TREATING OF LARKIN AND HIS COMMISSION
“Well,” said Lynn, looking across at “Tenby,” “I’m glad it’s going to be lived in at last, poor thing. It makes me quite mis’rable to see it standing there in the sun with its eyes shut up tight as if it wanted to wake up on’y it darerunt.”
“Like the Sleeping Beauty,” said Pauline.
Lynn, in whose composition had run from babyhood a marked vein of poetry, shook her hair back from her face.
“I made a song about it down at the waterfall the other day,” she said. “Only mamma wasn’t here to write it down, and I didn’t know if you could spell all the words, Paul.”
“What nonsense!” said Paul, “as if I couldn’t spell any word a child like you could think of.”
“Well, write it then,” urged Lynn, “and I can send it in my next letter to mamma; the rhyums in it came quite right this time.”
So Pauline, having nothing better to do, [p24] and anxious to display her spelling prowess, fished out of her pocket a bit of pencil and one of Octavius Smith’s trade cards that drew attention to his prime line of bacon. This last Larkin had pressed upon her that very morning, and urged her to put it on the mantelpiece, where their visitors could see it. They owed him a return. Morning after morning did he, after receiving his orders from Miss Bibby at the kitchen door, ride his horse to the road at one side of the house, where some well-grown pines made a kindly screen, and there let the children, one after the other, have all the delights of a stolen ride. The ever-present dread of Miss Bibby’s discovery naturally added a fearful joy to the proceedings “A judge’s eldest daughter astride a grocer’s horse!” Pauline could readily imagine the lady’s tone of horror.
It seemed very easy repayment for the happiest moment of the dull day to promise to put this advertisement in evidence. But at present it was only the white back of the card that was pressed into service.
Lynn’s eyes grew round and solemn, as they always did when she was delivering herself of a “song.” She stared hard at the shuttered house.
“Call it ‘The Very Sad House,’” she said.
“‘The Very Sad House,’” wrote Pauline obediently.
[p25]
“No, cross that out,” said Lynn; “I remember I thought of a better name. It’s called ‘Forsaked.’”
Pauline grumbled at this. “You mustn’t alter any more,” she said; “even writing very small I can’t get much in.”
“Well,” said Lynn, “write this down.” And she dictated slowly. And slowly and a little painfully, for the space was cramped, Pauline wrote:—
“‘Silent and sad it wates by the road,
And it’s eyes are shut with tears.
Oh, Tenby, my heart is so greavous for you,
You haven’t woked up for years.
Why don’t you open your eyelids up wide
And laugh and dance and frolick outside?
And why don’t—’”
“There can’t be any more,” said Pauline inexorably; “I’m at the bottom of the card.”
“Oh,” said the little poetess piteously, “you must put in the end lines,—can’t you turn over?”
“Well, go on,” said Pauline—“but it’s very silly. As if a house could frolic outside of itself! Mother will laugh like anything.”
But Lynn’s face was trustfully serene. Mother never laughed.
“Go on,” she said,—“the next line is, ‘Out on the grass.’”
“I won’t write stories,” said Pauline [p26] decisively. “There’s not a bit of grass in that garden, and you know there isn’t.”
Lynn looked distressed.
“But there ought to be,” she said.
“But there isn’t,” repeated Pauline; “and I tell you I won’t write untruths.”
“Very well,” said Lynn meekly, “it can be earth, only it doesn’t sound so green. Say,
‘Out on the earth where the fairies play;
Come and play with us, oh, come and play.’”
“‘Out on the earth where the fairies play,’” wrote Pauline, and the next line said, “Prime middle cuts at Octavius Smith’s, Elevenpence a pound.”
“Here’s Larkin,” called Muffie excitedly, “an’ he’s coming very slowly, so he can’t be in a hurry. Let’s ask him for another ride.”
The four clambered on to the gate again.
Larkin was riding back with lowered crest.
He was a thin lad, small for fourteen, with sharp features and blue eyes, and a head of hair nearer in shade to an orange than to the lowly carrot to which red hair is popularly likened. He wore a khaki coat a size too small for him, and an old Panama hat some big-headed “stranger” had left behind. Round this latter dangled a string veil that he had manufactured for himself against the ubiquitous and famous mountain fly.
[p27]
But the flamboyant head drooped wretchedly just at present.
He pulled up at the gate, seeing Miss Bibby was not on guard, and poured out a graphic account of the ride between himself and Howie. Browning’s “Ghent to Aix” was nothing to it, and “How we beat the Favourite” was colourless narrative to the early part of Larkin’s recital. But then the tragedy happened. Larkin’s horse got a pebble in its foot, and went dead lame. Howie shot ahead and caught the lady of the house just as she was reluctantly sallying forth to find one of his trade and leave her order.
“An’ she’s got a baby—patent foods and biscuits,” said Larkin in a choked voice, “and I saw quite four boys,—oatmeal, tins of jam, bacon, butter,—I wouldn’t have lost her for anything. An’ only for giving you kids a ride this morning I’d have heard sooner, an’ got the start of Howie.”
The children felt quite crushed to think they were the cause of Larkin’s great loss. For a loss it was indeed; both boys received commissions on the accounts of the new customers they obtained, and a lady with a baby and four hungry boys, not to mention a maid or two, and possible visitors, was not to be picked up every day.
Then Pauline had a brilliant thought.
“We know of another new one,” she cried.
[p28]
“‘Tenby’ is taken; a man’s coming up by to-night’s train. Howie doesn’t know, no one knows but ourselves,—that will make up to you, Larkin. Men eat more than babies.”
Larkin was greatly excited. He made rapid plans: he would slip his cards under the door to-night; he would present himself at the house the moment it was unlocked in the morning. He would take butter, eggs, sugar, with him, so that breakfast at least would be comfortable, and the wife or housekeeper, or maiden sister, whichever the “man” brought with him, would bless his thoughtfulness, and promptly promise her custom.
Then his jaw dropped with a sudden recollection.
To-morrow was his holiday—the only whole week-day holiday he received in six months. He had arranged to go home, as he always did, catching the 11 o’clock train that night, and travelling through the midnight to the highest point of the mountains, and into the early dawn down, down the Great Zigzag on the other side, till he came out on the plain to a little siding, where he scrambled out with his bundle, and shouldered it briskly, and trudged along eight miles, perhaps, to a wretched selection where his father, for his mother and six or seven children younger than Larkin, fought the losing fight of the Man on the Land. A few hours here, slipping [p29] his wages into his mother’s reluctant hand, escorted by his father round the place to see the latest devices for trapping rabbits and other pests, telling his brothers stirring tales of the struggles between himself and Howie, then the long tramp to the station, and the travelling through the night again, snatching his only chance of sleep sitting upright in his crowded carriage, he fitted his holidays naturally into the Railway Commissioners’ Cheap Excursion seasons. And then the fight again in the new-born day with Howie.
The lad looked miserable. How could he give up such a holiday? Yet how allow Howie an uncontested victory with the latest stranger?
Max and Muffie had run back along the path in pursuit of a lively lizard. Only Lynn and Pauline, their sweet little faces ashine with sympathy, hung on the gate.
The lad blurted out his highest hope to them. He gave his mother his wages, of course, he told them, but he had been saving up his commissions for a special purpose. He wanted to put “a bit of stuff” on the Melbourne Cup.
“I know I’ll win,” he said, with glistening eyes. “It’ll be five hundred at least,—p’raps a cool thou,—then I’ll buy Octavius and Septimus out, and mother and the old man shall chuck up that dirty selection, and come [p30] an’ get all the custom here. And the kids can go to school, an’ I’ll get Polly an’ Blarnche a pianner.” The rapt look of the visionary was on his face.
But he was torn with the conflict; it was plain he must give up either his holiday or his commission on the new “stranger.”
Pauline’s position as eldest had developed her naturally resourceful and intrepid disposition.
“Larkin,” she said, “I’ve thought what to do. You go and see your mother. We’ll get you the new man’s custom. And before Howie gets a chance of it.”
Then Anna appeared on the verandah, ringing the lunch bell violently, and Larkin rode home his dead lame horse, and Pauline marched into the house with her head up, the other children following and clamouring to be told of her great plan.
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