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He was too excited to mind my being grumpy. |
'Oh, Gilley!' he exclaimed at my first snort, 'I am so glad you are awake at last.' |
'I daresay you are,' I said, 'but I'm not. I should have slept another half-hour if you hadn't sat there staring me awake.' |
'Well, you needn't talk,' he went on, in a 'smoothing-you-down' tone; 'just listen and grunt sometimes.' |
I did grunt there and then. There was one comfortable thing about Peterkin even then, and it keeps on with him now that he is getting big and sensible. He always understands what you say, however you say it, or half say it. He was not the least surprised at my talking of his staring me awake, though he had not exactly ... |
'It has come into my mind, Giles,' he began, very importantly, 'how queer and lucky it is that the old lady is going away for a fortnight. I should not wonder if it had been managed somehow.' |
He waited for my grunt, but it turned into -- |
'What on earth do you mean?' |
'I mean, perhaps it's part of the spell, without her knowing, of course, that she should have to go to London. For if she was still there, we couldn't do anything without her finding out.' |
'I don't know what you mean about doing anything,' I said. 'And please don't say "we." I haven't promised to join you. Most likely I'll do my best to stop whatever it is you've got in that rummy head of yours.' |
'Oh no, you won't!' he replied coolly. 'I don't know that you could if you tried, without telling the others. And you can't do that, of course, as I've trusted you. It's word of honour, you see, though I didn't exactly make you say so. And it's nothing naughty or mischievous, else I wouldn't plan it.' |
'What is it, then? Hurry up and tell me, without such a lot of preparation,' I grumbled. |
'I can't tell you very much,' he answered, ''cos, you see, I don't know myself. It will show as we go on -- I'm certain you'll help me, Gilley. You remember the prince in the "Sleeping Beauty" did not know exactly what he would do -- no more did the one in -- -- ' |
'Never mind all that,' I interrupted. |
'Well, then, what we've got to do is to try to talk to her ourselves without any one hearing. That's the first thing. We will tell her what the parrot says, and then it will be easy to find out if she knows herself about the spell.' |
'But what do you think the spell is?' I asked, feeling again the strange interest and half belief in his fancies that Peterkin managed to put into me. 'What do you suppose your bad fairies, or whatever they are, have done to her?' |
'There are lots of things, it might be,' he replied gravely. 'They may have made her not able to walk, or very queer to look at -- p'raps turned her hair white, so that you couldn't be sure if she was a little girl or an old woman; or made her nose so long that it trails on the floor. No, I don't think it's that,' he a... |
'It would be easy to catch her, then, and bring her home in your pocket, if you waited till the magic time came,' I suggested, half joking again, of course. |
'It might be,' agreed Pete, quite seriously, 'or it might be very, very difficult, unless we could make her understand at the mouse time that we were friends. We can't settle anything till we see her, and talk to her like a little girl, of course.' |
'You certainly couldn't talk to her like anything else,' I said; 'but I'm sure I don't see how you mean to talk to her at all.' |
'I do,' said Peterkin. 'I've been planning it since last night. We can go round that way once or twice to look at the parrot, and just stand about. Nobody would wonder at us if they saw we were looking at him. And very likely we'd see something, as she lives in the very next-door house. P'raps she comes to the window s... |
'I don't suppose she is there all day,' I said. 'The parrot would not have heard her talking so much if she were. I think she must have been out on the balcony sometimes when it was warmer.' |
'Yes,' Peterkin agreed. 'I thought of that. Very likely she only comes downstairs for her dinner and tea. It's the dining-room, like Mrs. Wylie's.' |
'And if she only comes down there late she wouldn't see us in the dark, and, besides, the parrot wouldn't be out by then. And besides that, except for going to tea to Mrs. Wylie's, we'd never get leave to be out by ourselves so late. At least you wouldn't. Of course, for me, it's sometimes nearly dark when I come home ... |
I really did not see how Pete did mean to manage it. But the difficulties I spoke of only seemed to make him more determined. I could not help rather admiring him for it: he quite felt, I fancy, as if he was one of his favourite fairy-tale princes. And in the queer way I have spoken of already, he somehow made me feel ... |
He was silent for a moment or two after my last speech, staring before him with his round blue eyes. |
Then he said quietly -- |
'Yes; I'd thought of most of those things. But you will see. We'll manage it somehow. I daresay she comes downstairs in the middle of the day, too, for she's sure to have dinner early, and the parrot will be out then, if we choose a fine day.' |
'But we always have to be in for our own dinner by half-past one,' I said. |
'Well, p'raps she has hers at one, or even half-past twelve, like we used to, till you began going to school,' said he hopefully. 'And a very little talking would do at the first beginning. Then we could be very polite, and say we'd come again to see the parrot, and p'raps -- ' here Peterkin looked rather shy. |
'Perhaps what? Out with it!' I said. |
'We might take her a few flowers,' he answered, getting red, 'if -- if we could -- could get any. They're very dear to buy, I'm afraid, and we haven't any of our own. The garden is so small; it isn't like if we lived in the country,' rather dolefully. |
'You wouldn't have known anything about Rock Terrace, or the invisible princess, or the parrot, if we lived in the country,' I reminded him. |
'No,' said Pete, more cheerfully, 'I hadn't thought of that.' |
'And -- ' I went on, 'I daresay I could help you a bit if it really seemed any good,' for I rather liked the idea of giving the little girl some flowers. It made it all look less babyish. |
Peterkin grinned with delight. |
'You are kind, Gilley!' he exclaimed. 'I knew you would be. Oh, bother! here's nurse coming, and we haven't begun to settle anything properly.' |
'There's no hurry,' I said; 'you've forgotten that we certainly can't go there again till Mrs. Wylie's out of the way. And she said, "the end of the week"; that means Saturday, most likely, and this is -- oh dear! I was forgetting -- it's Sunday, and we'll be late.' |
Nurse echoed my words as she came in -- |
'You'll be late, Master Giles, and Master Peterkin, too,' she said. 'I really don't think you should talk so much on Sunday mornings.' |
It wasn't that we had to be any earlier on Sundays than any other day, but that dressing in your best clothes takes so much longer somehow, and we had to have our hair very neat, and all like that, because we generally went down to the dining-room, while papa and mamma and Clement and Blanche were at breakfast, after w... |
There would be no good in trying to remember all our morning talks that week about Peterkin's plans. He did not get the least tired of them, and I didn't, for a wonder, get tired of listening to him, he was so very much in earnest. |
He chopped and changed a good bit in little parts of them, but still he stuck to the general idea, and I helped him to polish it up. It was really more interesting than any of his fairy stories, for he managed to make both himself and me feel as if we were going to be in one of them ourselves. |
So I will skip over that week, and go on to the next. By that time we knew that Mrs. Wylie was in London, because mamma said something one day about having had a letter from her. Nothing to do with the little girl, as far as we knew; I think it was only about somebody who wanted a servant, or something stupid like that... |
It got on to the Monday of the next week again, and by that time Pete had got a sort of start of his plans. He had got leave to come to meet me at the corner of Lindsay Square, once or twice in the last few days. I used to get there about a quarter or twenty minutes to one. We were supposed to leave school not later th... |
Mamma was pleased for Peterkin to want to come to meet me. She was not at all coddling or stupid like that about us boys, though her being in such a fuss that evening Pete was lost may have seemed so. And she was always awfully glad for us to be fond of each other. She used to say she hoped we'd grow up 'friends' as we... |
It wasn't exactly a fit of affection for me, of course, that made Pete want to get into the way of coming to meet me. Still, we were very good friends; especially good friends just then, as you know. |
So that Monday, which luckily happened to be a very nice bright day, he had no difficulty in getting leave for it again. I had promised him to hurry over getting off from school, so we counted on having a good bit of time to spend in looking at the parrot and talking to him, and in 'spying the land' generally, includin... |
I remember all about that Monday morning particularly well. I did hurry off from school as fast as I could, though of course -- I think it nearly always happens so -- ever so many stupid little things turned up to keep me later than I often was. |
I skurried along pretty fast, you may be sure, once I did get out, and it wasn't long before I caught sight of poor old Pete eagerly watching for me at the corner of Lindsay Square. He did not dare to come farther, because, you see, he had promised mamma he never would, and that if I were ever very late he'd go home ag... |
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