It was not easy to find out. The title-page was missing, and quam, apud, and rara, though quite all right in their way, gave but little clue to what the book was about.
‘I wish we’d some one we could ask,’ said Charles. ‘I don’t suppose the Wilmington knows any Latin. I don’t suppose she knows even apud and quam and rara. If we had the Murdstone chap handy he could tell us, I suppose.’
‘I’m glad we haven’t,’ Charlotte said. ‘I don’t suppose he’d tell us. And he’d take it away. I say. I suppose there’s a church somewhere near. And a clergyman. He’d know.’
‘Of course he would,’ Caroline said with returning brightness. ‘Let’s go and ask him.’
Half an hour later the children, coming down a deep banked lane, saw before them the grey tower of the church, with elm-trees round it, standing among old gravestones and long grass.
A white faced house stood on the other side of the churchyard.
‘I suppose the clergyman lives there,’ said Caroline. ‘Please,’ she said to a pleasant-looking hook-nosed man who was mending the churchyard wall, and whistling ‘Blow away the morning dew’ as he slapped on the mortar and trimmed off the edges with a diamond-shaped trowel, ‘please, does the clergyman live in that house?’
‘He does,’ said the man with the trowel. ‘Do you want him?’
‘Yes, please,’ said Caroline.
‘Well, here he is,’ said the man with the trowel. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Do you mean to say that you’re It?—the clergyman, I mean,—I beg your pardon,’ said Caroline; and the man with the trowel said, ‘At your service.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Caroline again, very red as to her ears. ‘I thought you were a working man.’
‘So I am, thank God,’ said the man with the trowel. ‘You see we haven’t much money to spare. The parish is so poor. So we do any little repairs ourselves. Did you ever set a stone? It’s awfully jolly. The mortar goes on so nicely, and squeezes out pleasantly. Like to try?’ he asked Charles.
Of course they all liked to try. And it was not till each had laid a stone and patted it into place, and scraped off the mortar, and got thoroughly dusty and dirty and comfortable, that any one remembered why they had come.
‘Oh, this?’ said the clergyman—for so I must call him, though anything less clergyman-like than he looked in his mortar-stained flannels and blue blazer you can’t imagine. ‘It looks interesting. Latin,’ he said, opening it carefully, for his hands were very dirty.
‘Yes,’ said Charles with modest pride. ‘I told them it was. I saw rara and quam and apud.’
‘Quite so,’ said the clergyman; ‘rara, quam, and apud. Words of Power.’
‘Oh, do you know about Words of Power?’
‘Rather! Do you?’
‘Rather!’ they said. And if anything had been needed to cement this new friendship well, there it was.
‘Look here,’ said the clergyman. ‘If you’ll just wait while I wash my hands I’ll walk up with you. And I’ll look through the book and report to you to-morrow.’
‘But what’s it about?’
‘About?’ said he, turning the leaves delicately with the least mortared of his fingers. ‘Oh, it’s about spells and charms and things.’
‘How perfectly too lovely,’ said Charlotte. ‘Oh, do read us one—just only one.’
‘Right O,’ was the response of this unusual clergyman, and he read: ‘“The seed of the fern if pulverised”—pounded—smashed, you know,—“and laid upon the eyes at the twelfth hour”—midnight, you know—at least I think that’s it—“last before the feast of St. John”—that’s to-morrow by the way—“shall give to the eyes thus doctored”—treated—dealt with, you know,—“the power to see that which is not to be seen.” It means you’ll see invisible things. I say I must wash. I feel the dirt soaking into my bones. Will you wait?’
The children looked at each other. Then Charlotte said:
‘Look here. Don’t think we don’t like you. We do—awfully. But if you walk up with us will you feel bound to tell uncle about the book? Because it’s a secret. He’s looking for a book, and we think perhaps this is it. But we don’t want to tell him till we’re quite sure.’
‘I found it inside Somebody-or-other-quite-dull on Thessalonians, you know,’ said Charles, ‘and I saw it was Latin because of quam and——’
‘My dear sir—and ladies,’ said the agreeable clergyman, ‘I am the soul of honour. I would perish at the stake before I would reveal a centimetre of your least secret. Trust me to the death.’
And off he went.
‘What a different clergyman,’ said Charles; ‘he is just like anybody else—only nicer.’
‘He said thank God,’ Caroline reminded him; ‘he said it like being in church too, not like cabmen and people in the street.’
‘He said “Thank God he was a working man,”’ said Charlotte. ‘I wonder what he meant.’
‘I shall ask him some day,’ said Caroline, ‘when we know him better.’
But any one who had met the party as they went talking and laughing up the hill would have thought they had known each other for long enough, and could hardly know each other any better than they did.
Charles was dreaming of mortaring the Murdstone man securely into a first-class railway carriage, and tapping him on the head with a brass trowel which was also a candlestick, when he was awakened by a pinch given gently. At the same moment a hand was laid on his mouth, and a whisper said:
‘Hist!—not a word.’
‘Shut up,’ said Charles, recognising at once the voice of his sister Charlotte. ‘I’m asleep. Don’t be a duffer. Go to bed.’
‘No, but,’ said Charlotte in the dark, ‘Caroline and I have been talking about the fern-seed. And we’re going to try it—putting it on our eyes, I mean. To see whether we can see invisible things.’
‘Silly,’ said Charles briefly.
‘All right. Only don’t say we didn’t ask you to join in.’
‘There isn’t any fern-seed,’ objected Charles.
‘Yes, there is. Mrs. Wilmington’s got some in the room they call the housekeeper’s room. Under a bell-glass. Stupid little ferns; but I expect the seed’s all right. Caro saw them when she went in to ask the Wilmington if we might get up at seven instead of half-past because of everything being so new and lovely. She meant because of the charm-book, of course. And she saw the ferns then.’
‘Are you really going to?’ asked Charles, warm in bed.
‘Yes,’ said Charlotte in a take-it-or-leave-it tone.
‘Oh, very well,’ said Charles; ‘only don’t forget I told you it was silly rot. And of course nothing will happen. I was right about the Latin, you know.’
‘Here’s your dressing-gown,’ said Charlotte, who had been feeling for it in the mahogany wardrobe. ‘You can scrabble for your shoes with your feet; I suppose they’re beside the bed. Hurry up.’
Charles got up, grumbling gently. It