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“Directly we get home,” he said, “we’ll begin larking about with that old wheelbarrow – giving each other rides, and so on, and when it’s time to go in we’ll leave it at the far end of the field behind the old sheep hut near the gate. Then it’ll be handy for you at dead of night. You must take towels or something and tie around the wheel so that it doesn’t make a row. You can sleep with my toy alarm under your pillow and it won’t wake anyone but you. You get out through the dining room window and in the same way. I’ll lend you my new knife, with three blades and a corkscrew, if you’ll take care of it, to cut the canvas, and go by the back lane that comes out behind where the circus is, but if you took my advice you wouldn’t go at all. She’s not a nice Mermaid at all. I’d rather have had a seal, any day. Hullo, there’s Daddy and Mother. Come on.”
They came on.
The program sketched by Bernard was carried out without a hitch. Everything went well, only Francis and Mavis were both astonished to find themselves much more frightened than they had expected to be. Any really great adventure like the rescuing of a Mermaid does always look so very much more serious when you carry it out, at night, than it did when you were planning it in the daytime. Also, though they knew they were not doing anything wrong, they had an uncomfortable feeling that Mother and Daddy might not agree with them on that point. And of course they could not ask leave to go and rescue a Mermaid, with a chariot, at dead of night. It is not the sort of thing you can ask leave to do, somehow. And the more you explained your reasons the less grown-up people would think you fit to conduct such an expedition.
Francis lay down fully dressed, under his nightshirt. And Mavis under hers wore her short blue skirt and jersey. The alarm, true to its trust, went off into an ear-splitting whizz and bang under the pillow of Francis, but no one else heard it. He crept cautiously into Mavis’s room and wakened her, and as they crept down in stockinged feet not a board creaked. The French window opened without noise, the wheelbarrow was where they had left it, and they had fortunately brought quite enough string to bind wads of towels and stockings to the tire of its wheel. Also they had not forgotten the knife.
The wheelbarrow was heavy and they rather shrank from imagining how much heavier it would be when the discontented Mermaid was curled up in it. However, they took it in turns, and got along all right by the back lane that comes out above the waste ground where Beachfield holds its fairs.
“I hope the night’s dead enough,” Mavis whispered as the circus came in sight, looking very white in the starlight, “it’s nearly two by now I should think.”
“Quite dead enough, if that’s all,” said Francis; “but suppose the gypsies are awake? They do sit up to study astronomy to tell fortunes with, don’t they? Suppose this is their astronomy night? I vote we leave the barrow here and go and reconnoiter.”
They did. Their sandshoes made no noise on the dewy grass, and treading very carefully, on tiptoe, they came to the tent. Francis nearly tumbled over a guy rope; he just saw it in time to avoid it.
“If I’d been Bernard I should have come a beastly noisy cropper over that,” he told himself. They crept around the tent till they came to the little square bulge that marked the place where the tank was and the seaweed and the Mermaid.
“They die in captivity, they die in captivity, they die in captivity,” Mavis kept repeating to herself, trying to keep up her courage by reminding herself of the desperately urgent nature of the adventure. “It’s a matter of life and death,” she told herself – “life and death.”
And now they picked their way between the pegs and guy ropes and came quite close to the canvas. Doubts of the strength and silence of the knife possessed the trembling soul of Francis. Mavis’s heart was beating so thickly that, as she said afterward, she could hardly hear herself think. She scratched gently on the canvas, while Francis felt for the knife with the three blades and the corkscrew. An answering signal from the imprisoned Mermaid would, she felt, give her fresh confidence. There was no answering scratch. Instead, a dark line appeared to run up the canvas – it was an opening made by the two hands of the Mermaid which held back the two halves of the tent side, cut neatly from top to bottom. Her white face peered out.
“Where is the chariot?” she asked in the softest of whispers, but not too soft to carry to the children the feeling that she was, if possible, crosser than ever.
Francis was afraid to answer. He knew that his voice could never be subdued to anything as soft as the voice that questioned him, a voice like the sound of tiny waves on a summer night, like the whisper of wheat when the wind passes through it on a summer morning. But he pointed toward the lane where they had left the wheelbarrow and he and Mavis crept away to fetch it.
As they wheeled it down the waste place both felt how much they owed to Bernard. But for his idea of muffling the wheel they could never have got the clumsy great thing down that bumpy uneven slope. But as it was they and the barrow stole toward the gypsy’s tent as silently as the Arabs in the poem stole away with theirs, and they wheeled it close to the riven tent side. Then Mavis scratched again, and again the tent opened.
“Have you any cords?” the soft voice whispered, and Francis pulled what was left of the string from his pocket.
She had made two holes in the tent side, and now passing the string through these she tied back the flaps of the tent.
“Now,” she said, raising herself in the tank and resting her hands on its side. “You must both help – take hold of my tail and lift. Creep in – one on each side.”
It was a wet, sloppy, slippery, heavy business, and Mavis thought her arms would break, but she kept saying: “Die in captivity,” and just as she was feeling that she could not bear it another minute the strain slackened and there was the Mermaid curled up in the barrow.
“Now,” said the soft voice, “go – quickly.”
It was all very well to say go quickly. It was as much as the two children could do, with that barrow-load of dripping Mermaid, to go at all. And very, very slowly they crept up the waste space. In the lane, under cover of the tall hedges, they paused.
“Go on,” said the Mermaid.
“We can’t till we’ve rested a bit,” said Mavis, panting. “How did you manage to get that canvas cut?”
“My shell knife, of course,” said the person in the wheelbarrow. “We always carry one in our hair, in case of sharks.”
“I see,” said Francis, breathing heavily.
“You had much better go on,” said the barrow’s occupant. “This chariot is excessively uncomfortable and much too small. Besides, delays are dangerous.”
“We’ll go in half a sec,” said Francis, and Mavis added kindly:
“You’re really quite safe now, you know.”
“You aren’t,” said the Mermaid. “I don’t know whether you realize that I’m stolen property and that it will be extremely awkward for you if you are caught with me.”
“But we shan’t be caught with you,” said Mavis hopefully.
“Everybody’s sound asleep,” said Francis. It was wonderful how brave and confident they felt now that the deed was done. “It’s perfectly safe – Oh, what’s that! Oh!”
A hand had shot from the black shadow of the hedge and caught him by the arm.
“What is it, France? What is it?” said Mavis, who could not see what was happening.
“What is it – now what is it?” asked the Mermaid more crossly than she had yet spoken.
“Who is it? Oh, who is it?” gasped Francis, writhing in the grip of his invisible assailant. And from the dark shadow of the hedge came the simple and terrible reply:
“The police!”
CHAPTER FOUR
Gratitude
IT is hardly possible to imagine a situation less attractive than that of Mavis and Francis – even the position of the Mermaid curled up in a dry barrow and far from her native element was not exactly luxurious. Still, she was no worse off than she had been when the lariat first curled itself about her fishy extremity. But the children! They had braved the terrors of night in an adventure of singular courage and daring, they had carried out their desperate enterprise, the Mermaid was rescued, and success seemed near – no further off than the sea indeed, and that, in point of fact, was about a quarter of a mile away. To be within a quarter of a mile of achievement, and then to have the cup of victory dashed from your lips, the crown of victory torn from your brow by – the police!
It was indeed hard. And what was more, it was dangerous.
“We shall pass the night in the cells,” thought Mavis, in agony; “and whatever will Mother do when she finds we’re gone?” In her mind “the cells” were underground dungeons, dark and damp and vaulted, where toads and lizards crawled, and no daylight ever penetrated. That is how dungeons are described in books about the Inquisition.
When the voice from the bush had said “The police,” a stricken silence followed. The mouth of Francis felt dry inside, just as if he had been eating cracknels, he explained afterward, and he had to swallow nothing before he could say:
“What for?”
“Let go his arm,” said Mavis to the hidden foe. “We won’t run away. Really we won’t.”
“You can’t,” said the Mermaid. “You can’t leave me.”
“Leave go,” said Francis, wriggling. And then suddenly Mavis made a dart at the clutching hand and caught it by the wrist and whispered savagely:
“It’s not a policeman at all. Come out of that bush – come out,” and dragged. And something did come out of the bush. Something that certainly was not a policeman. It was small and thin, whereas policemen are almost always tall and stout. It did not wear the blue coats our Roberts wear, but velveteen knickerbockers and a tweed jacket. It was, in fact, a very small boy.
Francis broke into a cackle of relief.
“You little – animal,” he said. “What a fright you gave me.”
“Animal yourself, if you come to that, let alone her and her tail,” the boy answered; and Mavis thought his voice didn’t sound unfriendly. “My! But I did take a rise out of you that time, eh? Ain’t she bit you yet, nor yet strook you with that there mackerel-end of hers?”
And then they recognized him. It was the little Spangled Boy. Only now, of course, being off duty he was no more spangled than you and I are.
“Whatever did you do it for?” Mavis asked crossly. “It was horrid of you.”
“It wasn’t only just a lark,” said the boy. “I cut around and listened this afternoon when you was jawing, and I thought why not be in it? Only I do sleep that heavy, what with the riding and the tumbling and all. So I didn’t wake till you’d got her out and then I cut up along ahind the hedge to be beforehand with you. An’ I was. It was a fair cop, matey, eh?”
“What are you going to do about it?” Francis asked flatly; “tell your father?” But Mavis reflected that he didn’t seem to have told his father yet, and perhaps wouldn’t.
“Ain’t got no father,” said the Spangled Boy, “nor yet mother.”
“If you are rested enough you’d better go on,” said the Mermaid. “I’m getting dry through.”
And Mavis understood that to her that was as bad as getting wet through would be to us.
“I’m so sorry,” she said gently, “but – ”
“I must say I think it’s very inconsiderate of you to keep me all this time in the dry,” the Mermaid went on. “I really should have thought that even you– ”
But Francis interrupted her.
“What are you going to do?” he asked the Spangled Boy. And that surprising child answered, spitting on his hands and rubbing them:
“Do? Why, give a ’and with the barrer.”
The Mermaid put out a white arm and touched him.
“You are a hero,” she said. “I can recognize true nobility even under a once-spangled exterior. You may kiss my hand.”
“Well, of all the…” said Francis.
“Shall I?” the boy asked, more of himself than of the others.
“Do,” Mavis whispered. “Anything to keep her in a good temper.”
So the Spangled Boy kissed the still dampish hand of the Lady from the Sea, took the handles of the barrow and off they all went.
Mavis and Francis were too thankful for this unexpected help to ask any questions, though they could not help wondering exactly what it felt like to be a boy who did not mind stealing his own father’s Mermaid. It was the boy himself who offered, at the next rest-halt, an explanation.
“You see,” he said, “it’s like this here. This party in the barrow – ”
“I know you don’t mean it disrespectfully,” said the Mermaid, sweetly; “but not party – and not a barrow.”
“Lady,” suggested Mavis.
“This lydy in the chariot, she’d been kidnapped – that’s how I look at it. Same as what I was.”
This was romance indeed; and Mavis recognized it and said:
“You, kidnapped? I say!”
“Yus,” said Spangles, “when I was a baby kid. Old Mother Romaine told me, just afore she was took all down one side and never spoke no more.”
“But why?” Mavis asked. “I never could understand in the books why gypsies kidnapped babies. They always seem to have so many of their own – far, far more than anyone could possibly want.”
“Yes, indeed,” said the Mermaid, “they prodded at me with sticks – a multitude of them.”
“It wasn’t kids as was wanted,” said the boy, “it was revenge. That’s what Mother Romaine said – my father he was a sort of Beak, so he give George Lee eighteen months for poaching. An’ the day they took him the church bells was ringing like mad, and George, as he was being took, he said: ‘What’s all that row? It ain’t Sunday.’ And then they tells him as how the bells was ringing ’cause him that was the Beak – my father, you know – he’d got a son and hare. And that was me. You wouldn’t think it to look at me,” he added, spitting pensively and taking up the barrow handles, “but I’m a son and hare.”
“And then what happened?” Mavis asked as they trudged on.
“Oh, George – he done his time, and I was a kiddy then, year-and-a-half old, all lace and ribbons and blue shoes made of glove-stuff, and George pinched me, and it makes me breff short, wheeling and talking.”
“Pause and rest, my spangled friend,” said the Mermaid in a voice of honey, “and continue your thrilling narrative.”
“There ain’t no more to it,” said the boy, “except that I got one of the shoes. Old Mother Romaine ’ad kep’ it, and a little shirt like a lady’s handkercher, with R. V. on it in needlework. She didn’t ever tell me what part of the country my dad was Beak in. Said she’d tell me next day. An’ then there wasn’t no next day for her – not fer telling things in, there wasn’t.”
He rubbed his sleeve across his eyes.
“She wasn’t half a bad sort,” he explained.
“Don’t cry,” said Mavis unwisely.
“Cry? Me?” he answered scornfully. “I’ve got a cold in me ’ead. You oughter know the difference between a cold in the head and sniveling. You been to school, I lay? – they might have taught you that.”
“I wonder the gypsies didn’t take the shoe and the shirt away from you?”
“Nobody know’d I’d got ’em; I always kep’ ’em inside my shirt, wrapt up in a bit of paper, and when I put on me tights I used to hide ’em. I’m a-going to take the road one of these days, and find out who it was lost a kid with blue shoes and shirt nine years come April.”
“Then you’re ten and a half,” said Mavis.
And the boy answered admiringly:
“How do you do it in your head so quick, miss? Yes, that’s what I am.”
Here the wheelbarrow resumed its rather bumpety progress, and nothing more could be said till the next stoppage, which was at that spot where the sea-front road swings around and down, and glides into the beach so gently that you can hardly tell where one begins and the other ends. It was much lighter there than up on the waste space. The moon was just breaking through a fluffy white cloud and cast a trembling sort of reflection on the sea. As they came down the slope all hands were needed to steady the barrow, because as soon as she saw the sea the Mermaid began to jump up and down like a small child at a Christmas tree.
“Oh, look!” she cried, “isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it the only home in the world?”
“Not quite,” said the boy.
“Ah!” said the lady in the barrow, “Of course you’re heir to one of the – what is it…?”
“‘Stately homes of England – how beautiful they stand,’” said Mavis.
“Yes,” said the lady. “I knew by instinct that he was of noble birth.”
“‘I bid ye take care of the brat,’ said he,‘For he comes of a noble race,’”Francis hummed. He was feeling a little cross and sore. He and Mavis had had all the anxious trouble of the adventure, and now the Spangled Boy was the only one the Mermaid was nice to. It was certainly hard.
“But your stately home would not do for me at all,” she went on. “My idea of home is all seaweed of coral and pearl – so cosy and delightful and wet. Now – can you push the chariot to the water’s edge, or will you carry me?”
“Not much we won’t,” the Spangled Boy answered firmly. “We’ll push you as far as we can, and then you’ll have to wriggle.”
“I will do whatever you suggest,” she said amiably; “but what is this wriggle of which you speak?”
“Like a worm,” said Francis.
“Or an eel,” said Mavis.
“Nasty low things,” said the Mermaid; and the children never knew whether she meant the worm and the eel, or the girl and the boy.
“Now then. All together,” said the Spangled Child. And the barrow bumped down to the very edge of the rocks. And at the very edge its wheel caught in a chink and the barrow went sideways. Nobody could help it, but the Mermaid was tumbled out of her chariot on to the seaweed.
The seaweed was full and cushiony and soft, and she was not hurt at all – but she was very angry.
“You have been to school,” she said, “as my noble preserver reminds you. You might have learned how not to upset chariots.”
“It’s we who are your preservers,” Francis couldn’t help saying.
“Of course you are,” she said coolly, “plain preservers. Not noble ones. But I forgive you. You can’t help being common and clumsy. I suppose it’s your nature – just as it’s his to be…”
“Good-bye,” said Francis, firmly.
“Not at all,” said the lady. “You must come with me in case there are any places where I can’t exercise the elegant and vermiform accomplishment you spoke about. Now, one on each side, and one behind, and don’t walk on my tail. You can’t think how annoying it is to have your tail walked on.”
“Oh, can’t I,” said Mavis. “I’ll tell you something. My mother has a tail too.”
“I say!” said Francis.
But the Spangled Child understood.
“She don’t wear it every day, though,” he said; and Mavis is almost sure that he winked. Only it is so difficult to be sure about winks in the starlight.
“Your mother must be better born than I supposed,” said the Mermaid. “Are you quite sure about the tail?”
“I’ve trodden on it often,” said Mavis – and then Francis saw.
Wriggling and sliding and pushing herself along by her hands, and helped now and then by the hands of the others, the Mermaid was at last got to the edge of the water.
“How glorious! In a moment I shall be quite wet,” she cried.
In a moment everyone else was quite wet also – for with a movement that was something between a squirm and a jump, she dropped from the edge with a splashing flop.
And disappeared entirely.
CHAPTER FIVE
Consequences
THE three children looked at each other.
“Well!” said Mavis.
“I do think she’s ungrateful,” said Francis.
“What did you expect?” asked the Spangled Child.
They were all wet through. It was very late – they were very tired, and the clouds were putting the moon to bed in a very great hurry. The Mermaid was gone; the whole adventure was ended.
There was nothing to do but to go home, and go to sleep, knowing that when they woke the next morning it would be to a day in the course of which they would have to explain their wet clothes to their parents.
“Even you’ll have to do that,” Mavis reminded the Spangled Boy.
He received her remark in what they afterward remembered to have been a curiously deep silence.
“I don’t know how on earth we are to explain,” said Francis. “I really don’t. Come on – let’s get home. No more adventures for me, thank you. Bernard knew what he was talking about.”
Mavis, very tired indeed, agreed.
They had got over the beach by this time, recovered the wheelbarrow, and trundled it up and along the road. At the corner the Spangled Boy suddenly said:
“Well then, so long, old sports,” and vanished down a side lane.
The other two went on together – with the wheelbarrow, which, I may remind you, was as wet as any of them.
They went along by the hedge and the mill and up to the house.
Suddenly Mavis clutched at her brother’s arm.
“There’s a light,” she said, “in the house.”
There certainly was, and the children experienced that terrible empty sensation only too well known to all of us – the feeling of the utterly-found-out.
They could not be sure which window it was, but it was a downstairs window, partly screened by ivy. A faint hope still buoyed up Francis of getting up to bed unnoticed by whoever it was that had the light; and he and his sister crept around to the window out of which they had crept; but such a very long time ago it seemed. The window was shut.
Francis suggested hiding in the mill and trying to creep in unobserved later on, but Mavis said:
“No. I’m too tired for anything. I’m too tired to live, I think. Let’s go and get it over, and then we can go to bed and sleep, and sleep, and sleep.”
So they went and peeped in at the kitchen window, and there was no one but Mrs. Pearce, and she had a fire lighted and was putting a big pot on it.
The children went to the back door and opened it.
“You’re early, for sure,” said Mrs. Pearce, not turning.
This seemed a bitter sarcasm. It was too much. Mavis answered it with a sob. And at that Mrs. Pearce turned very quickly.
“What to gracious!” she said – “whatever to gracious is the matter? Where’ve you been?” She took Mavis by the shoulder. “Why, you’re all sopping wet. You naughty, naughty little gell, you. Wait till I tell your Ma – been shrimping I lay – or trying to – never asking when the tide was right. And not a shrimp to show for it, I know, with the tide where it is. You wait till we hear what your Ma’s got to say about it. And look at my clean flags and you dripping all over ’em like a fortnight’s wash in wet weather.”
Mavis twisted a little in Mrs. Pearce’s grasp. “Oh, don’t scold us, dear Mrs. Pearce,” she said, putting a wet arm up toward Mrs. Pearce’s neck. “We are so miserable.”
“And so you deserve to be,” said Mrs. Pearce, smartly. “Here, young chap, you go into the washhouse and get them things off, and drop them outside the door, and have a good rub with the jack-towel; and little miss can undress by the fire and put hern in this clean pail – and I’ll pop up softlike and so as your Ma don’t hear, and bring you down something dry.”
A gleam of hope fell across the children’s hearts – a gleam wild and watery as that which the moonlight had cast across the sea, into which the Mermaid had disappeared. Perhaps after all Mrs. Pearce wasn’t going to tell Mother. If she was, why should she pop up softlike? Perhaps she would keep their secret. Perhaps she would dry their clothes. Perhaps, after all, that impossible explanation would never have to be given.
The kitchen was a pleasant place, with bright brasses and shining crockery, and a round three-legged table with a clean cloth and blue-and-white teacups on it.
Mrs. Pearce came down with their nightgowns and the warm dressing gowns that Aunt Enid had put in in spite of their expressed wishes. How glad they were of them now!
“There, that’s a bit more like,” said Mrs. Pearce; “here, don’t look as if I was going to eat you, you little Peter Grievouses. I’ll hot up some milk and here’s a morsel of bread and dripping to keep the cold out. Lucky for you I was up – getting the boys’ breakfast ready. The boats’ll be in directly. The boys will laugh when I tell them – laugh fit to bust their selves they will.”