The Terror did not point out that all the trouble had sprung from her disregard for his instructions; he only said: “I just told Mr. Carrington that Wiggins was already in the water when I got to the pond.”
“That was awfully decent of you,” said Erebus after a pause in which she had gathered the full bearing of his reticence.
CHAPTER VIII
AND THE MUTTLE DEEPING PEACHES
The dreadful fright she had suffered did not throw a cloud over the spirit of Erebus for as long as might have been expected. She was as quick as any one to realize that all’s well that ends well; and Wiggins escaped lightly, with a couple of days in bed. The adventure, however, induced a change in her attitude to him; she was far less condescending with him than she had been; indeed she seemed to have acquired something of a proprietary interest in him and was uncommonly solicitous for his welfare. To such a point did this solicitude go that more than once he remonstrated bitterly with her for fussing about him.
During the rest of the winter, the spring and the early summer, their lives followed an even tenor: they did their lessons; they played their games; then tended the inmates of the cats’ home, selling them as they grew big, and replacing the sold with threepenny kittens just able to lap.
In the spring they fished the free water of the Whittle, the little trout-stream that runs through the estate of the Morgans of Muttle Deeping Grange. The free water runs for rather more than half a mile on the Little Deeping side of Muttle Deeping; and the Twins fished it with an assiduity and a skill which set the villagers grumbling that they left no fish for any one else. Also the Twins tried to get leave to fish Sir James Morgan’s preserved water, higher up the stream. But Mr. Hilton, the agent of the estate, was very firm in his refusal to give them leave: for no reason that the Twins could see, since Sir James was absent, shooting big game in Africa. They resented the refusal bitterly; it seemed to them a wanton waste of the stream. It was some consolation to them to make a well-judged raid one early morning on the strawberry-beds in one of the walled gardens of Muttle Deeping Grange.
About the middle of June the Terror went to London on a visit to their Aunt Amelia. Sir Maurice Falconer and Miss Hendersyde saw to it that it was not the unbroken series of visits to cats’ homes Lady Ryehampton had arranged for him; and he enjoyed it very much. On his return he was able to assure the interested Erebus that their aunt’s parrot still said “dam” with a perfectly accurate, but monotonous iteration.
Soon after his return the news was spread abroad that Sir James Morgan had let Muttle Deeping Grange. In the life of the Deeping villages the mere letting of Muttle Deeping Grange was no unimportant event, but the inhabitants of Great Deeping, Muttle Deeping (possibly a corruption of Middle Deeping), and Little Deeping were stirred to the very depths of their being when the news came that it had been let to a German princess. The women, at any rate, awaited her coming with the liveliest interest and curiosity, emotions dashed some way from their fine height when they learned that Princess Elizabeth, of Cassel-Nassau, was only twelve years and seven months old.
The Twins did not share the excited curiosity of their neighbors. Resenting deeply the fact that the tenant of Muttle Deeping was a German princess, they assumed an attitude of cold aloofness in the matter, and refused to be interested or impressed. Erebus was more resentful than the Terror; and it is to be suspected that the high patriotic spirit she displayed in the matter was in some degree owing to the fact that Mrs. Blenkinsop, who came one afternoon to tea, gushing information about the grandfathers, grandmothers, parents, uncles, cousins and aunts of the princess, ended by saying, with meaning, “And what a model she will be to the little girls of the neighborhood!”
Erebus told the Terror that things were indeed come to a pretty pass when it was suggested to an English girl, a Dangerfield, too, that she should model herself on a German.