by E. Nesbit
THE ENCHANCERIED HOUSE
A STORY ABOUT THE BASTABLES
The adventure which I am about to relate was a very long time ago, andit was nobody's fault. The part of it that was most like a real crimewas caused by H. O. not being at that date old enough to knowbetter--and this was nobody's fault--though we took care that but abrief 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 offather's while Dora was engaged in the unagreeable pastime of havingsomething catching at home. If she had been with us most likely none ofthis would have happened. For she has an almost unerring nose for rightand wrong. Or perhaps what the author means is that she never does thekind of thing that grown-ups don't like your doing. Father's old nursewas very jolly to us, and did not bother too much, except about wetfeet and being late for meals, and not airing your shirt before you putit on. But it is part of the nature of the nicest grown-ups to botherabout these little things, and we must not be hard on them for it, forno one can help their natures.
The part where old nurse's house was was where London begins to leaveoff being London, but before it can make up its mind not to be it. Thereare fields and bits of lanes and hedges, but the rows of ugly littlehouses go creeping along like yellow caterpillars, eating up the greenfields. There are brickfields here and there, and cabbage fields, andplaces where rhubarb is grown. And it is much more interesting than realtown, because there is more room to do things in, and not so many peopleto say 'Don't!' when you do.
Nurse's house was the kind that is always a house, no matter how muchyou pretend it is a baron's castle or an enchanted palace. And to playat its being a robber's cave or any part of a pirate ship is simplysilly, and no satisfaction to anyone. There were no books except sermonsand the Wesleyan Magazine. And there was a green cut-paper fuzziness onthe frame of the looking-glass in the parlour. There was a garden--atleast, there was enough ground for one, but nothing grew there exceptnettles and brick-bats and one elder-tree, and a poor old oak-tree thathad seen better days. There was a hole in the fence, very convenient forgoing through in a hurry.
One morning there had been what old nurse called a 'set out' becauseNoel was writing some of his world-without-end poetry, and he had got asfar 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 theend of the Latin prize Dicky got at the Preparatory School.
Noel--for mysterious reasons unknown to Fame--is Alice's favouritebrother, 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 Dickythat Noel was old enough to know better. It ended in Alice and Noelgoing out for a walk by themselves as soon as Noel had had the cryingwashed off his hands and face.
The rest of us spent the shining hours in getting a board and nailing itup in the oak-tree for a look-out station, in case of Saracens arrivingwith an army to attack London. The oak is always hard to climb, and thiswas a peculiarly hard day, because the next-door people had tied aclothes-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 Noelreturned. They came across the wide fields from the direction of apinewood that we had never explored yet, though always meaning to.
'There!' said Dicky, 'they've been and gone to the pinewood all bythemselves.'
But the hatchet Dicky was still cherishing in his breast was buried atonce 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 acareless 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 notbecause he could not bury hatchets. He said, 'Righto! There's room forus all up here. Catch hold, Noel. Oswald, give him a shove up. Alice andhe can sit in the Saracens' watch-tower, and I'll keep hold of H. O. ifyou'll hand him up.'
Alice was full of the politest compliments about the architecture of theSaracens' watch-tower, and Noel said:
'I say, Dicky, I'm awfully sorry about your prize.'
'It's all right,' said Dicky; 'I rubbed it out with bread.'
Noel opened his mouth. He looks like a very young bird when he doesthis.
'Then my beautiful poem's turned into dirty bread-crumbs,' he saidslowly.
'Never mind,' said Alice; 'I remember nearly every word of it: we'llwrite it out again after tea.'
'I thought you'd be so pleased,' Noel went on, 'because it makes a bookmore valuable to have an author's writing in it. Albert's uncle told meso.'
'But it has to be the same author that wrote the book,' Alice explained,'and it was Caesar wrote that book. And you aren't Caesar _yet_, youknow.'
'Nor don't want to be,' said Noel.
Oswald now thought that politeness was satisfied on both sides, so hesaid:
'What price treasures?'
And then Alice told. But it had to be in whispers, because the next-doorpeople, who always did things at times when not convenient to us, werenow taking in their washing off the line. I heard them remark that itwas a 'good drying day.'
'Well,' Alice mysteriously observed, 'it was like this. (Do you thinkthe Saracens' watch-tower is really safe for two? It seems to go downawfully much in the middle.)'
'Sit nearer the ends, then,' said Oswald. 'Well?'
'We thought we would go to the pinewoods because of reading in BretHarte that the resinous balsam of the pine is healing to the woundedspirit.'
'I should have thought if anybody's spirit was wounded...' said Dicky intones 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 OakappleDay--and----Where was I?'
We told her.
'So we went, and it is a very nice wood--quite tulgy, you know. Weexpected to see a Bandersnatch every minute, didn't we, Noel? It's notvery big, though, and on the other side there's an enchanteddesert--rather bare, with patches of grass and brambles. And in the verymiddle of it we found the treasure.'
'Let's have a squint at the treasure,' said Dicky. 'Did you fetch italong?'
Noel and Alice sniggered.
'Not exactly,' said Alice; 'the treasure is a _house_.'
'It's an enchanted house,' said Noel, 'and it's a deserted house, andthe garden is like in "The Sensitive Plant" after the lady has given upattending.'
'Did you go in?' we asked.
'No,' said Alice; 'we came back for you. And we asked an old man, andhe _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 Noel, 'only I expectthat'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.
Noel began to make a poem called 'The Enchanceried House,' but we gothim to stop till there was more for him to write about. There soon wasmore, and more than enough, as it turned out.
The setting sun had set, but it had left a redness in the sky (like oneof those distant fires that you go after, and they are always miles fromwhere you are) which shone through the pinetrees. The house lookedblack and mysterious
against the strawberry-ice-coloured horizon.
It was a good-sized house. The bottom-floor windows were boarded up. Ithad a Sensitive-Plantish garden and a paved yard and outhouses. Thegarden had a high wall with glass on top, but Oswald and Dicky got intothe yard. Green grass was growing between the paving-stones. The cornersof the stable and coach-house doors were rough, as if from the attacksof rats, but we never saw any of these stealthy rodents. The back-doorwas locked, but we climbed up on the water-butt and looked through alittle 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-doorpeople's clothes-line, and by tying it in loops made a sort ofrope-ladder, and then all of us got over. We had a glorious gamebesieging the pigsty, and all the military orders had to be given inwhispers 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 boardsto say what would be done to trespassers with the utmost rigour of thelaw. It was such a swat untying the knots in the next-door people'sclothes-line, that we only undid one; and then we bought them a new linewith our own pocket-money, and kept the rope-ladder in a hidden bed ofnettles, always on the spot and ready for us.
We found a way of going round, and getting to the house through a holein a hedge and across a lane, so as not to go across the big fieldswhere every human eye could mark our proceedings, and come after us andtell us not to.
We went there every day. It would have been a terrible thing if an armyof bloodthirsty Saracens had chosen that way to march on London, forthere was hardly ever a look-out in the tower now.
It was a jolly place to play in, and Oswald had found out what 'inChancery' really means, so he had no fear of being turned into apig-headed lady, or marble from the waist down.
And after a bit we began to want to get into the house, and we wanted itso much that our hearts got quite cold about the chicken-house and thepigsty, which at first had been a fairy dream of delight.
But the doors were all locked. We got all the old keys we could, butthey were all the keys of desks and workboxes and tea-caddies, and notthe right size or shape for doors.
Then one day Oswald, with his justly celebrated observingness, noticedthat one of the bars was loose in the brickwork of a sort ofhalf-underground window. To pull it out was to the lion-hearted youthbut the work of a moment. He got down through the gap thus obtained, andfound himself in a place like a very small area, only with no steps, andwith bars above him, broken glass and matted rags and straw beneath hisenterprising boots, and on one side a small cobwebby window. He got outagain and told the others, who were trying to get up the cobblestonesby the stable so as to make an underground passage into the stable atthe ratty corner of its door.
They came at once, and, after a brief discussion, it was decided tobreak the window a little more than it was already, and to try to get ina hand that could unlatch the window. Of course, as Oswald hadfound the bar, it was to be his hand.
The dauntless Oswald took off his jacket, and, wrapping it round hisfist, shoved at the pane nearest the window fastening. The glass fellinwards with the noise you would expect. In newspapers I suppose theywould call it a sickening thud. Really it was a sort of hollow tinklingsound. 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 areexploring.
Oswald got in his hand and undid the window fastening, which was veryrusty. The window opened out like a door. There was only just room inthe area under the bars for Oswald and the opening of the window. Heleaned forward and looked in. He was not surprised to find that it wasnot a well, after all, but a cellar.
'Come on,' he said; 'it's all right.'
Dicky came on so rapidly that his boots grazed the shoulder of theadvancing Oswald. Alice was coming next, but Noel begged her to wait.
'I don't think H. O. ought to go in till we're sure it's safe,' he said;and Oswald hopes it was not because Noel was in a funk himself, thoughwith a poet you never know.
The cellar into which Oswald now plunged had a damp and moulderingsmell, like of mouse-traps, and straw, and beer-barrels. Another cellaropened out of it, and in this there was traces of coal having existed inother ages.
Passing the coal-cellar, we went out to a cellar with shelves on thewall like berths in a ship, or the catacombs where early Christiansused to be bricked up. Of course, we knew it was only a wine-cellar,because we have one at home. Matches had to be used here. Then we founda flight of stone steps and went up. And Oswald is not ashamed to ownthat, the staircase being of a twisty nature, he did think what it wouldbe like if he and Dicky were to meet Something at one of the corners;but all was peace and solitude. Yet it was with joy, and like meeting anold friend, that we got out of the cellars, stairs, and through a doorto the back-kitchen, where the sink was, and the copper and theplate-rack. Oswald felt like a brother to the broken coal-scuttle. Ourfirst instant thought was the back door.
It was bolted top and bottom, and the bolts were sort of cemented intotheir places with rust. But they were unable to resist our patient anddetermined onslaught. Only when we had undone them the door kept shut,and by stooping down and looking we saw that this was because it waslocked.
Dicky at once despaired, and said, 'It's no go.'
But the researchful Oswald looked round, and there was a key on a nail,which shows how wrong it is to despair.
It was not the right key, proving later to be the key of thechicken-house. So we went into the hall. There was a bunch of keys on anail on the back of the front-door.
'There now, you see I was right,' remarked Oswald. And he was, as is sooften the case. All the keys had labels, and one of these said'Back-kitchen,' so we applied it at once, and the locked door yielded toit.
'You can bring H. O. in quite safely,' Oswald said when the door hadcreakingly consented to open itself, and to disclose the sunshine, andthe paved yard with the paving stones marked out with green grass, andthe interested expressions on the faces of Alice and the others. 'It'squite safe. It's just a house like anyone else's, only it hasn't got anyfurniture in it.'
We went all over the house. There were fourteen rooms altogether,fifteen if you counted the back-kitchen where the plate-warmer was, andthe copper, and the sink with the taps, and the brotherly coal-scuttle.The rooms were quite different from the ones in old nurse's house. Noelsaid he thought all the rooms in this house had been the scene of duelsor elopements, or concealing rightful heirs. The present author doesn'tknow about that, but there was a splendid cupboardiness about the placethat spoke volumes to a discerning eye. Even the window seats, of whichthere were six, lifted up like the lids of boxes, and you could havehidden a flying Cavalier in any of them, if he had been of only mediumheight and slender build, like heroes with swords so often are.
Then there were three staircases, and these must have been darklyconvenient for getting conspirators away when the King's officers wereat the door, as so constantly happened in romantic times.
The whole house was full of ideas for ripping games, and when we cameaway Alice said:
'We must be really better than we know. We must have done _something_ todeserve a find like this.'
'Don't worry,' said Oswald. 'Albert's uncle says you always have to payfor everything. We haven't paid for this yet.'
This reflection, like so many of our young hero's, was correct.
I have not yet told you about the finest find of all the fine finds wefound finally (that looks very odd, and I am not sure if it isallity-what's-its-name, or only carelessness. I wonder whether otherauthors are ever a prey to these devastating doubts?) This find was onthe top floor. It was a room with bars to the windows, and it was a veryodd shape. You went along a passage to the door, and then there was theroom; but the room went back along the same way as the passage had come,so that when you went ro
und there no one could see you from the door.The door was sort of in the middle of the room; but I see I must draw itfor you, or you will never understand.
The door that is marked 'Another Door' was full of agitated excitementfor us, because it wasn't a door at all--at least, not the kind that youare used to. It was a gate, like you have at the top of nursery stairsin the mansions of the rich and affluent; but instead of being halfwayup, it went all the way up, so that you could see into the room throughthe bars.
'Somebody must have kept tame lunatics here,' said Dicky.
'Or bears,' said H. O.
'Or enchanceried Princes,' said Noel.
'It seems silly, though,' said Alice, 'because the lunatic or the bearor the enchanted Prince could always hide round the corner when he heardthe keepers coming, if he didn't happen to want to show off just then.'
This was so, and the deep mystery of the way this room was built wasnever untwisted.
'Perhaps a Russian prisoner was kept there,' said Alice, 'and they didnot want to look too close for fear he would shoot them with hisbomb-gun. Poor man! perhaps he caught vodka, or some other of thoseawful foreign diseases, and died in his hidden confinement.'
It was a most ripping room for games. The key of it was on the bunchlabelled 'Mrs. S.'s room.' We often wondered who Mrs. S. was.
'Let's have a regular round of gaieties,' said Oswald. 'Each of us totake it in turns to have the room, and act what they like, and theothers look through the bars.'
So next day we did this.
Oswald, of course, dressed up in bath-towels and a sheet as the ghost ofMrs. S., but Noel and H. O. screamed, and would not be calm till he toreoff the sheet and showed his knickerbockers and braces as a guarantee ofgood faith. Alice put her hair up, and got a skirt, and a largehandkerchief to cry in, and was a hapless maiden imprisoned in a towerbecause she would not marry the wicked Baron. Oswald instantly took thepart of the wicked Baron, and Dicky was the virtuous lover of lowdegree, and they had a splendid combat, and Dicky carried off the lady.Of course, that was the proper end to the story, and Oswald had topretend to be beaten, which was not the case.
Dicky was Louis XVI. watch-making while waiting for the guillotine tohappen. So we were the guillotine, and he was executed in the pavedyard.
Noel was an imprisoned troubadour dressed in bright antimacassars, andhe fired off quite a lot of poetry at us before we could get the dooropen, which was most unfair.
H. O. was a clown. He had no fancy dress except flour and two Turkishtowels pinned on to look like trousers, but he put the flour all overhimself, and it took the rest of the day to clean him.
It was when Alice was drying the hair-brushes that she had washed afterbrushing the flour out of Noel's hair in the back-garden that Oswaldsaid:
'_I_ know what that room was made for.'
And everyone said, 'What?' which is not manners, but your brothers andsisters do not mind because it saves time.
'Why, _coiners_,' said Oswald. 'Don't you see? They kept a sentinel atthe door, that _is_ a door, and if anyone approached he whispered"_Cave_."'
'But why have iron bars?'
'In extra safety,' said Oswald; 'and if their nefarious fires were notburning he need not say "_Cave_" at all. It's no use saying anything fornothing.'
It is curious, but the others did not seem to see this cleardistinguishedness. All people have not the same fine brains.
But all the same the idea rankled in their hearts, and one day fathercame and took Dicky up to London about that tooth of his, and whenDicky came back he said:
'Look here, talking of coiners, there was a man in St. Swithin's Laneto-day selling little bottles of yellow stuff, and he rubbed some of iton a penny, and it turned the penny into a half-crown before youreyes--a new half-crown! It was a penny a bottle, so I bought threebottles.'
'I always thought the plant for coining was very expensive,' said Alice.
'Ah! they tell you that to keep you from doing it, because of its beinga crime,' said Dicky. 'But now I've got this stuff we can begin to becoiners right away. I believe it isn't really a crime unless you try tobuy things with the base coin.'
So that very afternoon, directly after dinner, which had a suet puddingin it that might have weighed down the enterprising spirit of anyone butus, we went over to the Enchanceried House.
We found our good rope ladder among its congealing bed of trustynettles, and got over into the paved yard, and through the kitchen-door.Oswald always carried the key of this hung round his neck by a bootlace,as if it was a talisman, or the hair of his lost love. Of course, Oswaldnever had a lost love. He would scorn the action. But some heroes dohave. _De gustibus_ something or other, which means, one man's meat isanother man's poison.
When we got up into the room with the iron-grated door, it all seemedvery bare. Three bottles of yellow stuff and tenpence halfpenny incoppers is not much to start a coining enterprise with.
'We ought to make it _look_ like coining, anyway,' said Oswald.
'Coiners have furnaces,' said Dicky.
Alice said: 'Wouldn't a spirit-lamp do? Old nurse has got an old one onthe scullery shelf.'
We thought it would.
Then Noel reminded us that coiners have moulds, and Oswald went andbought a pair of wooden lemon squeezers for sevenpence three farthings.In his far-sightedness he remembered that coiners use water, so hebought two enamelled iron bowls at sixpence halfpenny the two. When hecame back he noticed the coal-scuttle we had always felt so friendly to,and he filled it with water and brought it up. It did not leak worthmentioning.
'We ought to have a bench,' said Dicky; 'most trades havethat--shoemakers and watchmakers, and tailors and lawyers.'
This was difficult, but we did it. There were some planks in the cellar,and a tub and a beer-barrel. Unluckily, the tub and the beer-barrel werenot the same height, but we taught them better by getting old nurse's'Pilgrim's Progress' and the _Wesleyan Magazine_, to put on top of thetub; and then it was as high as the barrel, and we laid the boardsacross, and there was a bench as beautiful as you could wish.
Dicky was allowed to put the stuff on the coins, because he had boughtthe bottles with his own money. But Alice held them for him to do,because girls are inferior beings, except when you are ill, and you mustbe kind to them or you need never hope to be a hero. There are drawbacksto every ambition.
She let Noel hold them part of the time.
When she was not helping Dicky, she tried covering pennies with thesilver paper off chocolate, but it was not the kind of success thatwould take anyone in.
H. O. and Noel took it in turns to be sentinel, but they said it wasdull, so Oswald took it on. And before he had been there three minuteshe cried, 'Hist! someone approaches!' and the coining materials werehastily concealed and everyone hid round the corner, like we had agreedwe would do if disturbed in our unlawful pursuits.
Of course, there wasn't anyone really. After this the kids wanted to besentinels again, but Oswald would not let them.
It was a jolly good game. And there was something about that house thatmade whatever you played in it seem awfully real. When I was Mrs. S. Ifelt quite unhappy, and when Dicky was the unfortunate monarch whoperished in the French Revolution he told me afterwards he didn't halflike it when it came to the guillotine, though, of course, he knew theknife was only the little sliding-door of the chicken-house.
We played coiners for several days, and all learned to give the alarm,but we were beginning to feel it was time for something new. Noel wassaving the hairs out of his comb, and pulling them out of the horsehairsofa in the parlour, to make a hair shirt to be a hermit in, and Oswaldhad bought a file to get through the bars and be an escaped Bastilleprisoner, leaving his life-history concealed in the fireplace, when thegreat event occurred.
We found the silvered money turned to a dirty black when a few hours hadelapsed, and we tried silver paint and gold paint. Our pockets werealways full of gold and silver money, and we could jingle it and take itou
t in handfuls and let people see it--not too near.
Then came the great eventful day.
H. O. had fallen into the water-butt that morning. We dried his hollandsmock, but it went stiff like paper, so that old nurse noticed it, andthus found out that he was wringing wet underneath. So she put him tobed, for fear of his catching his death of cold, and the inveterate gangof coiners had to go to their fell lair without him. We left all ourfalse money at home, because old nurse had given Alice a piece oftrimming, for dolls, that was all over little imitation silver coins,called sequences, I believe, to imitate the coinage of Turkish regions.We reached our Enchanceried House, got in as usual, and started ourdesperate work of changing silver sequences into gold half-sovereigns,with gold paint.
Noel was very grumpy: he was odd altogether that day. He was trying towrite a poem about a Bastille prisoner. He asked to be sentry, so thathe could think about rhymes.
We had not coined more than about four half-sovereigns when we heardNoel say: 'Hist! Hide the plant!'
We didn't take any notice, because we wanted to get enough of them doneto play a game of misers, which was Alice's idea.
'Hist!' Noel said again. And then suddenly he rushed in and said: 'It'sa _real_ hist! I tell you there's someone on the stairs.'
And he shut the wooden-grated door, and Oswald, with rare presence ofmind, caught up the bunch of keys and locked the wooden-grated door withthe key labelled 'Mrs. S.'s room.'
Then, breathless and furtive, we all hid in the part of the room nearthe fireplace, where no one could see us from the door.
We hardly dared to breathe. Alice said afterwards that she could hearOswald's heart beating with terror, but the author is almost sure thatit was only his watch ticking. It had begun to go that week, after daysof unexplained idleness. If we _did_ have to pay for finding theEnchanceried House, this was when we paid.
There _were_ feet on the stairs. We all heard them. And voices. Theauthor distinctly heard the words 'replete with every moderninconvenience,' and 'pleasantly situate ten minutes from tram andrail.'
And Oswald, at least, understood that, somehow or other, our house hadgot itself disenchanceried, and that the owner was trying to let it.
We held our breaths till they were nearly choked out of us.
The steps came nearer and nearer. They came along the passage, andstopped at the door.
'This is the nursery,' said a manly voice. 'Ah, locked! I quiteunderstood from the agent that the keys were in the hall.'
Of course _we_ had the keys, and this was the moment that Noel chose fordropping them. Why he was fingering them where they lay on themantelpiece the author does not know, and never will know. There issomething about 'previously demented' in some Latin chap--Virgil orLucretius--that seems to hit the nail on the head. The keys fell on thecracked hearthstone with a clang that Oswald, at any rate, will neverforget.
There was an awful silence--quite a long one.
Then another voice said:
'There's someone in there.'
'Look at that bench,' said the other man; 'it's coiners' work, that'swhat it is, but there's nobody there. The keys must have _blown_ down!'
The two voices talked some time, but we could not hear all theirconversation. We were all wondering, as it turned out afterwards, whatexactly the utmost rigour of the law was. Because, of course, we knew wewere trespassers of the very deepest dye, even if we could prove that wewere not real coiners.
'No,' we heard one of them say, 'if we go for the police very likely thegang will return and destroy everything. There's no one here now. Let'ssecure the evidence. We can easily break the door down.'
It is a sickening feeling when the evidence against you is going to besecured, and you don't know what the punishment for coining is, orwhether anyone will believe you if you say you were only playing at it.
We exchanged pallid glances.
We could hear the two men shaking the door, and we had no means ofknowing just how weak it was, never having seriously tampered with itourselves.
It was then that Noel suddenly went quite mad. I think it was due tosomething old nurse had read to us at breakfast that day about a boy ofeight who played on the fiddle, and composed pieces of music. Affectedyoung ass!
He darted from us into the middle of the room, where the two intruderscould see him, and said:
'Don't break down the door! The villains may return any moment anddestroy you. Fetch the police!'
The surprised outsiders could find no word but 'Er?'
'You are surprised to see me here,' said Noel, not taking any notice ofthe furious looks of the rest of us. 'I am an infant prodigy. I play theviolin at concerts; I play it beautifully. They take me to London toplay in a closed carriage, so that I can't tell anyone my woes on theway.'
'My poor child!' said one of the outsiders; 'tell us all about it. Wemust rescue you.'
'Born of poor but honest parents,' said Noel--and this was what nursehad read out to us--'my musical talent early manifested itself on a toyviolin, the gift of a devoted great-aunt. Torn from my home----I say, dofetch the police. If the monsters who live on my violin-playing returnand find you here, they will brain you with the tools of their trade,and I shall be lost.'
'Their trade?' said one of them. 'What trade?'
'They are coiners,' said Noel, 'as well as what they do to me to make meplay.'
'But if we leave you?'
'Oh, they won't hurt _me_,' cried Noel, 'because I have to play to-nightat Exeter Hall. Fly--fly for the police! They may come up behind you anymoment and cleave you to the chine.'
And they actually flew. The present author would have known instantlythat it was rot that about cleaving chines, but the man who wanted tolet the Disenchanteried House and the man who wanted to have it let tohim were of other mettle.
We had remained perfectly still and silent. Of course, if the outsidershad attacked Noel, his brothers would have rushed to his rescue.
As soon as the retreating boots of the outsiders grew fainter on thestairs, Noel turned green, and had to be revived by splashings from thebrotherly coal-scuttle full of water. He got better directly, and we allscooted home to old nurse's, leaving our coining plant without a pang.All great generals say that a retreat is best conducted withoutimpediments.
Noel was so ill he had to go to bed and stay there. This was as well,because of the neighbourhood being scoured for the ill-used infantprodigy that had been imprisoned in the Enchanceried House. He got allright again in time to go home when father came up for us. While he wasin bed he wrote a long poem in six different coloured chalks, called'The Enchanceried Coiners, or the Liar's Remorse.' So I know he wassorry for what he had done. He told me he could not think what made him,and of course it was very wrong, but it did save our bacon, and preserveus from the noisome cells and bread and water that I am sure are thereal meaning of the 'utmost rigour of the law.'
Really the worst of it all was that while we were trembling in thecoiners' den, with the two outside gentlemen snorting and whispering onthe other side of the gate-door, H. O. had got up out of his bed at homeand answered the door. (Old nurse had gone out to get a lettuce and anaerated loaf for tea.) He answered it to a butcher's bill for fifteenand sevenpence that the butcher's little girl had brought, and he paidit with six of the pennies that we had disguised as half-crowns, andtold the little girl to call for the sevenpence in the morning. Ibelieve many people have been hanged for less. It was lucky for H. O.that old nurse was a friend of the butcher's, and able to persuade himthat it was only a joke. In sterner times, like the French Revolution... but Alice does not like to think what would have happened then. Asthis is the twentieth century, and not the eighteenth, our all goingdown to the butcher and saying we were sorry made it all right. Butsuppose it had been in other dates!
The butcher's wife gave us cake and ginger wine, and was very jolly. Sheasked us where we had got the false half-crowns. Oswald said they hadbeen given us. This was true, but when they were given us th
ey werepennies.
Did Oswald tell a lie to the butcher? He has often wondered. He hopesnot. It is easy to know whether a thing is a lie or not when nothingdepends on it. But when events are happening, and the utmost rigour ofthe law may be the result of your making a mistake, you have to tell thetruth as carefully as you can.
No English gentleman tells a lie--Oswald knows that, of course. But anEnglishman is not obliged to criminalate himself. The rules of honourand the laws of your country are very puzzling and contradictory.
But the butcher got paid afterwards in real money--a half-sovereign andtwo half-crowns, and seven unsilvered pennies. So nobody was injured,and the author thinks that is the great thing after all.
All the same, if ever he goes to stay with old nurse again, he thinks hewill tell the butcher All in confidence. He does not like to have anydoubts about such a serious thing as the honour of a Bastable.
THE END OF OSWALD'S PART OF THE BOOK.
