Bed-Knob and Broomstick (16 page)

   
As the flying figure approached the stake, the remaining soldier fled to join
the others, clutching his musket. The broomstick and the sweeping black cloak
seemed almost to touch the burning fagots when the children saw a sword flash.

   
"It's her father's sword," exclaimed Charles excitedly. "She's
going to cut him free."
Carey was reminded, watching the awkward efforts to bring the broomstick within
striking distance yet not too close, of a left-handed golfer trying to play
polo.

   
"Oh, dear," she cried in an agony of fear. "She'll cut his head
off."
Emelius, aware at last, twisted and leaned and strained at his cords in terrified
efforts to escape the deadly thrusts. A gust of spark-filled smoke blew against
his face, and the children saw him coughing. Still the attack continued.

   
"Careful," she shouted. "Please, oh please, Miss Price!"
Again there was a report, followed immediately by two others. The soldiers were
firing. Carey, glancing fearfully at the bell-mouthed weapons, wondered how
such guns could miss.

   
"They've got her," said Charles then, in his most reserved voice.

   
"No," cried Carey wildly, "no, they can't have!" Her eyes
flew back to the stake, and she covered her mouth quickly to hold back a scream.

   
The broomstick was poised, motionless, shuddering, above the crackling wood.
The sword dropped and stuck upright, quivering among the fagots. The broomstick
wavered and sank downward toward the smoke and flame. Then, as they watched,
painfully it seemed to pull itself free. It rose a little and made a limping,
hesitating flight toward the head of a road leading out of the square. The soldiers
turned slowly, keeping the fluttering object covered with their guns. Figures
appeared in doorways. Several men, braver than the others, ventured into the
street. All eyes were fixed on the black and tattered object that rose a little
and then sank once more toward the ground, in painful hopping flight.

   
The children no longer watched the stake, where each second for Emelius became
uncomfortably warmer; their eyes were fixed on the broomstick. They gripped
each other in an agony of fear. Nothing seemed to matter in the world except
Miss Price and her safety. As they watched, the broomstick rose a little. Jerkily
swaying, rather drunkenly, as if it had lost its sense of direction, it made
off down the street, at about the level of the first-floor windows.

   
Then a man threw a brick, and the soldiers fired again. The broomstick stopped
in mid-air.

   
For about the twentieth part of a second the children saw the folds of the black
cloak hang limp, before the whole equipage dropped like a stone. Then they could
see it no more. People ran out of doorways, out of yards, out of alleys. Some
were armed with staves, some with clubs; they saw one man, a butcher he must
have been, with a large and shining chopper. All these people made for the spot
where the broomstick had fallen. The narrow mouth of the street was choked with
an ever increasing crowd, composed mostly of boys and men. No one glanced at
the
stake or felt the sudden onslaught of the rain. It poured down suddenly, a slanting
rushing sheet of water, mingling with the tears on Carey's face and turning
the churned dust into mud.

   
"Miss Price . . . Miss Price . . ." sobbed Carey, while the rain ran
down her hair into the neck of her dressing gown. She hardly noticed Charles
had left her side. She did not know how he had got there when she saw him clamber
on the steaming fagots, which hissed and blackened under the downpour. She watched
Charles seize the sword and chop at the ropes that bound Emelius. She saw Emelius
fall forward on the piled wood, and the wood roll from under him. She saw Emelius
hit the ground, and Charles climbing down from the stake, sword in hand. She
saw Emelius picking himself up from the ground in a dazed way, his charred robe
hanging in strips about his yellow-stockinged legs. She saw Charles urging him,
talking to him, pulling him by the arm. Then Charles and Emelius were there
beside her where she leaned with Paul against the cattle pen. Charles was pulling
off Emelius's coat, so that he stood in shirt and breeches and wrinkled yellow
stockings. . . .

   
"Miss Price, Miss Price . . ." Carey went on sobbing.

   
"They won't recognize you so easily like that," Charles was-explaining
to Emelius. "You're not a bit burnt. Lucky your clothes were so wet. Come,
Carey," he went on, looking white but determined. "Do shut up, we've
got to get back to the bed."
"But Miss Price-" cried Carey wildly. "We can't leave Miss Price."
"We must," said Charles. "There's nothing we can do now. She
would want us to be sensible."
Paul began to bellow loudly. He had no inhibitions. If Miss Price was dead,
he was not going to be brave. Paul's noise had a steadying effect on Carey;
she took his hand. "Quiet, Paul," she said, sniffing. "We can
cry when we get home."
They could not walk quickly because Charles had burned his feet. Perhaps it
was just as well; running might have aroused suspicion. Emelius seemed in a
dream. He did not speak and gazed before him as if he still saw a black figure
fluttering wildly on a broomstick. As they neared the gate leading into the
field, the same fear descended on all of them. Suppose the bed had gone. . .
.

   
Carey and Paul had dropped a little behind, and it was Charles who entered the
cowshed first. When Carey heard him exclaim, she deliberately stood still-waiting
there in the squishy grass while the rain poured down. She felt she couldn't
bear much more.

   
"Carey!" Charles was shouting. "Carey! Come and see!"
Carey dragged herself to the door of the cowshed. At first, in the gloom, she
could see nothing. Then she distinguished the outline of the bed. A figure was
lying on it-a figure propped up on one elbow-and a pair of angry eyes met her
own in a stare of baleful accusation.

   
"Oh, Miss Price!" cried Carey. She clutched at the doorpost, as if
she might have fallen.

   
"You may well look guilty," scolded Miss Price. Even in that light
the tip of her nose was an angry pink. "You are the most thoughtless and
untrustworthy children. I distinctly told you to stay by the bed. I've been
frightened out of my wits about you. Out of my wits. I come back here, worn
out with witchcraft, longing to put my feet up for five minutes-and what do
I find?"
"Oh!" cried Carey. She rushed across the cowshed. She flung herself
upon the bed. She sobbed down Miss Price's neck as if her heart would break.

   
"There!" said Miss Price uncomfortably, patting Carey's shoulder blades.
"There! No need to get emotional. We've all been a little upset, that's
what it is."
"You're safe," gasped Carey. "Darling Miss Price. They didn't
kill you."
Miss Price drew her head away as if she were surprised. "Kill me?"
she exclaimed, with something like horror. She stared at them unbelievingly.
"Gracious goodness alive, you didn't imagine that was me on the broomstick?"
"Then what was it,Miss Price?" asked poor Carey, wiping her eyes.
"Whatever was it?"
Miss Price stared at her a moment longer, then she gave a little triumphant
glance in the direction of Emelius. "That," she said, blushing slightly,
"was just a particularly apposite use of intrasubstantiary-locomotion."
But Emelius, stretched out wearily on the hay in the corner, did not even look
up.

   
1O AND FARTHER STILL
Emelius was put to bed in Charles's room and remained there several days. He
was suffering, Miss Price said, from "shock." Charles's feet were
more scorched than burned, and some yellow ointment spread on gauze soon healed
them. In a week's time the vacation would be aver, and Miss Price was gentler,
kinder to them than they had ever known her. She spent her time between packing
for the children and arranging trays for Emelius. She was so kind, so unusually
long-suffering, that the children were a little afraid. They thought Emelius
must be worse than Miss Price had at first supposed. Several times Carey saw
a strange man in the house, and it was not always the same one. Once Miss Price
came downstairs with two of them at her heels. All three went into the dining
room and closed the door, and, for over an hour, the house felt tense with mystery.
She seemed, too, to be writing a lot of letters and running off down to the
village to telephone. But instead of getting fussed, she became kinder and kinder.
They didn't like it at all and were filled with dread when, on the last day
of the holidays, she summoned them rather solemnly into the sitting room, where,
since Emelius came, Charles had been sleeping.

   
The three children sat on Charles's bed, and Miss Price, facing them, took a
little upright chair. There was a feeling of great tenseness in the air.

   
Miss Price cleared her throat and clasped her hands together in her lap.

   
"Children," she said, "what I am going to tell you will not come
altogether as a surprise. You have noticed a good deal of coming and going in
the house during this past week and must have gathered something was afoot."
Miss Price moistened her lips with her tongue and clasped her hands a little
tighter together. The children's eyes watched every movement, seeking some hint
of what was going to come.

   
"I do not possess anything of great value," went on Miss Price, "but
my belongings, such as they are, are in excellent repair. The kitchen sink,
put in only last year, cost me, with the labor, nearly fifty pounds, but I shall
not leave the bathroom fittings. It was a help to me, in making my decision,
to remember that I could take these with me. If I have a weakness, and we all
have many, it is a weakness for modern plumbing. I've nothing against the Simple
Life, assuming that there is such a thing, but bathing in a washtub is so unnecessarily
complicated." Miss Price paused. "The proceeds will go to the Red
Cross," she added.

   
Carey leaned forward. She seemed to hesitate a moment, and then she said: "What
proceeds, Miss Price?"
"I keep telling you, Carey. The proceeds from the sale of the house."
"You're going to sell the house!"
"Carey, try to pay more attention when people are speaking to you. I'm
selling the house and the furniture, except, as I say, the bathroom fittings."
"And you're giving the money to the Red Cross?"
"Every penny."
"Why?" asked Charles.

   
"To compensate this century for the loss of an able-bodied
woman."
Carey began to smile. She half stood up and then sat down again. "I see,"
she said slowly. "Oh, Miss Price-"
"I don't see," complained Charles.

   
"Charles," said Carey, turning to him eagerly. "It's sort of
good and bad news. Miss Price means-" She looked at Miss Price uncertainly.
"I think Miss Price means-"
Miss Price made her face quite expressionless. She cleared her throat. "Perhaps
I didn't make it quite clear, Charles," she conceded, "that Mr. Jones
has asked me to share his life." She allowed Charles a small and dignified
smile. "And I have accepted."
Charles stared. He looked completely bewildered. "You're going to live
in the seventeenth century?"
"Of necessity," said Miss Price. "Mr. Jones can't stay here,
and, there, we have a house and livestock, an orchard -and Mr. Jones has a little
something laid by."
"But how will you go?" asked Charles. "Unless Paul comes too?"
"It's all arranged. Mr. Bisselthwaite will call for you tomorrow morning
and will put you on the train. And this evening, after supper, Paul will stand
on the floor near the head of the bed and twist the knob."
"You're going tonight?" exclaimed Charles.

   
"Unfortunately we must. I dislike doing things in a hurry, but, without
Paul, we have no means of conveyance."
Carey turned sideways, so that she lay on one elbow. She picked some fluff off
the blanket, staring closely at her hand.

   
"Miss Price-" she said.

   
"Well?"
"Will you-" Carey stared hard at the blanket. "Will you like
it?"
Miss Price lifted her hands and let them fall on the arms of the chair. Strangely
enough she did not, as Carey expected, have an answer ready.

   
"Mr. Jones and I," said Miss Price slowly, gazing at the wall as if
she could see through it, "are two lonely people. We shall be better together."
"The bed can never come back," said Charles.

   
Miss Price, gazing at the wall, did not reply.

   
Once again there was a faint film of dust (and two feathers) where the bed had
stood. But this time the room looked barer still, with the rugs rolled up and
the dressing-table drawers left slightly open. A crumpled piece of tissue flew
lightly across the room and caught itself against the leg of the washstand.

   
She had gone. Where a minute before there had been bustle and flurry, tyings-up
and tuckings-in, hurried good-bys and last-minute hugs, there was silence and
emptiness.

   
The bed had been dangerously overloaded. The bathroom plumbing, dissected amateurishly
by Charles and Emelius, and wrapped in ironing blankets and dust sheets, took
up so much room to start with. And then, besides the clothes-basket and two
suitcases, there were the last-minute things that Miss Price could not bear
to leave behind. The silver cream jug, her extra hot-water bottle, an egg beater,
a cake tin tied with string in which she had put her store of tea, some biscuits,
a packet of Ryvita, and six tins of sardines. There were her apostle spoons
and the best tea cloth, her father's sword, her photographs, a bottle of lavender
water. . . . They had tied and retied it all with the clothesline, but, all
the same, it looked terribly perilous with Miss Price and Emelius perched on
top. In spite of everything, Carey pointed out, Miss Price would wear her best
straw hat, which had been "done over" by a woman in the village. "Better
to wear it than pack it," she had insisted, as if there had been no other
alternative. She had cried a little when she said good-by to the children and
reminded them that Mrs. Kit-hatten down the road was coming in to cook their
breakfast; and that their tickets were on the mantelpiece in the dining room;
and that Mr. Bisselthwaite would be there by nine-thirty; and to remind Mrs.
Kithatten that the men would be along any time after one to check on the inventory;
and that they were to boil up the rest of the milk in case it turned before
morning.