The Railway Children | Page 8

Phyllis's shoe-laces had come
undone.

"Come," said Mother, "we've got to walk. There aren't any cabs here."
The walk was dark and muddy. The children stumbled a little on the
rough road, and once Phyllis absently fell into a puddle, and was picked
up damp and unhappy. There were no gas-lamps on the road, and the
road was uphill. The cart went at a foot's pace, and they followed the
gritty crunch of its wheels. As their eyes got used to the darkness, they
could see the mound of boxes swaying dimly in front of them.
A long gate had to be opened for the cart to pass through, and after that
the road seemed to go across fields--and now it went down hill.
Presently a great dark lumpish thing showed over to the right.
"There's the house," said Mother. "I wonder why she's shut the
shutters."
"Who's SHE?" asked Roberta.
"The woman I engaged to clean the place, and put the furniture straight
and get supper."
There was a low wall, and trees inside.
"That's the garden," said Mother.
"It looks more like a dripping-pan full of black cabbages," said Peter.
The cart went on along by the garden wall, and round to the back of the
house, and here it clattered into a cobble-stoned yard and stopped at the
back door.
There was no light in any of the windows.
Everyone hammered at the door, but no one came.
The man who drove the cart said he expected Mrs. Viney had gone
home.
"You see your train was that late," said he.

"But she's got the key," said Mother. "What are we to do?"
"Oh, she'll have left that under the doorstep," said the cart man; "folks
do hereabouts." He took the lantern off his cart and stooped.
"Ay, here it is, right enough," he said.
He unlocked the door and went in and set his lantern on the table.
"Got e'er a candle?" said he.
"I don't know where anything is." Mother spoke rather less cheerfully
than usual.
He struck a match. There was a candle on the table, and he lighted it.
By its thin little glimmer the children saw a large bare kitchen with a
stone floor. There were no curtains, no hearth-rug. The kitchen table
from home stood in the middle of the room. The chairs were in one
corner, and the pots, pans, brooms, and crockery in another. There was
no fire, and the black grate showed cold, dead ashes.
As the cart man turned to go out after he had brought in the boxes,
there was a rustling, scampering sound that seemed to come from
inside the walls of the house.
"Oh, what's that?" cried the girls.
"It's only the rats," said the cart man. And he went away and shut the
door, and the sudden draught of it blew out the candle.
"Oh, dear," said Phyllis, "I wish we hadn't come!" and she knocked a
chair over.
"ONLY the rats!" said Peter, in the dark.

Chapter II.

Peter's coal-mine.
"What fun!" said Mother, in the dark, feeling for the matches on the
table. "How frightened the poor mice were--I don't believe they were
rats at all."
She struck a match and relighted the candle and everyone looked at
each other by its winky, blinky light.
"Well," she said, "you've often wanted something to happen and now it
has. This is quite an adventure, isn't it? I told Mrs. Viney to get us some
bread and butter, and meat and things, and to have supper ready. I
suppose she's laid it in the dining-room. So let's go and see."
The dining-room opened out of the kitchen. It looked much darker than
the kitchen when they went in with the one candle. Because the kitchen
was whitewashed, but the dining-room was dark wood from floor to
ceiling, and across the ceiling there were heavy black beams. There was
a muddled maze of dusty furniture--the breakfast- room furniture from
the old home where they had lived all their lives. It seemed a very long
time ago, and a very long way off.
There was the table certainly, and there were chairs, but there was no
supper.
"Let's look in the other rooms," said Mother; and they looked. And in
each room was the same kind of blundering half-arrangement of
furniture, and fire-irons and crockery, and all sorts of odd things on the
floor, but there was nothing to eat; even in the pantry there were only a
rusty cake-tin and a broken plate with whitening mixed in it.
"What a horrid old woman!" said Mother; "she's just walked off with
the money and not got us anything to eat at all."
"Then shan't we have any supper at all?" asked Phyllis, dismayed,
stepping back on to