"Upon my word, Miss, you do it better than I do it myself."
Adrienne laughed, and Mrs. Donegan, going back to her work, returned to the current of her thoughts.
"I could tell you more about those children than anybody else that's here," she continued. "But whatever you do, Miss, don't you go to believe anything Mr. Plunkett says about them. It's not the like of him can understand these children. Wasn't I here in the nursery in old Mrs. Blair's time, and nursemaid to Mr. Launcelot himself? I know what Master Launce was when his mother died, and I know what sort his children's come of. And they're Mr. Launcelot's children to the very backbone. Master Harry was always quieter; but you're not much like him, Miss, except when you laugh you have a look of him about the eyes, I think."
Mrs. Donegan liked to talk, but after her own fashion, so before Adrienne could hear anything about the children she had to listen to a panegyric upon their father, which wound up with an account of how he married Mrs. Launcelot, a perfect lady; "Mr. Launcelot wouldn't have married none other, but a gentle, delicate bit of a thing, who had a French maid to look after her, and let the children do whatever they pleased."
Then Adrienne was told that Mr. and Mrs. Launcelot had been in India now nearly seven years, and Winnie and Murtagh had been sent home four years ago. "Mr. Launcelot wrote me a letter with his own hand," added Donnie, "asking me to take care of his two little orphans till he came himself to fetch them; and he told me to 'mother them, when they were lonely, the way I'd mothered him long ago when he needed it.' Those were his very words. Many an' many a time I've read the letter. And when I saw the poor little things drooping and pining, I used to think o' the night, thirty-two years ago, when the poor missis died, an' I crep' into the nursery after the old nurse was asleep, an' Master Launce was sobbing in his bed; and when I tried to comfort him, he knelt in his little nightgown an' put his two arms round about my neck,—and, 'Oh, Biddy,' says he, 'what shall I do now?'" Donnie's tears were running down at the remembrance.
"And he laid his head upon my shoulder, and he was that tired out with crying after a bit he fell asleep kneeling up against me; an' I carried him away into my own bed, and kept him warm till the morning. And then," she continued, indignantly sniffing away her tears, "tell me I don't know what I'm doing with his children. 'Deed, faith, I know a deal better than them as tells me such nonsense."
"They were very lonely when they first came, were they not?" said Adrienne, remembering Murtagh's words of the evening before.
"'Deed they were! poor little lambs, sick and lonely enough; they scarce cared to do anything, and I never could get them off my mind. Then after a bit, when the summer came, they used to go off whole days up the mountains; and when I saw that pleased them I used to give them their dinner to take with them, and then they took to rampaging about, and I began to grow easier.
"When Miss Rose and Master Bobbo were sent over with the baby—they were every bit as yellow and skinny as Master Murtagh and Miss Winnie; and where would you see finer, heartier-looking children now than the four of them? I'm not for cosseting children too much. Give 'em plenty of good fresh air, and plenty o' good food, and let 'em alone, that's what I say."
"But don't you think," said Adrienne, looking up with a smile, "that now they have had the fresh air and the food, they might have just a little learning, too, without doing them any harm?"