Complete Novels of E Nesbit

by Edith Nesbit

  Clifford himself thinks it is very strange that Fate should have played him such a rotten trick about that Lymchurch business and then behaved like this on another occasion — sending him a dream that looked utter nonsense, and which led to such glorifying results. But he remembers to have heard that Fate is very capricious. (Capricious means being inclined to play the goat.)

  CHAPTER SIX. THE COMING OF MADELINE

  This is all about some thing we were more sorry for than anything we ever did, and yet the present writer thinks it did more good than harm. But all the same we are sorry, because it was not sporting of us. And I say this now, to get it off my chest.

  But first of all I must tell you that a wonderful change came into our lives. I don’t mean Madeline, though she did too, but something really splendiferous and glorious.

  It happened soon after Clifford came home from his detective-like visit to the country. We were all sitting at breakfast in Aunt Emma’s house. There were some letters for Mother beside her plate, and when she had finished giving everyone their tea, she opened them. And then, while she was reading one, she turned quite pale. The others did not see this, but Clifford, who is an unusually observant boy, saw at once that something was up.

  I do not know why it is that it is always breakfast-time letters that contain the really important news of life. But it is so. No one ever hears anything interesting from letters that come by the afternoon post, such as the return of a long-lost relative, or that your house has been burnt to the ground, or exciting events like that.

  At first Clifford feared that this letter was from the Police, or the Government, or some other Interfering Person, about our having dammed the Kidbrook. (We had: and it was a great success, but you never know how grown-ups will take such things.)

  But when Mother dropped the letter and said, in an excited voice, “My darlings! Just listen!” he knew it was all right.

  And really it was. The letter said that a great-uncle of Mother’s, someone she had not seen for years and years, had died leaving her some money and the house he had lived in, complete with furniture and servants and everything desirable. At least, of course the letter didn’t say he had left her the servants, but that he had hoped she would retain their services after he was gone.

  At first we could not believe it, and then, when we did, we all began to ask questions about the house. Mother had to say:

  “I don’t know — I don’t know,” to nearly all of them; but at last she said:

  “Look here! We’ll go to-day and have a look at it, and you shall all come.”

  The house was at Yalding. It was a big red house, furnished with the same kind of lovely things we had had when we were little, before poverty descended upon us like a bolt from the blue.

  The house was built when James was King, and that is why it has a flat slab over the front door. I know this sounds silly, but I heard an architect say it once, so I know it must be true. There was a large garden with a red wall, and peaches and nectarines were growing on it. Mother let us each pick one and eat it, there and then. I would rather have one peach that I picked myself with no one to mind how you eat it, than two out of a dish, and be told all the time what you’re not to do with your dessert knife and fork.

  Besides the big garden, there was a stream to fish in, and the river not a mile away. Also there were stables, with a loft, and though there was no living thing in the stables we saw at once that they would make a splendid place to play in on wet days.

  And when Mother said:

  “I believe I can trace Mike” (Mike had been our donkey in brighter days), “perhaps we will be able to buy him back,” our cup was indeed full and some of us burst into tears. I will not say who.

  Mother wrote the joyful news to Father and told him to come home at once, and in two months’ time he came and we were all together again, with everything as jolly as it could be. Until Madeline.

  We were quite ready to be friends with Madeline. She was our cousin from India, and we had all seen her picture in a silver frame on Mother’s bedroom mantelpiece; much too pretty to be at all like, we agreed when we knew her.

  We did everything we could to make things nice for Madeline. The girls got sunflowers and nasturtiums to put in the room she was to sleep in, and Martin and I picked three of the plums off the green-gage-tree that is our own, for her. They were not ripe, but that was Madeline’s fault, if anybody’s, for coming before they had time to get soft.

  And we sat on the wall in front with the flags that were over from one of the Blackheath Bazaars, and when the carriage turned in at the gate we waved them and cheered and then shut the gate and tore up the drive after the carriage and passed it, and got there first, and cheered again.

  Then Mother got out and we hugged her and she said:

  “Wait till I’ve got Madeline out.”

  And she got her out. It was like getting a periwinkle out of its shell. My hat — she was a skinny little rat, and no mistake — more like a throstle than anything else — with long, streaky hair and a thin nose that was pink, and clothes that were black — because of a second cousin that she’d never seen, we found out afterwards, and not because of real afflictedness.

  We all shook hands with her and the girls kissed her, but she did not seem to enjoy any of it, and when we said, “How are you?” she only sniffed.

  I never knew such a kid for sniffing. Mother said it was natural she should be a little downhearted at parting from her mother, and we ought to make allowances — so we made them instantly. But no allowance that ever was would have been enough for the sniffing Madeline. She sniffed at tea and she sniffed at breakfast — she sniffed at the rabbits and the guinea-pigs and even at the cat that had got nine kittens in the stables, and the only time she stopped sniffing at all was when we let her have a ride on the donkey, and then she only stopped to scream:

  “I want to get down — I want to get down.”

  So Clifford lifted her off, and then she said I’d pinched her arm, and I hoped I had, though I didn’t mean to. And in the middle of dinner she pointed at me — the eldest son of the house and incapable of a mean act — and said right out before everyone:

  “He pinched me.”

  Mother looked at me and said:

  “Oh, Clifford — surely you didn’t?”

  Of course I wasn’t going to be a sneak just because Madeline was, so I said nothing, only looked silent contempt. The others looked silent contempt too. They understood right enough that their eldest brother hadn’t the kind of nature that stoops to pinch girls, except in play and for their own good.

  After dinner we escaped the fell Madeline and had a comfortable jaw all by ourselves on top of the stable-yard wall where it is soft with moss. Years later the present author learned from his Mother that Madeline instantly went and blubbered and said we wouldn’t play with her. But we did not know this baseness at the time.

  “She’s a little beast,” said Martin; “she buzzed those plums at my head because they were sour. Didn’t hit me, of course.”

  “She’s a fair terror,” Alan said. “She cut open a dozen of my cocoons to see what was inside. Duffer that I was to leave them in her bedroom.”

  “She’s an incubator,” said Carlie.

  “She means incubus,” said Olive. But when Clifford asked her what that meant she said she didn’t know; she and Carlie had got it out of a book.

  “And it doesn’t matter, anyhow,” she said — just like a girl—”because really whatever she is, she is the stranger within our gates, and we’ve got to be decent to her. You boys will give her another chance, won’t you?”

  “It isn’t chance she wants,” said Martin with gloominess, “it’s manners.”

  “It’s all strange to her,” said Olive, “ and I daresay she feels just as uncomfortable as we do.”

  Martin said he was sure he hoped so. I said what did she want us to do.

  After some jaw it expired, as newspapers say, that she wanted us to take the lit
tle beast fishing.

  “Well,” said the present writer, “if we’ve got to be noble and unselfish for goodness’ sake let’s be it, and get it over.”

  So we went fishing. Our punt is kept tied up to the two old willows at the bottom of the baker’s garden. The baker is a friend of ours and knows we can be trusted. If you’ll believe me, that kid pinched seven of the baker’s raspberries before we noticed. I shouldn’t have wondered if no one in Yalding had ever trusted us again. Then we got into the boat and found a nice likely place down the river, and gave her a rod and baited it, and everything we could think of. And then she said she didn’t like worms! And that the boat was full of water!

  There wasn’t any water at all in the boat, of course, considering it hadn’t been raining for three days. However, with patient politeness we got the boat back and helped her out and took her home.

  When we got quite home and right inside the house, she said we might have emptied the water out, and she wanted to go fishing without any worms on the hook!

  Clifford told her quite sensibly exactly how silly she was, and that worms were very interesting pets and very intelligent, compared with some people. She only said, “You can keep your nasty old wet worms. I want to go fishing without them.”

  The girls would have bent before her silliness like stubble in the blast and started fishing again, but Clifford was firm.

  “No,” he said, “you must draw the line somewhere. And perhaps this will be a lesson to her.” So he put the bait-tin and tackle on a shelf in the harness-room in case the girls should be silly about it, and went off to see a keeper he knows who has a young fox in a hutch. It is quite tame and I like it.

  That night when Clifford got into bed his feet touched something soft and cold and wriggly. You will find it hard to believe that anyone could be so fiend-like, yet so it was. Madeline had somehow contrived to obtain accession to the harness-room shelf, and she had emptied the bait-tin into my bed. If it had been some people, girls, for instance, they would have screamed and gone raving mad on the spot.

  This is a disgusting part of my story and I hasten to say no more, only pausing to observe that Clifford slept in blankets that night and there was an imperial row in the morning when the bath was discovered to be full of bait and Clifford’s sheets. But what else was he to do with them, without sneaking, which he is a stranger to?

  Clifford was now just about fed up with Madeline. But the girls still said how sad about being parted from her mother, and poor little thing. This continued until she broke the doll’s tea-pot lid at a party and would not say she was sorry. This did for her with Carlie, because it was her tea-pot.

  What she did with his silkworms had settled her hash with Alan from the first. She was rather friends with Martin for a little bit, but when she made faces at him at prayers so that he laughed — and then never owned up, though it was bed for him — all was over between them.

  Olive was the last to stand up for her. She is as patient as a tortoise generally, but even she gave out after the great Traitor’s Act that sealed the doom of Madeline. You know, of course, that however happy your home may be, and however fond you are of your kind parents, there are some things that you keep to yourself. Our great secret was the roof. No one knew anything about it but us. Clifford’s bed was an old-fashioned four-poster. What need to own that he was man enough to have climbed on to the top? There was a trap-door up there. It led to the roof, at least to the place between the ceiling and the roof. It was a dark passage pointed at the top, and you had to be jolly careful how you walked or you would have walked through the ceiling below and all would have been at an end — as far as the roof went.

  A little way down the passage was a door. It led on to a square leaded place with a grating in one corner that the rain ran down, and the four roofs of the house rose up like a mountainous range on each side. No one knew that we knew of this. It was our desert island. Oft when missed, and called for until all were hoarse, it was there that we lurked.

  One day when Mother and Father were going to a dinner-party we decided to have a brigand’s supper on our island. All was got ready in days and days of secret preparingness. We did not tell the hated Madeline till the last moment — but then we did. It was needful because she slept in the girls’ room, and she peeped when they told her not to and thus saw them put their nightgowns over their clothes. So then she wouldn’t go to sleep, and wanted to know why, and sniffed — and the whole plot had to be laid bare.

  “I want to come too,” was what the girls say she said.

  So they let her. Rash and fatal act!

  When the servants were at supper and all was still, the girls came into Clifford’s room, and with them the snivelling Madeline. We had a very fine feast — pears, apples, gingerbread, a bottle of chutney, cheese, bread, raspberry vinegar, a bottle of Florence cream, sponge-cakes, and cinnamon, in sticks.

  “I couldn’t help it,” Olive told me in a whisper. “She would come.”

  Our family are all good climbers — my great grandfather was at Trafalgar and learned it among the rigging, I believe — and the bedstead was easy to climb, being arranged for the purpose with carved knobs and leaves and things. But Madeline had never had a relation at a Naval engagement. We had to hoist her on to the top of the tallboys (a tallboys is like two chests of drawers on top of each other, in case you don’t know) and then shove her up to the top of the bed by main force. And the same with getting her through the trap-door. She was clumsy, but perhaps she was born like that — everyone cannot be born with the grace and agility that belonged to our family — and we made allowances, like Mother said.

  But when she saw the sort of place she had come up into, all cobwebby and plastery, and looking rather ratty by the light of the candle — though really we never saw so much as a mouse there — she began to sniff and then to cry, and then to scream.

  To pop her back through the trap-door was the work of a moment. She fell on the tight-spread damask top of the four-poster. Clifford joined her there, and it was like being in a blanket just before you are tossed. The uncertainness of the damask would not let you stand up. I don’t know how I got her off — but I did, and on to the tallboys. It’s as easy as wink to get off a tallboys — you just walk down by the handles. Not so the ill-fated Madeline. She fell from somewhere about the first long drawer of the top set — and I scorn to deny that there was a bump on her head later, really quite as big as a pigeon’s egg. But to hear her howl you’d have thought it was ostrich-egg size, at least.

  Clifford descended like a Greek god from above and got the pillow over her head at the exact moment when Jane knocked at the door with questions about what was up now. Clifford with the greatest presence of mind held the pillow where it was most needed and replied in brave tones:

  “Nothing, thank you. I only dropped something.”

  This besides being true was generous. Because, of course, he would never have dropped Madeline from the top drawer of a tallboys unless she had kicked and scratched so as to make resistance vain — to her Fate, I mean.

  Then the others came down and Clifford took the pillow away, a bit at a time, with earnest promises to put it back if she gave so much as a sniff. She didn’t.

  Then we dispersed, concealing the feast on the other side of the secret trap-door.

  The soft balm of slumber then fell on all — even the unworthy Madeline.

  You will notice that up to now we had done nothing at all to her except try to be nice. So it will show you the baseness she was full of at that time when you hear that next morning, before breakfast, she had told Mother the whole thing, ending up by saying that we had thrown her down on purpose. Mother asked me about it immediately, and I told her the plain truth with what is called a sinking heart. The sink proved to be but too true. We were not punished because, of course, Mother believed my plain truth, but our secret desert island was taken from us — the trap-door was padlocked, and we were forbidden ever to go up there again!

/>   The feast was not collared: it was judged that we had a right to it because we had bought most of it with our own money — except the chutney and the Florence cream and the cinnamon — and Mother let us have that too, only telling us to ask next time before we took things out of the store cupboard. The author has sometimes thought that perhaps Mother was young herself once.

  We had the feast in the orchard, Mother agreeing to conceal Madeline about her person for the afternoon. It was at that feast that we first dreamed of doing the Deed.

  We held an indignation meeting, for so I believe it is called in the House of Lords. And we were all agreed that something must be done.

  “We can’t have everything muddled up and spoilt like this all our lives,” Martin said.

  “And it does make me so angry,” said Olive, “and I hate to be angry. I always feel like a piece of chewed string afterwards.”

  The rest of us felt the same, and said it. But it was Clifford who was the first to state that something must be done — a decided Deed of some kind.

  The question was: What? This gave us food for thought and a good subject for jaw.

  Next day Mother took Carlie to stay with our aunt at Maidstone. Clifford from the round attic window watched the carriage drive away. Our young hero looked dreamily out across the street and to the left beheld the wooded slopes of Kent, which is sometimes called the garden of England. There is always a moment when the hero looks out over the landscape of whatever county he happens to be born in, and the ready tears spring unbidden to his eyes. Nothing sprang to this hero’s eyes, but an idea sprang to his brain.

  Hastily remarking “Got it!” he tore downstairs, found the others, and proposed a picnic in the woods. He unfolded the Deed to each of the others separately, and every time he unfolded it, it looked better and brighter. Olive was the only one who didn’t see its betterness and brighterness straight off. But she came round and owned that it might be a lesson to Madeline.

  What I am now about to relate looks a jolly sight worse now I am telling it than it did when first thought of while smarting under the yoke of the detested Madeline. It was...