The E. Nesbit Megapack: 26 Classic Novels and Stories

by E. Nesbit

  ‘I think it’s very mysterious,’ said Noël. ‘I shouldn’t wonder if they’re going to dig for buried treasure. Let’s go and see.’

  ‘No,’ said Oswald, who, though modest, is thoughtful. ‘If we do they’ll stop digging, or whatever they’re doing. When they’ve gone away, we’ll go and see if the ground is scratched about.’

  So we delayed where we were, but we saw no more scarlet.

  In a little while a dull-looking man in brown came by on a bicycle. He stopped and got off.

  ‘Seen a couple of Tommies about here, my lad?’ he said to Oswald.

  Oswald does not like being called anybody’s lad, especially that kind of man’s; but he did not want to spoil the review, or field-day, or sham-fight, or whatever it might be, so he said:

  ‘Yes; they’re up in the ruins.’

  ‘You don’t say so!’ said the man. ‘In uniform, I suppose? Yes, of course, or you wouldn’t have known they were soldiers. Silly cuckoos!’

  He wheeled his bicycle up the rough lane that leads to the old ruin.

  ‘It can’t be buried treasure,’ said Dicky.

  ‘I don’t care if it is,’ said Oswald. ‘We’ll see what’s happening. I don’t mind spoiling his sport. “My ladding” me like that!’

  So we followed the man with the bicycle. It was leaning against the churchyard gate when we got there. The man off it was going up to the ruin, and we went after him.

  He did not call out to the soldiers, and we thought that odd; but it didn’t make us think where it might have made us if we had had any sense. He just went creeping about, looking behind walls and inside arches, as though he was playing at hide-and-seek. There is a mound in the middle of the ruin, where stones and things have fallen during dark ages, and the grass has grown all over them. We stood on the mound, and watched the bicycling stranger nosing about like a ferret.

  There is an archway in that ruin, and a flight of steps goes down—only five steps—and then it is all stopped up with fallen stones and earth. The stranger stopped at last at this arch, and stooped forward with his hands on his knees, and looked through the arch and down the steps. Then he said suddenly and fiercely:

  ‘Come out of it, will you?’

  And the soldiers came. I wouldn’t have. They were two to his one. They came cringing out like beaten dogs. The brown man made a sort of bound, and next minute the two soldiers were handcuffed together, and he was driving them before him like sheep.

  ‘Back you go the same way as what you come,’ he said.

  And then Oswald saw the soldiers’ faces, and he will never forget what they looked like.

  He jumped off the mound, and ran to where they were.

  ‘What have they done?’ he asked the handcuffer.

  ‘Deserters,’ said the man. ‘Thanks to you, my lad, I got ’em as easy as kiss your hand.’

  Then one of the soldiers looked at Oswald. He was not very old—about as big as a fifth-form boy. And Oswald answered what the soldier looked at him.

  ‘I’m not a sneak,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have told if I’d known. If you’d told me, instead of saying to mind my own business I’d have helped you.’

  The soldier didn’t answer, but the bicycle man did.

  ‘Then you’d ’a helped yourself into the stone jug, my lad,’ said he. ‘Help a dirty deserter? You’re young enough to know better. Come along, you rubbish!’

  And they went.

  When they were gone Dicky said:

  ‘It’s very rum. I hate cowards. And deserters are cowards. I don’t see why we feel like this.’

  Alice and Dora and Noël were now discovered to be in tears.

  ‘Of course we did right to tell. Only when the soldier looked at me…’ said Oswald.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dicky, ‘that’s just it.’

  In deepest gloom the party retraced its steps.

  As we went, Dora said with sniffs:

  ‘I suppose it was the bicycle man’s duty.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Oswald, ‘but it wasn’t our duty. And I jolly well wish we hadn’t!’

  ‘And such a beautiful day, too,’ said Noël, sniffing in his turn.

  It was beautiful. The afternoon had been dull, but now the sun was shining flat across the marshes, making everything look as if it had been covered all over with the best gold-leaf—marsh and trees, and roofs and stacks, and everything.

  That evening Noël wrote a poem about it all. It began:

  ‘Poor soldiers, why did you run away

  On such a beautiful, beautiful day?

  If you had run away in the rain,

  Perhaps they would never have found you again,

  Because then Oswald would not have been there

  To show the hunter the way to your lair.’

  Oswald would have licked him for that—only Noël is not very strong, and there is something about poets, however young, that makes it rather like licking a girl. So Oswald did not even say what he thought—Noël cries at the least thing. Oswald only said, ‘Let’s go down to our pigman.’

  And we all went except Noël. He never will go anywhere when in the midst of making poetry. And Alice stayed with him, and H. O. was in bed.

  We told the pigman all about the deserters, and about our miserable inside remorsefulness, and he said he knew just how we felt.

  ‘There’s quite enough agin a pore chap that’s made a bolt of it without the rest of us a-joinin’ in,’ he said. ‘Not as I holds with deserting—mean trick I call it. But all the same, when the odds is that heavy—thousands to one—all the army and the navy and the pleece and Parliament and the King agin one pore silly bloke. You wouldn’t ’a done it a purpose, I lay.’

  ‘Not much,’ said Oswald in gloomy dejection. ‘Have a peppermint? They’re extra strong.’

  When the pigman had had one he went on talking.

  ‘There’s a young chap, now,’ he said, ‘broke out of Dover Gaol. I ’appen to know what he’s in for—nicked a four-pound cake, he did, off of a counter at a pastrycook’s—Jenner’s it was, in the High Street—part hunger, part playfulness. But even if I wasn’t to know what he was lagged for, do you think I’d put the coppers on to him? Not me. Give a fellow a chance is what I say. But don’t you grizzle about them there Tommies. P’raps it’ll be the making of ’em in the end. A slack-baked pair as ever wore boots. I seed ’em. Only next time just you take and think afore you pipes up—see?’

  We said that we saw, and that next time we would do as he said. And we went home again. As we went Dora said:

  ‘But supposing it was a cruel murderer that had got loose, you ought to tell then.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dicky; ‘but before you do tell you ought to be jolly sure it is a cruel murderer, and not a chap that’s taken a cake because he was hungry. How do you know what you’d do if you were hungry enough?’

  ‘I shouldn’t steal,’ said Dora.

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ said Dicky; and they argued about it all the way home, and before we got in it began to rain in torrents.

  Conversations about food always make you feel as though it was a very long time since you had had anything to eat. Mrs. Beale had gone home, of course, but we went into the larder. It is a generous larder. No lock, only a big wooden latch that pulls up with a string, like in Red Riding Hood. And the floor is clean damp red brick. It makes ginger-nuts soft if you put the bag on this floor. There was half a rhubarb pie, and there were meat turnovers with potato in them. Mrs. Beale is a thoughtful person, and I know many people much richer that are not nearly so thoughtful.

  We had a comfortable feast at the kitchen table, standing up to eat, like horses.

  Then we had to let Noël read us his piece of poetry about the soldier; he wouldn’t have slept if we hadn�
��t. It was very long, and it began as I have said, and ended up:

  ‘Poor soldiers, learn a lesson from to-day,

  It is very wrong to run away;

  It is better to stay

  And serve your King and Country—hurray!’

  Noël owned that Hooray sounded too cheerful for the end of a poem about soldiers with faces like theirs were.

  ‘But I didn’t mean it about the soldiers. It was about the King and Country. Half a sec. I’ll put that in.’ So he wrote:

  ‘P.S.—I do not mean to be unkind,

  Poor soldiers, to you, so never mind.

  When I say hurray or sing,

  It is because I am thinking of my Country and my King.’

  ‘You can’t sing Hooray,’ said Dicky. So Noël went to bed singing it, which was better than arguing about it, Alice said. But it was noisier as well.

  Oswald and Dicky always went round the house to see that all the doors were bolted and the shutters up. This is what the head of the house always does, and Oswald is the head when father is not there. There are no shutters upstairs, only curtains. The White House, which is Miss Sandal’s house’s name, is not in the village, but ‘quite a step’ from it, as Mrs. Beale says. It is the first house you come to as you come along the road from the marsh.

  We used to look in the cupboard and under the beds for burglars every night. The girls liked us to, though they wouldn’t look themselves, and I don’t know that it was much good. If there is a burglar, it’s sometimes safer for you not to know it. Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to find a burglar, especially as he would be armed to the teeth as likely as not. However, there is not much worth being a burglar about, in houses where the motto is plain living and high thinking, and there never was anyone in the cupboards or under the beds.

  Then we put out all the lights very carefully in case of fire—all except Noël’s. He does not like the dark. He says there are things in it that go away when you light a candle, and however much you talk reason and science to him, it makes no difference at all.

  Then we got into our pyjamas. It was Oswald who asked father to let us have pyjamas instead of nightgowns; they are so convenient for dressing up when you wish to act clowns, or West Indian planters, or any loose-clothed characters. Then we got into bed, and then we got into sleep.

  Little did the unconscious sleepers reck of the strange destiny that was advancing on them by leaps and bounds through the silent watches of the night.

  Although we were asleep, the rain went on raining just the same, and the wind blowing across the marsh with the fury of a maniac who has been transformed into a blacksmith’s bellows. And through the night, and the wind, and the rain, our dreadful destiny drew nearer and nearer. I wish this to sound as if something was going to happen, and I hope it does. I hope the reader’s heart is now standing still with apprehensionness on our account, but I do not want it to stop altogether, so I will tell you that we were not all going to be murdered in our beds, or pass peacefully away in our sleeps with angel-like smiles on our young and beautiful faces. Not at all. What really happened was this. Some time must have elapsed between our closing our eyes in serene slumber and the following narrative:

  Oswald was awakened by Dicky thumping him hard in the back, and saying in accents of terror—at least, he says not, but Oswald knows what they sounded like:

  ‘What’s that?’

  Oswald reared up on his elbow and listened, but there was nothing to listen to except Dicky breathing like a grampus, and the giggle-guggle of the rain-water overflowing from the tub under the window.

  ‘What’s what?’ said Oswald.

  He did not speak furiously, as many elder brothers would have done when suddenly awakened by thumps.

  ‘That!’ said Dicky. ‘There it is again!’

  And this time, certainly, there it was, and it sounded like somebody hammering on the front-door with his fists. There is no knocker to the plain-living, high-thinking house.

  Oswald controlled his fears, if he had any (I am not going to say whether he had or hadn’t), and struck a match. Before the candle had had time to settle its flame after the first flare up that doesn’t last, the row began again.

  Oswald’s nerves are of iron, but it would have given anybody a start to see two white figures in the doorway, yet so it was. They proved to be Alice and Dora in their nighties; but no one could blame anyone for not being sure of this at first.

  ‘Is it burglars?’ said Dora; and her teeth did chatter, whatever she may say.

  ‘I think it’s Mrs. Beale,’ said Alice. ‘I expect she’s forgotten the key.’

  Oswald pulled his watch out from under his pillow.

  ‘It’s half-past one,’ he said.

  And then the knocking began again. So the intrepid Oswald went to the landing window that is over the front-door. The others went too. And he opened the window in his pyjamas and said, ‘Who’s there?’

  There was the scraping sound of boots on the doorstep, as somebody down there stepped back.

  ‘Is this the way to Ashford?’ said the voice of a man.

  ‘Ashford’s thirteen miles off,’ said Oswald. ‘You get on to the Dover road.’

  ‘I don’t want to get on the Dover road,’ said the voice; ‘I’ve had enough of Dover.’

  A thrill ran through every heart. We all told each other so afterwards.

  ‘Well,’ said Dicky, ‘Ashford’s thirteen miles——’

  ‘Anybody but you in the house?’

  ‘Say we’ve got men and dogs and guns,’ whispered Dora.

  ‘There are six of us,’ said Oswald, ‘all armed to the teeth.’

  The stranger laughed.

  ‘I’m not a burglar,’ he said; ‘I’ve lost my way, that’s all. I thought I should have got to Ashford before dusk, but I missed the way. I’ve been wandering all over these marshes ever since, in the rain. I expect they’re out after me now, but I’m dead beat. I can’t go on. Won’t you let me in? I can sit by the kitchen fire.’

  Oswald drew his head back through the window, and a hasty council took place on the landing.

  ‘It is,’ said Alice.

  ‘You heard what he said about Dover, and their being out after him?’

  ‘I say, you might let a chap in,’ said the voice outside. ‘I’m perfectly respectable. Upon my word I am.’

  ‘I wish he hadn’t said that,’ whispered Dora. Such a dreadful story! And we didn’t even ask him if he was.’

  ‘He sounds very tired,’ said Alice.

  ‘And wet,’ said Oswald. ‘I heard the water squelching in his boots.’

  ‘What’ll happen if we don’t let him in?’ said Dicky.

  ‘He’ll be caught and taken back, like the soldiers,’ said Oswald. ‘Look here, I’m going to chance it. You others can lock yourselves into your rooms if you’re frightened.’

  Then Oswald put his brave young head out of the window, and the rain dripped on to the back of his bold young neck off the roof, like a watering-pot on to a beautiful flower, and he said:

  ‘There’s a porch to the side door. Just scoot round there and shelter, and I’ll come down in half a sec.’

  A resolve made in early youth never to face midnight encounters without boots was the cause of this delay. Oswald and Dicky got into their boots and jackets, and told the girls to go back to bed.

  Then we went down and opened the front-door. The stranger had heard the bolts go, and he was outside waiting.

  We held the door open politely, and he stepped in and began at once to drip heavily on the doormat.

  We shut the door. He looked wildly round.

  ‘Be calm! You are safe,’ said Oswald.

  ‘Thanks,’ said the stranger; ‘I see I am.’

  Al
l our hearts were full of pity for the outcast. He was, indeed, a spectacle to shock the benevolent. Even the prison people, Oswald thought, or the man he took the cake from, would have felt their fierceness fade if they could have seen him then. He was not in prison dress. Oswald would have rather liked to see that, but he remembered that it was safer for the man that he had found means to rid himself of the felon’s garb. He wore a gray knickerbocker suit, covered with mud. The lining of his hat must have been blue, and it had run down his face in streaks like the gentleman in Mr. Kipling’s story. He was wetter than I have ever seen anyone out of a bath or the sea.

  ‘Come into the kitchen,’ said Oswald; ‘you can drip there quite comfortably. The floor is brick.’

  He followed us into the kitchen.

  ‘Are you kids alone in the house?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Oswald.

  ‘Then I suppose it’s no good asking if you’ve got a drop of brandy?’

  ‘Not a bit,’ said Dicky.

  ‘Whisky would do, or gin—any sort of spirit,’ said the smeared stranger hopefully.

  ‘Not a drop,’ said Oswald; ‘at least, I’ll look in the medicine cupboard. And, I say, take off your things and put them in the sink. I’ll get you some other clothes. There are some of Mr. Sandal’s.’

  The man hesitated.

  ‘It’ll make a better disguise,’ said Oswald in a low, significant whisper, and turned tactfully away, so as not to make the stranger feel awkward.

  Dicky got the clothes, and the stranger changed in the back-kitchen. The only spirit Oswald could find was spirits of salts, which the stranger said was poison, and spirits of camphor. Oswald gave him some of this on sugar; he knows it is a good thing when you have taken cold. The stranger hated it. He changed in the back-kitchen, and while he was doing it we tried to light the kitchen fire, but it would not; so Dicky went up to ask Alice for some matches, and finding the girls had not gone to bed as ordered, but contrarily dressed themselves, he let them come down. And then, of course, there was no reason why they should not light the fire. They did.