of the growing water plants. He had thought it all out—how a cover might be made, very light, with rubber in between, like a screw-top bottle, to keep the water in while it traveled home in the guard’s van to the admiration of passengers and porters at both stations. And now—he was not to be allowed to take it.
He told Mavis, and she agreed with him that it was a shame.
“But I’ll tell you what,” she said, for she was not one of those comforters who just say, “I’m sorry,” and don’t try to help. She generally thought of something that would make things at any rate just a little better. “Let’s fill it with fresh water, and get some goldfish and sand and weeds; and I’ll make Eliza promise to put ants’ eggs in—that’s what they eat—and it’ll be something to break the dreadful shock when we have to leave the sea and come home again.”
Francis admitted that there was something in this and consented to fill the aquarium with water from the bath. When this was done the aquarium was so heavy that the combined efforts of all four children could not begin to move it.
“Never mind,” said Mavis, the consoler; “let’s empty it out again and take it back to the common room, and then fill it by secret jugfuls, carried separately, you know.”
This might have been successful, but Aunt Enid met the first secret jugful—and forbade the second.
“Messing about,” she called it. “No, of course I shan’t allow you to waste your money on fish.” And Mother was already at the seaside getting the lodgings ready for them. Her last words had been—
“Be sure you do exactly what Aunt Enid says.” So, of course, they had to. Also Mother had said, “Don’t argue,” so they had not even the melancholy satisfaction of telling Aunt Enid that she was quite wrong, and that they were not messing about at all.
Aunt Enid was not a real aunt, but just an old friend of Grandmamma’s, with an aunt’s name and privileges and rather more than an aunt’s authority. She was much older than a real aunt and not half so nice. She was what is called “firm” with children, and no one ever called her auntie. Just Aunt Enid. That will tell you in a moment.
So there the aquarium was, dishearteningly dry—for even the few drops left in it from its first filling dried up almost at once.
Even in its unwatery state, however, the aquarium was beautiful. It had not any of that ugly ironwork with red lead showing between the iron and the glass which you may sometimes have noticed in the aquariums of your friends. No, it was one solid thick piece of clear glass, faintly green, and when you stooped down and looked through you could almost fancy that there really was water in it.
“Let’s put flowers in it,” Kathleen suggested, “and pretend they’re anemones. Do let’s, Francis.”
“I don’t care what you do,” said Francis. “I’m going to read The Water Babies.”
“Then we’ll do it, and make it a lovely surprise for you,” said Kathleen cheerily.
Francis sat down squarely with The Water Babies flat before him on the table, where also his elbows were, and the others, respecting his sorrow, stole quietly away. Mavis just stepped back to say, “I say, France, you don’t mind their putting flowers? It’s to please you, you know.”
“I tell you I don’t mind anything,” said Francis savagely.
When the three had finished with it, the aquarium really looked rather nice, and, if you stooped down and looked sideways through the glass, like a real aquarium.
Kathleen took some clinkers from the back of the rockery—“where they won’t show,” she said—and Mavis induced these to stand up like an arch in the middle of the glassy square. Tufts of long grass, rather sparingly arranged, looked not unlike waterweed. Bernard begged from the cook some of the fine silver sand which she uses to scrub the kitchen tables and dressers with, and Mavis cut the thread of the Australian shell necklace that Uncle Robert sent her last Christmas, so that there should be real, shimmery, silvery shells on the sand. (This was rather self-sacrificing of her, because she knew she would have to put them all back again on their string, and you know what a bother shells are to thread.) They shone delightfully through the glass. But the great triumph was the sea anemones—pink and red and yellow—clinging to the rocky arch just as though they were growing there.
“Oh, lovely, lovely,” Kathleen cried, as Mavis fixed the last delicate flesh-tinted crown. “Come and look, France.”
“Not yet,” said Mavis, in a great hurry, and she tied the thread of the necklace round a tin goldfish (out of the box with the duck and the boat and the mackerel and the lobster and the magnet that makes them all move about—you know) and hung it from the middle of the arch. It looked just as though it were swimming—you hardly noticed the thread at all.
“Now, France,” she called. And Francis came slowly with his thumb in The Water Babies. It was nearly dark by now, but Mavis had lighted the four dollhouse candles in the gilt candlesticks and set them on the table around the aquarium.
“Look through the side,” she said; “isn’t it ripping?”
“Why,” said Francis slowly, “you’ve got water in it—and real anemones! Where on earth...?”
“Not real,” said Mavis. “I wish they were; they’re only dahlias. But it does look pretty, doesn’t it?”
“It’s like Fairyland,” said Kathleen, and Bernard added, “I am glad you bought it.”
“It just shows what it will be like when we do get the sea creatures,” said Mavis. “Oh, Francis, you do like it, don’t you?”
“Oh, I like it all right,” he answered, pressing his nose against the thick glass, “but I wanted it to be waving weeds and mysterious wetness like the Sabrina picture.”
The other three glanced at the picture which hung over the mantelpiece—Sabrina and the water nymphs, drifting along among the waterweeds and water lilies. There were words under the picture, and Francis dreamily began to say them:
“‘Sabrina fair, Listen where thou art sitting, Under the glassie, cool, translucent wave In twisted braids of Lillies knitting The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair....’”
“Hullo—what was that?” he said in quite a different voice, and jumped up.
“What was what?” the others naturally asked.
“Did you put something alive in there?” Francis asked.
“Of course not,” said Mavis. “Why?”
“Well, I saw something move, that’s all.”
They all crowded around and peered over the glass walls. Nothing, of course, but the sand and the grass and the shells, the clinkers and the dahlias and the little suspended tin goldfish.
“I expect the goldfish swung a bit,” said Bernard. “That’s what it must have been.”
“It didn’t look like that,” Francis answered. “It looked more like—”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know—get out of the light. Let’s have another squint.”
He stooped down and looked again through the glass.
“It’s not the goldfish,” he said. “That’s as quiet as a trout asleep. No—I suppose it was a shadow or something.”
“You might tell us what it looked like,” said Kathleen.
“Was it like a rat?” Bernard asked with interest.
“Not a bit. It was more like—”
“Well, like what?” asked three aggravated voices.
“Like Sabrina—only very, very tiny.”
“A