The E. Nesbit Megapack: 26 Classic Novels and Stories (77 page)

The burglar scratched his head in deep doubt.

“It’s ’ard to get a ’onest living anywheres nowadays,” he said, and his voice was sad.

“Yes, isn’t it?” said Jane, sympathetically; “but how about a sunny southern shore, where there’s nothing to do at all unless you want to.”

“That’s my billet, miss,” replied the burglar. “I never did care about work—not like some people, always fussing about.”

“Did you never like any sort of work?” asked Anthea, severely.

“Lor’, lumme, yes,” he answered, “gardening was my ’obby, so it was. But father died afore ’e could bind me to a nurseryman, an’—”

“We’ll take you to the sunny southern shore,” said Jane; “you’ve no idea what the flowers are like.”

“Our old cook’s there,” said Anthea. “She’s queen—”

“Oh, chuck it,” the burglar whispered, clutching at his head with both hands. “I knowed the first minute I see them cats and that cow as it was a judgement on me. I don’t know now whether I’m a-standing on my hat or my boots, so help me I don’t. If you
can
get me out, get me, and if you can’t, get along with you for goodness’ sake, and give me a chanst to think about what’ll be most likely to go down with the Beak in the morning.”

“Come on to the carpet, then,” said Anthea, gently shoving. The others quietly pulled, and the moment the feet of the burglar were planted on the carpet Anthea wished:

“I wish we were all on the sunny southern shore where cook is.”

And instantly they were. There were the rainbow sands, the tropic glories of leaf and flower, and there, of course, was the cook, crowned with white flowers, and with all the wrinkles of crossness and tiredness and hard work wiped out of her face.

“Why, cook, you’re quite pretty!” Anthea said, as soon as she had got her breath after the tumble-rush-whirl of the carpet. The burglar stood rubbing his eyes in the brilliant tropic sunlight, and gazing wildly round him on the vivid hues of the tropic land.

“Penny plain and tuppence coloured!” he exclaimed pensively, “and well worth any tuppence, however hard-earned.”

The cook was seated on a grassy mound with her court of copper-coloured savages around her. The burglar pointed a grimy finger at these.

“Are they tame?” he asked anxiously. “Do they bite or scratch, or do anything to yer with poisoned arrows or oyster shells or that?”

“Don’t you be so timid,” said the cook. “Look’e ’ere, this ’ere’s only a dream what you’ve come into, an’ as it’s only a dream there’s no nonsense about what a young lady like me ought to say or not, so I’ll say you’re the best-looking fellow I’ve seen this many a day. And the dream goes on and on, seemingly, as long as you behaves. The things what you has to eat and drink tastes just as good as real ones, and—”

“Look ’ere,” said the burglar, “I’ve come ’ere straight outer the pleece station. These ’ere kids’ll tell you it ain’t no blame er mine.”

“Well, you
were
a burglar, you know,” said the truthful Anthea gently.

“Only because I was druv to it by dishonest blokes, as well you knows, miss,” rejoined the criminal. “Blowed if this ain’t the ’ottest January as I’ve known for years.”

“Wouldn’t you like a bath?” asked the queen, “and some white clothes like me?”

“I should only look a juggins in ’em, miss, thanking you all the same,” was the reply; “but a bath I wouldn’t resist, and my shirt was only clean on week before last.”

Cyril and Robert led him to a rocky pool, where he bathed luxuriously. Then, in shirt and trousers he sat on the sand and spoke.

“That cook, or queen, or whatever you call her—her with the white bokay on her ’ed—she’s my sort. Wonder if she’d keep company!”

“I should ask her.”

“I was always a quick hitter,” the man went on; “it’s a word and a blow with me. I will.”

In shirt and trousers, and crowned with a scented flowery wreath which Cyril hastily wove as they returned to the court of the queen, the burglar stood before the cook and spoke.

“Look ’ere, miss,” he said. “You an’ me being’ all forlorn-like, both on us, in this ’ere dream, or whatever you calls it, I’d like to tell you straight as I likes yer looks.”

The cook smiled and looked down bashfully.

“I’m a single man—what you might call a batcheldore. I’m mild in my ’abits, which these kids’ll tell you the same, and I’d like to ’ave the pleasure of walkin’ out with you next Sunday.”

“Lor!” said the queen cook, “’ow sudden you are, mister.”

“Walking out means you’re going to be married,” said Anthea. “Why not get married and have done with it?
I
would.”

“I don’t mind if I do,” said the burglar. But the cook said—

“No, miss. Not me, not even in a dream. I don’t say anythink ag’in the young chap’s looks, but I always swore I’d be married in church, if at all—and, anyway, I don’t believe these here savages would know how to keep a registering office, even if I was to show them. No, mister, thanking you kindly, if you can’t bring a clergyman into the dream I’ll live and die like what I am.”

“Will you marry her if we get a clergyman?” asked the match-making Anthea.

“I’m agreeable, miss, I’m sure,” said he, pulling his wreath straight. “’Ow this ’ere bokay do tiddle a chap’s ears to be sure!”

So, very hurriedly, the carpet was spread out, and instructed to fetch a clergyman. The instructions were written on the inside of Cyril’s cap with a piece of billiard chalk Robert had got from the marker at the hotel at Lyndhurst. The carpet disappeared, and more quickly than you would have thought possible it came back, bearing on its bosom the Reverend Septimus Blenkinsop.

The Reverend Septimus was rather a nice young man, but very much mazed and muddled, because when he saw a strange carpet laid out at his feet, in his own study, he naturally walked on it to examine it more closely. And he happened to stand on one of the thin places that Jane and Anthea had darned, so that he was half on wishing carpet and half on plain Scotch heather-mixture fingering, which has no magic properties at all.

The effect of this was that he was only half there—so that the children could just see through him, as though he had been a ghost. And as for him, he saw the sunny southern shore, the cook and the burglar and the children quite plainly; but through them all he saw, quite plainly also, his study at home, with the books and the pictures and the marble clock that had been presented to him when he left his last situation.

He seemed to himself to be in a sort of insane fit, so that it did not matter what he did—and he married the burglar to the cook. The cook said that she would rather have had a solider kind of a clergyman, one that you couldn’t see through so plain, but perhaps this was real enough for a dream.

And of course the clergyman, though misty, was really real, and able to marry people, and he did. When the ceremony was over the clergyman wandered about the island collecting botanical specimens, for he was a great botanist, and the ruling passion was strong even in an insane fit.

There was a splendid wedding feast. Can you fancy Jane and Anthea, and Robert and Cyril, dancing merrily in a ring, hand-in-hand with copper-coloured savages, round the happy couple, the queen cook and the burglar consort? There were more flowers gathered and thrown than you have ever even dreamed of, and before the children took carpet for home the now married-and-settled burglar made a speech.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “and savages of both kinds, only I know you can’t understand what I’m a saying of, but we’ll let that pass. If this is a dream, I’m on. If it ain’t, I’m onner than ever. If it’s betwixt and between—well, I’m honest, and I can’t say more. I don’t want no more ’igh London society—I’ve got some one to put my arm around of; and I’ve got the whole lot of this ’ere island for my allotment, and if I don’t grow some broccoli as’ll open the judge’s eye at the cottage flower shows, well, strike me pink! All I ask is, as these young gents and ladies’ll bring some parsley seed into the dream, and a penn’orth of radish seed, and threepenn’orth of onion, and I wouldn’t mind goin’ to fourpence or fippence for mixed kale, only I ain’t got a brown, so I don’t deceive you. And there’s one thing more, you might take away the parson. I don’t like things what I can see ’alf through, so here’s how!” He drained a coconut-shell of palm wine.

It was now past midnight—though it was tea-time on the island.

With all good wishes the children took their leave. They also collected the clergyman and took him back to his study and his presentation clock.

The Phoenix kindly carried the seeds next day to the burglar and his bride, and returned with the most satisfactory news of the happy pair.

“He’s made a wooden spade and started on his allotment,” it said, “and she is weaving him a shirt and trousers of the most radiant whiteness.”

The police never knew how the burglar got away. In Kentish Town Police Station his escape is still spoken of with bated breath as the Persian mystery.

As for the Reverend Septimus Blenkinsop, he felt that he had had a very insane fit indeed, and he was sure it was due to over-study. So he planned a little dissipation, and took his two maiden aunts to Paris, where they enjoyed a dazzling round of museums and picture galleries, and came back feeling that they had indeed seen life. He never told his aunts or any one else about the marriage on the island—because no one likes it to be generally known if he has had insane fits, however interesting and unusual.

CHAPTER 10

THE HOLE IN THE CARPET

Hooray! hooray! hooray!

Mother comes home today;

Mother comes home today,

Hooray! hooray! hooray!”

Jane sang this simple song directly after breakfast, and the Phoenix shed crystal tears of affectionate sympathy.

“How beautiful,” it said, “is filial devotion!”

“She won’t be home till past bedtime, though,” said Robert. “We might have one more carpet-day.”

He was glad that mother was coming home—quite glad, very glad; but at the same time that gladness was rudely contradicted by a quite strong feeling of sorrow, because now they could not go out all day on the carpet.

“I do wish we could go and get something nice for mother, only she’d want to know where we got it,” said Anthea. “And she’d never, never believe it, the truth. People never do, somehow, if it’s at all interesting.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Robert. “Suppose we wished the carpet to take us somewhere where we could find a purse with money in it—then we could buy her something.”

“Suppose it took us somewhere foreign, and the purse was covered with strange Eastern devices, embroidered in rich silks, and full of money that wasn’t money at all here, only foreign curiosities, then we couldn’t spend it, and people would bother about where we got it, and we shouldn’t know how on earth to get out of it at all.”

Cyril moved the table off the carpet as he spoke, and its leg caught in one of Anthea’s darns and ripped away most of it, as well as a large slit in the carpet.

“Well, now you
have
done it,” said Robert.

But Anthea was a really first-class sister. She did not say a word till she had got out the Scotch heather-mixture fingering wool and the darning-needle and the thimble and the scissors, and by that time she had been able to get the better of her natural wish to be thoroughly disagreeable, and was able to say quite kindly—

“Never mind, Squirrel, I’ll soon mend it.”

Cyril thumped her on the back. He understood exactly how she had felt, and he was not an ungrateful brother.

“Respecting the purse containing coins,” the Phoenix said, scratching its invisible ear thoughtfully with its shining claw, “it might be as well, perhaps, to state clearly the amount which you wish to find, as well as the country where you wish to find it, and the nature of the coins which you prefer. It would be indeed a cold moment when you should find a purse containing but three oboloi.”

“How much is an oboloi?”

“An obol is about twopence halfpenny,” the Phoenix replied.

“Yes,” said Jane, “and if you find a purse I suppose it is only because some one has lost it, and you ought to take it to the policeman.”

“The situation,” remarked the Phoenix, “does indeed bristle with difficulties.”

“What about a buried treasure,” said Cyril, “and every one was dead that it belonged to?”

“Mother wouldn’t believe
that
,” said more than one voice.

“Suppose,” said Robert—“suppose we asked to be taken where we could find a purse and give it back to the person it belonged to, and they would give us something for finding it?”

“We aren’t allowed to take money from strangers. You know we aren’t, Bobs,” said Anthea, making a knot at the end of a needleful of Scotch heather-mixture fingering wool (which is very wrong, and you must never do it when you are darning).

“No,
that
wouldn’t do,” said Cyril. “Let’s chuck it and go to the North Pole, or somewhere really interesting.”

“No,” said the girls together, “there must be
some
way.”

“Wait a sec,” Anthea added. “I’ve got an idea coming. Don’t speak.”

There was a silence as she paused with the darning-needle in the air! Suddenly she spoke:

“I see. Let’s tell the carpet to take us somewhere where we can get the money for mother’s present, and—and—and get it some way that she’ll believe in and not think wrong.”

“Well, I must say you are learning the way to get the most out of the carpet,” said Cyril. He spoke more heartily and kindly than usual, because he remembered how Anthea had refrained from snarking him about tearing the carpet.

“Yes,” said the Phoenix, “you certainly are. And you have to remember that if you take a thing out it doesn’t stay in.”

No one paid any attention to this remark at the time, but afterwards every one thought of it.

“Do hurry up, Panther,” said Robert; and that was why Anthea did hurry up, and why the big darn in the middle of the carpet was all open and webby like a fishing net, not tight and close like woven cloth, which is what a good, well-behaved darn should be.

Then every one put on its outdoor things, the Phoenix fluttered on to the mantelpiece and arranged its golden feathers in the glass, and all was ready. Every one got on to the carpet.

“Please go slowly, dear carpet,” Anthea began; we like to see where we’re going.” And then she added the difficult wish that had been decided on.

Next moment the carpet, stiff and raftlike, was sailing over the roofs of Kentish Town.

“I wish—No, I don’t mean that. I mean it’s a
pity
we aren’t higher up,” said Anthea, as the edge of the carpet grazed a chimney-pot.

“That’s right. Be careful,” said the Phoenix, in warning tones. “If you wish when you’re on a wishing carpet, you
do
wish, and there’s an end of it.”

So for a short time no one spoke, and the carpet sailed on in calm magnificence over St Pancras and King’s Cross stations and over the crowded streets of Clerkenwell.

“We’re going out Greenwich way,” said Cyril, as they crossed the streak of rough, tumbled water that was the Thames. “We might go and have a look at the Palace.”

On and on the carpet swept, still keeping much nearer to the chimney-pots than the children found at all comfortable. And then, just over New Cross, a terrible thing happened.

Jane and Robert were in the middle of the carpet. Part of them was on the carpet, and part of them—the heaviest part—was on the great central darn.