‘Just exactly like,’ every one agreed, and asked whether it was really a secret staircase.
‘It is now, at any rate,’ said the Uncle. ‘It used to be merely the humble backstairs, but I had it shut up because I dislike noise.’
‘We’ll always come down in our bath slippers,’ Caroline promised him. ‘Oh, uncle, you are a darling!’
The Uncle submitted to a complicated threefold embrace, and went back to his brown folio.
‘Now, then,’ said the three, and entered the drawing-room.
You went up three steps to it. That was why you could not reach up from the outside to look through the windows, of which there were three. They were curtained with grey and pink brocade that rhymed with the carpet. There were tall gold-framed mirrors set over marble console tables with golden legs, and round mirrors whose frames had round knobs on them, and oval mirrors with candlesticks branching out from underneath them. There was a golden harp with hardly any of its strings broken, in one corner, and a piano with inlaid woods of varied colours, on which Caroline would have dearly loved to play ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’ and Haydn’s ‘Surprise’; but, as this would have meant Mrs. Wilmington’s surprise too, it was not to be thought of. There were carved Indian cabinets with elephants and lions on them, and Chinese cabinets with mandarins and little-footed gold ladies, and pagodas in ivory under glass cases, and wax flowers also glass-cased. There were statues, tall and white and cold, and boxes of carved ivory and carved ebony, and one of porcupine quills, and one of mother-of-pearl and silver—a work-box that was. There were cushions and chair-seats of faded needlework; old and beautiful and straight-backed chairs and round-backed chairs; two crystal chandeliers that looked like fountains wrong way up; china of all sorts, including a Chinaman who wagged his head when you came near him.
In fact, the room was the kind of room you sometimes find in houses where the same family has lived for many many many years, and each generation has taken care of the beautiful things left by its ancestors, and has added one or two more beautiful things, to be taken care of by the generation that is to come after. You could have amused yourself there for an hour just by looking; and the three C.’s remembered joyously that they had not been forbidden to touch.
It is wonderful how careful children can be if they do not allow their minds to wander from their determination to be careful. The three C.’s looked at everything and touched a good many things, and did not break or hurt anything at all. They examined the cabinets, opening their doors and pulling out every drawer in the hope of discovering some secret place where The Book might be. But they only found coins and medals and chessmen and draughts and spellicans, bright foreign sea-shells, a sea-horse and a snake skin, some mother-of-pearl counters and ivory draughts, and an ivory cribbage board inlaid with brass that shone like gold.
‘It’s no good,’ said Charles at last, pulling out one of the lacquered drawers; ‘let’s play spellicans. It’s a nice quiet game that grown-ups like you to play, and we owe the Uncle something.’
‘Let’s have just one more look,’ Charlotte pleaded. ‘Oh, I say, we haven’t looked at the books yet.’