New Treasure Seekers; Or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune
than any one I know, but he is not a bit of a prig really, when you come
to know him.
When the rash act was done Albert's uncle and his bride went home in a
carriage all by themselves, and then we had the lunch and drank the
health of the bride in real champagne, though Father said we kids must
only have just a taste. I'm sure Oswald, for one, did not want any more;
one taste was quite enough. Champagne is like soda-water with medicine
in it. The sherry we put sugar in once was much more decent.
Then Miss Ashleigh--I mean Mrs. Albert's uncle--went away and took off
her white dress and came back looking much warmer. Dora heard the
housemaid say afterwards that the cook had stopped the bride on the
stairs with "a basin of hot soup, that would take no denial, because the
bride, poor dear young thing, not a bite or sup had passed her lips that
day." We understood then why she had looked so unhappy. But Albert's
uncle had had a jolly good breakfast--fish and eggs and bacon and three
goes of marmalade. So it was not hunger made him sad. Perhaps he was
thinking what a lot of money it cost to be married and go to Rome.
A little before the bride went to change, H.O. got up and reached his
brown-paper parcel from under the sideboard and sneaked out. We thought
he might have let us see it given, whatever it was. And Dora said she
had understood he meant to; but it was his secret.
The bride went away looking quite comfy in a furry cloak, and Albert's
uncle cheered up at the last and threw off the burden of his cares and
made a joke. I forget what it was; it wasn't a very good one, but it
showed he was trying to make the best of things.
Then the Bridal Sufferers drove away, with the luggage on a cart--heaps
and heaps of it, and we all cheered and threw rice and slippers. Mrs.
Ashleigh and some other old ladies cried.
And then every one said, "What a pretty wedding!" and began to go. And
when our waggonette came round we all began to get in. And suddenly
Father said--
"Where's H.O.?" And we looked round. He was in absence.
"Fetch him along sharp--some of you," Father said; "I don't want to keep
the horses standing here in the cold all day."
So Oswald and Dicky went to fetch him along. We thought he might have
wandered back to what was left of the lunch--for he is young and he does
not always know better. But he was not there, and Oswald did not even
take a crystallised fruit in passing. He might easily have done this,
and no one would have minded, so it would not have been wrong. But it
would have been ungentlemanly. Dicky did not either. H.O. was not there.
We went into the other rooms, even the one the old ladies were crying
in, but of course we begged their pardons. And at last into the kitchen,
where the servants were smart with white bows and just sitting down to
their dinner, and Dicky said--
"I say, cookie love, have you seen H.O.?"
"Don't come here with your imperence!" the cook said, but she was
pleased with Dicky's unmeaning compliment all the same.
"_I_ see him," said the housemaid. "He was colloguing with the butcher
in the yard a bit since. He'd got a brown-paper parcel. Perhaps he got a
lift home."
So we went and told Father, and about the white present in the parcel.
"I expect he was ashamed to give it after all," Oswald said, "so he
hooked off home with it."
And we got into the wagonette.
"It wasn't a present, though," Dora said; "it was a different kind of
surprise--but it really is a secret."
Our good Father did not command her to betray her young brother.
But when we got home H.O. wasn't there. Mrs. Pettigrew hadn't seen him,
and he was nowhere about. Father biked back to the Cedars to see if he'd
turned up. No. Then all the gentlemen turned out to look for him through
the length and breadth of the land.
"He's too old to be stolen by gipsies," Alice said.
"And too ugly," said Dicky.
"Oh _don't_!" said both the girls; "and now when he's lost, too!"
We had looked for a long time before Mrs. Pettigrew came in with a
parcel she said the butcher had left. It was not addressed, but we knew
it was H.O.'s, because of the label on the paper from the shop where
Father gets his shirts. Father opened it at once.
Inside the parcel we found H.O.'s boots and braces, his best hat and his
chest-protector. And Oswald felt as if we had found his skeleton.
"Any row with any of you?" Father asked. But there hadn't been any.
"Was he worried about anything? Done anything wrong, and afraid to own
up?"
We turned cold, for we knew what he meant. That parcel was so horribly
like the lady's hat and gloves that she takes off on the seashore and
leaves with a letter saying it has come to this.
"_No_, _no_, NO, NO!" we all said. "He was perfectly jolly all the
morning."
Then suddenly Dicky leaned on the table and one of H.O.'s boots toppled
over, and there was something white inside. It was a letter. H.O. must
have written it before we left home. It said--
"DEAR FATHER AND EVERY ONE,--I am going to be a
Clown. When I am rich and reveared I will come
back rolling.
"Your affectionate son,
"HORACE OCTAVIUS BASTABLE."
"Rolling?" Father said.
"He means rolling in money," Alice said. Oswald noticed that every one
round the table where H.O.'s boots were dignifiedly respected as they
lay, was a horrid pale colour, like when the salt is thrown into
snapdragons.
"Oh dear!" Dora cried, "that was it. He asked me to make him a clown's
dress and keep it deeply secret. He said he wanted to surprise Aunt
Margaret and Albert's uncle. And I didn't think it was wrong," said
Dora, screwing up her face; she then added, "Oh dear, oh dear, oh, oh!"
and with these concluding remarks she began to howl.
Father thumped her on the back in an absent yet kind way.
"But where's he gone?" he said, not to any one in particular. "I saw the
butcher; he said H.O. asked him to take a parcel home and went back
round the Cedars."
Here Dicky coughed and said--
"I didn't think he meant anything, but the day after Noel was talking
about singing ballads in Rome, and getting poet's lyres given him, H.O.
did say if Noel had been really keen on the Roman lyres and things he
could easily have been a stowaway, and gone unknown."
"A stowaway!" said my Father, sitting down suddenly and hard.
"In Aunt Margaret's big dress basket--the one she let him hide in when
we had hide-and-seek there. He talked a lot about it after Noel had said
that about the lyres--and the Italians being so poetical, you know. You
remember that day we had toffee."
My Father is prompt and decisive in action, so is his eldest son.
"I'm off to the Cedars," he said.
"Do let me come, Father," said the decisive son. "You may want to send a
message."
So in a moment Father was on his bike and Oswald on the step--a
dangerous but delightful spot--and off to the Cedars.
"Have your teas; and _don't_ any more of you get lost, and don't sit up
if we're late," Father howled to them as we rushed away. How glad then
the thoughtful Oswald was that he was the eldest. It was very cold in
the dusk on the bicycle, but Oswald did not complain.
At the Cedars my father explained in a few manly but well-chosen words,
and the apartment of the dear departed bride was searched.
"Because," said my father, "if H.O. really was little ass enough to get
into that basket, he must have turned out something to make room for
himself."
Sure enough, when they came to look, there was a great bundle rolled in
a sheet under the bed--all lace things and petticoats and ribbons and
dressing-gowns and ladies' flummery.
"If you will put the things in something else, I'll catch the express to
Dover and take it with me," Father said to Mrs. Ashleigh; and while she
packed the things he explained to some of the crying old ladies who had
been unable to leave off, how sorry he was that a son of his--but you
know the sort of thing.
Oswald said: "Father, I wish you'd let me come too. I won't be a bit of
trouble."
Perhaps it was partly because my Father didn't want to let me walk home
in the dark, and he didn't want to worry the Ashleighs any more by
asking them to send me home. He said this was why, but I hope it was his
loving wish to have his prompt son, so like himself in his decisiveness,
with him.
We went.
It was an anxious journey. We knew how far from pleased the bride would
be to find no dressing-gowns and ribbons, but only H.O. crying and cross
and dirty, as likely as not, when she opened the basket at the hotel at
Dover.
Father smoked to pass the time, but Oswald had not so much as a
peppermint or a bit of Spanish liquorice to help him through the
journey. Yet he bore up.
When we got out at Dover there were Mr. and Mrs. Albert's uncle on the
platform.
"Hullo," said Albert's uncle. "What's up? Nothing wrong at home, I
hope."
"We've only lost H.O.," said my father. "You don't happen to have him
with you?"
"No; but you're joking," said the bride. "We've lost a dress-basket."
_Lost a dress-basket!_ The words struck us dumb, but my father recovered
speech and explained. The bride was very glad when we said we had
brought her ribbons and things, but we stood in anxious gloom, for now
H.O. was indeed lost. The dress-basket might be on its way to Liverpool,
or rocking on the Channel, and H.O. might never be found again. Oswald
did not say these things. It is best to hold your jaw when you want to
see a thing out, and are liable to be sent to bed at a strange hotel if
any one happens to remember you.
Then suddenly the station master came with a telegram.
It said: "A dress-basket without label at Cannon Street detained for
identification suspicious sounds from inside detain inquirers dynamite
machine suspected."
He did not show us this till my Father had told him about H.O., which it
took some time for him to believe, and then he did and laughed, and said
he would wire them to get the dynamite machine to speak, and if so, to
take it out and keep it till its Father called for it.
So back we went to London, with hearts a little lighter, but not gay,
for we were a very long time from the last things we had had to eat. And
Oswald was almost sorry he had not taken those crystallised fruits.
It was quite late when we got to Cannon Street, and we went straight
into the cloakroom, and there was the man in charge, a very jolly chap,
sitting on a stool. And there was H.O., the guilty stowaway, dressed in
a red-and-white clown's dress, very dusty, and his face as dirty as I
have ever seen it, sitting on some one else's tin box, with his feet on
some body else's portmanteau, eating bread and cheese, and drinking ale
out of a can.
My Father claimed him at once, and Oswald identified the basket. It was
very large. There was a tray on the top with hats in it, and H.O. had
this on top of him. We all went to bed in Cannon Street Hotel. My Father
said nothing to H.O. that night. When we were in bed I tried to get H.O.
to tell me all about it, but he was too sleepy and cross. It was the
beer and the knocking about in the basket, I suppose. Next day we went
back to the Moat House, where the raving anxiousness of the others had
been cooled the night before by a telegram from Dover.
My Father said he would speak to H.O. in the evening. It is very horrid
not to be spoken to at once and get it over. But H.O. certainly deserved
something.
It is hard to tell this tale, because so much of it happened all at once
but at different places. But this is what H.O. said to us about it. He
said--
"Don't bother--let me alone."
But we were all kind and gentle, and at last we got it out of him what