The Story of the Amulet, E. Nesbit [free children's online books TXT] 📗

beast-skins sat watching the playing children.

The children from Fitzroy Street stood on the fringe of the forest looking at the games. One woman with long, fair braided hair sat a little apart from the others, and there was a look in her eyes as she followed the play of the children that made Anthea feel sad and sorry.

‘None of those little girls is her own little girl,’ thought Anthea.

The little black-clad London child pulled at Anthea’s sleeve.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘that one there—she’s precious like mother; mother’s ‘air was somethink lovely, when she ‘ad time to comb it out. Mother wouldn’t never a-beat me if she’d lived ‘ere—I don’t suppose there’s e’er a public nearer than Epping, do you, Miss?’

In her eagerness the child had stepped out of the shelter of the forest. The sad-eyed woman saw her. She stood up, her thin face lighted up with a radiance like sunrise, her long, lean arms stretched towards the London child.

‘Imogen!’ she cried—at least the word was more like that than any other word—‘Imogen!’

There was a moment of great silence; the naked children paused in their play, the women on the bank stared anxiously.

‘Oh, it IS mother—it IS!’ cried Imogen-from-London, and rushed across the cleared space. She and her mother clung together—so closely, so strongly that they stood an instant like a statue carved in stone.

Then the women crowded round. ‘It IS my Imogen!’ cried the woman.

‘Oh it is! And she wasn’t eaten by wolves. She’s come back to me. Tell me, my darling, how did you escape? Where have you been? Who has fed and clothed you?’

‘I don’t know nothink,’ said Imogen.

‘Poor child!’ whispered the women who crowded round, ‘the terror of the wolves has turned her brain.’

‘But you know ME?’ said the fair-haired woman.

And Imogen, clinging with black-clothed arms to the bare neck, answered—

‘Oh, yes, mother, I know YOU right ‘nough.’

‘What is it? What do they say?’ the learned gentleman asked anxiously.

‘You wished to come where someone wanted the child,’ said the Psammead. ‘The child says this is her mother.’

‘And the mother?’

‘You can see,’ said the Psammead.

‘But is she really? Her child, I mean?’

‘Who knows?’ said the Psammead; ‘but each one fills the empty place in the other’s heart. It is enough.’

‘Oh,’ said the learned gentleman, ‘this is a good dream. I wish the child might stay in the dream.’

The Psammead blew itself out and granted the wish. So Imogen’s future was assured. She had found someone to want her.

‘If only all the children that no one wants,’ began the learned gentleman—but the woman interrupted. She came towards them.

‘Welcome, all!’ she cried. ‘I am the Queen, and my child tells me that you have befriended her; and this I well believe, looking on your faces. Your garb is strange, but faces I can read. The child is bewitched, I see that well, but in this she speaks truth. Is it not so?’

The children said it wasn’t worth mentioning.

I wish you could have seen all the honours and kindnesses lavished on the children and the learned gentleman by those ancient Britons.

You would have thought, to see them, that a child was something to make a fuss about, not a bit of rubbish to be hustled about the streets and hidden away in the Workhouse. It wasn’t as grand as the entertainment at Babylon, but somehow it was more satisfying.

‘I think you children have some wonderful influence on me,’ said the learned gentleman. ‘I never dreamed such dreams before I knew you.’

It was when they were alone that night under the stars where the Britons had spread a heap Of dried fern for them to sleep on, that Cyril spoke.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’ve made it all right for Imogen, and had a jolly good time. I vote we get home again before the fighting begins.’

‘What fighting?’ asked Jane sleepily.

‘Why, Julius Caesar, you little goat,’ replied her kind brother. ‘Don’t you see that if this is the year fifty-five, Julius Caesar may happen at any moment.’

‘I thought you liked Caesar,’ said Robert.

‘So I do—in the history. But that’s different from being killed by his soldiers.’

‘If we saw Caesar we might persuade him not to,’ said Anthea.

‘YOU persuade CAESAR,’ Robert laughed.

The learned gentleman, before anyone could stop him, said, ‘I only wish we could see Caesar some time.’

And, of course, in just the little time the Psammead took to blow itself out for wish-giving, the five, or six counting the Psammead, found themselves in Caesar’s camp, just outside Caesar’s tent. And they saw Caesar. The Psammead must have taken advantage of the loose wording of the learned gentleman’s wish, for it was not the same time of day as that on which the wish had been uttered among the dried ferns. It was sunset, and the great man sat on a chair outside his tent gazing over the sea towards Britain—everyone knew without being told that it was towards Britain. Two golden eagles on the top of posts stood on each side of the tent, and on the flaps of the tent which was very gorgeous to look at were the letters S.P.Q.R.

The great man turned unchanged on the newcomers the august glance that he had turned on the violet waters of the Channel. Though they had suddenly appeared out of nothing, Caesar never showed by the faintest movement of an eyelid, by the least tightening of that firm mouth, that they were not some long expected embassy. He waved a calm hand towards the sentinels, who sprang weapons in hand towards the newcomers.

‘Back!’ he said in a voice that thrilled like music. ‘Since when has Caesar feared children and students?’

To the children he seemed to speak in the only language they knew; but the learned gentleman heard—in rather a strange accent, but quite intelligibly—the lips of Caesar speaking in the Latin tongue, and in that tongue, a little stiffly, he answered—

‘It is a dream, O Caesar.’

‘A dream?’ repeated Caesar. ‘What is a dream?’

‘This,’ said the learned gentleman.

‘Not it,’ said Cyril, ‘it’s a sort of magic. We come out of another time and another place.’

‘And we want to ask you not to trouble about conquering Britain,’ said Anthea; ‘it’s a poor little place, not worth bothering about.’

‘Are you from Britain?’ the General asked. ‘Your clothes are uncouth, but well woven, and your hair is short as the hair of Roman citizens, not long like the hair of barbarians, yet such I deem you to be.’ ‘We’re not,’ said Jane with angry eagerness; ‘we’re not barbarians at all. We come from the country where the sun never sets, and we’ve read about you in books; and our country’s full of fine things—St Paul’s, and the Tower of London, and Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition, and—’ Then the others stopped her.

‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ said Robert in a bitter undertone.

Caesar looked at the children a moment in silence. Then he called a soldier and spoke with him apart. Then he said aloud—

‘You three elder children may go where you will within the camp. Few children are privileged to see the camp of Caesar. The student and the smaller girl-child will remain here with me.’

Nobody liked this; but when Caesar said a thing that thing was so, and there was an end to it. So the three went.

Left alone with Jane and the learned gentleman, the great Roman found it easy enough to turn them inside out. But it was not easy, even for him, to make head or tail of the insides of their minds when he had got at them.

The learned gentleman insisted that the whole thing was a dream, and refused to talk much, on the ground that if he did he would wake up.

Jane, closely questioned, was full of information about railways, electric lights, balloons, men-of-war, cannons, and dynamite.

‘And do they fight with swords?’ asked the General.

‘Yes, swords and guns and cannons.’

Caesar wanted to know what guns were.

‘You fire them,’ said Jane, ‘and they go bang, and people fall down dead.’

‘But what are guns like?’

Jane found them hard to describe.

‘But Robert has a toy one in his pocket,’ she said. So the others were recalled.

The boys explained the pistol to Caesar very fully, and he looked at it with the greatest interest. It was a two-shilling pistol, the one that had done such good service in the old Egyptian village.

‘I shall cause guns to be made,’ said Caesar, ‘and you will be detained till I know whether you have spoken the truth. I had just decided that Britain was not worth the bother of invading. But what you tell me decides me that it is very much worth while.’

‘But it’s all nonsense,’ said Anthea. ‘Britain is just a savage sort of island—all fogs and trees and big rivers. But the people are kind. We know a little girl there named Imogen. And it’s no use your making guns because you can’t fire them without gunpowder, and that won’t be invented for hundreds of years, and we don’t know how to make it, and we can’t tell you. Do go straight home, dear Caesar, and let poor little Britain alone.’

‘But this other girl-child says—’ said Caesar.

‘All Jane’s been telling you is what it’s going to be,’ Anthea interrupted, ‘hundreds and hundreds of years from now.’

‘The little one is a prophetess, eh?’ said Caesar, with a whimsical look. ‘Rather young for the business, isn’t she?’

‘You can call her a prophetess if you like,’ said Cyril, ‘but what Anthea says is true.’

‘Anthea?’ said Caesar. ‘That’s a Greek name.’

‘Very likely,’ said Cyril, worriedly. ‘I say, I do wish you’d give up this idea of conquering Britain. It’s not worth while, really it isn’t!’

‘On the contrary,’ said Caesar, ‘what you’ve told me has decided me to go, if it’s only to find out what Britain is really like. Guards, detain these children.’

‘Quick,’ said Robert, ‘before the guards begin detaining. We had enough of that in Babylon.’

Jane held up the Amulet away from the sunset, and said the word. The learned gentleman was pushed through and the others more quickly than ever before passed through the arch back into their own times and the quiet dusty sitting-room of the learned gentleman.

 

It is a curious fact that when Caesar was encamped on the coast of Gaul—somewhere near Boulogne it was, I believe—he was sitting before his tent in the glow of the sunset, looking out over the violet waters of the English Channel. Suddenly he started, rubbed his eyes, and called his secretary. The young man came quickly from within the tent.

‘Marcus,’ said Caesar. ‘I have dreamed a very wonderful dream. Some of it I forget, but I remember enough to decide what was not before determined. Tomorrow the ships that have been brought round from the Ligeris shall be provisioned. We shall sail for this three-cornered island. First, we will take but two legions.

This, if what we have heard be true, should suffice. But if my dream be true, then a hundred legions will not suffice. For the dream I dreamed was the most wonderful that ever tormented the brain even of Caesar. And Caesar has dreamed some strange things in his time.’

 

‘And if you hadn’t told Caesar all that about how things are now, he’d never have invaded Britain,’ said Robert to Jane as they sat down to tea.

‘Oh, nonsense,’ said Anthea, pouring out; ‘it was all settled hundreds of years ago.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Cyril. ‘Jam, please. This about time being only a thingummy of thought is very confusIng. If everything happens at the same time—’

‘It CAN’T!’