The adventure which I am about to relate was a very long time ago, and
it was nobody's fault. The part of it that was most like a real crime
was caused by H. O. not being at that date old enough to know
better--and this was nobody's fault--though we took care that but a
brief half-hour elapsed between the discovery of his acts and his
_being_ old enough to know better, and knowing it, too (better, I mean),
quite thoroughly. We were residing at the residence of an old nurse of
father's while Dora was engaged in the unagreeable pastime of having
something catching at home. If she had been with us most likely none of
this would have happened. For she has an almost unerring nose for right
and wrong. Or perhaps what the author means is that she never does the
kind of thing that grown-ups don't like your doing. Father's old nurse
was very jolly to us, and did not bother too much, except about wet
feet and being late for meals, and not airing your shirt before you put
it on. But it is part of the nature of the nicest grown-ups to bother
about these little things, and we must not be hard on them for it, for
no one can help their natures.
The part where old nurse's house was was where London begins to leave
off being London, but before it can make up its mind not to be it. There
are fields and bits of lanes and hedges, but the rows of ugly little
houses go creeping along like yellow caterpillars, eating up the green
fields. There are brickfields here and there, and cabbage fields, and
places where rhubarb is grown. And it is much more interesting than real
town, because there is more room to do things in, and not so many people
to say 'Don't!' when you do.
Nurse's house was the kind that is always a house, no matter how much
you pretend it is a baron's castle or an enchanted palace. And to play
at its being a robber's cave or any part of a pirate ship is simply
silly, and no satisfaction to anyone. There were no books except sermons
and the Wesleyan Magazine. And there was a green cut-paper fuzziness on
the frame of the looking-glass in the parlour. There was a garden--at
least, there was enough ground for one, but nothing grew there except
nettles and brick-bats and one elder-tree, and a poor old oak-tree that
had seen better days. There was a hole in the fence, very convenient for
going through in a hurry.
One morning there had been what old nurse called a 'set out' because
Noel was writing some of his world-without-end poetry, and he had got as
far as
'How beautiful the sun and moon
And all the stars appear!
They really are a long way off,
Although they look very near.'
'I do not think that they are worlds,
But apples on a tree;
The angels pick them whenever they like,
But it is not so with me.
I wish I was a little angel-child
To gather stars for my tea,'
before Dicky found out that he was writing it on the blank leaf at the
end of the Latin prize Dicky got at the Preparatory School.
Noel--for mysterious reasons unknown to Fame--is Alice's favourite
brother, and of course she stood up for him, and said he didn't mean it.
And things were said on both sides, and the rest of us agreed with Dicky
that Noel was old enough to know better. It ended in Alice and Noel
going out for a walk by themselves as soon as Noel had had the crying
washed off his hands and face.
The rest of us spent the shining hours in getting a board and nailing it
up in the oak-tree for a look-out station, in case of Saracens arriving
with an army to attack London. The oak is always hard to climb, and this
was a peculiarly hard day, because the next-door people had tied a
clothes-line to the oak, and hung their wet washing out on the line.
The sun was setting (in the west as usual) before Alice and Noel
returned. They came across the wide fields from the direction of a
pinewood that we had never explored yet, though always meaning to.
'There!' said Dicky, 'they've been and gone to the pinewood all by
themselves.'
But the hatchet Dicky was still cherishing in his breast was buried at
once under the first words spoken by the returning party of explorers.
'Oh, Oswald,' said Alice, 'oh, Dicky, we've found a treasure!'
Dicky hammered the last nail into the Saracen watch-tower.
'Not a real money one?' he said, dropping the hammer--which was a
careless thing to do, and the author told him so at the time.
'No, not a money one, but it's real all the same. Let's have a council,
and I'll tell you.'
It was then that Dicky showed that if he dropped hammers it was not
because he could not bury hatchets. He said, 'Righto! There's room for
us all up here. Catch hold, Noel. Oswald, give him a shove up. Alice and
he can sit in the Saracens' watch-tower, and I'll keep hold of H. O. if
you'll hand him up.'
Alice was full of the politest compliments about the architecture of the
Saracens' watch-tower, and Noel said:
'I say, Dicky, I'm awfully sorry about your prize.'
'It's all right,' said Dicky; 'I rubbed it out with bread.'
Noel opened his mouth. He looks like a very young bird when he does
this.
'Then my beautiful poem's turned into dirty bread-crumbs,' he said
slowly.
'Never mind,' said Alice; 'I remember nearly every word of it: we'll
write it out again after tea.'
'I thought you'd be so pleased,' Noel went on, 'because it makes a book
more valuable to have an author's writing in it. Albert's uncle told me
so.'
'But it has to be the same author that wrote the book,' Alice explained,
'and it was Caesar wrote that book. And you aren't Caesar _yet_, you
know.'
'Nor don't want to be,' said Noel.
Oswald now thought that politeness was satisfied on both sides, so he
said:
'What price treasures?'
And then Alice told. But it had to be in whispers, because the next-door
people, who always did things at times when not convenient to us, were
now taking in their washing off the line. I heard them remark that it
was a 'good drying day.'
'Well,' Alice mysteriously observed, 'it was like this. (Do you think
the Saracens' watch-tower is really safe for two? It seems to go down
awfully much in the middle.)'
'Sit nearer the ends, then,' said Oswald. 'Well?'
'We thought we would go to the pinewoods because of reading in Bret
Harte that the resinous balsam of the pine is healing to the wounded
spirit.'
'I should have thought if anybody's spirit was wounded...' said Dicky in
tones of heatening indignantness.
'Yes, I know. But you'd got the oak, and I expect oaks are just as good,
if not better, especially for English people, because of Oakapple
Day--and----Where was I?'
We told her.
'So we went, and it is a very nice wood--quite tulgy, you know. We
expected to see a Bandersnatch every minute, didn't we, Noel? It's not
very big, though, and on the other side there's an enchanted
desert--rather bare, with patches of grass and brambles. And in the very
middle of it we found the treasure.'
'Let's have a squint at the treasure,' said Dicky. 'Did you fetch it
along?'
Noel and Alice sniggered.
'Not exactly,' said Alice; 'the treasure is a _house_.'
'It's an enchanted house,' said Noel, 'and it's a deserted house, and
the garden is like in "The Sensitive Plant" after the lady has given up
attending.'
'Did you go in?' we asked.
'No,' said Alice; 'we came back for you. And we asked an old man, and
he _did_ say it was in Chancery, so no one can live in it.'
H. O. asked what was enchancery.
'I'm certain the old man meant enchanted,' said Noel, 'only I expect
that's the old-fashioned word for it. Enchanceried is a very nice word.
And it means it's an enchanted house, just like I said.'
Nurse now came out to remark, 'Tea, my dears,' so we left the Saracens'
tower and went in to that meal.
Noel began to make a poem called 'The Enchanceried House,' but we got
him to stop till there was more for him to write about. There soon was
more, and more than enough, as it turned out.
The setting sun had set, but it had left a redness in the sky (like one
of those distant fires that you go after, and they are always miles from
where you are) which shone through the pinetrees. The house looked
black and mysterious against the strawberry-ice-coloured horizon.
It was a good-sized house. The bottom-floor windows were boarded up. It
had a Sensitive-Plantish garden and a paved yard and outhouses. The
garden had a high wall with glass on top, but Oswald and Dicky got into
the yard. Green grass was growing between the paving-stones. The corners
of the stable and coach-house doors were rough, as if from the attacks
of rats, but we never saw any of these stealthy rodents. The back-door
was locked, but we climbed up on the water-butt and looked through a
little window, and saw a plate-rack, and a sink with taps, and a copper,
and a broken coal-scuttle. It was very exciting.
The day after we went again, and this time we borrowed the next-door
people's clothes-line, and by tying it in loops made a sort of
rope-ladder, and then all of us got over. We had a glorious game
besieging the pigsty, and all the military orders had to be given in
whispers for fear of us being turned out if anyone passed and heard us.
We found the pinewood, and the field, and the house had all got boards
to say what would be done to trespassers with the utmost rigour of the
law. It was such a swat untying the knots in the next-door people's
clothes-line, that we only undid one; and then we bought them a new line
with our own pocket-money, and kept the rope-ladder in a hidden bed of
nettles, always on the spot and ready for us.
We found a way of going round, and getting to the house through a hole
in a hedge and across a lane, so as not to go across the big fields
where every human eye could mark our proceedings, and come after us and
tell us not to.
We went there every day. It would have been a terrible thing if an army
of bloodthirsty Saracens had chosen that way to march on London, for
there was hardly ever a look-out in the tower now.
It was a jolly place to play in, and Oswald had found out what 'in
Chancery' really means, so he had no fear of being turned into a
pig-headed lady, or marble from the waist down.
And after a bit we began to want to get into the house, and we wanted it
so much that our hearts got quite cold about the chicken-house and the
pigsty, which at first had been a fairy dream of delight.
But the doors were all locked. We got all the old keys we could, but
they were all the keys of desks and workboxes and tea-caddies, and not
the right size or shape for doors.
Then one day Oswald, with his justly celebrated observingness, noticed
that one of the bars was loose in the brickwork of a sort of
half-underground window. To pull it out was to the lion-hearted youth
but the work of a moment. He got down through the gap thus obtained, and
found himself in a place like a very small area, only with no steps, and
with bars above him, broken glass and matted rags and straw beneath his
enterprising boots, and on one side a small cobwebby window. He got out
again and told the others, who were trying to get up the cobblestones
by the stable so as to make an underground passage into the stable at
the ratty corner of its door.
They came at once, and, after a brief discussion, it was decided to
break the window a little more than it was already, and to try to get in
a hand that could unlatch the window. Of course, as Oswald had
found the bar, it was to be his hand.
The dauntless Oswald took off his jacket, and, wrapping it round his
fist, shoved at the pane nearest the window fastening. The glass fell
inwards with the noise you would expect. In newspapers I suppose they
would call it a sickening thud. Really it was a sort of hollow tinkling
sound. It made even Oswald jump, and H. O. said:
'Suppose the window opens straight into a bottomless well!'
We did not think this likely, but you cannot be too careful when you are
exploring.
Oswald got in his hand and undid the window fastening, which was very
rusty. The window opened out like a door. There was only just room in
the area under the bars for Oswald and the opening of the window. He
leaned forward and looked in. He was not surprised to find that it was
not a well, after all, but a cellar.
'Come on,' he said; 'it's all right.'
Dicky came on so rapidly that his boots grazed the shoulder of the
advancing Oswald. Alice was coming next, but Noel begged her to wait.
'I don't think H. O. ought to go in till we're sure it's safe,' he said;
and Oswald hopes it was not because Noel was in a funk himself, though
with a poet you never know.
The cellar into which Oswald now plunged had a damp and mouldering
smell, like of mouse-traps, and straw, and beer-barrels. Another cellar
opened out of it, and in this there was traces of coal having existed in
other ages.
Passing the coal-cellar, we went out to a cellar with shelves on the
wall like berths in a ship, or the catacombs where early Christians
used to be bricked up. Of course, we knew it was only a wine-cellar,
because we have one at home. Matches had to be used here. Then we found
a flight of stone steps and went up. And Oswald is not ashamed to own
that, the staircase being of a twisty nature, he did think what it would
be like if he and Dicky were to meet Something at one of the corners;
but all was peace and solitude. Yet it was with joy, and like meeting an
old friend, that we got out of the cellars, stairs, and through a door
to the back-kitchen, where the sink was, and the copper and the
plate-rack. Oswald felt like a brother to the broken coal-scuttle. Our
first instant thought was the back door.
It was bolted top and bottom, and the bolts were sort of cemented into
their places with rust. But they were unable to resist our patient and
determined onslaught. Only when we had undone them the door kept shut,
and by stooping down and looking we saw that this was because it was
locked.