New Treasure Seekers; Or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune
Oswald thought he might have tried.
"It wasn't worth blacking your face all over just for that," he said.
But Mrs. Red House laughed very much and said it was a lovely paper, and
told _her_ all she wanted to know about 1066.
Then we went into the garden again and ran races, and Mrs. Red House
held all our spectacles for us and cheered us on. She said she was the
Patent Automatic Cheering Winning-post. We do like her.
Lunch was the glorious end of the Morden House Antiquarian Society and
Field Club's Field Day. But after lunch was the beginning of a real
adventure such as real antiquarians hardly ever get. This will be
unrolled later. I will finish with some French out of a newspaper.
Albert's uncle told it me, so I know it is right. Any of your own
grown-ups will tell you what it means.
_Au prochain numero je vous promets des emotions._
* * * * *
PS.--In case your grown-ups can't be bothered, "_emotions_" mean
sensation, I believe.
_THE INTREPID EXPLORER AND HIS LIEUTENANT_
WE had spectacles to play antiquaries in, and the rims were vaselined to
prevent rust, and it came off on our faces with other kinds of dirt, and
when the antiquary game was over, Mrs. Red House helped us to wash it
off with all the thoroughness of aunts, and far more gentleness.
Then, clean and with our hairs brushed, we were led from the bath-room
to the banqueting hall or dining-room.
It is a very beautiful house. The girls thought it was bare, but Oswald
likes bareness because it leaves more room for games. All the furniture
was of agreeable shapes and colours, and so were all the things on the
table--glasses and dishes and everything. Oswald politely said how nice
everything was.
The lunch was a blissful dream of perfect A.1.-ness. Tongue, and nuts,
and apples, and oranges, and candied fruits, and ginger-wine in tiny
glasses that Noel said were fairy goblets. Everybody drank everybody
else's health--and Noel told Mrs. Red House just how lovely she was,
and he would have paper and pencil and write her a poem for her very
own. I will not put it in here, because Mr. Red House is an author
himself, and he might want to use it in some of his books. And the
writer of these pages has been taught to think of others, and besides I
expect you are jolly well sick of Noel's poetry.
There was no restrainingness about that lunch. As far as a married lady
can possibly be a regular brick, Mrs. Red House is one. And Mr. Red
House is not half bad, and knows how to talk about interesting things
like sieges, and cricket, and foreign postage stamps.
Even poets think of things sometimes, and it was Noel who said directly
he had finished his poetry,
"Have you got a secret staircase? And have you explored your house
properly?"
"Yes--we have," said that well-behaved and unusual lady--Mrs. Red House,
"but _you_ haven't. You may if you like. Go anywhere," she added with
the unexpected magnificence of a really noble heart. "Look at
everything--only don't make hay. Off with you!" or words to that effect.
And the whole of us, with proper thanks, offed with us instantly, in
case she should change her mind.
I will not describe the Red House to you--because perhaps you do not
care about a house having three staircases and more cupboards and odd
corners than we'd ever seen before, and great attics with beams, and
enormous drawers on rollers, let into the wall--and half the rooms not
furnished, and those that were all with old-looking, interesting
furniture. There was something about that furniture that even the
present author can't describe--as though any of it might have secret
drawers or panels--even the chairs. It was all beautiful, and mysterious
in the deepest degree.
When we had been all over the house several times, we thought about the
cellars. There was only one servant in the kitchen (so we saw Mr. and
Mrs. Red House must be poor but honest, like we used to be), and we said
to her--
"How do you do? We've got leave to go wherever we like, and please where
are the cellars, and may we go in?"
She was quite nice, though she seemed to think there was an awful lot of
us. People often think this. She said:
"Lor, love a duck--yes, I suppose so," in not ungentle tones, and showed
us.
I don't think we should ever have found the way from the house into the
cellar by ourselves. There was a wide shelf in the scullery with a row
of gentlemanly boots on it that had been cleaned, and on the floor in
front a piece of wood. The general servant--for such indeed she proved
to be--lifted up the wood and opened a little door under the shelf. And
there was the beginning of steps, and the entrance to them was half
trap-door, and half the upright kind--a thing none of us had seen
before.
She gave us a candle-end, and we pressed forward to the dark unknown.
The stair was of stone, arched overhead like churches--and it twisted
most unlike other cellar stairs. And when we got down it was all arched
like vaults, very cobwebby.
"Just the place for crimes," said Dicky. There was a beer cellar, and a
wine cellar with bins, and a keeping cellar with hooks in the ceiling
and stone shelves--just right for venison pasties and haunches of the
same swift animal.
Then we opened a door and there was a cellar with a well in it.
"To throw bodies down, no doubt," Oswald explained.
They were cellars full of glory, and passages leading from one to the
other like the Inquisition, and I wish ours at home were like them.
There was a pile of beer barrels in the largest cellar, and it was H.O.
who said, "Why not play 'King of the Castle?'"
So we did. We had a most refreshing game. It was exactly like Denny to
be the one who slipped down behind the barrels, and did not break a
single one of all his legs or arms.
"No," he cried, in answer to our anxious inquiries. "I'm not hurt a
bit, but the wall here feels soft--at least not soft--but it doesn't
scratch your nails like stone does, so perhaps it's the door of a secret
dungeon or something like that."
"Good old Dentist!" replied Oswald, who always likes Denny to have ideas
of his own, because it was us who taught him the folly of
white-mousishness.
"It might be," he went on, "but these barrels are as heavy as lead, and
much more awkward to collar hold of."
"Couldn't we get in some other way?" Alice said. "There ought to be a
subterranean passage. I expect there is if we only knew."
Oswald has an enormous geographical bump in his head. He said--
"Look here! That far cellar, where the wall doesn't go quite up to the
roof--that space we made out was under the dining-room--I could creep
under there. I believe it leads into behind this door."
"Get me out! Oh do, do get me out, and let me come!" shouted the
barrel-imprisoned Dentist from the unseen regions near the door.
So we got him out by Oswald lying flat on his front on the top barrel,
and the Dentist clawed himself up by Oswald's hands while the others
kept hold of the boots of the representative of the house of Bastable,
which, of course, Oswald is, whenever Father is not there.
"Come on," cried Oswald, when Denny was at last able to appear, very
cobwebby and black. "Give us what's left of the matches!"
The others agreed to stand by the barrels and answer our knocking on the
door if we ever got there.
"But I daresay we shall perish on the way," said Oswald hopefully.
So we started. The other cellar was easily found by the ingenious and
geography-bump-headed Oswald. It opened straight on to the moat, and we
think it was a boathouse in middle-aged times.
Denny made a back for Oswald, who led the way, and then he turned round
and hauled up his inexperienced, but rapidly improving, follower on to
the top of the wall that did not go quite up to the roof.
"It is like coal mines," he said, beginning to crawl on hands and knees
over what felt like very prickly beach, "only we've no picks or
shovels."
"And no Sir Humphry Davy safety lamps," said Denny in sadness.
"They wouldn't be any good," said Oswald; "they're only to protect the
hard-working mining men against fire-damp and choke-damp. And there's
none of those kinds here."
"No," said Denny, "the damp here is only just the common kind."
"Well, then," said Oswald, and they crawled a bit further still on
their furtive and unassuming stomachs.
"This is a very glorious adventure. It is, isn't it?" inquired the
Dentist in breathlessness, when the young stomachs of the young
explorers had bitten the dust for some yards further.
"Yes," said Oswald, encouraging the boy, "and it's _your_ find, too," he
added, with admirable fairness and justice, unusual in one so young. "I
only hope we shan't find a mouldering skeleton buried alive behind that
door when we get to it. Come on. What are you stopping for now?" he
added kindly.
"It's--it's only cobwebs in my throat," Denny remarked, and he came on,
though slower than before.
Oswald, with his customary intrepid caution, was leading the way, and he
paused every now and then to strike a match because it was pitch dark,
and at any moment the courageous leader might have tumbled into a well
or a dungeon, or knocked his dauntless nose against something in the
dark.
"It's all right for you," he said to Denny, when he had happened to kick
his follower in the eye. "You've nothing to fear except my boots, and
whatever they do is accidental, and so it doesn't count, but _I_ may be
going straight into some trap that has been yawning for me for countless
ages."
"I won't come on so fast, thank you," said the Dentist. "I don't think
you've kicked my eye out yet."
So they went on and on, crampedly crawling on what I have mentioned
before, and at last Oswald did not strike the next match carefully
enough, and with the suddenness of a falling star his hands, which, with
his knees, he was crawling on, went over the edge into infinite space,
and his chest alone, catching sharply on the edge of the precipice,
saved him from being hurled to the bottom of it.
"Halt!" he cried, as soon as he had any breath again. But, alas! it was
too late! The Dentist's nose had been too rapid, and had caught up the
boot-heel of the daring leader. This was very annoying to Oswald, and
was not in the least his fault.
"Do keep your nose off my boots half a sec.," he remarked, but not
crossly. "I'll strike a match."
And he did, and by its weird and unscrutatious light looked down into
the precipice.
Its bottom transpired to be not much more than six feet below, so Oswald
turned the other end of himself first, hung by his hands, and dropped
with fearless promptness, uninjured, in another cellar. He then helped
Denny down. The cornery thing Denny happened to fall on could not have
hurt him so much as he said.
The light of the torch, I mean match, now revealed to the two bold and
youthful youths another cellar, with _things_ in it--very dirty
indeed, but of thrilling interest and unusual shapes, but the match went
out before we could see exactly what the things were.
The next match was the last but one, but Oswald was undismayed, whatever
Denny may have been. He lighted it and looked hastily round. There was a
door.
"Bang on that door--over there, silly!" he cried, in cheering accents,
to his trusty lieutenant; "behind that thing that looks like a _chevaux
de frize_."
Denny had never been to Woolwich, and while Oswald was explaining what a
_chevaux de frize_ is, the match burnt his fingers almost to the bone,
and he had to feel his way to the door and hammer on it yourself.
The blows of the others from the other side were deafening.