THE TOWN IN THE LIBRARY IN
THE TOWN IN THE LIBRARY
ROSAMUND and Fabian were left alone in the library. You may not believe this; but I advise you to believe everything I tell you, because it is true. Truth is stranger than story-books, and when you grow up you will hear people say this till you grow quite sick of listening to them: you will then want to write the strangest story that ever was—just to show that some stories can be stranger than truth.
Mother was obliged to leave the children alone, because Nurse was ill with measles, which seems a babyish thing for a grown-up nurse to have—but it is quite true. If I had wanted to make up anything I could have said she was ill of a broken heart or a brain-fever, which always happens in books. But I wish to speak the truth even if it sounds silly. And it was measles.
Mother could not stay with the children, because it was Christmas Eve, and on that day a lot of poor old people came up to get their Christmas presents, tea and snuff, and flannel petticoats, and warm capes, and boxes of needles and cottons and things like that. Generally the children helped to give out the presents, but this year Mother was afraid they might be going to have measles themselves, and measles is a nasty forward illness with no manners at all. You can catch it from a person before they know they’ve got it, and if Rosamund and Fabian had been going to have it they might have given it to all the old men and women who came up to get their Christmas presents. And measles is a present no old men or women want to have given them, even at Christmas time, no matter how old they may be. They would not mind brain-fever or a broken heart so much perhaps—because it is more interesting. But no one can think it interesting to have measles, at any rate till you come to the part where they give you jelly and boiled sole.
So the children were left alone. Before Mother went away she said—
“Look here, dears, you may play with your bricks, or make pictures with your pretty blocks that kind Uncle Thomas gave you, but you must not touch the two top-drawers of the bureau. Now don’t forget. And if you’re good you shall have tea with me, and perhaps there will be cake. Now you will be good, won’t you?”
Fabian and Rosamund promised faithfully that they would be very good and that they would not touch the two top-drawers, and Mother went away to see about the flannel petticoats and the tea and snuff and tobacco and things. When the children were left alone, Fabian said—
“I am going to be very good, I shall be much more good than Mother expects me to.”
“We won’t look in the drawers,” said Rosamund, stroking the shiny top of the bureau.