The Story of the Amulet Part 12

They all lay still, breathing in the safe, quiet air of Regent's Park.

'We'd better go home at once,' said Anthea presently. 'Old Nurse will be most frightfully anxious. The sun looks about the same as it did when we started yesterday. We've been away twenty-four hours.' 'The buns are quite soft still,' said Cyril, feeling one; 'I suppose the dew kept them fresh.'

They were not hungry, curiously enough.

They picked up the dinner-basket and the Psammead-basket, and went straight home.

Old Nurse met them with amazement.

'Well, if ever I did!' she said. 'What's gone wrong? You've soon tired of your picnic.'

The children took this to be bitter irony, which means saying the exact opposite of what you mean in order to make yourself disagreeable; as when you happen to have a dirty face, and someone says, 'How nice and clean you look!'

'We're very sorry,' began Anthea, but old Nurse said--

'Oh, bless me, child, I don't care! Please yourselves and you'll please me. Come in and get your dinners comf'table. I've got a potato on a-boiling.'

When she had gone to attend to the potatoes the children looked at each other. Could it be that old Nurse had so changed that she no longer cared that they should have been away from home for twenty-four hours--all night in fact--without any explanation whatever?

But the Psammead put its head out of its basket and said--

'What's the matter? Don't you understand? You come back through the charm-arch at the same time as you go through it. This isn't tomorrow!'

'Is it still yesterday?' asked Jane.

'No, it's today. The same as it's always been. It wouldn't do to go mixing up the present and the Past, and cutting bits out of one to fit into the other.'

'Then all that adventure took no time at all?'

'You can call it that if you like,' said the Psammead. 'It took none of the modern time, anyhow.'

That evening Anthea carried up a steak for the learned gentleman's dinner. She persuaded Beatrice, the maid-of-all-work, who had given her the bangle with the blue stone, to let her do it. And she stayed and talked to him, by special invitation, while he ate the dinner.

She told him the whole adventure, beginning with--

'This afternoon we found ourselves on the bank of the River Nile,' and ending up with, 'And then we remembered how to get back, and there we were in Regent's Park, and it hadn't taken any time at all.'

She did not tell anything about the charm or the Psammead, because that was forbidden, but the story was quite wonderful enough even as it was to entrance the learned gentleman.

'You are a most unusual little girl,' he said. 'Who tells you all these things?'

'No one,' said Anthea, 'they just happen.'

'Make-believe,' he said slowly, as one who recalls and p.r.o.nounces a long-forgotten word.

He sat long after she had left him. At last he roused himself with a start.

'I really must take a holiday,' he said; 'my nerves must be all out of order. I actually have a perfectly distinct impression that the little girl from the rooms below came in and gave me a coherent and graphic picture of life as I conceive it to have been in pre-dynastic Egypt.

Strange what tricks the mind will play! I shall have to be more careful.'

He finished his bread conscientiously, and actually went for a mile walk before he went back to his work.

CHAPTER 6. THE WAY TO BABYLON

'How many miles to Babylon?

Three score and ten!

Can I get there by candle light?

Yes, and back again!'

Jane was singing to her doll, rocking it to and fro in the house which she had made for herself and it. The roof of the house was the dining-table, and the walls were tablecloths and antimaca.s.sars hanging all round, and kept in their places by books laid on their top ends at the table edge.

The others were tasting the fearful joys of domestic tobogganing. You know how it is done--with the largest and best tea-tray and the surface of the stair carpet. It is best to do it on the days when the stair rods are being cleaned, and the carpet is only held by the nails at the top.

Of course, it is one of the five or six thoroughly tip-top games that grown-up people are so unjust to--and old Nurse, though a brick in many respects, was quite enough of a standard grown-up to put her foot down on the tobogganing long before any of the performers had had half enough of it. The tea-tray was taken away, and the baffled party entered the sitting-room, in exactly the mood not to be pleased if they could help it.

So Cyril said, 'What a beastly mess!'

And Robert added, 'Do shut up, Jane!'

Even Anthea, who was almost always kind, advised Jane to try another song. 'I'm sick to death of that,' said she.

It was a wet day, so none of the plans for seeing all the sights of London that can be seen for nothing could be carried out. Everyone had been thinking all the morning about the wonderful adventures of the day before, when Jane had held up the charm and it had turned into an arch, through which they had walked straight out of the present time and the Regent's Park into the land of Egypt eight thousand years ago.

The memory of yesterday's happenings was still extremely fresh and frightening, so that everyone hoped that no one would suggest another excursion into the past, for it seemed to all that yesterday's adventures were quite enough to last for at least a week. Yet each felt a little anxious that the others should not think it was afraid, and presently Cyril, who really was not a coward, began to see that it would not be at all nice if he should have to think himself one. So he said--

'I say--about that charm--Jane--come out. We ought to talk about it, anyhow.'

'Oh, if that's all,' said Robert.

Jane obediently wriggled to the front of her house and sat there.

She felt for the charm, to make sure that it was still round her neck.

'It ISN'T all,' said Cyril, saying much more than he meant because he thought Robert's tone had been rude--as indeed it had.

'We ought to go and look for that Amulet. What's the good of having a first-cla.s.s charm and keeping it idle, just eating its head off in the stable.'

'I'M game for anything, of course,' said Robert; but he added, with a fine air of chivalry, 'only I don't think the girls are keen today somehow.'

'Oh, yes; I am,' said Anthea hurriedly. 'If you think I'm afraid, I'm not.'

'I am though,' said Jane heavily; 'I didn't like it, and I won't go there again--not for anything I won't.'

'We shouldn't go THERE again, silly,' said Cyril; 'it would be some other place.'

'I daresay; a place with lions and tigers in it as likely as not.'

Seeing Jane so frightened, made the others feel quite brave. They said they were certain they ought to go.