II
It was two or three days after this that Roy went down to the river to fish. He had to go alone, because Christina wanted to play with Diana in the nursery; but not more than half an hour had passed when he heard feet swishing through the long grass behind him, and, looking up, there was Christina. Now, as Christina had refused so bluntly to have anything to do with his fishing, Roy was surprised to see her, but more surprised still to see that Diana had come too.
“Why, surely mother never said you might bring Diana?” he exclaimed.
THERE WAS CHRISTINA.
“No,” said Christina, rather sulkily, “but I didn’t think she’d mind. Besides, she’s gone to the village, and I couldn’t ask her.”
Roy looked troubled; his mother did not often make rules to interfere with their play, and when she did she liked to be obeyed. She had certainly forbidden Christina to take Diana out of the house. He did not say anything. Christina sat down and began to play. She was not really at all happy, because she knew it was wrong of her to have disobeyed, and she was really a very good girl. Roy went on fishing.
“Oh, do do something else,” Christina cried pettishly, after a few minutes. “It’s so cold sitting here waiting for you to catch stupid fish that never come. Let’s go to the cave.” The cave was an old disused lime-kiln, where robbers might easily have lived.
“All right,” Roy said.
“I’ll get there first,” Christina called out, beginning to run.
“Bah!” said Roy, and ran after. They had raced for a hundred yards, when, with a cry, Christina fell. Roy, who was still some distance behind, having had to pack up his rod, hastened to Christina’s side. He found her looking anxiously into Diana’s face.
“Oh, Roy,” she wailed, “her eyes have gone!”
It was too true. Diana, lately so radiantly observant, now turned to the world the blankest of empty sockets. Roy took her poor head in his hand and shook it. A melancholy rattle told that a pair of once serviceable blue eyes were now at large. Christina sank on the grass in an agony of grief—due partly, also, to the knowledge that if she had not been naughty this would never have happened. Roy stood by, feeling hardly less unhappy. After a while he took her arm. “Come along,” he said; “let’s see if Jim can mend her.”
“Jim!” Christina cried in a fury, shaking off his hand.
“But come along, anyway,” Roy said.
Christina continued sobbing. After a while she moved to rise, but suddenly fell back again. Her sobbing as suddenly ceased. “Roy!” she exclaimed fearfully, “I can’t walk.”
Christina had sprained her ankle.
Roy ran to the house as fast as he could to find help, and very soon old Pedder, the gardener, and Jim were carrying Christina between them, with mother, who had just come back, and nurse, walking by her side. Christina was put to bed and her foot wrapped in bandages, but she cried almost incessantly, no matter how often she was assured that she was forgiven. “Her sobs,” the cook said, coming downstairs after her twentieth visit to the nursery—“her sobs are that heartrending I couldn’t stand it; and all the while she asks for that blessed doll, which its eyes is rattling in its head like marbles, through falling on the ground, and Master Roy and Jim’s trying to catch them with a skewer.”
Cook was quite right. Roy and Jim, with Diana between them, were seated in the harness-room, probing tenderly the depths of that poor Parisienne’s skull. A housemaid was looking on without enthusiasm. “You won’t do it,” she said every now and then; “you can’t catch dolls’ eyes with skewers. No one can. It’s impossible. The King himself couldn’t. The Primest Minister couldn’t. No,” she went on, “no one could do it. No one but the Miss Bannisters’ Brother near where I live at Dormstaple. He could. You ought to take it to him. He’d mend it in a jiffy—there’s nothing he can’t do in that way.”
Roy said nothing, but went on prodding and probing. At last he gave up in despair. “All right, I’ll take it to the Miss Bannisters’ Brother,” he said. “Dormstaple’s only six miles.” But a sudden swoop from a figure in the doorway interrupted his bold plan.
“You’ll do nothing of the kind,” cried nurse, seizing the doll, “with that angel upstairs crying for it every minute, and the doctor saying she’s in a high fever with lying on the wet grass”; and with a swirl of white skirts and apron, nurse and Diana were gone.
Roy put his hands in his pockets and wandered moodily into the garden. The world seemed to have no sun in it any more.