The House of Arden · Chapter 10 (2/2)

The moat, they found, was fed by a stream that came across the field from Arden Knoll and entered the moat at the northeast corner, leaving it at the corner that was in the southwest. They followed the stream, and it was not till they had got quite into the middle of the field, and well away from the castle, that they saw how very beautiful the castle really was. It was quite perfect⁠—no crumbled arches, no broken pillars, no shattered, battered walls.

“Oh,” said Edred, “how beautiful it is! How glad I am that we’ve got a castle like this!”

“Our castle isn’t like this,” said Elfrida.

“No; but it shall be, when we’ve found the treasure. You’ve got the two film rolls all right?”

“Yes,” said Elfrida, who had got them in a great unwieldy pocket that was hanging and banging against her legs under the full skirt. “Oh, look! Where’s the river? It stops short!”

It certainly seemed to. They were walking beside it, and it ran swiftly⁠—looking like a steel-grey ribbon on the green cloth of the field⁠—and halfway across the field it did stop short; there wasn’t any more of it⁠—as though the ribbon had been snipped off by a giant pair of scissors, and the rest of it rolled up and put by safely somewhere out of the way.

“My hat!” said Edred; “it does stop short; and no mistake.” Curiosity pricked him, and he started running. They both ran. They ran to the spot where the giant scissors seemed to have snipped off the stream, and when they got there they found that the stream seemed to have got tired of running aboveground, and without any warning at all, any sloping of its bed, or any deepening of its banks, plunged straight down into the earth through a hole not eight feet across.

They stood fascinated, watching the water as it shot over the edge of the hole, like a steel band on a driving-wheel, smooth and shining, and moving so swiftly that it hardly seemed to move at all. It was Edred who roused himself to say, “I could watch it forever. But we’ll have it back; we’ll have it back. Come along; let’s go and see where it comes from.”

“Let’s photograph this place first,” said Elfrida, “so as to know, you know.” And the Brownie clicked twice.

Then they retraced their steps beside the stream and round two sides of the moat and across the field to Arden Knoll, and there⁠—oh, wonderful to see!⁠—the stream came straight out of the Knoll at the part where it joined on to the rest of the world⁠—came out under a rough, low arch of stone that lay close against the very lip of the water.

“So that’s where it came from and that’s where it goes to,” said Elfrida. “I wonder what became of it, and why it isn’t at Arden now?”

“We’ll bring it back,” said Edred firmly⁠—“when we find the treasure.”

And again the Brownie clicked.

“And we’ll make the castle like it is now,” said Elfrida. “Come on; let’s photograph it.”

So they went back, and they photographed the castle. They photographed it from the north and the south and the east and the west, and the northeast and the southeast, and the north-north-west⁠—and all the rest of the points of the compass that I could easily tell you if I liked; but why be wearisome and instructive?

And they went back across the hollow-echoing drawbridge, and past the soldier, who had now polished his helmet to his complete satisfaction and was wearing it.

There was a brief and ardent conference on the drawbridge; the subject of it, breakfast. Edred wanted to stay; he was curious to see what sort of breakfast people had in the country in James the First’s time, Elfrida wanted to get back to 1908, and the certainty of eggs and bacon.

“If we stay here we shall only be dragged into some new adventure,” she urged, “I know we shall. I never in my life knew such a place as history for adventures to happen in. And I’m tired, besides. Oh, Edred, do come along!”

“I believe it’s ducks,” said Edred, and he sniffed questioningly; “it smells like onion stuffing.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” said Elfrida; “that’s for dinner, most likely. I expect breakfast for us would be bread and water. You’d find we’d done something wrong, as likely as not. Oh, come along, do, before we get punished for it. Besides, don’t you want to know whether what Cousin Richard said about the cricket was right?”

“Well, yes,” said Edred, “and we can always come back here, can’t we?”

“Of course we can,” Elfrida said eagerly. “Oh, come on.”

So they climbed up to the twisty-twiny, corkscrew staircase, and found the door of the room where they had slept under the wonderful white coverlets that now were coats. Then they stood still and looked at each other, with a sudden shock.

“How are we to get back?” was the unspoken question that trembled on each lip.

The magic white coats cuddled close round their necks. There was, somehow, comfort and confidence in the soft, friendly touch of that magic fur. When you are wearing that sort of coat, it is quite impossible to feel that everything will not come perfectly right the moment you really, earnestly, and thoroughly wish that it should come right.

“Our clothes,” said Elfrida.

“Oh, yes, of course,” said Edred, “I was forgetting.”

“You may as well go on forgetting,” said his sister, “because the clothes aren’t here. They’re the other side of that twisty-twiny, inside-out, upside-down shakiness that turned the attic into the tower. I suppose the tower would turn back into the attic if we could only start that shaky upside-downness going⁠—wrong way before, you know.”

“I suppose it would,” said Edred, stopping-short, with his fingers between the buttons of his doublet. “Hallo! What’s this?”

He pulled out a folded paper.

“It’s the thing about cricket that Cousin Richard gave you. Don’t bother about that now. I want to get back. I suppose we ought to make some poetry.”

But Edred pulled out the paper and unfolded it.

“It might vanish, you know,” he said, “or get stuck here, and when we got home we should find it gone when we came to look for it. Let’s just see what he says Kent did make.”

He straightened out the paper, looked at it, looked again, and held it out with a sudden arm’s-length gesture.

“Look at that,” he said. “If that’s true, Richard has dreamed our times, and no mistake. And, what’s more, he’s brought things back here out of our times.”

Elfrida took the paper and looked at it, and her mouth dropped open. “If it’s true?” said she. “But it must be true!” The paper almost fell from her hand, for it was a bill from Gamage’s for three ships’ guns, a compass, and a half-dozen flags⁠—and the bill was made out to Mr. R. D. Arden, 117, Laurie Grove, New Cross, London, S.E. On the other side was the pencilled record of the runs made by Kent the previous Thursday.

“I say,” said Elfrida, and was going on to say I don’t know what clever and interesting things, when she felt the fur coat creep and wriggle all through its soft length, and along its soft width, and no wriggle that ever was wriggled expressed so completely “Danger! danger! danger! You’d better get off while you can⁠—while you can.” A quite violent ruffling of the fur round the neck of her coat said, as plain as it could speak, “Don’t stop to jaw. Go now⁠—now⁠—now!”

When you say a lady is a “true daughter of Eve” you mean that she is inquisitive. Elfrida was enough Eve’s daughter to scurry to the window and look out.

A thrill ran right down her backbone and ended in an empty feeling at the ends of her fingers and feet.

“Soldiers!” she cried, “And they’re after us⁠—I know they are.”

The fur coat knew it too, if knowledge can be expressed by wriggling.

“Oh, and they’re pulling up the drawbridge! What for?” said Edred, who had come to the window too. “And, I say, doesn’t the portcullis look guillotinish when it comes down like that?”

Through the window one looked straight down on to the drawbridge, and as the tower stuck out beyond the gate, its side window gave an excellent view of the slowly descending portcullis.

“I say,” said Elfrida, “my fluffy coat says ‘Go!’ Doesn’t yours?”

“It would if I’d listen to it,” said Edred carelessly.

The soldiers were quite near now⁠—so near that Elfrida could see how fierce they looked. And she knew that they were the same soldiers who had hammered so loud and so hard at the door of Arden House, in Soho. They must have ridden all night. So she screwed her mind up to make poetry, just as you screw your muscles up to jump a gate or run a hundred yards. And almost before she knew that she was screwing it up at all the screw had acted and she had screwed out a piece of Mouldiwarp poetry and was saying it aloud⁠—

“Dear Mouldiwarp, since Cousin Dick

Buys his beautiful flags from Gamage’s,

Take us away, and take us quick,

Before the soldiers do us any damages.”

And the moment she had said it, the white magic coats grew up and grew down and wrapped the children up as tight and as soft as ever a silkworm wrapped itself when it was tired of being a silkworm and entered into its cocoon, as the first step towards being a person with wings.

Can you imagine what it would be like to have lovely liquid sleep emptied on you by the warm tubful? That is what it felt like inside the white, wonderful cocoons. The children knew that the tower was turning wrong way up and inside out, but it didn’t matter a bit. Sleep was raining down on them in magic showers⁠—no; it was closing on them, closer and closer, nearer and nearer, soft, delicious layers of warm delight. A soft, humming sound was in their ears, like the sound of bees when you push through a bed of Canterbury bells, and the next thing that happened was that they came out of the past into the present with a sort of snap of light and a twist of sound. It was like coming out of a railway tunnel into daylight.

The magic coverlet-coat-cocoons had even saved them the trouble of changing into their own clothes, for they found that the stiff, heavy clothes had gone, and they were dressed in the little ordinary things that they had always been used to.

“And now,” said Elfrida, “let’s have another look at that Gamage paper, if it hasn’t disappeared. I expect it has though.”

But it hadn’t.

“I should like to meet Dick again,” said Edred, as they went downstairs. “He was much the jolliest boy I ever met.”

“Perhaps we shall,” Elfrida said hopefully. “You see he does come into our times. I expect that New Cross time he stayed quite a long while, like we did when we went to Gunpowder Plot times. Or we might go back there, a little later, when the Gunpowder Plot has all died away and been forgotten.”

“It isn’t forgotten yet,” said Edred, “and it’s three hundred years ago. Now let’s develop our films; I’m not at all sure about those films. You see, we took the films with us, and of course we’ve brought them back, but the picture that’s on the films⁠—we didn’t take that with us. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if the films are all blank.”

“It’s very, very clever of you to think of it,” said Elfrida respectfully; “but I do hope it’s a perfectly silly idea of yours. Let’s ask Mrs. Honeysett if we may use the old room she said used to be the still-room to develop them in. It’ll be a ripping darkroom when the shutters are up.”

“Course you may,” said Mrs. Honeysett. “Yes; an’ I’ll carry you in a couple of pails of water. The floor’s stone; so it won’t matter if you do slop a bit. You pump, my lord, and I’ll hold the pails.”

“Why was that part of the house let to go all dirty and cobwebby?” asked Elfrida, when the hoarse voice of the pump had ceased to be heard.

“It’s always been so,” said Mrs. Honeysett. “I couldn’t take upon me to clear up without Miss Edith’s orders. Not but what my fingers itch to be at it with a broom and a scrubbing brush.”

“But why?” Elfrida persisted.

“Oh, it’s one of them old, ancient tales,” said Mrs. Honeysett. “Old Beale could tell you, if anyone could.”

“We’ll go down to old Beale’s,” said Edred decidedly, “as soon as we’ve developed our pictures of the castle⁠—if there are any pictures,” he added.

“You never can tell with them photo-machines, can you?” said Mrs. Honeysett sympathetically. “My husband’s cousin’s wife was took, with all her family, by her own back door, and when they come to wash out the picture it turned out they’d took the next door people’s water-butt by mistake, owing to their billy-goat jogging the young man’s elbow that had got the camera. And it wasn’t a bit like any of them.”