The House of Arden, E. Nesbit [best historical fiction books of all time TXT] 📗

of you. There was always a boy and a girl⁠—a boy and a girl.” She had a sweet, patient face, with large, pale blue eyes that twinkled when she smiled, and she almost always smiled when she looked at the children.

Oh, but it was fine, to unpack one’s own box⁠—to lay out one’s clothes in long, cedarwood drawers, fronted with curved polished mahogany; to draw back the neat muslin blinds from lattice-paned windows that had always been Arden windows; to look out, as so many Ardens must have done, over land that, as far as one could see, had belonged to one’s family in old days. That it no longer belonged hardly mattered at all to the romance of hearts only ten and twelve years old.

Then to go down one’s own shallow, polished stairs (where portraits of old Ardens hung on the wall), and to find the cloth laid for dinner in one’s own wainscoted parlour, laid for two. I think it was nice of Edred to say, the moment Mrs. Honeysett had helped them to toad-in-the-hole and left them to eat it⁠—

“May I pass you some potatoes, Lady Arden?”

Elfrida giggled happily.

The parlour was furnished with the kind of furniture they knew and loved. It had a long, low window that showed the long, narrow garden outside. The walls were panelled with wood, browny-grey under its polish.

“Oh,” said Elfrida, “there must be secret panels here.”

And though Edred said, “Secret fiddlesticks!” he in his heart felt that she was right.

After dinner, “May we explore?” Elfrida asked, and Mrs. Honeysett, most charming of women, answered heartily⁠—

“Why not? It’s all his own, bless his dear heart.”

So they explored.

The house was much bigger than they had found it on that wonderful first day when they had acted the part of burglars. There was a door covered with faded green baize. Mrs. Honeysett pointed it out to them with, “Don’t you think this is all: there’s the other house beyond;” and at the other side of that door there was, indeed, the other house.

The house they had already seen was neat, orderly, “bees-whacked,” as Mrs. Honeysett said, till every bit of furniture shone like a mirror or a fond hope. But beyond the baize door there were shadows, there was dust, windows draped in cobwebs, before which hung curtains tattered and faded, drooping from their poles like the old banners that, slowly rotting in great cathedrals, sway in the quiet air where no wind is⁠—stirred, perhaps, by the breath of Fame’s invisible trumpet to the air of old splendours and glories.

The carpets lay in rags on the floors; on the furniture the dust lay thick, and on the boards of corridor and staircase; on the four-post beds in the bedchambers the hangings hung dusty and rusty⁠—the quilts showed the holes eaten by moths and mice. In one room a cradle of carved oak still had a coverlet of tattered silk dragging from it. From the great kitchen-hearth, where no fire had been this very long time, yet where still the ashes of the last fire lay grey and white, a chill air came. The place smelt damp and felt⁠—

“Do you think it’s haunted?” Elfrida asked.

“Rot!” was her brother’s brief reply, and they went on.

They found long, narrow corridors hung crookedly with old, black-framed prints, which drooped cobwebs, like grey-draped crape. They found rooms with floors of grey, uneven oak, and fireplaces in whose grates lay old soot and the broken nests of starlings hatched very long ago.

Edred’s handkerchief⁠—always a rag-of-all-work⁠—rubbed a space in one of the windows, and they looked out over the swelling downs. This part of the house was not built within the castle, that was plain.

When they had opened every door and looked at every roomful of decayed splendour they went out and round. Then they saw that this was a wing built right out of the castle⁠—a wing with squarish windows, with carved drip-stones. All the windows were yellow as parchment, with the inner veil laid on them by Time and the spider. The ivy grew thick round the windows, almost hiding some of them altogether.

“Oh!” cried Elfrida, throwing herself down on the turf, “it’s too good to be true. I can’t believe it.”

“What I can’t believe,” said Edred, doing likewise, “is that precious mole.”

“But we saw it,” said Elfrida; “you can’t help believing things when you’ve seen them.”

“I can,” said Edred, superior. “You remember the scarlet toadstools in Hereward. Suppose those peppermint creams were enchanted⁠—to make us dream things.”

“They were good,” said Elfrida. “I say!”

“Well?”

“Have you made up any poetry to call the mole with?”

“Have you?”

“No; I’ve tried, though.”

“I’ve tried. And I’ve done it.”

“Oh, Edred, you are clever. Do say it.”

“If I do, do you think the mole will come?”

“Of course it will.”

“Well,” said Edred slowly, “of course I want to find the treasure and all that. But I don’t believe in it. It isn’t likely⁠—that’s what I think. Now is it likely?”

“Unlikelier things happened in ‘The Amulet,’ ” said Elfrida.

“Ah,” said Edred, “that’s a story.”

“The mole said we were in a story. I say, Edred, do say your poetry.”

Edred slowly said it⁠—

“ ‘Mole, mole,
Come out of your hole;
I know you’re blind,
But I don’t mind.’ ”

Elfrida looked eagerly round her. There was the short turf; the castle walls, ivied and grey, rose high above her; pigeons circled overhead, and in the arches of the windows and on the roof of the house they perched, preening their bright feathers or telling each other, “Coo, coo; cooroo, cooroo,” whatever that may mean. But there was no mole⁠—not a hint or a dream or idea of a mole.

“Edred,” said his sister.

“Well?”

“Did you really make that up? Don’t be cross, but I do think I’ve heard something like it before.”

“I⁠—I adopted it,” said Edred.

“?” said Elfrida.

“Haven’t you seen it in books, ‘Adopted from the French’? I altered it.”

“I don’t believe that’ll do. How much did you alter? What’s the real poetry like?”

“ ‘The mole, the mole,
He lives in a hole.
The mole is blind;
I don’t mind,’ ”

said Edred sulkily. “Auntie