"WE'VE GOT MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS," SAID NOEL 280
_THE ROAD TO ROME; OR, THE SILLY STOWAWAY_
WE Bastables have only two uncles, and neither of them, are our
own natural-born relatives. One is a great-uncle, and the other is
the uncle from his birth of Albert, who used to live next door to
us in the Lewisham Road. When we first got to know him (it was over
some baked potatoes, and is quite another story) we called him
Albert-next-door's-Uncle, and then Albert's uncle for short. But
Albert's uncle and my father joined in taking a jolly house in the
country, called the Moat House, and we stayed there for our summer
holidays; and it was there, through an accident to a pilgrim with peas
in his shoes--that's another story too--that we found Albert's uncle's
long-lost love; and as she was very old indeed--twenty-six next
birthday--and he was ever so much older in the vale of years, he had to
get married almost directly, and it was fixed for about Christmas-time.
And when our holidays came the whole six of us went down to the Moat
House with Father and Albert's uncle. We never had a Christmas in the
country before. It was simply ripping. And the long-lost love--her name
was Miss Ashleigh, but we were allowed to call her Aunt Margaret even
before the wedding made it really legal for us to do so--she and her
jolly clergyman brother used to come over, and sometimes we went to the
Cedars, where they live, and we had games and charades, and
hide-and-seek, and Devil in the Dark, which is a game girls pretend to
like, and very few do really, and crackers and a Christmas-tree for the
village children, and everything you can jolly well think of.
And all the time, whenever we went to the Cedars, there was all sorts of
silly fuss going on about the beastly wedding; boxes coming from London
with hats and jackets in, and wedding presents--all glassy and silvery,
or else brooches and chains--and clothes sent down from London to choose
from. I can't think how a lady can want so many petticoats and boots and
things just because she's going to be married. No man would think of
getting twenty-four shirts and twenty-four waistcoats, and so on, just
to be married in.
"It's because they're going to Rome, I think," Alice said, when we
talked it over before the fire in the kitchen the day Mrs. Pettigrew
went to see her aunt, and we were allowed to make toffee. "You see, in
Rome you can only buy Roman clothes, and I think they're all stupid
bright colours--at least I know the sashes are. You stir now, Oswald.
My face is all burnt black."
Oswald took the spoon, though it was really not his turn by three; but
he is one whose nature is so that he cannot make a fuss about little
things--and he knows he can make toffee.
"Lucky hounds," H.O. said, "to be going to Rome. I wish I was."
"Hounds isn't polite, H.O., dear," Dora said; and H.O. said--
"Well, lucky bargees, then."
"It's the dream of my life to go to Rome," Noel said. Noel is our poet
brother. "Just think of what the man says in the 'Roman Road.' I wish
they'd take me."
"They won't," Dicky said. "It costs a most awful lot. I heard Father
saying so only yesterday."
"It would only be the fare," Noel answered; "and I'd go third, or even
in a cattle-truck, or a luggage van. And when I got there I could easily
earn my own living. I'd make ballads and sing them in the streets. The
Italians would give me lyres--that's the Italian kind of shilling, they
spell it with an _i_. It shows how poetical they are out there, their
calling it that."
"But you couldn't make Italian poetry," H.O. said, staring at Noel with
his mouth open.
"Oh, I don't know so much about that," Noel said. "I could jolly soon
learn anyway, and just to begin with I'd do it in English. There are
sure to be some people who would understand. And if they didn't, don't
you think their warm Southern hearts would be touched to see a pale,
slender, foreign figure singing plaintive ballads in an unknown tongue?
I do. Oh! they'd chuck along the lyres fast enough--they're not hard and
cold like North people. Why, every one here is a brewer, or a baker, or
a banker, or a butcher, or something dull. Over there they're all
bandits, or vineyardiners, or play the guitar, or something, and they
crush the red grapes and dance and laugh in the sun--you know jolly well
they do."
"This toffee's about done," said Oswald suddenly. "H.O., shut your silly
mouth and get a cupful of cold water." And then, what with dropping a
little of the toffee into the water to see if it was ready, and pouring
some on a plate that wasn't buttered and not being able to get it off
again when it was cold without breaking the plate, and the warm row
there was about its being one of the best dinner-service ones, the wild
romances of Noel's poetical intellect went out of our heads altogether;
and it was not till later, and when deep in the waters of affliction,
that they were brought back to us.
Next day H.O. said to Dora, "I want to speak to you all by yourself and
me." So they went into the secret staircase that creaks and hasn't been
secret now for countless years; and after that Dora did some white
sewing she wouldn't let us look at, and H.O. helped her.
[Illustration: DORA DID SOME WHITE SEWING.]
"It's another wedding present, you may depend," Dicky said--"a beastly
surprise, I shouldn't wonder." And no more was said. The rest of us were
busy skating on the moat, for it was now freezing hard. Dora never did
care for skating; she says it hurts her feet.
And now Christmas and Boxing Day passed like a radiating dream, and it
was the wedding-day. We all had to go to the bride's mother's house
before the wedding, so as to go to church with the wedding party. The
girls had always wanted to be somebody's bridesmaids, and now they
were--in white cloth coats like coachmen, with lots of little capes, and
white beaver bonnets. They didn't look so bad, though rather as if they
were in a Christmas card; and their dresses were white silk like
pocket-handkerchiefs under the long coats. And their shoes had real
silver buckles our great Indian uncle gave them. H.O. went back just as
the waggonette was starting, and came out with a big brown-paper parcel.
We thought it was the secret surprise present Dora had been making, and,
indeed, when I asked her she nodded. We little recked what it really
was, or how our young brother was going to shove himself forward once
again. He _will_ do it. Nothing you say is of any lasting use.
There were a great many people at the wedding--quite crowds. There was
lots to eat and drink, and though it was all cold, it did not matter,
because there were blazing fires in every fireplace in the house, and
the place all decorated with holly and mistletoe and things. Every one
seemed to enjoy themselves very much, except Albert's uncle and his
blushing bride; and they looked desperate. Every one said how sweet she
looked, but Oswald thought she looked as if she didn't like being
married as much as she expected. She was not at all a blushing bride
really; only the tip of her nose got pink, because it was rather cold in
the church. But she is very jolly.
Her reverend but nice brother read the marriage service. He reads better
than any one I know, but he is not a bit of a prig really, when you come
to know him.
When the rash act was done Albert's uncle and his bride went home in a
carriage all by themselves, and then we had the lunch and drank the
health of the bride in real champagne, though Father said we kids must
only have just a taste. I'm sure Oswald, for one, did not want any more;
one taste was quite enough. Champagne is like soda-water with medicine
in it. The sherry we put sugar in once was much more decent.
Then Miss Ashleigh--I mean Mrs. Albert's uncle--went away and took off
her white dress and came back looking much warmer. Dora heard the
housemaid say afterwards that the cook had stopped the bride on the
stairs with "a basin of hot soup, that would take no denial, because the
bride, poor dear young thing, not a bite or sup had passed her lips that
day." We understood then why she had looked so unhappy. But Albert's
uncle had had a jolly good breakfast--fish and eggs and bacon and three
goes of marmalade. So it was not hunger made him sad. Perhaps he was
thinking what a lot of money it cost to be married and go to Rome.
A little before the bride went to change, H.O. got up and reached his
brown-paper parcel from under the sideboard and sneaked out. We thought
he might have let us see it given, whatever it was. And Dora said she
had understood he meant to; but it was his secret.
The bride went away looking quite comfy in a furry cloak, and Albert's
uncle cheered up at the last and threw off the burden of his cares and
made a joke. I forget what it was; it wasn't a very good one, but it
showed he was trying to make the best of things.
Then the Bridal Sufferers drove away, with the luggage on a cart--heaps
and heaps of it, and we all cheered and threw rice and slippers. Mrs.
Ashleigh and some other old ladies cried.
And then every one said, "What a pretty wedding!" and began to go. And
when our waggonette came round we all began to get in. And suddenly
Father said--
"Where's H.O.?" And we looked round. He was in absence.
"Fetch him along sharp--some of you," Father said; "I don't want to keep
the horses standing here in the cold all day."
So Oswald and Dicky went to fetch him along. We thought he might have
wandered back to what was left of the lunch--for he is young and he does
not always know better. But he was not there, and Oswald did not even
take a crystallised fruit in passing. He might easily have done this,
and no one would have minded, so it would not have been wrong. But it
would have been ungentlemanly. Dicky did not either. H.O. was not there.
We went into the other rooms, even the one the old ladies were crying
in, but of course we begged their pardons. And at last into the kitchen,
where the servants were smart with white bows and just sitting down to
their dinner, and Dicky said--
"I say, cookie love, have you seen H.O.?"
"Don't come here with your imperence!" the cook said, but she was
pleased with Dicky's unmeaning compliment all the same.
"_I_ see him," said the housemaid. "He was colloguing with the butcher
in the yard a bit since. He'd got a brown-paper parcel. Perhaps he got a
lift home."
So we went and told Father, and about the white present in the parcel.
"I expect he was ashamed to give it after all," Oswald said, "so he
hooked off home with it."
And we got into the wagonette.
"It wasn't a present, though," Dora said; "it was a different kind of
surprise--but it really is a secret."
Our good Father did not command her to betray her young brother.
But when we got home H.O. wasn't there. Mrs. Pettigrew hadn't seen him,
and he was nowhere about. Father biked back to the Cedars to see if he'd
turned up. No. Then all the gentlemen turned out to look for him through
the length and breadth of the land.
"He's too old to be stolen by gipsies," Alice said.
"And too ugly," said Dicky.
"Oh _don't_!" said both the girls; "and now when he's lost, too!"
We had looked for a long time before Mrs. Pettigrew came in with a
parcel she said the butcher had left. It was not addressed, but we knew
it was H.O.'s, because of the label on the paper from the shop where
Father gets his shirts. Father opened it at once.
Inside the parcel we found H.O.'s boots and braces, his best hat and his
chest-protector. And Oswald felt as if we had found his skeleton.
"Any row with any of you?" Father asked. But there hadn't been any.
"Was he worried about anything? Done anything wrong, and afraid to own
up?"
We turned cold, for we knew what he meant. That parcel was so horribly
like the lady's hat and gloves that she takes off on the seashore and
leaves with a letter saying it has come to this.
"_No_, _no_, NO, NO!" we all said. "He was perfectly jolly all the
morning."
Then suddenly Dicky leaned on the table and one of H.O.'s boots toppled
over, and there was something white inside. It was a letter. H.O. must
have written it before we left home. It said--
"DEAR FATHER AND EVERY ONE,--I am going to be a
Clown. When I am rich and reveared I will come
back rolling.
"Your affectionate son,
"HORACE OCTAVIUS BASTABLE."
"Rolling?" Father said.
"He means rolling in money," Alice said. Oswald noticed that every one
round the table where H.O.'s boots were dignifiedly respected as they
lay, was a horrid pale colour, like when the salt is thrown into
snapdragons.
"Oh dear!" Dora cried, "that was it. He asked me to make him a clown's
dress and keep it deeply secret. He said he wanted to surprise Aunt
Margaret and Albert's uncle. And I didn't think it was wrong," said
Dora, screwing up her face; she then added, "Oh dear, oh dear, oh, oh!"
and with these concluding remarks she began to howl.
Father thumped her on the back in an absent yet kind way.
"But where's he gone?" he said, not to any one in particular. "I saw the
butcher; he said H.O. asked him to take a parcel home and went back
round the Cedars."