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till I’m quite sure whether I’m a white cat or Edred Arden.’
‘I know which I am,’ said Elfrida; but she, too, was not sorry to sit down.
‘That’s easy. You aren’t either of them,’ said Edred.
* * *
When, half an hour later, they slowly went down to the castle, still doubtful whether anything magic had ever really happened, or whether all the magic things that had seemed to happen had really been only a sort of double, or twin, dream. They were met at the door by Aunt Edith, pale as the pearl and ivory of the white clock, and with eyes that shone like the dewdrops on the wild flowers that Elfrida had given to the Queen.
‘Oh, kiddies!’ she cried. ‘Oh, dear, darling kiddies!’
And she went down on her knees so that she should be nearer their own height and could embrace them on more equal terms.
‘Something lovely’s happened,’ she said; ‘something so beautiful that you won’t be able to believe it.’
They kissed her heartily, partly out of affection, and partly to conceal their want of surprise.
‘Darlings, it’s the loveliest thing that could possible happen. What do you think?’
‘Daddy’s come home,’ said Elfrida, feeling dreadfully deceitful.
‘Yes,’ said Aunt Edith. ‘How clever of you, my pet! And Uncle Jim. They’ve been kept prisoners in South America, and an English boy with a performing bear helped them to escape.’
No mention of cats. The children felt hurt.
‘And they had the most dreadful time – months and months and months – coming across the interior – no water, and Indians and all sorts of adventures; and daddy had fever, and would insist that the bear was the Mouldiwarp – our crest, you know – come to life, and talking just like you or me, and that there were white cats that had your voices, and called him daddy. But he’s all right now, only very weak. That’s why I’m telling you all this. You must be very quiet and gentle. Oh, my dears, it’s too good to be true, too good to be true!’
* * *
Now, was it the father of Edred and Elfrida who had brain fever and fancied things? Or did they, blameless of fever, and not too guilty of brains, imagine it all? Uncle Jim can tell you exactly how it all happened. There is no magic in his story. Father – I mean Lord Arden – does not talk of what he dreamed when he had brain fever. And Edred and Elfrida do not talk of what happened when they hadn’t. At least they do, but only to me.
It is all very wonderful and mysterious, as all life is apt to be if you go a little below the crust, and are not content just to read newspapers and go by the Tube Railway, and buy your clothes ready-made, and think nothing can be true unless it is uninteresting.
* * *
‘I’ve found the most wonderful photographs of pictures of Arden Castle,’ said Aunt Edith, later on. ‘We can restore the castle perfectly from them. I do wish I knew where the original pictures were.’
‘I’m afraid we can’t restore the castle,’ said Lord Arden laughing; ‘our little fortune’s enough to keep us going quite comfortably – but it won’t rebuild Norman masonry.’
‘I do wish we could have found the buried treasure,’ said Edred.
‘We’ve got treasure enough,’ said Aunt Edith, looking at Uncle Jim.
As for what Elfrida thinks – well, I wish you could have seen her face when she went into the parlour that evening after Aunt Edith had knelt down to meet them on equal terms, and tell them of the treasure of love and joy that had come home to Arden.
There was Lord Arden, looking exactly like the Lord Arden she had known in the Gunpowder Plot days, and also exactly like the daddy she had known all her life, sitting at ease in the big chair just underneath the secret panel behind which Sir Edward Talbot had hidden when he was pretending to be the Chevalier St. George. His dear face was just the same, and the smile on it was her own smile – the merry, tender, twinkling smile that was for her and for no one else in the world. It was just a moment that she stood at the door. But it was one of these moments that are as short as a watch-tick, and as long as a year. She stood there and asked herself, ‘Have I dreamed it all? Isn’t there really any Mouldiwarp or any treasure?’
And then a great wave of love and longing caught at her, and she knew that, Mouldiwarp or no Mouldiwarp, the treasure was hers, and in one flash she was across the room and in her father’s arms, sobbing and laughing and saying again and again:
‘Oh, my daddy! Oh, my daddy, my daddy!’
THE STORY OF THE AMULET
VII. ‘The Deepest Dungeon Below the Castle Moat’
X. The Little Black Girl and Julius Caesar
XII. The Sorry-Present and the Expelled Little Boy
XIII. The Shipwreck on the Tin Islands
Chapter I.
The Psammead
There were once four children who spent their summer holidays in a white house, happily situated between a sandpit and a chalkpit. One day they had the good fortune to find in the sandpit a strange creature. Its eyes were on long horns like snail’s eyes, and it could move them in and out like telescopes. It had ears like a bat’s ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider’s and covered with thick soft fur – and it had hands and feet like a monkey’s. It told the children – whose names were Cyril, Robert, Anthea, and Jane – that it was a Psammead or sand-fairy. (Psammead is pronounced Sammy-add.) It was old, old, old, and its birthday was almost at the very beginning of everything. And it had been buried in the sand for thousands of years. But it still kept its fairylikeness, and part of this fairylikeness was its power to give people whatever they wished for. You know fairies have always been able to do this. Cyril, Robert,