Chapter Eighteen.
At the Circus.
Mamzelle Paddy began and continued her work in the Wallace nursery with complete satisfaction to all concerned. Esmeralda, it is true, had surpassed herself in violence of diction in the letter which came in answer to the one breaking the news; but while Bridgie shed tears of distress, and Jack frowned impatience, the person against whom the hurricane of invective was hurled, received it with unruffled and even sympathetic composure.
As Pixie read over the crowded sheets her eye flashed approval of dramatic points, she set her lips, and wagged her head, entering so thoroughly into the spirit of the writer that she unconsciously adopted her manner when aroused, and when the concluding words were read, heaved a deep sigh of satisfaction. “She’ll feel a lot better after that!” she remarked tersely, and the prophecy could not fail to be comforting to those who knew Mrs Hilliard’s temperament.
After such an outburst, repentance might be expected to set in even more speedily than usual, and a peace-offering in the shape of a hamper crowded with good things could be confidently looked for in the course of the next few days. Esmeralda disliked formal apologies, and from the boys’ point of view, at least, turkeys and game made a more eloquent amende.
Viva and Inda Wallace were loving and lovable children, but possessed with a nervous restlessness, an insatiable curiosity, and with such easily-roused tempers as would have reduced an ordinary adult governess to despair within a very short period. Their delicate mother was occupied with many social duties, and the father, though devoted to his pretty daughters, had little patience with their vagaries, while the frequent screaming attacks which sounded through the house had a trying effect on nerves already strained by long residence abroad.
Parents and servants alike breathed sighs of relief when each morning punctually as the clock struck ten, Mamzelle Paddy came running upstairs primed with half a dozen thrilling devices for amusement and occupation. Viva, as ringleader and rebel-in-chief, had flatly refused to speak, or listen to, a word of French, but when it was presently revealed to her that the Spoopjacks understood no other language, there was no course left but to withdraw her opposition. The Bobityshooties were English, and stupid at that, but by the time that Nicholas Spoopjack had succeeded in teaching them how to address him with propriety, the two unsuspicious listeners to the conversation had themselves mastered the lesson without once suspecting what they were about.
The adventures which those two enterprising and admirable families went through, were as varied as they were endless, and each day brought a thrilling development of the situation. Nicholas Spoopjack thought nothing of going out in a diving-bell in the morning, and a balloon in the afternoon, while the Bobityshooties entertained royalty to dinner in the kitchen cupboard, and feasted luxuriously on the cruets, and the pinked-out paper which covered the shelves.