The Magic World. Nesbit Edith
across gardens, the safety of the plum tree gained only just in time.
And, worst of all, despair took hold of him, for he saw that nothing he could do would make any one say those simple words that would release him. He had hoped that Mabel might at last be made to understand, but the ink had failed him; she did not understand his subdued mewings, and when he got the cardboard letters and made the same sentence with them Mabel only thought it was that naughty boy who came through locked windows. Somehow he could not spell before any one – his nerves were not what they had been. His brain now gave him no new ideas. He felt that he was really growing like a cat in his mind. His interest in his meals grew beyond even what it had been when they were a schoolboy’s meals. He hunted mice with growing enthusiasm, though the loss of his whiskers to measure narrow places with made hunting difficult.
He grew expert in bird-stalking, and often got quite near to a bird before it flew away, laughing at him. But all the time, in his heart, he was very, very miserable. And so the week went by.
Maurice in his cat shape dreaded more and more the time when Lord Hugh in the boy shape should come back from Dr. Strongitharm’s. He knew – who better? – exactly the kind of things boys do to cats, and he trembled to the end of his handsome half-Persian tail.
And then the boy came home from Dr. Strongitharm’s, and at the first sound of his boots in the hall Maurice in the cat’s body fled with silent haste to hide in the boot-cupboard.
Here, ten minutes later, the boy that had come back from Dr. Strongitharm’s found him.
Maurice fluffed up his tail and unsheathed his claws. Whatever this boy was going to do to him Maurice meant to resist, and his resistance should hurt the boy as much as possible. I am sorry to say Maurice swore softly among the boots, but cat-swearing is not really wrong.
‘Come out, you old duffer,’ said Lord Hugh in the boy shape of Maurice. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’
‘I’ll see to that,’ said Maurice, backing into the corner, all teeth and claws.
‘Oh, I’ve had such a time!’ said Lord Hugh. ‘It’s no use, you know, old chap; I can see where you are by your green eyes. My word, they do shine. I’ve been caned and shut up in a dark room and given thousands of lines to write out.’
‘I’ve been beaten, too, if you come to that,’ mewed Maurice. ‘Besides the butcher’s dog.’
It was an intense relief to speak to some one who could understand his mews.
‘Well, I suppose it’s Pax for the future,’ said Lord Hugh; ‘if you won’t come out, you won’t. Please leave off being a cat and be Maurice again.’
And instantly Maurice, amid a heap of goloshes and old tennis bats, felt with a swelling heart that he was no longer a cat. No more of those undignified four legs, those tiresome pointed ears, so difficult to wash, that furry coat, that contemptible tail, and that terrible inability to express all one’s feelings in two words – ‘mew’ and ‘purr.’
He scrambled out of the cupboard, and the boots and goloshes fell off him like spray off a bather.
He stood upright in those very chequered knickerbockers that were so terrible when their knees held one vice-like, while things were tied to one’s tail. He was face to face with another boy, exactly like himself.
‘You haven’t changed, then – but there can’t be two Maurices.’
‘There sha’n’t be; not if I know it,’ said the other boy; ‘a boy’s life’s a dog’s life. Quick, before any one comes.’
‘Quick what?’ asked Maurice.
‘Why tell me to leave off being a boy, and to be Lord Hugh Cecil again.’
Maurice told him at once. And at once the boy was gone, and there was Lord Hugh in his own shape, purring politely, yet with a watchful eye on Maurice’s movements.
‘Oh, you needn’t be afraid, old chap. It’s Pax right enough,’ Maurice murmured in the ear of Lord Hugh. And Lord Hugh, arching his back under Maurice’s stroking hand, replied with a purrrr-meaow that spoke volumes.
‘Oh, Maurice, here you are. It is nice of you to be nice to Lord Hugh, when it was because of him you – ’
‘He’s a good old chap,’ said Maurice, carelessly. ‘And you’re not half a bad old girl. See?’
Mabel almost wept for joy at this magnificent compliment, and Lord Hugh himself took on a more happy and confident air.
Please dismiss any fears which you may entertain that after this Maurice became a model boy. He didn’t. But he was much nicer than before. The conversation which he overheard when he was a cat makes him more patient with his father and mother. And he is almost always nice to Mabel, for he cannot forget all that she was to him when he wore the shape of Lord Hugh. His father attributes all the improvement in his son’s character to that week at Dr. Strongitharm’s – which, as you know, Maurice never had. Lord Hugh’s character is unchanged. Cats learn slowly and with difficulty.
Only Maurice and Lord Hugh know the truth – Maurice has never told it to any one except me, and Lord Hugh is a very reserved cat. He never at any time had that free flow of mew which distinguished and endangered the cat-hood of Maurice.
II
THE MIXED MINE
The ship was first sighted off Dungeness. She was labouring heavily. Her paint was peculiar and her rig outlandish. She looked like a golden ship out of a painted picture.
‘Blessed if I ever see such a rig – nor such lines neither,’ old Hawkhurst said.
It was a late afternoon, wild and grey. Slate-coloured clouds drove across the sky like flocks of hurried camels. The waves were purple and blue, and in the west a streak of unnatural-looking green light was all that stood for the splendours of sunset.
‘She do be a rum ’un,’ said young Benenden, who had strolled along the beach with the glasses the gentleman gave him for saving the little boy from drowning. ‘Don’t know as I ever see another just like her.’
‘I’d give half a dollar to any chap as can tell me where she hails from – and what port it is where they has ships o’ that cut,’ said middle-aged Haversham to the group that had now gathered.
‘George!’ exclaimed young Benenden from under his field-glasses, ‘she’s going.’ And she went. Her bow went down suddenly and she stood stern up in the water – like a duck after rain. Then quite slowly, with no unseemly hurry, but with no moment’s change of what seemed to be her fixed purpose, the ship sank and the grey rolling waves wiped out the place where she had been.
Now I hope you will not expect me to tell you anything more about this ship – because there is nothing more to tell. What country she came from, what port she was bound for, what cargo she carried, and what kind of tongue her crew spoke – all these things are dead secrets. And a dead secret is a secret that nobody knows. No other secrets are dead secrets. Even I do not know this one, or I would tell you at once. For I, at least, have no secrets from you.
When ships go down off Dungeness, things from them have a way of being washed up on the sands of that bay which curves from Dungeness to Folkestone, where the sea has bitten a piece out of the land – just such a half-moon-shaped piece as you bite out of a slice of bread-and-butter. Bits of wood tangled with ropes – broken furniture – ships’ biscuits in barrels and kegs that have held brandy – seamen’s chests – and sometimes sadder things that we will not talk about just now.
Now, if you live by the sea and are grown-up you know that if you find anything on the seashore (I don’t mean starfish or razor-shells or jellyfish and sea-mice, but anything out of a ship that you would really like to keep) your duty is to take it up to the coast-guard and say, ‘Please, I’ve found this.’ Then the coast-guard will send it to the proper authority, and one of these days you’ll get a reward of one-third of the value of whatever it was that you picked up. But two-thirds of the value of anything, or even three-thirds of its value, is not