But the researchful Oswald looked round, and there was a key on a nail,
which shows how wrong it is to despair.
It was not the right key, proving later to be the key of the
chicken-house. So we went into the hall. There was a bunch of keys on a
nail on the back of the front-door.
'There now, you see I was right,' remarked Oswald. And he was, as is so
often the case. All the keys had labels, and one of these said
'Back-kitchen,' so we applied it at once, and the locked door yielded to
it.
'You can bring H. O. in quite safely,' Oswald said when the door had
creakingly consented to open itself, and to disclose the sunshine, and
the paved yard with the paving stones marked out with green grass, and
the interested expressions on the faces of Alice and the others. 'It's
quite safe. It's just a house like anyone else's, only it hasn't got any
furniture in it.'
We went all over the house. There were fourteen rooms altogether,
fifteen if you counted the back-kitchen where the plate-warmer was, and
the copper, and the sink with the taps, and the brotherly coal-scuttle.
The rooms were quite different from the ones in old nurse's house. Noel
said he thought all the rooms in this house had been the scene of duels
or elopements, or concealing rightful heirs. The present author doesn't
know about that, but there was a splendid cupboardiness about the place
that spoke volumes to a discerning eye. Even the window seats, of which
there were six, lifted up like the lids of boxes, and you could have
hidden a flying Cavalier in any of them, if he had been of only medium
height and slender build, like heroes with swords so often are.
Then there were three staircases, and these must have been darkly
convenient for getting conspirators away when the King's officers were
at the door, as so constantly happened in romantic times.
The whole house was full of ideas for ripping games, and when we came
away Alice said:
'We must be really better than we know. We must have done _something_ to
deserve a find like this.'
'Don't worry,' said Oswald. 'Albert's uncle says you always have to pay
for everything. We haven't paid for this yet.'
This reflection, like so many of our young hero's, was correct.
I have not yet told you about the finest find of all the fine finds we
found finally (that looks very odd, and I am not sure if it is
allity-what's-its-name, or only carelessness. I wonder whether other
authors are ever a prey to these devastating doubts?) This find was on
the top floor. It was a room with bars to the windows, and it was a very
odd shape. You went along a passage to the door, and then there was the
room; but the room went back along the same way as the passage had come,
so that when you went round there no one could see you from the door.
The door was sort of in the middle of the room; but I see I must draw it
for you, or you will never understand.
[Illustration]
The door that is marked 'Another Door' was full of agitated excitement
for us, because it wasn't a door at all--at least, not the kind that you
are used to. It was a gate, like you have at the top of nursery stairs
in the mansions of the rich and affluent; but instead of being halfway
up, it went all the way up, so that you could see into the room through
the bars.
'Somebody must have kept tame lunatics here,' said Dicky.
'Or bears,' said H. O.
'Or enchanceried Princes,' said Noel.
'It seems silly, though,' said Alice, 'because the lunatic or the bear
or the enchanted Prince could always hide round the corner when he heard
the keepers coming, if he didn't happen to want to show off just then.'
This was so, and the deep mystery of the way this room was built was
never untwisted.
'Perhaps a Russian prisoner was kept there,' said Alice, 'and they did
not want to look too close for fear he would shoot them with his
bomb-gun. Poor man! perhaps he caught vodka, or some other of those
awful foreign diseases, and died in his hidden confinement.'
It was a most ripping room for games. The key of it was on the bunch
labelled 'Mrs. S.'s room.' We often wondered who Mrs. S. was.
'Let's have a regular round of gaieties,' said Oswald. 'Each of us to
take it in turns to have the room, and act what they like, and the
others look through the bars.'
So next day we did this.
Oswald, of course, dressed up in bath-towels and a sheet as the ghost of
Mrs. S., but Noel and H. O. screamed, and would not be calm till he tore
off the sheet and showed his knickerbockers and braces as a guarantee of
good faith. Alice put her hair up, and got a skirt, and a large
handkerchief to cry in, and was a hapless maiden imprisoned in a tower
because she would not marry the wicked Baron. Oswald instantly took the
part of the wicked Baron, and Dicky was the virtuous lover of low
degree, and they had a splendid combat, and Dicky carried off the lady.
Of course, that was the proper end to the story, and Oswald had to
pretend to be beaten, which was not the case.
Dicky was Louis XVI. watch-making while waiting for the guillotine to
happen. So we were the guillotine, and he was executed in the paved
yard.
Noel was an imprisoned troubadour dressed in bright antimacassars, and
he fired off quite a lot of poetry at us before we could get the door
open, which was most unfair.
H. O. was a clown. He had no fancy dress except flour and two Turkish
towels pinned on to look like trousers, but he put the flour all over
himself, and it took the rest of the day to clean him.
It was when Alice was drying the hair-brushes that she had washed after
brushing the flour out of Noel's hair in the back-garden that Oswald
said:
'_I_ know what that room was made for.'
And everyone said, 'What?' which is not manners, but your brothers and
sisters do not mind because it saves time.
'Why, _coiners_,' said Oswald. 'Don't you see? They kept a sentinel at
the door, that _is_ a door, and if anyone approached he whispered
"_Cave_."'
'But why have iron bars?'
'In extra safety,' said Oswald; 'and if their nefarious fires were not
burning he need not say "_Cave_" at all. It's no use saying anything for
nothing.'
It is curious, but the others did not seem to see this clear
distinguishedness. All people have not the same fine brains.
But all the same the idea rankled in their hearts, and one day father
came and took Dicky up to London about that tooth of his, and when
Dicky came back he said:
'Look here, talking of coiners, there was a man in St. Swithin's Lane
to-day selling little bottles of yellow stuff, and he rubbed some of it
on a penny, and it turned the penny into a half-crown before your
eyes--a new half-crown! It was a penny a bottle, so I bought three
bottles.'
'I always thought the plant for coining was very expensive,' said Alice.
'Ah! they tell you that to keep you from doing it, because of its being
a crime,' said Dicky. 'But now I've got this stuff we can begin to be
coiners right away. I believe it isn't really a crime unless you try to
buy things with the base coin.'
So that very afternoon, directly after dinner, which had a suet pudding
in it that might have weighed down the enterprising spirit of anyone but
us, we went over to the Enchanceried House.
We found our good rope ladder among its congealing bed of trusty
nettles, and got over into the paved yard, and through the kitchen-door.
Oswald always carried the key of this hung round his neck by a bootlace,
as if it was a talisman, or the hair of his lost love. Of course, Oswald
never had a lost love. He would scorn the action. But some heroes do
have. _De gustibus_ something or other, which means, one man's meat is
another man's poison.
When we got up into the room with the iron-grated door, it all seemed
very bare. Three bottles of yellow stuff and tenpence halfpenny in
coppers is not much to start a coining enterprise with.
'We ought to make it _look_ like coining, anyway,' said Oswald.
'Coiners have furnaces,' said Dicky.
Alice said: 'Wouldn't a spirit-lamp do? Old nurse has got an old one on
the scullery shelf.'
We thought it would.
Then Noel reminded us that coiners have moulds, and Oswald went and
bought a pair of wooden lemon squeezers for sevenpence three farthings.
In his far-sightedness he remembered that coiners use water, so he
bought two enamelled iron bowls at sixpence halfpenny the two. When he
came back he noticed the coal-scuttle we had always felt so friendly to,
and he filled it with water and brought it up. It did not leak worth
mentioning.
'We ought to have a bench,' said Dicky; 'most trades have
that--shoemakers and watchmakers, and tailors and lawyers.'
This was difficult, but we did it. There were some planks in the cellar,
and a tub and a beer-barrel. Unluckily, the tub and the beer-barrel were
not the same height, but we taught them better by getting old nurse's
'Pilgrim's Progress' and the _Wesleyan Magazine_, to put on top of the
tub; and then it was as high as the barrel, and we laid the boards
across, and there was a bench as beautiful as you could wish.
Dicky was allowed to put the stuff on the coins, because he had bought
the bottles with his own money. But Alice held them for him to do,
because girls are inferior beings, except when you are ill, and you must
be kind to them or you need never hope to be a hero. There are drawbacks
to every ambition.
She let Noel hold them part of the time.
When she was not helping Dicky, she tried covering pennies with the
silver paper off chocolate, but it was not the kind of success that
would take anyone in.
H. O. and Noel took it in turns to be sentinel, but they said it was
dull, so Oswald took it on. And before he had been there three minutes
he cried, 'Hist! someone approaches!' and the coining materials were
hastily concealed and everyone hid round the corner, like we had agreed
we would do if disturbed in our unlawful pursuits.
Of course, there wasn't anyone really. After this the kids wanted to be
sentinels again, but Oswald would not let them.
It was a jolly good game. And there was something about that house that
made whatever you played in it seem awfully real. When I was Mrs. S. I
felt quite unhappy, and when Dicky was the unfortunate monarch who
perished in the French Revolution he told me afterwards he didn't half
like it when it came to the guillotine, though, of course, he knew the
knife was only the little sliding-door of the chicken-house.
We played coiners for several days, and all learned to give the alarm,
but we were beginning to feel it was time for something new. Noel was
saving the hairs out of his comb, and pulling them out of the horsehair
sofa in the parlour, to make a hair shirt to be a hermit in, and Oswald
had bought a file to get through the bars and be an escaped Bastille
prisoner, leaving his life-history concealed in the fireplace, when the
great event occurred.
We found the silvered money turned to a dirty black when a few hours had
elapsed, and we tried silver paint and gold paint. Our pockets were
always full of gold and silver money, and we could jingle it and take it
out in handfuls and let people see it--not too near.
Then came the great eventful day.
H. O. had fallen into the water-butt that morning. We dried his holland
smock, but it went stiff like paper, so that old nurse noticed it, and
thus found out that he was wringing wet underneath. So she put him to
bed, for fear of his catching his death of cold, and the inveterate gang
of coiners had to go to their fell lair without him. We left all our
false money at home, because old nurse had given Alice a piece of
trimming, for dolls, that was all over little imitation silver coins,
called sequences, I believe, to imitate the coinage of Turkish regions.
We reached our Enchanceried House, got in as usual, and started our
desperate work of changing silver sequences into gold half-sovereigns,
with gold paint.
Noel was very grumpy: he was odd altogether that day. He was trying to
write a poem about a Bastille prisoner. He asked to be sentry, so that
he could think about rhymes.
We had not coined more than about four half-sovereigns when we heard
Noel say: 'Hist! Hide the plant!'
We didn't take any notice, because we wanted to get enough of them done
to play a game of misers, which was Alice's idea.
'Hist!' Noel said again. And then suddenly he rushed in and said: 'It's
a _real_ hist! I tell you there's someone on the stairs.'
And he shut the wooden-grated door, and Oswald, with rare presence of
mind, caught up the bunch of keys and locked the wooden-grated door with
the key labelled 'Mrs. S.'s room.'
Then, breathless and furtive, we all hid in the part of the room near
the fireplace, where no one could see us from the door.
We hardly dared to breathe. Alice said afterwards that she could hear
Oswald's heart beating with terror, but the author is almost sure that
it was only his watch ticking. It had begun to go that week, after days
of unexplained idleness. If we _did_ have to pay for finding the
Enchanceried House, this was when we paid.
There _were_ feet on the stairs. We all heard them. And voices. The
author distinctly heard the words 'replete with every modern
inconvenience,' and 'pleasantly situate ten minutes from tram and
rail.'
And Oswald, at least, understood that, somehow or other, our house had
got itself disenchanceried, and that the owner was trying to let it.
We held our breaths till they were nearly choked out of us.
The steps came nearer and nearer. They came along the passage, and
stopped at the door.
'This is the nursery,' said a manly voice. 'Ah, locked! I quite
understood from the agent that the keys were in the hall.'
Of course _we_ had the keys, and this was the moment that Noel chose for
dropping them. Why he was fingering them where they lay on the
mantelpiece the author does not know, and never will know. There is
something about 'previously demented' in some Latin chap--Virgil or
Lucretius--that seems to hit the nail on the head. The keys fell on the
cracked hearthstone with a clang that Oswald, at any rate, will never
forget.
There was an awful silence--quite a long one.
Then another voice said:
'There's someone in there.'
'Look at that bench,' said the other man; 'it's coiners' work, that's
what it is, but there's nobody there. The keys must have _blown_ down!'
The two voices talked some time, but we could not hear all their
conversation. We were all wondering, as it turned out afterwards, what
exactly the utmost rigour of the law was. Because, of course, we knew we
were trespassers of the very deepest dye, even if we could prove that we
were not real coiners.
'No,' we heard one of them say, 'if we go for the police very likely the
gang will return and destroy everything. There's no one here now. Let's
secure the evidence. We can easily break the door down.'
It is a sickening feeling when the evidence against you is going to be
secured, and you don't know what the punishment for coining is, or
whether anyone will believe you if you say you were only playing at it.
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 ass!
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!'