Enchanted Castle and Five Children and It (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Edith Nesbit

  “You know I can’t,” said Jimmy.

  “Can’t anyone think of anything?” Gerald asked, shivering.

  “When they find we’ve disappeared they’ll drag all the water for miles round,” said Jimmy hopefully, “in case we’ve fallen in and sunk to the bottom. When they come to drag this we can yell and be rescued.”

  “Yes, dear, that will be nice,” was Gerald’s bitter comment.

  “Don’t be so disagreeable,” said Mabel with a tone so strangely cheerful that the rest stared at her in amazement.

  “The ring,” she said. “Of course we’ve only got to wish ourselves home with it. Phoebus washed it in the moon ready for the next wish.”

  “You didn’t tell us about that,” said Gerald in accents of perfect good temper. “Never mind. Where is the ring?”

  “You had it,” Mabel reminded Kathleen.

  “I know I had,” said that child in stricken tones, “but I gave it to Psyche to look at—and—and she’s got it on her finger!”

  Everyone tried not to be angry with Kathleen. All partly succeeded.

  “If we ever get off this beastly island,” said Gerald, “I suppose you can find Psyche’s statue and get it off again?”

  “No I can’t,” Mabel moaned. “I don’t know where the statue is. I’ve never seen it. It may be in Hellas, wherever that is—or anywhere, for anything I know.”

  No one had anything kind to say, and it is pleasant to record that nobody said anything. And now it was grey daylight, and the sky to the north was flushing in pale pink and lavender.

  The boys stood moodily, hands in pockets. Mabel and Kathleen seemed to find it impossible not to cling together, and all about their legs the long grass was icy with dew.

  A faint sniff and a caught breath broke the silence.

  “Now, look here,” said Gerald briskly, “I won’t have it. Do you hear? Snivelling’s no good at all. No, I’m not a pig. It’s for your own good. Let’s make a tour of the island. Perhaps there’s a boat hidden somewhere among the overhanging boughs.”

  “How could there be?” Mabel asked.

  “Someone might have left it there, I suppose,” said Gerald.

  “But how would they have got off the island?”

  “In another boat, of course,” said Gerald; “come on.”

  Downheartedly, and quite sure that there wasn’t and couldn’t be any boat, the four children started to explore the island. How often each one of them had dreamed of islands, how often wished to be stranded on one! Well, now they were. Reality is sometimes quite different from dreams, and not half so nice. It was worst of all for Mabel, whose shoes and stockings were far away on the mainland. The coarse grass and brambles were very cruel to bare legs and feet.

  They stumbled through the wood to the edge of the water, but it was impossible to keep close to the edge of the island, the branches grew too thickly. There was a narrow, grassy path that wound in and out among the trees, and this they followed, dejected and mournful. Every moment made it less possible for them to hope to get back to the school-house unnoticed. And if they were missed and beds found in their present unslept-in state—well, there would be a row of some sort, and, as Gerald said, “Farewell to liberty!”

  “Of course we can get off all right,” said Gerald. “Just all shout when we see a gardener or a keeper on the mainland. But if we do, concealment is at an end and all is absolutely up!”

  “Yes,” said everyone gloomily.

  “Come, buck up!” said Gerald, the spirit of the born general beginning to reawaken in him. “We shall get out of this scrape all right, as we’ve got out of others; you know we shall. See, the sun’s coming out. You feel all right and jolly now, don’t you?”

  “Yes, oh yes!” said everyone, in tones of unmixed misery.

  The sun was now risen, and through a deep cleft in the hills it sent a strong shaft of light straight at the island. The yellow light, almost level, struck through the stems of the trees and dazzled the children’s eyes. This, with the fact that he was not looking where he was going, as Jimmy did not fail to point out later, was enough to account for what now happened to Gerald, who was leading the melancholy little procession. He stumbled, clutched at a tree-trunk, missed his clutch, and disappeared, with a yell and a clatter; and Mabel, who came next, only pulled herself up just in time not to fall down a steep flight of moss-grown steps that seemed to open suddenly in the ground at her feet.

  “Oh, Gerald!” she called down the steps; “are you hurt?”

  “No,” said Gerald, out of sight and crossly, for he was hurt, rather severely; “it’s steps, and there’s a passage.”

  “There always is,” said Jimmy.

  “I knew there was a passage,” said Mabel; “it goes under the water and comes out at the Temple of Flora. Even the gardeners know that, but they won’t go down, for fear of snakes.”

  “Then we can get out that way—I do think you might have said so,” Gerald’s voice came up to say.

  “I didn’t think of it,” said Mabel. “At least—And I suppose it goes past the place where the Ugly-Wugly found its good hotel.”

  “I’m not going,” said Kathleen positively, “not in the dark, I’m not. So I tell you!”

  “Very well, baby,” said Gerald sternly, and his head appeared from below very suddenly through interlacing brambles. “No one asked you to go in the dark. We’ll leave you here if you like, and return and rescue you with a boat. Jimmy, the bicycle lamp!” He reached up a hand for it.

  Jimmy produced from his bosom, the place where lamps are always kept in fairy stories—see Aladdin and others—a bicycle lamp.

  “We brought it,” he explained, “so as not to break our shins over bits of long Mabel among the rhododendrons.”

  “Now,” said Gerald very firmly, striking a match and opening the thick, rounded glass front of the bicycle lamp, “I don’t know what the rest of you are going to do, but I’m going down these steps and along this passage. If we find the good hotel—a good hotel never hurt anyone yet.”

  “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 ah
ead 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 hall, 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.11) 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 dose 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 dog-carts. 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 southernwood 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 hi
gh-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.”