There was not very much time. This was Friday and Christmas Day was on Monday, so there were only two more clear week-days before the birthday and Miss Hacket would be church-decorating on the morrow; but Lady Merrifield would not send her daughters to help, as there were plenty of hands without them, and they were too young to trust in a mixed set, who were not always sure to be reverent.
Dinner had rested and refreshed them; they rejoiced in the absence of the man-kind, and Primrose was sent out for her walk while the numerous boxes and packages were opened, and displayed sconces and tapers, gilt balls and glass birds, oranges and bon-bons, disguised in every imaginable fashion. There was a double set of the tapers, and two relays of devices in sweets, for the benefit of the party of the second night, a list of whom Miss Hacket had brought, that heads might be counted, and any deficiency supplied in time through Aunt Jane. For Lady Merrifield had commissioned Gillian to lay in—unknown to the good lady—a stock of such treasures as are valuable indeed to the little maid: shell pin-cushions, Cinderella slippers holding thimbles, cases of hair-pins, queer housewives, and the like things, wonderfully pretty for the price, and which filled the kind heart of Miss Hacket with rapture and gratitude at such brilliant additions to her own home-made contrivances in the way of cuffs, comforters, and illuminated workbags, all beautifully neat; I though it was hard to persuade her of what Lady Merrifield averred, that such things ought to be far more precious than brilliant, shop-bought, ready-made ware, ‘with no love-seed in it.’
‘It is very hard,’ she said; ‘how fancy shops try to spoil all one used to be able to do for one’s friends. The purses, and the penwipers, and the needle-cases that were one’s choicest presents in my youth, are all turned out now smart and tight and fashioned, but without a scrap of the honest old labour and love that went into them.’
‘But papa and mamma do care still,’ cried Gillian; ‘papa never will have any purse but the long ones mamma nets for him.’
‘And mamma always will have the old brown and blue carriage-bag that Aunt Phyllis worked,’ chimed in Mysie, ‘though Claude did say he would throw it into the sea when we crossed from Dublin for it looked like an old housekeeper’s.’
‘Claude was in a superfine condition then—in awe of an old Sandhurst comrade. He would be gild enough to see the old brown bag now, poor fellow,’ said Lady Merrifield, tenderly.
So it went on, with merry chat and a good deal of real preparation, till the early darkness came on, and a great noise in the haul announced the return of ‘the boys,’ among whom Lady Merrifield still classed her colonel brother. They were muddy up to the eyes, but they had seen a great deal more than was easy to understand in their incoherent accounts. Wilfed had rolled into a wet ditch, and been picked out by his uncle and hung up to dry at a little village inn, where—this seemed to have been the supreme glory—they had made a meal on pigs’-liver and bread-and-cheese before plodding home again—losing their way under Wilfred’s confident pilotage—finding themselves five miles from home—getting a cast in a cart for the two little boys just as Fergus was almost ready to cry—Colonel Mohun and Jasper walking alongside of the carter for two miles, and conversing in a friendly manner, though the man said he knew the soldier by his step, and thought it was a pool-trade. Finally, he directed them by a short cut, which proved to be through a lane of clay and pools of such an adhesive nature that Fergus had to be pulled out step by step by main force by his uncle, who deposited him on some stones at the other end, and then came back to assist the struggles of Wilfred, who was slowly proceeding with Jasper’s help.
‘And that’s the way we make you spend your Christmas holiday, Regie,’ said Lady Merrifield.
‘Never mind. Lily; mud was a congenial element to us both in old times, you know, so no wonder your brood take to it like ducks or hippopotamuses. I say, we ought to have come in by the rear. Couldn’t that imp of a buttons of yours come and scrape us before we go upstairs?’
‘You are certainly grown older, Regie. You never would have thought of that once.’