It was not till after the cold mutton and the jam tart, as well as the tea and bread-and-butter, that anyone found time to regret the golden treasure which had been left scattered on the floor of the underground passage, and which, indeed, no one had thought of till now, since the moment when Cyril burnt his fingers at the flame of the last match.
“What owls and goats we were!” said Robert. “Look how we’ve always wanted treasure—and now—”
“Never mind,” said Anthea, trying as usual to make the best of it. “We’ll go back again and get it all, and then we’ll give everybody presents.”
More than a quarter of an hour passed most agreeably in arranging what presents should be given to whom, and, when the claims of generosity had been satisfied, the talk ran for fifty minutes on what they would buy for themselves.
It was Cyril who broke in on Robert’s almost too technical account of the motorcar on which he meant to go to and from school.
“There!” he said. “Dry up. It’s no good. We can’t ever go back. We don’t know where it is.”
“Don’t you know?” Jane asked the Phoenix, wistfully.
“Not in the least,” the Phoenix replied, in a tone of amiable regret.
“Then we’ve lost the treasure,” said Cyril. And they had.
“But we’ve got the carpet and the Phoenix,” said Anthea.
“Excuse me,” said the bird, with an air of wounded dignity, “I do so hate to seem to interfere, but surely you must mean the Phoenix and the carpet?”
III
The Queen Cook
It was on a Saturday that the children made their first glorious journey on the wishing carpet. Unless you are too young to read at all, you will know that the next day must have been Sunday.
Sunday at 18, Camden Terrace, Camden Town, was always a very pretty day. Father always brought home flowers on Saturday, so that the breakfast-table was extra beautiful. In November, of course, the flowers were chrysanthemums, yellow and coppery coloured. Then there were always sausages on toast for breakfast, and these are rapture, after six days of Kentish Town Road eggs at fourteen a shilling.
On this particular Sunday there were fowls for dinner, a kind of food that is generally kept for birthdays and grand occasions, and there was an angel pudding, when rice and milk and oranges and white icing do their best to make you happy.
After dinner father was very sleepy indeed, because he had been working hard all the week; but he did not yield to the voice that said, “Go and have an hour’s rest.” He nursed the Lamb, who had a horrid cough that cook said was whooping-cough as sure as eggs, and he said—
“Come along, kiddies; I’ve got a ripping book from the library, called The Golden Age, and I’ll read it to you.”
Mother settled herself on the drawing-room sofa, and said she could listen quite nicely with her eyes shut. The Lamb snugged into the “armchair corner” of daddy’s arm, and the others got into a happy heap on the hearthrug. At first, of course, there were too many feet and knees and shoulders and elbows, but real comfort was actually settling down on them, and the Phoenix and the carpet were put away on the back top shelf of their minds (beautiful things that could be taken out and played with later), when a surly solid knock came at the drawing-room door. It opened an angry inch, and the cook’s voice said, “Please, m’, may I speak to you a moment?”
Mother looked at father with a desperate expression. Then she put her pretty sparkly Sunday shoes down from the sofa, and stood up in them and sighed.
“As good fish in the sea,” said father, cheerfully, and it was not till much later that the children understood what he meant.
Mother went out into the passage, which is called “the hall,” where the umbrella-stand is, and the picture of the “Monarch of the Glen” in a yellow shining frame, with brown spots on the Monarch from the damp in the house before last, and there was cook, very red and damp in the face, and with a clean apron tied on all crooked over the dirty one that she had dished up those dear delightful chickens in. She stood there and she seemed to get redder and damper, and she twisted the corner of her apron round her fingers, and she said very shortly and fiercely—
“If you please, ma’am, I should wish to leave at my day month.”
Mother leaned against the hatstand. The children could see her looking pale through the crack of the door, because she had been very kind to the cook, and had given her a holiday only the day before, and it seemed so very unkind of the cook to want to go like this, and on a Sunday too.
“Why, what’s the matter?” mother said.
“It’s them children,” the cook replied, and somehow the children all felt that they had known it from the first. They did not remember having done anything extra wrong, but it is so frightfully easy to displease a cook. “It’s them children: there’s that there new carpet in their room, covered thick with mud, both sides, beastly yellow mud, and sakes alive knows where they got it. And all that muck to clean up on a Sunday! It’s not my place, and it’s not my intentions, so I don’t deceive you, ma’am, and but for them limbs, which they is if ever there was, it’s not a bad place, though I says it, and I wouldn’t wish to leave, but—”
“I’m very sorry,” said mother, gently. “I will speak to the children. And you had better think it over, and if you really wish to go, tell me tomorrow.”
Next day mother had a quiet talk with cook, and cook said she didn’t mind if she stayed on a bit, just to
