The House of Arden: A Story for Children

They went in and out of the cottages as they chose. Every one seemed to know them and to be pleased, in an absent sort of way, to see them, but nobody had time to talk to them, so they soon lost the fear they had had at first of being found out to be not the people they were being taken for. They found the women busy brushing and mending old scarlet coats and tight white trousers, and all along the dip of the cliff men were posted, with spy-glasses, looking out to sea. Other men toiled up the slope with great bundles of brown brush-wood and dried furze on their backs, and those bundles were piled high, ready to be lighted the moment it should be certain that the French were coming.

Elfrida wished more than ever that she knew more about the later chapters of the history book. Did Boney land in England on the 17th of June, 1807? She could not remember. There was something, she knew, in the book about a French invasion, but she could not remember what it was an invasion of, nor when it took place. So she and Edred knew as little as any one else what really was going to happen. The Mouldiwarp, in the hurried interview she had had with it before dinner, had promised to come if she called it, “With poetry, of course,” it added, as it curled up in the corner of the drawer, and this comforted her a good deal when, going up to get her bonnet, she found the bottom drawer empty. So, though she was as interested as Edred in all that was going on, it was only with half her mind. The other half was busy trying to make up a piece of poetry, so that any emergency which might suddenly arise would not find her powerless because poetry-less.

So for once Edred was more observant than she, and when he noticed that the men built a bonfire not at all on the spot which Lord Arden had pointed out as most convenient, he wondered why.

And presently, seeing a man going by that very spot, he asked him why. To his surprise, the man at once poked him in the ribs with a very hard finger, and said—

“Ah, you’re a little wag, you are! But you’re a little gentleman, too, and so’s the little lady, bless her. You never gave us away to the Preventives—for all you found out.”

“Of course,” said Elfrida cautiously, “we should never give any one away.”

“Want to come along down now?” the man asked. He was a brown-faced, sturdy, sailor-looking man, with a short pigtail sticking out from the back of his head like the china handle of a Japanese teapot.

“Oh, yes,” said Elfrida, and Edred did not say “Oh, no.”

“Then just you wait till I’m out of sight, and then come down the way you see me go. Go long same as if you was after butterflies or the like—a bit this way and a bit that—see?” said the man. And they obeyed.

Alas! too few children in those uninteresting times of ours have ever been in a smuggler’s cave. To Edred and to Elfrida it was as great a novelty as it would be to you or to me.

When they came up with the brown man he was crouching in the middle of a patch of furze.

“Jump they outside bushes,” he said. And they jumped, and wound their way among the furze-bushes by little narrow rabbit-paths till they stood by his side.

Then he lifted a great heap of furze and bramble that looked as if it had lived and died exactly where it was. And there was a hole—with steps going down.

It was dark below, but Elfrida did not hesitate to do as she was told and to go forward. And if Edred hesitated it was only for a minute.

The children went down some half a dozen steps. Then the brown man came into the hole too, and drew the furze after him. And he lighted a lantern; there was a tallow candle in it, and it smelt very nasty indeed. But what are smells, even those of hot tallow and hot iron, compared with the splendid exploring of a smuggler’s cave? It was everything the children had ever dreamed of—and more.

There was the slow descent with the yellowness of the lantern flame casting golden lights and inky shadows on the smooth whiteness of the passage’s chalk walls. There were steps, there was a rude heavy door, fastened by a great lock and a key to open it—as big as a church key. And when the door had creaked open there was the great cave. It was so high that you could not see the roof—only darkness. Out of an opening in the chalk at the upper end a stream of water fell, slid along a smooth channel down the middle of the cave and ran along down a steep incline, rather like a small railway cutting, and disappeared under a low arch.

“So there’d always be water if you had to stand a siege,” said Edred.

On both sides of the great cave barrels and bales were heaped on a sanded floor. There were a table and benches cut out of solid chalk, and an irregular opening partly blocked by a mass of fallen cliff, through which you saw the mysterious twilit sea, with stars coming out over it.

You saw this, and you felt—quite suddenly, too—a wild wind that pressed itself against you like a wrestler trying a fall, and whistled in your ears and drove you back to the big cave, out of breath and panting.

“There’ll be half a gale to-night,” said the smuggler; for such, no doubt, he was.

“Do you think the French will land to-morrow in Lymchurch Bay?” Edred asked.

By the light of the lantern the smuggler solemnly winked.

“You two can keep a secret, I know,” he said. “The French won’t land; it’s us what’ll land, and we’ll land here and not in bay; and what we’ll land is a good drop of the real thing, and a yard or two of silk or lace maybe. I don’t know who ’twas put it about as the French was a-coming, but you may lay to it they aren’t no friends of the Revenue.”

“Oh, I see,” said Elfrida. “And did——”

“The worst of it’ll be the look-out they’ll keep. Lucky for us it’s all our men as has volunteered for duty. And we know our friends.”

“But do you mean,” said Edred, “that you can be friends with a Frenchman, when we’re at war with them?”

“It’s like this, little man,” said the smuggler, sitting down on a keg that stood handily on its head ready for a seat. “We ain’t no quarrel with the free-trade men—neither here nor there. A man’s got his living to get, hasn’t he now? So you see a man’s trade comes first—what he gets his bread by. So you see these chaps as meet us mid-channel and hand us the stuff—they’re free traders first and Frenchies after—the same like we’re merchants before all. We ain’t no quarrel with them. It’s the French soldiers we’re at war with, not the honest French traders that’s in the same boat as us ourselves.”

“Then somebody’s just made up about Boney coming, so as to keep people busy in the bay while you’re smuggling here?” said Edred.

“I wouldn’t go so far as that, sir,” said the man, “but if it did happen that way it ’ud be a sort of special dispensation for us free-trade men that get our living by honest work and honest danger; that’s all I say, knowing by what’s gone before that you two are safe as any old salt afloat.”

The two children would have given a good deal to know what it was that had “gone before.” But they never did know. And sometimes, even now, they wonder what it was that the Edred and Elfrida of those days had done to win the confidence of this swaggering smuggler. They both think, and I daresay they are right, that it must have been something rather fine.

Having seen all the ins and outs of the cave, the children were not sorry to get back to Arden Castle, for it was now dark, and long past their proper bedtime, and it really had been rather a wearing day.

They were put to bed, rather severely, by Lady Arden’s own maid, whom they had not met before and did not want to meet again—so shrivelled and dry and harsh was she. And they slept like happy little tops, in the coarse homespun linen sheets scented with lavender grown in the castle garden, that were spread over soft, fat, pincushion-beds, filled with the feathers of geese eaten at the castle table.

Only Elfrida woke once and found the room filled with red light, and, looking out of the window, saw that one of the beacon bonfires was alight and that the flames and smoke were streaming across the dark summer sky—driven by the wind that shouted and yelled and shook the windows, and was by this time, she felt sure, at least three-quarters of a gale. The beacon was lighted; therefore the French were coming. And Elfrida yawned and went back to bed. She was too sleepy to believe in Boney. But at that time, a hundred years ago, hundreds of little children shivered and cried in their beds, being quite sure that now at last all the dreadful prophecies of mothers and nurses would come true, and that Boney, in all his mysterious, unknown horror, would really now, at last, “have them.”

It was grey morning when the wind, wearied of the silly resistance of the leaded window, suddenly put forth his strength, tore the window from its hinges, drove it across the window frame, and swept through the room, flapping the bedclothes like wet sails, and wakening the children most thoroughly, far beyond any hope of “one more snooze.” They got up and dressed. No one was about in the house, but the front door was open. It was quite calm on that side, but as soon as the children left the shelter of the castle wall the wind caught at them, hit, slapped, drove, worried, beat them, till they had hard work to stand upright, and getting along was very slow and difficult. Yet they made their way somehow to the cliff, where a thick, black crowd stood—a crowd that was not really black when you got quite close and could look at it in the grey dawn-light, but rather brilliantly red, white, and blue, like the Union Jack, because they were the armed men in their make-shift uniforms whom old Lord Arden had drilled and paraded the evening before. And they were all looking out to sea.

The sea was like the inside of an oyster-shell, barred with ridges of cold silver, the sky above was grey as a gull’s wing, and between sea and sky a ship was driving straight on to the rocks a hundred feet below.

“’Tis a French ship, by her rig,” some one said.

“The first of the fleet—a scout,” said another, “and Heaven has sent a storm to destroy them like it destroyed the accursed Armada in Queen Bess’s time.”

And still the ship came nearer.

“’Tis the Bonne Esperance,” said the low voice of the smuggler friend close to Elfrida’s ear, and she could only just hear him through the whistling of the gale. “’Tis true what old Betty said; the French will land here to-day—but they’ll land dead corpses. And all our little cargo—they’ve missed our boat in the gale—it’ll all be smashed to bits afore our eyes. It’s poor work being a honest merchant.”

The men in their queer uniforms, carrying their queer weapons, huddled closer together, and all eyes were fixed on the ship as it came on and on.

“Is it sure to be wrecked?” whispered Elfrida, catching at old Lord Arden’s hand.

“No hope, my child. Get you home to bed,” he said.

It did not make any difference that all this had happened a hundred years ago. There was the cold, furious sea lashing the rocks far down below the cliff. Elfrida could not bear to stay and see that ship smash on the rocks as her carved work-box had smashed when she dropped it on the kitchen bricks. She could not even bear to think of seeing it. Poetry was difficult, but to stay here and see a ship wrecked—a ship that had men aboard—was more difficult still.

was not, perhaps, fine poetry, but it expressed her feelings exactly, and, anyhow, it did what it was meant to do. The white mole rubbed against her ankles even as she spoke. She caught it up.

“Oh, what are we to do?”

“Go home,” it said, “to the castle—you’ll find the door now.”

And they turned to go. And as they turned they heard a grinding crunch, mixed with the noise of the waves and winds, enormously louder, but yet just the sort of noise a dog makes when he is eating the bones of the chicken you had for dinner and gets the chicken’s ribs all at once into his mouth. Then there was a sort of sighing moan from the crowd on the cliff, who had been there all night for the French to land, and then Lord Arden’s voice—

“The French have landed. She spoke the truth. The French have landed—Heaven help them!”

And as the children ran towards the house they knew that every man in that crowd would now be ready to risk his life to save from the sea those Frenchies whom they had sat up all night to kill with swords and scythes and bills and meat-choppers. Men are queer creatures!

To get out of it—back to the safe quiet of a life without shipwrecks and witches—that was all Elfrida wanted. Holding the mole in one hand and dragging Edred by the other, she got back to the castle and in at the open front door, up the stairs, and straight to a door—she knew it would be the right one, and it was.

There was the large attic with the beams, and the long, wonderful row of chests under the sloping roof. And the moment the door was shut, the raging noise of the winds ceased, as the flaring noise of gas ceases when you turn it off. And now once more the golden light filtered through the chinks of the tiles, and outside was the “tick, tick” of moving pigeon feet, the rustling of pigeon feathers, and the cooroocoo of pigeon voices.

On the ground lay their own clothes. “Change,” said the white mole, a little out of breath because it had been held very tight and carried very fast.

And the moment they began to put on their own clothes it seemed that the pigeon noises came closer and closer, and somehow helped them out of the prickly clothes of 1807 and back into the comfortable sailor suits of 1907.

“Did ye find the treasure?” the mole asked, and the children answered—

“Why no; we never thought of it.”

“It don’t make no odds,” said the mole. “’Twaren’t dere.”

“There?” said Elfrida. “Then we’re here? We’re now again, I mean? We’re not then?”

“Oh, you’re now, sure enough,” said the mole, “and won’t you catch it! Dame Honeysett’s been raising the countryside arter ye. Next time ye go gallivantin’ into old ancient days you’d best set the clock back. Young folks don’t know everything. Get along down and take your scolding.

Good-bye.”

It ran under one of the chests, and Edred and Elfrida were left looking at each other in the attic between the rows of chests.

“Do you like adventures?” said Edred slowly.

“Yes,” said Elfrida firmly; “and so do you. Come along down.”

CHAPTER V
THE HIGHWAYMAN AND THE ——

They both meant what they said. And yet, of course, it is nonsense to promise that you will never do anything again, because, of course, you must do something, if it’s only simple subtraction or eating poached eggs and sausages. You will, of course, understand that what they meant was that they would never again do anything to cause Mrs. Honeysett a moment’s uneasiness, and in order to make this possible the first thing to do was, of course, to find out how to set the clock back. Slowly munching sausage, and feeling, as she always did when she ate slowly, that she was doing something very virtuous and ought to have a prize or a medal for it, Elfrida asked her mind to be kind enough to get some poetry ready by the time she had finished breakfast. And sure enough, her mind, in its own secret backyard, as it were, did get something ready. And while this was happening Elfrida, in what corresponded to her mind’s front garden, was wishing that she had been born a poet.

“Like the one who did the piece about the favourite gold-fish drowned in a tub of cats,” she said pensively.

“Yes, or even Shakespeare,” said Edred; “only he’s so long always.”

“I wonder,” said the girl, “where the clock is that we’ve got to set back?”

“Oh, Mouldiwarp’ll tell us,” said the boy.

But Mouldiwarp didn’t.

When breakfast was over they went out into the grassy space round which the ruined walls of the castle rose up so grey and stately, with the wallflowers and toad-flax growing out of them, and sat down among the round-faced, white-frilled daisies and told each other what they had thought, or what they thought they had thought, while they were back in those times when people were afraid of Boney.

And the castle’s sward was very green, and the daisies were very white, and the sun shone on everything very grand and golden.

And as they sat there it came over Elfrida suddenly how good a place it was and how lucky they were to be there at home at Arden, rather than in the house with the pale, smooth brass door-knocker that stood in the street with the red pavement, and the lodgers who kept all on ringing their bells—so that she said, quite without knowing she was going to say anything—

“That’s more like poetry, that is,” said the Mouldiwarp, sitting on the green grass between the children; “more lik’n anything I’ve heard ye say yet—so ’tis. An’ now den, what is it for you dis fine day an’ all?”

It seemed in such a good temper that Elfrida asked a question that had long tried to get itself asked.

“Why,” was the question, and it was spoken to the white mole,—“why do you talk like the country people do?”

“Sussex barn an’ bred,” said the mole, “but I know other talk. Sussex talks what they call ‘racy of the soil’—means ‘smells of the earth’ where I live. I can talk all sorts, though. I used to spit French once on a time, young Fitz-le-seigneur.”

“You must know lots and lots,” said Edred.

“I do,” said the mole.

“How old are you?” Edred asked, in spite of Elfrida’s warning “Hush! it’s rude.”

“’S old as my tongue an’ a little older’n me teeth,” said the mole, showing them.

“Ah, don’t be cross,” said Elfrida, “and such a beautiful day, too, and just when we wanted you to show us how to put back the clock and all.”

“That’s a deed, that is,” said the mole, “but you’ve not quarrelled this three days, so you can go where you please and do what you will. Only you’re in the way here if you want to stop the clock. Get up into the gate tower and look out, and when you see the great clock face, come down at once and sit on the second hand. That’ll stop it, if anything will.”

Looking out through the breezy arch among the swinging ends of ivy and the rustle and whir of pigeon wings, the children saw a very curious sight.

The green and white of grass and daisies began to swim, as it were, before their eyes. The lawn within the castle walls was all uneven because the grass had not been laid there by careful gardeners, with spirit-levels and rollers, who wanted to make a lawn, but by Nature herself, who wanted just to cover up bits of broken crockery and stone, and old birds’ nests, and all sorts of odd rubbish. And now it began to stretch itself, as though it were a live carpet, and to straighten and tighten itself till it lay perfectly flat.

And the grass seemed to be getting greener in places. And in other places there were patches of white thicker and purer than before.

“Look! look!” cried Edred; “look! the daisies are walking about!”

They were. Stiffly and steadily, like well-drilled little soldiers, the daisies were forming into twos, into fours, into companies. Looking down from the window of the gate tower it was like watching thousands of little white beads sort themselves out from among green ones.

“What are they going to do?” Edred asked, but naturally Elfrida was not able to answer.

The daisies marched very steadily, like little people who knew their business very well. They massed themselves together in regiments, in armies. On certain parts of the smooth grass certain companies of them stopped and stayed.

“They’re making a sort of pattern,” said Edred. “Look! there’s a big ring all round—a sort of pattern.”

“I should think they were!” cried Elfrida. “Look! look! It’s the clock.”

It was. On the pure green face of the lawn was an enormous circle marked by a thick line of closely packed white daisies. Within it were the figures that are on the face of a clock—all twelve of them. The hands were of white daisies, too, both the minute hand and the hand that marks the hours, and between the VI and the centre was a smaller circle, also white and of daisies—round which they could see a second hand move—a white second hand formed of daisies wheeling with a precision that would have made the haughtiest general in the land shed tears of pure admiration.

With one accord the two children blundered down the dark, dusty, cobwebby, twisty stairs of the gate tower and rushed across the lawn. In the very centre of the clock-face sat the Mouldiwarp, looking conscious and a little conceited.

“How did you do it?” Elfrida gasped.

“The daisies did it. Poor little things! They can’t invent at all. But they do carry out other people’s ideas quite nicely. All the white things have to obey me, of course,” it added carelessly.

“And this is The Clock?”

The Mouldiwarp giggled. “My child, what presumption! The clock is much too big for you to see ever—all at once. The sun’s the centre of it. This is just a pretending clock. It’ll do for what we want, of course, or I wouldn’t have had it made for you. Sit down on the second hand—oh no, it won’t hurt the daisies. Count a hundred—yes, that’s right.”

They sat down on the close, white line of daisies and began to count earnestly.

“And now,” the Mouldiwarp said, when the hundred was counted, “it’s just the same time as it was when you began! So now you understand.”

They said they did, and I am sure I hope you do.

“But if we sit here,” said Elfrida, “how can we ever be anywhere else?”

“You can’t,” said the Mouldiwarp. “So one of you will have to stay and the other to go.”

“You go, Elfie,” said Edred. “I’ll stay till you come back.”

“That’s very dear of you,” said Elfrida, “but I’d rather we went together. Can’t you manage it?” she asked the mole.

“I could, of course,” it said; “but . . . he’s afraid to go without you,” it said suddenly.

“He isn’t, and he’s two years younger than me, anyway,” Elfrida said hotly.

“Well, go without him,” said the mole. “You understand perfectly, don’t you, that when he has stopped the clock your going is the same as your not going, and your being here is the same as not being, and—— What I mean,” it added, hastily returning to Sussex talk, “you needn’t be so turble put out. He won’t know you’ve gone nor yet ’e won’t believe you’ve come back. Be off with ’e, my gell.”

Elfrida hesitated. Then, “Oh, Edred,” she said, “I have had such a time! Did it seem very long? I know it was horrid of me, but it was so interesting I couldn’t come back before.”

“Nonsense,” said Edred. “Well, go if you like; I don’t mind.”

“I’ve been, I tell you,” said Elfrida, dragging him off the second hand of the daisy clock, whose soldiers instantly resumed their wheeling march.

“So now you see,” said the mole. “Tell you what—next time you wanter stop de clock we’ll just wheel de barrer on to it. Now you go along and play. You’ve had enough Arden magic for this ’ere Fursday, so you ’ave, bless yer hearts an’ all.”

And they went.

That was how Edred perceived the adventure of “The Highwayman and the ——.” But I will not anticipate. The way the adventure seemed to Elfrida was rather different.

After the mole said “my gell” she hesitated, and then went slowly towards the castle where the red roof of the house showed between the old, ivy-grown grey buttresses. She looked back, to see Edred and the Mouldiwarp close together on the face of the wonderful green and white clock. They were very still. She made her mind up—ran indoors and up the stairs and straight to The Door—she found it at once—shut the door, and opened the second chest to the right.

said the pigeons or the silence or Elfrida.

“I wonder,” she said, slipping on a quilted green satin petticoat with pink rosebuds embroidered on it, “whether Shakespeare began being a poet like that—just little odd lines coming into his head without him meaning them to.” And her mind as she put on a pink-and-white brocaded dress, was busy with such words as “Our great poet, Miss Elfrida Arden,” or “Miss Arden, the female Milton of nowadays.”

She tied a white, soft little cap with pink ribbons under her chin and ran to open the door. She was not a bit afraid. It was like going into a dream. Nothing would be real there. Yet as she ran through the attic door and the lace of her sleeve caught on a big rusty nail and tore with a harsh hissing noise, she felt very sorry. In a thing that was only a dream that lace felt very real, and was very beautiful.

But she had only half the first half of a thought to give to the lace—for the door opened, not on the quiet corridor with the old prints at Arden Castle, but on a quite strange panelled room, full of a most extraordinary disorder of stuffs—feathers, dresses, cloaks, bonnet-boxes, parcels, rolls, packets, lace, scarves, hats, gloves, and finery of all sorts. There were a good many people there: serving-maids—she knew they were serving-maids—a gentleman in knee-breeches showing some fine china on a lacquered tray, and in the middle a very pretty, languishing-looking young lady with whom Elfrida at once fell deeply in love. All the women wore enormous crinolines—or hoops.

“What! Hid in the closet all the while, cousin?” said the young lady. “Oh, but it’s the slyest chit! Come, see how the new scarf becomes thy Bet. Is it not vastly modish?”

“Yes,” said Elfrida, not knowing in the least what to say.

Everything gave a sort of tremble and twist, like the glass, bits in a kaleidoscope give just before they settle into a pattern. Then, as with the bits of glass, everything was settled, and Elfrida, instead of feeling that she was looking at a picture, felt that she was alive, with live people.

Some extraordinary accident had fixed in Elfrida’s mind the fact that Queen Anne began to reign in 1702. I don’t know how it was. These accidents do sometimes occur. And she knew that in Queen Anne’s day ladies wore hoops. Also, since they had gone back a hundred years to Boney’s time, perhaps this second venture had taken her back two hundred years. If so——

“Please,” she said, very quickly, “is this 1707, and is Queen Anne dead?”

“Heaven forbid,” said every one in the room; and Bet added, “La, child, don’t delay us with your prattle. The coach will be here at ten, and we must lie at Tonbridge to-night.”

So Elfrida, all eyes and ears, squeezed into a corner between a band-box and a roll of thick, pink-flowered silk and looked and listened.

Bet, she gathered, was her cousin—an Arden, too. She and Bet and the maids, and an escort of she couldn’t quite make out how many men, were to go down to Arden together. The many men were because of the Arden jewels, that had been reset in the newest mode, and the collar of pearls and other presents Uncle Arden had given to Bet; and the highwaymen, who, she learned, were growing so bold that they would attack a coach in St. Paul’s Churchyard in broad daylight. Bet, it seemed, had undertaken commissions for all her girl friends near Arden, and had put off most of them till the last moment. She had carefully spent her own pin-money during her stay in town, and was now hastily spending theirs. The room was crowded with tradesmen and women actually pushing each other to get near the lady who had money to spend. One woman with a basket of china was offering it in exchange for old clothes or shoes, just as old women do now at back doors. And Cousin Bet’s maid had a very good bargain, she considered, in a china teapot and two dishes, in exchange for a worn, blue lutestring dress and a hooped petticoat of violet quilted satin. Then there was a hasty meal of cakes and hot chocolate, and, Elfrida being wrapped up in long-skirted coat and scarves almost beyond bearing, it was announced that the coach was at the door. It was a very tight fit when at last they were all packed into the carriage, for though the carriage was large there was a great deal to fill it up, what with Cousin Bet and her great hoops, and the maids, and the band-boxes and packages of different sizes and shapes, and the horrid little pet dog that yapped and yahed, and tried to bite every one, from the footmen to Elfrida. The streets were narrow and very dirty, and smelt very nasty in the hot June sun.

And it was very hot and stuffy inside the carriage, and more bumpety than you would think possible—more bumpety even than a wagon going across a furrowed corn-field. Elfrida felt rather headachy, as you do when you go out in a small boat and every one says it is not at all rough. By the time the carriage got to Lewisham Elfrida’s bones were quite sore, and she felt as though she had been beaten. There were no springs to the carriage, and it reminded her of a bathing-machine more than anything else—you know the way it bumps on the shingly part of the shore when they are drawing you up at the beach, and you tumble about and can’t go on dressing, and all your things slide off the seats. The maids were cross and looked it. Cousin Bet had danced till nigh midnight, and been up with the lark, so she said. And, having said it, went to sleep in a corner of the carriage looking crosser than the maids. Elfrida began to feel that empty, uninterested sensation which makes you wish you hadn’t come. The carriage plunged and rattled on through the green country, the wheels bounding in and out of the most dreadful ruts. More than once the wheel got into a rut so deep that it took all the men to heave it out again. Cousin Bet woke up to say that it was vastly annoying, and instantly went to sleep again.

Elfrida, being the smallest person in the carriage except Amour, the dog, was constantly being thrown into somebody’s lap—to the annoyance of both parties. It was very much the most uncomfortable ride she had ever had. She thought of the smooth, swift rush of the train—even the carrier’s cart was luxury compared to this. “The roads aren’t like roads at all,” she told herself, “they’re like ploughed fields with celery trenches in them”—she had a friend a market gardener, so she knew.

Long before the carriage drew up in front of the “Bull” at Tonbridge, Elfrida felt that if she only had a piece of poetry ready she would say it, and ask the Mouldiwarp to take her back to her own times, where, at any rate, carriages had springs and roads were roads. And when the carriage did stop she was so stiff she could hardly stand.

“Come along in,” said a stout, pleasant-faced lady in a frilled cap; “come in, my poppet. There’s a fine supper, though it’s me says it, and a bed that you won’t beat in Kent for soft and clean, you may lay to that.”

There was a great bustle of shouting ostlers and stablemen; the horses were taken out before the travellers were free of the carriage. Supper was laid in a big, low, upper room, with shining furniture and windows at both ends, one set looking on the road where the sign of the “Bull” creaked and swung, and the other looking on a very neat green garden, with clipped box hedges and yew arbours. Getting all the luggage into the house seemed likely to be a long business. Elfrida saw that she would not be missed, and she slipped down the twisty-cornery back-stairs and through the back kitchen into the green garden. It was pleasant to stretch one’s legs, and not to be cramped and buffeted and shaken. But she walked down the grass-path rather demurely, for she was very stiff indeed.

And it was there, in a yew arbour, that she came suddenly on the grandest and handsomest gentleman that she had ever seen. He wore a white wig, very full at the sides and covered with powder, and a full-skirted coat of dark-blue silk, and under it a long waistcoat with the loveliest roses and forget-me-nots tied in bunches with gold ribbons, embroidered on silk. He had lace ruffles and a jewelled brooch, and the jolliest blue eyes in the world. He looked at Elfrida very kindly with his jolly eyes.

“A lady of quality, I’ll be bound,” he said, “and travelling with her suite.”

“I’m Miss Arden of Arden,” said Elfrida.

“Your servant, madam,” said he, springing to his feet and waving his hat in a very flourishing sort of bow.

Elfrida’s little curtsey was not at all the right kind of curtsey, but it had to do.

“And what can I do to please Miss Arden of Arden?” he asked. “Would she like a ride on my black mare?”

“Oh, no, thank you,” said Elfrida, so earnestly that he laughed as he said—

“Sure I should not have thought fear lived with those eyes.”

“I’m not afraid,” said Elfrida contemptuously; “only I’ve been riding in a horrible carriage all day, and I feel as though I never wanted to ride on anything any more.”

He laughed again.

“Well, well,” he said, “come and sit by me and tell me all the town news.”

Elfrida smiled to think what news she could tell him, and then frowned in the effort to think of any news that wouldn’t seem nonsense.

She told him all that she knew of Cousin Bet and the journey. He was quite politely interested. She told of Cousin Bet’s purchases—the collar of pearls and the gold pomander studded with corals, the little gold watch, and the family jewels that had been reset.

“And you have all to-night to rest in from that cruel coach?” he said.

“Yes,” said Elfrida, “we don’t go on again till after breakfast to-morrow. It’s very dull—and oh, so slow! Don’t you think you’d like to have a carriage drawn by a fiery iron horse that went sixty miles an hour?”

“You have an ingenious wit,” said the beautiful gentleman, “such as I should admire in my wife. Will you marry me when you shall be grown a great girl?”

“No,” said Elfrida; “you’d be too old—even if you were to be able to stop alive till I was grown up, you’d be much too old.”

“How old do you suppose I shall be when you’re seventeen?”

“I should have to do sums,” said Elfrida, who was rather good at these exercises. She broke a twig from a currant bush and scratched in the dust.

“I don’t know,” she said, raising a flushed face, and trampling out her “sum” with little shoes that had red heels, “but I think you’ll be two hundred and thirty.”

On that he laughed more than ever and vowed she was the lady for him. “Your ciphering would double my income ten times over,” he said.

He was very kind indeed—would have her taste his wine, which she didn’t like, and the little cakes on the red and blue plate, which she did.

“And what’s your name?” she asked.

“My name,” said he, “is a secret. Can you keep a secret?”

“Yes,” said Elfrida.

“So can I,” said he.

And then a flouncing, angry maid came suddenly sweeping down between the box hedges and dragged Elfrida away before she could curtsey properly and say, “Thank you for being so kind.”

“Farewell,” said the beautiful gentleman, “doubt not but we shall meet again. And next time ’tis I shall carry thee off and shut thee in a tower for two hundred years till thou art seventeen and hast learned to cipher.”

Elfrida was slapped by the maid, which nearly choked her with fury, and set down to supper in the big upstairs room. The maid indignantly told where she had found Elfrida “talking with a strange gentleman,” and when Cousin Betty had heard all about it Elfrida told her tale.

“And he was a great dear,” she said.

“A——?”

“A very beautiful gentleman. I wish you’d been there, Cousin Betty. You’d have liked him too.”

Then Cousin Bet also slapped her. And Elfrida wished more than ever that she had some poetry ready for the Mouldiwarp.

The next day’s journey was as bumpety as the first, and Elfrida got very tired of the whole business. “Oh, I wish something would happen!” she said.

It was a very much longer day too, and the dusk had fallen while still they were on the road. The sun had set red behind black trees, and brown twilight was thickening all about, when at a cross-roads, a man in a cloak and mask on a big black horse suddenly leaped from a hedge, stooped from his saddle, opened the carriage door, caught Elfrida with one hand by the gathers of her full travelling coat (he must have been frightfully strong, and so must the gathers), set her very neatly and quite comfortably on the saddle before him, and said—

“Hand up your valuables, please—or I shoot the horses. And keep your barkers low, for if you aim at me you shoot the child. And if you shoot my horse, the child and I fall together.”

But even as he spoke through his black mask, he wheeled the horse so that his body was a shield between her and the pistols of the serving-men.

“What do you want?” Cousin Bet’s voice was quite squeaky. “We have no valuables; we are plain country people, travelling home to our farm.”

“I want the collar of pearls,” said he, “and the pomander, and the little gold watch, and the jewels that have been reset.”

Then Elfrida knew who he was.

“Oh,” she cried, “you are mean!”

“Trade’s trade,” said he, but he held her quite gently and kindly. “Now, my fair madam——”

The men were hesitating, fingering their pistols. The horses, frightened by the sudden check, were dancing and prancing all across the road: the maidservants were shouting that it was true; he had the child, and better lose a few jewels than all their lives, and Cousin Bet was sobbing and wailing inside the dark coach.

Well, the jewels were handed out—that was how it ended—handed out slowly and grudgingly, and the hand that reached for them through the dusk was very white, Cousin Bet said afterwards.

Elfrida, held by the highwayman’s arm, kept very still. Suddenly he stooped and whispered in her ear.

“Are you afraid that I shall do you any harm?”

“No,” whispered Elfrida. And to this day she does not know why she was not afraid.

“Then——” said he. “Oh, the brave little lady——”

And on that suddenly set spurs to his horse, leapt the low hedge, and reined up sharply.

“Go on home, my brave fellows,” he shouted, “and keep your mouths shut on this night’s work. I shall be at Arden before you——”

“The child!” shrieked the maids; “oh, the child!” and even Cousin Bet interrupted her hysterics, now quite strong and overwhelming, to say, “The child——”