“I’ve got three stings,” replied Dexter, who had escaped without further harm.
“And I’ve got five, I think,” said Peter. “What was you doing to ’em, Dan’l!”
“Doin’ to ’em!” growled Dan’l, who was stamping about and rubbing himself, and looking exceedingly like the bear in the old fable. “I wasn’t doin’ nothin’ to ’em. One o’ the hives have been threatenin’ to swarm again, and I was just goin’ by, when they come at me like a swarm o’ savidges, just as if some one had been teasing them.” Dexter was rubbing the back of his neck, and feeling horribly guilty, as he asked himself whether he had not better own to having disturbed the hive; but there was something so unpleasantly repellent about the old gardener, and he was looking so suspiciously from one to the other, that the boy felt as if he could not speak to him.
If it had been Peter, who, with all his roughness, seemed to be tolerant of his presence, he would have spoken out at once; but he could not to Dan’l, and he remained silent.
“They stings pretty sharp,” said Peter, laughing. “Blue-bag’s best thing. I shall go up and get Maria to touch mine up. Coming?”
“Nay, I’m not coming,” growled Dan’l. “I can bear a sting or two of a bee without getting myself painted up with blue-bags. Dock leaves is good enough for me.”
“And there aren’t a dock left in the garden,” said Peter. “You found fault with me for not pulling the last up.”
So Peter went up to the house to be blue-bagged, Dan’l remained like a bear in his den, growling to himself, and Dexter, whose stings still throbbed, went off across the lawn to walk off the pain, till it was time to go to Sir James’s.
“Who’d have thought that the little things could hurt so much!”
Then the pain began to diminish till it was only a tingle, and the spots where the stings went in were round and hard, and now it was that Dexter’s conscience began to prick him as sharply as the bees’ stings, and he walked about the garden trying to make up his mind as to whether he should go and confess to Dan’l that he stirred the bees up with a long stick.