The Phoenix and the Carpet by E. Nesbit

Author:E. Nesbit
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780141937472
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2008-11-22T05:00:00+00:00

The stone was heaved up. It swung up on a creaking, unwilling hinge, and showed a growing oblong of dazzling daylight; and it fell back with a bang against something that kept it upright. Every one climbed out, but there was not room for every one to stand comfortably in the little paved house where they found themselves, so when the Phoenix had fluttered up from the darkness they let the stone down, and it closed like a trap-door, as indeed it was.

You can have no idea how dusty and dirty the children were. Fortunately there was no one to see them but each other. The place they were in was a little shrine, built on the side of a road that went winding up through yellow-green fields to the topless tower. Below them were fields and orchards, all bare boughs and brown furrows, and little houses and gardens. The shrine was a kind of tiny chapel with no front wall – just a place for people to stop and rest in and wish to be good. So the Phoenix told them. There was an image that had once been brightly coloured, but the rain and snow had beaten in through the open front of the shrine, and the poor image was dull and weather-stained. Under it was written: ‘St Jean de Luz. Priez pour nous.’ It was a sad little place, very neglected and lonely, and yet it was nice, Anthea thought, that poor travellers should come to this little rest-house in the hurry and worry of their journeyings and be quiet for a few minutes, and think about being good. The thought of St Jean de Luz – who had, no doubt, in his time, been very good and kind – made Anthea want more than ever to do something kind and good.

‘Tell us,’ she said to the Phoenix, ‘what is the good and kind action the carpet brought us here to do?’

‘I think it would be kind to find the owners of the treasure and tell them about it,’ said Cyril.

‘And give it them all?’ said Jane.

‘Yes. But whose is it?’

‘I should go to the first house and ask the name of the owner of the castle,’ said the golden bird, and really the idea seemed a good one.

They dusted each other as well as they could and went down the road. A little way on they found a tiny spring, bubbling out of the hillside and falling into a rough stone basin surrounded by draggled hart’s-tongue ferns, now hardly green at all. Here the children washed their hands and faces and dried them on their pocket-handkerchiefs, which always, on these occasions, seem unnaturally small. Cyril’s and Robert’s handkerchiefs, indeed, rather undid the effects of the wash. But in spite of this the party certainly looked cleaner than before.

The first house they came to was a little white house with green shutters and a slate roof. It stood in a prim little garden, and down each side of the neat path were large stone vases for flowers to grow in; but all the flowers were dead now.

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