The Palace in the Garden

Well, I ran down to the library and went straight to our own corner. They were funny-looking books – mostly rather shabby, for they had been children's books for two, and some of them for three, generations. It took me a little while to find the one I was in search of; indeed, I wasn't quite sure which it was, and I had to take out several, and open them to see the page at the beginning before I got the right one. It was a small book; the name of it was Ornaments Discovered, and on the first leaf was written the name of the person it had belonged to. There were two names, but the first had been so scored through that one could only distinguish the first letter of it, which was "R," and the second name was our name and grandpapa's name, "Ansdell." And lower down on the page was the date, and the name of a place just above it. But this name also had been scored through, only not so blackly as the other, so that it was still easy to make out that it was that of the house we were going to live at: "Rosebuds."

I remembered it quite well now – I had often puzzled over the writing in this book, and though I had never made out the name before, "Ansdell," I remembered having read that the other was "Rosebuds." I understood now a sort of feeling I had had when grandpapa had told us the name that morning, that I had heard it before – or, as it turned out, seen it before.

I rushed up stairs with the little red book in my hand.

"Tib," I said, looking and feeling very excited, "just look at this."

Up jumped Tib – she had been down on the floor arranging the primroses in some little glasses that we always kept on the mantelpiece for any flowers that came our way. Liddy had left the room, and Gerald had gone with her. We leant over the book together.

"You see?" I said, pointing to the word above the date.

"Yes," said Tib; "it's certainly 'Rosebuds.' I suppose grandpapa had it when he was a little boy, there."

"Oh, you stupid!" I exclaimed. "You're always wanting to make up wonderful stories of adventures and mysteries, and now, when I've found you a real mystery, all ready made, you won't see it. If it had just been grandpapa's book, what would he have scored the name out for? Besides, you know very well that his name is 'Gerald,' like papa and Gerald. And this name begins with a 'R.'"

Tib had taken the book in her own hands by this time, and was peering at it.

"You may call me stupid, if you like," she said, "but I've found out something else. The name is 'Regina' – my second name;" for Tib's whole name was Mercedes Regina. "Mercedes Regina Ansdell" – isn't that an awfully grand name for a little girl? She was a little girl then.

I seized the book in my turn. Sure enough, now that Tib had put the idea into my head, it seemed quite plain – even through the very thick crossing-out one could see the confused shapes of the word "Regina."

"You're right, Gussie," said Tib; "there is a mystery. You remember that time that grandpapa was grumbling at my name – like he did this morning – and I said, 'Mightn't I be called by my second name?' how he snapped out, 'No, certainly not.' It frightened me so, I remember. There must have been somebody called 'Regina Ansdell' that he didn't like, or he was angry with, or something. Oh! how I do wonder who she was, and why he has never told us about her?"

"We might ask nurse," I said. "I am sure she knows something – for you see, this Regina Ansdell must have lived at Rosebuds, and it's something about there that Liddy has heard, and won't tell us. And I shouldn't wonder if it has to do with grandpapa's not wanting us to know any of the people there."

"What can it be?" said Tib, her eyes growing bigger and rounder. "There can't surely be any one shut up there – a mysterious lady called 'Regina.' Oh, no, that can't be it, for grandpapa would never take us there if there were. Besides – though he's rather frightening and strict – grandpapa's not bad and wicked."

"The Queen wouldn't let him be in the Parliament if he were," said I. "At least, I suppose not."

"It's good of him to have all of us living with him. Nursey says it is. I don't think we've got any money of our own."

"Well, we're his grandchildren, and it isn't our fault that papa and mamma died," I said. "I don't think that's so very good of him. Still, he is good to us in some ways, I know."

Tib was still staring at the book.

"I don't think it's any use asking nurse," she said. "If she does know anything she doesn't want to tell us. And it's no use telling Gerald: he's too little. If we told him not to speak of it, he'd very likely get red the first time grandpapa looked at him – like that day you filled the hood of Miss Evans' waterproof with peas, and he kept staring at it all the time of our lessons, till she found out there was something the matter."

"No," said I; "it's better not to tell him. Of course, Tib, we mustn't do anything naughty. It would be naughty to go prying into grandpapa's secrets, if he has any. But what we've found out hasn't been with prying. It's impossible not to wonder a little about it. And it's grandpapa's own fault for telling us so sharply not to know anybody or speak to anybody at Rosebuds. Of course, we'll obey him, but we can't help our minds wondering – they're made to wonder."

Tib considered for a while. Then her face cleared.

"I'll tell you what we can do, Gussie," she said; "we can turn it into a play. We can't leave off wondering, as you say, but we can mix up our wondering with fancy, and make up a plan of how it all was. It will be very interesting, for we shall know there is something real, and yet we can make it more wonderful than anything real could be now that everything's grown so plain and – and – I don't know the word – the opposite of poetry and fairy stories, I mean – in the world. We must think about it, Gussie. We might make it an 'ancient times' story, or an ogre story, or – "

"Yes," I said, "we'll think about it."

I did not want to disappoint Tib, and I thought, in a way, it was rather a good idea. But I am not so fond of fancying or pretending as Tib – I like real things. And the idea of a real secret or mystery had taken hold of my mind, and I wanted to find out about it. Still, the making a play of it wasn't a bad idea. As Tib said, it would be more interesting than an altogether make-up play.

We didn't say anything about the name in the book to Liddy. It was no use worrying the poor old thing by teasing her about what she thought would be wrong to tell; even if it had not anything to do with our mystery, it would have been wrong and unkind of us. And we said nothing to Gerald either; and indeed for some days we did not think or speak much about our discovery even to each other; we were so very much taken up about the real preparing to go away.

It was much more of a nice bustle and fuss than it had ever been to go to Ansdell Friars. There, everything was left from year to year just as we had always had it. The rooms had all we needed, and there was very little besides our clothes to pack up and take. But for going to Rosebuds it was quite different. None of the servants had ever been there, and they were all in a to-do about it, especially as only about half of them were to go; and the other half were cross at being sent away, and kept telling the others they'd be sure to find everything wrong there.

Nurse was the only one who was really pleased to go; and I am sure, dear old thing, it was more for our sakes than her own.

"It'll be a real change for them, poor dears," she kept saying; and this gave her patience to bear all our teasing and the servants' grumbling. What a time she had of it, to be sure! From Gerald's "Nursey, may I take all my horses? If I leave Sultan in the cupboard won't the mouses and butterflies eat him?" – Gerald always called moths butterflies – "Will there be any wheelbarrows, like at Ansdell?" to Fanny's suggestion that there'd be no nursery tea-service there – "a house that nobody's been in for years and years" – everything fell on old Liddy! And you see she dared not go asking grandpapa all sorts of things, as if he'd been a lady. He was even rather cross when she went trembling one day to ask if there were shops anywhere near Rosebuds, or if she must plan to take everything we could want for all the summer.

"Shops," said grandpapa – I heard him, for Liddy had caught him on his way down stairs one morning, and I was standing just inside the school-room doorway; "of course there are shops near enough – five miles off or so. I'm not going to take you to the middle of Africa. I dare say there are shops enough in the village for common things. Mrs. Munt will tell you all that. No need to worry me about it."

"Mrs. Munt!" I had never heard that name before. I pricked up my ears, but I was dreadfully afraid that Liddy would be too frightened to ask any more. To my satisfaction I heard her meek old voice again:

"And who may Mrs. Munt be, sir, if you please?"

At this grandpapa stopped short and looked at her – I couldn't see him, but I felt him stop short and look at her. Poor Liddy!

"Upon my soul!" he said. Then some reflection seemed to strike him, for his next words were more amiable.

"Mrs. Munt is the housekeeper at Rosebuds. She's been there ever since I can remember. You didn't suppose I was going to trust to that Mary Ann's cooking?" Mary Ann was the kitchen-maid. She was coming with us, but not the cook, who was leaving to be married. "Mrs. Munt is, or used to be, a very good cook, and a very good sort of person altogether."

"Oh, thank you, sir," said Liddy very heartily. Mrs. Munt was a great relief to her mind, for the idea of Mary Ann's cooking on the days that "master" came down to Rosebuds had been weighing on it. To me the idea of Mrs. Munt brought back the thought of the mystery. If she had been there as long as grandpapa could remember, what must she not know?

I flew off to Tib with the news, but she did not receive it with much interest.

"An old cook!" she said disdainfully. "Why, that would spoil it all. It wouldn't matter so much for an ogre story, if we could fancy her a witch, but for an 'ancient times' one, it would never do."

"Oh, bother!" I exclaimed, "I don't want pretending. I want to know about it really. If you only wanted make-ups, you can always get things that will do for them. I am sure Miss Evans would have been a beautiful witch! Oh, Tib, aren't you glad she isn't coming any more?"

For Miss Evans had left off coming altogether. She was going to begin a school – how we pitied the scholars! – and had asked grandpapa to let her off at once. She came to say good-bye to us, and gave us each a present of a book – and, to our surprise, there were tears in her eyes when she kissed us! People are really very queer in this world – they never seem to care for things till they know they are not going to have them any more. We all felt rather ashamed that we couldn't cry too, and Tib said she was afraid we must have very little feeling, which made Gerald and me quite unhappy for a while.

All the same, we weren't at all in a hurry to hear of the new "Miss Evans."

CHAPTER III

"ROSEBUDS."

"To one who has been long in city pent,'Tis very sweet to look into the fairAnd open face of heaven."Keats' Sonnets.

suppose it is true, as older people say, that things very seldom turn out as one expects. Sometimes they are not so bad as one feels sure they will be – and very often, or almost always, they are not so nice as one has thought they would be, if one has been fancying and picturing a great deal about them. And any way, they are never quite what one expects. I am beginning to find this out for myself now – looking back, I can recollect very few nice things in my life that have turned out as nice as I had imagined them. But of these few, Rosebuds was one, and that has made me always remember with particular distinctness all about our first acquaintance with the dear little place. I think I could tell everything about our arrival there, exactly how each room looked, and what we had for tea – oh, how hungry we were that first evening! and I seem to feel again the feeling of the snowy white sheets and the sort of faint hay-ey – Tib said it was lavender – scent in our beds when we got into them that first night – very tired, but very happy.

What plans we made for the next day – how we settled to get up with the sun, to ramble about and see everything – and how, after all, we slept, of course, much later than usual! Still, it was a delicious waking. Do you know how beautiful a first waking in the real country is when you have been a long time in London? There is a sort of clear stillness in the air that you can feel, and then a cock crows – with quite a different crow from the poor London cocks, I always think, and hens cluck a little, just under your window perhaps; or, best of all, a turkey gobble-wobbles and some ducks quack – perhaps there is a rush of all together if your window happens to be not far from the poultry-yard, and the girl is coming out with the creatures' breakfast – and further off you hear a moo from some cows, and nearer, and yet more distant, the clear sweet notes of the ever busy little birds as they pass by on their way up to who knows where? Oh, it is too delicious – and when you hear all those sounds, as you are lying there still dreamy and sleepy, there is a sort of strangeness and fairy-ness– I must make up that word – that makes you think of Red Riding-hood setting off in the early morning to her grandmother's cottage, or of the little princess who went to live with the dwarfs to keep house for them.

But I must come back to the evening before – the evening, that is to say, of our arrival at Rosebuds. It had been a pouring wet day when we left London (it went on pouring till we were only about half-an-hour from our journey's end); and just at the last moment grandpapa had got a telegram which stopped his coming with us. He grumbled a little, but I don't think he had been looking forward with much pleasure to the journey in our company, and though we thought it our duty to look grave, and Tib said gently, "What a pity!" I don't think we minded much either. Indeed, to tell the real truth – and it isn't any harm telling it in here, as grandpapa will never see this story – I think it was his not being with us, and our feeling so lovelily free and unafraid, that made that first evening at Rosebuds so delightful.

And Mrs. Munt! – oh, yes, it had to do with Mrs. Munt. There never was anybody so nice as Mrs. Munt – there never could be!

But I must go straight on, and not keep slipping a little bit backwards, and hurrying on too far forwards, this sort of way. Well then, as I was saying, it rained and rained all through the three hours' journey, or at least two hours and a half of it, so that we all felt rather doleful and shivery, and Liddy began hoping there'd be no mistake about the carriage from the inn meeting us at the station, as grandpapa had told her it should. Poor Liddy was rather inclined to get nervous when she was thrown on her own resources.

"Never mind, nursey," we said, all three, to comfort her; "we can easily walk if it isn't there. You know grandpapa said it was only about half a mile, and we've got our big cloaks on – the rain wouldn't hurt us."

But Liddy still looked rather unhappy, till suddenly from her side of the railway carriage Tib called out, "It's clearing up – it's clearing up splendidly; and oh, Gussie! do look – there's such a lovely rainbow!"

So there was. I never before or since saw such a rainbow – it seemed a very nice welcome for us, and after all, Liddy's fears were quite without reason. For the queer old "one-horse fly" was waiting for us, and we all bundled into it and drove off without any mishaps, except that nurse was sure the packet of umbrellas had been left in the railway carriage, and stood shouting to the guard to stop after the train was already moving out of the station, which made us all laugh so, that we hadn't breath to tell her that it was all safe in the fly.

Though Rosebuds is almost in the village – at least, a very tiny bit out of it – it is some little way from the station, because for some reason that I've never found out, the station stands away by itself in the fields, as if it and the village had quarrelled and wouldn't have anything to say to each other. I dare say it's not a bad thing that it is so: the nice country-ness of it all would have been a little spoilt by the trains whistling in and out, and as it is, we scarcely hear it, as the railroad is low down and is hardly noticed. And the road from the station to the village is so pretty. I never, even now, go along it without remembering that first evening when we drove to Rosebuds in the clear brightness that comes after rain, the fields and the hedges glistening with the water diamonds, the little clouds hurrying away as if they were afraid of being caught, and over all the sort of hush that seems to me to follow a regular rainy day – as if the world were a naughty child that had cried itself to sleep with the tears still on its cheeks.

It is a hilly bit of road – first it goes down, and then it goes up, and when it comes into the village it does so quite suddenly. You see a high, ivy-covered wall, which is the wall of the church-yard, and then comes a row of sweet little alms-houses, and then the inn, and one by one all the village houses and shops in the most irregular way possible. Some one said once that it was more like an old German village than an English one, but I have never been in Germany, so I can't tell, only it certainly is very unlike everywhere else. We were so pleased to see it so queer and funny, that we kept tugging each other to look out, first at one side, and then at the other, and sometimes at both at once. Then we began wondering which of the houses, as we came to them, could be Rosebuds, and I think we would have been quite pleased whichever it was – they all looked so tempting and snug.

But we were all wrong in our guesses, for, as I said, Rosebuds was quite at the end, and, like the village itself, we came upon it quite suddenly, turning sharply down a sort of lane so shaded with trees that you could scarcely see where you were going; then with some tugging at the old horse, and some swaying of the clumsy old fly, in we drove at an open gate, and pulled up in front of a low white house, nestling, so to speak, in thickly-growing, bushy trees.

Never was a house so like its name! The trees were not really planted so very close as they looked, but it seemed at first sight as if it was almost buried in them: it stood out so white against their green. It looks at first sight smaller than it really is, for it extends a good deal out at the back. But large or small, to us it was just perfection, and so was the very rosy old woman who stood smiling and bobbing in the porch. She was so comical-looking that we could hardly help laughing. I think she must find the world a very good-humoured place, for nobody could be cross when they look at her!

"Mrs. Munt, ma'am, I suppose?" said nurse as she got down.

And, "Certainly, ma'am," replied Mrs. Munt, and then the two old bodies shook hands very ceremoniously. It was so funny to see their politeness to each other. But Mrs. Munt was too eager to see us to waste much time on Liddy.

"And is these the dear young ladies and gentleman?" she said, hastening forward as we emerged from the fly. "Dear, dear! to think you should be so big already, and me never to have seen you before!"

The tears were in her eyes, and we felt rather at a loss what to say or do. She seemed to know all about us so well that we felt really ashamed to think – though it certainly was not our fault – that we had never heard of her till about two days ago. I felt too shy to speak, but Tib held out her hand.

"I am very glad to see you, Mrs. Munt," she said. "I am the eldest, you know. I am Miss Ansdell."

A slight shadow of pain crossed the old woman's face.

"Miss Ansdell," she repeated, with a strange sadness in her tone: "yes, my dear – to be sure – you are Miss Ansdell – Master Gerald's eldest."

"I'm Gerald, too," said Gerald himself. "I'm called after grandpapa and papa. Did you know papa when he was as little as me?"

Mrs. Munt smiled.

"I should think so, indeed – and your grandpapa too," she said. "And this is Miss Gustava – you're not like the others, my dear. Perhaps you take after your mamma's family – the Ansdells have all blue eyes and dark hair. I remember Master Gerald writing about his lady's beautiful light hair."

"Yes, indeed," said nurse, rather primly, very anxious to put in a word for her side of the house, "Miss Gussie's hair is very nice, but it's nothing to what her dear mamma's was."

But we didn't want to stand at the door all the evening while the old bodies discussed our looks in this way. Gerald, who somehow seemed less shy with Mrs. Munt than Tib and I, put a stop to it in his own way.

"Mrs. Munt," he said, "I'm dreadfully hungry. I'm only seven years old, you know, though I look more; and nurse says seven's a hungry age."

"And we're hungry too – Tib and I, though I'm ten and Tib's eleven," said I. "And we do so want to see all the rooms and everything. Oh, I do think Rosebuds is far the nicest place in the world."

My words quite gained Mrs. Munt's heart.

"Indeed, miss, I don't think you're far wrong," she said. And then, just for a moment before going in, we stood and looked round. In front of the house there was a beautiful lawn, right down to the low wall which separated it from the high road. And away on the other side of that, the ground sloped down gradually, so that we seemed to have nothing to interfere with the view, which was really a very lovely one – right over the old Forest of Evold, to where the river Rother flows quietly along at the foot of the Rothering Hills. But children don't care much for views – it's since I've got big that I've learnt to like the view – we were much more interested to follow Mrs. Munt into the house, across the low square hall into a short wide passage, with a window along one side, and a flight of steps at one end. A door stood open close to the foot of the stairs, and Mrs. Munt led the way through it into a bright, plainly-furnished room, where tea was already set out for us.

"I might have got it ready in the dining-room this first evening," she said, "but I thought master would be coming, and that there'd be his dinner to see to. This is the old play-room – the school-room as used to be is now a bed-room – and I thought this would be the best for you to have quite as your own."

"It will be very nice, I'm sure," said Tib, whom Mrs. Munt looked at as the eldest. "And there's a door right out into the garden – oh, that will be nice! won't it, Gussie?"

"So that we can come out and in whenever we like. Yes, I'm glad of that," I said. "Is the garden big, Mrs. Munt? I hope it is, because – because we've no chance of being allowed to play in any other," I was going to say, but I stopped, and I felt myself grow a little red. I wondered if Mrs. Munt knew why grandpapa was so strict about our not making any friends; and I fancied she looked at me curiously as she replied —

"Yes, Miss Gustava; it's a good big garden, and it's nice to play in, for there's a deal of rather wild shrubbery – down at the back. Our young ladies and gentlemen long ago used to say there was nowhere like Rosebuds for hide-and-seek."

"Who were your young ladies and gentlemen?" I asked quietly. "Papa had no brothers and sisters, I know."

"Ah! but I was here long before your dear papa's time, Miss Gustava," said Mrs. Munt. "I was here when your grandpapa was a boy. I'm five years older nor master."

"And had grandpapa brothers and sisters, then?" I asked again.

Mrs. Munt grew a little uneasy.

"You must have heard of your uncle, the Colonel, who was killed in India," she said. "And there was Miss Mary, who died when she was only fifteen. You must have seen her grave at Ansdell Friars."

I shook my head.

"No, I don't think so. But I do remember the tablet in the church to Colonel Baldwin Ansdell. I often wondered who he was. You remember it, Tib? But hadn't grandpapa any other sisters? You said young ladies, Mrs. Munt."