And everyone said, "What?" which is not manners, but your brothers and sisters do not mind because it saves time.
"Why, _coiners_," said Oswald. "Don"t you see? They kept a sentinel at the 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 not burning he need not say "_Cave_" at all. It"s no use saying anything for nothing."
It is curious, but the others did not seem to see this clear distinguishedness. All people have not the same fine brains.
But all the same the idea rankled in their hearts, and one day father came and took d.i.c.ky up to London about that tooth of his, and when d.i.c.ky came back he said:
"Look here, talking of coiners, there was a man in St. Swithin"s Lane to-day selling little bottles of yellow stuff, and he rubbed some of it on a penny, and it turned the penny into a half-crown before your eyes--a new half-crown! It was a penny a bottle, so I bought three bottles."
"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 being a crime," said d.i.c.ky. "But now I"ve got this stuff we can begin to be coiners right away. I believe it isn"t really a crime unless you try to buy things with the base coin."
So that very afternoon, directly after dinner, which had a suet pudding in it that might have weighed down the enterprising spirit of anyone but us, we went over to the Enchanceried House.
We found our good rope ladder among its congealing bed of trusty nettles, 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, Oswald never had a lost love. He would scorn the action. But some heroes do have. _De gustibus_ something or other, which means, one man"s meat is another man"s poison.
When we got up into the room with the iron-grated door, it all seemed very bare. Three bottles of yellow stuff and tenpence halfpenny in coppers is not much to start a coining enterprise with.
"We ought to make it _look_ like coining, anyway," said Oswald.
"Coiners have furnaces," said d.i.c.ky.
Alice said: "Wouldn"t a spirit-lamp do? Old nurse has got an old one on the scullery shelf."
We thought it would.
Then Noel reminded us that coiners have moulds, and Oswald went and bought a pair of wooden lemon squeezers for sevenpence three farthings.
In his far-sightedness he remembered that coiners use water, so he bought two enamelled iron bowls at sixpence halfpenny the two. When he came 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 worth mentioning.
"We ought to have a bench," said d.i.c.ky; "most trades have that--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 were not 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 the tub; and then it was as high as the barrel, and we laid the boards across, and there was a bench as beautiful as you could wish.
d.i.c.ky was allowed to put the stuff on the coins, because he had bought the 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 must be kind to them or you need never hope to be a hero. There are drawbacks to every ambition.
She let Noel hold them part of the time.
When she was not helping d.i.c.ky, she tried covering pennies with the silver paper off chocolate, but it was not the kind of success that would take anyone in.
H. O. and Noel took it in turns to be sentinel, but they said it was dull, so Oswald took it on. And before he had been there three minutes he cried, "Hist! someone approaches!" and the coining materials were hastily concealed and everyone hid round the corner, like we had agreed we would do if disturbed in our unlawful pursuits.
Of course, there wasn"t anyone really. After this the kids wanted to be sentinels again, but Oswald would not let them.
It was a jolly good game. And there was something about that house that made whatever you played in it seem awfully real. When I was Mrs. S. I felt quite unhappy, and when d.i.c.ky was the unfortunate monarch who perished in the French Revolution he told me afterwards he didn"t half like it when it came to the guillotine, though, of course, he knew the knife 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 was saving the hairs out of his comb, and pulling them out of the horsehair sofa in the parlour, to make a hair shirt to be a hermit in, and Oswald had bought a file to get through the bars and be an escaped Bastille prisoner, leaving his life-history concealed in the fireplace, when the great event occurred.
We found the silvered money turned to a dirty black when a few hours had elapsed, and we tried silver paint and gold paint. Our pockets were always full of gold and silver money, and we could jingle it and take it out in handfuls and let people see it--not too near.
Then came the great eventful day.
H. O. had fallen into the water-b.u.t.t that morning. We dried his holland smock, but it went stiff like paper, so that old nurse noticed it, and thus found out that he was wringing wet underneath. So she put him to bed, for fear of his catching his death of cold, and the inveterate gang of coiners had to go to their fell lair without him. We left all our false money at home, because old nurse had given Alice a piece of tr.i.m.m.i.n.g, 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 our desperate 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 to write a poem about a Bastille prisoner. He asked to be sentry, so that he could think about rhymes.
We had not coined more than about four half-sovereigns when we heard Noel say: "Hist! Hide the plant!"
We didn"t take any notice, because we wanted to get enough of them done to play a game of misers, which was Alice"s idea.
"Hist!" Noel said again. And then suddenly he rushed in and said: "It"s a _real_ hist! I tell you there"s someone on the stairs."
And he shut the wooden-grated door, and Oswald, with rare presence of mind, caught up the bunch of keys and locked the wooden-grated door with the key labelled "Mrs. S."s room."
Then, breathless and furtive, we all hid in the part of the room near the fireplace, where no one could see us from the door.
We hardly dared to breathe. Alice said afterwards that she could hear Oswald"s heart beating with terror, but the author is almost sure that it was only his watch ticking. It had begun to go that week, after days of unexplained idleness. If we _did_ have to pay for finding the Enchanceried House, this was when we paid.
There _were_ feet on the stairs. We all heard them. And voices. The author distinctly heard the words "replete with every modern inconvenience," and "pleasantly situate ten minutes from tram and rail."
And Oswald, at least, understood that, somehow or other, our house had got 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 pa.s.sage, and stopped at the door.
"This is the nursery," said a manly voice. "Ah, locked! I quite understood from the agent that the keys were in the hall."
Of course _we_ had the keys, and this was the moment that Noel chose for dropping them. Why he was fingering them where they lay on the mantelpiece the author does not know, and never will know. There is something about "previously demented" in some Latin chap--Virgil or Lucretius--that seems to hit the nail on the head. The keys fell on the cracked hearthstone with a clang that Oswald, at any rate, will never forget.
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"s what it is, but there"s n.o.body there. The keys must have _blown_ down!"
The two voices talked some time, but we could not hear all their conversation. We were all wondering, as it turned out afterwards, what exactly the utmost rigour of the law was. Because, of course, we knew we were trespa.s.sers of the very deepest dye, even if we could prove that we were not real coiners.
"No," we heard one of them say, "if we go for the police very likely the gang will return and destroy everything. There"s no one here now. Let"s secure the evidence. We can easily break the door down."
It is a sickening feeling when the evidence against you is going to be secured, and you don"t know what the punishment for coining is, or whether anyone will believe you if you say you were only playing at it.