"I think it would be kind to find the owners of the treasure and tell them about it," said Cyril.
"And give it them ALL?" said Jane.
"Yes. But whose is it?"
"I should go to the first house and ask the name of the owner of the castle," said the golden bird, and really the idea seemed a good one.
They dusted each other as well as they could and went down the road. A little way on they found a tiny spring, bubbling out of the hillside and falling into a rough stone basin surrounded by draggled hart"s-tongue ferns, now hardly green at all. Here the children washed their hands and faces and dried them on their pocket-handkerchiefs, which always, on these occasions, seem unnaturally small. Cyril"s and Robert"s handkerchiefs, indeed, rather undid the effects of the wash. But in spite of this the party certainly looked cleaner than before.
The first house they came to was a little white house with green shutters and a slate roof. It stood in a prim little garden, and down each side of the neat path were large stone vases for flowers to grow in; but all the flowers were dead now.
Along one side of the house was a sort of wide veranda, built of poles and trellis-work, and a vine crawled all over it. It was wider than our English verandas, and Anthea thought it must look lovely when the green leaves and the grapes were there; but now there were only dry, reddish-brown stalks and stems, with a few withered leaves caught in them.
The children walked up to the front door. It was green and narrow. A chain with a handle hung beside it, and joined itself quite openly to a rusty bell that hung under the porch. Cyril had pulled the bell and its noisy clang was dying away before the terrible thought came to all.
Cyril spoke it.
"My hat!" he breathed. "We don"t know any French!"
At this moment the door opened. A very tall, lean lady, with pale ringlets like whitey-brown paper or oak shavings, stood before them. She had an ugly grey dress and a black silk ap.r.o.n. Her eyes were small and grey and not pretty, and the rims were red, as though she had been crying.
She addressed the party in something that sounded like a foreign language, and ended with something which they were sure was a question.
Of course, no one could answer it.
"What does she say?" Robert asked, looking down into the hollow of his jacket, where the Phoenix was nestling. But before the Phoenix could answer, the whitey-brown lady"s face was lighted up by a most charming smile.
"You--you ar-r-re fr-r-rom the England!" she cried. "I love so much the England. Mais entrez--entrez donc tous! Enter, then--enter all. One essuyes his feet on the carpet." She pointed to the mat.
"We only wanted to ask--"
"I shall say you all that what you wish," said the lady. "Enter only!"
So they all went in, wiping their feet on a very clean mat, and putting the carpet in a safe corner of the veranda.
"The most beautiful days of my life," said the lady, as she shut the door, "did pa.s.s themselves in England. And since long time I have not heard an English voice to repeal me the past."
This warm welcome embarra.s.sed every one, but most the boys, for the floor of the hall was of such very clean red and white tiles, and the floor of the sitting-room so very shiny--like a black looking-gla.s.s--that each felt as though he had on far more boots than usual, and far noisier.
There was a wood fire, very small and very bright, on the hearth--neat little logs laid on bra.s.s fire-dogs. Some portraits of powdered ladies and gentlemen hung in oval frames on the pale walls. There were silver candlesticks on the mantelpiece, and there were chairs and a table, very slim and polite, with slender legs. The room was extremely bare, but with a bright foreign bareness that was very cheerful, in an odd way of its own. At the end of the polished table a very un-English little boy sat on a footstool in a high-backed, uncomfortable-looking chair. He wore black velvet, and the kind of collar--all frills and lacey--that Robert would rather have died than wear; but then the little French boy was much younger than Robert.
"Oh, how pretty!" said every one. But no one meant the little French boy, with the velvety short knickerbockers and the velvety short hair.
What every one admired was a little, little Christmas-tree, very green, and standing in a very red little flower-pot, and hung round with very bright little things made of tinsel and coloured paper. There were tiny candles on the tree, but they were not lighted yet.
"But yes--is it not that it is genteel?" said the lady. "Sit down you then, and let us see."
The children sat down in a row on the stiff chairs against the wall, and the lady lighted a long, slim red taper at the wood flame, and then she drew the curtains and lit the little candles, and when they were all lighted the little French boy suddenly shouted, "Bravo, ma tante! Oh, que c"est gentil," and the English children shouted "Hooray!"
Then there was a struggle in the breast of Robert, and out fluttered the Phoenix--spread his gold wings, flew to the top of the Christmas-tree, and perched there.
"Ah! catch it, then," cried the lady; "it will itself burn--your genteel parrakeet!"
"It won"t," said Robert, "thank you."
And the little French boy clapped his clean and tidy hands; but the lady was so anxious that the Phoenix fluttered down and walked up and down on the shiny walnut-wood table.
"Is it that it talks?" asked the lady.
And the Phoenix replied in excellent French. It said, "Parfaitement, madame!"
"Oh, the pretty parrakeet," said the lady. "Can it say still of other things?"
And the Phoenix replied, this time in English, "Why are you sad so near Christmas-time?"
The children looked at it with one gasp of horror and surprise, for the youngest of them knew that it is far from manners to notice that strangers have been crying, and much worse to ask them the reason of their tears. And, of course, the lady began to cry again, very much indeed, after calling the Phoenix a bird without a heart; and she could not find her handkerchief, so Anthea offered hers, which was still very damp and no use at all. She also hugged the lady, and this seemed to be of more use than the handkerchief, so that presently the lady stopped crying, and found her own handkerchief and dried her eyes, and called Anthea a cherished angel.
"I am sorry we came just when you were so sad," said Anthea, "but we really only wanted to ask you whose that castle is on the hill."
"Oh, my little angel," said the poor lady, sniffing, "to-day and for hundreds of years the castle is to us, to our family. To-morrow it must that I sell it to some strangers--and my little Henri, who ignores all, he will not have never the lands paternal. But what will you? His father, my brother--Mr the Marquis--has spent much of money, and it the must, despite the sentiments of familial respect, that I admit that my sainted father he also--"
"How would you feel if you found a lot of money--hundreds and thousands of gold pieces?" asked Cyril.
The lady smiled sadly.
"Ah! one has already recounted to you the legend?" she said. "It is true that one says that it is long time; oh! but long time, one of our ancestors has hid a treasure--of gold, and of gold, and of gold--enough to enrich my little Henri for the life. But all that, my children, it is but the accounts of fays--"
"She means fairy stories," whispered the Phoenix to Robert. "Tell her what you have found."
So Robert told, while Anthea and Jane hugged the lady for fear she should faint for joy, like people in books, and they hugged her with the earnest, joyous hugs of unselfish delight.
"It"s no use explaining how we got in," said Robert, when he had told of the finding of the treasure, "because you would find it a little difficult to understand, and much more difficult to believe. But we can show you where the gold is and help you to fetch it away."
The lady looked doubtfully at Robert as she absently returned the hugs of the girls.
"No, he"s not making it up," said Anthea; "it"s true, TRUE, TRUE!--and we are so glad."
"You would not be capable to torment an old woman?" she said; "and it is not possible that it be a dream."
"It really IS true," said Cyril; "and I congratulate you very much."
His tone of studied politeness seemed to convince more than the raptures of the others.
"If I do not dream," she said, "Henri come to Manon--and you--you shall come all with me to Mr the Curate. Is it not?"
Manon was a wrinkled old woman with a red and yellow handkerchief twisted round her head. She took Henri, who was already sleepy with the excitement of his Christmas-tree and his visitors, and when the lady had put on a stiff black cape and a wonderful black silk bonnet and a pair of black wooden clogs over her black cashmere house-boots, the whole party went down the road to a little white house--very like the one they had left--where an old priest, with a good face, welcomed them with a politeness so great that it hid his astonishment.
The lady, with her French waving hands and her shrugging French shoulders and her trembling French speech, told the story. And now the priest, who knew no English, shrugged HIS shoulders and waved HIS hands and spoke also in French.
"He thinks," whispered the Phoenix, "that her troubles have turned her brain. What a pity you know no French!"