the garden. She was very fond of flowers, and she used to tell us about the big garden where she used to live; and I remember Dora and I helped her to plant seeds. But it is no use wishing. She would have liked that garden, though.
The girls and the white mice did not do anything boldly wicked—though of course they used to borrow Mrs Pettigrew’s needles, which made her very nasty. Needles that are borrowed might just as well be stolen. But I say no more.
I have only told you these things to show the kind of events which occurred on the days I don’t tell you about. On the whole, we had an excellent time.
It was on the day we had the pillow-fight that we went for the long walk. Not the Pilgrimage—that is another story. We did not mean to have a pillow-fight. It is not usual to have them after breakfast, but Oswald had come up to get his knife out of the pocket of his Etons, to cut some wire we were making rabbit snares of. It is a very good knife, with a file in it, as well as a corkscrew and other things—and he did not come down at once, because he was detained by having to make an apple-pie bed for Dicky. Dicky came up after him to see what he was up to, and when he did see he buzzed a pillow at Oswald, and the fight began. The others, hearing the noise of battle from afar, hastened to the field of action, all except Dora, who couldn’t because of being laid up with her foot, and Daisy, because she is a little afraid of us still, when we are all together. She thinks we are rough. This comes of having only one brother.
Well, the fight was a very fine one. Alice backed me up, and Noël and H. O. backed Dicky, and Denny heaved a pillow or two; but he cannot shy straight, so I don’t know which side he was on.
And just as the battle raged most fiercely, Mrs Pettigrew came in and snatched the pillows away, and shook those of the warriors who were small enough for it. She was rough if you like. She also used language I should have thought she would be above. She said, Drat you!’ and ‘Drabbit you!’ The last is a thing I have never heard said before. She said—
‘There’s no peace of your life with you children. Drat your antics! And that poor, dear, patient gentleman right underneath, with his headache and his handwriting: and you rampaging about over his head like young bull-calves. I wonder you haven’t more sense, a great girl like you.’
She said this to Alice, and Alice answered gently, as we are told to do—
‘I really am awfully sorry; we forgot about the headache. Don’t be cross, Mrs Pettigrew; we didn’t mean to; we didn’t think.’
‘You never do,’ she said, and her voice, though grumpy, was no longer violent. ‘Why on earth you can’t take yourselves off for the day I don’t know.’
We all said, ‘But may we?’
She said, ‘Of course you may. Now put on your boots and go for a good long walk. And I’ll tell you what—I’ll put you up a snack, and you can have an egg to your tea to make up for missing your dinner. Now don’t go clattering about the stairs and passages, there’s good children. See if you can’t be quiet this once, and give the good gentleman a chance with his copying.’
She went off. Her bark is worse than her bite. She does not understand anything about writing books, though. She thinks Albert’s uncle copies things out of printed books, when he is really writing new ones. I wonder how she thinks printed books get made first of all. Many servants are like this.
She gave us the ‘snack’ in a basket, and sixpence to buy milk with. She said any of the farms would let us have it, only most likely it would be skim. We thanked her politely, and she hurried us out of the front door as if we’d been chickens on a pansy bed.
(I did not know till after I had left the farm gate open, and the hens had got into the garden, that these feathered bipeds display a great partiality for the young buds of plants of the genus viola, to which they are extremely destructive. I was told that by the gardener. I looked it up in the gardening book afterwards to be sure he was right. You do learn a lot of things in the country.)
We went through the garden as far as the church, and then we rested a bit in the porch, and just looked into the basket to see what the ‘snack’ was. It proved to be sausage rolls and queen cakes, and a Lent pie in a round tin dish, and some hard-boiled eggs, and some apples. We all ate the apples at once, so as not to have to carry them about with us. The churchyard smells awfully good. It is the wild thyme that grows on the graves. This is another thing we did not know before we came into the country.
Then the door of the church tower was ajar, and we all went up; it had always been locked before when we had tried it.
We saw the ringers’ loft where the ends of the bell-ropes hang down with long, furry handles to them like great caterpillars, some red, and some blue and white, but we did not pull them. And then we went up to where the bells are, very big and dusty among large dirty beams; and four windows with no glass, only shutters like Venetian blinds, but they won’t pull up. There were heaps of straws and sticks on the window ledges. We think they were owls’ nests, but we did not see any owls.
Then the tower stairs got very narrow and dark, and we went on up, and we came to a door and opened it suddenly, and it was like being hit in the face, the light was so sudden. And there we were on the top of the tower, which is flat, and people have cut their names on it, and a turret at one corner, and a low wall all round, up and down, like castle battlements. And we looked down and saw the roof of the church, and the leads, and the churchyard, and our garden, and the Moat House, and the farm, and Mrs Simpkins’s cottage, looking very small, and other farms looking like toy things out of boxes, and we saw corn-fields and meadows and pastures. A pasture is not the same thing as a meadow, whatever you may think. And we saw the tops of trees and hedges, looking like the map of the United States, and villages, and a tower that did not look very far away standing by itself on the top of a hill. Alice pointed to it, and said—
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s not a church,’ said Noël, ‘because there’s no churchyard. Perhaps it’s a tower of mystery that covers the entrance to a subterranean vault with treasure in it.’
Dicky said, ‘Subterranean fiddlestick!’ and ‘A waterworks, more likely.’
Alice thought perhaps it was a ruined castle, and the rest of its crumbling walls were concealed by ivy, the growth of years.
Oswald could not make his mind up what it was, so he said, ‘Let’s go and see! We may as well go there as anywhere.’
So we got down out of the church tower and dusted ourselves, and set out.
The Tower of Mystery showed quite plainly from the road, now that we knew where to look for it, because it was on the top of a hill. We began to walk. But the tower did not seem to get any nearer. And it was very hot.
So we sat down in a meadow where there was a stream in the ditch and ate the ‘snack.’ We drank the pure water from the brook out of our hands, because there was no farm to get milk at just there, and it was too much fag to look for one—and, besides, we thought we might as well save the sixpence.
Then we started again, and still the tower looked as far off as ever. Denny began to drag his feet, though he had brought a walking-stick wh
ich none of the rest of us had, and said—
‘I wish a cart would come along. We might get a lift.’
He knew all about getting lifts, of course, from having been in the country before. He is not quite the white mouse we took him for at first. Of course when you live in Lewisham or Blackheath you learn other things. If you asked for a lift in Lewisham, High Street, your only reply would be jeers. We sat down on a heap of stones, and decided that we would ask for a lift from the next cart, whichever way it was going. It was while we were waiting that Oswald found out about plantain seeds being good to eat.
When the sound of wheels came we remarked with joy that the cart was going towards the Tower of Mystery. It was a cart a man was going to fetch a pig home in. Denny said—
‘I say, you might give us a lift. Will you?’
The man who was going for the pig said—
‘What, all that little lot?’ but he winked at Alice, and we saw that he meant to aid us on our way. So we climbed up, and he whipped up the horse and asked us where we were going. He was a kindly old man, with a face like a walnut shell, and white hair and beard like a jack-in-the-box.
‘We want to get to the tower,’ Alice said. ‘Is it a ruin, or not?’
‘It ain’t no ruin,’ the man said; ‘no fear of that! The man wot built it he left so much a year to be spent on repairing of it! Money that might have put bread in honest folks’ mouths.’
We asked was it a church then, or not.
‘Church?’ he said. ‘Not it. It’s more of a tombstone, from all I can make out. They do say there was a curse on him that built it, and he wasn’t to rest in earth or sea. So he’s buried half-way up the tower—if you can call it buried.’
‘Can you go up it?’ Oswald asked.
‘Lord love you! yes; a fine view from the top they say. I’ve never been up myself, though I’ve lived in sight of it, boy and man, these sixty-three years come harvest.’
Alice asked whether you had to go past the dead and buried person to get to the top of the tower, and could you see the coffin.
‘No, no,’ the man said; ‘that’s all hid away behind a slab of stone, that is, with reading on it. You’ve no call to be afraid, missy. It’s daylight all the way up. But I wouldn’t go there after dark, so I wouldn’t. It’s always open, day and night, and they say tramps sleep there now and again. Anyone who likes can sleep there, but it wouldn’t be me.’
We thought that it would not be us either, but we wanted to go more than ever, especially when the man said—
‘My own great-uncle of the mother’s side, he was one of the masons that set up the stone slab. Before then it was thick glass, and you could see the dead man lying inside, as he’d left it in his will. He was lying there in a glass coffin with his best clothes—blue satin and silver, my uncle said, such as was all the go in his day, with his wig on, and his sword beside him, what he used to wear. My uncle said his hair had grown out from under his wig, and his beard was down to the toes of him. My uncle he always upheld that that dead man was no deader than you and me, but was in a sort of fit, a transit, I think they call it, and looked for him to waken into life again some day. But the doctor said not. It was only something done to him like Pharaoh in the Bible afore he was buried.’
Alice whispered to Oswald that we should be late for tea, and wouldn’t it be better to go back now directly. But he said—
‘If you’re afraid, say so; and you needn’t come in anyway—but I’m going on.’
The man who was going for the pig put us down at a gate quite near the tower—at least it looked so until we began to walk again. We thanked him, and he said—
‘Quite welcome,’ and drove off.
We were rather quiet going through the wood. What we had heard made us very anxious to see the tower—all except Alice, who would keep talking about tea, though not a greedy girl by nature. None of the others encouraged her, but Oswald thought himself that we had better be home before dark.
As we went up the path through the wood we saw a poor wayfarer with dusty bare feet sitting on the bank.
He stopped us and said he was a sailor, and asked for a trifle to help him to get back to his ship.
I did not like the look of him much myself, but Alice said, ‘Oh, the poor man, do let’s help him, Oswald.’ So we held a hurried council, and decided to give him the milk sixpence. Oswald had it in his purse, and he had to empty the purse into his hand to find the sixpence, for that was not all the money he had, by any means. Noël said afterwards that he saw the wayfarer’s eyes fastened greedily upon the shining pieces as Oswald returned them to his purse. Oswald has to own that he purposely let the man see that he had more money, so that the man might not feel shy about accepting so large a sum as sixpence.
The man blessed our kind hearts and we went on.
The sun was shining very brightly, and the Tower of Mystery did not look at all like a tomb when we got to it. The bottom Storey was on arches, all open, and ferns and things grew underneath. There was a round stone stair going up in the middle. Alice began to gather ferns while we went up, but when we had called out to her that it was as the pig-man had said, and daylight all the way up, she said—
‘All right. I’m not afraid. I’m only afraid of being late home,’ and came up after us. And perhaps, though not downright manly truthfulness, this was as much as you could expect from a girl.
There were holes in the little tower of the staircase to let light in. At the top of it was a thick door with iron bolts. We shot these back, and it was not fear but caution that made Oswald push open the door so very slowly and carefully.
Because, of course, a stray dog or cat might have got shut up there by accident, and it would have startled Alice very much if it had jumped out on us.
When the door was opened we saw that there was no such thing. It was a room with eight sides. Denny says it is the shape called octogenarian; because a man named Octagius invented it. There were eight large arched windows with no glass, only stone-work, like in churches. The room was full of sunshine, and you could see the blue sky through the windows, but nothing else, because they were so high up. It was so bright we began to think the pig-man had been kidding us. Under one of the windows was a door. We went through, and there was a little passage and then a turret-twisting stair, like in the church, but quite light with windows. When we had gone some way up this, we came to a sort of landing, and there was a block of stone let into the wall—polished—Denny said it was Aberdeen graphite, with gold letters cut in it. It said—
‘Here lies the body of Mr Richard Ravenal
Born 1720. Died 1779.’
and a verse of poetry:
‘Here lie I, between earth and sky,
Think upon me, dear passers-by,
And you who do my tombstone see
Be kind to say a prayer for me.’
‘How horrid!’ Alice said. ‘Do let’s get home.’
‘We may as well go to the top,’ Dicky said, ‘just to say we’ve been.’
And Alice is no funk—so she agreed; though I could see she did not like it.
Up at the top it was like the top of the church tower, only octogenarian in shape, instead of square.
Alice got all right there; because you cannot think much about ghosts and nonsense when the sun is shining bang down on you at four o’clock in the afternoon, and you can see red farm-roofs between the trees, and the safe white roads, with people in carts like black ants crawling.
It was very jolly, but we felt we ought to be getting back, because tea is at five, and we could not hope to find lifts both ways.
So we started to go down. Dicky went first, then Oswald, then Alice—and H. O. had just stumbled over the top step and saved himself by Alice’s back, which nearly upset Oswald and Dicky, when the hearts of all stood still,
and then went on by leaps and bounds, like the good work in missionary magazines.
For, down below us, in the tower where the man whose beard grew down to his toes after he was dead was buried, there was a noise—a loud noise. And it was like a door being banged and bolts fastened. We tumbled over each other to get back into the open sunshine on the top of the tower, and Alice’s hand got jammed between the edge of the doorway and H. O.’s boot; it was bruised black and blue, and another part bled, but she did not notice it till long after.
We looked at each other, and Oswald said in a firm voice (at least, I hope it was)—
‘What was that?’
‘He has waked up,’ Alice said. ‘Oh, I know he has. Of course there is a door for him to get out by when he wakes. He’ll come up here. I know he will.’
Dicky said, and his voice was not at all firm (I noticed that at the time), ‘It doesn’t matter, if he’s alive.’
