by Edith Nesbit
“I never would have believed it of him,” added Harry, in an agitated india-rubber-ball note, “he always seemed such a superior person, you’d have thought he was a gentleman if you’d met him in any other position.”
“I should. I did,” she said to herself. “And, oh, how frightfully clever! And the way he talked! And all the time he was only keeping me out of the way while they stole the silver and things. I wish he hadn’t taken the ruby necklace: it does suit me so. And what nerve! He actually talked about the robberies in the neighbourhood. He must have done them all. Oh, what a pity! But he was a dear. And how awfully wicked he was, too — but I’ll never tell Harry!”
She never has.
Curiously enough, her Burglar Valet Hero was not caught, though the police most intelligently traced his career, from his being sent down from Oxford to his last best burglary.
She was married to Harry, with the complete consent of everyone concerned, for Harry had money, and so had she, and there had never been the slightest need for an elopement, save in youth’s perennial passion for romance. It was on her birthday that she received a registered postal packet. It had a good many queer postmarks on it, and the stamps were those of a South American republic. It was addressed to her by her new name, which was as good as new still. It came at breakfast-time, and it contained the ruby necklace, several gold rings, and a diamond brooch. All were the property of her late aunts. Also there was an india-rubber ball, and in it a letter.
“Here is a birthday present for you,” it said. “Try to forgive me. Some temptations are absolutely irresistible. That one was. And it was worth it. It rounded off the whole thing so perfectly. That last indiscretion of mine nearly ruined everything. There was a policeman in the lane. I only escaped by the merest fluke. But even then it would have been worth it. At least, I should like you to believe that I think so.”
“His last indiscretion,” said Harry, who saw the note but not the india-rubber ball, “that means stealing your aunts’ things, of course, unless it was dumping me down by the waterworks, but, of course, that wasn’t the last one. But worth it? Why, he’d have had seven years if they’d caught him — worth it? He must have a passion for burglary.”
She did not explain to Harry, because he would never have understood. But the burglar would have found it quite easy to understand that or anything. She was so shocked to find herself thinking this that she went over to Harry and kissed him with more affection even than usual.
“Yes, dear,” he said, “I don’t wonder you’re pleased to get something back out of all those things. I quite understand.”
“Yes, dear,” said she. “I know. You always do!”
OSWALD BASTABLE AND OTHERS
CONTENTS
AN OBJECT OF VALUE AND VIRTUE
THE RUNAWAYS
THE ARSENICATORS
THE ENCHANCERIED HOUSE
MOLLY, THE MEASLES, AND THE MISSING WILL
BILLY AND WILLIAM
THE TWOPENNY SPELL
SHOWING OFF; OR, THE LOOKING-GLASS BOY
THE RING AND THE LAMP
THE CHARMED LIFE; OR, THE PRINCESS AND THE LIFT-MAN
BILLY THE KING
THE PRINCESS AND THE CAT
THE WHITE HORSE
SIR CHRISTOPHER COCKLESHELL
MUSCADEL
TO
MY DEAR NIECE
ANTHONIA NESBIT
AN OBJECT OF VALUE AND VIRTUE
This happened a very little time after we left our humble home in Lewisham, and went to live at the Blackheath house of our Indian uncle, which was replete with every modern convenience, and had a big garden and a great many greenhouses. We had had a lot of jolly Christmas presents, and one of them was Dicky’s from father, and it was a printing-press. Not one of the eighteenpenny kind that never come off, but a real tip-topper, that you could have printed a whole newspaper out of if you could have been clever enough to make up all the stuff there is in newspapers. I don’t know how people can do it. It’s all about different things, but it is all just the same too. But the author is sorry to find he is not telling things from the beginning, as he has been taught. The printing-press really doesn’t come into the story till quite a long way on. So it is no use your wondering what it was that we did print with the printing-press. It was not a newspaper, anyway, and it wasn’t my young brother’s poetry, though he and the girls did do an awful lot of that. It was something much more far-reaching, as you will see if you wait.
There wasn’t any skating those holidays, because it was what they call nice open weather. That means it was simply muggy, and you could play out of doors without grown-ups fussing about your overcoat, or bringing you to open shame in the streets with knitted comforters, except, of course, the poet Noël, who is young, and equal to having bronchitis if he only looks at a pair of wet boots. But the girls were indoors a good deal, trying to make things for a bazaar which the people our housekeeper’s elder sister lives with were having in the country for the benefit of a poor iron church that was in difficulties. And Noël and H. O. were with them, putting sweets in bags for the bazaar’s lucky-tub. So Dicky and I were out alone together. But we were not angry with the others for their stuffy way of spending a day. Two is not a good number, though, for any game except fives; and the man who ordered the vineries and pineries, and butlers’ pantries and things, never had the sense to tell the builders to make a fives court. Some people never think of the simplest things. So we had been playing catch with a fives ball. It was Dicky’s ball, and Oswald said:
‘I bet you can’t hit it over the house.’
‘What do you bet?’ said Dicky.
And Oswald replied:
‘Anything you like. You couldn’t do it, anyhow.’
Dicky said:
‘Miss Blake says betting is wicked; but I don’t believe it is, if you don’t bet money.’
Oswald reminded him how in ‘Miss Edgeworth’ even that wretched little Rosamond, who is never allowed to do anything she wants to, even lose her own needles, makes a bet with her brother, and none of the grown-ups turn a hair.
‘But I don’t want to bet,’ he said. ‘I know you can’t do it.’
‘I’ll bet you my fives ball I do,’ Dicky rejoindered.
‘Done! I’ll bet you that threepenny ball of string and the cobbler’s wax you were bothering about yesterday.’
So Dicky said ‘Done!’ and then he went and got a tennis racket — when I meant with his hands — and the ball soared up to the top of the house and faded away. But when we went round to look for it we couldn’t find it anywhere. So he said it had gone over and he had won. And Oswald thought it had not gone over, but stayed on the roof, and he hadn’t. And they could not agree about it, though they talked of nothing else till tea time.
It was a few days after that that the big greenhouse began to leak, and something was said at brekker about had any of us been throwing stones. But it happened that we had not. Only after brek Oswald said to Dicky:
‘What price fives balls for knocking holes in greenhouses?’
‘Then you own it went over the house, and I won my bet. Hand over!’ Dicky remarked.
But Oswald did not see this, because it wasn’t proved it was the fives ball. It was only his idea.
Then it rained for two or three days, and the greenhouse leaked much more than just a fives ball, and the grown-ups said the man who put it up had scamped the job, and they sent for him to put it right. And when he was ready he came, and men came with ladders and putty and glass, and a thing to cut it with a real diamond in it that he let us have to look at. It was fine that day, and Dicky and H. O. and I were out most of the time talking to the men. I think the men who come to do things to houses are so interesting to talk to; they seem to know much more about the things that really matter than gentlemen do. I shall try to be like them when I grow up, and not always talk about politics and the way the army is going to the dogs.
The men were very jolly, and let us go up th
e ladder and look at the top of the greenhouse. Not H. O., of course, because he is very young indeed, and wears socks. When they had gone to dinner, H. O. went in to see if some pies were done that he had made out of a bit of putty the man gave him. He had put the pies in the oven when the cook wasn’t looking. I think something must have been done to him, for he did not return.
So Dicky and I were left. Dicky said:
‘If I could get the ladder round to the roof of the stovehouse I believe I should find my fives ball in the gutter. I know it went over the house that day.’
So Oswald, ever ready and obliging, helped his brother to move the ladder round to the tiled roof of the stovehouse, and Dicky looked in the gutter. But even he could not pretend the ball was there, because I am certain it never went over at all.
When he came down, Oswald said:
‘Sold again!’
And Dicky said:
‘Sold yourself! You jolly well thought it was there, and you’d have to pay for it.’
This unjustness was Oswald’s reward for his kind helpingness about moving the ladder. So he turned away, just saying carelessly over his retiring shoulder:
‘I should think you’d have the decency to put the ladder back where you found it.’ And he walked off.
But he has a generous heart — a crossing-sweeper told him so once when he gave him a halfpenny — and when Dicky said, ‘Come on, Oswald; don’t be a sneak,’ he proved that he was not one, and went back and helped with the ladder. But he was a little distant to Dicky, till all disagreeableness was suddenly buried in a rat Pincher found in the cucumber frame.
Then the washing-hands-and-faces-for-dinner bell rang, and, of course, we should have gone in directly, only just then the workmen came back from their dinner, and we waited, because one of them had promised Oswald some hinges for a ferrets’ hutch he thought of making, and while he was talking to this man the other one went up the ladder. And then the most exciting and awful thing I ever saw happened, all in a minute, before anyone could have said ‘Jack Robinson,’ even if they had thought of him. The bottom part of the ladder slipped out along the smooth tiles by the greenhouse, and there was a long, dream-like, dreadful time, when Oswald knew what was going to happen; but it could only have been a second really, because before anyone could do anything the top end of the ladder slid softly, like cutting butter, off the top of the greenhouse, and the man on the ladder fell too. I never saw anything that made me feel so wrong way up in my inside. He lay there all in a heap, without moving, and the men crowded round him. Dicky and I could not see properly because of the other men. But the foreman, the one who had given Oswald the hinges, said:
‘Better get a doctor.’
It always takes a long time for a workman to understand what you want him to do, and long before these had, Oswald had shouted ‘I’ll go!’ and was off like an arrow from a bow, and Dicky with him.
They found the doctor at home, and he came that minute. Oswald and Dicky were told to go away, but they could not bear to, though they knew their dinner-bell must have been already rung for them many times in vain, and it was now ringing with fury. They just lurked round the corner of the greenhouse till the doctor said it was a broken arm, and nothing else hurt; and when the poor man was sent home in a cab, Oswald and Dicky got the cabman, who is a friend of theirs, to let them come on the box with him. And thus they saw where the man lived, and saw his poor wife greet the sufferer. She only said:
‘Gracious, Gus, whatever have you been up to now? You always was an unlucky chap.’
But we could see her loving heart was full to overflowing.
When she had taken him in and shut the door we went away. The wretched sufferer, whose name transpired to be Augustus Victor Plunkett, was lucky enough to live in a mews. Noël made a poem about it afterwards:
‘O Muse of Poetry, do not refuse
To tell about a man who loves the Mews.
It is his humble home so poor,
And the cabman who drove him home lives next door
But two: and when his arm was broke
His loving wife with tears spoke.’
And so on. It went on for two hundred and twenty-four lines, and he could not print it, because it took far too much type for the printing-press. It was as we went out of the mews that we first saw the Goat. I gave him a piece of cocoanut ice, and he liked it awfully. He was tied to a ring in the wall, and he was black and white, with horns and a beard; and when the man he belonged to saw us looking at him, he said we could have that Goat a bargain. And when we asked, out of politeness and not because we had any money, except twopence halfpenny of Dicky’s, how much he wanted for the Goat, he said:
‘Seven and sixpence is the lowest, so I won’t deceive you, young gents. And so help me if he ain’t worth thribble the money.’
Oswald did the sum in his head, which told him the Goat was worth one pound two shillings and sixpence, and he went away sadly, for he did want that Goat.
We were later for dinner than I ever remember our being, and Miss Blake had not kept us any pudding; but Oswald bore up when he thought of the Goat. But Dicky seemed to have no beautiful inside thoughts to sustain him, and he was so dull Dora said she only hoped he wasn’t going to have measles.
It was when we had gone up to bed that he fiddled about with the studs and old buttons and things in a velvety box he had till Oswald was in bed, and then he said:
‘Look here, Oswald, I feel as if I was a murderer, or next-door to. It was our moving that ladder: I’m certain it was. And now he’s laid up, and his wife and children.’
Oswald sat up in bed, and said kindly:
‘You’re right, old chap. It was your moving that ladder. Of course, you didn’t put it back firm. But the man’s not killed.’
‘We oughtn’t to have touched it,’ he said. ‘Or we ought to have told them we had, or something. Suppose his arm gets blood-poisoning, or inflammation, or something awful? I couldn’t go on living if I was a doer of a deed like that.’
Oswald had never seen Dicky so upset. He takes things jolly easy as a rule. Oswald said:
‘Well, it is no use fuming over it. You’d better get out of your clothes and go to bed. We’ll cut down in the morning and leave our cards and kind inquiries.’
Oswald only meant to be kind, and by making this amusing remark he wished to draw his erring brother’s thoughts from the remorse that was poisoning his young life, and would very likely keep him awake for an hour or more thinking of it, and fidgetting about so that Oswald couldn’t sleep.
But Dicky did not take it at all the way Oswald meant. He said:
‘Shut up, Oswald, you beast!’ and lay down on his bed and began to blub.
Oswald said, ‘Beast yourself!’ because it is the proper thing to say; but he was not angry, only sorry that Dicky was so duffing as not to see what he meant. And he got out of bed and went softly to the girls’ room, which is next ours, and said:
‘I say, come in to our room a sec., will you? Dicky is howling fit to bring the house down. I think a council of us elder ones would do him more good than anything.’
‘Whatever is up?’ Dora asked, getting into her dressing-gown.
‘Oh, nothing, except that he’s a murderer! Come on, and don’t make a row. Mind the mats and our boots by the door.’
They came in, and Oswald said:
‘Look here, Dicky, old boy, here are the girls, and we’re going to have a council about it.’
They wanted to kiss him, but he wouldn’t, and shrugged his shoulders about, and wouldn’t speak; but when Alice had got hold of his hand he said in a muffled voice:
‘You tell them, Oswald.’
When Oswald and Dicky were alone, you will have noticed the just elder brother blamed the proper person, which was Dicky, because he would go up on the stovehouse roof after his beastly ball, which Oswald did not care a rap about. And, besides, he knew it wasn’t there. But now that other people were there Oswald, of course, said:
‘You see, we moved the men’s ladder when they were at their dinner. And you know the man that fell off the ladder, and we went with him in the cab to the place where that Goat was? Well, Dicky has only just thought of it; but, of course, it was really our fault his tumbling, because we couldn’t have put the ladder back safely. And Dicky thinks if his arm blood-poisoned itself we should be as good as murderers.’
Dicky is perfectly straight; he sat up and sniffed, and blew his nose, and said:
‘It was my idea moving the ladder: Oswald only helped.’
‘Can’t we ask uncle to see that the dear sufferer wants for nothing while he’s ill, and all that?’ said Dora.
‘Well,’ said Oswald, ‘we could, of course. But, then, it would all come out. And about the fives ball too. And we can’t be at all sure it was the ball made the greenhouse leak, because I know it never went over the house.’
‘Yes, it did,’ said Dicky, giving his nose a last stern blow.
Oswald was generous to a sorrowing foe, and took no notice, only went on:
‘And about the ladder: we can’t be quite sure it wouldn’t have slipped on those tiles, even if we’d never moved it. But I think Dicky would feel jollier if we could do something for the man, and I know it would me.’
That looks mixed, but Oswald was rather agitated himself, and that was what he said.
‘We must think of something to do to get money,’ Alice said, ‘like we used to do when we were treasure-seekers.’
Presently the girls went away, and we heard them jawing in their room. Just as Oswald was falling asleep the door opened, and a figure in white came in and bent above his almost sleeping form. It said:
‘We’ve thought of something! We’ll have a bazaar, like the people Miss Blake’s elder sister lives with did for the poor iron church.’