Like the echo of a tempest, or the shadow of a dream.”
All the other dolls belonging to the pair led quiet, domestic lives, into whose annals few things more eventful came than tea-parties, christenings, funerals, and attacks of galloping consumption or heart disease.
But Jennie and Suey, the two longest owned and most deeply cherished, were called upon to enact every possible and impossible phase of the romance with which the souls of those two little maids were bitten through and through.
Both of the waxen creatures were of pallid complexion; their hair was thin, their noses were worn down by the vicissitudes of years. Sometimes they might be met clad in blue cashmere frocks, with white muslin pinafores, shoes, stockings, and even a [22] ]microscopic handkerchief apiece. And it might then be known they were passing through a calm period of existence, and were simply the daughters of the pair, or such mild and admired characters from books as Ellen Montgomery or Alice Humphreys.
But if you came across their attenuated forms swathed merely in pieces of black velvet or crimson cashmere, you would know—that is, if the scales could fall from your eyes, and the eager, wonderful second-sight of under twelve be yours for half-an-hour—that all domesticity had passed away and heroines lay before you.
Perhaps Virginia, walking blindly and happily to her lurid death, or Flora Macdonald struggling through dangers to save her king, or glorious Mary bowing her doomed head, or Lammermuir’s bride, or Constance following Marmion to the wars.
There was hardly an adventure of hero and heroine of all the strange miscellany of books devoured by the little pair that those unemotional little dolls had not been through.
They had been lowered by knotted handkerchiefs from the highest windows in the house, both as princesses running away with fairy princes, and as heroines escaping from burning hotels. They had had their internal sawdust badly congested by being forced to swim across the narrow ditch of water that ran below the currant-bushes and formed an enchanted castle’s moat. They had been hanged by the neck, [23] ]shut up in a disused bird-cage called the Bastille, buried up to their necks, plants for a Nero’s eyes to gaze upon, placed in an arena to meet with fortitude the Christian martyr’s death from ravening lions.
But hitherto, when eight o’clock came, Romance’s wings had always fallen to, and fingers, merely loving and maternal now, had soothed and comforted the racked bodies, clad them in night-gowns of most patient work, and laid them to rest in the most elaborate and comfortable of all the little beds.
This was the first night that when bedtime came Romance was still soaring irresistibly. All the afternoon Joan of Arc and Grace Darling had been making their way with unheard-of difficulties from the mines of Siberia to St. Petersburg, to beg an audience of the Czar, in order to rescue their aged parents from the life of toil.