"Out of the gravel-pit," said truthful Jane.
"Next article," said the man.
"I tell you we did," Jane said. "There"s a fairy there--all over brown fur--with ears like a bat"s and eyes like a snail"s, and he gives you a wish a day, and they all come true."
"Touched in the head, eh?" said the man in a low voice; "all the more shame to you boys dragging the poor afflicted child into your sinful burglaries."
"She"s not mad; it"s true," said Anthea; "there _is_ a fairy. If I ever see him again I"ll wish for something for you; at least I would if vengeance wasn"t wicked--so there!"
"Lor" lumme," said Billy Peasemarsh, "if there ain"t another on "em!"
And now Willum came back, with a spiteful grin on his face, and at his back a policeman, with whom Mr. Peasemarsh spoke long in a hoa.r.s.e earnest whisper.
"I daresay you"re right," said the policeman at last. "Anyway, I"ll take "em up on a charge of unlawful possession, pending inquiries. And the magistrate will deal with the case. Send the afflicted ones to a home, as likely as not, and the boys to a reformatory. Now then, come along, youngsters! No use making a fuss. You bring the gells along, Mr.
Peasemarsh, sir, and I"ll shepherd the boys."
Speechless with rage and horror, the four children were driven along the streets of Rochester. Tears of anger and shame blinded them, so that when Robert ran right into a pa.s.ser-by he did not recognise her till a well-known voice said, "Well, if ever I did! Oh, Master Robert, whatever have you been a-doing of now?" And another voice, quite as well known, said, "Panty; want go own Panty!"
They had run into Martha and the Baby!
[Ill.u.s.tration: They had run into Martha and the baby]
Martha behaved admirably. She refused to believe a word of the policeman"s story, or of Mr. Peasemarsh"s either, even when they made Robert turn out his pockets in an archway and show the guineas.
"I don"t see nothing," she said. "You"ve gone out of your senses, you two! There ain"t any gold there--only the poor child"s hands, all over dirt, and like the very chimbley. Oh that I should ever see the day!"
And the children thought this very n.o.ble of Martha, even if rather wicked, till they remembered how the Fairy had promised that the servants should never notice any of the fairy gifts. So of course Martha couldn"t see the gold, and so was only speaking the truth, and that was quite right, of course, but not extra n.o.ble.
It was getting dusk when they reached the police-station. The policeman told his tale to an inspector, who sat in a large bare room with a thing like a clumsy nursery-fender at one end to put prisoners in. Robert wondered whether it was a cell or a dock.
"Produce the coins, officer," said the inspector.
"Turn out your pockets," said the constable.
Cyril desperately plunged his hands in his pockets, stood still a moment, and then began to laugh--an odd sort of laugh that hurt, and that felt much more like crying. His pockets were empty. So were the pockets of the others. For of course at sunset all the fairy gold had vanished away.
"Turn out your pockets, and stop that noise," said the inspector.
Cyril turned out his pockets, every one of the nine which enriched his suit. And every pocket was empty.
"Well!" said the inspector.
"I don"t know how they done it--artful little beggars! They walked in front of me the "ole way, so as for me to keep my eye on them and not to attract a crowd and obstruct the traffic."
"It"s very remarkable," said the inspector, frowning.
"If you"ve done a-browbeating of the innocent children," said Martha, "I"ll hire a private carriage and we"ll drive home to their papa"s mansion. You"ll hear about this again, young man!--I told you they hadn"t got any gold, when you were pretending to see it in their poor helpless hands. It"s early in the day for a constable on duty not to be able to trust his own eyes. As to the other one, the less said the better; he keeps the Saracen"s Head, and he knows best what his liquor"s like."
[Ill.u.s.tration: He said, "Now then!" to the policeman and Mr. Peasemarsh]
"Take them away, for goodness" sake," said the inspector crossly. But as they left the police-station he said, "Now then!" to the policeman and Mr. Peasemarsh, and he said it twenty times as crossly as he had spoken to Martha.
Martha was as good as her word. She took them home in a very grand carriage, because the carrier"s cart was gone, and, though she had stood by them so n.o.bly with the police, she was so angry with them as soon as they were alone for "trapesing into Rochester by themselves," that none of them dared to mention the old man with the pony-cart from the village who was waiting for them in Rochester. And so, after one day of boundless wealth, the children found themselves sent to bed in deep disgrace, and only enriched by two pairs of cotton gloves, dirty inside because of the state of the hands they had been put on to cover, an imitation crocodile-skin purse, and twelve penny buns, long since digested.
The thing that troubled them most was the fear that the old gentleman"s guinea might have disappeared at sunset with all the rest, so they went down to the village next day to apologise for not meeting him in Rochester, and to _see_. They found him very friendly. The guinea had not disappeared, and he had bored a hole in it and hung it on his watch-chain. As for the guinea the baker took, the children felt they _could_ not care whether it had vanished or not, which was not perhaps very honest, but on the other hand was not wholly unnatural. But afterwards this preyed on Anthea"s mind, and at last she secretly sent twelve postage stamps by post to "Mr. Beale, Baker, Rochester." Inside she wrote, "To pay for the buns." I hope the guinea did disappear, for that baker was really not at all a nice man, and, besides, penny buns are seven for sixpence in all really respectable shops.
CHAPTER III
BEING WANTED
The morning after the children had been the possessors of boundless wealth, and had been unable to buy anything really useful or enjoyable with it, except two pairs of cotton gloves, twelve penny buns, an imitation crocodile-skin purse, and a ride in a pony-cart, they awoke without any of the enthusiastic happiness which they had felt on the previous day when they remembered how they had had the luck to find a Psammead, or Sand-fairy, and to receive its promise to grant them a new wish every day. For now they had had two wishes, Beauty and Wealth, and neither had exactly made them happy. But the happening of strange things, even if they are not completely pleasant things, is more amusing than those times when nothing happens but meals, and they are not always completely pleasant, especially on the days when it is cold mutton or hash.
There was no chance of talking things over before breakfast, because everyone overslept itself, as it happened, and it needed a vigorous and determined struggle to get dressed so as to be only ten minutes late for breakfast. During this meal some efforts were made to deal with the question of the Psammead in an impartial spirit, but it is very difficult to discuss anything thoroughly and at the same time to attend faithfully to your baby brother"s breakfast needs. The Baby was particularly lively that morning. He not only wriggled his body through the bar of his high chair, and hung by his head, choking and purple, but he seized a tablespoon with desperate suddenness, hit Cyril heavily on the head with it, and then cried because it was taken away from him. He put his fat fist in his bread-and-milk, and demanded "nam," which was only allowed for tea. He sang, he put his feet on the table--he clamoured to "go walky." The conversation was something like this--
"Look here--about that Sand-fairy---- Look out!--he"ll have the milk over."
Milk removed to a safe distance.
"Yes--about that Fairy---- No, Lamb dear, give Panther the narky poon."
Then Cyril tried. "Nothing we"ve had yet has turned out---- He nearly had the mustard that time!"
"I wonder whether we"d better wish---- Hullo!--you"ve done it now, my boy!" And in a flash of gla.s.s and pink baby-paws, the bowl of golden carp in the middle of the table rolled on its side and poured a flood of mixed water and gold-fish into the Baby"s lap and into the laps of the others.
Everyone was almost as much upset as the gold-fish; the Lamb only remaining calm. When the pool on the floor had been mopped up, and the leaping, gasping gold-fish had been collected and put back in the water, the Baby was taken away to be entirely re-dressed by Martha, and most of the others had to change completely. The pinafores and jackets that had been bathed in gold-fish-and-water were hung out to dry, and then it turned out that Jane must either mend the dress she had torn the day before or appear all day in her best petticoat. It was white and soft and frilly, and trimmed with lace, and very, very pretty, quite as pretty as a frock, if not more so. Only it was _not_ a frock, and Martha"s word was law. She wouldn"t let Jane wear her best frock, and she refused to listen for a moment to Robert"s suggestion that Jane should wear her best petticoat and call it a dress.
"It"s not respectable," she said. And when people say that, it"s no use anyone"s saying anything. You"ll find this out for yourselves some day.
So there was nothing for it but for Jane to mend her frock. The hole had been torn the day before when she happened to tumble down in the High Street of Rochester, just where a water-cart had pa.s.sed on its silvery way. She had grazed her knee, and her stocking was much more than grazed, and her dress was cut by the same stone which had attended to the knee and the stocking. Of course the others were not such sneaks as to abandon a comrade in misfortune, so they all sat on the gra.s.s-plot round the sun-dial, and Jane darned away for dear life. The Lamb was still in the hands of Martha having its clothes changed, so conversation was possible.
Anthea and Robert timidly tried to conceal their inmost thought, which was that the Psammead was not to be trusted; but Cyril said--
"Speak out--say what you"ve got to say--I hate hinting, and "don"t know," and sneakish ways like that."
So then Robert said, as in honour bound, "Sneak yourself--Anthea and me weren"t so gold-fishy as you two were, so we got changed quicker, and we"ve had time to think it over, and if you ask me"--
"I didn"t ask you," said Jane, biting off a needleful of thread as she had always been strictly forbidden to do. (Perhaps you don"t know that if you bite off ends of cotton and swallow them they wind tight round your heart and kill you? My nurse told me this, and she told me also about the earth going round the sun. Now what is one to believe--what with nurses and science?)
"I don"t care who asks or who doesn"t," said Robert, "but Anthea and I think the Sammyadd is a spiteful brute. If it can give us our wishes I suppose it can give itself its own, and I feel almost sure it wishes every time that our wishes shan"t do us any good. Let"s let the tiresome beast alone, and just go and have a jolly good game of forts, on our own, in the chalk-pit."
(You will remember that the happily-situated house where these children were spending their holidays lay between a chalk-quarry and a gravel-pit.)