Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
Edith Nesbit's The Complete Mouldiwarp Series (Illustrated Edition) is a delightful collection of whimsical stories that follow the adventures of the Mouldiwarp family. Nesbit's witty and charming writing style is sure to captivate readers of all ages, as she weaves together tales of friendship, courage, and magical encounters. Set in a world where common animals possess extraordinary abilities, the Mouldiwarp Series offers a unique blend of fantasy and humor, making it a timeless classic in children's literature. The book is beautifully illustrated, enhancing the reader's experience and bringing the characters to life on the page. Edith Nesbit, known for her pioneering work in children's literature, drew inspiration from her own experiences as a mother and storyteller. Her imaginative storytelling and deep understanding of childhood emotions shine through in The Complete Mouldiwarp Series, making it a must-read for fans of classic literature and fantasy. Nesbit's ability to create enchanting worlds and endearing characters has solidified her reputation as one of the most beloved children's authors of all time. I highly recommend The Complete Mouldiwarp Series (Illustrated Edition) to readers looking for a charming and magical escape into a world filled with adventure and wonder. Edith Nesbit's timeless stories are sure to enchant and delight readers of all ages, making this collection a valuable addition to any library. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 702
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
The Complete Mouldiwarp Series
Table of Contents
Introduction
This illustrated volume gathers, in a single place, the two novels that constitute Edith Nesbit’s complete Mouldiwarp series: The House of Arden (1908) and Harding’s Luck (1909). Presented together, they allow readers to trace the full span of a design that interweaves everyday childhood with the deep currents of English history. The aim of the collection is straightforward and complete: to present both related narratives in their entirety, with images that support the sense of time and place, so that new readers and longstanding admirers may appreciate the unity of character, setting, and idea that binds these books into one sustained imaginative project.
Edith Nesbit (1858–1924), publishing as E. Nesbit, occupies a central position in the formation of modern children’s literature. She pioneered a mode in which recognizably modern children meet the marvelous without abandoning ordinary concerns, speech, or humor. Her stories proceed with brisk clarity, a conversational narrator, and a keen eye for social detail. Within that accessible surface, she explores questions of responsibility, justice, loyalty, and the ways families hold together under strain. The Mouldiwarp novels exemplify her characteristic blend of invention and sympathy, linking the enchantments of fantasy with the textures of daily life and the living presence of the past.
The unifying figure across these two books is the Mouldiwarp, an enigmatic helper who opens the path between present and past. Nesbit does not present magic as escape, but as an exacting invitation. The appearances of the Mouldiwarp set terms, illuminate choices, and give the children access to times other than their own. Through this device, the novels connect personal desires with larger historical frames, encouraging readers to consider how fortunes are made, lost, found, and earned. The Mouldiwarp thus becomes less a trickster than a catalyst, joining adventure to consequence and curiosity to conscience.
The collection consists of two complete children’s novels and no other text types. Readers will find no ancillary short stories, poems, essays, letters, or diaries here; the focus is the pair of narratives that together form the Mouldiwarp sequence. They are works of children’s fantasy and time‑slip historical fiction, written for a general audience and cherished by readers of many ages. The designation Illustrated Edition signals that the texts are accompanied by images intended to enrich the experience of the story worlds. The illustrations do not replace the prose; they support it, clarifying settings, costumes, and atmospheres summoned by Nesbit’s energetic imagination.
The House of Arden begins with two children, Edred and Elfrida Arden, who come unexpectedly into a crumbling inheritance and a mystery. Their family name, once grand, bears the trace of a lost treasure and a history clouded by misfortune. The Mouldiwarp opens to them passages into earlier centuries, where scenes from England’s past supply hints and tests that may help recover what has been forgotten. The premise is not merely a hunt for objects; it is a schooling in what it means to belong to a lineage, a place, and a set of obligations that extend beyond individual wishes.
Harding’s Luck introduces Dickie Harding, a boy living in London poverty who finds his path entangled with that of the Ardens. Through a transformative encounter with the Mouldiwarp, he is carried into earlier times and different stations, where the question of who he is takes on new dimensions. The novel sets urban hardship against the possibilities of courage, resourcefulness, and friendship, and it treats luck as something to be examined rather than simply possessed. Without repeating the first book, it complements it, opening the same imaginative doorway from a different angle and thereby enlarging the moral field of the series.
Though each novel stands fully on its own, they are intricately related. Places recur, names echo, and events glimpsed from one vantage are reframed from another. Read together, the books reveal a pattern of correspondences in which inheritance, chance, character, and care are tested across time. The connections are never mere puzzles to be solved; they build a conversation between stories about what binds families and communities, what history remembers, and how present choices reach backward and forward. Taken as a pair, they form a complete design whose parts deepen and complete one another.
Nesbit’s abiding themes flow strongly here: the dignity of childhood, the ethics of using power, the tug between self‑interest and duty, and the porous boundary between home life and the larger world. By moving her protagonists through lived textures of the past, she invites reflection on class, work, and the claims of justice without turning the novels into allegory. The children’s decisions matter, not because they save worlds in spectacular fashion, but because they learn to see clearly and act considerately. In this way, the Mouldiwarp books make historical feeling accessible, humane, and grounded in everyday choices.
Stylistically, Nesbit’s hallmarks are evident on every page: a companionable narrative voice that treats the reader as an intelligent partner, quick comic turns that release tension without dissolving seriousness, and dialogue that captures the rhythms of children’s thought. She excels at staging magical intrusions within ordinary rooms, lanes, kitchens, and schoolyards, so that wonder arises from the familiar. Scenes are built with economy and movement; episodes turn on small objects, misremembered facts, or hastily made promises. The tone is warm but unsentimental, encouraging adventure while recognizing the real limits and responsibilities of growing up.
The historical imagination of these books is vivid and tactile. Without pedantry, Nesbit animates earlier centuries through clothing, speech patterns, customs, and domestic details, so that the past feels inhabited rather than museumlike. The time‑slip frame allows the novels to set present concerns against different arrangements of law, labor, power, and belief. Children discover that history is not merely a backdrop but a field in which ordinary people lived, chose, and endured. The effect is to awaken curiosity about how the present came to be, and to suggest that sympathy across time is a form of moral understanding.
As a whole, Edith Nesbit’s work endures because it marries invention to clarity and play to purpose. The Mouldiwarp series in particular shows her at ease with an ambitious structure that remains welcoming to young readers. The books helped establish a durable pattern in children’s fantasy: magical means used to explore real questions in recognizable settings. Their continuing vitality lies in their balance of momentum and reflection, humor and gravity. They invite rereading, not only for incident, but for the ways they teach attention—to words, to other people, and to the long stories that flow through families and places.
This Illustrated Edition presents the complete texts of The House of Arden and Harding’s Luck together, offering a coherent approach to a connected imaginative world. The images accompanying the novels aim to heighten the sense of period and place without dictating interpretation, leaving room for each reader’s own discovery. Whether encountered for the first time or revisited after many years, these stories reward a steady reading that allows their echoes and crossings to accumulate. At the heart of both books stands the Mouldiwarp, a guide who opens doors; beyond those doors, Nesbit invites us to travel, remember, and choose well.
Author Biography
Edith Nesbit (1858–1924), widely published as E. Nesbit, was an English poet, novelist, and innovator of children’s fiction during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. She helped shift the genre from moral fables and fairy-tale realms to contemporary settings in which ordinary children encounter the marvelous. Blending humor, brisk dialogue, and realistic family dynamics, she created a narrative voice whose wit and immediacy continue to sound modern. Her oeuvre spans poetry, journalism, and more than three dozen books for young readers, including historical and time‑slip fantasies. Within this legacy, The House of Arden and Harding’s Luck exemplify her interest in history, identity, and social justice.
Nesbit’s education was varied and largely self-directed, shaped by frequent moves in her youth and wide reading rather than a single institutional course. She absorbed English folklore, European tales, and contemporary journalism, and she developed a strong sense of place—from city streets and suburban commons to castles, moors, and old houses. As a poet she learned compression and cadence; as a journalist she prized clarity and economy. Beyond literature, her outlook was influenced by late‑nineteenth‑century reform ideas. An active founding member of the Fabian Society, she read and spoke about gradual social change, ideas that later surfaced in her fiction as questions of class, fairness, and civic responsibility.
She first came to notice as a poet, publishing collections such as Lays and Legends in the 1880s, while supporting herself through journalism and editorial work. By the 1890s she had begun writing fiction for young readers, serializing stories in magazines before issuing them in book form. Her technique—placing magic directly into the recognizable present and letting resourceful children test it—was strikingly fresh. She addressed her audience with a conspiratorial, companionable tone, inviting readers to weigh choices and consequences alongside her protagonists. This balance of playfulness and moral discernment made her books popular across classes and ages and established a model for twentieth‑century children’s narratives.
Among her best‑known works are the contemporary adventures and fantasies that defined Edwardian children’s literature: Five Children and It and its sequels The Phoenix and the Carpet and The Story of the Amulet, as well as the non‑fantasy classic The Railway Children. These books consolidated her reputation and demonstrated her range, from comic domestic scenes to speculative encounters with history and myth. She also wrote stand‑alone fantasies and historical tales that refined her time‑slip method. In all, her stories foreground cooperation, ingenuity, and ethical choice, while allowing room for mischief and surprise—a durable combination that prepared readers for the more focused historical experiments of The House of Arden and Harding’s Luck.
The House of Arden, published in 1908, is a historical fantasy that follows children of an old family who travel across periods of English history in search of understanding and inheritance. Without revealing plot turns, the book uses time shifts to test how memory, place, and duty shape identity. Episodes in different eras illuminate everyday textures—clothes, speech, and custom—rather than grand battles alone, and the narrative keeps a light touch even as it raises questions about what is owed to the past. The novel’s structure lets Nesbit combine curiosity about antiquity with a modern sensibility and brisk, colloquial storytelling.
Harding’s Luck (1909) is a companion to The House of Arden, expanding the time‑slip design to follow a boy whose present‑day London life intersects with earlier centuries. The novel explores the persistence of character across circumstance, the contingencies of birth and class, and the obligations that knowledge of the past imposes on the present. Its historical episodes are textured yet swift, and its magic serves ethical inquiry rather than mere spectacle. Read alongside The House of Arden, it deepens Nesbit’s meditation on inheritance by juxtaposing family legend with urban poverty and resilience—an emphasis consistent with her reformist sympathies and interest in practical compassion.
In her later years Nesbit continued to publish fiction for adults and children while giving readings and public talks. She died in 1924, having left a body of work that reshaped expectations for children’s books. Subsequent writers of fantasy and adventure, including C. S. Lewis and Edward Eager, acknowledged her influence, particularly her conversational narrator, ensemble casts, and seamless transit between everyday life and the marvelous. The House of Arden and Harding’s Luck remain notable for their inventive use of time travel to think about history as lived experience. Reissued widely, they continue to invite new readers to imagine responsibility as an adventurous, communal act.
Historical Context
Edith Nesbit wrote at the hinge of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, publishing for children from the 1890s through the 1910s. The Mouldiwarp books, The House of Arden (1908) and Harding’s Luck (1909), emerge from that milieu, combining realistic contemporary childhood with time-slip journeys across English history. They belong to the so‑called Golden Age of children’s literature, when writers such as Lewis Carroll, George MacDonald, and later Kenneth Grahame and Rudyard Kipling reimagined what children’s books could do. Nesbit’s innovation was to set recognizably modern children in ordinary settings who encounter magic as a catalyst for ethical reflection and historical inquiry.
The political background of the books is Edwardian Britain, a society negotiating reform after the South African War (1899–1902). Liberal governments from 1906 introduced a program of social legislation—old-age pensions (1908), labour exchanges (1909), and, shortly after, national insurance (1911)—that signaled a shift from Victorian laissez‑faire toward a nascent welfare state. Nesbit, an active member of the Fabian Society from the mid‑1880s, engaged with debates on class and poverty through journalism and fiction. Harding’s Luck, in particular, reflects anxieties about urban deprivation and social mobility while insisting, in a child-centered form, on the dignity and potential of those left at society’s margins.
The urban-industrial transformation of London forms a crucial substratum. By 1900 the metropolis had expanded across the Thames, with dense working-class districts in places such as Southwark, Bermondsey, and the East End. Railways, docks, and factories shaped livelihoods and landscapes; so did philanthropic “settlement” initiatives like Toynbee Hall (founded 1884). Slum clearances and municipal reforms altered neighborhoods unevenly. Harding’s Luck draws on this environment, presenting the textures of street trading, casual labor, and tenement life with unusual attention for a children’s fantasy. The House of Arden, while centered on a country estate, constantly juxtaposes rural nostalgia with the realities of modern economic change.
Shifts in educational policy reframed the idea of childhood that Nesbit inherited. The Elementary Education Act of 1870 established state-funded schooling; the 1902 Act reorganized provision under local authorities; reforms in 1906–1907 introduced school meals and medical inspections. The Children Act of 1908—the “Children’s Charter”—strengthened protections around neglect and juvenile courts. These measures, together with expanding children’s print culture, created a readership equipped to encounter history and social questions in fiction. Nesbit’s protagonists are inquisitive, literate, and competent—figures of a new mass-schooled child who could read the past critically while navigating the swiftly modernizing present.
The 1890s and 1900s witnessed intensifying public interest in national heritage and preservation. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (founded 1877) and the National Trust (1895) promoted conservation, while local “pageant” movements (circa 1905–1914) dramatized civic histories for popular audiences. The House of Arden’s fascination with ruined towers, family papers, and hidden chambers belongs to this heritage turn. Its excursions into earlier centuries echo contemporary antiquarian enthusiasms and the popularization of archaeology and local history. The novels invite children to ask how artifacts—clothes, coins, buildings—carry memory, and how the past is curated, staged, and sometimes mythologized for modern consumption.
Anxieties over the future of the landed gentry shadow the country-house frame in The House of Arden. Since the late nineteenth century, changing agricultural markets, the growth of urban wealth, and fiscal policy—most notably the introduction of estate duties in 1894—strained aristocratic and gentry finances. Debates about entail, primogeniture, and the social role of landowners entered the press and fiction. Nesbit dramatizes the moral responsibilities attached to inheritance without romanticizing privilege. The estate becomes a testing ground for questions asked widely in Edwardian Britain: What obligations accompany property? Can historical continuity be reconciled with the egalitarian impulses of a reforming age?
The series’ time-slip device intersects with how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century readers learned history. School curricula and popular histories favored narrative episodes, famous rulers, and vivid scenes. Museums and exhibitions offered material culture as spectacle. Nesbit adapts these pedagogies, moving her characters through different centuries where craft, costume, and custom can be seen, not merely recited. Yet the books insist that history is not pageantry alone: actions have social consequences, and private choices intersect with larger forces. The magic becomes a mode of inquiry, staging what historians were then debating—continuity and change, cause and effect, and the moral uses of the past.
The novels range across multiple periods of English history, from medieval craft worlds to early modern marketplaces and eighteenth- or nineteenth-century settings, without pretending to exhaustive coverage. This breadth reflects a common Edwardian approach that used emblematic scenes to sketch a national story. Guilds and household economies, seafaring and trade, urban governance and rural custom are glimpsed as living systems. Such representations echo school readers and children’s encyclopedias of the time, which distilled complex processes into accessible vignettes. Nesbit’s contribution is to let children witness—and sometimes aid—ordinary people, thus shifting emphasis from royal chronicle to social texture.
The Thames corridor—bridgeheads, quays, and the shifting foreshore—anchors Harding’s Luck in a distinctly London historical geography. Nineteenth-century engineering projects such as the Victoria and Albert Embankments (constructed mainly in the 1860s–1870s) had already transformed the river’s margins. Bridges multiplied; wharves and warehouses proliferated; later, slum clearances and municipal improvements pressed riverside communities into tighter quarters. By the 1900s, debates about housing, sanitation, and labor regulation were constant. Nesbit’s use of riverlands and alleys underscores the city as palimpsest: medieval lanes beneath modern streets, Tudor wharves remembered in place-names, and livelihoods repeatedly remade by infrastructure and commerce.
Contemporary arguments over poverty policy give Harding’s Luck particular bite. The Poor Law of 1834, still influential into the early 1900s, made relief conditional and stigmatized. A Royal Commission (1905–1909) split over reform, reflecting national disagreements about rights versus charity. Meanwhile, voluntary societies, including the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (founded 1884), expanded child protection efforts. Nesbit’s portrayal of a disabled, impoverished child resists the era’s sentimental archetypes and engages questions of agency, access, and belonging. While medical and social provision remained limited before 1911–1912 insurance schemes, the novel imagines ethical community beyond institutional minimalism.
The production context of an illustrated, mass-market children’s book also matters. By the turn of the century, advances in halftone reproduction and process engraving made abundant illustration economically feasible. Periodicals and publishers cultivated recognizable house styles, and artists such as H. R. Millar often collaborated with Nesbit and her contemporaries. Illustration shaped how young readers visualized clothing, architecture, and gesture across centuries—effectively teaching material history. Circulating libraries, school libraries, and an expanding middle-class readership sustained this market. An “Illustrated Edition” of the Mouldiwarp books thus partakes in the era’s visual pedagogy, anchoring fantasy in a persuasive historical look.
Gender debates inflect Nesbit’s characterizations. The late Victorian “New Woman” discourse and Edwardian suffrage agitation (the Women’s Social and Political Union formed in 1903) amplified discussions about women’s roles in public and domestic life. Nesbit rarely polemicizes in these books, yet she consistently grants girls initiative, competence, and interpretive authority in historical episodes. Such portrayals aligned with incremental expansions in girls’ schooling and public participation, even while social expectations remained restrictive. The result is a children’s historical fantasy attentive to how gender shapes access to knowledge, labor, and property—issues sharpened, not softened, by temporal leaps.
Questions of empire hover at the edges. Around 1908–1909 the British Empire was territorially vast and ideologically contested, with the recent Boer War prompting moral scrutiny at home. Nesbit’s Mouldiwarp books turn inward, privileging the English past over imperial adventure. That choice reflects a broader cultural moment that used national history—castles, charters, and parish life—to negotiate identity amid global power. The novels’ emphasis on local attachments, customary obligations, and communal memory provided an alternative to imperial spectaculars common in juvenile publishing, suggesting that the ethical imagination might be schooled as much in village and city street as in far‑flung colonies.
The period’s fascination with the unseen—alongside scientific progress—frames Nesbit’s blend of magic and realism. The Society for Psychical Research (founded 1882) and popular spiritualism indicate a culture curious about extraordinary phenomena, even as physics, engineering, and medicine advanced rapidly. Nesbit’s magic is governed by rules, consequences, and limits; it coexists with empirical problem‑solving and practical ethics. This negotiation mirrors a society comfortable with both mechanized transport and medieval pageantry, school laboratories and folklore. The Mouldiwarp—a dialect word for “mole”—signals the books’ interest in vernacular tradition, grounding wonder in local language and the lived soil of place.
Class encounter is central. Edwardian Britain was still hierarchical, yet new forms of mobility—educational, occupational, political—were emerging, marked by the rise of the Labour Representation Committee (1900) and, shortly, the Labour Party’s parliamentary presence. In both books, children meet people across the social spectrum—craftspeople, servants, traders, officials, and gentlefolk—within past and present frames. These encounters expose the contingency of status and the persistence of duty. Nesbit neither romanticizes poverty nor demonizes wealth; rather, she interrogates how custom, law, and habit shape opportunity, inviting readers to imagine solidarities stronger than inherited boundaries.
Within Nesbit’s oeuvre, the Mouldiwarp books develop a time‑slip method she had refined in earlier fantasies, but here the past becomes an explicit laboratory for civic virtue. The House of Arden tests stewardship and remembrance in a country setting; Harding’s Luck probes justice and belonging in the city. Written back‑to‑back in 1908–1909, they converse with public debates about taxation, welfare, and the uses of history. The novels’ episodic structures resemble museum tours or historical tableaux, teaching readers to attend to evidence, weigh motives, and recognize structural constraints—skills prized by the progressive educators and social reformers of their day.
Critical and popular reception placed Nesbit among the most influential children’s writers of her generation. Later authors, notably C. S. Lewis, acknowledged her impact on modern fantasy’s blend of the ordinary and the marvelous. The time‑slip strand she helped popularize fed subsequent works such as Alison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time (1939) and, later, Penelope Farmer’s Charlotte Sometimes (1969). Twentieth‑century critics have read the Mouldiwarp books as articulations of Fabian-inflected ethics, heritage consciousness, and urban realism. Their continued availability in illustrated reprints and digital editions has kept alive a mode of historical imagination that is playful, critical, and socially alert by design.
Synopsis (Selection)
THE HOUSE OF ARDEN
Two orphaned siblings, Edred and Elfrida Arden, inherit a crumbling castle and, with the help of the capricious Mouldiwarp, slip through time to seek their family’s lost treasure. Their episodic journeys into England’s past set puzzles of loyalty and truth, as pageantry and peril test their courage without foreclosing the mystery’s final outcome. Nesbit blends brisk adventure, playful narration, and gentle satire with a curiosity about national memory and the burdens of inheritance.
HARDING'S LUCK
A poor London boy, Dickie Harding, stumbles into the Mouldiwarp’s magic and is cast between his gritty present and a harsher, long-ago England where his fate becomes entangled with questions of name and home. Shifting social stations across eras confront him with choices about loyalty, law, and friendship, advancing the series’ arc without revealing the story’s ultimate turns. The tone grows more compassionate and socially searching, marrying swashbuckling time travel with close attention to poverty, disability, and the shaping of identity.
The Complete Mouldiwarp Series (Illustrated Edition)
THE HOUSE OF ARDEN
Chapter I. Arden’s Lord
It had been a great house once, with farms and fields, money and jewels – with tenants and squires and men-at-arms. The head of the house had ridden out three days’ journey to meet King Henry at the boundary of his estate, and the King had ridden back with him to lie in the tall State bed in the castle guest-chamber. The heir of the house had led his following against Cromwell; younger sons of the house had fought in foreign lands, to the honour of England and the gilding and regilding with the perishable gold of glory of the old Arden name. There had been Ardens in Saxon times, and there were Ardens still – but few and impoverished. The lands were gone, and the squires and men-at-arms; the castle itself was roofless, and its unglazed windows stared blankly across the fields of strangers, that stretched right up to the foot of its grey, weather-worn walls. And of the male Ardens there were now known two only – an old man and a child[1q].
The old man was Lord Arden, the head of the house, and he lived lonely in a little house built of the fallen stones that Time and Cromwell’s round-shot had cast from the castle walls. The child was Edred Arden, and he lived in a house in a clean, wind-swept town on a cliff.
It was a bright-faced house with bow-windows and a green balcony that looked out over the sparkling sea. It had three neat white steps and a brass knocker, pale and smooth with constant rubbing. It was a pretty house, and it would have been a pleasant house but for one thing – the lodgers. For I cannot conceal from you any longer that Edred Arden lived with his aunt, and that his aunt let lodgings. Letting lodgings is one of the most unpleasant of all possible ways of earning your living, and I advise you to try every other honest way of earning your living before you take to that.
Because people who go to the seaside and take lodgings seem, somehow, much harder to please than the people who go to hotels. They want ever so much more waiting on; they want so many meals, and at such odd times. They ring the bell almost all day long. They bring in sand from the shore in every fold of their clothes, and it shakes out of them on to the carpets and the sofa cushions, and everything in the house. They hang long streamers of wet seaweed against the pretty roses of the new wall-papers, and their washhand basins are always full of sea anemones and shells. Also, they are noisy; their boots seem to be always on the stairs, no matter how bad a headache you may have; and when you give them their bill they always think it is too much, no matter bow little it may be. So do not let lodgings if you can help it.
Miss Arden could not help it. It happened like this.
Edred and his sister were at school. (Did I tell you that he had a sister? Well, he had, and her name was Elfrida.) Miss Arden lived near the school, so that she could see the children often. She was getting her clothes ready for her wedding, and the gentleman who was going to marry her was coming home from South America, where he had made a fortune. The children’s father was coming home from South America, too, with the fortune that he had made, for he and Miss Arden’s sweetheart were partners. The children and their aunt talked whenever they met of the glorious time that was coming, and how, when Father and Uncle Jim – they called him Uncle Jim already – came home, they were all going to live in the country and be happy ever after.
And then the news came that Father and Uncle Jim had been captured by brigands, and all the money was lost, too, and there was nothing left but the house on the cliff. So Miss Arden took the children from the expensive school in London, and they all went to live in the cliff house, and as there was no money to live on, and no other way of making money to live on except letting lodgings, Miss Arden let them, like the brave lady she was, and did it well. And then came the news that Father and Uncle Jim were dead, and for a time the light of life went out in Cliff House.
This was two years ago; but the children had never got used to the lodgers. They hated them. At first they had tried to be friendly with the lodgers’ children, but they soon found that the lodgers’ children considered Edred and Elfrida very much beneath them, and looked down on them accordingly. And very often the lodgers’ children were the sort of children on whom anybody might have looked down, if it were right and kind to look down on anyone. And when Master Reginald Potts, of Peckham, puts his tongue out at you on the parade and says, right before everybody, ‘Lodgings! Yah!’ it is hard to feel quite the same to him as you did before.
When there were lodgers – and. there nearly always were, for the house was comfortable, and people who had been once came again – the children and their aunt had to live in the very top and the very bottom of the house – in the attics and the basement, in fact.
When there were no lodgers they used all the rooms in turn, to keep them aired. But the children liked the big basement parlour room best, because there all the furniture had belonged to dead-and-gone Ardens, and all the pictures on the walls were of Ardens dead and gone. The rooms that the lodgers had were furnished with a new sort of furniture that had no stories belonging to it such as belonged to the old polished oak tables and bureaux that were in the basement parlour.
Edred and Elfrida went to school every day and learned reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, spelling, and useful knowledge, all of which they hated quite impartially, which means they hated the whole lot – one thing as much as another.
The only part of lessons they liked was the home-work, when, if Aunt Edith had time to help them, geography became like adventures, history like story-books, and even arithmetic suddenly seemed to mean something.
‘I wish you could teach us always,’ said Edred, very inky, and interested for the first time in the exports of China; ‘it does seem so silly trying to learn things that are only words in books.’
‘I wish I could,’ said Aunt Edith, ‘but I can’t do twenty-nine thousand and seventeen things all at once, and—’ A bell jangled. ‘That’s the seventh time since tea.’ She got up and went into the kitchen. ‘There’s the bell again, my poor Eliza. Never mind; answer the bell, but don’t answer them, whatever they say. It doesn’t do a bit of good, and it sometimes prevents their giving you half-crowns when they leave.’
‘I do love it when they go,’ said Elfrida.
‘Yes,’ said her aunt. ‘A cab top-heavy with luggage, the horse’s nose turned stationward, it’s a heavenly sight – when the bill is paid and – But, then, I’m just as glad to see the luggage coming. Chickens! when my ship comes home we’ll go and live on a desert island where there aren’t any cabs, and we won’t have any lodgers in our cave.’
‘When I grow up,’ said Edred, ‘I shall go across the sea and look for your ship and bring it home. I shall take a steam-tug and steer it myself.’
‘Then I shall be captain,’ said Elfrida.
‘No, I shall be captain.’
You can’t if you steer.’
‘Yes, I can!’
‘No, you can’t!’
‘Yes, I can!’
‘Well, do, then!’ said Elfrida; ‘and while you’re doing it – I know you can’t – I shall dig in the garden and find a gold-mine, and Aunt Edith will be rolling in money when you come back, and she won’t want your silly old ship.’
‘Spelling next,’ said Aunt Edith. ‘How do you spell “disagreeable”?’
‘Which of us?’ asked Edred acutely.
‘Both,’ said Aunt Edith, trying to look very severe.
When you are a child you always dream of your ship coming home – of having a hundred pounds, or a thousand, or a million pounds to spend as you like. My favourite dream, I remember, was a thousand pounds and an express understanding that I was not to spend it on anything useful. And when you have dreamed of your million pounds, or your thousand, or your hundred, you spend happy hour on hour in deciding what presents you will buy for each of the people you are fond of, and in picturing their surprise and delight at your beautiful presents and your wonderful generosity. I think very few of us spend our dream fortunes entirely on ourselves. Of course, we buy ourselves a motor-bicycle straight away, and footballs and bats – and dolls with real hair, and real china tea-sets, and large boxes of mixed chocolates, and ‘Treasure Island,’ and all the books that Mrs. Ewing ever wrote, but, when we have done that we begin to buy things for other people. It is a beautiful dream, but too often, by the time it comes true – up to a hundred pounds or a thousand – we forget what we used to mean to do with our money, and spend it all in stocks and shares, and eligible building sites, and fat cigars and fur coats. If I were young again I would sit down and write a list of all the kind things I meant to do when my ship came home, and if my ship ever did come home I would read that list, and – But the parlour bell is ringing for the eighth time, and the front-door bell is ringing too, and the first-floor is ringing also, and so is the second-floor, and Eliza is trying to answer four bells at once – always a most difficult thing to do.
The front-door bell was rung by the postman; he brought three letters. The first was a bill for mending the lid of the cistern, on which Edred had recently lighted a fire, fortified by an impression that wood could not burn if there were water on the other side – a totally false impression, as the charred cistern lid proved. The second was an inquiry whether Miss Arden would take a clergyman in at half the usual price, because he had a very large family which had all just had measles. And the third was THE letter, which is really the seed, and beginning, and backbone, and rhyme, and reason of this story.
Edred had got the letters from the postman, and he stood and waited while Aunt Edith read them. He collected postmarks, and had not been able to make out by the thick half-light of the hall gas whether any of these were valuable.
The third letter had a very odd effect on Aunt Edith. She read it once, and rubbed her hand across her eyes. Then she got up and stood under the chandelier, which wanted new burners badly, and so burned with a very unlighting light, and read it again. Then she read it a third time, and then she said, ‘Oh!’
‘What is it, auntie?’ Elfrida asked anxiously; ‘is it the taxes?’ It had been the taxes once, and Elfrida had never forgotten. (If you don’t understand what this means ask your poorest relations, who are also likely to be your nicest and if they don’t know, ask the washerwoman.)
‘No; it’s not the taxes, darling,’ said Aunt Edith; ‘on the contrary.’
I don’t know what the contrary (or opposite) of taxes is, any more than the children did – but I am sure it is something quite nice – and so were they.
‘Oh, auntie, I am so glad,’ they both said, and said it several times before they asked again, ‘What is it?’
‘I think – I’m not quite sure – but I think it’s a ship come home – oh, just a quite tiny little bit of a ship – a toy boat – hardly more than that. But I must go up to London tomorrow the first thing, and see if it really is a ship, and, if so, what sort of ship it is. Mrs. Blake shall come in, and you’ll be good as gold, children, won’t you?’
‘Yes – oh, yes,’ said the two.
‘And not make booby traps for the butcher, or go on the roof in your nightgowns, or play Red Indians in the dust-bin, or make apple-pie beds for the lodgers?’ Aunt Edith asked, hastily mentioning a few of the little amusements which had lately enlivened the spare time of her nephew and niece.
‘No, we really won’t,’ said Edred; ‘and we’ll truly try not to think of anything new and amusing,’ he added, with real self-sacrifice.
‘I must go by the eight-thirty train. I wish I could think of some way of – of amusing you,’ she ended, for she was too kind to say ‘of keeping you out of mischief for the day,’ which was what she really thought. ‘I’ll bring you something jolly for your birthday, Edred. Wouldn’t you like to spend the day with nice Mrs. Hammond?’
‘Oh, no,’ said Edred; and added, on the inspiration of the moment, ‘Why mayn’t we have a picnic – just Elf and me – on the downs, to keep my birthday? It doesn’t matter it being the day before, does it? You said we were too little last summer, and we should this, and now it is this and I have grown two inches and Elf’s grown three, so we’re five inches taller than when you said we weren’t big enough.’
‘Now you see how useful arithmetic is,’ said the aunt. ‘Very well, you shall. Only wear your old clothes, and always keep in sight of the road. Yes; you can have a whole holiday. And now to bed. Oh, there’s that bell again! Poor, dear Eliza.’
A Clapham cub, belonging to one of the lodgers, happened to be going up to bed just as Edred and Elfrida came through the baize door that shut off the basement from the rest of the house. He put his tongue out through the banisters at the children of the house and said, ‘Little slaveys.’ The cub thought he could get up the stairs before the two got round the end of the banisters, but he had not counted on the long arm of Elfrida, whose hand shot through the banisters and caught the cub’s leg and held on to it till Edred had time to get round. The two boys struggled up the stairs together and then rolled together from top to bottom, where they were picked up and disentangled by their relations. Except for this little incident, going to bed was uneventful.
Next morning Aunt Edith went off by the eight-thirty train. The children’s school satchels were filled, not with books, but with buns; instead of exercise-books there were sandwiches; and in the place of inky pencil-boxes were two magnificent boxes of peppermint creams which had cost a whole shilling each, and had been recklessly bought by Aunt Edith in the agitation of the parting hour when they saw her off at the station.
They went slowly up the red-brick-paved sidewalk that always looks as though it had just been washed, and when they got to the top of the hill they stopped and looked at each other.
‘It can’t be wrong,’ said Edred.
‘She never told us not to,’ said Elfrida.
‘I’ve noticed,’ said Edred, ‘that when grownup people say “they’ll see about” anything you want it never happens.’
‘I’ve noticed that, too,’ said Elfrida. ‘Auntie always said she’d see about taking us there.’
‘Yes, she did.’
‘We won’t be mean and sneaky about it,’ Edred insisted, though no one had suggested that he would be mean and sneaky. ‘We’ll tell auntie directly she gets back.’
‘Of course,’ said Elfrida, rather relieved, for she had not felt at all sure that Edred meant to do this.
‘After all,’ said Edred, ‘it’s our castle. We ought to go and see the cradle of our race. That’s what it calls it in “Cliffgate and its Environs.” I say, let’s call it a pilgrimage. The satchels will do for packs, and we can get halfpenny walking-sticks with that penny of yours. We can put peas in our shoes, if you like,’ he added generously.
‘We should have to go back for them, and I don’t expect the split kind count, anyhow. And perhaps they’d hurt,’ said Elfrida doubtfully. ‘And I want my penny for—’ She stopped, warned by her brother’s frown. ‘All right, then,’ she ended; ‘you can have it. Only give me half next time you get a penny; that’s only fair.’
‘I’m not usually unfair,’ said Edred coldly. ‘Don’t let’s be pilgrims.’
‘But I should like to,’ said Elfrida.
Edred was obstinate. ‘No,’ he said, ‘we’ll just walk.’
So they just walked, rather dismally.
The town was getting thinner, like the tract of stocking that surrounds a hole; the houses were farther apart and had large gardens. In one of them a maid was singing to herself as she shook out the mats – a thing which, somehow, maids don’t do much in towns.
‘That’s lucky for us,’ said Elfrida amiably.
‘We’re not her silly sweetheart,’ said Edred.
‘No; but we heard her sing it, and he wasn’t here, so he couldn’t. There’s a sign-post. I wonder how far we’ve gone? I’m getting awfully tired.’
‘You’d better have been pilgrims,’ said Edred. ‘They never get tired, however many peas they have in their shoes.’
‘I will now,’ said Elfrida.
‘You can’t,’ said Edred; ‘it’s too late. We’re miles and miles from the stick shop.’
‘Very well, I shan’t go on,’ said Elfrida. ‘You got out of bed the wrong side this morning. I’ve tried to soft-answer you as hard as ever I could all the morning, and I’m not going to try any more, so there.’
‘Don’t, then,’ said Edred bitterly. ‘Go along home if you like. You’re only a girl.’
‘I’d rather be only a girl than what you are,’ said she.
‘And what’s that, I should like to know?’
Elfrida stopped and shut her eyes tight.
‘Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t!’ she said. ‘I won’t be cross, I won’t be cross, I won’t be cross! Pax. Drop it. Don’t let’s!
‘Don’t let’s what?’
‘Quarrel about nothing,’ said Elfrida, opening her eyes and walking on very fast. ‘We’re always doing it. Auntie says it’s a habit. If boys are so much splendider than girls, they ought to be able to stop when they like.’
‘Suppose they don’t like?’ said he, kicking his boots in the thick, white dust.
‘Well,’ said she, ‘I’ll say I’m sorry first. Will that do?’
‘I was just going to say it first myself,’ said Edred, in aggrieved tones. ‘Come on,’ he added more generously, ‘here’s the sign-post. Let’s see what it says.’
It said, quite plainly and without any nonsense about it, that they had come a mile and three-quarters, adding, most unkindly, that it was eight miles to Arden Castle. But, it said, it was a quarter of a mile to Ardenhurst Station.
‘Let’s go by train,’ said Edred grandly.
‘No money,’ said Elfrida, very forlornly indeed.
‘Aha!’ said Edred; ‘now you’ll see. I’m not mean about money. I brought my new florin.’
‘Oh, Edred,’ said the girl, stricken with remorse, ‘you are noble.’
‘Pooh!’ said the boy, and his ears grew red with mingled triumph and modesty; ‘that’s nothing. Come on.’
So it was from the train that the pilgrims got their first sight of Arden Castle. It stands up boldly on the cliff where it was set to keep off foreign foes and guard the country round about it. But of all its old splendour there is now nothing but the great walls that the grasses and wild flowers grow on, and round towers whose floors and ceilings have fallen away, and roofless chambers where owls build, and brambles and green ferns grow strong and thick.
The children walked to the castle along the cliff path where the skylarks were singing like mad up in the pale sky, and the bean-fields, where the bees were busy, gave out the sweetest scent in the world – a scent that got itself mixed with the scent of the brown seaweed that rises and falls in the wash of the tide on the rocks at the cliff-foot.
‘Let’s have dinner here,’ said Elfrida, when they reached the top of a little mound from which they could look down on the castle. So they had it.
Two bites of sandwich and one of peppermint cream; that was the rule.
And all the time they were munching they looked down on the castle, and loved it more and more.
‘Don’t you wish it was real, and we lived in it?’ Elfrida asked, when they had eaten as much as they wanted – not of peppermint creams, of course; but they had finished them.
‘It is real, what there is of it.’
‘Yes; but I mean if it was a house with chimneys, and fireplaces, and doors with bolts, and glass in the windows.’
‘I wonder if we could get in?’ said Edred.
‘We might climb over,’ said Elfrida, looking hopefully at the enormous walls, sixty feet high, in which no gate or gap showed.
‘There’s an old man going across that field no, not that one; the very green field. Let’s ask him.’
So they left their satchels lying on the short turf, that was half wild thyme, and went down. But they were not quite quick enough; before they could get to him the old man had come through the field of young corn, clambered over a stile, and vanished between the high hedges of a deep-sunk lane. So over the stile and down into the lane went the children, and caught up with the old man just as he had clicked his garden gate behind him and had turned to go up the bricked path between beds of woodruff, and anemones, and narcissus, and tulips of all colours.
His back was towards them. Now it is very difficult to address a back politely. So you will not be surprised to learn that Edred said, ‘Hi!’ and Elfrida said, ‘Halloa! I say!’
The old man turned and saw at his gate two small figures dressed in what is known as sailor costume. They saw a very wrinkled old face with snowy hair and mutton-chop whiskers of a silvery whiteness. There were very bright twinkling blue eyes in the sun-browned face, and on the clean-shaven mouth a kind, if tight, smile.
‘Well,’ said he, ‘and what do you want?’
‘We want to know—’ said Elfrida.
‘About the castle,’ said Edred, ‘Can we get in and look at it?’
‘I’ve got the keys,’ said the old man, and put his hand in at his door and reached them from a nail.
‘I s’pose no one lives there?’ said Elfrida.
‘Not now,’ said the old man, coming back along the garden path. ‘Lord Arden, he died a fortnight ago come Tuesday, and the place is shut up till the new lord’s found.’
‘I wish I was the new lord,’ said Edred, as they followed the old man along the lane.
‘An’ how old might you be?’ the old man asked.
‘I’m ten nearly. It’s my birthday tomorrow,’ said Edred. ‘How old are you?’
‘Getting on for eighty. I’ve seen a deal in my time. If you was the young lord you’d have a chance none of the rest of them ever had – you being the age you are.’
‘What sort of chance?’
‘Why,’ said the old man, ‘don’t you know the saying? I thought everyone knowed it hereabouts.’
‘What saying?’
‘I ain’t got the wind for saying and walking too,’ said the old man, and stopped; ‘leastways, not potery.’ He drew a deep breath and said:
‘I say!’ said both the children. ‘And where’s Arden Knoll?’ Edred asked.
‘Up yonder.’ He pointed to the mound where they had had lunch.
Elfrida inquired, ‘What treasure?’
But that question was not answered – then.
‘If I’m to talk I must set me down,’ said the old man. ‘Shall we set down here, or set down inside of the castle?’
Two curiosities struggled, and the stronger won. ‘In the castle,’ said the children.
So it was in the castle, on a pillar fallen from one of the chapel arches, that the old man sat down and waited. When the children had run up and down the grassy enclosure, peeped into the ruined chambers, picked their way along the ruined colonnade, and climbed the steps of the only tower that they could find with steps to climb, then they came and sat beside the old man on the grass that was white with daisies, and said, ‘Now, then!’
‘Well, then,’ said the old man, ‘you see the Ardens was always great gentry. I’ve heard say there’s always been Ardens here since before William the Conker, whoever he was.’
‘Ten-sixty-six,’ said Edred to himself.
‘An’ they had their ups and downs like other folks, great and small. And once, when there was a war or trouble of some sort abroad, there was a lot of money, and jewelery, and silver plate hidden away. That’s what it means by treasure. And the men who hid it got killed – ah, them was unsafe times to be alive in, I tell you – and nobody never knew where the treasure was hid.’
‘Did they ever find it?’
‘Ain’t I telling you? An’ a wise woman that lived in them old ancient times, they went to her to ask her what to do to find the treasure, and she had a fit directly, what you’d call a historical fit nowadays. She never said nothing worth hearing without she was in a fit, and she made up the saying all in potery whilst she was in her fit, and that was all they could get out of her. And she never would say what the spell was. Only when she was a-dying, Lady Arden, that was then, was very took up with nursing of her, and before she breathed her lastest she told Lady Arden the spell.’ He stopped for lack of breath.
‘And what is the spell?’ said the children, much more breathless than he.
‘Nobody knows,’ said he.
‘But where is it?’
‘Nobody knows. But I’ve ’eard say it’s in a book in the libery in the house yonder. But it ain’t no good, because there’s never been a Lord Arden come to his title without he’s left his ten years far behind him.’
Edred had a queerer feeling in his head than you can imagine; his hands got hot and dry, and then cold and damp.
‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘you’ve got to be Lord Arden? It wouldn’t do if you were just plain John or James or Edred Arden? Because my name’s Arden, and I would like to have a try?’
The old man stooped, caught Edred by the arm, pulled him up, and stood him between his knees.
‘Let’s have a look at you, sonny,’ he said; and had a look. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘you’re an Arden, for sure. To think of me not seeing that. I might have seen your long nose and your chin that sticks out like a spur. I ought to have known it anywhere. But my eyes ain’t what they was. If you was Lord Arden – What’s your father’s name – his chrissened name, I mean?’
‘Edred, the same as mine. But Father’s dead,’ said Edred gravely.
‘And your grandf’er’s name? It wasn’t George, was it – George William?’
‘Yes, it was,’ said Edred. ‘How did you know?’
The old man let go Edred’s arms and stood up. Then he touched his forehead and said:
‘I’ve worked on the land ’ere man and boy, and I’m proud I’ve lived to see another Lord Arden take the place of him as is gone. Lauk-alive, boy, don’t garp like that,’ he added sharply. ‘You’re Lord Arden right enough.’
‘I – I can’t be,’ gasped Edred.
‘Auntie said Lord Arden was a relation of ours – a sort of great-uncle – cousin.’
‘That’s it, missy,’ the old man nodded. ‘Lord Arden – chrissen name James—’e was first cousin to Mr. George as was your grandf’er. His son was Mr. Edred, as is your father. The late lord not ’avin’ any sons – nor daughters neither for the matter of that – the title comes to your branch of the family. I’ve heard Snigsworthy, the lawyer’s apprentice from Lewis, tell it over fifty times this last three weeks. You’re Lord Arden, I tell you.’
‘If I am,’ said Edred, ‘I shall say the spell and find the treasure.’
‘You’ll have to be quick about it,’ said Elfrida. ‘You’ll be over ten the day after tomorrow.’
‘So I shall,’ said Edred.
‘When you’re Lord Arden,’ said the old man very seriously, – ‘I mean, when you grow up to enjoy the title – as, please God, you may – you remember the poor and needy, young master – that’s what you do.’
‘If I find the treasure I will,’ said Edred.
‘You do it whether or no,’ said the old man. ‘I must be getting along home. You’d like to play about a bit, eh? Well, bring me the keys when you’ve done. I can trust you not to hurt your own place, that’s been in the family all these hundreds of years.’
‘I should think you could!’ said Edred proudly. ‘Goodbye, and thank you.’
‘Goodbye, my lord,’ said the old man, and went.
‘I say,’ said Edred, with the big bunch of keys in his hand, – ‘if I am Lord Arden!’
‘You are! you are!’ said Elfrida. ‘I am perfectly certain you are. And I suppose I’m Lady Arden. How perfectly ripping! We can shut up those lodging-children now, anyhow. What’s up?’
Edred was frowning and pulling the velvet covering of moss off the big stone on which he had absently sat down.
‘Do you think it’s burglarish,’ he said slowly, ‘to go into your own house without leave?’
‘Not if it is your own house. Of course not,’ said Elfrida.
‘But suppose it isn’t? They might put you in prison for it.’
‘You could tell the policeman you thought it was yours. I say, Edred, let’s!’
‘It’s not vulgar curiosity, like auntie says; it’s the spell I want,’ said the boy.
‘As if I didn’t know that,’ said the girl contemptuously. ‘But where’s the house?’
She might well ask, for there was no house to be seen – only the great grey walls of the castle, with their fine fringe of flowers and grass showing feathery against the pale blue of the June sky. Here and there, though, there were grey wooden doors set in the grey of the stone.
‘It must be one of those,’ Edred said. ‘We’ll try all the keys and all the doors till we find it.’
So they tried all the keys and all the doors. One door led to a loft where apples were stored. Another to a cellar, where brooms and spades and picks leaned against the damp wall, and there were baskets and piles of sacks. A third opened into a tower that seemed to be used as a pigeon-cote. It was the very last door they tried that led into the long garden between two high walls, where already the weeds had grown high among the forget-me-nots and pansies. And at the end of this garden was a narrow house with a red roof, wedged tightly in between two high grey walls that belonged to the castle.
All the blinds were down; the garden was chill and quiet, and smelt of damp earth and dead leaves.
‘Oh, Edred, do you think we ought?’ Elfrida said, shivering.
‘Yes, I do,’ said Edred; ‘and you’re not being good, whatever you may think. You’re only being frightened.’
Elfrida naturally replied, ‘I’m not. Come on.’
But it was very slowly, and with a feeling of being on tiptoe and holding their breaths, that they went up to those blinded windows that looked like sightless eyes.
The front door was locked, and none of the keys would fit it.
‘I don’t care,’ said Edred. ‘If I am Lord Arden I’ve got a right to get in, and if I’m not I don’t care about anything, so here goes.’
Elfrida almost screamed, half with horror and half with admiration of his daring, when he climbed up to a little window by means of an elder-tree that grew close to it, tried to open the window, and when he found it fast deliberately pushed his elbow through the glass.
‘Thus,’ he said rather unsteadily, ‘the heir of Arden Castle re-enters his estates.’
He got the window open and disappeared through it. Elfrida stood clasping and unclasping her hands, and in her mind trying to get rid of the idea of a very large and sudden policeman appearing in the garden door and saying, in that deep voice so much admired in our village constables, ‘Where’s your brother?’
No policeman came, fortunately, and presently a blind went up, a French window opened, and there was Edred beckoning her with the air of a conspirator.
It needed an effort to obey his signal, but she did it. He closed the French window, drew down the blind again, and—
‘Oh, don’t let’s,’ said Elfrida.
‘Nonsense,’ said Edred; ‘there’s nothing to be frightened of. It’s just like our rooms at home.’
It was. They went all over the house, and it certainly was. Some of the upper rooms were very bare, but all the furniture was of the same kind as Aunt Edith’s, and there were the same kind of pictures. Only the library was different. It was a very large room, and there were no pictures at all. Nothing but books and books and books, bound in yellowy leather. Books from ceiling to floor, shelves of books between the windows and over the mantelpiece – hundreds and thousands of books. Even Edred’s spirits sank. ‘It’s no go. It will take us years to look in them all,’ he said.
‘We may as well look at some of them,’ said Elfrida, always less daring, but more persevering than her brother. She sat down on the worn carpet. and began to read the names on the backs of the books nearest to her. ‘Burton’s Atomy of Melon something,’ she read, and ‘Locke on Understanding,’ and many other dull and wearying titles. But none of the books seemed at all likely to contain a spell for finding treasure. ‘Burgess on the Precious Metals’ beguiled her for a moment, but she saw at once that there was no room in its closely-printed, brown-spotted pages for anything so interesting as a spell. Time passed by. The sunlight that came through the blinds had quite changed its place on the carpet, and still Elfrida persevered. Edred grew more and more restless.
‘It’s no use,’ he kept saying, and ‘Let’s chuck it,’ and ‘I expect that old chap was just kidding us. I don’t feel a bit like I did about it,’ and ‘Do let’s get along home.’
But Elfrida plodded on, though her head and her back both ached. I wish I could say that her perseverance was rewarded. But it wasn’t; and one must keep to facts. As it happened, it was Edred who, aimlessly running his finger along the edge of the bookshelf just for the pleasure of looking at the soft, mouse-coloured dust that clung to the finger at the end of each shelf, suddenly cried out, ‘What about this?’ and pulled out a great white book that had on its cover a shield printed in gold with squares and little spots on it, and a gold pig standing on the top of the shield, and on the back, ‘The History of the Ardens of Arden.’
In an instant it was open on the floor between them, and they were turning its pages with quick, anxious hands. But, alas! it was as empty of spells as dull old Burgess himself.
It was only when Edred shut it with a bang and the remark that he had had jolly well enough of it that a paper fluttered out and swept away like a pigeon, settling on the fireless hearth. And it was the spell. There was no doubt of that.
Written in faint ink on a square yellowed sheet of letter-paper that had been folded once, and opened and folded again so often that the fold was worn thin and hardly held its two parts together, the writing was fine and pointed and ladylike. At the top was written: ‘The Spell Aunt Anne Told Me. – December 24, 1793.’
And then came the spell:
