The E. Nesbit Megapack: 26 Classic Novels and Stories (169 page)

‘I suppose that’s the Committee. Come on!’

So we all went down—we were in our Sunday things—and Albert’s uncle received the Committee like a feudal system baron, and we were his retainers.

He talked about dates, and king posts and gables, and mullions, and foundations, and records, and Sir Thomas Wyatt, and poetry, and Julius Caesar, and Roman remains, and lych gates and churches, and dog’s-tooth moulding till the brain of Oswald reeled. I suppose that Albert’s uncle remarked that all our mouths were open, which is a sign of reels in the brain, for he whispered—

‘Go hence, and mingle unsuspected with the crowd!’

So we went out on to the lawn, which was now crowded with men and women and one child. This was a girl; she was fat, and we tried to talk to her, though we did not like her. (She was covered in red velvet like an arm-chair.) But she wouldn’t. We thought at first she was from a deaf-and-dumb asylum, where her kind teachers had only managed to teach the afflicted to say ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’ But afterwards we knew better, for Noël heard her say to her mother, ‘I wish you hadn’t brought me, mamma. I didn’t have a pretty teacup, and I haven’t enjoyed my tea one bit.’ And she had had five pieces of cake, besides little cakes and nearly a whole plate of plums, and there were only twelve pretty teacups altogether.

Several grown-ups talked to us in a most uninterested way, and then the President read a paper about the Moat House, which we couldn’t understand, and other people made speeches we couldn’t understand either, except the part about kind hospitality, which made us not know where to look.

Then Dora and Alice and Daisy and Mrs Pettigrew poured out the tea, and we handed cups and plates.

Albert’s uncle took me behind a bush to see him tear what was left of his hair when he found there were one hundred and twenty-three Antiquities present, and I heard the President say to the Secretary that ‘tea always fetched them.’

Then it was time for the Roman ruin, and our hearts beat high as we took our hats—it was exactly like Sunday—and joined the crowded procession of eager Antiquities. Many of them had umbrellas and overcoats, though the weather was fiery and without a cloud. That is the sort of people they were. The ladies all wore stiff bonnets, and no one took their gloves off, though, of course, it was quite in the country, and it is not wrong to take your gloves off there.

We had planned to be quite close when the digging went on; but Albert’s uncle made us a mystic sign and drew us apart.

Then he said: ‘The stalls and dress circle are for the guests. The hosts and hostesses retire to the gallery, whence, I am credibly informed, an excellent view may be obtained.’

So we all went up on the Roman walls, and thus missed the cream of the lark; for we could not exactly see what was happening. But we saw that things were being taken from the ground as the men dug, and passed round for the Antiquities to look at. And we knew they must be our Roman remains; but the Antiquities did not seem to care for them much, though we heard sounds of pleased laughter. And at last Alice and I exchanged meaning glances when the spot was reached where we had put in the extras. Then the crowd closed up thick, and we heard excited talk and we knew we really
had
sold the Antiquities this time.

Presently the bonnets and coats began to spread out and trickle towards the house and we were aware that all would soon be over. So we cut home the back way, just in time to hear the President saying to Albert’s uncle—

‘A genuine find—most interesting. Oh, really, you ought to have
one
. Well, if you insist—’

And so, by slow and dull degrees, the thick sprinkling of Antiquities melted off the lawn; the party was over, and only the dirty teacups and plates, and the trampled grass and the pleasures of memory were left.

We had a very beautiful supper—out of doors, too—with jam sandwiches and cakes and things that were over; and as we watched the setting monarch of the skies—I mean the sun—Alice said—

‘Let’s tell.’

We let the Dentist tell, because it was he who hatched the lark, but we helped him a little in the narrating of the fell plot, because he has yet to learn how to tell a story straight from the beginning.

When he had done, and we had done, Albert’s uncle said, ‘Well, it amused you; and you’ll be glad to learn that it amused your friends the Antiquities.’

‘Didn’t they think they were Roman?’ Daisy said; ‘they did in
The Daisy Chain
.’

‘Not in the least,’ said Albert’s uncle; ‘but the Treasurer and Secretary were charmed by your ingenious preparations for their reception.’

‘We didn’t want them to be disappointed,’ said Dora.

‘They weren’t,’ said Albert’s uncle. ‘Steady on with those plums, H.O. A little way beyond the treasure you had prepared for them they found two specimens of
real
Roman pottery which sent every man-jack of them home thanking his stars he had been born a happy little Antiquary child.’

‘Those were our jugs,’ said Alice, ‘and we really
have
sold the Antiquities. She unfolded the tale about our getting the jugs and burying them in the moonlight, and the mound; and the others listened with deeply respectful interest. ‘We really have done it this time, haven’t we?’ she added in tones of well-deserved triumph.

But Oswald had noticed a queer look about Albert’s uncle from almost the beginning of Alice’s recital; and he now had the sensation of something being up, which has on other occasions frozen his noble blood. The silence of Albert’s uncle now froze it yet more Arcticly.

‘Haven’t we?’ repeated Alice, unconscious of what her sensitive brother’s delicate feelings had already got hold of. ‘We have done it this time, haven’t we?’

‘Since you ask me thus pointedly,’ answered Albert’s uncle at last, ‘I cannot but confess that I think you have indeed done it. Those pots on the top of the library cupboard
are
Roman pottery. The amphorae which you hid in the mound are probably—I can’t say for certain, mind—priceless. They are the property of the owner of this house. You have taken them out and buried them. The President of the Maidstone Antiquarian Society has taken them away in his bag. Now what are you going to do?’

Alice and I did not know what to say, or where to look. The others added to our pained position by some ungenerous murmurs about our not being so jolly clever as we thought ourselves.

There was a very far from pleasing silence. Then Oswald got up. He said—

‘Alice, come here a sec; I want to speak to you.’

As Albert’s uncle had offered no advice, Oswald disdained to ask him for any.

Alice got up too, and she and Oswald went into the garden, and sat down on the bench under the quince tree, and wished they had never tried to have a private lark of their very own with the Antiquities—‘A Private Sale,’ Albert’s uncle called it afterwards. But regrets, as nearly always happens, were vain. Something had to be done.

But what?

Oswald and Alice sat in silent desperateness, and the voices of the gay and careless others came to them from the lawn, where, heartless in their youngness, they were playing tag. I don’t know how they could. Oswald would not like to play tag when his brother and sister were in a hole, but Oswald is an exception to some boys.

But Dicky told me afterwards he thought it was only a joke of Albert’s uncle’s.

The dusk grew dusker, till you could hardly tell the quinces from the leaves, and Alice and Oswald still sat exhausted with hard thinking, but they could not think of anything. And it grew so dark that the moonlight began to show.

Then Alice jumped up—just as Oswald was opening his mouth to say the same thing—and said, ‘Of course—how silly! I know. Come on in, Oswald.’ And they went on in.

Oswald was still far too proud to consult anyone else. But he just asked carelessly if Alice and he might go into Maidstone the next day to buy some wire-netting for a rabbit-hutch, and to see after one or two things.

Albert’s uncle said certainly. And they went by train with the bailiff from the farm, who was going in about some sheep-dip and to buy pigs. At any other time Oswald would not have been able to bear to leave the bailiff without seeing the pigs bought. But now it was different. For he and Alice had the weight on their bosoms of being thieves without having meant it—and nothing, not even pigs, had power to charm the young but honourable Oswald till that stain had been wiped away.

So he took Alice to the Secretary of the Maidstone Antiquities’ house, and Mr Turnbull was out, but the maid-servant kindly told us where the President lived, and ere long the trembling feet of the unfortunate brother and sister vibrated on the spotless gravel of Camperdown Villa.

When they asked, they were told that Mr Longchamps was at home. Then they waited, paralysed with undescribed emotions, in a large room with books and swords and glass bookcases with rotten-looking odds and ends in them. Mr Longchamps was a collector. That means he stuck to anything, no matter how ugly and silly, if only it was old.

He came in rubbing his hands, and very kind. He remembered us very well, he said, and asked what he could do for us.

Oswald for once was dumb. He could not find words in which to own himself the ass he had been. But Alice was less delicately moulded. She said—

‘Oh, if you please, we are most awfully sorry, and we hope you’ll forgive us, but we thought it would be such a pity for you and all the other poor dear Antiquities to come all that way and then find nothing Roman—so we put some pots and things in the barrow for you to find.’

‘So I perceived,’ said the President, stroking his white beard and smiling most agreeably at us; ‘a harmless joke, my dear! Youth’s the season for jesting. There’s no harm done—pray think no more about it. It’s very honourable of you to come and apologize, I’m sure.’

His brow began to wear the furrowed, anxious look of one who would fain be rid of his guests and get back to what he was doing before they interrupted him.

Alice said, ‘We didn’t come for that. It’s
much
worse. Those were two
real
true Roman jugs you took away; we put them there; they aren’t ours. We didn’t know they were real Roman. We wanted to sell the Antiquities—I mean Antiquaries—and we were sold ourselves.’

‘This is serious,’ said the gentleman. ‘I suppose you’d know the—the “jugs” if you saw them again?’

‘Anywhere,’ said Oswald, with the confidential rashness of one who does not know what he is talking about.

Mr Longchamps opened the door of a little room leading out of the one we were in, and beckoned us to follow. We found ourselves amid shelves and shelves of pottery of all sorts; and two whole shelves—small ones—were filled with the sort of jug we wanted.

‘Well,’ said the President, with a veiled menacing sort of smile, like a wicked cardinal, ‘which is it?’

Oswald said, ‘I don’t know.’

Alice said, ‘I should know if I had it in my hand.’

The President patiently took the jugs down one after another, and Alice tried to look inside them. And one after another she shook her head and gave them back. At last she said, ‘You didn’t
wash
them?’

Mr Longchamps shuddered and said ‘No.’

‘Then,’ said Alice, ‘there is something written with lead-pencil inside both the jugs. I wish I hadn’t. I would rather you didn’t read it. I didn’t know it would be a nice old gentleman like you would find it. I thought it would be the younger gentleman with the thin legs and the narrow smile.’

‘Mr Turnbull.’ The President seemed to recognize the description unerringly. ‘Well, well—boys will be boys—girls, I mean. I won’t be angry. Look at all the “jugs” and see if you can find yours.’

Alice did—and the next one she looked at she said, ‘This is one’—and two jugs further on she said, ‘This is the other.’

‘Well,’ the President said, ‘these are certainly the specimens which I obtained yesterday. If your uncle will call on me I will return them to him. But it’s a disappointment. Yes, I think you must let me look inside.’

He did. And at the first one he said nothing. At the second he laughed.

‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘we can’t expect old heads on young shoulders. You’re not the first who went forth to shear and returned shorn. Nor, it appears, am I. Next time you have a Sale of Antiquities, take care that you yourself are not “sold.” Good-day to you, my dear. Don’t let the incident prey on your mind,’ he said to Alice. ‘Bless your heart, I was a boy once myself, unlikely as you may think it. Good-bye.’

We were in time to see the pigs bought after all.

I asked Alice what on earth it was she’d scribbled inside the beastly jugs, and she owned that just to make the lark complete she had written ‘Sucks’ in one of the jugs, and ‘Sold again, silly,’ in the other.

But we know well enough who it was that was sold. And if ever we have any Antiquities to tea again, they shan’t find so much as a Greek waistcoat button if we can help it.

Unless it’s the President, for he did not behave at all badly. For a man of his age I think he behaved exceedingly well. Oswald can picture a very different scene having been enacted over those rotten pots if the President had been an otherwise sort of man.

But that picture is not pleasing, so Oswald will not distress you by drawing it for you. You can most likely do it easily for yourself.

CHAPTER 11

THE BENEVOLENT BAR

Th
e tramp was very dusty about the feet and legs, and his clothes were very ragged and dirty, but he had cheerful twinkly grey eyes, and he touched his cap to the girls when he spoke to us, though a little as though he would rather not.

We were on the top of the big wall of the Roman ruin in the Three Tree pasture. We had just concluded a severe siege with bows and arrows—the ones that were given us to make up for the pistol that was confiscated after the sad but not sinful occasion when it shot a fox.

To avoid accidents that you would be sorry for afterwards, Oswald, in his thoughtfulness, had decreed that everyone was to wear wire masks.

Luckily there were plenty of these, because a man who lived in the Moat House once went to Rome, where they throw hundreds and thousands at each other in play, and call it a Comfit Battle or Battaglia di Confetti (that’s real Italian). And he wanted to get up that sort of thing among the village people—but they were too beastly slack, so he chucked it.

And in the attic were the wire masks he brought home with him from Rome, which people wear to prevent the nasty comfits getting in their mouths and eyes.

So we were all armed to the teeth with masks and arrows, but in attacking or defending a fort your real strength is not in your equipment, but in your power of Shove. Oswald, Alice, Noël and Denny defended the fort. We were much the strongest side, but that was how Dicky and Oswald picked up.