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 gla.s.s on top, but Oswald and d.i.c.ky got into the yard. Green gra.s.s 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-b.u.t.t 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 pa.s.sed and heard us.
We found the pinewood, and the field, and the house had all got boards to say what would be done to trespa.s.sers 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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sage 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 gla.s.s 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."
d.i.c.ky came on so rapidly that his boots grazed the shoulder of the advancing 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, 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.
Pa.s.sing 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 d.i.c.ky 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.
d.i.c.ky 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 gra.s.s, 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. Noel 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.
Then there were three staircases, and these must have been darkly convenient for getting conspirators away when the King"s officers were at the door, as so constantly happened in romantic times.
The whole house was full of ideas for ripping games, and when we came away Alice said:
"We must be really better than we know. We must have done _something_ to deserve a find like this."
"Don"t worry," said Oswald. "Albert"s uncle says you always have to pay for 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 we found finally (that looks very odd, and I am not sure if it is allity-what"s-its-name, or only carelessness. I wonder whether other authors are ever a prey to these devastating doubts?) This find was on the top floor. It was a room with bars to the windows, and it was a very odd shape. You went along a pa.s.sage to the door, and then there was the room; but the room went back along the same way as the pa.s.sage had come, so that when you went round 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 it for you, or you will never understand.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
The door that is marked "Another Door" was full of agitated excitement for us, because it wasn"t a door at all--at least, not the kind that you are used to. It was a gate, like you have at the top of nursery stairs in the mansions of the rich and affluent; but instead of being halfway up, it went all the way up, so that you could see into the room through the bars.
"Somebody must have kept tame lunatics here," said d.i.c.ky.
"Or bears," said H. O.
"Or enchanceried Princes," said Noel.
"It seems silly, though," said Alice, "because the lunatic or the bear or the enchanted Prince could always hide round the corner when he heard the 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 was never untwisted.
"Perhaps a Russian prisoner was kept there," said Alice, "and they did not want to look too close for fear he would shoot them with his bomb-gun. Poor man! perhaps he caught vodka, or some other of those awful foreign diseases, and died in his hidden confinement."
It was a most ripping room for games. The key of it was on the bunch labelled "Mrs. S."s room." We often wondered who Mrs. S. was.
"Let"s have a regular round of gaieties," said Oswald. "Each of us to take it in turns to have the room, and act what they like, and the others look through the bars."
So next day we did this.
Oswald, of course, dressed up in bath-towels and a sheet as the ghost of Mrs. S., but Noel and H. O. screamed, and would not be calm till he tore off the sheet and showed his knickerbockers and braces as a guarantee of good faith. Alice put her hair up, and got a skirt, and a large handkerchief to cry in, and was a hapless maiden imprisoned in a tower because she would not marry the wicked Baron. Oswald instantly took the part of the wicked Baron, and d.i.c.ky was the virtuous lover of low degree, and they had a splendid combat, and d.i.c.ky carried off the lady.
Of course, that was the proper end to the story, and Oswald had to pretend to be beaten, which was not the case.
d.i.c.ky was Louis XVI. watch-making while waiting for the guillotine to happen. So we were the guillotine, and he was executed in the paved yard.
Noel was an imprisoned troubadour dressed in bright antimaca.s.sars, and he fired off quite a lot of poetry at us before we could get the door open, which was most unfair.
H. O. was a clown. He had no fancy dress except flour and two Turkish towels pinned on to look like trousers, but he put the flour all over himself, and it took the rest of the day to clean him.
It was when Alice was drying the hair-brushes that she had washed after brushing the flour out of Noel"s hair in the back-garden that Oswald said:
"_I_ know what that room was made for."