SIR CHRISTOPHER COCKLESHELL

The children called him Sir Christopher Cockleshell.--'Sir,' in token of

respect for his gray hairs and noble-looking face; Christopher, because

he had once carried Mabel across the road on a very muddy day, when

thunder showers and the parish water-carts had both been particularly

busy; and Cockleshell, because of the house he lived in.

It was a most wonderful house--like the gateway of an old castle. It had

a big arch in the middle and a window over the arch, and there were

windows, too, in the towers on each side of the arch. All along the top

were in-and-out battlements. It had been covered with white plaster

once, but flakes of this had fallen away and showed the pinky bricks

underneath. But the oddest thing about the house was the trimming that

ran all round the bottom story about the height of a tall man. This

trimming was of oyster-shells, and cockle-shells, and mussel-shells,

and whelk-shells, and scallop-shells, all stuck on the wall of the house

in patterns. It was a very wonderful house indeed, and the children

always tried to go past it on their way to everywhere.

The children themselves lived in a large, square, ordinary brown-brick

house among other ordinary brown-brick houses. Their house had a long

garden with tall old trees in it, and so had the other houses. Looking

out of the boxroom window was like looking down on the top of a green

forest, Phyllis always thought. Only now, of course, the trees were not

green any more, because it was nearly Christmas.

'I wish Sir Christopher had a garden to his house,' Phyllis said one day

to the new housemaid.

'There used to be a pleasure-gardens there, I've heard father tell,'

said the new housemaid. 'Quite a big gardens, it was. The gent as owned

it was as rich as rich, kep' his carriage and butlers and all. But when

his son come into the property he sold the gardens for building on, and

only kep' the gate-house--the Grotto they calls it. An' there 'e's lived

ever since in quite a poor way. Nasty old miser, that's what he is!'

'He may be a miser,' said Phyllis, 'but he's not nasty. He carried Mabel

as kind as could be.'

'Have you ever spoke to him since?' demanded the housemaid.

'No,' said Phyllis; 'he always smiles at us, but he's always in a

hurry.'

'That's it,' said the housemaid; ''e's afraid to let anyone inside of

his house, fear they should get to see all the sacks of money he's got

there. And he pokes about and picks things outer the gutters, so he

won't get to know anyone. My young brother he knocked at the door once

to arst for a drink of water--thought he'd get a squint at the inside of

the house while the old chap was gone to draw it. But he shuts the door

in Elf's face, and only opens it a crack to hand him the mug through.'

'It was kind of him to give your brother the water,' said Phyllis.

'Elf didun want the water,' said Alf's sister; ''e'd just 'ad a lemonade

at the paper shop.'

Phyllis had often wanted to do something kind for Sir Christopher, but

she could not think of anything that wasn't just as likely to annoy him

as to please him. If she had known when his birthday was, she would have

put a birthday card under his door; but no one can be pleased at having

a card with 'Bright be thy natal morn' on it when really the natal morn

is quite a different date. She would have taken him flowers at the time

when dahlias and sunflowers grew at the end of the garden, but perhaps

he would not like the bother of putting them in water; and, if he was

really poor, and not a miser, as Jane said, he might not have a vase or

jug to put them in.

And now it was Christmas-time. Guy was home for the holidays, and that

was splendid. But, on the other hand, mother and father had had to go to

granny, who was ill. So there would be no real Christmas in the brown

house.

'But I'll tell you what,' said Phyllis; 'there's the Christmas-tree for

the poor children at the schools. Suppose we were to make some things

for that, and buy some, and go down and help decorate? Mother said we

might.'

Guy was rather clever with his fingers, and as we all like doing what we

can do really well, he did not make such a fuss over making things as

some boys do. He could make doll's furniture out of pins and wool, and

armchairs out of the breast-bones of geese; only there are so seldom

enough breast-bones of geese to make a complete set of furniture.

There was nearly a week to make things in, and long before its end the

schoolroom began to look like a bazaar. There were little boxes of

sweets covered with silver paper, and scrapbooks made of postcards

covered with red calico, and some little dolls that the girls dressed,

as well as all the things that Guy made.

'How ravishingly beautiful!' said Mabel, when the shiny, shimmery, real

Christmas-tree things bought at the shop were spread out with the

others.

The day before Christmas Eve the children were very happy indeed,

although they had had to be made thoroughly tidy before Jane would allow

them to go down to the school; and being thoroughly tidy, as you know,

often means a lot of soap in your eyes, and having your nails cleaned by

someone who does not know as well as you do where the nail leaves off

and the real you begins.

They went to the side-door of the school, and left the baskets and

bundles of pretty things in the porch and went in.

The big tree was there, but it was just plain fir-tree so far, nothing

Christmassy about it, except that it was planted in a tub.

'How do you do?' said Guy politely to the stout lady in a bonnet with

black beads and a violet feather; 'I'm so glad we're in time.'

'What for?' said the stout lady. 'The tree's not till to-morrow. Run

away, little boy.'

'Oh, Mrs. Philkins,' said Phyllis, 'he's not a little boy, he's Guy;

don't you remember him?'

'I remember him in petticoats,' said Mrs. Philkins: 'he's grown.

Good-afternoon.'

'Mother said,' said Guy, keeping his temper beautifully, 'that we might

come and help.'

'Very kind of your mother to arrange it like that. But _I_ happen to be

in charge of the tree, and I don't want any outside assistance.'

The children turned away without a word. When they got outside Guy said:

'I hate Mrs. Philkins!'

'We oughtn't to hate anybody,' said Mabel.

'She isn't anybody--at least, not anybody in particular,' said Phyllis;

'I heard father say so.'

'She wouldn't have been such a pig to us if she'd known what we'd

brought for the tree,' said Phyllis.

'I'm glad she didn't know. I wish we hadn't done the things at all,'

said Guy; 'it's always the way if you try to do good to others.'

'It _isn't_,' said the others indignantly; 'you know it isn't.'

'That's right!' said Guy aggravatingly, 'let's begin to quarrel about

it--_us_--that would just please her. Let's drop the whole lot into the

canal, and say no more about it.'

'Oh _no_!' cried both the girls together, clutching the precious parcels

they carried.

'But what's the good?' said Guy; 'we don't know anyone who's got a

Christmas-tree to give them to.'

Phyllis stopped short on the pavement, struck motionless by an idea.

'I know,' she said: 'we'll have a tree of our very own.'

'What's the good if there's no one to see it?'

'We'll ask someone to see it.'

'Who?'

'Sir Christopher!'

The daring and romance of this idea charmed even Guy. But he thought it

would be better not to ask Sir Christopher to come to their house:

'Servants are so odd,' he said; 'they might be rude to him, or

something. No; we'll get it ready, and we'll wheel it round after dark,

and ask him to let us light it in his yard. Then he won't think we're

trying to pry into his house.'

Half an hour later Guy staggered in, bearing a fir-tree.

'Only ninepence,' he said; 'it's a bit lop-sided, but we can tie ivy on

or something to make that right. I'm glad that old cat wouldn't let us

help. It's much jollier like this.'

The tree was planted in a pot that a dead azalea had lived in; and Mrs.

Philkins was quite forgotten in the joy of trimming their own tree.

Besides the things they had made there were the lovely things they had

bought--stars and flags, and a sugar bird-cage with a yellow bird in it,

and a glass boat with glass sails, and a blue china bird with a tail of

spun glass.

Guy went out and borrowed a wheelbarrow from the gardener who

cut their grass when it was cut, and when the tree was trimmed he and

Phyllis carried it downstairs. The top branch with the star on it got

banged against the banisters, and the side branch got into Guy's eye,

and Phyllis's thumb got jammed between the pot and the banister rail.

But what are trifles like these in an adventure like this?

They got the tree out of the front-door without being seen by the

servants--a real triumph. They stood the pot in the barrow, and started

to wheel it out of the front-gate. But directly they lifted the handles

of the barrow the floor of it naturally ceased to be straight, and the

flower-pot toppled over and cracked itself slightly against the side of

the barrow, while the boughs of the tree, with their gay decorations,

took the opportunity to entangle themselves in the bad-tempered leaves

of the holly that stood there, and were disengaged with difficulty.

Then the pot refused to stand up, and at last it had to be laid down in

the barrow, with its shiny treasures dangling over the front-wheel.

Then, the barrow was extremely heavy even without the tree in it; and

the children did not go the nearest way to the Grotto, because they did

not want to meet people, so they were thoroughly tired and extremely hot

by the time they approached Sir Christopher Cockleshell's castle.

There was a bit of waste land close to it, where someone had once begun

to build a house and had then thought better of it. A bit of this

house's wall was standing on each side of the space where its front-door

would have been if it had ever come to the point of having one. They

wheeled the barrow in, and the light of a street lamp that obligingly

shone through the door-space made it possible for them to disentangle

the little strings that had got twisted round each other, to disengage

the gilt fish from the sugar bird-cage, and to take the glass bird out

of the goose-bone armchair in which it was trying to sit. Also they set

up all the candles--six dozen of them. This is done with tin-tacks, as

no doubt you know.

'Now,' said Guy, 'one of us must go and ask if he'll let us light it in

his yard, and one of us must wait here with the tree.'

'What about me?' said Mabel.

'You can do which you like,' said Guy.

'I want to do both,' said Mabel; 'I want to stay with the pretty tree,

_and_ I want to go and ask him if he wants us.'

Mabel was still too small to understand thoroughly how hard it is, even

for a grown-up person, to be in two places at once.

It ended in Guy's staying with the tree.

'In case of attacks by boys,' he said.

'Then I shall go with Phyllis,' said Mabel.

Both girls felt their hearts go quite pitter-pattery when at last they

stood on the doorstep of the castle.

'Why don't you knock?' Mabel asked.

'I don't like to,' said Phyllis.

Mabel instantly knocked very loudly with a wooden ninepin-ball that she

happened to have in her pocket.

'Oh, I _wish_ you hadn't!' said Phyllis; 'I wanted to think what to say

first, and now there's no time.'

There certainly was not. The door opened a cautious inch, and a voice

said:

'Who's there?'

'It's us,' said Phyllis, 'please. We don't want to pry into your

beautiful house like Jane's brother Alf when he asked you for the drink

of water, only we've made up a Christmas-tree, and may we stand it in

your yard and light it--the candles, I mean?'

The door opened a little further, and a face looked out--the face, of

course, of Sir Christopher. All the house that showed through the crack

of the door didn't, as Mabel said afterwards, show at all, because it

was pitch-dark.

'I don't quite understand,' said Sir Christopher gently. Phyllis was a

little surprised to find that the voice was what she called a

gentleman's voice.

'We--you were so kind carrying Mab across the road that water-carty day

when it thundered----'

'Oh, it's you, is it?' he said.

'Yes, it's us; and they wouldn't let us help with the school tree, and

so we made one of our own and then we wanted someone to see it. And we

thought of you, because you don't seem to have many friends, and we

thought---- But we'll take it home again if you don't care about it.'

She stopped, just on the right side of tears.

'There's a glass bird with a spun-lovely tail,' said Mabel persuasively,

'and sweets and fishes, and a crocodile that goes waggle-waddle when you

wind him up.'

'My dears,' said Sir Christopher, and cleared his throat. 'My dears,' he

began again, and again he stopped.

'We'll go away if--if you'd rather,' said Phyllis, and sniffed

miserably.

'No, no!' he said; 'no, no--I was only thinking. I never thought--would

you like to bring the tree into the house? It's just the sort of thing

my little girl always liked.'

'Oh yes,' said Phyllis; 'we'll go and fetch it now.'

He closed the door gently. The children flew back to Guy and the tree.

'Oh, Guy! we've to take the tree inside the house! And he's got a little

girl--at least, he says so. Come on, quick. We'd better carry it. The

barrow's so heavy, and it does interfere so!'

They carried the pot between them. It was very heavy, and they had to

put it down and rest several times. But at last they dumped it down in

the dark on the front-door step of the castle, and breathed deep breaths

of fatigue, relief, and excitement.

The door opened, and opened wide, and this time light streamed from

within.

'Welcome!' said Sir Christopher. 'Come in. Let me help to lift it. What

a beautiful tree!'

'It is rather decent, isn't it?' said Guy dispassionately.

Sir Christopher raised the pot, carried it in, and the door was shut.

The children found themselves in a small square hall. A winding

staircase of iron corkscrewed upwards in one corner. The hall was

lighted only by two candles.

The old gentleman led the way through a door on the right into a round

room with white walls.

'We're inside the tower now,' said Guy.

'Yes,' said their host, 'this is part of the tower.'

He hastily lighted a big lamp, and then a deep 'Oh!' broke from the

children. For the walls were not white, they were all of

mother-of-pearl, and here and there all over the walls round pearls

shone with a starry, milky radiance.

'How radishing!' said Mabel in a whisper. 'I always said he wasn't a

miser. He's a magician.'

'What a lovely, lovely room!' sighed Phyllis.

'What's it made of?' asked Guy downrightly.

'Oyster-shells,' said Sir Christopher, 'and pearl beads.'

And it was.

'Oh!' said Mabel gaily, 'then that's what you go prowling about in dirty

gutters for?'

'Don't be rude, Mab dear!' whispered Phyllis.

But the old gentleman did not seem to mind. He just said, 'Yes, that's

it,' in an absent sort of way. He seemed to be thinking about something

else. Then he said, 'The Christmas-tree.'

The children had forgotten all about the Christmas-tree.

When its seventy-two candles were lighted the pearly room shone and

glimmered like a fairy palace in a dream.

'It's many a year since my little girl had such a Christmas-tree,' he

said. 'I don't know how to thank you.'

'Seeing your pearly halls is worth all the time and money,' said Mabel

heartily.

And Phyllis added in polite haste:

'And you being pleased.'

'Would you like to see the black marble hall?' asked Sir Christopher.