The Wonderful Garden or The Three Cs

There were books, not many, on some of the tables – large books with pictures, and one, a photograph book, so heavy that Caroline could not lift it up.

‘I say. Look here,’ she called out; ‘this book’s only got about three pages of uncles and aunts, the rest is solid, like a box made to imitate a book. Suppose the book were inside the box part?’

‘Won’t it open?’ The others were crowding close to look.

‘There’s a sort of catch there,’ said Charles, putting his finger on a little brass button.

‘Oh, crikey!’ he started back. So did the others. For a low whirring sound had come from the book, and Charlotte had hardly time to say, ‘It’s a Nihilist bomb, come away!’ before the book broke into the silvery chiming cadence of ‘Home, Sweet Home.’

‘It’s a musical box,’ Charlotte explained needlessly. And then the same thought struck each mind.

‘Mrs. Wilmington!’ For the musical box was a fine one, and its clear silvery notes rang out through the room. Mrs. Wilmington must hear wherever she was. She would hear and come.

‘Fly!’ said Caroline, and they fled. They got out, locked the door, rushed softly yet swiftly up the stairs and waited behind the upper door till they heard Mrs. Wilmington’s alpaca sweep down the front stairs. Then out, and down after her, quickly and quietly, so that when, having found the musical box playing with sweet tinkling self-possession to an empty drawing-room whose doors were locked, and having satisfied herself that no intruder lurked behind brocaded curtain or Indian screen, she came to the dining-room, she found the three C.’s quietly seated there each with a book, a picture of good little children on a rainy day. She could not see that Charles’s book was a Bradshaw and Caroline’s Zotti’s Italian Grammar, wrong way up.

‘Oh, you are here,’ she said; ‘did you hear that musical box?’

‘Yes,’ said the children meekly.

Mrs. Wilmington stood a moment in the door. She did not understand machinery, and to her it seemed quite possible that a musical box might begin to play all on its own account without any help from outside. On the other hand, it had never chosen to do it before these children came.

‘You ought not to wear bedroom slippers in the sitting-rooms,’ she said, and went away without more words.

‘I nearly burst,’ said Charles then; ‘especially when she noticed our feet.’

‘But she’ll find out,’ Charlotte said. ‘She found out about Rupert. Let’s go back now; because she won’t think we’re there now she knows we’re here. There was another book, all heavy too. We’ll start that and wake her up again.’

‘I say, isn’t it a lark?’ Charles whispered, as they crept up the stairs.

CHAPTER XII

THE OTHER BOOK

They found the second book. It was not so heavy as the other, but in it, too, there were only three or four pages of ladies in crinolines and gentlemen in whiskers and chokers, leaning against marble pillars with velvet curtains loosely draped in the background.

‘Be careful,’ Charlotte urged; ‘be quite ready to fly before you start it.’

But when they pressed the little catch and sprang towards the door ready to ‘fly,’ no silvery sound met the ear. In an awe-struck silence they went slowly back to the table.

And now, looking more closely, they saw that the catch was not made to press down but to slide along. Charlotte pushed it. A lid flew up, and there was a space that had perhaps once held a musical box, but now held a reel of silk, an old velvet needle-book with a view of the Isle of Wight painted on it outside, and inside, needles red with many a year’s rust; a box of beads with a glass top, a bone silk-winder, a netting needle, and a sheet of paper with some finely pencilled writing on it.

‘Bother!’ said Charles; ‘let’s start the other.’

But Charlotte was looking at the beads and Caroline was looking at the writing.

‘What jolly little different beads, not a bit like now,’ said Charlotte; and Caroline said:

‘It’s a list of books, that’s all. I say,’ she added in quite another voice, ‘that Thessalonian book is underlined, hard, I wonder why?’ She unfolded the paper and turned it over. ‘There’s another underlined, Pope’s Ill Something,’ she said.

‘Iliad,’ said Charles, looking over her shoulder. ‘I always know Latin words the minute I see them, even if I don’t know what they mean. Let’s start the other musical box.’

‘No,’ said Caroline quickly, ‘let’s find Pope’s What’s-its-name. There’s only those two underlined. It’s a clue, that’s what it is. Come on and don’t make a row. I feel we’re on the brink of – the very brink. Punctuality and despatch.’

‘All the books in the dining-room’s names are in a book at the end of the bottom shelf,’ said Charles. ‘I know, because I thought it was the book; the cover’s something like the one in the picture.’

It was easy to find Pope’s Iliad in the Catalogue. ‘1 vol. Top shelf. Case 6. Number 39,’ it said. Then there was a rush for Case 6 and a dragging of chairs to the spot. Caroline being the tallest, reached the volume and got it down.

‘The cover feels loose in my hand,’ she said. ‘Oh, I do believe it is!’

It was. From the loose boards whose back pretended that they were covering Mr. Alexander Pope’s translation of the Greek epic, another and quite different book came forth. A thin brown book, the second book of the picture! Charlotte climbed on a chair expressly to compare the two. There was no doubt of it. The two were the same. Inside was yellowy paper with a queer sort of waviness about it, and large print of that curious old-fashioned kind where the s’s are all like f’s, except at the ends of words.

‘We can read this,’ said Charles hopefully. ‘I mean even you can. It’s not Latin this time. Let’s take it to uncle and tell him we’ve found it. Won’t he be delighted with us?’

‘We promised not to bother for a week,’ Charlotte reminded him. ‘Let’s keep it for a week, and then we’ll give him the two together. He won’t be able to believe his eyes. It is an eyesore, isn’t it?’

‘I think what you mean’s a sight for sore eyes,’ Caroline suggested. ‘Let’s have a look. Is it spells?’

‘It looks like all about being ill,’ said Charlotte doubtfully; ‘but it’s very hard with these s’s pretending to be f’s, and the spelling is rum, isn’t it?’

‘All spelling’s rum, I think,’ said Charles; ‘especially ie’s and ei’s.’

‘I.E., except after C,’ said Charlotte absently, ‘It says, “Government and Virtues. It is under the Moon!”’

‘What is?’

‘I don’t know. It goes on: “It is a good wound-e herb-e and the juice taken in wine helpeth the jaundice, and is ſovereign for the plague, if ſo be the ſufferer be not too far gone in it.”’

‘What does? What is?’

‘“The flowers,”’ Charlotte read on, ‘“be large and yellow in forme and in others paler and ſmaller. The ſtalk is two feet high and divideth himſelf into many ſpreading branches.’”

‘What does?’

‘Rugged wort. It’s all about plants, I think, and what they’re good for.’

‘How glorious!’ Caroline cried and clapped her hands. ‘Now we’ve got all three. The spells, and the medicine, and the Language Of. And what one won’t do, the other will. Hist! not a word!’ She had only just time to throw the book into a chair and sit down on it as the door opened, and Harriet entered with the tea-tray.

The Uncle did not come in to tea. Only Mrs. Wilmington looked in for a moment to say that Rupert’s cold was worse, and that they had better not see him again that day.

‘And please don’t be up and down stairs all the time in your heavy boots,’ she added.

‘Our feet don’t seem to please her to-day, somehow, whatever we put them in,’ said Charlotte. ‘I wish we could give her something to make her like us. We might just as well be black-beetles.’

‘What we’ve got to do,’ said Caroline, pouring out milk, ‘is to get Rupert better. I felt all the time in the drawing-room how hateful it is for him to be out of things like this. If we could work something out of the three books, I’m sure he would get all right in no time. A threefold spell; that’s what we want.’

‘Well, we can’t have it then,’ said Charlotte. ‘I should think two books would be ample. It’s only a cold he’s got. It might want the three if it was plague or wounds or jauntry – jaundice, or whatever it is.’

They spread out the book on the table as soon as tea was cleared away, and put their heads together over the yellow pages. But it was some time before they could find anything that seemed as though it could possibly do Rupert any good.