The Wonderful Garden; or, The Three Cs

by E. Nesbit

Rupert, once safely landed in the drawing-room, found the leopard skin easily enough, but the needle and cotton were not so easily found. He found a work-table indeed, made of satinwood, inlaid with ivory and lined with faded red velvet, where were reels of silk and flat ivory winders with thread on them, but all the needles were red with rust, and fast embedded in their cushions and cases. He looked round. None of the cabinets looked as though they held needles. And besides, what was the use of finding more rusty needles? One rusty needle was as useful, or rather as useless, as fifty could be. He thought of using the blind-cords instead of cotton, but they were too thick, and one could not push them through the leopard skin without tearing it. Then he saw the golden quiet harp standing in its far corner. Its strings perhaps? But he did not know how to unstring a harp, and when he touched one of its fine wires, just the thing for sewing with without a needle, it gave out the thin sweet ghost of a note of music, faint indeed, but loud enough to warn him of the cry it could and would give if he attempted violence. The harp quivered under his hands as he gently let the string go, and something rattled. It was the lid of a sort of box in the pedestal of the harp.

‘Perhaps they kept spare strings there,’ Rupert thought, and opened the lid.

‘They,’ it seemed, had kept spare strings here, and here the spare strings still lay, coiled neatly in little round boxes. Rupert opened several, and choosing the thinner strings, put them in his pocket. One box rattled dryly in his hand, and when he opened it there were no strings, only a number of odd, flat, pinkish heart-shaped seeds. On the box was written, ‘Seed of the F. of H.D. Sow only in the way and on the day.’

He put its lid on and thought, then, no more of the box. But afterwards he remembered it.

And now, with the leopard’s skin in his arms and the wires in his pockets, Rupert went cautiously to the window. Yes, all was safe; so William’s signal told him. He dropped the bright skin into William’s hands, and himself dropped to the ground.

‘I’ve thought of something better than straw,’ he said, when he and William and the leopard skin were alone together in the harness-room. And William, when the new thought was explained to him, slapped his leg harder, and laughed more thoroughly than before.

Rupert had only just entered the secret passage, his first match had just gone out, when he heard the children at the other end. He went towards them, fully meaning to explain what sort of leopard he was, and what sort of joke—he called it a joke to himself—he and William had arranged to play upon Poad. But when he heard them speak, and saw the showers of leopard’s-bane fall on the flags of the passage, he, as he put it later, ‘played up.’ And when the children had gone, he laughed softly to himself and began to think what would be the best spot in the tunnel to wait for Poad in. He had noticed, by the light of that first match, an arched recess, the one, you remember, where the children stored their sacks of wet rose leaves the night they played at Rosicurians and cured Rupert. He would hide in this, and then, when Poad came along, he would jump out at him with that snarl which had sounded so well when he met the children.

He waited till the garden door was locked, and then felt for his matches. He could not find them. He must have dropped them when he was pretending to the children. He felt along the floor, but there were no matches to be found. Never mind, he could feel his way in the dark. He knew exactly where the arch was. To the left, about three-quarters of the way down the passage. He stood up and laid his hand upon the wall, walked forward till he felt the corner of the recess, and stooped to curl himself up in it and wait for Poad. He put his hand out to steady himself as he sat down, and his hand touched, not the stone floor, but soft warm fur. And not dry hard fur like that which he himself wore, sewn tightly round him with harp-strings, but living fur, on a living creature. He drew back his hand, and a cold sweat of horror broke out on his forehead, and the little hairs on the back of his neck seemed to move by themselves. His hand still felt the dreadful warm softness of that fur. It almost seemed to him that he had felt the spots on it.

‘Oh, I wish I hadn’t!’ said Rupert to himself, as so many of us have said when it was too late to say anything. ‘Oh, I wish I hadn’t!’

He stood perfectly still in the mockery of his sewn-on leopard skin, waiting for the real leopard to move, or to settle down. Perhaps it would settle down? The leopard must have crept in when the door into the garden was opened in readiness for the children to pass through. It must have gone to sleep there, and perhaps he had not roused it.