Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

My mother saw that protest was vain, so these two were stowed in the rumble, and the carriage jolted on more heavily. We now began to be seriously frightened. I know I endured agonies of torture. No doubt these were highwaymen, and at the nearest convenient spot they would stop the carriage and murder us all. In the next few miles two more passengers were added to our number, a cousin and an uncle. All wore blue blouses, and had villainous-looking faces. The uncle, who looked like a porpoise and smelt horribly of brandy, was put inside the carriage with us, because there was now no room left in any other part of the conveyance. The family party laughed and jolted in a patois wholly unintelligible to us. I was convinced that they were arranging for the disposal of our property and our bodies after the murder. My mother and sisters were talking in low voices in English.

  “If we only get to the half-way house safe,” she said, “ we can appeal to the landlord for protection,” and after a seemingly interminable drive we got to the half-way house.

  It was a low, roughly-built, dirty auberge, with an uneven, earthen floor, the ceiling, benches and tables black with age, just the place where travellers are always murdered in Christmas stories. My teeth chattered with terror, but there was a certain pleasure in the excitement all the same. We ordered supper; it was now near midnight, and while it was being prepared, my mother emptied her purse of all, save the money promised to the driver, and a ten-france piece to pay for our suppers. The rest of the money she put into a canvas bag which hung round her neck, where she always carried her bank-notes. The supper was like something out of a fairy tale. A clean cloth, in itself an incongruous accident in such a place, new milk, new bread, and new honey. When the woman brought in our bill, my mother poured out her woes, and confessed her fear of the driver’s intention.

  “Nonsense,” said the woman briskly, “ he’s the best man in the world — he’s my own son! Surely he has a right to give his own relations a lift in his carriage if he likes!”

  “But we had paid for his carriage, he has no right to put other people in when we are paying for it!”

  “Oh, yes, he has!” retorted the woman shortly. “You paid him so much to take you to Murat, and he will take you to Murat; but there was nothing said about his not taking anyone else, and he says now he won’t take you on to Murat unless you pay him double the fare you agreed for, his horses are tired!”

  “I should think they were,” muttered my sister, “considering the number of extra passengers they have dragged.”

  My mother emptied her purse on the table. “You see,” she said, “here is only the money I promised your son and enough to pay for our suppers; but when we get to Murat I shall find money waiting for me, and I will give him what you ask.”

  I believe this conduct of my mother saved us at any rate from being robbed by violence. The inn stood quite by itself in one of the loneliest spots in the mountains of Auvergnes. If they had believed that we were worth robbing, and had chosen to rob us, nothing could have saved us.

  We started again. My mother now began to make light of the adventure, and my terror subsided sufficiently for me to be able to note the terrible grandeur of the scenery we passed through. Vast masses of bare volcanic rock, iron grey in the moonlight, with black chasms and mysterious gorges, each one eloquent of bandits and gnomes, and an absolute stillness, save for the rattle of our carriage, as though, with vegetation, life too had ceased, as though indeed we rode through a land deathstill, under the enchantment of some evil magician. The rocks and the mountains beyond them towered higher and higher on each side of the road. The strip of flat ground between us and the rocks grew narrower, till presently the road wound between two vast black cliffs, and the strip of sky high up looked bright and blue. The tall cliffs were on either side, and presently I saw with dismay that in front of us the dark cliff stretched right across the road. We seemed to be driving straight into the heart of the rock. In another moment, with a crack of the whip and an encouraging word or two, the driver urged his horses to a gallop, and we plunged through a dark archway into pitch darkness, for, with a jolt, the carriage lamps went out. We had just been able to see that we had passed out of the night air into a tunnel cut in the solid rock. Oh, how thankful we were then that the porpoise and all the rest of our driver’s relations had been left behind at the half-way house. The driver lighted the lamps again almost immediately. He seemed in a better temper than before, and explained to us that this was the great arch under the mountains, and to me he added: “It will be something for you to remember and to tell your children about when you are old,” which was certainly true. That tunnel was unbearably long. As we rattled through its cavernous depths, I could not persuade myself that at any moment our driver’s accomplices might not spring out upon us and kill us there and then. Who would ever have known? Oh, the relief of seeing at last a faint pin-prick of light! It grew larger and larger and larger, and at last, through another arch, we rattled out into the moonlight again.

  Of course, I shall never know now how many of the terrors of that night were imaginary. It is not pleasant, even now, to think of what might have happened.

  At last we reached our journey’s end, a miserable, filthy inn, and, with a thankful heart, saw the last of our blue-bloused driver.

  The landlady objected very strongly to letting us in, and we objected still more strongly to the accommodation which she at last consented to offer us. The sheets were grey with dirt, and the pillows grimed with the long succession of heads that had lain on them. A fire was the only good thing that we got at Murat. To go to bed was impossible. We sat round the fire waiting for daylight and the first morning train. My mother took me on her knee. I grew warm and very comfortable and forgot all my troubles. “Ah,” I said, with sleepy satisfaction “this is very nice; it’s just like home.”

  The contrast between my words and that filthy, squalid inn must have been irresistibly comic, for my mother and sisters laughed till I thought they would never stop. My innocent remark and some bread and milk — the only things clean enough to touch — cheered us all up wonderfully, and in another twenty-four hours my mother and sisters were all saying to each other that perhaps, after all, there had been nothing to be frightened about; but all the same, I don’t think any of that party would ever have cared to face another night drive through the mountains of Auvergne.

  PART IX. — LA HAYE.

  After our experience in Auvergnes, the rest of our travel was so flat as to have faded almost entirely from my memory. As soon as we reached England, I was sent to school-to a school of which I shall have more to say presently. There were only twenty girls. Mrs. MacBean was one of the best and kindest women who ever lived — a devoted Christian with a heart large enough to take in all her girls. If I could have been happy at any school I should have been happy there. And I was not actively unhappy, for I lived on my mother’s promise that in July I should go back to her again. Where she was I didn’t know; but I knew she was looking for a pretty home for us all. I used to write letters to her addressed to St. Martin’s le Grand, which I think I believed to be in Paris.

  At last the news came that she had decided to live at Dinan in Brittany, and that in two short days I was to go by boat and join her. One day passed. The next day at dinner I was hugging myself on the thought of the morrow.

  “To-morrow,” I said to the girl next to me, “I shall be going to my mother in France.”

  “Oh, no, dear!” said the governess at the foot of the table. “Miss MacBean says you’re not going till Wednesday.”

  With a crash my card-castle came tumbling about my ears. Wednesday might as well have been next year — it seemed so far off. I burst into passionate weeping just as the servant placed a large plate of steaming black-currant pudding before me. I saw through my tears how vexed Miss MacBean looked; she hadn’t meant to break the news to me in this way.

  “Come, Daisy,” she said after a while “Don’t cry, dear. Have some black-currant pudding — nice black-currant pudding.”

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p; “I don’t want any black-currant pudding!” I cried. “I hate it! I never want any pudding again!” And, with that, I rushed from the room; and from that day to this I have never been able to tolerate black-currant pudding.

  Every one was very kind to me; but there was not any one there who could at all understand the agony that that delay cost me. I didn’t care to eat, I didn’t care to sleep or play or read.

  When my mother met me at St. Malo on the following Thursday, her first words were, “Why, how pale and ill the child looks!” My sister suggested that it was the steamboat; but I don’t believe it was. I believe it was the awful shock that came to me over the black-currant pudding.

  A long drive on a diligence by miles and miles of straight white road — the fatigue of the journey forgotten in the consciousness that I was going home, not to an hotel, not to a boarding-house, but home.

  The small material objects that surround one’s daily life have always influenced me deeply. Even as a child I found that in a familiar entourage one could be contented, if not happy; but hotels and boarding-houses and lodgings have always bored me to extinction. Of course, as a matter of theory, one ought to carry one’s intellectual atmosphere with one and be independent of surroundings; but, as a matter of practice, it can’t be done, at least, by me. I have a cat-like fondness for things I am accustomed to, and I am not singular in this respect. I once knew a woman who, after years of genteel poverty and comfortless economy, had an opportunity of a new life in comparatively affluent circumstances.

  “Why ever don’t you accept it?” I said when she told me of it.

  “I can’t make up my mind to it,” she said. “You see, I should have to leave the furniture.”

  I felt some sympathy for her, though I hope that in her place I should have been strong-minded enough to make another choice.

  At last the diligence drew up at crossroads, where a cart was waiting, and to this our luggage was transferred. It turned up one of the side roads, and we followed on foot. Up a hill wound the road, a steep wooded slope on one side, and on the other a high, clay bank set with dainty ferns. Here and there a tiny spring trickled down to join the little stream that ran beside the road.

  We turned a corner by a farm, through a herd of gaunt pigs nearly as big as donkeys-the sight of which made me clasp my mother’s hand more tightly. Each pig had a bar of wood suspended from his neck by a string, so that if he tried to stray through the hedge, the bar would catch and hold him back. All the pigs tried to walk over this bar as it hung against their forelegs. They never succeeded; but the action gave them all the air of high-stepping carriage-horses.

  Then we walked a little further along the white road, and the cart turned in at a wooden gate. We followed along the carriage-drive which ran along outside the high red wall of the big garden, then through a plantation of huge horse-chestnut trees. To the left, I could see ricks, cows and pigs, all the bustle and colour of a farm-yard.

  Two great brown. gates swung back on their hinges and we passed through them into the courtyard of the dearest home of my childhood. The courtyard was square. One side was formed by the house; dairy, coach-house. and the chicken-house formed the second side; on the third were stable, cow-house and goat-shed; on the fourth wood-shed, dogkennel, and the great gates by which we had entered. The house itself was an ordinary white-washed, slate-roofed, French country house, with an immense walled fruit garden on the other side of it.

  There never was such another garden, there never will be! Peaches, apricots, nectarines, and grapes of all kinds, lined the inside walls; the avenue that ran down the middle of it was of fig trees and standard peach-trees. There were raspberries, cherries and strawberries, and flowers mingling with fruits and vegetables in a confusion the most charming in the world. Along the end of the garden was a great arcade of black, clipped yews, so thick and strong that a child could crawl on the outside of it without falling through. Above the dairy and coach-house was an immense hay-loft, a straw-loft over the stable and cow-house. What play-rooms for wet days! Beyond the chicken-house was the orchard, full of twisted grey apple trees, beneath whose boughs in due season the barley grew. Beyond, a network of lanes, fringed with maiden-hair, led away into fairyland.

  My brothers eagerly led me round to show me all the treasures of the new home. There was a swing in the orchard, there were trees full of cherries, white and black.

  “And we may eat as many as we like,” said Alfred.

  That afternoon we gathered a waste-paper basket full of cherries, and, with strenuous greed, set ourselves to empty it. We didn’t succeed, of course; but the effort, so far as I remember, was attended by no evil consequences. We gave what we couldn’t eat to the little black English pig, another of the treasures of the new home.

  There was a little black cow, there was a goat who resented with her horns my efforts after goat’s milk. I learnt to milk her afterwards though, and she grew very kind and condescending. Then there were two ponies, Punch and Judy, and Punch, my brothers told me proudly, was for us to ride. This was the crowning happiness; we had never had a pony of our own before. He was a tiresome, pigheaded little beast that pony; but we loved him dearly. He had a way of pretending to be frightfully thirsty when you were out riding him, and when, in the kindness of your heart, you let him bend his head to a wayside pond for a drink, be would kick up his wicked little heels and over his head you had to go. If he could rub you off against a tree as you rode across the fields, he would do it with all the pleasure in life. He was rather good at jumping, and he and I had some pleasant cross-country expeditions; but if anything in the nature of the obstacle you put him at happened to strike his fancy disagreeably, he had a clever way of stopping short at the last moment, when, of course, you went over his head. He threw me three times in this way in one morning; but after that I was up to him.

  PART X. — PIRATES AND EXPLORERS.

  That summer was an ideally happy one. My mother, with a wisdom for which I shall thank her all my days, allowed us to run wild; we were expected to appear at meals with some approach to punctuality, and with hands and faces moderately clean. Sometimes when visitors were expected, we were seized and scrubbed, and clothed, and made to look something like the good little children we were not; then my brothers fidgeted awkwardly on their chairs and tried to conceal their hands and feet, while I nibbled a biscuit or cake in an agony of shyness, not quite unrelieved by a sneaking appreciation of my fine dress, an appreciation for which my brothers would never have forgiven me, had I been foolish enough to show it. But, as a rule, we were left to go our own way, and a very happy way it was. I don’t mean that we were neglected; my eldest sister was always a refuge on wet days when a fairy story seemed to be the best thing to be had.

  In the midst of all the parties, picnics and gaieties in which our elders were plunged, my other sister found time to read aloud to us, and to receive such confidences as we deemed it wise to make concerning our plans and our plays.

  We had gauged the possibilities of the lofts correctly. With trusses of hay or straw, a magnificent fort could be made. I usually held the fort when the boys had built it, and the weakness of the garrison was lessened by the introduction of the two dogs, who defended it with me nobly, understanding perfectly the parts they had to play. We got the black pig up once, but that was a failure. When there was no time to organise a play, when it was not worth while to begin anything because dinner or breakfast would be ready in a few minutes, it was a constant delight to scale the wall behind the stable, and watch the great wooden wheel slowly dragged round the circular stone trough where the apples for cider lay; the old, blind, white horse harnessed to the wheel went sleepily round and round; you could hear the crunch, crunch of the apples as the great wooden wheel went over them, and smell the sweet scent of the crushed fruit as you sat swinging your legs on the wall among the yellow stone-crop and sulphur-coloured snap-dragon; or if you had the time to spare, what rapture to balance yourself on the edge of the stone trough
, and wall: round it just behind the big wheel, knowing that if you slipped, you might fall on the muddy track outside, but that you were much more likely to fall into the trough itself, in which case your pinafore and stockings (we wore white stockings then) would be richly stained with apple juice to the colour of red rust. If the farmer were in a good temper, he would sometimes take you in to see the apples put in the press; you had to climb up by rough steps cut in the beams if the press was nearly full. At the top, on a little platform, stood the farmer, drawing up the crushed apples from below by bucketsful, and spreading them on their bed of clean straw with a wooden shovel. A layer of straw and a layer of apples, and when the press was full, the big beams screwed down, we hastened below to see the russet juice run out from its stone channel into the great vats.

  Though the farm adjoined our house, it was not our property, but as far as we children were concerned, it was just as good as ours, for the farmer allowed us the same privileges that he accorded to his own children; that is to say, if the farmer were in a good temper, we might watch any of the farming operations, if he was not, his own children had to keep out of the way, and so had we.

  There was a delightful pond in the field where the farm horses went to drink. It had a trampled muddy shore on one side, and on the other a high bank of yellow clay. We made a raft, of course, out of an old door and two barrels, and successfully sailed across to the yellow cliffs.

  “How nice it would be,” I said, “if there were a cave in these cliffs; we could have no end of a good time and be pirates and things!”

  “You don’t suppose,” said Alfred scornfully, “that a pirate chief would wait to find a cave if he wanted one — he would make one of course; I shall make one.”

  “I don’t believe you can,” said Harry and I in a breath.

  “All right,” said my brother, “you’ll see!”

  Next morning when Harry and I went out into the field, there was Alfred, ankle deep in water shovelling out clay from the bank.