"And in February there'll be such a lot of scarlet fever in the southern portions of England," added the little Corona. "Oh, Corney, just look at that kitty on the airey railings!"

"Area, Corona," corrected her brother. "Oh, my! ain't it funny?"

The Prophet remembered that he was travelling with the scions of a prophetic house.

It seemed many years before the 'bus stopped before a brick building full of quart pots, situated upon a gentle eminence sloping to a coal-yard, and the voice of the conductor proclaimed that the place of repose was reached. The Prophet and his diminutive guides descended from the roof and were shortly in a train puffing between the hunched backs of abominable little houses, sooty as street cats and alive with crying babies. Then bits of waste land appeared, bald wildernesses in which fragments of broken crockery hibernated with old tin cans and kettles yellow as dying leaves. A furtive brown rivulet wandered here and there like a thing endeavouring to conceal itself and unable to find a hiding-place.

"That's the Mouse, Mr. Vivian," remarked Capricornus, proudly. "We shall soon be there."

"Ridiculum mus," rejoined his sister, who evidently took after her learned mother.

"Culus, Corona; and you're not to say that. Pater familias says that the Mouse is a n.o.ble stream. We get out here, Mr. Vivian."

Here proved to be a wayside station on the very bank of the n.o.ble stream, and on the edge of a piece of waste ground so large that it might almost have been called country.

The Prophet and the two kids set off across this earth, which was named by the inhabitants "the Common." In the distance rose a fringe of detached brick and stone villas towards which Capricornus now pointed a forefinger that trembled with pride.

"That's where we live," he said, in a voice that was grown squeaky from conceit.

"Dulce domus," piped his sister, clutching the skirt of the Prophet's coat, and, thus supported, performing several very elaborate dancing steps upon the clayey soil over which he was feebly staggering. "Dulce dulce, dulce domus. Look at that rat, Corney!"

A large, raking rodent, indeed, at that instant emerged from the wreckage of what had once been a copper cauldron near by, and walked slowly away towards a slope of dust garnished with broken bottles and abandoned cabbage stalks. The Prophet shuddered and longed to flee, but the two kids, as if divining his thought, now clasped his hands and led him firmly forward to a yellow villa, fringed with white Bath stone and garnished plentifully with griffins. From its flat front shot ostentatiously forth a porch adorned with Roman columns which commanded a near view of the Mouse, and before the porch was a small garden in which several healthy-looking nettles had made their home.

As the Prophet and the two kids approached this delightful abode, a white face appeared, gluing itself to the pane of an upper window.

"There's pater familias!" piped Capricornus. "Don't he look ill?"

As they mounted the flight of imitation marble steps the face disappeared abruptly.

"He's coming to let us in," said Capricornus. "You're sure you've brought the crab and all the rashes?"

"Quite sure."

"Because, if you haven't, I don't know whatever mater familias'll--"

At this moment the portal of the lodge was furtively opened about half an inch, and a very small segment of ashen-coloured human face, containing a large and apprehensive eye, was shown in the aperture.

"Are you alone?" said the hollow voice of Mr. Sagittarius.

"Quite, quite alone," said the Prophet, rea.s.suringly.

"It's all right, pater familias!" cried Capricornus. "He's brought all the rashes and the first tooth and everything. I made him."

"I don't think he wanted to," added the little Corona, suddenly developing malice.

"I've taken this long journey, Mr. Sagittarius," said the Prophet, with a remnant of self-respect, "at your special request. Am I to be permitted to come in?"

"If you're sure you're quite alone," returned the sage, showing a slightly enlarged segment of face.

"I am quite sure--positive!"

At this the door was opened just sufficiently to admit the pa.s.sage of one thin person at a time, and, in single file, the Prophet, Corona and Capricornus pa.s.sed into the lodge.

CHAPTER XV

THE PROPHET CREATES A DIVERSION AT HIS OWN EXPENSE

On stepping into a small vestibule, paved with black and white lozenges, and fitted up with an iron umbrella stand, a Moorish lamp and a large yellow china pug dog, the Prophet found himself at once faced by Mr.

Sagittarius, whose pallid countenance, nervous eye and suspicious demeanour plainly proclaimed him to be, as he had stated, very rightly and properly going about in fear of his life.

"Go to the schoolroom, my darlings," he whispered to his children. "Why, what have you there?"

"Choclets," said Capricornus.

"From the pretty lady, mulius pulchrum," added the little Corona.

"Who is a mulibus pulchrum, my love?" asked Mr. Sagittarius, before Capricornus had time to correct his sister's Latin.

"It was Miss Minerva," said the Prophet. "We happened to meet her."

"Indeed, sir. Run away, my pretties, and don't eat more than one each, or mater familias will not approve."

Then, as the little ones disappeared into the shadows of the region above, he added to the Prophet,--

"You've nearly been the death of Madame, sir."

"I'm sure I'm very sorry," said the Prophet.

"Sorrow is no salve, sir, no salve at all. Were it not for her books I fear we might have lost her."

"Good gracious!"

"Mercifully her books have comforted her. She is resting among them now.

Madame is possessed of a magnificent library, sir, encyclopaedic in its scope and cosmopolitan in its point of view. In it are represented every age and every race since the dawn of letters; thousands upon thousands of authors, sir, Rabelais and Dean Farrar, Lamb and the Hindoos, Mettlelink and the pith of the great philosophers such as John Oliver Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Earl Spencer; the biting sarcasm of Hiny, the pathos of Peps, the oratorical master-strokes of such men as Gladstone, Demosthenes and Keir Hardie; the romance of Kipling, sir, of Bret Harte and Danty Rossini; the poetry of Kempis a Browning and of Elizabeth Thomas Barrett--all, all are there bound in Persian calf. Among these she seeks for solace. To these she flies in hours of anguish."

"Does she indeed?" said the Prophet, feeling thoroughly overwhelmed.

"She desires me to take you to her at once, sir, there to confer and"--he lowered his voice and trembled visibly--"to arrange measures for the protection of my life."

The Prophet found himself wishing that he had been less precipitate in covertly alluding to Sir Tiglath's long desire of a.s.sault and battery, but before he had time to wish anything for more than half a minute, Mr.

Sagittarius had guided him ceremoniously across the hall and was turning the handle of a door that was decorated with black and scarlet paint.

"Here, sir," he whispered, "you will find Madame surrounded by the authors whom she loves, by their portraits, their biographies and their writings. Here she communes with the great philosophers, sir, the poets, the historians and the humourists of the entire world, from the earliest days down to this very moment--in Persian calf, sir."

He gazed awfully at the Prophet, and gently opened the door of this temple of the intellect.

The Prophet expected to find himself ushered into a gigantic chamber, lined from floor to ceiling with shelves that groaned beneath their burden of the literature of genius. Indeed he had, in fancy, beheld even the chairs and couches covered with stacks of volumes, the very floor littered with the choicest productions of the brains of the dead and living. His surprise was, therefore, very great when, on pa.s.sing through the door, he beheld Madame Sagittarius reposing at full length upon a maroon sofa in a small apartment, whose bare walls, were entirely innocent of book-shelves. Indeed the only thing of the sort which was visible was a dwarf revolving bookcase which stood beside the sofa, and contained some twenty volumes bound, as Mr. Sagittarius had stated, in Persian calf, each of these volumes being numbered and adorned with a label on which was printed in letters of gold, "The Library of Famous Literature: Edited by Dr. Carter. Tasty t.i.t-bits from all Times."