Kitabı oku: «The Wonderful Garden or The Three Cs», sayfa 7
CHAPTER XI
THE ROSICURIANS
The door of the drawing-room at the Manor House was kept locked, and Mrs. Wilmington dusted the room herself and carried its key in her pocket. After the Uncle had said that about Mrs. Wilmington having expected the children to break everything in the house, the three C.’s began to wonder whether the drawing-room had always been kept in this locked-up state, or whether it was only done on their account.
‘Out of compliment to us,’ as Charles put it.
‘I almost think it must be that,’ Caroline said; ‘because of course drawing-rooms are for people to sit in, and the Wilmington must expect some one to sit in it or she wouldn’t dust it so carefully.’
‘I looked in the other day when she was dusting,’ said Charlotte. ‘I couldn’t see much just a bit of the carpet, pink and grey and pretty, and the corner of a black cupboard-thing with trees and birds and gold Chinamen on it, and a table with a soup tureen with red rabbits’ heads for handles, and a round looking-glass that you could see some more of the room in, all tiny and all drawn wrong somehow – you know the sort; convict mirrors, Harriet says they are. I asked her.’
‘When?’ said Charles.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Just after. And Harriet goes in to sweep it. She says its full of lovelies.’
‘Why don’t you ask her if it was shut up out of compliment to us?’ Charles asked.
‘Because I wasn’t going to put ideas into Harriet’s head, of course.’
And Caroline agreed that such a question would have been simply giving themselves away.
Each of the three C.’s had turned the handle of the drawing-room door many times to see whether by chance Mrs. Wilmington had just this once not remembered to lock it. But she always had. And their interest in the room had steadily grown. And now here was another wet day, just the day for examining golden Chinamen and looking at yourself in convex mirrors; and the room was locked up so that no one could enjoy these advantages.
Rupert was still in bed, the doctor had decided against measles; but the feverish cold which had given rise to the measle idea was still too bad for Rupert to be anywhere but where he was. And the others were only allowed to see him for a few minutes at a time. Mrs. Wilmington had, so Harriet explained, ‘taken to the new young gentleman in a way you’d hardly believe,’ and was spending the afternoon reading Masterman Ready to him after a baffled attempt to read him Eric, or Little by Little, which she fetched from her own room on purpose, and which Rupert stopped his ears with his fingers rather than listen to.
‘It is the time,’ said Charlotte; ‘there is a time in the affairs of men that they call the Nick. And this is it. Let’s try to get in. The Wilmington is safely out of the way. Let’s!’
‘Yes, let’s,’ said Charles.
‘No, don’t let’s,’ said Caroline. ‘The Uncle mightn’t want us to. Perhaps compliments to us aren’t the real reason. Perhaps there’s some wonderful secret kept in there, known only to the head of the house and his faithful Wilmington. The Uncle’s been so jolly decent. Let’s ask the Wilmington for the key.’
The others laughed, and Charles said, ‘You know well enough that’s no earthly.’
Caroline did not think there could be a secret, because the Uncle was now a member of the Royal Order of the Secret Rose, whose unchangeable motto was ‘halves in all secrets.’
‘So if there’d been anything like that he’d have told us without preservation,’ Charles added. ‘Yes, I agree with Caro.’
‘And,’ said Charlotte, ‘I don’t see – Oh, I say, I’ve got an idea! Let’s have another hunt for that second book the Lady in the picture’s got under her elbow. We really ought to find it. It’s a sacred duty we owe the Uncle for being so decent about Rupert.’
‘The drawing-room door’s knob is just the same as this one’s,’ Charles pointed out; ‘and the morning-room’s and the library’s door knobs are the same too. Let’s see if this key won’t fit the drawing-room.’ He rattled the key of the dining-room door as he spoke.
‘I wish you wouldn’t,’ said Caroline. ‘It’s jolly rough on me. Everybody always blames the eldest. I wish you’d been the eldest, Charles.’
‘I would have if I could, you bet,’ said Charles. ‘Come on.’
‘No, look here,’ said Caroline desperately, ‘please don’t. And I’ll go and ask uncle if we mayn’t. There!’
‘But we’re forbidden to disturb him.’
‘I’d rather disturb him than go poking into places he doesn’t want us to go poking into. Don’t you see? If he doesn’t mind us going in he’ll say “Yes,” and if he does mind he’ll say “No,” and then we shall be glad we didn’t without asking him.’
‘But what could be in there that he doesn’t want us to see?’ Charles wanted to know.
‘Oh, anything! Clouds of live butterflies that are let out after lunch, and go back to their cages when the tea-bell rings. I think Caro’s right about asking the Uncle,’ Charlotte said.
‘Butterflies are simply piffle,’ Charles pointed out. ‘They’d be laying their eggs all over everything and turning into cocoons all the time. I know, because of silkworms.’
‘Well, a snake then,’ said Charlotte briskly: ‘an enormous king-serpent, with a crown on its head, and yards and yards long, that comes out of a cupboard from two to four every day, and twines pieces of itself round the legs of the furniture, or your legs if you go in. It wouldn’t mind what legs they were it twined round, I expect.’
‘I like snakes,’ said Charles briefly. ‘Let Caro go to the Uncle if she wants to.’
They all went. It was deemed respectful to wash a little.
‘They like you to be clean when you ask for things,’ said Caroline.
‘It’s always “wash!” whatever you do,’ Charlotte complained. ‘While there’s life there’s soap.’ But she washed too.
There was an agitated pause on the sheepskin mat outside the Uncle’s study door.
‘Shall we knock?’ Charles asked.
‘You don’t knock at sitting-room doors,’ said Caroline, turned the handle, and opened the door three inches and three-eighths.
‘Who’s that?’ said the voice of the Uncle. ‘How often am I to give orders that I am not to be disturbed on any pretence?’
‘There isn’t any pretence,’ Charles was beginning, when Caroline broke in with:
‘It’s a depredation of the Secret Rose.’
‘So I perceive. But I am too busy to play now,’ said the Uncle; and you could tell by the very way he spoke that he had his thumb in a book and was afraid of losing his place.
‘It isn’t play. We want to ask your permission for something.’
‘Well, if I receive this deputation, will it undertake not to do it again for a week, on any pretence? Then come in.’
They came in, to a room that seemed quite full of books. There were books on the tables, books on the floor, books on the mantelpiece and on the window-ledge, books open and books shut, books old and new, books handsome and ugly. The Uncle seemed even to have used books to cover the walls with, as ordinary people use wall-paper. He was sitting at a wide green leather-covered writing-table, and sure enough he had his thumb in a tall brown folio.
They all said ‘Good morning’ politely, and Caroline coughed and said:
‘If you please, uncle, we want to explore the whole house to look for the other book – the book, I mean, that is lost out of the picture. Dame Eleanour’s book, I mean. You said we might. But the drawing-room door’s locked.’
‘Dear me,’ said the Uncle impatiently, ‘can’t you unlock it.’
‘No,’ Charles told him. ‘The Wil – I mean Mrs. Wilmington keeps the key in her under-pocket.’
‘Oh, she does, does she? You won’t break anything? But of course you won’t,’ said the Uncle rather in a hurry. ‘Well, as members of the Society of the Secret Rose, I’ll let you through my secret door.’
He put a folded paper in his book to mark the place, got up, and crossed the room to a low narrow door by the fireplace that looked as though it led to a cupboard. He went through the door and the children followed him. They found themselves in a little carpeted corridor. At the left was a door, closed and barred; to the right a flight of stairs, and in front another door. This the Uncle opened.
‘Here is the drawing-room,’ he said; and there it was. They could see a corner of its carpet, and it was the same pink and grey rose-pattern as the other corner that Charlotte had seen.
‘Now come up here,’ said the Uncle, and led the way. At the top of the stairs was another door. The Uncle opened it, and behold, the well-known corridor, with the stuffed birds and fishes, from which their bedroom doors opened.
‘I will give you the key of this door to keep,’ said the Uncle, ‘and then you can visit the drawing-room when you please. If you do not disturb anything, and refrain from making your visits in muddy boots, Mrs. Wilmington need never know. It will be a secret between us – my little contribution to the Society of the Rose. Like a conspiracy, isn’t it?’ he asked anxiously.
‘Just exactly like,’ every one agreed, and asked whether it was really a secret staircase.
‘It is now, at any rate,’ said the Uncle. ‘It used to be merely the humble backstairs, but I had it shut up because I dislike noise.’
‘We’ll always come down in our bath slippers,’ Caroline promised him. ‘Oh, uncle, you are a darling!’
The Uncle submitted to a complicated threefold embrace, and went back to his brown folio.
‘Now, then,’ said the three, and entered the drawing-room.
You went up three steps to it. That was why you could not reach up from the outside to look through the windows, of which there were three. They were curtained with grey and pink brocade that rhymed with the carpet. There were tall gold-framed mirrors set over marble console tables with golden legs, and round mirrors whose frames had round knobs on them, and oval mirrors with candlesticks branching out from underneath them. There was a golden harp with hardly any of its strings broken, in one corner, and a piano with inlaid woods of varied colours, on which Caroline would have dearly loved to play ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’ and Haydn’s ‘Surprise’; but, as this would have meant Mrs. Wilmington’s surprise too, it was not to be thought of. There were carved Indian cabinets with elephants and lions on them, and Chinese cabinets with mandarins and little-footed gold ladies, and pagodas in ivory under glass cases, and wax flowers also glass-cased. There were statues, tall and white and cold, and boxes of carved ivory and carved ebony, and one of porcupine quills, and one of mother-of-pearl and silver – a work-box that was. There were cushions and chair-seats of faded needlework; old and beautiful and straight-backed chairs and round-backed chairs; two crystal chandeliers that looked like fountains wrong way up; china of all sorts, including a Chinaman who wagged his head when you came near him.
In fact, the room was the kind of room you sometimes find in houses where the same family has lived for many many many years, and each generation has taken care of the beautiful things left by its ancestors, and has added one or two more beautiful things, to be taken care of by the generation that is to come after. You could have amused yourself there for an hour just by looking; and the three C.’s remembered joyously that they had not been forbidden to touch.
It is wonderful how careful children can be if they do not allow their minds to wander from their determination to be careful. The three C.’s looked at everything and touched a good many things, and did not break or hurt anything at all. They examined the cabinets, opening their doors and pulling out every drawer in the hope of discovering some secret place where The Book might be. But they only found coins and medals and chessmen and draughts and spellicans, bright foreign sea-shells, a sea-horse and a snake skin, some mother-of-pearl counters and ivory draughts, and an ivory cribbage board inlaid with brass that shone like gold.
‘It’s no good,’ said Charles at last, pulling out one of the lacquered drawers; ‘let’s play spellicans. It’s a nice quiet game that grown-ups like you to play, and we owe the Uncle something.’
‘Let’s have just one more look,’ Charlotte pleaded. ‘Oh, I say, we haven’t looked at the books yet.’
There were books, not many, on some of the tables – large books with pictures, and one, a photograph book, so heavy that Caroline could not lift it up.
‘I say. Look here,’ she called out; ‘this book’s only got about three pages of uncles and aunts, the rest is solid, like a box made to imitate a book. Suppose the book were inside the box part?’
‘Won’t it open?’ The others were crowding close to look.
‘There’s a sort of catch there,’ said Charles, putting his finger on a little brass button.
‘Oh, crikey!’ he started back. So did the others. For a low whirring sound had come from the book, and Charlotte had hardly time to say, ‘It’s a Nihilist bomb, come away!’ before the book broke into the silvery chiming cadence of ‘Home, Sweet Home.’
‘It’s a musical box,’ Charlotte explained needlessly. And then the same thought struck each mind.
‘Mrs. Wilmington!’ For the musical box was a fine one, and its clear silvery notes rang out through the room. Mrs. Wilmington must hear wherever she was. She would hear and come.
‘Fly!’ said Caroline, and they fled. They got out, locked the door, rushed softly yet swiftly up the stairs and waited behind the upper door till they heard Mrs. Wilmington’s alpaca sweep down the front stairs. Then out, and down after her, quickly and quietly, so that when, having found the musical box playing with sweet tinkling self-possession to an empty drawing-room whose doors were locked, and having satisfied herself that no intruder lurked behind brocaded curtain or Indian screen, she came to the dining-room, she found the three C.’s quietly seated there each with a book, a picture of good little children on a rainy day. She could not see that Charles’s book was a Bradshaw and Caroline’s Zotti’s Italian Grammar, wrong way up.
‘Oh, you are here,’ she said; ‘did you hear that musical box?’
‘Yes,’ said the children meekly.
Mrs. Wilmington stood a moment in the door. She did not understand machinery, and to her it seemed quite possible that a musical box might begin to play all on its own account without any help from outside. On the other hand, it had never chosen to do it before these children came.
‘You ought not to wear bedroom slippers in the sitting-rooms,’ she said, and went away without more words.
‘I nearly burst,’ said Charles then; ‘especially when she noticed our feet.’
‘But she’ll find out,’ Charlotte said. ‘She found out about Rupert. Let’s go back now; because she won’t think we’re there now she knows we’re here. There was another book, all heavy too. We’ll start that and wake her up again.’
‘I say, isn’t it a lark?’ Charles whispered, as they crept up the stairs.
CHAPTER XII
THE OTHER BOOK
They found the second book. It was not so heavy as the other, but in it, too, there were only three or four pages of ladies in crinolines and gentlemen in whiskers and chokers, leaning against marble pillars with velvet curtains loosely draped in the background.
‘Be careful,’ Charlotte urged; ‘be quite ready to fly before you start it.’
But when they pressed the little catch and sprang towards the door ready to ‘fly,’ no silvery sound met the ear. In an awe-struck silence they went slowly back to the table.
And now, looking more closely, they saw that the catch was not made to press down but to slide along. Charlotte pushed it. A lid flew up, and there was a space that had perhaps once held a musical box, but now held a reel of silk, an old velvet needle-book with a view of the Isle of Wight painted on it outside, and inside, needles red with many a year’s rust; a box of beads with a glass top, a bone silk-winder, a netting needle, and a sheet of paper with some finely pencilled writing on it.
‘Bother!’ said Charles; ‘let’s start the other.’
But Charlotte was looking at the beads and Caroline was looking at the writing.
‘What jolly little different beads, not a bit like now,’ said Charlotte; and Caroline said:
‘It’s a list of books, that’s all. I say,’ she added in quite another voice, ‘that Thessalonian book is underlined, hard, I wonder why?’ She unfolded the paper and turned it over. ‘There’s another underlined, Pope’s Ill Something,’ she said.
‘Iliad,’ said Charles, looking over her shoulder. ‘I always know Latin words the minute I see them, even if I don’t know what they mean. Let’s start the other musical box.’
‘No,’ said Caroline quickly, ‘let’s find Pope’s What’s-its-name. There’s only those two underlined. It’s a clue, that’s what it is. Come on and don’t make a row. I feel we’re on the brink of – the very brink. Punctuality and despatch.’
‘All the books in the dining-room’s names are in a book at the end of the bottom shelf,’ said Charles. ‘I know, because I thought it was the book; the cover’s something like the one in the picture.’
It was easy to find Pope’s Iliad in the Catalogue. ‘1 vol. Top shelf. Case 6. Number 39,’ it said. Then there was a rush for Case 6 and a dragging of chairs to the spot. Caroline being the tallest, reached the volume and got it down.
‘The cover feels loose in my hand,’ she said. ‘Oh, I do believe it is!’
It was. From the loose boards whose back pretended that they were covering Mr. Alexander Pope’s translation of the Greek epic, another and quite different book came forth. A thin brown book, the second book of the picture! Charlotte climbed on a chair expressly to compare the two. There was no doubt of it. The two were the same. Inside was yellowy paper with a queer sort of waviness about it, and large print of that curious old-fashioned kind where the s’s are all like f’s, except at the ends of words.
‘We can read this,’ said Charles hopefully. ‘I mean even you can. It’s not Latin this time. Let’s take it to uncle and tell him we’ve found it. Won’t he be delighted with us?’
‘We promised not to bother for a week,’ Charlotte reminded him. ‘Let’s keep it for a week, and then we’ll give him the two together. He won’t be able to believe his eyes. It is an eyesore, isn’t it?’
‘I think what you mean’s a sight for sore eyes,’ Caroline suggested. ‘Let’s have a look. Is it spells?’
‘It looks like all about being ill,’ said Charlotte doubtfully; ‘but it’s very hard with these s’s pretending to be f’s, and the spelling is rum, isn’t it?’
‘All spelling’s rum, I think,’ said Charles; ‘especially ie’s and ei’s.’
‘I.E., except after C,’ said Charlotte absently, ‘It says, “Government and Virtues. It is under the Moon!”’
‘What is?’
‘I don’t know. It goes on: “It is a good wound-e herb-e and the juice taken in wine helpeth the jaundice, and is ſovereign for the plague, if ſo be the ſufferer be not too far gone in it.”’
‘What does? What is?’
‘“The flowers,”’ Charlotte read on, ‘“be large and yellow in forme and in others paler and ſmaller. The ſtalk is two feet high and divideth himſelf into many ſpreading branches.’”
‘What does?’
‘Rugged wort. It’s all about plants, I think, and what they’re good for.’
‘How glorious!’ Caroline cried and clapped her hands. ‘Now we’ve got all three. The spells, and the medicine, and the Language Of. And what one won’t do, the other will. Hist! not a word!’ She had only just time to throw the book into a chair and sit down on it as the door opened, and Harriet entered with the tea-tray.
The Uncle did not come in to tea. Only Mrs. Wilmington looked in for a moment to say that Rupert’s cold was worse, and that they had better not see him again that day.
‘And please don’t be up and down stairs all the time in your heavy boots,’ she added.
‘Our feet don’t seem to please her to-day, somehow, whatever we put them in,’ said Charlotte. ‘I wish we could give her something to make her like us. We might just as well be black-beetles.’
‘What we’ve got to do,’ said Caroline, pouring out milk, ‘is to get Rupert better. I felt all the time in the drawing-room how hateful it is for him to be out of things like this. If we could work something out of the three books, I’m sure he would get all right in no time. A threefold spell; that’s what we want.’
‘Well, we can’t have it then,’ said Charlotte. ‘I should think two books would be ample. It’s only a cold he’s got. It might want the three if it was plague or wounds or jauntry – jaundice, or whatever it is.’
They spread out the book on the table as soon as tea was cleared away, and put their heads together over the yellow pages. But it was some time before they could find anything that seemed as though it could possibly do Rupert any good.
‘What a beastly lot of herbs there are in the world,’ Charlotte remarked. And Charles reminded her that they called any old flower an herb in books.
‘What I can’t understand,’ he added, ‘is how people can possibly have so many disgusting things the matter with them – palsy and leprosy and quinsy, and all the other things as well.’
‘I don’t suppose people have them now,’ said Caroline consolingly. ‘Aunt Emmeline says Hygiene has got on so nicely, people don’t have nearly such awful things the matter with them as they used. Look at the Black Death in fourteen hundred something. You never hear of black deaths now.’
‘I wonder whether funerals are black because of that,’ said Charles. ‘I think there’s something in Latin about Black Death knocking the back of the horseman with an even foot.’
‘I always did think Latin was nonsense,’ said Charlotte.
Their eyes were quite tired of the yellow paper and the long s’s before the great idea occurred to them. It was Caroline who had it.
‘Let’s look up Roses,’ she said. ‘I’m sure the rose is Rupert’s lucky flower. Perhaps if we made a conserve, or a decoction, or a tincture or something – ’
‘We promised not to give any one anything for their insides. I’ve just remembered,’ said Charles. ‘How rotten!’
‘Never mind – let’s look! We’ll make it a spell as well. Out of the Language Of. I expect it’ll work all right. Find Rose.’
They found Rose – pages and pages of it. The author of the Herbal had plenty to say. As he himself put it: ‘If I ſhould ſet down here all uſes of the roſe my booke would be already too long.’
But after diligent search they found out that the rose is under the dominion of Venus.
‘That’s all right,’ said Charles. ‘She had a little boy of her own. So she’d know.’
Also, that the decoction of roses ‘is proper to cool the heat of fevers.’
‘Only we don’t know what fever Rupert’s got,’ Charles said. ‘It might be the scarlet kind or the swine kind, if humans have that.’
They also found that the rose was ‘a conſiderable reſtorative. The bitterneſs of the roſes when they be freſh is of good uſe to cure choler and watery humours.’
‘I suppose watery humours means when you’re in the humour to cry; he isn’t that,’ said Charlotte.
Farther down the page they found: ‘The moiſt conſerve of roſes mixed with mithridate and taken together is good for thoſe that are troubled with diſtillations of rheum from the brain to the eyes and the noſe.’
‘That’s it!’ cried Caroline. ‘I knew the rose would do the trick! I know a cold in the head is rheum. That’s French. I daresay it’s Latin too,’ she added hastily. ‘But I never knew before that colds come from your brain. I expect that’s what makes you feel so duffing when you’ve got a cold.’
If a doubt was still left in any breast, it was set at rest when they learned that ‘Red roſes procure reſt and ſleep,’ and that ‘a ſtrong tincture of the roſe maketh a pleaſant julep, calmeth delirium, and helpeth the action of the bark.’
‘Rest’s what he wants; the Wil-cat said so,’ Caroline shut the book with a bang, ‘and if roses help the action of the bark, that’s the very thing. She said the cough wanted easing.’
‘Does bark mean cough?’ Charles asked doubtfully.
‘You may depend it did in those old times,’ Caroline assured him. ‘Aunt Emmeline told me lots of the words they call slang now, were book-words once. “Swank” wasn’t slang in Shakespeare’s time, she said. And it’s stopped raining. Let’s get the roses, and we can think about how we’ll give them afterwards. Perhaps if he just smelt them.’
‘There was an old Roman Johnny,’ said Charles instructively; ‘he asked all his friends to a party, and let down tons of rose leaves on them till they died. Couldn’t we do that to Rupert? Not till he died, of course, but till he got better.’
‘We might cover him with rose leaves,’ said Caroline, delighted with the romantic idea, ‘like babes in the wood. Let’s get pillow-cases full – I know where the linen-room is – and hide them till every one’s in bed. And then put them over him. We ought to put something out of the Language Of as well. Iceland moss means health, I believe. Only there isn’t any.’
A hasty search in the Language of Flowers informed them that nemophila meant ‘success everywhere’; and as nothing more suitable could be found, it was decided to mix a few nemophila flowers with the rose leaves.
‘There was a secret Society once called The Rosicurians. Aunt Emmeline told me,’ said Caroline. ’We shall be that if the roses cure Rupert. I like being long-ago things, don’t you?’
The garden was very wet indeed. Even in mackintoshes it was difficult to avoid getting wet through. Every tree dripped on the children’s heads, and the water from the soaked rose leaves ran up their sleeves and down their necks. There were so many fully-blown roses that it was easy enough to fill the three frilled linen pillow-cases, though of course it isn’t the sort of thing that is done all in a minute.
It was nearly bedtime when the three dripping children, each carrying a dripping sack of rose leaves, stood outside the arbour which led to the secret passage. They had gone out that way.
‘I know we were told not to,’ Charlotte had said, ’but it was only the Wil-cat who told us, and it was only because the Uncle doesn’t like other people to use the passage. And of course we’ll tell him afterwards, and he’ll say it was all right. When we’ve cured Rupert every one will say how clever.’
Yet now at the last they hesitated.
‘I do wish I could remember,’ said Caroline frowning, ’whether we did promise not to go through the passage or whether it was only that we were told not to. It really does make all the difference, doesn’t it?’
(It often happens that grown-up people think children are disobedient because really and truly the children can’t remember whether they promised or not, and naturally they give themselves the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes the grown-ups do not, in their turn, give the children this benefit.)
Neither Charles nor Charlotte could remember having promised.
‘Then here goes!’ said Caroline, pushing open the door. The candle they had put there in readiness gave them enough light to fasten the bolts by, and also to find the recess in the vault of the passage which they had decided to use to hide the rose leaves in.
They listened at the other door, got safely into the passage and up to their rooms. Caroline pulled off her wet things, put on her bath slippers, and crept down with her bath towel to rub away the water they had dripped on the floor by the door of the room where the secret staircase was. They feared so wet a patch might prove a clue to Mrs. Wilmington. But Mrs. Wilmington was with Rupert, putting cold bandages on a very hot head, and before she left him for the night, the stones were dry.
Perhaps you would not like to go down a secret staircase in the middle of the night and into an underground passage, even to fetch rose leaves to cure a sick friend? But the three C.’s were not afraid of the darkness. Their mother had always accustomed them to go about in the dark. It was a sort of game to them, to feel their way about the house without a light, and to fetch sweets which their mother would put ready for them. She used to tell them exactly where to find the little packets, and so the dark was always mixed up in their minds with sweets and expectation and pleasant things. And they only had to go down the house stairs in the dark. Directly they got to the secret stair of course they lighted the candle.
And now you see them in their quilted red dressing-gowns carrying up the wet sacks of rose leaves. They felt their way to Rupert’s room. In it a night-light was burning dimly. They lighted the dressing-table candles.
‘Hullo!’ said Rupert; ’who’s that?’
‘It’s only us,’ whispered Caroline. ‘Is the fever very hot?’
‘It is now,’ said Rupert; ‘it was cold just now. I wish I could go to sleep. I can’t though. I feel all hot and then all cold. It is beastly.’
‘We’ve brought you something nice and cool,’ said Charlotte. ‘You get out of bed and you’ll see.’
Rupert, his eyes very shining, and his cheeks a bright scarlet, tumbled out of bed in a very long night-shirt and rolled into the arm-chair by the bed head. Caroline threw a blanket over him.
‘I must,’ she said, when he protested; ‘they always do when you’re ill and they’re making your bed.’
The children turned back the bedclothes and emptied three sacks of dripping rose leaves on to the bed.
‘Now,’ said Charles, shivering a little himself, ‘get in. I should think that’s enough to cool the hottest fever.’
Rupert rolled into bed. He was really very feverish – if he had not been, he would never have rolled into that couch of wet red rose leaves.
‘Oh, how ripping,’ he said; ‘it’s lovely; so cold, so cold. You are bricks to bring them. And how sweet they are. No! don’t cover me up. That’s what Mrs. Wilmington does. Let me get cool.’
‘They always cover you up,’ said Caroline severely. ‘Lie still, or the spell won’t work.’
‘Oh, is it a spell?’ said Rupert. ‘I thought it was rose leaves. Sacks of them, sacks and sacks and sacks and sacks and sacks. Each sack had a cat, each cat had a kit, you know. I say, if I talk nonsense, it’s because I want to. You’re not to think I don’t know it’s nonsense.’
‘You’re not to talk at all, even if you could talk sense,’ said Charlotte, tucking the bedclothes very tightly round his neck. ‘Lie still and say, “I am much better. I am quite well.” I have an aunt called Emmeline, and she never has a doctor, and she always says that.’
