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

speak of impossible people. Well, now she knew what they were like.

Summer twilight had melted into summer moonlight. The shadows of the Ugly-Wuglies on the white road were much more horrible than their more solid selves. Mabel wished it had been a dark night, and then corrected the wish with a hasty shudder.

Gerald, submitting to a searching interrogatory from the tall-hatted Ugly-Wugly as to his schools, his sports, pastimes, and ambitions, wondered how long the spell would last. The ring seemed to work in sevens. Would these things have seven hours’ life⁠—or fourteen or twenty-one? His mind lost itself in the intricacies of the seven-times table (a teaser at the best of times) and only found itself with a shock when the procession found itself at the gates of the Castle grounds.

Locked⁠—of course.

“You see,” he explained, as the Ugly-Wuglies vainly shook the iron gates with incredible hands; “it’s so very late. There is another way. But you have to climb through a hole.”

“The ladies,” the respectable Ugly-Wugly began objecting; but the ladies with one voice affirmed that they loved adventures. “So frightfully thrilling,” added the one who wore roses.

So they went round by the road, and coming to the hole⁠—it was a little difficult to find in the moonlight, which always disguises the most familiar things⁠—Gerald went first with the bicycle lantern which he had snatched as his pilgrims came out of the yard; the shrinking Mabel followed, and then the Ugly-Wuglies, with hollow rattlings of their wooden limbs against the stone, crept through, and with strange vowel-sounds of general amazement, manly courage, and feminine nervousness, followed the light along the passage through the fern-hung cutting and under the arch.

When they emerged on the moonlit enchantment of the Italian garden a quite intelligible “Oh!” of surprised admiration broke from more than one painted paper lip; and the respectable Ugly-Wugly was understood to say that it must be quite a showplace by George, sir! yes.

Those marble terraces and artfully serpentining gravel walks surely never had echoed to steps so strange. No shadows so wildly unbelievable had, for all its enchantments, ever fallen on those smooth, grey, dewy lawns. Gerald was thinking this, or something like it (what he really thought was, “I bet there never was such ado as this, even here!”), when he saw the statue of Hermes leap from its pedestal and run towards him and his company with all the lively curiosity of a street boy eager to be in at a street fight. He saw, too, that he was the only one who perceived that white advancing presence. And he knew that it was the ring that let him see what by others could not be seen. He slipped it from his finger. Yes; Hermes was on his pedestal, still as the snow man you make in the Christmas holidays. He put the ring on again, and there was Hermes, circling round the group and gazing deep in each unconscious Ugly-Wugly face.

“This seems a very superior hotel,” the tall-hatted Ugly-Wugly was saying; “the grounds are laid out with what you might call taste.”

“We should have to go in by the back door,” said Mabel suddenly. “The front door’s locked at half-past nine.”

A short, stout Ugly-Wugly in a yellow and blue cricket cap, who had hardly spoken, muttered something about an escapade, and about feeling quite young again.

And now they had skirted the marble-edged pool where the goldfish swam and glimmered, and where the great prehistoric beast had come down to bathe and drink. The water flashed white diamonds in the moonlight, and Gerald alone of them all saw that the scaly-plated vast lizard was even now rolling and wallowing there among the lily pads.

They hastened up the steps of the Temple of Flora. The back of it, where no elegant arch opened to the air, was against one of those sheer hills, almost cliffs, that diversified the landscape of that garden. Mabel passed behind the statue of the goddess, fumbled a little, and then Gerald’s lantern, flashing like a searchlight, showed a very high and very narrow doorway: the stone that was the door, and that had closed it, revolved slowly under the touch of Mabel’s fingers.

“This way,” she said, and panted a little. The back of her neck felt cold and goose-fleshy.

“You lead the way, my lad, with the lantern,” said the suburban Ugly-Wugly in his bluff, agreeable way.

“I⁠—I must stay behind to close the door,” said Gerald.

“The Princess can do that. We’ll help her,” said the wreathed one with effusion; and Gerald thought her horribly officious.

He insisted gently that he would be the one responsible for the safe shutting of that door.

“You wouldn’t like me to get into trouble, I’m sure,” he urged; and the Ugly-Wuglies, for the last time kind and reasonable, agreed that this, of all things, they would most deplore.

“You take it,” Gerald urged, pressing the bicycle lamp on the elderly Ugly-Wugly; “you’re the natural leader. Go straight ahead. Are there any steps?” he asked Mabel in a whisper.

“Not forever so long,” she whispered back. “It goes on for ages, and then twists round.”

“Whispering,” said the smallest Ugly-Wugly suddenly, “ain’t manners.”

“He hasn’t any, anyhow,” whispered the lady Ugly-Wugly; “don’t mind him⁠—quite a self-made man,” and squeezed Mabel’s arm with horrible confidential flabbiness.

The respectable Ugly-Wugly leading with the lamp, the others following trustfully, one and all disappeared into that narrow doorway; and Gerald and Mabel standing without, hardly daring to breathe lest a breath should retard the procession, almost sobbed with relief. Prematurely, as it turned out. For suddenly there was a rush and a scuffle inside the passage, and as they strove to close the door the Ugly-Wuglies fiercely pressed to open it again. Whether they saw something in the dark passage that alarmed them, whether they took it into their empty heads that this could not be the back way to any really respectable hotel, or whether a convincing sudden instinct warned them that they were being tricked, Mabel and Gerald