“Yes, Miss. Why, if I hadn’t been run over, my leg wouldn’t have been broke, and then the doctor wouldn’t have mended it, and I shouldn’t be here. What’s she gone away for?” said the boy to himself, as he stared after Richmond. “She’s been a-crying; one of her eyes was wet. What cowards gals are to cry!”
The boy went to the door and listened, but all was perfectly still; so he set down the boots, rolled his apron into what he called a cow’s tail, the process consisting in twisting it up very tightly and tucking it round his waist.
This done he listened again, and finding all still, he thrust his arms into the doctor’s boots and indulged in a hearty laugh of a silently weird description before going down on all fours, and walking as slowly and solemnly round the table as a tom cat, whose movements he accurately copied, rubbing himself up against the legs of the table, and purring loudly.
This over, he rose to his feet and listened, but all being still, he went down upon all fours again and trotted round the table, leaped on to a chair, leaped down again, and ran out of the room and along the dark passage towards the head of the kitchen stairs, looking in the gloom wonderfully like some large ape.
Active as he was, a descent of the dark stone stairs on all fours was beyond him; so he rose up, and reaching over, glided silently down the balustrade, to the great detriment of his buttons. But, arrived upon the mat at the bottom, he once more resumed his quadrupedal attitude, thrust his hands well into the Wellington boots, and trotted with a soft patter into a dark back kitchen, out of which came a droning noise uttered by some one at work, and apparently under the impression that it was a song.
The boy, more animal-like than ever, disappeared in the gloom, with the boots making a low pat-pat, pat-pat, and then there was a loud shriek, and Bob bounded out, skimmed up the stairs, after evidently having alarmed some one, and disappeared with the boots, which he sedately carried up to the bedroom. Then he descended, to listen at the head of the stairs to a complaining voice relating to Richmond Chartley an account of how an “ormuz” great dog had come down the area, run into the back kitchen, and frighted some one almost out of her wits!
Bob’s face expressed happiness approaching the sublime, and he hurriedly cleared the breakfast-things, and took them down in time to be sent down by a not over-clean-looking maid-of-all-work to shut that there gate.
The boy was in the act of performing this duty when a neatly-dressed girlish-looking body approached, carrying a large folio under one arm—a folio so bound that the neatly-mended and well-fitting little glove which covered a very small hand could hardly reach to the bottom.
“Is your mistress in?”
“Yes, Miss,” said Bob, whose face seemed to reflect the sweet, sunny smile which greeted him. “I’ll slip round and let you in.”