The Runaways Read Online Free PDF

blankets.Their combinations, excellent garments, but as out of fashion now as the kind of grandmother Grandmama was, clung warmly. The moonlight lay in benediction upon the bed and they were immensely happy and presently immensely sleepy. Yet suddenly Nan raised her head from the deep hollow in her feather pillow and asked, ‘Robert, did
you
wash?’
    There was no answer. He was asleep and so were Timothy, Betsy and Absolom. For a moment Nan felt annoyed, then she dropped her head back in the hollowed pillow again. What did it matter? She was too warm and happy to mind. It was nice sleeping in blankets , with no chilly sheets. She gave a sigh of contentment and closed her eyes.
     
    A few hours later she suddenly woke up again, and in a moment she was sitting bolt upright with trickles of fear running down her spine. She had been awakened by a tremendous crash, followed by a piercing yell and then yowling and booting. She was so terrified that for a moment or two she forgot about Ezra Oake, and then she heard a tenor voice carolling out a rollicking song that was like a spring wind and the sea on a fine day and suet pudding with treacle. It was punctuated by the sound of castanets, and an extraordinary thumping sound, and was altogether so exciting that her fear vanished and she shook the others awake so that they could hear it too. ‘It’s Ezra Oake,’ she told them. ‘He’s come home and fallen into the saucepans. But now he’s singing and I think Hector and Andromache are singing too. And he’s dancing. Come on.’
    All four children had the gift of awaking instantly from the deepest of sleeps if there was anything exciting going on. They rolled out of bed on to the floor without bothering to go down the steps, picked themselves up and made for the door. Nothing except being picked up and dropped woke Absolom and so he remained in bed and asleep. They raced down the passage and down the stairs to the kitchen, where a glorious sight met their eyes. A man with a wooden leg was dancing in the bright moonlight, two saucepan lids held in his hands as castanets, singing as he danced. Hector was perched on a flowerpot on the mantelpiece hooting like mad, and Andromache was yowling melodiously on top of a pile of dishes on the kitchen table. To complete the perfection it only needed the cuckoo clock to join in, which it immediately did, cuckooing twelve times down inside the sink, and after the cuckooing came the sound of a great bell tolling far up in the sky. The children only paused for a moment at the door and then they leapt in and began to dance too, stamping their feet and clapping their hands and trying to join in the song that was like a spring wind and the sea on a fine day and suet pudding with treacle. They did not get the words properly that night, but they caught the tune. They could have sung and danced for ever, only suddenly the man tripped over a saucepan, fell on his back on the settle, stretched out his legs and was instantly asleep.
    Andromache returned to her box, where she could be heard purring contentedly to her kittens, Hector flitted away into the passage and back into the library and the children gazed in adoration at the man.
    He was a little man, not much bigger than Robert, and he lay with his brown gardener’s hands placidly folded on his chest. His rosy wrinkled face was even in sleep extraordinarily kind. He had a short grey beard, but there was not a single hair upon his acorn-coloured head. His brown corduroy trousers were fastened below the knee with string on his real leg, but on the wooden leg they were folded back to show the fascinating bee that was carved and painted upon its round polished surface. He had a mustard-coloured waistcoat, a full-skirted beech-brown coat and a scarlet handkerchief knotted round his throat. In the moonlight all these wonderful colours were muted and the moon lent them mystery. With a sigh of satisfaction the children tiptoed out of the kitchen and up