ANNA ENJOYS ILL-HEALTH
“Anna,” said Miss Bibby, with happy eyes the next morning, “I am going to take a whole holiday to-day.”
“An’ about time,” said Anna, “I’ve been wonderin’ how long you could keep it up, Miss Bibby. You’ve not had one yet, and me half a dozen. I don’t have half as much to do with those childerun as you, but if I didn’t get away from them sometimes I’d get hysterics.”
“I am sure they are very good children—wonderfully good, Anna,” said Miss Bibby.
“Oh yes, they’re good enough,” said Anna, “but so uncommon lively. And talk! They keeps it up, one after the other, and sometimes all four at a time, till your head spins round like a top. I got quite giddy goin’ down to the waterfall with them yesterday, and it wasn’t the steps, neither, it was just their tongues going at it, clackerty-clack all the time. What time will you be back, Miss Bibby?”
[p113]
“Oh,” said Miss Bibby, “I should not think of going away for my holiday, Anna. Mrs. Lomax knows nothing would make me leave the children so long, while she is so far away. But since she begged me to take a day a week to myself, I am going to shut myself in my room to-day. I have very important work.”
“Working him a pair of slippers, I’ll undertake,” ran Anna’s thoughts. But aloud she said, “Yes, you do, Miss Bibby. I’ll keep them youngsters away from you; you get a good rest while you’re about it.”
The heartiness in her tone was due to the fact that she was about to ask for an extra special holiday for herself in a day or two to attend the Mountain Bakers’ picnic at a distant waterfall.
So Miss Bibby disappeared into her room for the day, after having written down the children’s meals in her painstaking fashion on the kitchen slate, and given the tradesmen’s orders, and seen the children happily engaged in their favourite game of Swiss Family Robinson.
Anna sighed with relief; gentle as Miss Bibby was she had a way of keeping people up to the mark, and on a warm day like this, a well-executed policy of “letting things slip” appealed to the imagination.
Miss Bibby came back a moment.
[p114] />“Anna,” she said, “I have neglected to give Master Max and Miss Lynn their medicine, will you call them in and give it to them? I do not want to waste time.”
Anna undertook the commission.
“Don’t know what I’m thinking of; I forgot my own doses,” she muttered as she went to the dining-room for the bottles. Max had been ordered a pleasant preparation of malt to fortify his little system during his convalescence, and Lynn an iron tonic. The other two were making such excellent recoveries nothing was needed.
Anna reached the two bottles from the cupboard, measured out with a steady hand a tablespoon of the malt, and swallowed it, then followed it by a teaspoonful of Lynn’s iron. She looked at herself in the sideboard mirror as she did so. “I don’t think I’m looking any better,” she said mournfully.
Anna keenly enjoyed the worst of health.
She was an anæmic-looking girl with a pasty complexion, and hair several shades too light to correspond comfortably with it.
Ill-health was the only subject in life in which she took a genuine interest.
Miss Bibby supposed Anna quite a reader, so often did she find her deep in a paper, and so the girl was—of medical advertisements. The marvellous recoveries of persons like Mrs. Joseph Huggins, of Arabella Street, [p115] Chippendale, who had been given up by six leading doctors after suffering from a blood-curdling list of ailments for seventeen years, and had been cured after taking one bottle, were a source of unfailing interest to Anna.
And never did an advertisement offer free a sample bottle of any drug, no matter for what purpose, but Anna sent instantly and claimed it.
It needed nothing but the announcement on Max’s malt bottle of its tissue-building qualities, and its power of restoring the waste of nature in the human frame, for the girl at once privately to take a course of the same treatment and, as the chemist’s bill might have testified, from the same bottle.
Similarly with Lynn’s tonic; the accompanying pamphlet said something about its invigorating powers and the restoration of red corpuscles to the blood, so Anna at once prescribed it for herself also—out of Lynn’s bottle.
And Miss Bibby’s Health Foods that that lady paid for out of her slender purse—Anna determined that it was these things that gave the temporary head of the house that curiously delicate clear skin of hers; so being by no means satisfied with her own complexion, she consistently assisted herself to a small quantity of each, without, it need hardly be stated, foregoing any of her [p116] hearty meals at the kitchen table with Blake the gardener.
Miss Bibby had certainly been vaguely surprised at first at the rapid lowering both of the children’s medicines and her own tins, but never dreaming of suspecting so unusual a cause, soon grew entirely accustomed to it, and imagined it was the normal consumption.
Her own constitution thus fortified, this morning Anna called loudly through the window for Max and Lynn to come in this instant and take their “medsuns.”
Max came eagerly; he was so fond of his treacley spoonful it was a marvel he had not of his own accord jogged some one’s memory and insisted upon the omission being rectified.
But Lynn’s tonic embittered life for her for a considerable time before taking, as well as for several minutes afterwards, until a long drink and a chocolate removed the nauseous taste.
She was playing this morning, before Anna’s call, in a mood of chastened joy.
Her conscience was always a prickly little affair, and forced her to confess to her sins almost before she had committed them. But she told herself this morning that it was certainly no business of hers to point out to Miss Bibby Miss Bibby’s forgetfulness. And she was just comfortably settled up in [p117] the big quince tree as Fritz, in “Falconhurst,” when that soul-vexing cry about “medsun” shrilled through a window.
“’Tend you don’t hear; it’s only Anna,” said Pauline in swift sympathy.
Lynn flattened her body along a bough and drew up a possibly betraying leg.
“Do I show?” she whispered.
Paul shook her head, and moved with Muffie hastily away from the tree and began to run towards Anna, who, failing to obtain her quarry with a shout, was now seen rapidly coming to the Island of the Robinson family, late of Switzerland.
“Anna,” shouted Pauline, one of the most resourceful young people in the world, “have you seen Lynn anywhere?”
Anna pulled up.
“No, I haven’t,” she said.
“Are you sure she’s not in the house?” persisted Paul.
“If she is and heard me calling, I’ll give it to her, or my name’s not Anna,” said that maiden irately.
“Do you think she can have gone again over to ‘Tenby’?” pursued Pauline.
“That’s it—that’s what’s got her,” said Anna; “and fine and mad Miss Bibby will be with her, going worrying that book-man again. Well, I’m not going trapesing over there in this sun, but I’ll make her take two [p118] doses at lunch if I have to put it down her back.”
And with this frightful threat Anna returned to the house.
Poor Fritz nearly fell out of “Falconhurst” in his agitation.
“Oh, I think I’ll go up and take it, Paul,” she said; “two doses together would be too awful.”
Her eyes grew round with horror at the mere thought.
“You could shut your teeth hard, after the first spoonful,” said Paul, “and refuse, firmly refuse more.”
“You could spit it out,” said Muffie eagerly, “like when they gave me the castor-oil; and it was the last in the bottle, so they couldn’t give me any more.”
“But there are gallons more in my bottle,” Lynn said dolefully, “and you heard what she said about putting it down my back.”
“Look here,” said Pauline, the judicial look of her father in her eyes, “that’s just talk about putting it down our backs. I thought it all out that day Muffie ate the green peach. You know Miss Bibby said then she’d put it down her back—the castor-oil, you know. Well, if I’d been Muffie I’d just have said, ‘All right, do.’ Do you think they would have done so, and got her clothes [p119] all nasty and greasy? Not they, they think far too much of clothes. But even if they had—well, it might have been a bit sticky, but it would be better than taking stuff like that down your mouth.”
This was marvellous perspicacity of thought; Lynn looked admiringly down at her sister, and Muffie stood, with her mouth open, digesting this freshly-minted fact, and making clear resolutions for all future consequences of green peaches.
They fell to playing again, Lynn remaining in the tree, however. Mrs. Robinson now engaged in sewing skin coats with a porcupine needle and flax, since the more active part of Fritz, shooting and shouting down below, was fraught with too much danger.
“I can’t make Tentholm, ’less I have the diny-room tablecloth,” said Muffie.
“Well, go and get it,” said Pauline.
“All right,” said Muffie, making a line for it, then calling back, just as a little sop to duty, “she said we weren’t to, though.”
“Run up and ask her,” said Lynn, a law-abiding little person so long as the iron did not enter her soul or body.
Muffie dashed into Miss Bibby’s bedroom after the briefest knock, and made her request.
“Yes, yes,” murmured Miss Bibby, looking up with bright eyes from some writing she [p120] was engaged upon, “just this once, dear, but be careful not to——”
But Muffie had sprung away again, and what she had to avoid with the cloth, whether tearing it into holes, or getting mud on it, or losing it, or wetting it, she did not wait to hear. It is possible Miss Bibby did not even finish the sentence—her eyes looked absent-minded enough for such a lapse.
Muffie went gleefully back to Robinson Island, the art-green serge trailing behind her.
“We can have it, we can have it!” she announced gleefully, “only we’re to be careful not to—come on, fasten it on to the sticks, Paul.”
Miss Bibby had reached the chronicle of Hugh Kinross’s “endearing little eccentricities.”
A small pile of neatly written sheets lay to the right of her. In front of her lay more sheets, scored through, corrected, polished, until Flaubert himself would have been satisfied with the labour bestowed.
She had worked steadily through the night, the silent night in the hills, her lamp the only household eye still open in miles of black slumbering country.
At three o’clock she had flung herself down and snatched a few hours’ sleep, but by seven she was up again, the same quivering excitement [p121] in her veins. A little more polishing, then a fair copy in her very neatest hand, and she might bear it up to the four o’clock post, and send it flying forward to the Evening Mail.
The envelope that would hold it would hold also her destiny, she told herself. This was the most important crisis of her life; she had travelled nearly forty years—thirty-six to be exact—along a road of life, not rough and stony as many a road is, but just dull and level and monotonous and dusty, as are so many excellent highways. But now she stood at two crossroads, and saw stretching before her one in no wise different from that she had traversed so long, and the other a glittering tempting path springing joyously up a high hill, on the top of which, in the shade of laurel trees, sat at ease the whole goodly company of great authors. She fancied they were beckoning to her; she heard sweet voices from them throughout that feverish night—“Come up higher, Agnes Bibby,” they were saying.
The interview was the first step along this second path. The story, already promised space for, would be the second. And then, from out the bitter gloom of the trunk, the novels would emerge, one after the other, the world graciously holding out its hand for them.
[p122]
“Miss Bibby,” said a mournful voice at the door, “Miss Bibby.”
“Oh, dear,” sighed Miss Bibby, “what is it now, Max?”
Max entered with a wool door-mat depending from his collar and just reaching his shoes.
“I have no tail,” he said, his lip drooping, “an’ Paul an’ Muff’s got late big long ones.”
“Oh, dear!” said Miss Bibby, after a frantic glance round her own apartment in search of an appendix, “I have nothing that would do, Max. Do run away, darling. Pretend you’ve got a tail, that is just as good.”
Max gulped threateningly.
“Laindeers have leal tails,” he said.
Again a frantic glance around. “Would a towel do if I pinned it on, dear?”
Max shook his head.
“In the lawning-loom lere’s a tail on the curtains,” he said, “but it’s showd on tight.”
“Well, ask Paul, ask Anna, ask some one else to look for something for you; but you mustn’t come to me, darling, this is Miss Bibby’s holiday, you don’t want to spoil it for her, do you?” Miss Bibby looked at him beseechingly.
But Max’s lip drooped lower and lower. Outside in the garden pranced Muffie and Pauline, a long tasselled drawback from the dining-room curtains, sweeping magnificently after each of them.
[p123]
They had thought of them first, they insisted and, strongest reason of all, had got them first. Max had better be a sheep or a Manx cat, and not bother about a tail.
But Max, after a heart-breaking attempt to remove the drawing-room tie-back, which some over-provident person had stitched firmly in its place (as if anticipating unhallowed use being made of it), Max had gone bursting with his woes to the one who held his mother’s place.
“Please run away, darling,” said Miss Bibby again.
But Max sank down to the ground, and lifted up his voice in a bitter howl.
“Mamma—I want my mamma,” he yelled, as if he thought that by pitching the key high his voice might sound across the watery waste that separated her from him.
Miss Bibby was not proof against this; in fact it is just possible that Max had long since discovered that this mode of appeal was the most successful one he could essay.
She kissed and comforted him and, holding his hand, went out of the room in search of some article that would lend itself to the present necessity.
Max dragged her to the drawing-room.
“Cut it off,” he said, temptingly, “you’ve got lissors.”
There is no doubt whatever that in the [p124] circumstances Mrs. Lomax herself would have promptly given the much-desired article.
But Miss Bibby had established herself as anxious caretaker of the household chattels as well as children.
“Oh, darling!” she said, “I couldn’t possibly. Mamma’s pretty tie-back to trail in the dust!”
“I wouldn’t lail it on the paths, only on the lass,” said Max.
But Miss Bibby still shook her head, and Max began to work up from low down in his breast another howl.
Then Miss Bibby had a brilliant notion. She caught sight of a length of rope hanging on the verandah post, relic of a hammock that had gone the way of most hammocks.
“Where is a knife?” she said, “and run and get me a comb, Max.”
In five minutes she had half a yard of the excellent material beautifully unravelled, and Max was crazy with pride and eagerness to burst out upon the envious gaze of his sisters thus caparisoned.
He could hardly wait for the realistic affair to be fastened firmly to his belt, but kept saying, “be quick, be quick, Miss Bibby.”
“I think I deserve a kiss, Max,” she said wistfully, holding the eager little man a moment to her; this baby of the family had made himself a very warm corner in her heart.
“Then he shot away through the door.”
[p125] Max kissed her hurriedly.
“How much do you love me, darling?” persisted the misguided lady.
Quite conceivably Mrs. Lomax was in the habit of putting this question also, but had learned the wisdom of confining it to sleepy and leisure moments, and not obtruding it upon the strenuous time of play.
Max struggled away. “Big as th’ sea, big as th’ stars, big as this loom, big as anything,” he said hastily. It was his customary formula after this troublesome question.
“You dear little boy!” said Miss Bibby, kissing his soft young cheek. Then he shot away through the door, and she went back with rapid steps to the collar habit of Hugh Kinross.
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