copies of the poets—the kind that are given for birthday presents and prizes, beautiful outside, and inside very small print on thin paper that lets the printing on the other side show through. Charlotte found this out as they waited, by the light of their one candle, for it to be twelve o’clock.
Caroline was plucking fronds of fern, carefully, so that the lack of them should not disfigure the plants.
‘It’s all duffing,’ said Charles. ‘Don’t forget I said so. And how are you going to pound the beastly stuff? You’ll wake the Wilmington and the Uncle and the whole lot if you pound.’
‘I thought,’ said Caroline, hesitating with the fern-fronds in her hand, and her little short pig-tail sticking out like a saucepan handle, as Charles put it later, ‘I thought—it sounds rather nasty, but it isn’t really, you know, if you remember it’s all you—I thought we might chew them. Each do our own, you know, and put them on our eyes like a poultice. I know you hated it when Aunt Emmeline chewed the lily leaves and put them on your thumb when you burnt it,’ she told Charles, ‘but then her chewing is quite different from you doing it.’
‘I don’t care,’ said Charles; ‘it’s only a bit more of your nonsense. Give us the beastly seeds.’
‘They won’t come off the leaves,’ said Caroline. ‘We shall have to chew the lot.’
‘In for a penny, in for a sheep,’ said Charlotte cheerfully. ‘I mean we may as well be hanged for a pound as a lamb. I mean——’
‘I know what you mean,’ Caroline interrupted. ‘Here you are. It’s just on twelve. Chew for all you’re worth, and when the Wilmington’s clock begins to strike put it on your eyes. And when it’s struck six of them take it off. Yes. I’ve thought about it all. I’m sure that’s right. Now, then, chew.’
‘I hope it’s not poison,’ said Charles; ‘you’ll remember I told you——’
‘Of course it isn’t,’ said Caroline. ‘I’ve often licked ferns, and I’m not dead. I say—I daresay nothing will happen—but think how silly we should feel if we hadn’t tried it. And this is the only night. He said so.’
‘Oh, all right,’ said Charles. ‘At any rate, if we do it you can’t be always saying we ought to have.’
‘Chew,’ said Charlotte; and the clock began to strike.
‘One, two, three, four, five, six,’ said Mrs. Wilmington’s highly ornamented pink china clock; and each child thrust a little bunch of fern fronds into its mouth.
‘Seven,’ said the clock.
‘Now,’ said Caroline.
And each child.... But you picture the scene.
‘Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, purr,’ said the clock, and said no more.
‘I don’t like to take it off,’ said Charlotte, her hands to her eyes. ‘Suppose we did see something.’
‘We shan’t,’ said Charles.
‘You must,’ said Caroline.
‘Oh, well,’ said Charlotte, and took away the little poultice of chewed fern from each eye.
‘There’s nothing,’ she said.
‘I knew there wouldn’t be,’ said Charles. ‘Perhaps another time you’ll know I’m right.’
‘Never mind,’ said Caroline. ‘We did it. So we can’t keep bothering about what might have happened if we had. Let’s go to bed. It was decent of you to try, Charles, when you didn’t want to so much—Oh!’
‘What?’ said the others.
‘Poisoned,’ said Charles gloomily. ‘I knew it wasn’t safe. I expect you chewed harder than we did, and—Oh!’
Charlotte had already said her ‘Oh.’ And now all three children were staring straight before them at the window. And there, where a moment ago was just black bare outside night, was a face—a white face with wide dark eyes.
‘It’s true,’ gasped Caroline, ‘it is true—the fern-seed does——’
‘It’s not true,’ said Charles stoutly, his eyes on the face.
‘Oh, but it is,’ said Charlotte. ‘Oh, what’s going to happen now?’
And each child felt that the fern-seed had done what no one had, in the deep heart, believed that it would do, and that their eyes now gazed—seeing—upon the unseen.
‘I wish we hadn’t,’ said Charles. ‘I told you not to.’
The lips of the face outside moved, as though it were speaking.
‘No,’ cried Charlotte. ‘I don’t want it to be true.’
A hand was raised—a hand outside the window. Would it knock at the window? The fern-seed only made you see the unseen, not hear the unheard. If the hand knocked at the window—and plainly it was going to knock,—if the hand knocked, would they hear it?
The hand knocked.
Chapter V.
The Midnight Adventure
Now, the fern-seed was only warranted to show the invisible, not to make the unhearable heard. If there should be no sound when that raised hand tapped at the window, then the children would know that the fern-seed was doing what it was warranted to do by the Latin book. If, on the other hand, the hand tapped and made, in tapping, the usual noise produced by a common tapper, then one of two things might be true. Either the fern-seed was stronger than the Latin book bargained for, and was able to make people hear the unhearable even if they did not cover their ears with the charm that had covered their eyes, or else the fern-seed spell was all nonsense and the face outside the window was a real person’s face and the hand was a real person’s hand, and the tap that was coming on the window was a really-tap that would sound hard and rattly on the glass of the window, as taps sound when fingers of bone and flesh make them.
All the children felt quite sure that they were not at all sure whether they wanted the face to be the face of a real person, or whether they wished it to be the Invisible made visible by fern-seed. But when the hand tapped at the window and a sound came to the children within—a sound quite distinct, and just the noise you or I might make if we tapped at a window and didn’t want every one in the house to hear us—the children, though startled, no longer felt any doubt as to what they wished that face to be.
‘It’s only a real person,’ whispered Charles, and sighed deeply.
‘It’s only a boy,’ said Caroline. ‘What does he want?’
‘It’s that Rupert chap we saw in the train,’ said Charlotte.
Every one breathed much more freely, and they all smiled and nodded towards the window; and the face nodded back, but it did not smile.
‘He must have run away,’ said Charles, ‘like I told him to.’
‘It wasn’t you; it was me,’ said Charlotte promptly.
‘I like this much better than its being invisible people,’ said Charles, changing the subject a little. ‘This is something like an adventure.’
‘We shouldn’t have had it without coming down for the fern-seed,’ Caroline reminded him. And again they all nodded and smiled. The face outside moved its lips. It was saying something, but they could not hear what it said.
‘It is