Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  ‘But no one would know it was us if we held our tongues.’

  ‘We can’t hold our tongues,’ Oswald said; ‘if we do someone else will be blamed, as sure as fate. You didn’t hear what that woman said about insurance money.’

  ‘We might wait and see if anyone does get into trouble, and then come forward,’ said Dicky.

  And Oswald owned they might do that, but his heart was full of despair and remorse.

  Just as they got to their bikes a man met them.

  ‘All lost, I suppose?’ he said, jerking his thumb at the blazing farmyard.

  ‘Not all,’ said Dicky; ‘we saved the furniture and the wool and things — —’

  The man looked at us, and said heavily:

  ‘Very kind of you, but it was all insured.’

  ‘Look here,’ said Oswald earnestly, ‘don’t you say that to anyone else.’

  ‘Eh?’ said the man.

  ‘If you do, they’re safe to think you set fire to it yourself!’

  He stared, then he frowned, then he laughed, and said something about old heads on young shoulders, and went on.

  We went on, too, in interior gloom, that only grew gloomier as we got nearer and nearer home.

  We held a council that night after the little ones had gone to bed. Dora and Alice seemed to have been crying most of the day. They felt a little better when they heard that no one had been burned to death. Alice told me she had been thinking all day of large families burned to little cinders. But about telling of the fire-balloon we could not agree.

  Alice and Oswald thought we ought. But Dicky said ‘Wait,’ and Dora said ‘Write to father about it.’

  Alice said:

  ‘No; it doesn’t make any difference about our not being sure whether our balloon was the cause of destruction. I expect it was, and, anyway, we ought to own up.’

  ‘I feel so too,’ said Oswald; ‘but I do wish I knew how long in prison you got for it.’

  We went to bed without deciding anything.

  And very early in the morning Oswald woke, and he got up and looked out of the window, and there was a great cloud of smoke still going up from the doomed rickyard. So then he went and woke Alice, and said:

  ‘Suppose the police have got that poor farmer locked up in a noisome cell, and all the time it’s us.’

  ‘That’s just what I feel,’ said Alice.

  Then Oswald said, ‘Get dressed.’

  And when she had, she came out into the road, where Oswald, pale but resolute, was already pacing with firm steps. And he said:

  ‘Look here, let’s go and tell. Let’s say you and I made the balloon. The others can stop out of it if they like.’

  ‘They won’t if it’s really prison,’ said Alice. ‘But it would be noble of us to try it on. Let’s — —’

  But we found we didn’t know who to tell.

  ‘It seems so fatal to tell the police,’ said Alice; ‘there’s no getting out of it afterwards. Besides, he’s only Jameson, and he’s very stupid.’

  The author assures you you do not know what it is like to have a crime like arsenic on your conscience, and to have gone to the trouble and expense of making up your mind to confess it, and then not to know who to.

  We passed a wretched day. And all the time the ricks were blazing. All the people in the village went over with carts and bikes to see the fire — like going to a fair or a show. In other circumstances we should have done the same, but now we had no heart for it.

  In the evening Oswald went for a walk by himself, and he found his footsteps turning towards the humble dwelling of the Ancient Mariner who had helped us in a smuggling adventure once.

  The author wishes to speak the truth, so he owns that perhaps Oswald had some idea that the Ancient Mariner, who knew so much about smugglers and highwaymen, might be able to think of some way for us to save ourselves from prison without getting an innocent person put into it. Oswald found the mariner smoking a black pipe by his cottage door. He winked at Oswald as usual. Then Oswald said:

  ‘I want to ask your advice; but it’s a secret. I know you can keep secrets.’

  When the aged one had agreed to this, Oswald told him all. It was a great relief.

  The mariner listened with deep attention, and when Oswald had quite done, he said:

  ‘It ain’t the stone jug this time mate. That there balloon of yours, I see it go up — fine and purty ’twas, too.’

  ‘We all saw it go up,’ said Oswald in despairing accents. ‘The question is, where did it come down?’

  ‘At Burmarsh, sonny,’ was the unexpected and unspeakably relieving reply. ‘My sister’s husband’s niece — it come down and lodged in their pear-tree — showed it me this morning, with the red ink on it what spelled your names out.’

  Oswald, only pausing to wring the hand of his preserver, tore home on the wings of the wind to tell the others.

  I don’t think we were ever so glad of anything in our lives. It is a frightfully blighting thing when you believe yourself to be an Arsenicator (or whatever it is) of the deepest dye.

  As soon as we could think of anything but our own cleanness from guilt, we began to fear the worst of Tom Simkins, the farmer at Crown Ovenden. But he came out of it, like us, without a stain on his fair name, because he and his sister and his man Honeysett all swore that he had given a tramp leave to sleep up against the beanstack the night before the fire, and the tramp’s pipe and matches were found there. So he got his insurance money; but the tramp escaped.

  But when we told father all about it, he said he wished he had been a director of that fire insurance company.

  We never made another fire-balloon. Though it was not us that time, it might have been. And we know now but too well the anxieties of a life of crime.

  THE ENCHANCERIED HOUSE

  A STORY ABOUT THE BASTABLES

  The adventure which I am about to relate was a very long time ago, and it was nobody’s fault. The part of it that was most like a real crime was caused by H. O. not being at that date old enough to know better — and this was nobody’s fault — though we took care that but a brief half-hour elapsed between the discovery of his acts and his being old enough to know better, and knowing it, too (better, I mean), quite thoroughly. We were residing at the residence of an old nurse of father’s while Dora was engaged in the unagreeable pastime of having something catching at home. If she had been with us most likely none of this would have happened. For she has an almost unerring nose for right and wrong. Or perhaps what the author means is that she never does the kind of thing that grown-ups don’t like your doing. Father’s old nurse was very jolly to us, and did not bother too much, except about wet feet and being late for meals, and not airing your shirt before you put it on. But it is part of the nature of the nicest grown-ups to bother about these little things, and we must not be hard on them for it, for no one can help their natures.

  The part where old nurse’s house was was where London begins to leave off being London, but before it can make up its mind not to be it. There are fields and bits of lanes and hedges, but the rows of ugly little houses go creeping along like yellow caterpillars, eating up the green fields. There are brickfields here and there, and cabbage fields, and places where rhubarb is grown. And it is much more interesting than real town, because there is more room to do things in, and not so many people to say ‘Don’t!’ when you do.

  Nurse’s house was the kind that is always a house, no matter how much you pretend it is a baron’s castle or an enchanted palace. And to play at its being a robber’s cave or any part of a pirate ship is simply silly, and no satisfaction to anyone. There were no books except sermons and the Wesleyan Magazine. And there was a green cut-paper fuzziness on the frame of the looking-glass in the parlour. There was a garden — at least, there was enough ground for one, but nothing grew there except nettles and brick-bats and one elder-tree, and a poor old oak-tree that had seen better days. There was a hole in the fence, very convenient for going thro
ugh in a hurry.

  One morning there had been what old nurse called a ‘set out’ because Noël was writing some of his world-without-end poetry, and he had got as far as

  ‘How beautiful the sun and moon

  And all the stars appear!

  They really are a long way off,

  Although they look very near.’

  ‘I do not think that they are worlds,

  But apples on a tree;

  The angels pick them whenever they like,

  But it is not so with me.

  I wish I was a little angel-child

  To gather stars for my tea,’

  before Dicky found out that he was writing it on the blank leaf at the end of the Latin prize Dicky got at the Preparatory School.

  Noël — for mysterious reasons unknown to Fame — is Alice’s favourite brother, and of course she stood up for him, and said he didn’t mean it.

  And things were said on both sides, and the rest of us agreed with Dicky that Noël was old enough to know better. It ended in Alice and Noël going out for a walk by themselves as soon as Noël had had the crying washed off his hands and face.

  The rest of us spent the shining hours in getting a board and nailing it up in the oak-tree for a look-out station, in case of Saracens arriving with an army to attack London. The oak is always hard to climb, and this was a peculiarly hard day, because the next-door people had tied a clothes-line to the oak, and hung their wet washing out on the line.

  The sun was setting (in the west as usual) before Alice and Noël returned. They came across the wide fields from the direction of a pinewood that we had never explored yet, though always meaning to.

  ‘There!’ said Dicky, ‘they’ve been and gone to the pinewood all by themselves.’

  But the hatchet Dicky was still cherishing in his breast was buried at once under the first words spoken by the returning party of explorers.

  ‘Oh, Oswald,’ said Alice, ‘oh, Dicky, we’ve found a treasure!’

  Dicky hammered the last nail into the Saracen watch-tower.

  ‘Not a real money one?’ he said, dropping the hammer — which was a careless thing to do, and the author told him so at the time.

  ‘No, not a money one, but it’s real all the same. Let’s have a council, and I’ll tell you.’

  It was then that Dicky showed that if he dropped hammers it was not because he could not bury hatchets. He said, ‘Righto! There’s room for us all up here. Catch hold, Noël. Oswald, give him a shove up. Alice and he can sit in the Saracens’ watch-tower, and I’ll keep hold of H. O. if you’ll hand him up.’

  Alice was full of the politest compliments about the architecture of the Saracens’ watch-tower, and Noël said:

  ‘I say, Dicky, I’m awfully sorry about your prize.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Dicky; ‘I rubbed it out with bread.’

  Noël opened his mouth. He looks like a very young bird when he does this.

  ‘Then my beautiful poem’s turned into dirty bread-crumbs,’ he said slowly.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Alice; ‘I remember nearly every word of it: we’ll write it out again after tea.’

  ‘I thought you’d be so pleased,’ Noël went on, ‘because it makes a book more valuable to have an author’s writing in it. Albert’s uncle told me so.’

  ‘But it has to be the same author that wrote the book,’ Alice explained, ‘and it was Cæsar wrote that book. And you aren’t Cæsar yet, you know.’

  ‘Nor don’t want to be,’ said Noël.

  Oswald now thought that politeness was satisfied on both sides, so he said:

  ‘What price treasures?’

  And then Alice told. But it had to be in whispers, because the next-door people, who always did things at times when not convenient to us, were now taking in their washing off the line. I heard them remark that it was a ‘good drying day.’

  ‘Well,’ Alice mysteriously observed, ‘it was like this. (Do you think the Saracens’ watch-tower is really safe for two? It seems to go down awfully much in the middle.)’

  ‘Sit nearer the ends, then,’ said Oswald. ‘Well?’

  ‘We thought we would go to the pinewoods because of reading in Bret Harte that the resinous balsam of the pine is healing to the wounded spirit.’

  ‘I should have thought if anybody’s spirit was wounded...’ said Dicky in tones of heatening indignantness.

  ‘Yes, I know. But you’d got the oak, and I expect oaks are just as good, if not better, especially for English people, because of Oakapple Day — and —— Where was I?’

  We told her.

  ‘So we went, and it is a very nice wood — quite tulgy, you know. We expected to see a Bandersnatch every minute, didn’t we, Noël? It’s not very big, though, and on the other side there’s an enchanted desert — rather bare, with patches of grass and brambles. And in the very middle of it we found the treasure.’

  ‘Let’s have a squint at the treasure,’ said Dicky. ‘Did you fetch it along?’

  Noël and Alice sniggered.

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Alice; ‘the treasure is a house.’

  ‘It’s an enchanted house,’ said Noël, ‘and it’s a deserted house, and the garden is like in “The Sensitive Plant” after the lady has given up attending.’

  ‘Did you go in?’ we asked.

  ‘No,’ said Alice; ‘we came back for you. And we asked an old man, and he did say it was in Chancery, so no one can live in it.’

  H. O. asked what was enchancery.

  ‘I’m certain the old man meant enchanted,’ said Noël, ‘only I expect that’s the old-fashioned word for it. Enchanceried is a very nice word. And it means it’s an enchanted house, just like I said.’

  Nurse now came out to remark, ‘Tea, my dears,’ so we left the Saracens’ tower and went in to that meal.

  Noël began to make a poem called ‘The Enchanceried House,’ but we got him to stop till there was more for him to write about. There soon was more, and more than enough, as it turned out.

  The setting sun had set, but it had left a redness in the sky (like one of those distant fires that you go after, and they are always miles from where you are) which shone through the pinetrees. The house looked black and mysterious against the strawberry-ice-coloured horizon.

  It was a good-sized house. The bottom-floor windows were boarded up. It had a Sensitive-Plantish garden and a paved yard and outhouses. The garden had a high wall with glass on top, but Oswald and Dicky got into the yard. Green grass was growing between the paving-stones. The corners of the stable and coach-house doors were rough, as if from the attacks of rats, but we never saw any of these stealthy rodents. The back-door was locked, but we climbed up on the water-butt and looked through a little window, and saw a plate-rack, and a sink with taps, and a copper, and a broken coal-scuttle. It was very exciting.

  The day after we went again, and this time we borrowed the next-door people’s clothes-line, and by tying it in loops made a sort of rope-ladder, and then all of us got over. We had a glorious game besieging the pigsty, and all the military orders had to be given in whispers for fear of us being turned out if anyone passed and heard us. We found the pinewood, and the field, and the house had all got boards to say what would be done to trespassers with the utmost rigour of the law. It was such a swat untying the knots in the next-door people’s clothes-line, that we only undid one; and then we bought them a new line with our own pocket-money, and kept the rope-ladder in a hidden bed of nettles, always on the spot and ready for us.

  We found a way of going round, and getting to the house through a hole in a hedge and across a lane, so as not to go across the big fields where every human eye could mark our proceedings, and come after us and tell us not to.

  We went there every day. It would have been a terrible thing if an army of bloodthirsty Saracens had chosen that way to march on London, for there was hardly ever a look-out in the tower now.

  It was a jolly place to play in, and Oswald had found
out what ‘in Chancery’ really means, so he had no fear of being turned into a pig-headed lady, or marble from the waist down.

  And after a bit we began to want to get into the house, and we wanted it so much that our hearts got quite cold about the chicken-house and the pigsty, which at first had been a fairy dream of delight.

  But the doors were all locked. We got all the old keys we could, but they were all the keys of desks and workboxes and tea-caddies, and not the right size or shape for doors.

  Then one day Oswald, with his justly celebrated observingness, noticed that one of the bars was loose in the brickwork of a sort of half-underground window. To pull it out was to the lion-hearted youth but the work of a moment. He got down through the gap thus obtained, and found himself in a place like a very small area, only with no steps, and with bars above him, broken glass and matted rags and straw beneath his enterprising boots, and on one side a small cobwebby window. He got out again and told the others, who were trying to get up the cobblestones by the stable so as to make an underground passage into the stable at the ratty corner of its door.

  They came at once, and, after a brief discussion, it was decided to break the window a little more than it was already, and to try to get in a hand that could unlatch the window. Of course, as Oswald had found the bar, it was to be his hand.

  The dauntless Oswald took off his jacket, and, wrapping it round his fist, shoved at the pane nearest the window fastening. The glass fell inwards with the noise you would expect. In newspapers I suppose they would call it a sickening thud. Really it was a sort of hollow tinkling sound. It made even Oswald jump, and H. O. said:

  ‘Suppose the window opens straight into a bottomless well!’

  We did not think this likely, but you cannot be too careful when you are exploring.

  Oswald got in his hand and undid the window fastening, which was very rusty. The window opened out like a door. There was only just room in the area under the bars for Oswald and the opening of the window. He leaned forward and looked in. He was not surprised to find that it was not a well, after all, but a cellar.

  ‘Come on,’ he said; ‘it’s all right.’