“I hope I won’t tumble any more,” he said, “for there’s lots of fings still to bring down.”
“Suppose I offer to help too?” said Chrissie. “My face is quite clean now and my hair’s tidy. I think it was too bad of Mummy to say anything about them before Aunt Margaret, when it was all, or nearly all, Lell’s fault this morning.”
“Auntie’s werry kind,” said Jasper. “I daresay she’d like you to help,” and if he felt a tiny scrap of disappointment at not having all the honour to himself, his good little heart would not allow him to show it. “What’s Lelly doing?” he went on.
“Crouched up by the dining-room fire over a story-book, of course,” said Chrissie. “She won’t mind,” and her face was so bright and her tone so pleasant when she went into her aunt’s room with Jasper, that Miss Fortescue began to think that she had really been taking the little girls’ misdemeanours too seriously!
“They are only children after all,” she said to herself, and “Yes, dear,” she replied to Christabel, “I shall be very glad of your help. Can you hang up some of these cloaks and things in the cupboard? I am so glad there is a cupboard! And Jasper, my boy, will you put my boots and shoes and slippers neatly in a row on that lowest shelf? I won’t send anything more downstairs till I see what had better stay up here, and I have not come across my wool for knitting yet.”
Her cheerfulness touched a gentle chord in Chrissie.
“Aunt Margaret,” she said, “it must be awfully strange for you here in this poky house, compared to Fareham. I wonder you don’t mind more.”
“Dear child, you must not think me better than I am,” Miss Fortescue replied. “I have ‘minded’,” and her voice shook a little, “terribly—wrongly, I fear. But it might have been so much worse. Think what some have to bear—of loneliness and lovelessness when they are old like me! If I can feel that I am of use to you all, and able to brighten things a little for your father and mother, it will be almost as great a joy as it used to be to me to have you all at Fareham.”
Christabel did not reply. But her aunt’s words impressed her. Ideas—feelings rather, perhaps—were awaking in her, which were new to her; though she had often heard and read of “unselfishness,” and the happiness of living for others, of bearing, or at least sharing their burdens, she had never really “taken in,” realised these truths. To see them acted upon, made the very sunshine of life, struck her as very wonderful. For perhaps the first time, she said to herself, “I wish I could really care for other people and try to make them happy and not mind about myself,” and though the thought passed off again, and she was as ready as ever to grumble and to squabble with Leila and to fight for her own rights and fancies, still, it was something that it had been there, a beginning, a tiny seedling, which might yet take root and blossom into beauty.
So the day which had seemed likely, like poor long-ago Rosamund’s, to be “one of misfortunes,” cleared and improved as it went on. Chrissie had one happy quality—she really, if once interested in a thing, did throw her whole heart and cleverness into it; and careless and unmethodical though she was, the sight of her aunt’s fairy-like neatness and order struck her pleasantly.