The Phoenix and the Carpet, E. Nesbit [best summer reads .TXT] 📗

their hiding-place and out through the door before the two ladies had done looking out of the trap-door on to the empty leads.

Robert and Jane tiptoed down the stairs—one flight, two flights. Then they looked over the banisters. Horror! a servant was coming up with a loaded scuttle.

The children with one consent crept swiftly through the first open door.

The room was a study, calm and gentlemanly, with rows of books, a writing table, and a pair of embroidered slippers warming themselves in the fender. The children hid behind the window-curtains. As they passed the table they saw on it a missionary-box with its bottom label torn off, open and empty.

‘Oh, how awful!’ whispered Jane. ‘We shall never get away alive.’

‘Hush!’ said Robert, not a moment too soon, for there were steps on the stairs, and next instant the two ladies came into the room. They did not see the children, but they saw the empty missionary box.

‘I knew it,’ said one. ‘Selina, it WAS a gang. I was certain of it from the first. The children were not mad. They were sent to distract our attention while their confederates robbed the house.’

‘I am afraid you are right,’ said Selina; ‘and WHERE ARE THEY NOW?’

‘Downstairs, no doubt, collecting the silver milk-jug and sugar-basin and the punch-ladle that was Uncle Joe’s, and Aunt Jerusha’s teaspoons. I shall go down.’

‘Oh, don’t be so rash and heroic,’ said Selina. ‘Amelia, we must call the police from the window. Lock the door. I WILL—I will—’

The words ended in a yell as Selina, rushing to the window, came face to face with the hidden children.

‘Oh, don’t!’ said Jane; ‘how can you be so unkind? We AREN’T burglars, and we haven’t any gang, and we didn’t open your missionary-box. We opened our own once, but we didn’t have to use the money, so our consciences made us put it back and—DON’T! Oh, I wish you wouldn’t—’

Miss Selina had seized Jane and Miss Amelia captured Robert. The children found themselves held fast by strong, slim hands, pink at the wrists and white at the knuckles.

‘We’ve got YOU, at any rate,’ said Miss Amelia. ‘Selina, your captive is smaller than mine. You open the window at once and call “Murder!” as loud as you can.

Selina obeyed; but when she had opened the window, instead of calling ‘Murder!’ she called ‘Septimus!’ because at that very moment she saw her nephew coming in at the gate.

In another minute he had let himself in with his latch-key and had mounted the stairs. As he came into the room Jane and Robert each uttered a shriek of joy so loud and so sudden that the ladies leaped with surprise, and nearly let them go.

‘It’s our own clergyman,’ cried Jane.

‘Don’t you remember us?’ asked Robert. ‘You married our burglar for us—don’t you remember?’

‘I KNEW it was a gang,’ said Amelia. ‘Septimus, these abandoned children are members of a desperate burgling gang who are robbing the house. They have already forced the missionary-box and purloined its contents.’

The Reverend Septimus passed his hand wearily over his brow.

‘I feel a little faint,’ he said, ‘running upstairs so quickly.’

‘We never touched the beastly box,’ said Robert.

‘Then your confederates did,’ said Miss Selina.

‘No, no,’ said the curate, hastily. ‘I opened the box myself. This morning I found I had not enough small change for the Mothers’ Independent Unity Measles and Croup Insurance payments. I suppose this is NOT a dream, is it?’

‘Dream? No, indeed. Search the house. I insist upon it.’

The curate, still pale and trembling, searched the house, which, of course, was blamelessly free of burglars.

When he came back he sank wearily into his chair.

‘Aren’t you going to let us go?’ asked Robert, with furious indignation, for there is something in being held by a strong lady that sets the blood of a boy boiling in his veins with anger and despair. ‘We’ve never done anything to you. It’s all the carpet. It dropped us on the leads. WE couldn’t help it. You know how it carried you over to the island, and you had to marry the burglar to the cook.’

‘Oh, my head!’ said the curate.

‘Never mind your head just now,’ said Robert; ‘try to be honest and honourable, and do your duty in that state of life!’

‘This is a judgement on me for something, I suppose,’ said the Reverend Septimus, wearily, ‘but I really cannot at the moment remember what.’

‘Send for the police,’ said Miss Selina.

‘Send for a doctor,’ said the curate.

‘Do you think they ARE mad, then,’ said Miss Amelia.

‘I think I am,’ said the curate.

Jane had been crying ever since her capture. Now she said— ‘You aren’t now, but perhaps you will be, if—And it would serve you jolly well right, too.’

‘Aunt Selina,’ said the curate, ‘and Aunt Amelia, believe me, this is only an insane dream. You will realize it soon. It has happened to me before. But do not let us be unjust, even in a dream. Do not hold the children; they have done no harm. As I said before, it was I who opened the box.’

The strong, bony hands unwillingly loosened their grasp. Robert shook himself and stood in sulky resentment. But Jane ran to the curate and embraced him so suddenly that he had not time to defend himself.

‘You’re a dear,’ she said. ‘It IS like a dream just at first, but you get used to it. Now DO let us go. There’s a good, kind, honourable clergyman.’

‘I don’t know,’ said the Reverend Septimus; ‘it’s a difficult problem. It is such a very unusual dream. Perhaps it’s only a sort of other life—quite real enough for you to be mad in. And if you’re mad, there might be a dream-asylum where you’d be kindly treated, and in time restored, cured, to your sorrowing relatives. It is very hard to see your duty plainly, even in ordinary life, and these dream-circumstances are so complicated—’

‘If it’s a dream,’ said Robert, ‘you will wake up directly, and then you’d be sorry if you’d sent us into a dream-asylum, because you might never get into the same dream again and let us out, and so we might stay there for ever, and then what about our sorrowing relatives who aren’t in the dreams at all?’

But all the curate could now say was, ‘Oh, my head!’

And Jane and Robert felt quite ill with helplessness and hopelessness. A really conscientious curate is a very difficult thing to manage.

And then, just as the hopelessness