The E. Nesbit Megapack: 26 Classic Novels and Stories (199 page)

Then a woman came along, and Eliza got her into a corner by the stairs and jawed. I heard part of the jaw.

‘An’ pore Mrs. Simpkins, her man he’s gone to Ashford Market with his beasts and the three other men, and me and my man said we’d have Liz up at my place, her being my sister, so as Honeysett could go off to Romney about the sheep. But she wouldn’t come, not though we brought the light cart over for her. So we thought it best Honeysett stayed about his work, and go for the sheep to-morrow.’

‘Then the house would ha’ been all empty but for her not being wishful to go along of you?’ Oswald heard the other say.

‘Yes,’ said Eliza; ‘an’ so you see——’

‘You keep your mouth shut,’ the other woman fiercely said; ‘you’re Lily’s sister, but Tom, he’s my brother. If you don’t shut your silly mouth you’ll be getting of them into trouble. It’s insured, ain’t it?’

‘I don’t see,’ said Eliza.

‘You don’t never see nothing,’ said the other. ‘You just don’t say a word ‘less you’re arst, and then only as you come to look after her and found the fire a-raging something crool.’

‘But why——’

The other woman clawed hold of her and dragged her away, whispering secretly.

All this time the fire was raging, but there were lots of men now to work the well and the buckets, and the house and the barn had not caught.

When we had got out all the furniture, some of the men set to work on the barn, and, of course, Oswald and Dicky, though weary, were in this also. They helped to get out all the wool—bundles and bundles and bundles of it; but when it came to sacks of turnip seed and things, they thought they had had enough, and they went to where the things were that had come out of the larder, and they got a jug of milk and some bread and cheese, and took it to the woman who was lying in the dry ditch on the nice bed they had so kindly made for her. She drank some milk, and asked them to have some, and they did, with bread and cheese (Dutch), and jolly glad they were of it.

Just as we had finished we heard a shout, and there was the fire-engine coming across the field.

I do like fire-engines. They are so smart and fierce, and look like dragons ready to fight the devouring element.

It was no use, however, in spite of the beautiful costumes of the firemen, because there was no water, except in the well, and not much left of that.

The man named Honeysett had ridden off on an old boneshaker of his to fetch the engines. He had left the key in the place where it was always kept, only Eliza had not had the sense to look for it. He had left a letter for her, too, written in red pencil on the back of a bill for a mowing-machine. It said: ‘Rix on fir’; going to git fir’-injins.’

Oswald treasures this letter still as a memento of happier days.

When Honeysett saw the line of men handing up buckets to throw on the tarry wall, he said:

‘That ain’t no manner of use. Wind’s changed a hour agone.’

And so it had. The flames were now reaching out the other way, and two more ricks were on fire. But the tarry walls were quite cool, and very wet, and the men who were throwing the water were very surprised to find that they were standing in a great puddle.

And now, when everything in the house and the barn was safe, Oswald had time to draw his breath and think, and to remember with despair exactly who it was that had launched a devastating fire-balloon over the peaceful marsh.

It was getting dusk by this time; but even the splendour of all those burning ricks against the darkening sky was merely wormwood and gall to Oswald’s upright heart, and he jolly soon saw that it was the same to Dicky’s.

‘I feel pretty sick,’ he said. ‘Let’s go home.’

‘They say the whole eleven ricks are bound to go,’ said Dicky, ‘with the wind the way it is.’

‘We’re bound to go,’ said Oswald.

‘Where?’ inquired the less thoughtful Dicky.

‘To prison,’ said his far-seeing brother, turning away and beginning to walk towards the bicycles.

‘We can’t be sure it was our balloon,’ said Dicky, following.

‘Pretty average,’ said Oswald bitterly.

‘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

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 through 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.’

Dicky came on so rapidly that his boots grazed the shoulder of the advancing Oswald. Alice was coming next, but Noël 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 Noël was in a funk himself, though with a poet you never know.

The cellar into which Oswald now plunged had a damp and mouldering smell, like of mouse-traps, and straw, and beer-barrels. Another cellar opened out of it, and in this there was traces of coal having existed in other ages.

Passing the coal-cellar, we went out to a cellar with shelves on the wall like berths in a ship, or the catacombs where early Christians used 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 found a flight of stone steps and went up. And Oswald is not ashamed to own that, the staircase being of a twisty nature, he did think what it would be 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 an old friend, that we got out of the cellars, stairs, and through a door to the back-kitchen, where the sink was, and the copper and the plate-rack. Oswald felt like a brother to the broken coal-scuttle. Our first instant thought was the back door.

It was bolted top and bottom, and the bolts were sort of cemented into their places with rust. But they were unable to resist our patient and determined onslaught. Only when we had undone them the door kept shut, and by stooping down and looking we saw that this was because it was locked.

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 the chicken-house. So we went into the hall. There was a bunch of keys on a nail on the back of the front-door.

‘There now, you see I was right,’ remarked Oswald. And he was, as is so often 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 to it.

‘You can bring H. O. in quite safely,’ Oswald said when the door had creakingly consented to open itself, and to disclose the sunshine, and the paved yard with the paving stones marked out with green grass, and the interested expressions on the faces of Alice and the others. ‘It’s quite safe. It’s just a house like anyone else’s, only it hasn’t got any furniture 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, and the 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. Noël said he thought all the rooms in this house had been the scene of duels or elopements, or concealing rightful heirs. The present author doesn’t know about that, but there was a splendid cupboardiness about the place that spoke volumes to a discerning eye. Even the window seats, of which there were six, lifted up like the lids of boxes, and you could have hidden a flying Cavalier in any of them, if he had been of only medium height and slender build, like heroes with swords so often are.