Alice stopped to think a little. All things looked so uninviting that she would rather keep her distance. Surely now that the sun had departed – whether well or otherwise – some other time would do as nicely for going on with the business. There was nothing said of any special hurry, so far as she could remember; and what could be a more stupid thing than to try to unlock an ancient door without any light for the keyhole? She had a very great mind to go back, and to come again in the morning.
She turned with a quick turn towards the light, and the comfort, and the company; then suddenly she remembered how she had boasted of her courage; and who would be waiting to laugh at her, if she came back without her errand. Fearing further thought, she ran like a sunset cloud up the stairway.
Fifty or sixty steps went by her before she had time to think of them; a few in the light of loopholes, but the greater part in governed gloom, or shadowy mixture flickering. Then at the top she stopped to breathe, and recover her wits, for a moment. Here a long black door repelled her – a door whose outside she knew pretty well, but had no idea of the other side. Upon this, she began to think again; and her thoughts were almost too much for her.
With a little sigh that would have moved all imaginable enemies, the swiftly sensitive girl called up the inborn spirit of her race, and her own peculiar romance. These in combination scarcely could have availed her to turn the key, unless her father had happened to think of oiling it with a white pigeon’s feather.
When she heard the bolt shoot back, she made the best of a bad affair. “In for a penny, in for a pound;” “faint heart is fain;” “two bites at a cherry;” and above all, “noblesse oblige.” With all these thoughts to press her forward, in she walked, quite dauntlessly.
And lo, there was nothing to frighten her. Everything looked as old and harmless as the man who had loved them all; having made or befriended them. His own little lathe, with its metal bed (cast by himself from a mixture of his own, defying the rust of centuries), wanted nothing more than dusting, and some oil on the bearings. And the speculum he had worked so hard at, for a reflecting telescope – partly his own idea, and partly reflected (as all ideas are) some years ere the time of Gregory – the error in its grinding, which had driven him often to despair, might still be traced by an accurate eye through the depth of two hundred dusty years. Models, patterns, moulds, and castings, – many of which would have shown how slowly our boasted discoveries have grown, – also favourite tools, and sundry things past out of their meaning, lay about among their fellows, doomed alike to do no work, because the man who had kept them moving was shorter-lived than they were.
Now young Alice stood among them, in a reverential way. They were, of course, no more than other things laid by to rust, according to man’s convenience. And yet she could not make up her mind to meddle with any one of them. So that she only looked about, and began to be at home with things.
Her eager mind was always ready to be crowded with a rash young interest in all things. It was the great fault of her nature that she never could perceive how very far all little things should lie beneath her notice. So that she now had really more than she could contrive to take in all at once.
But while she stood in this surprise, almost forgetting her errand among the multitude of ideas, a cloud above the sunset happened to be packed with gorgeous light. Unbosoming itself to the air in the usual cloudy manner, it managed thereby to shed down some bright memories of the departed one. And hence there came a lovely gleam of daylight’s afterthought into the north-western facet of the old eight-sided room. Alice crossed this glance of sunset, wondering what she was to do, until she saw her shadow wavering into a recess of wall. There, between the darker windows to the right hand of the door, a little hover of refraction, striking upon reflection, because it was fugitive, caught her eyes. She saw by means of this a keyhole in a brightened surface, on a heavy turn of wall that seemed to have no meaning. In right of discovery up she ran, passed her fingers over a plate of polished Sussex iron, and put her key into the hole, of course.
The lock had been properly oiled perhaps, and put into working order sometimes, even within the last hundred years. But still it was so stiff that Alice had to work the key both ways, and with both hands, ere it turned. And even after the bolt went back, she could not open the door at once, perhaps because the jamb was rusty, or the upper hinge had given forward. Whatever the hesitation was, the girl would have no refusal. She set the key crosswise in the lock, and drew one corner of her linen handkerchief through the loop of it, and then tied a knot, and, with both hands, pulled. Inasmuch as her handkerchief was not made of gauze, or lace, or gossamer, and herself of no feeble material, the heavy door gave way at last, and everything lay before her.
“Is that all? oh, is that all?” she cried in breathless disappointment, and yet laughing at herself. “No jewels, no pearls, no brooches, or buckles, or even a gold watch! And the great Astrologer must have foreseen how sadly, in this year of our reckoning, I should be longing for a gold watch! Alas! without it, what is the use of being ‘brave and beautiful’? Here is nothing more than dust, mouldy old deeds, and a dirty cushion!”
Alice had a great mind at first to run back to her father and tell him that, after all, there was nothing found that would be worth the carrying. And she even turned, and looked round the room, to support this strong conclusion. But the weight of ancient wisdom (pressed on the young imagination by the stamp of mystery) held her under, and made her stop from thinking her own thoughts about it. “He must have known better, of course, than I do. Only look at his clever tools! I am sure I could live in this room for a week, and never be afraid of anything.”
But even while she was saying this to herself, with the mind in command of the heart, and a fine conscientious courage, there came to her ears, or seemed to come, a quiet, low, unaccountable sound. It may have been nothing, as she tried to think, when first she began to recover herself; or it may have been something, quite harmless, and most easily traced to its origin. But whatever it was, in a moment it managed to quench her desire to live in that room. With quick hands, now delivered from their usual keen sense of grime, she snatched up whatever she saw in the cupboard, and banged the iron door and locked it, with a glance of defiant terror over the safer shoulder first, and then over the one that was nearer the noise.
Then she knew that she had done her duty very bravely; and that it would be a cruel thing to expect her to stay any longer. And, so to shut out all further views of anything she had no right to see, she slipped back the band of her beautiful hair, and, under that cover, retreated.
CHAPTER X.
A BOY AND A DONKEY
At this very time there happened to be a boy of no rank, and of unknown order, quietly jogging homeward. He differed but little from other boys; and seemed unworthy of consideration, unless one stopped to consider him. Because he was a boy by no means virtuous, or valiant, neither gifted by nature with any inborn way to be wonderful. Having nothing to help him much, he lived among the things that came around him, to his very utmost; and he never refused a bit to eat, because it might have been a better bit. And now and then, if he got the chance (without any more in the background than a distant view of detection), he had been imagined perhaps to lay hand upon a stray trifle that would lie about, and was due, but not paid, to his merits. Nobody knew where this boy came from, or whether he came at all indeed, or was only the produce of earth or sky, at some improper conjuncture. Nothing was certain about him; except that there he was; and he meant to stay; and people, for the most part, liked him. And many women would been glad to love him, in a protective way, but for the fright by all of them felt, by reason of the magistrates.
These had settled it long ago, at every kind of session, that this boy (though so comparatively honest)