The Enchanted Castle - E. Nesbit (best novels to read for students TXT) 📗

inside of the monster. In a moment a shower began to descend from the opening⁠—a shower of empty waistcoats, trousers with wildly waving legs, and coats with sleeves uncontrolled.

“Heads below!” called Kathleen, and down came walking-sticks and golf-sticks and hockey-sticks and broomsticks, rattling and chattering to each other as they came.

“Come on,” said Jimmy.

“Hold on a bit,” said Gerald. “I’m coming up.” He caught the edge of the hole above in his hands and jumped. Just as he got his shoulders through the opening and his knees on the edge he heard Kathleen’s boots on the floor of the dinosaurus’s inside, and Kathleen’s voice saying: “Isn’t it jolly cool in here? I suppose statues are always cool. I do wish I was a statue. Oh!”

The “oh” was a cry of horror and anguish. And it seemed to be cut off very short by a dreadful stony silence.

“What’s up?” Gerald asked. But in his heart he knew. He climbed up into the great hollow. In the little light that came up through the hole he could see something white against the grey of the creature’s sides. He felt in his pockets, still kneeling, struck a match, and when the blue of its flame changed to clear yellow he looked up to see what he had known he would see⁠—the face of Kathleen, white, stony, and lifeless. Her hair was white, too, and her hands, clothes, shoes everything was white, with the hard, cold whiteness of marble. Kathleen had her wish: she was a statue. There was a long moment of perfect stillness in the inside of the dinosaurus. Gerald could not speak. It was too sudden, too terrible. It was worse than anything that had happened yet. Then he turned and spoke down out of that cold, stony silence to Jimmy, in the green, sunny, rustling, live world outside.

“Jimmy,” he said, in tones perfectly ordinary and matter of fact, “Kathleen’s gone and said that ring was a wishing-ring. And so it was, of course. I see now what she was up to, running like that. And then the young duffer went and wished she was a statue.”

“And she is?” asked Jimmy, below.

“Come up and have a look,” said Gerald. And Jimmy came, partly with a pull from Gerald and partly with a jump of his own.

“She’s a statue, right enough,” he said, in awestruck tones. “Isn’t it awful!”

“Not at all,” said Gerald firmly. “Come on⁠—let’s go and tell Mabel.”

To Mabel, therefore, who had discreetly remained with her long length screened by rhododendrons, the two boys returned and broke the news. They broke it as one breaks a bottle with a pistol-shot.

“Oh, my goodness!” said Mabel, and writhed through her long length so that the leaves and fern tumbled off in little showers, and she felt the sun suddenly hot on the backs of her legs. “What next? Oh, my goodness!”

“She’ll come all right,” said Gerald, with outward calm.

“Yes; but what about me?” Mabel urged. “I haven’t got the ring. And my time will be up before hers is. Couldn’t you get it back? Can’t you get it off her hand? I’d put it back on her hand the very minute I was my right size again⁠—faithfully I would.”

“Well, it’s nothing to blub about,” said Jimmy, answering the sniffs that had served her in this speech for commas and full-stops; “not for you, anyway.”

“Ah! you don’t know,” said Mabel; “you don’t know what it is to be as long as I am. Do⁠—do try and get the ring. After all, it is my ring more than any of the rest of yours, anyhow, because I did find it, and I did say it was magic.”

The sense of justice always present in the breast of Gerald awoke to this appeal.

“I expect the ring’s turned to stone⁠—her boots have, and all her clothes. But I’ll go and see. Only if I can’t, I can’t, and it’s no use your making a silly fuss.”

The first match lighted inside the dinosaurus showed the ring dark on the white hand of the statuesque Kathleen.

The fingers were stretched straight out. Gerald took hold of the ring, and, to his surprise, it slipped easily off the cold, smooth marble finger.

“I say, Cathy, old girl, I am sorry,” he said, and gave the marble hand a squeeze. Then it came to him that perhaps she could hear him. So he told the statue exactly what he and the others meant to do. This helped to clear up his ideas as to what he and the others did mean to do. So that when, after thumping the statue hearteningly on its marble back, he returned to the rhododendrons, he was able to give his orders with the clear precision of a born leader, as he later said. And since the others had, neither of them, thought of any plans, his plan was accepted, as the plans of born leaders are apt to be.

“Here’s your precious ring,” he said to Mabel. “Now you’re not frightened of anything, are you?”

“No,” said Mabel, in surprise. “I’d forgotten that. Look here, I’ll stay here or farther up in the wood if you’ll leave me all the coats, so that I shan’t be cold in the night. Then I shall be here when Kathleen comes out of the stone again.”

“Yes,” said Gerald, “that was exactly the born leader’s idea.”

“You two go home and tell Mademoiselle that Kathleen’s staying at the Towers. She is.”

“Yes,” said Jimmy, “she certainly is.”

“The magic goes in seven-hour lots,” said Gerald; “your invisibility was twenty-one hours, mine fourteen, Eliza’s seven. When it was a wishing-ring it began with seven. But there’s no knowing what number it will be really. So there’s no knowing which of you will come right first. Anyhow, we’ll sneak out by the cistern window and come down the trellis, after we’ve said good night to Mademoiselle, and come and have a look at you before we go to bed. I think you’d better come close up to the