“What your father say, children? Run quick, like rabbits! Go short way up steps! Run quick!”
CHAPTER III
THE LIGHT AND THE LIGHTHOUSE
To reach the Lighthouse from Stumpy’s dwelling, you might either follow Jenny Lind’s car-track a long way around, or scramble up a rocky path, broken here and there by a flight of whitewashed steps, till you arrived at the top of the mighty heap of rocks that formed the island. Should a high wind be blowing, you crushed your hat far down on your head, gripped the handrail hard when you reached the steps, and often sat down flat until some sudden gust had passed by. As this was Margaret McLean’s only fashionable promenade, you can imagine that she seldom ventured on it, preferring to stroll about the patch of green in front of the Lighthouse, or to walk up and down between the scanty rows of vegetables behind. She and her husband, however, were well accustomed to seeing the children scramble over the rocks like their own goats and were never anxious about Ronald, if Lesley were with him, for alone he was apt to venture too far and attempt heights which he might reach, but never be able to descend.
He had been only a tiny tot of two or three years, running about the kitchen, when, sitting on the floor in front of the sink one day, he had amused himself by slipping the various cooking-pots over his head and laughing out at Lesley with a “Peep bo!” from beneath them. His mother, hearing the clatter, was hurrying from another room to inquire into its cause when a series of loud cries and calls for help were heard. She found the baby completely extinguished by a large kettle which Lesley was trying to pull off his head, while the more he struggled and screamed, the tighter grew the kettle.
Mrs. McLean pulled, Lesley pulled, Ronnie beat his hands and kicked and roared until the mother was thoroughly frightened. “Get your father, quick!” she cried to Lesley, and the child climbed, panting, to the tower where Malcolm was trimming the Light. She was too breathless to speak when she reached him, but he saw that something was wrong below and half-leaped, half-tumbled down the stairs to the kitchen. He took the baby in his arms and succeeded with his big sailor voice in reaching the ears under the kettle.
“Be quiet, Ronnie!” he ordered. “Stop crying at once! Father’s here. Father’ll help you.”
The screams stopped, the beating hands grew quiet, and the Lightkeeper walked to and fro patting the small shoulders till they grew still enough to allow him to lay the child in his mother’s arms. Then, while Lesley watched him with astonished eyes he seized a lump of lard from the shelf, greased the inside of the kettle and Ronnie’s head as far as his hand could reach, saying all the time, “Quiet, sonny, quiet, sonny; Father’s here!” This done, with one swift jerk the kettle came off and the small boy was restored to the world.
Oh, what a wonderful father, Lesley thought; there was nothing that he couldn’t do and nothing that he didn’t know, and I believe that everybody on the island, including Jenny Lind, the rabbits, and the sea-birds, thought much the same thing.
The wonderful father was waiting in the doorway to-day as the children’s feet were heard on the rocky pathway, and after a little washing of grimy paws and smoothing of rough locks they all sat down at table. Six times a year the Lighthouse tender called at the island with stores for its inhabitants, so tea and sugar and coffee, flour and meal, spices and cereals were always on hand, but for the rest they depended on goats’ milk, fresh fish, eggs, chickens, rabbits, and such vegetables as they could raise on their wind-swept height, three hundred feet above the sea.
Margaret McLean boasted, when she could find any one to hear her boast, that she could prepare rabbit in fifteen different ways, but which one of the fifteen she followed that day will probably never be known. At all events, it seemed to please the children who jumped down from the table when grace had been said, quite refreshed and ready to dry the dishes and help to set the room in order.