The Complete Mouldiwarp Series (Illustrated Edition). Эдит Несбит
the horrid little pet dog that yapped and yahed, and tried to bite everyone, from the footmen to Elfrida. The streets were narrow and very dirty, and smelt very nasty in the hot June sun.
And it was very hot and stuffy inside the carriage, and more bumpety than you would think possible – more bumpety even than a wagon going across a furrowed corn-field. Elfrida felt rather headachy, as you do when you go out in a small boat and everyone says it is not at all rough. By the time the carriage got to Lewisham Elfrida’s bones were quite sore, and she felt as though she had been beaten. There were no springs to the carriage, and it reminded her of a bathing-machine more than anything else – you know the way it bumps on the shingly part of the shore when they are drawing you up at the beach, and you tumble about and can’t go on dressing, and all your things slide off the seats. The maids were cross and looked it. Cousin Bet had danced till nigh midnight, and been up with the lark, so she said. And, having said it, went to sleep in a corner of the carriage looking crosser than the maids. Elfrida began to feel that empty, uninterested sensation which makes you wish you hadn’t come. The carriage plunged and rattled on through the green country, the wheels bounding in and out of the most dreadful ruts. More than once the wheel got into a rut so deep that it took all the men to heave it out again. Cousin Bet woke up to say that it was vastly annoying, and instantly went to sleep again.
Elfrida, being the smallest person in the carriage except Amour, the dog, was constantly being thrown into somebody’s lap – to the annoyance of both parties. It was very much the most uncomfortable ride she had ever had. She thought of the smooth, swift rush of the train – even the carrier’s cart was luxury compared to this. ‘The roads aren’t like roads at all,’ she told herself, ‘they’re like ploughed fields with celery trenches in them’ – she had a friend a market gardener, so she knew.
Long before the carriage drew up in front of the ‘Bull’ at Tonbridge, Elfrida felt that if she only had a piece of poetry ready she would say it, and ask the Mouldiwarp to take her back to her own times, where, at any rate, carriages had springs and roads were roads. And when the carriage did stop she was so stiff she could hardly stand.
‘Come along in,’ said a stout, pleasant-faced lady in a frilled cap; ‘come in, my poppet. There’s a fine supper, though it’s me says it, and a bed that you won’t beat in Kent for soft and clean, you may lay to that.’
There was a great bustle of shouting ostlers and stablemen; the horses were taken out before the travellers were free of the carriage. Supper was laid in a big, low, upper room, with shining furniture and windows at both ends, one set looking on the road where the sign of the ‘Bull’ creaked and swung, and the other looking on a very neat green garden, with clipped box hedges and yew arbours. Getting all the luggage into the house seemed likely to be a long business. Elfrida saw that she would not be missed, and she slipped down the twisty-cornery back-stairs and through the back kitchen into the green garden. It was pleasant to stretch one’s legs, and not to be cramped and buffeted and shaken. But she walked down the grass-path rather demurely, for she was very stiff indeed.
And it was there, in a yew arbour, that she came suddenly on the grandest and handsomest gentleman that she had ever seen. He wore a white wig, very full at the sides and covered with powder, and a full-skirted coat of dark-blue silk, and under it a long waistcoat with the loveliest roses and forget-me-nots tied in bunches with gold ribbons, embroidered on silk. He had lace ruffles and a jewelled brooch, and the jolliest blue eyes in the world. He looked at Elfrida very kindly with his jolly eyes.
‘A lady of quality, I’ll be bound,’ he said, ‘and travelling with her suite.’
‘I’m Miss Arden of Arden,’ said Elfrida.
‘Your servant, madam,’ said he, springing to his feet and waving his hat in a very flourishing sort of bow.
Elfrida’s little curtsey was not at all the right kind of curtsey, but it had to do.
‘And what can I do to please Miss Arden of Arden?’ he asked. ‘Would she like a ride on my black mare?’
‘Oh, no, thank you,’ said Elfrida, so earnestly that he laughed as he said:
‘Sure, I should not have thought fear lived with those eyes.’
‘I’m not afraid,’ said Elfrida contemptuously; ‘only I’ve been riding in a horrible carriage all day, and I feel as though I never wanted to ride on anything any more.’
He laughed again.
‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘come and sit by me and tell me all the town news.’
Elfrida smiled to think what news she could tell him, and then frowned in the effort to think of any news that wouldn’t seem nonsense.
She told him all that she knew of Cousin Bet and the journey. He was quite politely interested. She told of Cousin Bet’s purchases – the collar of pearls, and the gold pomander studded with corals, the little gold watch, and the family jewels that had been reset.
‘And you have all tonight to rest in from that cruel coach?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Elfrida, ‘we don’t go on again till after breakfast tomorrow. It’s very dull – and oh, so slow! Don’t you think you’d like to have a carriage drawn by a fiery iron horse that went sixty miles an hour?’
‘You have an ingenious wit,’ said the beautiful gentleman, ‘such as I should admire in my wife. Will you marry me when you shall be grown a great girl?’
‘No,’ said Elfrida; ‘you’d be too old – even if you were to be able to stop alive till I was grown up, you’d be much too old.’
‘How old do you suppose I shall be when you’re seventeen?’
‘I should have to do sums,’ said Elfrida, who was rather good at these exercises. She broke a twig from a currant bush and scratched in the dust.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, raising a flushed face, and trampling out her ‘sum’ with little shoes that had red heels, ‘but I think you’ll be two hundred and thirty.’
On that he laughed more than ever and vowed she was the lady for him. ‘Your ciphering would double my income ten times over,’ he said.
He was very kind indeed – would have her taste his wine, which she didn’t like, and the little cakes on the red and blue plate, which she did.
‘And what’s your name?’ she asked.
‘My name,’ said he, ‘is a secret. Can you keep a secret?’
‘Yes,’ said Elfrida.
‘So can I,’ said he.
And then a flouncing, angry maid came suddenly sweeping down between the box hedges and dragged Elfrida away before she could curtsey properly and say, ‘Thank you for being so kind.’
‘Farewell,’ said the beautiful gentleman, ‘doubt not but we shall meet again. And next time ’tis I shall carry thee off and shut thee in a tower for two hundred years till thou art seventeen and hast learned to cipher.’
Elfrida was slapped by the maid, which nearly choked her with fury, and set down to supper in the big upstairs room. The maid indignantly told where she had found Elfrida ‘talking with a strange gentleman,’ and when Cousin Betty had heard all about it Elfrida told her tale.
‘And he was a great dear,’ she said.
‘A —?’
‘A very beautiful gentleman. I wish you’d been there, Cousin Betty. You’d have liked him too.’
Then Cousin Bet also slapped her. And Elfrida wished more than ever that she had some poetry ready for the Mouldiwarp.
* * *
The next day’s journey was as bumpety as the first, and Elfrida got very tired of the whole business. ‘Oh, I wish something would happen!’ she said.
It was a very