The Enchanted Castle by E. Nesbit (smart ebook reader .txt) 📕

“Hush!” said Gerald savagely: he was still wearing the ring. “Hold your tongues! I’ll get him away,” he added in a whisper.

“Very sad affair this,” said the respectable Ugly-Wugly. He spoke with a curious accent; there was something odd about his r’s, and his m’s and n’s were those of a person labouring under an almost intolerable cold in the head. But it was not the dreadful “oo” and “ah” voice of the night before. Kathleen and Jimmy stooped over the bailiff. Even that prostrate form, being human, seemed some little protection. But Gerald, strong in the fearlessness that the ring gave to its wearer, looked full into the face of the Ugly-Wugly and started. For though the face was almost the same as the face he had himself painted on the school drawing-paper, it was not the same. For it was no longer paper. It was a real face, and the hands, lean and almost transparent as they were, were real hands. As it moved a little to get a better view of the bailiff it was plain that it had legs, arms live legs and arms, and a self-supporting backbone. It was alive indeed with a vengeance.

“How did it happen?” Gerald asked, with an effort of calmness a successful effort.

“Most regrettable,” said the Ugly-Wugly. “The others must have missed the way last night in the passage. They never found the hotel.”

“Did you?” asked Gerald blankly.

“Of course,” said the Ugly-Wugly. “Most respectable, exactly as you said. Then when I came away I didn’t come the front way because I wanted to revisit this sylvan scene by daylight, and the hotel people didn’t seem to know how to direct me to it I found the others all at this door, very angry. They’d been here all night, trying to get out. Then the door opened this gentleman must have opened it and before I could protect him, that underbred man in the high hat you remember ,”

Gerald remembered.

“Hit him on the head, and he fell where you see him. The others dispersed, and I myself was just going for assistance when I saw you.”

Here Jimmy was discovered to be in tears and Kathleen white as any drawing-paper.

“What’s the matter, my little man?” said the respectable Ugly-Wugly kindly. Jimmy passed instantly from tears to yells.

“Here, take the ring!” said Gerald in a furious whisper, and thrust it on to Jimmy’s hot, damp, resisting finger. Jimmy’s voice stopped short in the middle of a howl. And Gerald in a cold flash realized what it was that Mabel had gone through the night before. But it was daylight, and Gerald was not a coward.

“We must find the others,” he said.

“I imagine,” said the elderly Ugly-Wugly, “that they have gone to bathe. Their clothes are in the wood.”

He pointed stiffly.

“You two go and see,” said Gerald. “I’ll go on dabbing this chap’s head.”

In the wood Jimmy, now fearless as any lion, discovered four heaps of clothing, with broomsticks, hockeysticks, and masks complete all that had gone to make up the gentlemen Ugly-Wuglies of the night before. On a stone seat well in the sun sat the two lady Ugly-Wuglies, and Kathleen approached them gingerly. Valour is easier in the sunshine than at night, as we all know. When she and Jimmy came close to the bench, they saw that the Ugly-Wuglies were only Ugly-Wuglies such as they had often made. There was no life in them. Jimmy shook them to pieces, and a sigh of relief burst from Kathleen.

“The spell’s broken, you see,” she said; “and that old gentleman, he’s real. He only happens to be like the Ugly-Wugly we made.”

“He’s got the coat that hung in the hall on, anyway,” said Jimmy.

“No, it’s only like it. Let’s get back to the unconscious stranger.”

They did, and Gerald begged the elderly Ugly-Wugly to retire among the bushes with Jimmy; “because, said he, “I think the poor bailiff’s coming round, and it might upset him to see strangers and Jimmy’ll keep you company. He’s the best one of us to go with you,” he added hastily.

And this, since Jimmy had the ring, was certainly true.

So the two disappeared behind the rhododendrons. Mabel came back with the salts just as the bailiff opened his eyes.

“It’s just like life,” she said; “I might just as well not have gone. However ,” She knelt down at once and held the bottle under the sufferer’s nose till he sneezed and feebly pushed her hand away with the faint question: “What’s up now?”

“You’ve hurt your head,” said Gerald. “Lie still.”

“No more smelling-bottle,” he said weakly, and lay.

Quite soon he sat up and looked round him. There was an anxious silence. Here was a grownup who knew last night’s secret, and none of the children were at all sure what the utmost rigour of the law might be in a case where people, no matter how young, made Ugly-Wuglies, and brought them to life dangerous, fighting, angry life. What would he say what would he do?” He said: “What an odd thing! Have I been insensible long?”

“Hours,” said Mabel earnestly.

“Not long,” said Kathleen.

“We don’t know. We found you like it,” said Gerald.

“I’m all right now,” said the bailiff, and his eye fell on the blood-stained handkerchief. “I say, I did give my head a bang. And you’ve been giving me first aid. Thank you most awfully. But it is rum.”

“What’s rum?” politeness obliged Gerald to ask.

“Well, I suppose it isn’t really rum I expect I saw you just before I fainted, or whatever it was but I’ve dreamed the most extraordinary dream while I’ve been insensible and you were in it.”

“Nothing but us?” asked Mabel breathlessly.

“Oh, lots of things impossible things but you were real enough.”

Everyone breathed deeply in relief. It was indeed, as they agreed later, a lucky let-off.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” they all asked, as he got on his feet.

“Perfectly, thank you.” He glanced behind Flora’s statue as he spoke. “Do you know, I dreamed there was a door there, but of course there isn’t. I don’t know how to thank you,” he added, looking at them with what the girls called his beautiful, kind eyes; “it’s lucky for me you came along. You come here whenever you like, you know,” he added. “I give you the freedom of the place.”

“You’re the new bailiff, aren’t you?” said Mabel.

“Yes. How did you know?” he asked quickly; but they did not tell him how they knew. Instead, they found out which way he was going, and went the other way after warm handshakes and hopes on both sides that they would meet again soon.

“I’ll tell you what,” said Gerald, as they watched the tall, broad figure of the bailiff grow smaller across the hot green of the grass slope, “have you got any idea of how we’re going to spend the day? Because I have.”

The others hadn’t.

“We’ll get rid of that Ugly-Wugly oh, we’ll find a way right enough and directly we’ve done it we’ll go home and seal up the ring in an envelope so that its teeth’ll be drawn and it’ll be powerless to have unforeseen larks with us. Then we’ll get out on the roof, and have a quiet day books and apples. I’m about fed up with adventures, so I tell you.”

The others told him the same thing.

“Now, think,” said he “think as you never thought before how to get rid of that Ugly-Wugly.”

Everyone thought, but their brains were tired with anxiety and distress, and the thoughts they thought were, as Mabel said, not worth thinking, let alone saying.

“I suppose Jimmy’s all right,” said Kathleen anxiously.

“Oh, he’s all right: he’s got the ring,” said Gerald.

“I hope he won’t go wishing anything rotten,” said Mabel, but Gerald urged her to shut up and let him think.

“I think I think best sitting down,” he said, and sat; “and sometimes you can think best aloud. The Ugly-Wugly’s real don’t make any mistake about that. And he got made real inside that passage. If we could get him back there he might get changed again, and then we could take the coats and things back.”

“Isn’t there any other way?” Kathleen asked; and Mabel, more candid, said bluntly: “I’m not going into that passage, so there!”

“Afraid! In broad daylight,” Gerald sneered.

“It wouldn’t be broad daylight in there,” said Mabel, and Kathleen shivered.

“If we went to him and suddenly tore his coat off,” said she “he is only coats he couldn’t go on being real then.

“Couldn’t he!” said Gerald. “You don’t know what he’s like under the coat.”

Kathleen shivered again. And all this time the sun was shining gaily and the white statues and the green trees and the fountains and terraces looked as cheerfully romantic as a scene in a play.

“Anyway,” said Gerald, “we’ll try to get him back, and shut the door. That’s the most we can hope for. And then apples, and Robinson Crusoe or the Swiss Family, or any book you like that’s got no magic in it. Now, we’ve just got to do it. And he’s not horrid now; really he isn’t. He’s real, you see.”

“I suppose that makes all the difference,” said Mabel, and tried to feel that perhaps it did.

“And it’s broad daylight just look at the sun,” Gerald insisted. “Come on!”

He took a hand of each, and they walked resolutely towards the bank of rhododendrons behind which Jimmy and the Ugly-Wugly had been told to wait, and as they went Gerald said: “He’s real” “The sun’s shining” “It’ll all be over in a minute.” And he said these things again and again, so that there should be no mistake about them.

As they neared the bushes the shining leaves rustled, shivered, and parted, and before the girls had time to begin to hang back Jimmy came blinking out into the sunlight. The boughs closed behind him, and they did not stir or rustle for the appearance of anyone else. Jimmy was alone.

“Where is it?” asked the girls in one breath.

“Walking up and down in a fir-walk,” said Jimmy, “doing sums in a book. He says he’s most frightfully rich, and he’s got to get up to town to the Stocks or something where they change papers into gold if you’re clever, he says. I should like to go to the Stocks-change, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t seem to care very much about changes, said Gerald. “I’ve had enough. Show us where he is we must get rid of him.”

“He’s got a motor-car,” Jimmy went on, parting the warm varnished-looking rhododendron leaves, “and a garden with a tennis-court and a lake and a carriage and pair, and he goes to Athens for his holiday sometimes, just like other people go to Margate.”

“The best thing,” said Gerald, following through the bushes, “will be to tell him the shortest way out is through that hotel that he thinks he found last night. Then we get him into the passage, give him a push, fly back, and shut the door.”

“He’ll starve to death in there,” said Kathleen, “if he’s really real.”

“I expect it doesn’t last long, the ring magics don’t anyway, it’s the only thing I can think of.”

“He’s frightfully rich,” Jimmy went on unheeding amid the cracking of the bushes; “he’s building a public library for the people where he lives, and having his portrait painted to put in it. He thinks they’ll like that.”

The belt of rhododendrons was passed, and the children had reached a smooth grass walk bordered by tall pines and firs of strange different kinds. “He’s just round that corner,” said Jimmy.