The Girl Crusoes: A Story of the South Seas

by Mrs. Herbert Strang

Dan's reply was not a particularly lucid one, but as anybody's business was everybody's business in Poppicombe, the station-master had no difficulty in understanding the youth. He warned Dan of the evil effects of not minding one's own business, and crossing the line, entered into a long discussion with his ticket-clerk concerning Miss Tommy and her private affairs.

Meanwhile Tommy was galloping at breakneck speed the four miles which led to her home. About a quarter of a mile from Plum-Tree Farm, where the Westmacott family, Tommy's people, had lived for generations, she espied her sisters standing at the gate leading into the paddock. They had heard the sound of the quick tramp of the pony's hoofs in the distance, and had rushed out to see why Tommy on this particular day was riding so furiously. On catching sight of them she repeated, in her own inimitable way, Dan's method of breaking the good news. She yelled at the top of her voice, and waved the newspaper high above her head. So excited was she that she almost threw the newspaper at her elder sister, and it dropped in a puddle formed by the recent rains. Tommy was off the saddle in a moment, and leaving the pony to find his way to the stable, she picked up the fallen paper, and wiping the dirt from it with her pocket-handkerchief, gave it triumphantly to her tall, dark, handsome sister Elizabeth, whilst Mary, the second girl, drawing nearer to Elizabeth's side, stood quietly waiting.

The three girls bore a certain family likeness to each other, but the differences were almost equally striking. The two eldest were tall and slim, and had the same dark-coloured eyes, but there the resemblance ceased. In character they were as far apart as the poles. Elizabeth, called after her mother, who had died when Tommy was only a few months old, was a capable girl of nineteen years of age, with a magnificent head of rich dark hair, and deep-blue eyes. Her manner was grave and quiet. She had been a mother to the two younger girls ever since she could remember, and responsibility had made her old for her years. Her father, too, had made her his constant companion, and she had been his right hand in managing the farm and keeping the accounts during the years that had preceded his death a few months before. Mary, the second girl, who had just turned fifteen, was as fair as Elizabeth was dark, but with the same deep-coloured starry eyes. She was the most studious of the three, and it was always a great delight to Tommy, when she found her lost in some book of travel or adventure, to awaken her from her dreams by forming a mouthpiece with her hands and shouting in poor Mary's ear, "Hallo! are you there?" But Tommy's winning smile always disarmed Mary's wrath, and, in spite of constant small disagreements, the two were excellent friends.

The youngest girl, Katherine, our friend Tommy, was thin and wiry in build, somewhat short for her years, with small black twinkling eyes, and a little head running over with golden curls. Her chief characteristic so far was an endless capacity for getting into scrapes. A demon of mischief always seemed lurking in the twinkling depths of her merry eyes. Just now they danced with excitement, as she said: "Well, of all the cool customers you must be the coolest, Mary, to stand there waiting, and never to change a hair, or look over the paper in Elizabeth's hand, or anything. Oh dear! Oh dear! what can you be made of? Dear old Uncle Ben is coming home, coming home, coming home!" and catching Mary by the waist, she sang, "Waltz me round, Mary, waltz me round," and twirled her sister round and round until she was completely out of breath.

"Do make her stop it, Bess," besought Mary gaspingly.

"Tommy darling, do try to be a bit sensible," said Elizabeth, with a smile.

"Not I!" said Tommy, "why should be sensible?" as she gave Mary's pigtail a tug.

Elizabeth, recognizing Tommy's mood, and fearing there would be "ructions" presently, tactfully put her arm about her gay-hearted, mischievous small sister, and led the way indoors.

This was not the first time by any means that Elizabeth had acted as peacemaker in the Westmacott family. When she was quite a child, and Tommy a mere baby, she had often been called by Mrs. Pratt, the housekeeper, to see if she could induce "that plaguy young limb" to behave herself. Later on, Elizabeth had, times without number, pleaded with her father not to be so angry, or quite so severe, with his youngest girl, however trying the child might be; and Mr. Westmacott, seeing that Elizabeth thoroughly understood "the imp of mischief," as he called her the day he had been obliged to summon all hands on the farm to rescue her and her pony from a bog, left her more and more to his eldest daughter's care. Then when Tommy was old enough to accompany her sisters to "lessons" at the Vicarage, again Elizabeth had to pour oil on troubled waters, for the vicar, an old friend of her father's, who had undertaken the education of the three girls, and whose word had hitherto been taken as law, often became very irritable when Tommy would argue instead of accepting facts. As Tommy increased in stature, she became, under Elizabeth's wise guidance, more and more amenable to reason, but she never lost her absolute fearlessness and independence.

All the girls had been encouraged by their father to live an open-air life, and Tommy always led the way instinctively whenever they went riding, driving, rowing and fishing. The farmhouse was the old manor house. The huge kitchen, with its deep-seated fireplace and low-raftered oak-beamed ceiling, was now used as a living-room. It had three deep bay windows, each looking across the flower garden on to the moors. The breath of autumn was in the air, but the hollyhocks and gladioli still flaunted their gay colours, as though they refused to own that summer had ended. The garden was Elizabeth's special pride; she loved to keep it an old-fashioned, old-world garden, and had herself planted sweet peas and stocks, and the spiked gillyflower, amongst the lavender bushes and the oleanders. In fact, after her father's death, when Elizabeth had found that his assets were really "nil," owing to a succession of bad crops and the cattle-disease spreading so rapidly among the kine, she had had serious thoughts of trying to take up gardening as a profession, but on talking it over with her sisters they agreed that it would be better to wait until the return of their uncle.