The Greatest Works of E. Nesbit (220+ Titles in One Illustrated Edition). Эдит Несбит
Dora said very primly and speaking rather slowly, and she was very pale—
"I think it would be lovely to fly. Will you just show me how the flying-machine looks when it is unfolded?"
The gentleman dropped Oswald, and Dora made "Go! go" with her lips without speaking, while he began to unfold the flying-machine. We others went, Oswald lingering last, and then in an instant Dora had nipped out of the room and banged the door and locked it.
"To the Mill!" she cried, and we ran like mad, and got in and barred the big door, and went up to the first floor, and looked out of the big window to warn off Mrs. Beale.
And we thumped Dora on the back, and Dicky called her a Sherlock Holmes, and Noël said she was a heroine.
"It wasn't anything," Dora said, just before she began to cry, "only I remember reading that you must pretend to humour them, and then get away, for of course I saw at once he was a lunatic. Oh, how awful it might have been! He could have made us all jump out of the attic window, and there would have been no one left to tell Father. Oh! oh!" and then the crying began.
But we were proud of Dora, and I am sorry we make fun of her sometimes, but it is difficult not to.
We decided to signal the first person that passed, and we got Alice to take off her red flannel petticoat for a signal.
The first people who came were two men in a dog-cart. We waved the signalising petticoat and they pulled up, and one got out and came up to the Mill.
We explained about the lunatic and the wanting us to jump out of the windows.
"Right oh!" cried the man to the one still in the cart; "got him." And the other hitched the horse to the gate and came over, and the other went to the house.
"Come along down, young ladies and gentlemen," said the second man when he had been told. "He's as gentle as a lamb. He does not think it hurts to jump out of windows. He thinks it really is flying. He'll be like an angel when he sees the doctor."
We asked if he had been mad before, because we had thought he might have suddenly gone so.
"Certainly he has!" replied the man; "he has never been, so to say, himself since tumbling out of a flying-machine he went up in with a friend. He was an artist previous to that—an excellent one, I believe. But now he only draws objects with wings—and now and then he wants to make people fly—perfect strangers sometimes, like yourselves. Yes, miss, I am his attendant, and his pictures often amuse me by the half-hours together, poor gentleman."
"How did he get away?" Alice asked.
"Well, miss, the poor gentleman's brother got hurt and Mr. Sidney—that's him inside—seemed wonderfully put out and hung over the body in a way pitiful to see. But really he was extracting the cash from the sufferer's pockets. Then, while all of us were occupied with Mr. Eustace, Mr. Sidney just packs his portmanteau and out he goes by the back door. When we missed him we sent for Dr. Baker, but by the time he came it was too late to get here. Dr. Baker said at once he'd revert to his boyhood's home. And the doctor has proved correct."
We had all come out of the Mill, and with this polite person we went to the gate, and saw the lunatic get into the carriage, very gentle and gay.
"But, Doctor," Oswald said, "he did say he'd give nine pounds a week for the rooms. Oughtn't he to pay?"
"You might have known he was mad to say that," said the doctor. "No. Why should he, when it's his own sister's house? Gee up!"
And he left us.
It was sad to find the gentleman was not a Higher Life after all, but only mad. And I was more sorry than ever for poor Miss Sandal. As Oswald pointed out to the girls they are much more blessed in their brothers than Miss Sandal is, and they ought to be more grateful than they are.
The Smuggler's Revenge
The days went on and Miss Sandal did not return. We went on being very sorry about Miss Sandal being so poor, and it was not our fault that when we tried to let the house in lodgings, the first lodger proved to be a lunatic of the deepest dye. Miss Sandal must have been a fairly decent sort, because she seems not to have written to Father about it. At any rate he didn't give it us in any of our letters, about our good intentions and their ending in a maniac.
Oswald does not like giving up a thing just because it has once been muffed. The muffage of a plan is a thing that often happens at first to heroes—like Bruce and the spider, and other great characters. Beside, grown-ups always say—
"If at first you don't succeed,
Try, try, try again!"
And if this is the rule for Euclid and rule-of-three and all the things you would rather not do, think how much more it must be the rule when what you are after is your own idea, and not just the rotten notion of that beast Euclid, or the unknown but equally unnecessary author who composed the multiplication table. So we often talked about what we could do to make Miss Sandal rich. It gave us something to jaw about when we happened to want to sit down for a bit, in between all the glorious wet sandy games that happen by the sea.
Of course if we wanted real improving conversation we used to go up to the boat-house and talk to the coastguards. I do think coastguards are A1. They are just the same as sailors, having been so in their youth, and you can get at them to talk to, which is not the case with sailors who are at sea (or even in harbours) on ships. Even if you had the luck to get on to a man-of-war, you would very likely not be able to climb to the top-gallants to talk to the man there. Though in books the young hero always seems able to climb to the mast-head the moment he is told to. The coastguards told us tales of Southern ports, and of shipwrecks, and officers they had not cottoned to, and messmates that they had, but when we asked them about smuggling they said there wasn't any to speak of nowadays.
"I expect they think they oughtn't to talk about such dark crimes before innocent kids like us," said Dicky afterwards, and he grinned as he said it.
"Yes," said Alice; "they don't know how much we know about smugglers, and bandits, and highwaymen, and burglars, and coiners," and she sighed, and we all felt sad to think that we had not now any chance to play at being these things.
"We might play smugglers," said Oswald.
But he did not speak hopefully. The worst of growing up is that you seem to want more and more to have a bit of the real thing in your games. Oswald could not now be content to play at bandits and just capture Albert next door, as once, in happier days, he was pleased and proud to do.
It was not a coastguard that told us about the smugglers. It was a very old man that we met two or three miles along the beach. He was leaning against a boat that was wrong way up on the shingle, and smoking the strongest tobacco Oswald's young nose has ever met. I think it must have been Black Jack. We said, "How do you do?" and Alice said, "Do you mind if we sit down near you?"
"Not me," replied the aged seafarer. We could see directly that he was this by his jersey and his sea-boots.
The girls sat down on the beach, but we boys leaned against the boat like the seafaring one. We hoped he would join in conversation, but at first he seemed too proud. And there was something dignified about him, bearded and like a Viking, that made it hard for us to begin.
At last he took his pipe out of his mouth and said—
"Here's a precious Quakers' meeting! You didn't set down here just for to look at me?"
"I'm sure you look very nice," Dora said.
"Same to you, miss, I'm sure," was the polite reply.
"We want to talk to you awfully," said Alice, "if you don't mind?"
"Talk away," said he.
And then, as so often happens, no one could think of anything to say.
Suddenly Noël