Читать книгу Ring O' Bells Mystery - Enid blyton - Страница 6

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As the children went past the queer little “Mother Hubbard” cottage, they peeped over the high garden wall of stone, just to see if they could spy “Old Grandad” there.

They saw a tiny old man fast asleep in a chair, propped up with cushions. A long clay-pipe dangled in one gnarled, wrinkled hand. He had a little fringe of fluffy white hair round his head, which otherwise was quite pink and bald. His nose was a mere button, but his eyebrows made up for that. They jutted out fiercely and shaggily, snow-white and thick, almost hiding his closed eyes.

“He looks fierce, except for his nose,” said Diana in a low voice. “Look at his mouth, with its stuck-out lower lip, and his chin with the funny bit of white beard on it. Do you suppose he really is a hundred years old?”

“He looks two hundred,” said Snubby. “Get down, Loony, you ass. I warn you, Grandad won’t stand any nonsense from a silly young thing like you. Get hold of Loopy, Di—he looks as if he’s going to leap over the wall.”

“We’ll certainly come back and talk to him,” said Roger. “A hundred years old! The things he could remember! He’s a bit of living history.”

They went on their way, and soon came to Ring O’ Bells Hall. It was a big, grand building, but rather grim looking, built of such solid grey-white stone that it looked as if not even a bomb would disturb it.

It had two towers, one square, and one round, which seemed queer to the children. A stone-flagged path led up to the great door, which was studded with iron nails. It was open.

The children went in with the dogs. A cold voice greeted them. “Dogs not allowed inside, please. Tie them up outside.”

“But they’ll bark their heads off!” protested Snubby.

“Then don’t come in yourselves,” said the voice. At first they could not see who was speaking, because the great hall of the building was dark, lit only by a slit of a window at one end, and the dim light that came through the front door.

Then they saw that there was a table set at one side of the hall, and a woman sat there, knitting. She was dressed very neatly in plain black, and her grey hair was strained away from her white face, and put into a bun at the back. She was rather shapeless, and her hands looked very big and bony as she clicked her knitting-needles in and out.

The children didn’t like her face very much. The mouth was set in what was meant to be a smile, but the small black eyes above it were hard and unsmiling as they looked over at the three children and the dogs. How old was she? She might have been any age, Diana thought.

“We thought we might see round the Hall,” she said, at last. “Are we allowed to?”

“Yes, but not with dogs,” said the woman. “Not allowed, as I told you. This place has some very valuable old furniture and ornaments in it, and no animals are allowed inside. They might cause great damage.”

“Well, that’s fair enough, I suppose,” said Roger, and he took Loony and Loopy outside. They didn’t in the least mind going, because neither of them liked the great cold Hall, nor the small cold woman. Roger tied them to a post, put their bones down beside them, and left them, hoping that they wouldn’t begin barking.

They paid their fees to the woman. She put down her knitting, rolled up her wool, and wrote down the sums of money in her big account book, which lay open before her.

Then she got up. The children followed her round the mansion. It felt a dead, forgotten place, and everywhere struck cold, that lovely warm May morning. Diana shivered. She didn’t like any of it much.

The woman recited long strings of facts about the old place, but she didn’t make them sound very interesting.

“In 1645 Hugh Dourley lived in this Hall, and it was he who first caused it to be called Ring O’ Bells,” she droned on.

“Why?” asked Snubby, his interest caught at last.

“He had a peal of bells put in the south tower,” said the woman, beginning to gabble. “He rang them when he had anything to rejoice about. But one night they rang themselves, so it’s said—and it wasn’t because there was anything to rejoice about, either. His eldest son had been killed, and he didn’t know. But the bells rang at the very moment of his death.”

This sounded rather weird. The children were now at the bottom of the square south tower. A small spiral stairway went up, and they wondered if they might climb it.

“Yes, climb up if you want to,” said the woman. “You’ll see the bells hanging there, high up. They say they’re still the same ones that Hugh Dourley put in, but it stands to reason they can’t be.”

The children climbed up the stairway. It was steep and narrow and twisted sharply, so that it was difficult to climb without slipping.

At the top of the stairway was a small platform. The children looked up, and saw, high above their heads, a cluster of bells, hanging silently on what looked like thick ropes.

Snubby stared at the bells, and his hands itched to ring them. Snubby always liked anything that made a loud noise.

“Can we ring them?” he asked, feeling, of course, perfectly certain of the answer.

The guide-woman looked shocked. “Of course not,” she said. “Whatever would people think?”

“I don’t know,” said Snubby. “We could ring the bells and find out.”

“There aren’t any ropes to ring the bells,” said Diana. Sure enough, there were no long ropes hanging down to the little platform they stood on. The bells hung high up on their own short ropes, and there was no way of ringing them at all.

“They’ll never ring again,” said the guide. “People say they’ll ring only when enemies come to Ring O’ Bells, but that’s nonsense. How can bells ring if there’s nothing to peal them with?”

“And what enemies could come here, to this little out-of-the-way place?” said Diana. “Roger, isn’t this a queer tower, with its tiny spiral staircase, and its long-forgotten bells, unable to ring ever again.”

“You sound very dismal,” said Roger. “Like me to throw up a stone and make one of the bells ring?”

“Now, now,” said the woman sharply. “Don’t talk like that or I shall have to ask you to go.”

“I’m only funning,” said Roger, grinning. “What else is there to see?”

The history of the old place was full of boring recitals of this person and that person, who happened to have lived in the house. The children followed the guide about, yawning, but one piece of information made them prick up their ears.

“The Lady Paulet had a secret chamber made in the fire-place here,” droned the guide, as she took them into a small room with an enormous fire-place. All the rooms had big, old-fashioned fire-places. The children had actually been able to stand upright in some of them, their heads and shoulders up the wide chimney. There was no soot, because it was years now since Ring O’ Bells Hall had been lived in.

“A secret chamber!” said Roger. “Where?” He gazed at the big fire-place, and could not imagine where any secret room could be.

“Look up the chimney,” said the guide. “You will see what looks like two steps there, cut in the wall of the chimney. If you go up those steps, and then put out your hand, you will feel a cavity behind the fire-place there. It is big enough for a man to step inside and hide.”

“Can we go and see?” asked Snubby, eagerly, visualising a proper little secret room, with perhaps a small table and a bench, as dark as pitch.

“If you like,” said the woman, and she produced a torch, which she held out to them. Roger went first. He shone the torch up the wide chimney, and saw the two rough steps hewn there in the side. He climbed up and began to feel about for the cavity the woman had mentioned. He soon found it. It was a fairly big hole, taller than he was, and he found that he could easily step into it.

But that was all he could do! There was no room for anything except just his own body! It wasn’t so much a secret room, as a secret place to hide in, just big enough to take a man—and woe betide him if there should happen to be a fire on the hearth!

“He’d be suffocated, or would be cooked,” thought Roger, getting down thankfully, and handing the torch to Diana. He gave her a shove up. She didn’t like the cavity at all when she felt it and shone her torch there. She wouldn’t go into it.

“Ugh! It’s horrid!” she said. “It feels so dirty too. Fancy hiding there! Why, it would only just about take a grown-up.”

Snubby went next, and he, of course, insisted on squeezing himself right into the cavity, and feeling all round it, just in case there was something else to find. But there wasn’t. It was just what it was meant to be—a temporary hiding-place for some man in danger. Snubby found that he could sit down in it too. The others got impatient and called to him. “Snubby! Come along! You’ll get filthy.”

Roger was very dirty through getting into the cavity. He hadn’t realised it might be so filthy. As for Snubby, when he finally jumped down on to the big stone hearth, and appeared before the others, they could hardly believe their eyes. He looked like a sweep!

“I say—Miss Pepper’s going to have something to say to you,” said Diana. “Keep away from me, for goodness’ sake. You look awful—and you smell awful too. Just like you to get dirtier than anyone else, Snubby. Keep away from me, I said!”

Snubby blew down at himself, feeling rather dismayed to see his coating of dirt. He glanced at the guide and caught a look of pleasure on her face. “Horrid old thing!” he thought. “She only encouraged us to get into that cavity because she thought we’d get black, and be rowed when we got home.”

He went near to her and banged himself violently as if to get rid of the dust and soot. Some flew over her, and she started back in disgust.

“You’d better go home and clean up,” she said.

“Oh, no!” said Snubby at once. “OH, no! We haven’t seen the thing we want to see most—the secret passage. Where is that? We want to see it, please.”