The Railway Children (With All Original Illustrations). Edith Nesbit
Читать онлайн книгу.
afternoon a cab came to take them to the station.
Aunt Emma saw them off. They felt that THEY were seeing HER off, and they were glad of it.
“But, oh, those poor little foreign children that she’s going to governess!” whispered Phyllis. “I wouldn’t be them for anything!”
At first they enjoyed looking out of the window, but when it grew dusk they grew sleepier and sleepier, and no one knew how long they had been in the train when they were roused by Mother’s shaking them gently and saying:—
“Wake up, dears. We’re there.”
They woke up, cold and melancholy, and stood shivering on the draughty platform while the baggage was taken out of the train. Then the engine, puffing and blowing, set to work again, and dragged the train away. The children watched the tail-lights of the guard’s van disappear into the darkness.
This was the first train the children saw on that railway which was in time to become so very dear to them. They did not guess then how they would grow to love the railway, and how soon it would become the centre of their new life, nor what wonders and changes it would bring to them. They only shivered and sneezed and hoped the walk to the new house would not be long. Peter’s nose was colder than he ever remembered it to have been before. Roberta’s hat was crooked, and the elastic seemed tighter than usual. Phyllis’s shoe-laces had come undone.
“Come,” said Mother, “we’ve got to walk. There aren’t any cabs here.”
The walk was dark and muddy. The children stumbled a little on the rough road, and once Phyllis absently fell into a puddle, and was picked up damp and unhappy. There were no gas-lamps on the road, and the road was uphill. The cart went at a foot’s pace, and they followed the gritty crunch of its wheels. As their eyes got used to the darkness, they could see the mound of boxes swaying dimly in front of them.
A long gate had to be opened for the cart to pass through, and after that the road seemed to go across fields — and now it went down hill. Presently a great dark lumpish thing showed over to the right.
“There’s the house,” said Mother. “I wonder why she’s shut the shutters.”
“Who’s SHE?” asked Roberta.
“The woman I engaged to clean the place, and put the furniture straight and get supper.”
There was a low wall, and trees inside.
“That’s the garden,” said Mother.
“It looks more like a dripping-pan full of black cabbages,” said Peter.
The cart went on along by the garden wall, and round to the back of the house, and here it clattered into a cobble-stoned yard and stopped at the back door.
There was no light in any of the windows.
Everyone hammered at the door, but no one came.
The man who drove the cart said he expected Mrs. Viney had gone home.
“You see your train was that late,” said he.
“But she’s got the key,” said Mother. “What are we to do?”
“Oh, she’ll have left that under the doorstep,” said the cart man; “folks do hereabouts.” He took the lantern off his cart and stooped.
“Ay, here it is, right enough,” he said.
He unlocked the door and went in and set his lantern on the table.
“Got e’er a candle?” said he.
“I don’t know where anything is.” Mother spoke rather less cheerfully than usual.
He struck a match. There was a candle on the table, and he lighted it. By its thin little glimmer the children saw a large bare kitchen with a stone floor. There were no curtains, no hearth-rug. The kitchen table from home stood in the middle of the room. The chairs were in one corner, and the pots, pans, brooms, and crockery in another. There was no fire, and the black grate showed cold, dead ashes.
As the cart man turned to go out after he had brought in the boxes, there was a rustling, scampering sound that seemed to come from inside the walls of the house.
“Oh, what’s that?” cried the girls.
“It’s only the rats,” said the cart man. And he went away and shut the door, and the sudden draught of it blew out the candle.
“Oh, dear,” said Phyllis, “I wish we hadn’t come!” and she knocked a chair over.
“ONLY the rats!” said Peter, in the dark.
Chapter II.
Peter’s Coal-Mine
“What fun!” said Mother, in the dark, feeling for the matches on the table. “How frightened the poor mice were — I don’t believe they were rats at all.”
She struck a match and relighted the candle and everyone looked at each other by its winky, blinky light.
“Well,” she said, “you’ve often wanted something to happen and now it has. This is quite an adventure, isn’t it? I told Mrs. Viney to get us some bread and butter, and meat and things, and to have supper ready. I suppose she’s laid it in the dining-room. So let’s go and see.”
The dining-room opened out of the kitchen. It looked much darker than the kitchen when they went in with the one candle. Because the kitchen was whitewashed, but the dining-room was dark wood from floor to ceiling, and across the ceiling there were heavy black beams. There was a muddled maze of dusty furniture — the breakfast-room furniture from the old home where they had lived all their lives. It seemed a very long time ago, and a very long way off.
There was the table certainly, and there were chairs, but there was no supper.
“Let’s look in the other rooms,” said Mother; and they looked. And in each room was the same kind of blundering half-arrangement of furniture, and fire-irons and crockery, and all sorts of odd things on the floor, but there was nothing to eat; even in the pantry there were only a rusty cake-tin and a broken plate with whitening mixed in it.
“What a horrid old woman!” said Mother; “she’s just walked off with the money and not got us anything to eat at all.”
“Then shan’t we have any supper at all?” asked Phyllis, dismayed, stepping back on to a soap-dish that cracked responsively.
“Oh, yes,” said Mother, “only it’ll mean unpacking one of those big cases that we put in the cellar. Phil, do mind where you’re walking to, there’s a dear. Peter, hold the light.”
The cellar door opened out of the kitchen. There were five wooden steps leading down. It wasn’t a proper cellar at all, the children thought, because its ceiling went up as high as the kitchen’s. A bacon-rack hung under its ceiling. There was wood in it, and coal. Also the big cases.
Peter held the candle, all on one side, while Mother tried to open the great packing-case. It was very securely nailed down.
“Where’s the hammer?” asked Peter.
“That’s just it,” said Mother. “I’m afraid it’s inside the box. But there’s a coal-shovel — and there’s the kitchen poker.”
And with these she tried to get the case open.
“Let me do it,” said Peter, thinking he could do it better himself. Everyone thinks this when he sees another person stirring a fire, or opening a box, or untying a knot in a bit of string.
“You’ll hurt your hands, Mammy,” said Roberta; “let me.”
“I wish Father was here,” said Phyllis; “he’d get it open in two