Vivian's Lesson

by Elizabeth W. Grierson

Receiving no answer, he turned round, wondering if his brother had gone to sleep again.

‘Whatever are you doing?’ he asked in astonishment, for it was just light enough for him to see his brother sitting on the edge of the bed drawing on his stockings.

‘I’m going to get up,’ said Vivian slowly, ‘to see what’s the matter.’

His voice sounded harsh and broken, partly through terror, partly from his cold, which was decidedly worse.

‘You’re going to do nothing of the sort,’ said Ronald. ‘Aunt Dora said last night that you were to stay in bed to breakfast, if your cold was not quite better, and you are croaking like a raven. Look out, I’m coming back to bed, or I’ll catch cold too; I have stood here until I feel like a block of ice.’ With a flying leap he was back among the blankets. ‘Isn’t it lovely to come back to bed on a cold morning?’ he said, laughing. ‘I can understand what Dorothy meant when she said to mother that “the comfiest bit of bed is when one has to get up;”’ and then he rolled over, and settled himself for a nap before Anne came to pull up the blinds and bring in the hot water.

Poor Vivian had been obliged to lie down again too, but all his chances of sleep had been banished effectually; and as he lay, with wide-open eyes, watching the light in the room grow clearer and clearer, and listening to the unusual sounds which were still going on outside the room, he wondered what would have happened and where he would be by the time the darkness came again. Seven o’clock struck on the cuckoo clock in the hall, and a quarter past, and then the half-hour, and at last Anne came in without knocking, and pulled up the blinds, but she had on an old dirty apron, and no cap, and was so unlike her usual trim self that Ronald could not help asking, ‘Is there anything wrong, Anne? We have been hearing such a lot of talking all morning. Every one seemed to be up long before it was daylight.’

‘There’s plenty wrong, Master Ronald,’ was Anne’s somewhat grim answer. ‘The house has been broken into, and every morsel of silver taken, not to mention the master’s watch and a lot of the mistress’s jewellery. How the scoundrels have done it dear only knows, for they must have been in nearly every room in the house, and they have forced open the very safe itself, which stands in the master’s dressing-room. ’Tis a wonder we were not all murdered in our beds, for they seem to have been carrying firearms. And as if all that wasn’t enough, here is little Miss Isobel taken ill, and Doctor Robson shaking his head over her quite serious-like. So get up as quiet as you can, like good boys, and give no more trouble to any one than you can help.’

The boys needed no second bidding to get up. The news which Anne had brought was too exciting for them to linger a moment longer in bed. Vivian’s cold and his aunt’s injunction about it were alike forgotten, and indeed, as the little boy hurried into his clothes, he began to feel much better, for a weight of anxiety was lifted from his mind. Always quick to note the probable consequences of things, he saw at once that this unexpected development would divert suspicion from himself, even when the broken windows in the summer-house were discovered. Who was to know that the damage had not been done by the burglars for some reason of their own? The police were much more likely to suspect them than some one who was living in the house.

When the boys arrived downstairs, after a somewhat hasty toilet, they found everything in a state of dire confusion. Breakfast was laid in the servants’ hall, but no one seemed to have time to attend to it.