We exchanged pallid glances.
We could hear the two men shaking the door, and we had no means of knowing just how weak it was, never having seriously tampered with it ourselves.
It was then that Noel suddenly went quite mad. I think it was due to something old nurse had read to us at breakfast that day about a boy of eight who played on the fiddle, and composed pieces of music. Affected young a.s.s!
He darted from us into the middle of the room, where the two intruders could see him, and said:
"Don"t break down the door! The villains may return any moment and destroy 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 of the furious looks of the rest of us. "I am an infant prodigy. I play the violin at concerts; I play it beautifully. They take me to London to play in a closed carriage, so that I can"t tell anyone my woes on the way."
"My poor child!" said one of the outsiders; "tell us all about it. We must rescue you."
"Born of poor but honest parents," said Noel--and this was what nurse had read out to us--"my musical talent early manifested itself on a toy violin, the gift of a devoted great-aunt. Torn from my home----I say, do fetch the police. If the monsters who live on my violin-playing return and 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 me play."
"But if we leave you?"
"Oh, they won"t hurt _me_," cried Noel, "because I have to play to-night at Exeter Hall. Fly--fly for the police! They may come up behind you any moment and cleave you to the chine."
And they actually flew. The present author would have known instantly that it was rot that about cleaving chines, but the man who wanted to let the Disenchanteried House and the man who wanted to have it let to him were of other mettle.
We had remained perfectly still and silent. Of course, if the outsiders had attacked Noel, his brothers would have rushed to his rescue.
As soon as the retreating boots of the outsiders grew fainter on the stairs, Noel turned green, and had to be revived by splashings from the brotherly coal-scuttle full of water. He got better directly, and we all scooted home to old nurse"s, leaving our coining plant without a pang.
All great generals say that a retreat is best conducted without impediments.
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 infant prodigy that had been imprisoned in the Enchanceried House. He got all right again in time to go home when father came up for us. While he was in bed he wrote a long poem in six different coloured chalks, called "The Enchanceried Coiners, or the Liar"s Remorse." So I know he was sorry 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 preserve us from the noisome cells and bread and water that I am sure are the real meaning of the "utmost rigour of the law."
Really the worst of it all was that while we were trembling in the coiners" den, with the two outside gentlemen snorting and whispering on the other side of the gate-door, H. O. had got up out of his bed at home and answered the door. (Old nurse had gone out to get a lettuce and an aerated loaf for tea.) He answered it to a butcher"s bill for fifteen and sevenpence that the butcher"s little girl had brought, and he paid it with six of the pennies that we had disguised as half-crowns, and told the little girl to call for the sevenpence in the morning. I believe 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 him that it was only a joke. In sterner times, like the French Revolution ... but Alice does not like to think what would have happened then. As this is the twentieth century, and not the eighteenth, our all going down to the butcher and saying we were sorry made it all right. But suppose it had been in other dates!
The butcher"s wife gave us cake and ginger wine, and was very jolly. She asked us where we had got the false half-crowns. Oswald said they had been given us. This was true, but when they were given us they were pennies.
Did Oswald tell a lie to the butcher? He has often wondered. He hopes not. It is easy to know whether a thing is a lie or not when nothing depends on it. But when events are happening, and the utmost rigour of the law may be the result of your making a mistake, you have to tell the truth as carefully as you can.
No English gentleman tells a lie--Oswald knows that, of course. But an Englishman is not obliged to criminalate himself. The rules of honour and the laws of your country are very puzzling and contradictory.
But the butcher got paid afterwards in real money--a half-sovereign and two half-crowns, and seven unsilvered pennies. So n.o.body 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 he will tell the butcher All in confidence. He does not like to have any doubts about such a serious thing as the honour of a Bastable.
THE END OF OSWALD"S PART OF THE BOOK.
OTHERS
[Ill.u.s.tration: "A little person in a large white cap."--Page 257]
MOLLY, THE MEASLES, AND THE MISSING WILL
We all think a great deal too much of ourselves. We all believe--every man, woman, and child of us--in our very insidest inside heart, that no one else in the world is at all like us, and that things happen to us that happen to no one else. Now, this is a great mistake, because however different we may be in the colour of our hair and eyes, the inside part, the part that we feel and suffer with, is pretty much alike in all of us. But no one seems to know this except me. That is why people won"t tell you the really wonderful things that happen to them: they think you are so different that you could never believe the wonderful things. But of course you are not different really, and you can believe wonderful things as easily as anybody else. For instance, you will be able to believe this story quite easily, for though it didn"t happen to you, that was merely an accident. It might have happened, quite easily, to you or any else. As it happened, it happened to Maria Toodlethwaite Carruthers.
You will already have felt a little sorry for Maria, and you will have thought that I might have chosen a prettier name for her. And so I might. But I did not do the choosing. Her parents did that. And they called her Maria after an aunt who was disagreeable, and would have been more disagreeable than ever if the baby had been called Enid or Elaine or Vivien, or any of the pretty names that will readily occur to you.
She was called Toodlethwaite after the eminent uncle of that name who had an office in London and an office in Liverpool, and was said to be rolling in money.
"I _should_ like to see Uncle Toodlethwaite rolling in his money," said Maria, "but he never does it when I"m about."
The third name, Carruthers, was Maria"s father"s name, and she often felt thankful that it was no worse. It might so easily have been Snooks or Prosser.
Of course no one called Maria Maria except Aunt Maria herself. Her Aunt Eliza, who was very refined, always wrote in the improving books that she gave Maria on her birthday, "To dearest Marie, from her affectionate Aunt Elise," and when she spoke to her she called her Mawrie. Her brothers and sisters, whenever they wanted to be aggravating, called her Toodles, but at times of common friendliness they called her Molly, and so did most other people, and so shall I, and so may you.
Molly and her brothers and sisters were taken care of by a young woman who was called a nursery-governess. I don"t know why, for she did not nurse them, and she certainly did not govern them. In her last situation she had been called a lady-help--I don"t know the why of that, either.
Her name was Simpshall, and she was always saying "Don"t," and "You mustn"t do that," and "Put that down directly," and "I shall tell your mamma if you don"t leave off." She never seemed to know what you ought to do, but only what you oughtn"t.
One day the children had a grand battle with all the toy soldiers, and the little bra.s.s cannons that shoot peas, and the other kind that shoot pink caps with "_Fortes Amorces_" on the box.
Bertie, who always liked to have everything as real as possible, did not like the soldiers to be standing on the bare polished mahogany of the dining-table.
"It"s not a bit like the field of glory," he said. And indeed it was not.
So he borrowed the large kitchen knife-box and went out, and brought it in full of nice real clean mould out of the garden. Half a dozen knife-box-fulls were needed to cover the table. Then the children made forts and ditches, and brought in sprigs of geranium and calceolaria and box and yew and made trees and ambushes and hedges. It was a lovely battlefield, and would have melted the heart of anyone but a nursery-governess.
But she just said, "What a disgusting mess! How naughty you are!" and fetched a brush and swept the field of glory away into the dustpan.
There was only just time to save the lives of the soldiers.
And then Cecily put the knife-box back without saying what it had been used for, and the knives were put into it, so that at dinner everything tasted of earth, and the grit got between people"s teeth, so that they could not eat their mutton or potatoes or cabbage, or even their gravy.
This, of course, was entirely Miss Simpshall"s fault. If she had not behaved as she did Bertie or Eva would have remembered to clean out the knife-box. As it was, the story of the field of glory came out over the gritty mutton and things, and father sent all the battlefield-makers to bed.
Molly was out of this. She was staying with Aunt Eliza, who was kind, if refined. She was to come back the next day. But as mother was on her way to the station to meet Aunt Maria for a day"s shopping, she met a telegraph boy, who gave her a telegram from Aunt Eliza saying:
"Am going to Palace to-day instead of to-morrow. Fetch Marie.--ELISE."
So mother fetched her from Aunt Eliza"s flat in Kensington and took her shopping with Aunt Maria. There were hours of shopping in hot, stuffy shops full of tired shop-people and angry ladies, and even the new hat and jacket and the strawberry ice at the pastrycook"s in Oxford Street did not make up to Molly for that tiresome day.
Still, she was out of the battlefield row. Only as she did not know that it could not comfort her.