The Wonderful Garden or The Three Cs. Nesbit Edith

wounds – sponged his feet, I mean,’ she added, after a pause full of doubt. ‘The mud was thick – if it wasn’t a dream it’ll be in the basin.’

      But Jane knew her duty too well for there to be anything in the basin except a bright brass can of hot water with a clean towel laid neatly across it.

      ‘Well, the fern-seed did something, anyhow, if it only made us both dream like that,’ said Caroline. But Charles wanted to know how she knew they hadn’t dreamed the fern-seed as well.

      ‘Oh, you get dressed,’ said his sister shortly, and went to her own dressing.

      Charlotte, when really roused, owned that she remembered Rupert’s coming. But, if he had come, he had gone and left no trace. And it is rare for boys to do that.

      The children agreed that it must have been a dream, after the eating of the fern-seed, for all of them, for some reason that I can’t understand, agreed that the fern-seed eating, at any rate, was real.

      Breakfast seemed less interesting than usual, and when, after the meal, Mrs. Wilmington minced a request to them to go out for the morning, ‘the same as you were requisted to do yisterday,’ they went with slow footsteps and boots strangely weighty.

      ‘Let’s get out of sight of the house,’ said Charlotte heavily.

      They went away beyond the shrubbery, to the wood where there were oak-trees and hazels and dog-wood and silver birches and here and there a black yew, with open bracken-feathered glades between. Here they found a little glade between a honeysuckle and a sweet chestnut and a hazel thicket, flattened the bracken, and sat down amid the sweet scent of it.

      ‘To hold a council about the wonderful dream we’ve all of us had,’ said Caroline slowly.

      But the council, if it could be called one, was brief and languid.

      ‘I’d rather think first,’ said Caroline. And the others said so would they.

      ‘I could think better with my head on your lap, Caro,’ Charles said.

      And Charlotte murmured, ‘Bunch the fern up closer under my back, Caro.’

      And when the sun came over the top of the sweet chestnut it fell upon a warm and comfortable heap of children asleep.

      You really can’t stay up all night, or even dream that you stay up, and then hold important councils next day just as though nothing had happened.

      When the children awoke, because the sun had crept up over the sweet chestnut and was shining straight into their eyes, everything looked different and much more interesting.

      ‘I tell you what,’ said Charlotte. ‘Let’s do fern-seed again.’

      ‘It’s only on the eve of – ’ Charles began, but Charlotte interrupted.

      ‘The seed goes on when once you’ve planted it – chewed it, I mean. I’m certain it does. If we don’t see anything, we may dream something more.’

      ‘There wouldn’t be time for a really thick dream before dinner,’ Charles objected.

      ‘Never mind! Let’s try. If we are late for dinner we’d tell the truth and say that we fell asleep in the woods. There’s such heaps of fern here it would be simply silly not to try.’

      There was something in this. Fern-seed was chewed once more. Bracken, I have heard really well-educated people say, is not a fern at all, but it seemed a fern to them. And it certainly did its best to act up to what was expected of it. For when the three removed the little green damp pads from their eyes and blinked at the green leaves, there in the thick of them was Rupert, looking at them between the hazel thicket and the honeysuckle – a real live Rupert, and no dream-nonsense about him.

      ‘Was it a dream last night?’ they all asked him, in an eager chorus. ‘When you came to the window?’

      ‘Of course it wasn’t,’ he said flatly. ‘Only I was so afraid of being nabbed. So I got out early and put the shelves back and the pillows on the bed, and I took the biscuits; I thought you wouldn’t mind – ’

      ‘Not a bit. Rather not’ – chorus of polite hospitality.

      ‘And I got out of your dressing-room window and down the ivy; it was quite easy. And I cut across the grass and in under those fancy sort of fir-trees, the ones that drag their branches – you know – in the avenue. And I saw you come out, but the place was all thick with gardeners and people. So I waited till their dinner-bell rang, and then I crept out here, and I was just going to say “Hi!” when you stuck that green stuff on your eyes. It looks nasty. What did you do it for?’

      They told him.

      ‘That’s rummy,’ he said, sitting among them quite at his ease, with one hand in his pocket. ‘Because I knew fern-seed made you invisible – it says so in Shakespeare, you know, – and I ate a bit coming along, just on the chance it might be some good – so that no one should see me, you know – and nobody did till you did. So,’ he went on more slowly, ‘perhaps I was really invisible until you put the fern-seed on your eyes.’

      ‘What a perfectly splendid idea!’ cried Charlotte. ‘Because that makes it all true. We were most awfully sick when we thought it had only just made us dream. I say! Do, now, do tell us how you ran away and why – and what you’re going to do, and everything.’

      ‘I thought,’ Rupert answered carelessly, ‘of running away to sea. But it’s a long way to the coast. I would much rather stop here with you. Couldn’t you hide me in a log-hut or something, like a runaway slave? Just till they stopped looking for me. And I could write to my father in India and ask him to let me stay here instead of with old Mug’s brother. Couldn’t you hide me till the answer came?’

      ‘We could try,’ said Charles, a little doubtfully.

      But Charlotte said, ‘Of course we can – we will! Only, why are you so different? You seem miles older than you were when we saw you on the platform.’

      ‘You’d look miles older if you’d locked your master in his study and then done a bunk – and been running and hiding for half a day and a night,’ said Rupert, a little crossly.

      ‘But what did he do to you?’ they asked.

      ‘Well, you saw what he was like in the train.’

      ‘But you seemed so frightened of him. I wonder you dared to run away.’

      ‘That wasn’t funk – in the train. That was just suppressed fury,’ Rupert explained tranquilly. ‘I was wondering where I should run to if I had to run. And then I did have to run – like Billy-o! And when I saw the name on a sign-post I remembered what you’d said about “true to the death” – and I kept behind the hedges, because I wasn’t sure about the fern-seed being any good, and I got up a tree and I saw you go by, and when you came back with the parson I just followed on quietly till I got to outside your house. I hoped you’d come out, but you didn’t. And I hid under one of those fancy firs, and then, I suppose, I went to sleep, and when I woke up there was a light in a window, and I went towards it, stupid, like a bird. You know how sparrows come out of the ivy if you show a light?’

      They didn’t.

      ‘Well, they do. And then I saw you monkeying about. I was glad, I tell you. And I tapped on the window, and – you know the rest,’ he ended, like a hero in a book.

      ‘But what did the Murdstone man do to you?’ Charlotte insisted on knowing.

      ‘He was playing up for a row from the very first,’ said Rupert; ‘and when we got to his beastly house that night’ – Rupert lowered his voice and spoke in a tone of deep disgust and bitterness – ‘he gave me bread and milk to eat. Bread and milk – with a teaspoon! And when I said I’d rather not, he said I must learn to eat what was set before me. And he talked about discipline and showed me a cane. He said he was glad there were no other little boys there – little boys! – because he could devote himself entirely to breaking me in.’

      ‘Beast!’