The Enchanted Castle, E. Nesbit [books to read fiction .txt] 📗

they have the sheepskin hearthrugs? Might they have tea in the garden, because they had almost got the stage ready in the dining-room, and Eliza wanted to set tea? Could Mademoiselle lend them any coloured clothes⁠—scarves or dressing-gowns, or anything bright? Yes, Mademoiselle could, and did silk things, surprisingly lovely for a governess to have. Had Mademoiselle any rouge? They had always heard that French ladies⁠—No. Mademoiselle hadn’t and to judge by the colour of her face, Mademoiselle didn’t need it. Did Mademoiselle think the chemist sold rouge⁠—or had she any false hair to spare? At this challenge Mademoiselle’s pale fingers pulled out a dozen hairpins, and down came the loveliest blue-black hair, hanging to her knees in straight, heavy lines.

“No, you terrible infants,” she cried. “I have not the false hair, nor the rouge. And my teeth⁠—you want them also, without doubt?”

She showed them in a laugh.

“I said you were a Princess,” said Mabel, “and now I know. You’re Rapunzel. Do always wear your hair like that! May we have the peacock fans, please, off the mantelpiece, and the things that loop back the curtains, and all the handkerchiefs you’ve got?”

Mademoiselle denied them nothing. They had the fans and the handkerchiefs and some large sheets of expensive drawing-paper out of the school cupboard, and Mademoiselle’s best sable paintbrush and her paintbox.

“Who would have thought,” murmured Gerald, pensively sucking the brush and gazing at the paper mask he had just painted, “that she was such a brick in disguise? I wonder why crimson lake always tastes just like Liebig’s Extract.”

Everything was pleasant that day somehow. There are some days like that, you know, when everything goes well from the very beginning; all the things you want are in their places, nobody misunderstands you, and all that you do turns out admirably. How different from those other days which we all know too well, when your shoelace breaks, your comb is mislaid, your brush spins on its back on the floor and lands under the bed where you can’t get at it⁠—you drop the soap, your buttons come off, an eyelash gets into your eye, you have used your last clean handkerchief, your collar is frayed at the edge and cuts your neck, and at the very last moment your suspender breaks, and there is no string. On such a day as this you are naturally late for breakfast, and everyone thinks you did it on purpose. And the day goes on and on, getting worse and worse⁠—you mislay your exercise-book, you drop your arithmetic in the mud, your pencil breaks, and when you open your knife to sharpen the pencil you split your nail. On such a day you jam your thumb in doors, and muddle the messages you are sent on by grownups. You upset your tea, and your bread-and-butter won’t hold together for a moment. And when at last you get to bed⁠—usually in disgrace⁠—it is no comfort at all to you to know that not a single bit of it is your own fault.

This day was not one of those days, as you will have noticed. Even the tea in the garden⁠—there was a bricked bit by a rockery that made a steady floor for the tea-table⁠—was most delightful, though the thoughts of four out of the five were busy with the coming play, and the fifth had thoughts of her own that had had nothing to do with tea or acting.

Then there was an interval of slamming doors, interesting silences, feet that flew up and down stairs.

It was still good daylight when the dinner-bell rang the signal had been agreed upon at teatime, and carefully explained to Eliza. Mademoiselle laid down her book and passed out of the sunset-yellowed hall into the faint yellow gaslight of the dining-room. The giggling Eliza held the door open before her, and followed her in. The shutters had been closed⁠—streaks of daylight showed above and below them. The green-and-black tablecloths of the school dining-tables were supported on the clothesline from the backyard. The line sagged in a graceful curve, but it answered its purpose of supporting the curtains which concealed that part of the room which was the stage.

Rows of chairs had been placed across the other end of the room⁠—all the chairs in the house, as it seemed⁠—and Mademoiselle started violently when she saw that fully half a dozen of these chairs were occupied. And by the queerest people, too⁠—an old woman with a poke bonnet tied under her chin with a red handkerchief, a lady in a large straw hat wreathed in flowers and the oddest hands that stuck out over the chair in front of her, several men with strange, clumsy figures, and all with hats on.

“But,” whispered Mademoiselle, through the chinks of the tablecloths, “you have then invited other friends? You should have asked me, my children.”

Laughter and something like a “hurrah” answered her from behind the folds of the curtaining tablecloths.

“All right, Mademoiselle Rapunzel,” cried Mabel; “turn the gas up. It’s only part of the entertainment.”

Eliza, still giggling, pushed through the lines of chairs, knocking off the hat of one of the visitors as she did so, and turned up the three incandescent burners.

Mademoiselle looked at the figure seated nearest to her, stooped to look more closely, half laughed, quite screamed, and sat down suddenly.

“Oh!” she cried, “they are not alive!”

Eliza, with a much louder scream, had found out the same thing and announced it differently. “They ain’t got no insides,” said she. The seven members of the audience seated among the wilderness of chairs had, indeed, no insides to speak of. Their bodies were bolsters and rolled-up blankets, their spines were broom-handles, and their arm and leg bones were hockey sticks and umbrellas. Their shoulders were the wooden crosspieces that Mademoiselle used for keeping her jackets in shape; their hands were gloves stuffed out with handkerchiefs; and their faces were the paper masks painted in the afternoon by the untutored brush of Gerald, tied