CHAPTER IX.
A peacock's feather and a kiss.
| "We tried to quarrel yesterday. |
| Ah! … kiss the memory away." |
In Ted's pleasant home there was a queer little room used for nothing in particular. It was a very little room, hardly worthy indeed of the name, but it had, like some small men who have very big minds, a large window with a most charming view. I think it was partly this which made Ted take such a fancy to this queer little room in the first place—he used to stand at the window when they first came to the house and gaze out at the stretch of sloping fields, with peeps here and there of the blue river fringed with splendid trees, and farther off still the distant hills fading away into the mysterious cloudiness, the sight of which always gave him a strange feeling as if he would like to cry—Ted used to gaze out of this window for ever so long at a time, till somehow the little room came to be associated with him, and the rest of the family got into the way of speaking of it as his. And gradually an idea took shape in his mind which he consulted his mother about, and which she was quite pleased to agree to. Might he have this little room for his museum? That was Ted's idea, and oh how eagerly his blue eyes looked up into his mother's face for her reply, and how the light danced in them with pleasure when she said "yes."
There were shelves in the little room—shelves not too high up, some of them at least, for Ted to arrange his curiosities on, without having to climb on to a chair, and even Cissy, when she was trusted as a great treat to dust some of the treasures, could manage nicely with just a footstool. It would be impossible to tell you half the pleasure Ted got out of his museum. It was to him a sort of visible history of his simple happy life, for nowhere did he go without bringing back with him some curious stone or shell, or bird's feather, or uncommon leaf even, to be placed in his collection, both as a remembrance of his visit and as a thing of interest in itself.
There were specimens of cotton in its different stages, of wool too, from a soft bit of fluff which Ted had picked off a Welsh bramble, to a square inch of an exquisitely knitted Shetland shawl, fine as a cobweb, which Ted had begged from Mabel when she was giving the remains of the shawl to Cissy for her doll. There were bits of different kinds of coal; there was "Blue John" from a Derbyshire cavern, and a tiny china doll which, much charred and disfigured, had yet survived the great fire of Chicago, where one of the children's uncles had passed by not long after; there was a bit of black bread from the siege of Paris; there were all manner of things, all ticketed and numbered, and their description neatly entered in a catalogue which lay on a little table by the door, on which was also to be seen another book, in which Ted requested all visitors to the museum to write their names, and all the big people of the family so well understood the boy's pride and pleasure in his museum, that no one ever thought of making his way into his little room without his invitation.
Ted had begun his museum some months before the great excitement of the nest in the tree, but the delights of the long summer days out of doors had a little put it out of his head. But the latter part, as well as the beginning of these holidays, happened to be very rainy, and the last fortnight was spent mostly by Percy and Ted in the tiny museum room, where Percy helped Ted to finish the ticketing and numbering that he had not long before begun. And Cissy, of course, was as busy as anybody, flopping about with an old pocket-handkerchief which she called her duster, and reproving the boys with great dignity for unsettling any of the trays she had made so "bootily clean."
"You must try to get some more feathers, Ted," said Percy. "They make such a pretty collection. There's a fellow at our school that has an awful lot. He fastens them on to cards—he's got a bird-of-Paradise plume, an awful beauty. Indeed he's got two, for he offered to sell me one for half-a-crown. Wouldn't you like it?"
"I should think I would," said Ted, "but I can't buy anything this half. You know my money's owing to mother for that that I told you about."
He gave a little sigh; the bird of Paradise was a tempting idea.