Everybody has heard of the Little House in the Kensington Gardens, which is the only house in the whole world that the fairies have built for humans. But no one has really seen it, except just three or four, and they have not only seen it but slept in it, and unless you sleep in it you never see it. This is because it is not there when you lie down, but it is there when you wake up and step outside.
In a kind of way every one may see it, but what you see is not really it, but only the light in the windows. You see the light after Lock-out Time. David, for instance, saw it quite distinctly far away among the trees as we were going home from the pantomime, and Oliver Bailey saw it the night he stayed so late at the Temple, which is the name of his father’s office. Angela Clare, who loves to have a tooth extracted because then she is treated to tea in a shop, saw more than one light, she saw hundreds of them all together, and this must have been the fairies building the house, for they build it every night and always in a different part of the Gardens. She thought one of the lights was bigger than the others, though she was not quite sure, for they jumped about so, and it might have been another one that was bigger. But if it was the same one, it was Peter Pan’s light. Heaps of children have seen the light, so that is nothing. But Maimie Mannering was the famous one for whom the house was first built.
Maimie was always rather a strange girl, and it was at night that she was strange. She was four years of age, and in the daytime she was the ordinary kind. She was pleased when her brother Tony, who was a magnificent fellow of six, took notice of her, and she looked up to him in the right way, and tried in vain to imitate him and was flattered rather than annoyed when he shoved her about. Also, when she was batting she would pause though the ball was in the air to point out to you that she was wearing new shoes. She was quite the ordinary kind in the daytime.
But as the shades of night fell, Tony, the swaggerer, lost his contempt for Maimie and eyed her fearfully, and no wonder, for with dark there came into her face a look that I can describe only as a leary look. It was also a serene look that contrasted grandly with Tony’s uneasy glances. Then he would make her presents of his favourite toys (which he always took away from her next morning), and she accepted them with a disturbing smile. The reason he was now become so wheedling and she so mysterious was (in brief) that they knew they were about to be sent to bed. It was then that Maimie was terrible. Tony entreated her not to do it to-night, and the mother and their coloured nurse threatened her, but Maimie merely smiled her agitating smile. And by-and-by when they were alone with their night-light she would start up in bed crying “Hsh! what was that?” Tony beseeches her: “It was nothing--don’t, Maimie, don’t!” and pulls the sheet over his head. “It is coming hearer!” she cries. “Oh, look at it, Tony! It is feeling your bed with its horns--it is boring for you, oh, Tony, oh!” and she desists not until he rushes downstairs in his combinations, screeching. When they came up to whip Maimie they usually found her sleeping tranquilly, not shamming, you know, but really sleeping, and looking like the sweetest little angel, which seems to me to make it almost worse.
But of course it was daytime when they were in the Gardens, and then Tony did most of the talking. You could gather from his talk that he was a very brave boy, and no one was so proud of it as Maimie. She would have loved to have a ticket on her saying that she was his sister. And at no time did she admire him more than when he told her, as he often did with splendid firmness, that one day he meant to remain behind in the Gardens after the gates were closed.
“Oh, Tony,” she would say, with awful respect, “but the fairies will be so angry!”
“I daresay,” replied Tony, carelessly.
“Perhaps,” she said, thrilling, “Peter Pan will give you a sail in his boat!”
“I shall make him,” replied Tony; no wonder she was proud of him.
But they should not have talked so loudly, for one day they were overheard by a fairy who had been gathering skeleton leaves, from which the little people weave their summer curtains, and after that Tony was a marked boy. They loosened the rails before he sat on them, so that down he came on the back of his head; they tripped him up by catching his boot-lace and bribed the ducks to sink his boat. Nearly all the nasty accidents you meet with in the Gardens occur because the fairies have taken an ill-will to you, and so it behoves you to be careful what you say about them.
Maimie was one of the kind who like to fix a day for doing things, but Tony was not that kind, and when she asked him which day he was to remain behind in the Gardens after Lock-out he merely replied, “Just some day”; he was quite vague about which day except when she asked “Will it be to-day?” and then he could always say for certain that it would not be to-day. So she saw that he was waiting for a real good chance.
This brings us to an afternoon when the Gardens were white with snow, and there was ice on the Round Pond, not thick enough to skate on, but at least you could spoil it for to-morrow by flinging stones, and many bright little boys and girls were doing that.
When Tony and his sister arrived they wanted to go straight to the pond, but their ayah said they must take a sharp walk first, and as she said this she glanced at the time-board to see when the Gardens closed that night. It read half-past five. Poor ayah! she is the one who laughs continuously because there are so many white children in the world, but she was not to laugh much more that day.
Well, they went up the Baby Walk and back, and when the returned to the time-board she was surprised to see that it now read five o’clock for closing time. But she was unacquainted with the tricky ways of the fairies, and so did not see (as Maimie and Tony saw at once) that they had changed the hour because there was to be a ball to-night. She said there was only time now to walk to the top of the Hump and back, and as they trotted along with her she little guessed what was thrilling their little breasts. You see the chance had come of seeing a fairy ball. Never, Tony felt, could he hope for a better chance.
He had to feel this, for Maimie so plainly felt it for him. Her eager eyes asked the question, “Is it to-day?” and he gasped and then nodded. Maimie slipped her hand into Tony’s, and hers was hot, but his was cold. She did a very kind thing; she took off her scarf and gave it to him! “In case you should feel cold,” she whispered. Her face was aglow, but Tony’s was very gloomy.
As they turned on the top of the Hump he whispered to her, “I’m afraid Nurse would see me, so I sha’n’t be able to do it.”
Maimie admired him more than ever for being afraid of nothing but their ayah, when there were so many unknown terrors to fear, and she said aloud, “Tony, I shall race you to the gate,” and in a whisper, “Then you can hide,” and off they ran.
Tony could always outdistance her easily, but never had she known him speed away so quickly as now, and she was sure he hurried that he might have more time to hide. “Brave, brave!” her doting eyes were crying when she got a dreadful shock; instead of hiding, her hero had run out at the gate! At this bitter site Maimie stopped blankly, as if all her lapful of darling treasures were suddenly spilled, and then for very disdain she could not sob; in a swell of protest against all puling cowards she ran to St. Govor’s Well and hid in Tony’s stead.
When the ayah reached the gate and saw Tony far in front she thought her other charge was with him and passed out. Twilight came on, and scores and hundreds of people passed out, including the last one, who always has to run for it, but Maimie saw them not. She had shut her eyes tight and glued them with passionate tears. When she opened them something very cold ran up her legs and up her arms and dropped into her heart. It was the stillness of the Gardens. Then she heard clang, then from another part clang, then clang, clang far away. It was the Closing of the Gates.
Immediately the last clang had died away Maimie distinctly heard a voice say, “So that’s all right.” It had a wooden sound and seemed to come from above, and she looked up in time to see an elm-tree stretching out its arms and yawning.
She was about to say, “I never knew you could speak!” when a metallic voice that seemed to come from the ladle at the well remarked to the elm, “I suppose it is a bit coldish up there?” and the elm replied, “Not particularly, but you do get numb standing so long on one leg,” and he flapped his arms vigorously just as the cabmen do before they drive off. Maimie was quite surprised to see that a number of other tall trees were doing the same sort of thing, and she stole away to the Baby Walk and crouched observantly under a Minorca Holly which shrugged its shoulders but did not seem to mind her.
She was not in the least cold. She was wearing a russet-coloured pelisse and had the hood over her head, so that nothing of her showed except her dear little face and her curls. The rest of her real self was hidden far away inside so many warm garments that in shape she seemed rather like a ball. She was about forty round the waist.
There was a good deal going on in the Baby Walk, when Maimie arrived in time to see a magnolia nd a Persian lilac step over the railing and set off for a smart walk. They moved in a jerky sort of way certainly, but that was because they used crutches. An elderberry hobbled across the walk, and stood chatting with some young quinces, and they all had crutches. The crutches were the sticks that are tied to young trees and shrubs. they were quite familiar objects to Maimie, but she had never known what they were for until to-night.
She peeped up the walk and saw her first fairy. He was a street-boy fairy who was running up the walk closing the weeping trees. The way he did it was this, he pressed a spring in the trunk and they shut like umbrellas, deluging the little plants beneath with snow. “Oh, you naughty, naughty child!” Maimie cried indignantly, for she knew what it was to have a dripping umbrella about your ears.
Fortunately the mischievous fellow was out of earshot, but the chrysanthemums heard her, and they all said so pointedly “Hoity-toity, what is this?” that she had to come out and show herself. Then the whole vegetable kingdom was rather puzzled what to do.
“Of course it is no affair of ours,” a spindle-tree said after they had whispered together, “but you know quite well you ought not to be here, and perhaps our duty is to report you to the fairies; what do you think yourself?”
“I think you should not,” Maimie replied, which so perplexed them that they said petulantly there was no arguing with her. “I wouldn’t ask it of you,” she assured them, “if I thought it was wrong,” and of course after this they could not well carry tales. They then said, “Well-a-day,” and “Such is life!” for they can be frightfully sarcastic, but she felt sorry for those of them who had no crutches, and she said good-naturedly, “Before I go to the fairies’ ball, I should like to take you for a walk one at a time; you can lean on me, you know.”
At this they clapped their hands, and she escorted them up to the Baby Walk and back again, one at a time, putting an arm or a finger round the very frail, setting their leg right when it got too ridiculous, and treating the foreign ones quite as courteously as the English, though she could not understand a word they said.
They behaved well on the whole, though some whimpered that she had not taken them as far as she took Nancy or Grace or Dorothy, and others jagged her, but it was quite unintentional, and she was too much of a lady to cry out. So much walking tired her, and she was anxious to be off to the ball, but she no longer felt afraid. The reason she felt no more fear was that it was now night-time, and in the dark, you remember, Maimie was always rather strange.
They were now loath to let her go, for “If the fairies see you,” they warned her, “they will mischief you, stab you to death or compel you to nurse their children or turn you into something tedious, like an evergreen oak.” As they said this they looked with affected pity at an evergreen oak, for in winter they are very envious of the evergreens.
“Oh, la!” replied the oak bitingly, “how deliciously cosy it is to stand her buttoned to the neck and watch you poor naked creatures shivering!”
This made them sulky though they had really brought it on themselves, and they drew for Maimie a very gloomy picture of the perils that faced her if she insisted on going to the ball.
She learned from a purple filbert that the court was not in its usual good temper at present, the cause being the tantalising heart of the Duke of Christmas Daisies. He was an oriental fairy, very poorly of a dreadful complaint, namely, inability to love, and though he had tried many ladies in many lands he could not fall in love with one of them. Queen Mab, who rules in the Gardens, had been confident that her girls would bewitch him, but alas, his heart, the doctor said, remained cold. This rather irritating doctor, who was his private physician, felt the Duke’s heart immediately after any lady was presented, and then always shook his bald head and murmured, “Cold, quite cold!” Naturally Queen Mab felt disgraced, and first she tried the effect of ordering the court into tears for nine minutes, and then she blamed the Cupids and decreed that they should wear fools’ caps until they thawed the Duke’s frozen heart.
“How I should love to see the Cupids in their dear little fools’ caps!” Maimie cried, and away she ran to look for them very recklessly, for the Cupids hate to be laughed at.
It is always easy to discover where a fairies’ ball is being held, as ribbons are stretched between it and all the populous parts of the Gardens, on which those invited may walk to the dance without wetting their pumps. This night the ribbons were red and looked very pretty on the snow.
Maimie walked alongside one of them for some distance without meeting anybody, but at last she saw a fairy cavalcade approaching. To her surprise they seemed to be returning from the ball, and she had just time to hide from them by bending her knees and holding out her arms and pretending to be a garden-chair. There were six horsemen in front and six behind, in the middle walked a prim lady wearing a long train held up by two pages, and on the train, as if it were a couch, reclined a............