The Story of the Amulet, E. Nesbit [free children's online books TXT] 📗
- Author: E. Nesbit
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Anthea’s hand was on the counter, something seemed to slide under it. She lifted it. There lay five bright half sovereigns.
‘Why, I HAVE got it after all,’ she said; ‘here’s the money, now let’s have the Sammy,… the monkey I mean.’
The dealer looked hard at the money, but he made haste to put it in his pocket.
‘I only hope you come by it honest,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders. He scratched his ear again.
‘Well!’ he said, ‘I suppose I must let you have it, but it’s worth thribble the money, so it is—’
He slowly led the way out to the hutch—opened the door gingerly, and made a sudden fierce grab at the Psammead, which the Psammead acknowledged in one last long lingering bite.
‘Here, take the brute,’ said the shopman, squeezing the Psammead so tight that he nearly choked it. ‘It’s bit me to the marrow, it have.’
The man’s eyes opened as Anthea held out her arms.
‘Don’t blame me if it tears your face off its bones,’ he said, and the Psammead made a leap from his dirty horny hands, and Anthea caught it in hers, which were not very clean, certainly, but at any rate were soft and pink, and held it kindly and closely.
‘But you can’t take it home like that,’ Cyril said, ‘we shall have a crowd after us,’ and indeed two errand boys and a policeman had already collected.
‘I can’t give you nothink only a paper-bag, like what we put the tortoises in,’ said the man grudgingly.
So the whole party went into the shop, and the shopman’s eyes nearly came out of his head when, having given Anthea the largest paper-bag he could find, he saw her hold it open, and the Psammead carefully creep into it. ‘Well!’ he said, ‘if that there don’t beat cockfighting! But p’raps you’ve met the brute afore.’
‘Yes,’ said Cyril affably, ‘he’s an old friend of ours.’
‘If I’d a known that,’ the man rejoined, ‘you shouldn’t a had him under twice the money. ‘Owever,’ he added, as the children disappeared, ‘I ain’t done so bad, seeing as I only give five bob for the beast. But then there’s the bites to take into account!’
The children trembling in agitation and excitement, carried home the Psammead, trembling in its paper-bag.
When they got it home, Anthea nursed it, and stroked it, and would have cried over it, if she hadn’t remembered how it hated to be wet.
When it recovered enough to speak, it said—
‘Get me sand; silver sand from the oil and colour shop. And get me plenty.’
They got the sand, and they put it and the Psammead in the round bath together, and it rubbed itself, and rolled itself, and shook itself and scraped itself, and scratched itself, and preened itself, till it felt clean and comfy, and then it scrabbled a hasty hole in the sand, and went to sleep in it.
The children hid the bath under the girls’ bed, and had supper. Old Nurse had got them a lovely supper of bread and butter and fried onions. She was full of kind and delicate thoughts.
When Anthea woke the next morning, the Psammead was snuggling down between her shoulder and Jane’s.
‘You have saved my life,’ it said. ‘I know that man would have thrown cold water on me sooner or later, and then I should have died. I saw him wash out a guinea-pig’s hutch yesterday morning. I’m still frightfully sleepy, I think I’ll go back to sand for another nap. Wake the boys and this dormouse of a Jane, and when you’ve had your breakfasts we’ll have a talk.’
‘Don’t YOU want any breakfast?’ asked Anthea.
‘I daresay I shall pick a bit presently,’ it said; ‘but sand is all I care about—it’s meat and drink to me, and coals and fire and wife and children.’ With these words it clambered down by the bedclothes and scrambled back into the bath, where they heard it scratching itself out of sight.
‘Well!’ said Anthea, ‘anyhow our holidays won’t be dull NOW. We’ve found the Psammead again.’
‘No,’ said Jane, beginning to put on her stockings. ‘We shan’t be dull—but it’ll be only like having a pet dog now it can’t give us wishes.’
‘Oh, don’t be so discontented,’ said Anthea. ‘If it can’t do anything else it can tell us about Megatheriums and things.’
Long ago—that is to say last summer—the children, finding themselves embarrassed by some wish which the Psammead had granted them, and which the servants had not received in a proper spirit, had wished that the servants might not notice the gifts which the Psammead gave. And when they parted from the Psammead their last wish had been that they should meet it again. Therefore they HAD met it (and it was jolly lucky for the Psammead, as Robert pointed out). Now, of course, you see that the Psammead’s being where it was, was the consequence of one of their wishes, and therefore was a Psammead-wish, and as such could not be noticed by the servants. And it was soon plain that in the Psammead’s opinion old Nurse was still a servant, although she had now a house of her own, for she never noticed the Psammead at all. And that was as well, for she would never have consented to allow the girls to keep an animal and a bath of sand under their bed.
When breakfast had been cleared away—it was a very nice breakfast with hot rolls to it, a luxury quite out of the common way—Anthea went and dragged out the bath, and woke the Psammead.
It stretched and shook itself.
‘You must have bolted your breakfast most unwholesomely,’ it said, ‘you can’t have been five minutes over it.’
‘We’ve been nearly an hour,’ said Anthea. ‘Come—you know you promised.’
‘Now look here,’ said the Psammead, sitting back on the sand and shooting out its long eyes suddenly, ‘we’d better begin as we mean to go on. It won’t do to have any misunderstanding, so I tell you plainly that—’
‘Oh, PLEASE,’ Anthea pleaded, ‘do wait till we get to the others. They’ll think it most awfully sneakish of me to talk to you without them; do come down, there’s a dear.’
She knelt before the sand-bath and held out her arms. The Psammead must have remembered how glad it had been to jump into those same little arms only the day before, for it gave a little grudging grunt, and jumped once more.
Anthea wrapped it in her pinafore and carried it downstairs. It was welcomed in a thrilling silence. At last Anthea said, ‘Now then!’
‘What place is this?’ asked the Psammead, shooting its eyes out and turning them slowly round.
‘It’s a sitting-room, of course,’ said Robert.
‘Then I don’t like it,’ said the Psammead.
‘Never mind,’ said Anthea kindly; ‘we’ll take you anywhere you like if you want us to. What was it you were going to say upstairs when I said the others wouldn’t like it if I stayed talking to you without them?’
It looked keenly at her, and she blushed.
‘Don’t be silly,’ it said sharply. ‘Of course, it’s quite natural that you should like your brothers and sisters to know exactly how good and unselfish you were.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t,’ said Jane. ‘Anthea was quite right. What was it you were going to say when she stopped you?’
‘I’ll tell you,’ said the Psammead, ‘since you’re so anxious to know. I was going to say this. You’ve saved my life—and I’m not ungrateful—but it doesn’t change your nature or mine. You’re still very ignorant, and rather silly, and I am worth a thousand of you any day of the week.’
‘Of course you are!’ Anthea was beginning but it interrupted her.
‘It’s very rude to interrupt,’ it said; ‘what I mean is that I’m not going to stand any nonsense, and if you think what you’ve done is to give you the right to pet me or make me demean myself by playing with you, you’ll find out that what you think doesn’t matter a single penny. See? It’s what I think that matters.’
‘I know,’ said Cyril, ‘it always was, if you remember.’
‘Well,’ said the Psammead, ‘then that’s settled. We’re to be treated as we deserve. I with respect, and all of you with—but I don’t wish to be offensive. Do you want me to tell you how I got into that horrible den you bought me out of? Oh, I’m not ungrateful! I haven’t forgotten it and I shan’t forget it.’
‘Do tell us,’ said Anthea. ‘I know you’re awfully clever, but even with all your cleverness, I don’t believe you can possibly know how—how respectfully we do respect you. Don’t we?’
The others all said yes—and fidgeted in their chairs. Robert spoke the wishes of all when he said—
‘I do wish you’d go on.’ So it sat up on the green-covered table and went on.
‘When you’d gone away,’ it said, ‘I went to sand for a bit, and slept. I was tired out with all your silly wishes, and I felt as though I hadn’t really been to sand for a year.’
‘To sand?’ Jane repeated.
‘Where I sleep. You go to bed. I go to sand.’
Jane yawned; the mention of bed made her feel sleepy.
‘All right,’ said the Psammead, in offended tones. ‘I’m sure I don’t want to tell you a long tale. A man caught me, and I bit him. And he put me in a bag with a dead hare and a dead rabbit. And he took me to his house and put me out of the bag into a basket with holes that I could see through. And I bit him again. And then he brought me to this city, which I am told is called the Modern Babylon—though it’s not a bit like the old Babylon—and he sold me to the man you bought me from, and then I bit them both. Now, what’s your news?’
‘There’s not quite so much biting in our story,’ said Cyril regretfully; ‘in fact, there isn’t any. Father’s gone to Manchuria, and Mother and The Lamb have gone to Madeira because Mother was ill, and don’t I just wish that they were both safe home again.’
Merely from habit, the Sand-fairy began to blow itself out, but it stopped short suddenly.
‘I forgot,’ it said; ‘I can’t give you any more wishes.’
‘No—but look here,’ said Cyril, ‘couldn’t we call in old Nurse and get her to say SHE wishes they were safe home. I’m sure she does.’
‘No go,’ said the Psammead. ‘It’s just the same as your wishing yourself if you get some one else to wish for you. It won’t act.’
‘But it did yesterday—with the man in the shop,’ said Robert.
‘Ah yes,’ said the creature, ‘but you didn’t ASK him to wish, and you didn’t know what would happen if he did. That can’t be done again. It’s played out.’
‘Then you can’t help us at all,’ said Jane; ‘oh—I did think you could do something; I’ve been thinking about it ever since we saved your life yesterday. I thought you’d be certain to be able to fetch back Father, even if you couldn’t manage Mother.’
And Jane began to cry.
‘Now DON’T,’ said the Psammead hastily; ‘you know how it always upsets me if you cry. I can’t feel safe a moment. Look here; you must have some new kind of charm.’
‘That’s easier said than done.’
‘Not a bit of it,’ said the creature; ‘there’s one of the strongest charms in the world not a stone’s throw from where you bought me yesterday. The man that I bit
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