It was the one thing, however, that they couldn’t persuade Rupert to be sure of. He was certainly better, but, as he pointed out, he might have got better without the rose leaves.
‘Of course it was jolly decent of you to get them, and all that,’ he said; ‘but the medicine the doctor gave me cured me, I expect. I don’t want to be ungrateful, but what are doctors for, anyhow?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Charles, ‘but I know you jolly well tried fern-seed when you pretended to be invisible.’
‘I feel much older than I did then,’ said Rupert, biting ends of grass as he lay on the dry crisp turf. It was the first day of his being loosed from those bonds which hamper the movements of persons who have been ill. You know the sort of times when you feel perfectly well, and yet, merely because you have a cold or measles or something, you are kept in when you want to go out, and sent out (in what is called ‘the best of the day’) when you want to stay in, and little driblets of medicine are brought you when you feel least need of them, and glasses of hot milk and cups of beef-tea occur just when you are thinking fondly of roast beef and suet pudding, and you are assured that what you need is not heavy food like pudding and beef, but something light and at the same time nourishing. Also you have to go to bed earlier than the others and not to sit in draughts.
However, all this was now over for Rupert, and he was one of the others, on a natural meal-footing. His parents, by the way, had telegraphed thanking Uncle Charles very much, and accepting his invitation for Rupert to spend the rest of the holidays at the Manor House. They had also telegraphed to the Murdstone master telling him that Rupert would not return to him. So that now there seemed to be no bar to complete enjoyment, except that one little fact that Rupert wouldn’t believe in spells.
‘But the fern-seed acted,’ said Caroline, ‘and the secret rose acted, and the Rosicurian rose leaves acted.’
‘I don’t see how you can say the fern-seed acted. I wasn’t invisible, because you all saw me through the window.’
‘Oh, but,’ said Charlotte eagerly, ‘don’t you see? You wanted us to see you. You can’t expect a spell to act if you don’t want it to act. I wouldn’t myself, if I was a spell.’
‘It wasn’t that at all,’ said Caroline; ‘don’t you remember we chewed the fern-seed to make us see invisible things, and we saw you. And you were invisible, because you’d chewed fern-seed too. It came out just perfectly. Only you won’t see it. But let’s try it again if you like—the fern-seed, I mean.’
But Rupert wouldn’t. He preferred to read The Dog Crusoe, lying on his front upon the grass. The others also got books.