The Wouldbegoods: Being the Further Adventures of the Treasure Seekers by E. Nesbit (best books to read TXT) 📗

Only now somehow we felt that Mr Richard Ravenal was all right and quiet, but that some one had done it for a lark, or perhaps not known about anyone being up there. So we rushed up, and Oswald told the others in a few hasty but well-chosen words, and we all leaned over between the battlements, and shouted, ‘Hi! you there!’

Then from under the arches of the quite-downstairs part of the tower a figure came forth—and it was the sailor who had had our milk sixpence. He looked up and he spoke to us. He did not speak loud, but he spoke loud enough for us to hear every word quite plainly. He said—

‘Drop that.’

Oswald said, ‘Drop what?’

He said, ‘That row.’

Oswald said, ‘Why?’

He said, ‘Because if you don’t I’ll come up and make you, and pretty quick too, so I tell you.’

Dicky said, ‘Did you bolt the door?’

The man said, ‘I did so, my young cock.’

Alice said—and Oswald wished to goodness she had held her tongue, because he saw right enough the man was not friendly—‘Oh, do come and let us out—do, please.’

While she was saying it Oswald suddenly saw that he did not want the man to come up. So he scurried down the stairs because he thought he had seen something on the door on the top side, and sure enough there were two bolts, and he shot them into their sockets. This bold act was not put in the Golden Deed book, because when Alice wanted to, the others said it was not GOOD of Oswald to think of this, but only CLEVER. I think sometimes, in moments of danger and disaster, it is as good to be clever as it is to be good. But Oswald would never demean himself to argue about this.

When he got back the man was still standing staring up. Alice said—

‘Oh, Oswald, he says he won’t let us out unless we give him all our money. And we might be here for days and days and all night as well. No one knows where we are to come and look for us. Oh, do let’s give it him ALL.’

She thought the lion of the English nation, which does not know when it is beaten, would be ramping in her brother’s breast. But Oswald kept calm. He said—

‘All right,’ and he made the others turn out their pockets. Denny had a bad shilling, with a head on both sides, and three halfpence. H. O. had a halfpenny. Noel had a French penny, which is only good for chocolate machines at railway stations. Dicky had tenpence-halfpenny, and Oswald had a two-shilling piece of his own that he was saving up to buy a gun with. Oswald tied the whole lot up in his handkerchief, and looking over the battlements, he said—

‘You are an ungrateful beast. We gave you sixpence freely of our own will.’

The man did look a little bit ashamed, but he mumbled something about having his living to get. Then Oswald said—

‘Here you are. Catch!’ and he flung down the handkerchief with the money in it.

The man muffed the catch—butter-fingered idiot!—but he picked up the handkerchief and undid it, and when he saw what was in it he swore dreadfully. The cad!

‘Look here,’ he called out, ‘this won’t do, young shaver. I want those there shiners I see in your pus! Chuck ‘em along!’

Then Oswald laughed. He said—

‘I shall know you again anywhere, and you’ll be put in prison for this. Here are the SHINERS.’ And he was so angry he chucked down purse and all. The shiners were not real ones, but only card-counters that looked like sovereigns on one side. Oswald used to carry them in his purse so as to look affluent. He does not do this now.

When the man had seen what was in the purse he disappeared under the tower, and Oswald was glad of what he had done about the bolts—and he hoped they were as strong as the ones on the other side of the door.

They were.

We heard the man kicking and pounding at the door, and I am not ashamed to say that we were all holding on to each other very tight. I am proud, however, to relate that nobody screamed or cried.

After what appeared to be long years, the banging stopped, and presently we saw the brute going away among the trees. Then Alice did cry, and I do not blame her. Then Oswald said—

‘It’s no use. Even if he’s undone the door, he may be in ambush. We must hold on here till somebody comes.’

Then Alice said, speaking chokily because she had not quite done crying—

‘Let’s wave a flag.’

By the most fortunate accident she had on one of her Sunday petticoats, though it was Monday. This petticoat is white. She tore it out at the gathers, and we tied it to Denny’s stick, and took turns to wave it. We had laughed at his carrying a stick before, but we were very sorry now that we had done so.

And the tin dish the Lent pie was baked in we polished with our handkerchiefs, and moved it about in the sun so that the sun might strike on it and signal our distress to some of the outlying farms.

This was perhaps the most dreadful adventure that had then ever happened to us. Even Alice had now stopped thinking of Mr Richard Ravenal, and thought only of the lurker in ambush.

We all felt our desperate situation keenly. I must say Denny behaved like anything but a white mouse. When it was the others’ turn to wave, he sat on the leads of the tower and held Alice’s and Noel’s hands, and said poetry to them—yards and yards of it. By some strange fatality it seemed to comfort them. It wouldn’t have me.

He said ‘The Battle of the Baltic’, and ‘Gray’s Elegy’, right through, though I think he got wrong in places, and the ‘Revenge’, and Macaulay’s thing about Lars Porsena and the Nine Gods. And when it was his turn he waved like a man.

I will try not to call him a white mouse any more. He was a brick that day, and no mouse.

The sun was low in the heavens, and we were sick of waving and very hungry, when we saw a cart in the road below. We waved like mad, and shouted, and Denny screamed exactly like a railway whistle, a thing none of us had known before that he could do.

And the cart stopped. And presently we saw a figure with a white beard among the trees. It was our Pig-man.

We bellowed the awful truth to him, and when he had taken it in—he thought at first we were kidding—he came up and let us out.