Complete Novels of E Nesbit, page 195
First came a wide, smooth ring of lawn, then marble steps going down to a round pool, where there were no water-lilies, only gold and silver fish that darted here and there like flashes of quicksilver and dark flames. And the enclosed space of water and marble and grass was lighted with a clear, white, radiant light, seven times stronger than the whitest moonlight, and in the still waters of the pool seven moons lay reflected. One could see that they were only reflections by the way their shape broke and changed as the gold and silver fish rippled the water with moving fin and tail that steered.
The girls looked up at the sky, almost expecting to see seven moons there. But no, the old moon shone alone, as she had always shone on them.
“There are seven moons,” said Mabel blankly, and pointed, which is not manners.
“Of course,” said Phœbus kindly; “everything in our world is seven times as much so as in yours.”
“But there aren’t seven of you,” said Mabel.
“No, but I am seven times as much,” said the Sun God. “You see, there’s numbers, and there’s quantity, to say nothing of quality. You see that, I’m sure.”
“Not quite,” said Kathleen.
“Explanations always weary me,” Phœbus interrupted. “Shall we join the ladies?”
On the further side of the pool was a large group, so white, that it seemed to make a great white hole in the trees. Some twenty or thirty figures there were in the group — all statues and all alive. Some were dipping their white feet among the gold and silver fish, and sending ripples across the faces of the seven moons. Some were pelting each other with roses — roses so sweet that the girls could smell them even across the pool. Others were holding hands and dancing in a ring, and two were sitting on the steps playing cat’s-cradle — which is a very ancient game indeed — with a thread of white marble.
As the new-comers advanced a shout of greeting and gay laughter went up.
“Late again, Phœbus!” some one called out. And another: “Did one of your horses cast a shoe?” And yet another called out something about laurels.
“I bring two guests,” said Phœbus, and instantly the statues crowded round, stroking the girls’ hair, patting their cheeks, and calling them the prettiest love-names.
“Are the wreaths ready, Hebe?” the tallest and most splendid of the ladies called out. “Make two more!”
And almost directly Hebe came down the steps, her round arms hung thick with rose-wreaths. There was one for each marble head.
Every one now looked seven times more beautiful than before, which, in the case of the gods and goddesses, is saying a good deal. The children remembered how at the raspberry vinegar feast Mademoiselle had said that gods and goddesses always wore wreaths for meals.
Hebe herself arranged the roses on the girls’ heads — and Aphrodite Urania, the dearest lady in the world, with a voice like mother’s at those moments when you love her most, took them by the hands and said: —
“Come, we must get the feast ready. Eros — Psyche — Hebe — Ganymede — all you young people can arrange the fruit.”
“I don’t see any fruit,” said Kathleen, as four slender forms disengaged themselves from the white crowd and came toward them.
“You will though,” said Eros, a really nice boy, as the girls instantly agreed; “you’ve only got to pick it.”
“Like this,” said Psyche, lifting her marble arms to a willow branch. She reached out her hand to the children — it held a ripe pomegranate.
“I see,” said Mabel. “You just — —” She laid her fingers to the willow branch and the firm softness of a big peach was within them.
“Yes, just that,” laughed Psyche, who was a darling, as any one could see.
After this Hebe gathered a few silver baskets from a convenient alder, and the four picked fruit industriously. Meanwhile the elder statues were busy plucking golden goblets and jugs and dishes from the branches of ash-trees and young oaks and filling them with everything nice to eat and drink that any one could possibly want, and these were spread on the steps. It was a celestial picnic. Then everyone sat or lay down and the feast began. And oh! the taste of the food served on those dishes, the sweet wonder of the drink that melted from those gold cups on the white lips of the company! And the fruit — there is no fruit like it grown on earth, just as there is no laughter like the laughter of those lips, no songs like the songs that stirred the silence of that night of wonder.
“Oh!” cried Kathleen, and through her fingers the juice of her third peach fell like tears on the marble steps. “I do wish the boys were here!”
“I do wonder what they’re doing,” said Mabel.
IT WAS A CELESTIAL PICNIC.
“At this moment,” said Hermes, who had just made a wide ring of flight, as a pigeon does, and come back into the circle—”at this moment they are wandering desolately near the home of the dinosaurus, having escaped from their home by a window, in search of you. They fear that you have perished, and they would weep if they did not know that tears do not become a man, however youthful.”
Kathleen stood up and brushed the crumbs of ambrosia from her marble lap.
“Thank you all very much,” she said. “It was very kind of you to have us, and we’ve enjoyed ourselves very much, but I think we ought to go now, please.”
“If it is anxiety about your brothers,” said Phœbus obligingly, “it is the easiest thing in the world for them to join you. Lend me your ring a moment.”
He took it from Kathleen’s half-reluctant hand, dipped it in the reflection of one of the seven moons, and gave it back. She clutched it. “Now,” said the Sun-god, “wish for them that which Mabel wished for herself. Say — —”
“I know,” Kathleen interrupted. “I wish that the boys may be statues of living marble like Mabel and me till dawn, and afterwards be like they are now.”
“If you hadn’t interrupted,” said Phœbus—”but there, we can’t expect old heads on shoulders of young marble. You should have wished them here — and — but no matter. Hermes, old chap, cut across and fetch them, and explain things as you come.”
He dipped the ring again in one of the reflected moons before he gave it back to Kathleen.
“There,” he said, “now it’s washed clean ready for the next magic.”
“It is not our custom to question guests,” said Hera the queen, turning her great eyes on the children; “but that ring excites, I am sure, the interest of us all.”
“It is the ring,” said Phœbus.
“That, of course,” said Hera; “but if it were not inhospitable to ask questions I should ask, How came it into the hands of these earth-children?”
“That,” said Phœbus, “is a long tale. After the feast the story, and after the story the song.”
Hermes seemed to have “explained everything” quite fully; for when Gerald and Jimmy in marble whiteness arrived, each clinging to one of the god’s winged feet, and so borne through the air, they were certainly quite at ease. They made their best bows to the goddesses and took their places as unembarrassed as though they had had Olympian suppers every night of their lives. Hebe had woven wreaths of roses ready for them, and as Kathleen watched them eating and drinking, perfectly at home in their marble, she was very glad that amid the welling springs of immortal peach-juice she had not forgotten her brothers.
“And now,” said Hera, when the boys had been supplied with everything they could possibly desire, and more than they could eat—”now for the story.”
“Yes,” said Mabel intensely; and Kathleen said, “Oh yes; now for the story. How splendid!”
“The story,” said Phœbus unexpectedly, “will be told by our guests.”
“Oh no!” said Kathleen, shrinking.
“The lads, maybe, are bolder,” said Zeus the king, taking off his rose-wreath, which was a little tight, and rubbing his compressed ears.
“I really can’t,” said Gerald; “besides, I don’t know any stories.”
“Nor yet me,” said Jimmy.
“It’s the story of how we got the ring that they want,” said Mabel in a hurry. “I’ll tell it if you like. Once upon a time there was a little girl called Mabel,” she added yet more hastily, and went on with the tale — all the tale of the enchanted castle, or almost all, that you have read in these pages. The marble Olympians listened enchanted — almost as enchanted as the castle itself, and the soft moonlit moments fell past like pearls dropping into a deep pool.
“And so,” Mabel ended abruptly, “Kathleen wished for the boys and the Lord Hermes fetched them and here we all are.”
A burst of interested comment and question blossomed out round the end of the story, suddenly broken off short by Mabel.
“But,” said she, brushing it aside, as it grew thinner, “now we want you to tell us.”
“To tell you —— ?”
“How you come to be alive, and how you know about the ring — and everything you do know.”
“Everything I know?” Phœbus laughed — it was to him that she had spoken — and not his lips only but all the white lips curled in laughter. “The span of your life, my earth-child, would not contain the words I should speak, to tell you all I know.”
“Well, about the ring anyhow, and how you come alive,” said Gerald; “you see, it’s very puzzling to us.”
“Tell them, Phœbus,” said the dearest lady in the world; “don’t tease the children.”
So Phœbus, leaning back against a heap of leopard-skins that Dionysus had lavishly plucked from a spruce fir, told.
“All statues,” he said, “can come alive when the moon shines, if they so choose. But statues that are placed in ugly cities do not choose. Why should they weary themselves with the contemplation of the hideous?”
“Quite so,” said Gerald politely, to fill the pause.
“In your beautiful temples,” the Sun-god went on, “the images of your priests and of your warriors who lie cross-legged on their tombs come alive and walk in their marble about their temples, and through the woods and fields. But only on one night in all the year can any see them. You have beheld us because you held the ring, and are of one brotherhood with us in your marble, but on that one night all may behold us.”
“And when is that?” Gerald asked, again polite, in a pause.
“At the festival of the harvest,” said Phœbus. “On that night as the moon rises it strikes one beam of perfect light on to the altar in certain temples. One of these temples is in Hellas, buried under the fall of a mountain which Zeus, being angry, hurled down upon it. One is in this land; it is in this great garden.”
“Then,” said Gerald, much interested, “if we were to come up to that temple on that night, we could see you, even without being statues or having the ring?”
“Even so,” said Phœbus. “More, any question asked by a mortal we are on that night bound to answer.”
“And the night is — when?”
“Ah!” said Phœbus, and laughed. “Wouldn’t you like to know!”
Then the great marble King of the Gods yawned, stroked his long beard, and said: “Enough of stories, Phœbus. Tune your lyre.”
“But the ring,” said Mabel in a whisper, as the Sun-god tuned the white strings of a sort of marble harp that lay at his feet—”about how you know all about the ring?”
“Presently,” the Sun-god whispered back. “Zeus must be obeyed; but ask me again before dawn, and I will tell you all I know of it.” Mabel drew back, and leaned against the comfortable knees of one Demeter — Kathleen and Psyche sat holding hands. Gerald and Jimmy lay at full length, chins on elbows, gazing at the Sun-god; and even as he held the lyre, before ever his fingers began to sweep the strings, the spirit of music hung in the air, enchanting, enslaving, silencing all thought but the thought of itself, all desire but the desire to listen to it.
Then Phœbus struck the strings and softly plucked melody from them, and all the beautiful dreams of all the world came fluttering close with wings like doves’ wings; and all the lovely thoughts that sometimes hover near, but not so near that you can catch them, now came home as to their nests in the hearts of those who listened. And those who listened forgot time and space, and how to be sad, and how to be naughty, and it seemed that the whole world lay like a magic apple in the hand of each listener, and that the whole world was good and beautiful.
And then, suddenly, the spell was shattered. Phœbus struck a broken chord, followed by an instant of silence; then he sprang up, crying, “The dawn! the dawn! To your pedestals, O gods!”
In an instant the whole crowd of beautiful marble people had leaped to its feet, had rushed through the belt of wood that cracked and rustled as they went, and the children heard them splash in the water beyond. They heard, too, the gurgling breathing of a great beast, and knew that the dinosaurus, too, was returning to his own place.
Only Hermes had time, since one flies more swiftly than one swims, to hover above them for one moment, and to whisper with a mischievous laugh: —
“In fourteen days from now, at the Temple of Strange Stones.”
“What’s the secret of the ring?” gasped Mabel.
“The ring is the heart of the magic,” said Hermes. “Ask at the moonrise on the fourteenth day, and you shall know all.”
With that he waved the snowy caduceus and rose in the air supported by his winged feet. And as he went the seven reflected moons died out and a chill wind began to blow, a grey light grew and grew, the birds stirred and twittered, and the marble slipped away from the children like a skin that shrivels in fire, and they were statues no more, but flesh and blood children as they used to be, standing knee-deep in brambles and long coarse grass. There was no smooth lawn, no marble steps, no seven-mooned fish-pond. The dew lay thick on the grass and the brambles, and it was very cold.
“We ought to have gone with them,” said Mabel with chattering teeth. “We can’t swim now we’re not marble. And I suppose this is the island?”
It was — and they couldn’t swim.
They knew it. One always knows those sort of things somehow without trying. For instance, you know perfectly that you can’t fly. There are some things that there is no mistake about.
The dawn grew brighter and the outlook more black every moment.
“There isn’t a boat, I suppose?” Jimmy asked.
“No,” said Mabel, “not on this side of the lake; there’s one in the boat-house, of course — if you could swim there.”
“You know I can’t,” said Jimmy.
“Can’t any one think of anything?” Gerald asked, shivering.
“When they find we’ve disappeared they’ll drag all the water for miles round,” said Jimmy hopefully, “in case we’ve fallen in and sunk to the bottom. When they come to drag this we can yell and be rescued.”
“Yes, dear, that will be nice,” was Gerald’s bitter comment.
“Don’t be so disagreeable,” said Mabel with a tone so strangely cheerful that the rest stared at her in amazement.
“The ring,” she said. “Of course we’ve only got to wish ourselves home with it. Phœbus washed it in the moon ready for the next wish.”
“You didn’t tell us about that,” said Gerald in accents of perfect good temper. “Never mind. Where is the ring?”
“You had it,” Mabel reminded Kathleen.
“I know I had,” said that child in stricken tones, “but I gave it to Psyche to look at — and — and she’s got it on her finger!”
Every one tried not to be angry with Kathleen. All partly succeeded.
“If we ever get off this beastly island,” said Gerald, “I suppose you can find Psyche’s statue and get it off again?”
“No I can’t,” Mabel moaned. “I don’t know where the statue is. I’ve never seen it. It may be in Hellas, wherever that is — or anywhere, for anything I know.”
No one had anything kind to say, and it is pleasant to record that nobody said anything. And now it was grey daylight, and the sky to the north was flushing in pale pink and lavender.
The boys stood moodily, hands in pockets. Mabel and Kathleen seemed to find it impossible not to cling together, and all about their legs the long grass was icy with dew.
A faint sniff and a caught breath broke the silence.
“Now, look here,” said Gerald briskly, “I won’t have it. Do you hear? Snivelling’s no good at all. No, I’m not a pig. It’s for your own good. Lets make a tour of the island. Perhaps there’s a boat hidden somewhere among the overhanging boughs.”
“How could there be?” Mabel asked.
“Some one might have left it there, I suppose,” said Gerald.
“But how would they have got off the island?”
“In another boat, of course,” said Gerald; “come on.”
Downheartedly, and quite sure that there wasn’t and couldn’t be any boat, the four children started to explore the island. How often each one of them had dreamed of islands, how often wished to be stranded on one! Well, now they were. Reality is sometimes quite different from dreams, and not half so nice. It was worst of all for Mabel, whose shoes and stockings were far away on the mainland. The coarse grass and brambles were very cruel to bare legs and feet.
They stumbled through the wood to the edge of the water, but it was impossible to keep close to the edge of the island, the branches grew too thickly. There was a narrow, grassy path that wound in and out among the trees, and this they followed, dejected and mournful. Every moment made it less possible for them to hope to get back to the school-house unnoticed. And if they were missed and beds found in their present unslept-in state — well, there would be a row of some sort, and, as Gerald said, “Farewell to liberty!”
“Of course we can get off all right,” said Gerald. “Just all shout when we see a gardener or a keeper on the mainland. But if we do, concealment is at an end and all is absolutely up!”
