[p126]
V
SEPTIMUS SEPTIMUSSON
The wind was screaming over the marsh. It shook the shutters and rattled the windows, and the little boy lay awake in the bare attic. His mother came softly up the ladder stairs shading the flame of the tallow candle with her hand.
‘I’m not asleep, mother,’ said he. And she heard the tears in his voice.
‘Why, silly lad,’ she said, sitting down on the straw-bed beside him and putting the candle on the floor, ‘what are you crying for?’
‘It’s the wind keeps calling me, mother,’ he said. ‘It won’t let me alone. It never has since I put up the little weather-cock for it to play with. It keeps saying, “Wake up, Septimus Septimusson, wake up, you’re the seventh son of a seventh son. You can see the fairies and hear the beasts speak, and you must go out and seek your fortune.” And I’m afraid, and I don’t want to go.’
[p127]
‘I should think not indeed,’ said his mother. ‘The wind doesn’t talk, Sep, not really. You just go to sleep like a good boy, and I’ll get father to bring you a gingerbread pig from the fair to-morrow.’
But Sep lay awake a long time listening to what the wind really did keep on saying, and feeling ashamed to think how frightened he was of going out all alone to seek his fortune—a thing all the boys in books were only too happy to do.
Next evening father brought home the loveliest gingerbread pig with currant eyes. Sep ate it, and it made him less anxious than ever to go out into the world where, perhaps, no one would give him gingerbread pigs ever any more.
Before he went to bed he ran down to the shore where a great new harbour was being made. The workmen had been blasting the big rocks, and on one of the rocks a lot of mussels were sticking. He stood looking at them, and then suddenly he heard a lot of little voices crying, ‘Oh Sep, we’re so frightened, we’re choking.’
The voices were thin and sharp as the edges of mussel shells. They were indeed the voices of the mussels themselves.