[ii]
]

“‘There they are,’ Phyl said, in a tremulous voice.” ([Page 17].)
Three Little Maids] [Frontispiece

[iii]
]Three Little Maids

BY

ETHEL TURNER
(Mrs. H. R. CURLEWIS)

AUTHOR OF ‘SEVEN LITTLE AUSTRALIANS,’ ‘THE LITTLE LARRIKIN,’
‘THE CAMP AT WANDINONG,’ ETC.

“O to be young again!

O to have dreams and dreams!

And to talk in the gardens of Wonderland

With stars and flowers and streams!”

W. A. MacKenzie.

WARD, LOCK & CO., LIMITED
LONDON, MELBOURNE AND TORONTO

[v]
]TO
MY TINY DAUGHTER

Here is a chain for you, sweet,

Hold up your soft hands to catch it;

Pansy and white marguerite,

You will think nothing can match it.

But you will say, Are they true?

All of the flowers in the chain, dear?

Did they all grow up with you,

Or some of them just in your brain, dear?

Count true the white marguerite,

Pansies—as false I must own them.

Life, it may well be, my sweet,

Had not so fair to you grown them.

E. S. C.

Mosman’s Bay
Sydney

[vii]
]CONTENTS

PART I.—PLAY DAYS

[viii]
]PART II.—SCRIBBLING DAYS

[9]
]PART I
PLAY DAYS

[11]
]Three Little Maids

CHAPTER I
TWELVE O’ THE CLOCK

“What’s done cannot be undone; to bed, to bed, to bed.”

There was the listening hush of midnight in the house. No light burned in any of the rooms, but through the windows, where the blinds were up, a woe-begone struggling moon shone palely.

The big bedroom at the front of the house was empty, and the moonbeams lay quiet on the smooth white counterpane of the canopied bed. Even in so faint a light it was plain to see the room was unused; the chairs and sofa held no heaps of flung-off clothes, the dressing-table appointments were in the most precise order, the chill air lay over everything, unbroken by the regular fall and rise of human breath.

The mother had taken the visitors’ room to sleep in ever since the day two months ago when Death had [12] ]walked whitely into that larger room and frozen with his strange breath the father of her youngest child.

The moon touched sadly now the face that lay in the smaller room, in that strangest of places wandered to by mortals—perfect dreamlessness.

Brown waves of hair strayed on the pillow, brown eyelashes lay motionless on cheeks where the lifeless tinge of grief knew itself for stranger, and was slowly giving way once more to the healthy life-colour that loved to dwell there. The contour of the face was at once grave and childish; an irresponsible flower-life of happiness would have accentuated certain lines about the nostrils and mouth into a look of spirited wilfulness, but the hard climbing of hills had been given to her instead, and the mouth at eight-and-twenty was wholesomely self-reliant.

Her youngest child, Weenie, was curled up beside her, a dark-haired morsel of four.

Across the landing, but rather lower down, was a third bedroom with a very tossed bed, where two little light-haired girls lay, their arms flung across each other, their curls tangled in the same heap.

From under the pillow of each peeped a book, but there were restrictions against reading in bed at night, and in the morning at eight and ten years old one is always so ready to get up that the volumes were merely put there for company. Against the wall stood a row of four dolls’ beds crowded with occupants, and, a little apart, a fifth one, quite empty.

[13]
]The book of the younger girl, Dorothy, slipped from the pillow and made a hard ridge for her neck to lie on. She turned restlessly for a minute or two, and tossed her head about, but the hardness did not move, and she woke drowsily. Her slumber had been uneasy, like her sister’s, most of the night, and the waking instantly brought a dull sense of a certain trouble in life. By the time she had blinked twice, recollection had come and she sat up, gently disengaging herself from the thin little arm across her chest, and gazed, all her heart in her eyes, at the empty miniature bed a moonbeam faintly discovered.

Then her gaze went to the windows, where the blinds were always left high up, that none of the sun’s first merry darts might be lost.

“Oh,” she said with a sudden gasp, horror in her eyes, “Phyl, Phyl, wake up at once.” She shook her hastily. Phyl’s face had almost a spiritual look in this faint light, so thin it was, so drained of colour the cheeks and lips.

“Whatever’s the matter?” she said, the impatience of a spoiled dreamland upon her.

“It’s snowing” said Dorothy, in a voice fraught with intensest emotion.

Phyl rolled comfortably over to her left side without the least unclosing of her heavy eyelids.

“Well, I don’t care,” she said, drowsily.

Dorothy shook her vigorously to bring her to reason. She was quite quivering with cold and grief [14] ]herself. “Don’t you remember?” she said. “Jennie and Suey are out all this time.”

Then indeed Phyl’s eyes sprang open, and the horror in her sister’s eyes showed equally strong in her own.

“Whatever shall we do?” she said.

They crept out of bed softly and stole through cold air to the window against which the little soft flakes were beginning to fall.

“H’sh!” Dorothy said, “we shall wake mother.” So they tiptoed and spoke in whispers.

Phyl was peering in an anguished way through a patch of glass she had rubbed clear of breath-mist, but the moon was growing more and more woe-begone now the snow-clouds were drifting down, and all it revealed of the garden were some vague shadows of trees and stretches of dark grass patched here and there with white.

“[They’ll get galloping consumption] at least,” Dorothy said in a choked voice.

Phyl drew a deep breath and moved to one of the chairs where their clothes lay neatly folded.

“I’m going to fetch Suey in,” she said.

“Oh,” gasped Dolly, whose mind had not travelled quite so far as this.

Phyl was slipping some petticoats on over her nightgown; she groped about and found one shoe and one boot for her feet.

“Are you coming?” she said. “P’raps you don’t care.”

[15]
]Dorothy stumbled to her own chair and put on a garment or two.

“I care more than you,” she said in a fierce whisper; “I’ve kept waking and waking all night, and you just went on being asleep.”

“[They’ll get galloping consumption at least.]”

“That’s all you know,” Phyl said. “Why, I’ve been awake hours and hours, and all this time you were fast asleep. I don’t believe you were awake more than a minute.”

“Every time I was awake you were asleep, ’cause I heard you talking silly things,” said Dorothy indignantly.

[16]
]“Every time I was awake you had your eyes screwed up fast, so you must have been asleep,” contended Phyl.

Dorothy was summoning a fresh argument, but Phyl’s tender thoughts fled out into the snow.

“Think how they’ll be shivering!” she said. “Come on, Dolly.”

They dragged the eider-down quilt off the bed, doubled it, and wrapped it round the shoulders of both of them, for they were quite alive to the cold. Then they stumbled off softly and awkwardly, thus pinioned together, along the passage, down the dark, still stairs, and to the side-door in the hall.

It was Phyl’s cold little hand that softly undid the bolt, while Dorothy, with impartial justice, held the wrap round the two pairs of shoulders. They crept down the steps, their loose shoes crushing the fresh-fallen snow in a way that alarmed them for a moment lest the house should be aroused. But then the keen mysterious terrors of the white-patched darkness assailed them and made them callous to all other fears.

What was that eerie-looking thing crouched there by the porch? Phyl whispered, in a would-be stout voice, that it was only a great heap of leaves old John had swept up; but both of them felt in their hearts it was pregnant with horrible spirit life. And that mournful sigh and whistle that came from among the bare-armed trees of the shrubbery? Dorothy said it [17] ]was only the wind, but the saying in no wise reassured either of them. They stopped and clung in terror to each other half-a-dozen times before they reached the spot for which they were bound—the bottom of the kitchen garden. Light feathery flakes lay on their hair, their breath congealed as it came from their blue lips, their teeth chattered loosely.

And yet none of these things quite killed the romance for them. Phyl even stood still one dreadful half-second.

“This really ought to have been part of their adventure; we oughtn’t to rescue them so soon,” she said gloomily, “it would have been an experience.”

But Dolly’s heart was bleeding, and she dragged on so determinedly that the other half of the quilt was forced to follow.

“Oh,” she said in a most poignant tone of grief, “they can’t go on having expewiences when it’s snowing, Phyl.”

Where the cabbages ended a row of rhubarb-plants divided the vegetables from the gooseberry-bushes. Beyond these was a rough bank covered with prickly bush, and beyond that again was a wild heap of quarried stone left from some repairing that had recently been done to the house.

“[There they are,]” Phyl said in a tremulous voice.

On the roughest ledge of stone, exposed to all the wind and weather, lay two dolls. The little girls’ hands went to them, never a moment confused as to [18] ]which belonged to which, and drew them with passionate thankfulness into the eider-down shelter.

“Suey’s soaking,” said Phyl, bitter reproach in her voice.

“Jennie’s dying, I think,” said Dorothy, with a great sob.

They wound the cumbersome quilt round the four of them and scuttled back to the house. Up-stairs again they crept, their boots in their hands, and their frozen feet bare to the bitter cold that crept about the floors. But how happy were their hearts now their darlings were safe in their arms!

“I think I’ll just light the candle,” Phyl said, “we can’t see how they look in the dark.”

She struck a match very very softly, and the pale light illuminated the room.

Dorothy was stripping off Jennie’s dripping frock as she sat on the edge of the bed. “We’ll have to wrap them in towels,” she said, “their night-gowns are in the nursery.”

So they seized a towel each and enveloped the sawdust bodies tenderly. It was agreed to be impossible to put them in the little bed against the wall after such an eventful night, so were snuggled down in their own bed, into which they crept once more.

“Ugh, how wet your hair is!” Dolly said, as Phyl’s damp light curls brushed her face again.

Then she sat up in dismay.

“You oughtn’t to have gone, Phyl,” she said; [19] ]“you’ll go and get another cold, and have to stay in bed.”

Phyl recollected her troublesome chest for the first time.

“Oh, I’ll dry my head and then I’ll be all right,” she said easily, and gave her hair a rub or two with the towel, that acted—both before and after the operation—as Suey’s night-gown.

But Dorothy was feeling still disturbed, for had she not promised her mother to help to look after this delicate Phyl and keep her from danger? She slipped out of bed once more, and went to the mantel-piece where stood the bottle of cod-liver oil, with which they had built Phyl up after her last attack.

“I won’t,” Phyl said, in a stormy whisper as the nauseous bottle was thrust before her.

“Oh, go on,” said Dorothy, “you’ll have a fwightful cold if you don’t, and wemember how fwitened mama gets.”

Phyl

“wemembered,” and struggled nobly with herself. All her soul rose against taking the slimy, ill-looking stuff, but her heart went out to the poor mother, whose colour died and whose sweet mouth trembled at each fresh attack of hers.

“I can’t take it without a spoon,” she said in a piteous way.

“Here’s a doll’s plate,” said Dolly, “I’ll pour some on it and you can lick it off.”

[20]
]Phyl groaned, but Dolly held the tiny plate close to her mouth.

“Do wemember mama,” she adjured her.

So Phyl thrust out her shrinking tongue, licked the plate tolerably clean, and with much shuddering lay down again.

[21]
]CHAPTER II
PRETENDING

“Far away and yet so near us, lies a land where all have been,

Played beside its sparkling waters, danced along its meadows green,

Where the busy world we live in, and its noises only seem

Like the echo of a tempest, or the shadow of a dream.”

All the other dolls belonging to the pair led quiet, domestic lives, into whose annals few things more eventful came than tea-parties, christenings, funerals, and attacks of galloping consumption or heart disease.

But Jennie and Suey, the two longest owned and most deeply cherished, were called upon to enact every possible and impossible phase of the romance with which the souls of those two little maids were bitten through and through.

Both of the waxen creatures were of pallid complexion; their hair was thin, their noses were worn down by the vicissitudes of years. Sometimes they might be met clad in blue cashmere frocks, with white muslin pinafores, shoes, stockings, and even a [22] ]microscopic handkerchief apiece. And it might then be known they were passing through a calm period of existence, and were simply the daughters of the pair, or such mild and admired characters from books as Ellen Montgomery or Alice Humphreys.

But if you came across their attenuated forms swathed merely in pieces of black velvet or crimson cashmere, you would know—that is, if the scales could fall from your eyes, and the eager, wonderful second-sight of under twelve be yours for half-an-hour—that all domesticity had passed away and heroines lay before you.

Perhaps Virginia, walking blindly and happily to her lurid death, or Flora Macdonald struggling through dangers to save her king, or glorious Mary bowing her doomed head, or Lammermuir’s bride, or Constance following Marmion to the wars.

There was hardly an adventure of hero and heroine of all the strange miscellany of books devoured by the little pair that those unemotional little dolls had not been through.

They had been lowered by knotted handkerchiefs from the highest windows in the house, both as princesses running away with fairy princes, and as heroines escaping from burning hotels. They had had their internal sawdust badly congested by being forced to swim across the narrow ditch of water that ran below the currant-bushes and formed an enchanted castle’s moat. They had been hanged by the neck, [23] ]shut up in a disused bird-cage called the Bastille, buried up to their necks, plants for a Nero’s eyes to gaze upon, placed in an arena to meet with fortitude the Christian martyr’s death from ravening lions.

But hitherto, when eight o’clock came, Romance’s wings had always fallen to, and fingers, merely loving and maternal now, had soothed and comforted the racked bodies, clad them in night-gowns of most patient work, and laid them to rest in the most elaborate and comfortable of all the little beds.

This was the first night that when bedtime came Romance was still soaring irresistibly. All the afternoon Joan of Arc and Grace Darling had been making their way with unheard-of difficulties from the mines of Siberia to St. Petersburg, to beg an audience of the Czar, in order to rescue their aged parents from the life of toil.

When the tea-bell rang Dorothy picked Jennie up from the salt mine in which she had taken refuge for an hour.

“Let’s ask if we may have waspberry jam for tea, Phyl,” she said, tucking her heroine under her arm.

But Phyl’s eyes still held the fire and glory of the struggle.

“I’ll tell you,” she said; “let’s leave them here on this mountain till bedtime—they never get any real adventures; Grace and Joan didn’t go in and sit by the nursery fire as soon as the tea-bell went.”

“O-oh,” said Dolly, clasping her dear one jealously. [24] ]It was all very well to have adventures when they themselves were actually on the spot to see no real harm befell, but it seemed a horrible thing to go and leave them unprotected, out-of-doors at night. “O-oh, Phyl,—I wouldn’t like to leave Jennie where I couldn’t see her.”

“Grace’s and Joan’s mothers couldn’t see them,” Phyl said darkly.

“It might be wet,” said Dorothy, with an anxious look at the sky.

“No; it’s beautifully fine,” said Phyl; “at any rate Joan is going to stay and brave it; p’raps Grace hasn’t got enough pluck, though.”

“Gwace is a lot bwaver than Joan,” protested Dolly, quickly fired. She sprang across to the stones and laid her down recklessly. Phyl placed Joan in an equally exposed position, and then with determined faces but anxious hearts they ran in to tea, and left the heroines to struggle on across Russia in the dark.

When bedtime came Dolly was ready to slip out and bring them in after the long three hours.

But Phyl’s eyes were full of exultation

, and drew her sister away from Weenie, who tried thirstily to hear the whisper.

“Let’s let it be a really truly adventure this time,” she said; “let’s let them go on struggling there till morning.”

Dolly’s heart swelled.

[25]
]“They’d get dreadful colds, Phyl,” she pleaded, “and Jennie’s only just getting over her menumia.”

“Oh!” said Phyl impatiently, “heroines can’t think about colds and things,—I’ve decided to let Joan stay,—your cowardly little Grace Darling can come to bed if she likes.”

Of course she did not like, and the result was both small maidens crept unhappily into bed, and after long and wistful gazing at the window dropped off at last into troubled sleep.

But who could wake and find it snowing,—an undreamed-of thing that fine night,—and still leave two unfortunate heroines making their harrowing way across the Steppes? There was no thought of Grace in Dolly’s mind and none of Joan in Phyl’s in that midnight hour; it was little Jennie and Suey who lay beneath the bitter sky, and their instantaneous rescue had to be effected at all costs.

But who could marvel that, even despite the cod-liver oil, Phyllida

awoke with laboured breathing, and even strong, rosy Dolly sneezed and sneezed as she slipped on her clothes in the morning to run and tell her mother the sorrowful news that Phyl’s Old Man of the Sea was sitting on her chest?

“Oh dear! oh dear!” cried the mother, when after much questioning all the story of the night was extracted. “What am I going to do with you? Phyl, Phyl, are you trying to break my heart again? Dolly, and you promised to help me!”

[26]
]“We didn’t think,” sobbed the little girls, heartbroken themselves to have given such trouble.

“But you never do,” said the distracted young mother. “All these dreadful, dreadful things that come into your heads,—you always do them first, and then are sorry after.”

“If only you had forbidden us to do it,” wept Phyl; “we never do the things you forbid, do we, mother?”

The mother was forced to admit this; their obedience to direct command was unswerving, but how could any one circumvent wild proceedings by laying an embargo on them before the wild young minds had conceived them?

“How could I have dreamed you would do anything so mad?” she said. “Didn’t you stay one moment to think how it would grieve me?”

“When we got back we did,” said Dolly, with streaming eyes, “and Phyl ate ever so much cod-liver oil to please you.”

What was there to be done but scold and scold, and then beg and entreat future carefulness?

“Write it down in the book, Dolly,” Phyl said, when the mother had gone off to see about linseed poultices and hot drinks.

And Dolly got out a little book made of bits of paper stitched together by themselves, and she made one new entry on the list of “Things we’re not to do on any account.”

“Not to go out in the garden when it’s snowing in [27] ]middle of the night,” she wrote now in large plain letters.

The prohibitions on the preceding page or two were a little curious.

“Not to read any more of Sarah’s and Jane’s books in paper covers.”

“Phyl not to get her feet wet in the ditch, and D. not to let her get them wet.”

“Not to tie Weenie to the table any more when she touches our things. N.B.—Weenie not to touch our things.”

“Not to pretend we’re angels going up and down Jacob’s ladder.”

“Not to pretend Suey is Jael, and not to hammer nails in the table.”

“Not to pretend Bibel stories any more at all.”

“P. not to pretend Sarah is Sinbad when she is washing the floor, and never to get on her back again.”

“D. not to give her best books to poor girls at the door any more.”

“What’ll we be to-day?” Dolly said, tucking the book of prohibitions in a secret place between the skirting-board and the wall. “Tell you, I’ll be Snow-White and you can be Rose-Red.”

Phyl considered.

“Well, out of the blue book,” she said. “The green with twirly letters is stupid.”

The blue held Andersen’s versions, all other [28] ]attempts to disguise or dress up this immortal story being swiftly resented by the two.

Phyl was at a disadvantage, being confined to a prostrate position, and could only make passes in the air, but Dolly moved about the room in a slow, queer way, her arms outstretched and waving regularly.

At any hour of the day the two might be seen moving about the house or garden in the same mysterious fashion, their arms tossing gently, their eyes dreamy. But if they met any one their arms dropped guiltily to their sides and their faces grew very red; to no one, not even their mother, would they have confessed that they were fairies floating about the earth.

Rose-Red, with a blissful smile on her face, was in the midst of a conversation with the Prince when the steaming linseed poultice came to interrupt.

“You must keep your arms under the blankets,” the mother said, tucking the clothes well in.

“Oh, mother!” was Phyl’s dismayed answer.

“Wouldn’t it do if you tied some flannel round each arm?” said Dolly anxiously.—How was a fairy to “float” and be “wafted airily,” or to “rustle musically,” with her arms smothered in bed-clothes?

“No,” said Mrs. Conway very decisively, “until the fire burns up much better Phyl is to keep the clothes—faithfully—up to her chin. Remember, I trust you, Phyl. Now I am going to see about your tray.”

[29]
]“Oh!” began Dorothy with beseeching eyes.

The mother laughed resignedly.

“I suppose I must say yes,” she said, and went down to see that the tray was laid for two bedroom breakfasts. She had long since found the only way to induce Phyl to eat anything when she was ill was to allow Dolly to have her meals with her.

Harriet came up with the two pink bowls of bread-and-milk.

“Serve you well right, Miss Phyl,” she said; “real bad girls, that’s what you are! And people thinking you’re so good. Do you know what Jane’s mother said when she first saw you?”

“No,” they answered, but they looked nervous; they were both very sensitive to anything said about them.

“She sez to me, she sez, ‘What nice quiet little ladies yours look, Harriet! They’d never give you any trouble, I’m sure,’ she sez. An’ do you know what I sez to her?”

“No,” they said again, meekly.

“I sez, ‘Don’t you go judging by aperyances, Mrs. Barnes. For all they look so quiet, they’re real downright bad,’ I sez. An’ so you are.”

They accepted the statement with a certain amount of relief, for they had both secretly feared it was a worse charge that Mrs. Barnes had brought against them. They would far rather have been termed “bad” than “silly” or “romantic.”

[30]
]“What dishes have the minions set before us?” said Phyl as the door shut behind the hard speaker-of-truth.

“There are woc’s eggs, haunches of venison, pweserved woses, and almond toffee,” responded Dolly.

“Then let us anon,” said Phyl. “Anon” was the last word that had struck her fancy, and she dragged it into her conversation in all possible and impossible places.

They had just emptied their heavy gold plates and laid down their spoons, the handles of which were encrusted with priceless diamonds, when the mother came in with another tray bearing cocoa, bread-and-butter, and boiled eggs. Weenie followed with the salt, and a look of envy on her face.

“I never det any colds,” she said forlornly.

After breakfast, when the tray had been taken away and the mother had gone to her various duties, Dolly looked at Phyl, and Phyl looked at Dolly, and then they both looked at Weenie.

“Oh,” the small one said entreatingly, very quick to interpret the glances, “do let’s stay, Phyl—please, Dolly, let’s stay.”

Phyl looked at her impatiently. “Don’t begin to be tiresome, Weenie,” she said; “you’re not nearly old enough for this game. Think how nice it will be to have the nursery to yourself all day.”

“We’ll lend you the pink tea-set if you’ll be very careful with it,” Dolly added consolingly.

[31]
]But Weenie seemed entirely to fail to see the advantage of the sole use of the nursery, even with the pink tea-set—which was not the very best one—thrown in.

“I will stay,” she said. “I shall stay. I will stay—I will stay.” She wound her arms round the bedpost to prevent the forcible ejection that so often overtook her.

“Take no notice of her,” whispered Dolly, “she’ll soon get tired of it and go.”

They commenced waving their arms and talking in that strange tongue of theirs again.

Within the space of ten minutes Dolly had been rescued from an enchanted castle; turned into a swan to elude the pursuit of a wicked step-mother; had danced at a ball on the waters of the lake, clad in a garment made of sunset clouds studded with dewdrops; and now, seated on a magnificent throne hewn out of a block of priceless jasper, arrayed in royal purple robes sparkling with diamonds, she was a princess once more restored to her own rights, and was extending a fairy-like foot in a golden slipper for a prince to kiss.

But Weenie listened to the low buzz of talk, and watched the strange actions with contemptuous discontent.

She was the most practical child in the world, and for her life could see nothing of the cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces wherein her sisters were [32] ]dwelling. There was no glittering throne for her eyes, no dazzlingly beautiful princess gracefully extending a foot slippered in gleaming gold. There was merely Dolly to be seen, rosy-cheeked, ordinary little Dolly with a long bath-towel trailing from her waist, and the pincushion-cover on her head. And she was just sitting on two pillows with a very silly look on her face, and was stiffly sticking out a foot clad in a plain black stocking and well-worn house shoe.

“Oh,” said the little weary one, “please, Dolly, [isn’t zere a dog] in the story, and I could bark—or isn’t zere a drate bear and I could roar?” Dolly was advancing now towards the washstand with her arm crooked slightly, a small pocket-handkerchief hanging over her curls, and an ineffable smile on her face. The prince was leading her, a bride, up the rose-strewn church-path, and the air was full of joy-bells and the happy voices of the villagers. Weenie caught pleadingly at the black frock. “Or I could be ze wicked old woman, and chase you,” she said.

“She’s been put in a spiked barrel, and is rolling down a mountain,” Phyl said darkly; “her machinations are over.” She pronounced the word “machine-ashones,” and her tongue lingered admiringly over it.

“Zen I’ll be ze little dog, and I’ll drink up your blood when your head falls off,” said Weenie, undeterred. That and the character of the “sullen headsman” [33] ]were the only parts that took her fancy in the frequently played drama Mary Queen of Scots.

Dolly turned from the washstand altar, her bouquet (the three small toothbrushes) in her hand. There was a sound of tears in the forlorn little sister’s voice that touched her conscience.

“[Isn’t zere a dog in the story?]”

“We might play Wobin Hood for a little time—eh, Phyl?” she said, unwillingly taking off her bridal veil and putting it back in her pocket. There were opportunities for shooting, a lively work in this game which led Weenie to tolerate it.

“All right,” Phyl said, also softened by the lonely tone in the small sister’s voice.

[34]
]Weenie scrambled energetically up a bedpost and hung there, showing her small gleaming teeth.

“We’re playing Zoo,” she said, swift to take advantage of the concession. “I am ze monkey, an’ Phyl can be ze effelunt, an’ Dolly’s ze tross old zrinoceros.”

The room was in an uproar speedily, Dolly and Phyl playing their allotted parts with great vigour and enjoyment. “We can be pwetending we’re pwincesses, an’ have been changed into these shapes,” Dolly seized a moment to whisper consolingly to Phyl. Then she swung herself over the foot-rail of the bed and hung head downwards and growled, which pleased Weenie’s ideas of realism even if it was hardly in accordance with the character of rhinoceros.

[35]
]CHAPTER III
FAMILY MATTERS

It was a pleasant smiling-faced place this English home of the three little maids. Phyl and Dolly would like to have heard it was old enough to call it a “venerable pile” or an “ancient structure,” but, as a matter of fact, its age was not more than sixty or seventy years. It was of brown, rough stone, mellowed to a harmonious tint by the suns and rains of that more than half-century. It was square in shape with a big, welcoming porch at the front, round which in summer roses clustered, but that winter saw fringed with icicles. All the rooms were big and bright, with old-fashioned furniture, the wood of which was chiefly oak, and the draperies and cushions of flowered chintz in delicate colours. From the gate a broad drive, ill-kept at this time, swept to the porch, then curved and ran behind the house to the empty stables. A shrubbery filled the broad space between the left side of the house and the thick, tall hedge that cut it off from the road; the right side looked [36] ]over a vegetable garden, chiefly filled with gooseberries, and saw at the limit of the grounds that side a high red brick wall where a cherished apricot tree grew vine-wise.

At the front stretched a green unmown lawn, lovely to play upon; a high green bank at the end had to be climbed to come to a strawberry bed, where as many as three berries had ripened at a time. Red, white, and black currant bushes, red and yellow raspberries grew in a tangle beyond, and then came the orchard trees—apples, pears, and mulberries.

Phyl had a dim and fading recollection of an earlier home than this—a home that brought memories of more flowers and many more books than this brown-grey, pleasant place of later play-days; a home where her lisping voice had called father a grave, sad-faced scholar, who was in no wise like the laughing, merry-natured man for whom nearly all were wearing these fresh black frocks.

Weenie and the elder little girls were only half-sisters. As a high-spirited, beautiful girl of seventeen Mrs. Conway had won the love of a man double her own age, and one for whom all life had gone sadly. Pleased and touched at the wealth of love he brought her, though she was hardly old enough to reciprocate it properly, she accepted him, and they were married at once, her parents, stern, strict Christians of the old, long dead school, being glad to give their daughter into such safe hands.

[37]
]Three years went by, and the girl was still happy, a little more touched with soberness perhaps at the quiet, reclusive life they led, but a very child again, with two little daughters, Phyl and Dolly, who came to spread sunshine through the quiet, book-filled house. But when Dorothy was barely out of long clothes, and Phyl a slender, restless sprite of three, the girl—wife and mother already before she was twenty-one—was also a widow. Her husband, called on sudden business to Paris, stayed at a hotel where the sheets on his bed were damp, and so sudden and violent an illness followed that he was dead and buried before she had time fairly to realize the news.

Three years slipped by again, the widow living in seclusion, and devoting herself entirely to her little girls. And then, so young yet and full of life, and so overcome by her loneliness, she married again—a widower this time, with a half-grown-up family of boys and girls.

The young, glad love her years reasonably entitled her to, again had slipped past her. Relief at the escape from the rigid discipline of her girlhood’s home, together with the wealth of tender, almost fatherly love showered upon her by her husband, had led her in her first marriage not to miss that blossoming spring-time. And now, saddened and chastened in spirit, it seemed to her that only a man of two-score years could give her the tender protection and cherishing for which she was yearning again.

[38]
]And, again, a wealth of affection was given her: surely few women have passed down life with so great a power of making love spring up for them in every heart. But with these autumn roses of love came also many thorns.

There were the ceaseless discussions that are almost inevitable when a father brings a very young wife home to sons and daughters of almost a like age. And there were years of nursing.

Mr. Conway, a year after the marriage, fell ill of an incurable disease, and until his death, some four years later, the slight shoulders of his new wife carried—and carried cheerfully and patiently—a burden few older women are called upon to bear.

In addition to the unruly household, the wearing struggle to preserve justice and peace between the elder members of the family and her own little girls—now three in number—and the continual nursings for the last two years of her husband’s life, Mrs. Conway picked up the reins of business his fingers had gradually dropped, and managed to guide affairs so as to keep off, for all that time, the ruin with which they had been threatened.

Mr. Conway was a manufacturer, and before this lingering illness sapped his energy a moderately wealthy one. The little girls had often driven over with him to the busy, noisy town, five miles away, and had been taken over the big factories and seen the great looms at work, and shuddered at the big [39] ]engines and the swarms of dirty-looking men, women, and children. Phyl and Dolly used to be in a state of nervous trepidation each time they were inside the building lest an arm of a loom should descend, entangle itself in the hair of one of them, or rise up again with a dangling body to the ceiling; they had heard some such accident talked of once. Weenie alone approved of it, and asked to be taken again; the clashing and banging and whirring seemed most jolly to her.

But foreign competition, together with strikes and bad management, struck such blows that two years before the death of Mr. Conway the factories were almost at a standstill, and complete ruin stared the big family in the face. It was then the brave-hearted wife stepped into the breach. From her husband and the foremen of the different buildings she managed to learn nearly every technicality connected with the business; she withdrew, all but four hundred pounds, the small fortune that had been settled on Phyl and Dolly after their father’s death, and spent it in starting the looms to work once more. Day and night she worked, business woman, wife, mother, and nurse, and the old home for two more years still sheltered them within its walls, and the best of medical skill was made available.

But now at length it was all over. Two months had passed since the long, sad procession had wound away down the red drive, and away up the beautiful [40] ]country road to the Place of Peace. Lawyers and business men, relatives and friends, had come and gone. The factories stood silent again, and there was no money anywhere to galvanize them into fresh life. The big boys and girls were scattered all over England; the girls with relations until they could help themselves, the boys already helping themselves, taken into offices of business friends.

The servants were dismissed—all but Harriet Bywater, who had been the children’s nurse since Dorothy was born, and now insisted upon being laundress and cook and housemaid and friend to them for the little time that remained.

Such a very little time it was now; the house had been bought, but the owner was abroad, and had left instructions that the widow was not to be disturbed until he was ready to occupy. This had given two peaceful months in which to make plans for the future and lay the past aside in its sorrowful shroud, but now word had come that in one more month the workmen would arrive to make additions and alterations to the house.

The three little girls, after their first passionate tears and grief were spent, had slipped gradually back as children will into their old ways of life and play. It was a week after the midnight rescue of Jennie and Suey that they were first told of and began to realize the strange thing that was going to happen in their lives.

[41]
]CHAPTER IV
A WINTER SUNDAY

On Sunday evenings it had always been the custom for the little girls to gather round their mother, and talk of their funny little plans, tell of their past week’s naughtinesses, make high resolutions with earnest eyes for future weeks, and generally disburden themselves. Of late the time had been very precious to both mother and children, for all week-days had been so brimmed with work, the mother had scarcely any time to pause to watch the wings of their young souls develop, and prune them, and pluck out the dark feathers that creep in so readily.

The elder boys and girls had often scoffed and laughed at the quiet hour that was always taken on that one evening of the week, but nothing had made the mother relinquish it.

This Sunday evening when the great news was first told, the house seemed strangely quiet and lonely. Outside a noiseless fall of snow was making the garden and road all gleaming white, and an [42] ]icy-handed wind tapped at the window-pane and rattled the doors as if eager to get inside to the warmth and comfort.

Harriet had just taken away the tea-tray, and poked up the fire of the cosy little breakfast-room, which, apart from the bedrooms, was the only room they used now.

The sense of peacefulness was very exquisite to Phyl and Dolly; they lay on the hearthrug side by side and gazed into the fire. The very tea they had just finished had in some strange way appealed to them—the round table with its spotless cloth, the delicate pale-green china cups and plates, the thin bread-and-butter, the amber jelly, the limpid honey, the toasted Sally-lunn. It was even a dreamy pleasure to watch the tea being made in the silver tea-pot with a wide spout like a dragon’s mouth, and to remember that mother’s mother’s mother’s mother had once poured out from it.

Their thoughts shrank away from the five years that had just finished, the noisy, rough, nursery meals, the teasing and boisterous raillery, the unmerciful ridicule that had been heaped on their ways of talk and play. This tender firelit evening seemed like a bit of the dreamy past come back.

“I’ve been twite good, haven’t done anysin’ or anysin’ for twenty hundred days,” announced Weenie, sitting up straight on her mother’s knee and commencing operations.

[43]
]“It’s my turn to say first,” said Phyl, and she also sat up and looked business-like; “let’s be quick to-night.” She never settled quite comfortably to the evening until she had acknowledged the week’s transgressions.

“Well,” said Mrs. Conway, “I hope no one has a big list to-night, for I want to do most of the talking myself. Phyl, darling, I hope you have been trying harder this week.”

Phyllida looked thoughtful. “Really on Monday and Tuesday I did, mother,” she said; “Weenie was dreadfully tiresome, and I hardly said anything to her. But on Wednesday I was bad. I made you cry, Weenie, didn’t I, when you broke the doll’s saucepan? And I know she really didn’t do it on purpose.”

“The handle of the old thing was broken before, it just comed off in my hand,” said Weenie, with a look of injured innocence.

“You know we have forbidden you to touch our things,” Phyl said, severity taking the place of penitence in her voice.

“It would have lasted for long enough,” Dorothy said; “it would have been quite good enough to make the soup in,—the handle was only the tiniest bit cwacked.” She looked perilously near being angry again at the recollection.

“Come, come,” the mother said, “it will be no use for you to tell me these things, if you feel naughty [44] ]again immediately. Anything else, Phyl?” Phyl’s eyes fell. “On Thursday I teased Harriet again,” she said, and recounted the details of the sinfulness, “and I was sorry all the time,” she added in a vague sort of wonder at herself. “I knew I was horrid, but every minute things kept popping into my head that I knew would vex her, and I couldn’t help doing them. [I even got on her back] while she was washing the floor, and you know how that makes her rage.”

“[I got on her back while she was washing the floor.]”

The mother was glad her hand was hiding her mouth; she had witnessed this reprehensible scene two or three times, and had been girlish enough to see the humorous side of it. But she spoke gravely of the kindness and consideration one owes to dependants, [45] ]and of Harriet’s sterling goodness, till Phyl wanted to rush off and kiss the ill-used girl for compensation.

“I hope that is all, Phyl,” Mrs. Conway said.

“No,” Phyl said in a shamed whisper; “in church this morning I thought about the carpet for the dolls-house, and I couldn’t help pretending Miss Keating and the little girl in her pew were Ellen Montgomery and Alice Humphreys.”

Then Dolly rose up from her lowly position and recited similar sins with similar sadness in her eyes.

She too had been cross with Weenie on Wednesday, because of the doll’s saucepan, and on Thursday because she would keep making a noise just when Jennie and Suey were going to sleep.

“Pooh,” said Weenie, “they’s nosing but old dolls. If forty thousand earfquakes camed, they wouldn’t hear.”

“Anything else, Dolly?” interposed Mrs. Conway, swift to avert the heated discussion that would otherwise have followed this statement. “I suppose you too made Harriet’s life a burden, and also sat on her back while she washed the floor.”

Strange to relate, Dolly had not kept close to Phyl in this.

“No, I didn’t, mama,” she said in surprise; “don’t you remember I was helping you put the silver in tissue-paper?” Then her head dropped a little. [46] ]“But in the afternoon I called her a demon,” she said.

Mrs. Conway was much startled, though she knew of the strange little bursts of anger that sometimes possessed her second small daughter.

“Oh, Dolly,” she said in a grieving voice, “that a word like that should come from the lips of one of my little girls!”

Dorothy in her turn was horrified.

“Oh,” she said, “I didn’t weally say it with my tongue, mama—Ha’yat didn’t hear at all; I said it down in my thwoat.”

“That is nearly as bad,” said the mother, and called upon the young person to account for such a word rising even to her throat.

Dorothy spoke of the circumstances that caused the heinous offence in low tones. It seemed Jennie and Suey were dangerously ill in bed with consumption and “appleplexy,” and of course they ought to have been kept very warm, and the counterpane being thin, they had covered the bed over with one of their sealskin jackets. And just as the “crisis” came, Harriet had dragged the jacket away to hang it up, and all the clothes were pulled off Jennie, too.

“She hadn’t a thing left on but her night-gown, and her flannel jacket,” said the child.

“She had a frightful relapse,” said Phyl darkly, “and it turned to heart disease.”

The children had lately picked up the words [47] ]“crisis,” “relapse,” and “convalescent,” and their application of them was a trifle amusing. Jennie was subject to as many as seven “relapses” in one day, while the “crisis” of hers and Suey’s various complaints occurred as often as three times in a morning. If you met a doll wrapped up to its eyes, being slowly wheeled up and down the drive, you would know the “convalescent” stage was reached.

“Now, my Weenie one,” said the mother, after a wise little talk on the wrongfulness of saying “demon” in one’s throat.

Weenie untucked herself deliberately.

“I took the biggest piece of cake to-night,” she said, “but if I hadn’t took it, Phyl would, or Dolly; then they would have been greedy ’stead.”

“That’s one,” said Mrs. Conway.

“There was lots and crowds of tarts in the pantry on Sursday, ’bout thirty hundred,—I only took one.”

“That’s two,” said the mother, adding one more finger to the hand she was holding up to number the crimes.

Weenie looked carefully away from the elder sisters while she confessed the next item.

“On Wesenday I gave Jennie and Suey a frashing,” she said. “Well, Phyl and Dolly should have played with me—serves them right.”

Phyl and Dolly sprang to their feet, a wrathful scarlet rushing into their faces; this was the first intimation they had had that the bodies of their [48] ]darlings had been so maltreated, and they looked as if they could have fallen on the offender and “frashed” her in retaliation.

But Weenie blinked at them mildly from her secure position.

“An uzzer time,” she said, “p’raps you will let me play with you.”

Again the mother shielded her face as if from the fire.

“That was very, very naughty,” she said, when she could trust her voice; she knew the hearts of the two little mothers were bleeding for the unmerited sufferings of their darlings. “What should you think, Weenie, if auntie and I quarrelled, and then when I was out of the way, auntie came and thrashed you?”

But Weenie looked more supercilious than repentant.

“They’s only got sawdust in their ole bodies, they’s nosing but dolls,” she said; “it didn’t hurt them.”

“But it hurt poor Phyl and Dolly,” the mother said.

“Um,” said Weenie’s lips. Her eyes added that they had brought it entirely upon themselves.

Three accusing fingers were standing up against her.

“Anything else?” said Mrs. Conway.

“Fordet what else,” said her babyship, and tucked herself up again to dismiss the subject. Then she untucked herself half-an-inch. “Le’s have a lump of iggy to put in mine pocket,” she said. Phyl laughed [49] ]at her. In her haste to proffer this request, the small one had fallen back into the baby word she had called “sugar” during the first year or two of her initiation into speech and language.

“Yes, it sud have some iggy, it sud, poor little baby,” Phyl said teasingly.

Weenie blushed painfully.

“Well, I can say my R’s and Dolly can’t,” she said excusingly. “Dolly says Yobbin Yedbwest.”

It was Dolly’s turn to grow pink. She was very sensitive about this defect in her speech.

“You are both dreadful little babies,” said Phyl, with a superior smile.

“I knew a still more dreadful baby,” said the mother. “Weenie, there never was such a silly little girl as Phyl when she was even bigger than you. Why, what do you think she called my silver thimble even when she was five?”

Phyl blushed in her turn now, but Weenie was eager.

“Oh, tell’s,” she said.

“Simby-fimby,” said the mother; “that’s quite as bad as ‘iggy,’ isn’t it?”

Weenie laughed chucklingly.

“Tell’s some more,” she said.

“Sometimes,” said the mother, “when I was working the machine she used to play with the tools in the drawer. And she always called the screw-driver ‘mama’s coy-guiby.’”

[50]
]Dolly laughed derisively this time to vindicate the R’s her tongue could not bring straight.

“Coy-guiby, coy-guiby,” she echoed mockingly.

The mother smiled.

“Dolly could not say pinafore,” she continued, “until she was quite a great girl. ‘Pindispy’ she used to call it—‘banty my pindispy, mama,’ meant ‘button my pinafore,’ but no one would have guessed it, would they, Phyl?”

But Phyl gave Dolly a sudden loving kiss just where the pink had sprung again on her cheek, and the intricacies of language were no longer dwelt upon.

“Dear ones,” the mother said, growing suddenly grave, “in two more days I may have a very great piece of news to tell you. But I have something to tell you even now. In just one month we shall go away for ever from this house. We are very, very poor now, so poor I am almost afraid to think about it. But that you knew, didn’t you?”

They had just known without comprehending. True, they had said good-bye to the servants, and had known they were being sent away because the mother could no longer afford to pay them. And they knew Mr. Conway’s children were all gone to make ways for themselves in the world.

They tried hard to realize the fact now and console their mother at the same time, so grave and sad was her face. [51]
]“We don’t care, darling,” Phyl said, “we’ll wear our old frocks; we shan’t want new ones for long enough, shall we, Dolly? And those last boots we had will last us a long time yet.”

Mrs.

Conway smiled sadly.

“There are other things besides frocks and boots,” she said.

Dolly nodded wisely.

“Meat and puddings and things, of course,” she said. “Couldn’t we go without meat, mama? We all like puddings better, and Ha’yat says meat is a fwightful pwice.”

The mother smiled and sighed again.

“There are even other things besides meat, my daughter,” she said.

“You can have my silver mug to make shillings wif,” said Weenie, grasping as well as she could at the idea that there was no money for any of them.

“Go away in a month?” echoed Phyl; “wherever shall we go?—Oh, we can’t go and leave this house, mother, think how long we’ve been living here.”

But Dolly gave a sudden joyful skip.

“Shall we have a dear little weeney-teeney cottage like Mrs. Meredith’s, all covered with ivy and things?” she said.

At that Phyl lost her apprehension and skipped too. The dwelling of Mrs. Meredith, a naval officer’s widow, was like a tiny fairy house to them.

“How lovely!” she said, “and no servants; [52] ]Mrs. Meredith has only a little girl. Oh, let me have whitening the steps for my work, mummie darling?”

“I’ll wash the floors,” Dolly cried joyously.

Weenie clambered higher on her mother’s knee.

“She isn’t to do them all, is she, mama?—le’s wash some, won’t you?”

Mrs. Conway kissed her and set her down.

“We shall be far poorer than Mrs. Meredith,” she said, “but don’t worry, darlings—mother will see you don’t quite starve.”

She went to bed that Sunday night comforted in some strange way by the uncrushable spirits of childhood.

[53]
]CHAPTER V
WHICH RUSHES FOURTEEN THOUSAND MILES AWAY

“If I had guessed, if I had dreamed

Its weight was meant for me,

I should have built a lighter cross

To bear up Calvary.”

To the lad swinging monotonously on the gate, the straight grey road that lay in front of his house seemed to run on to dull eternity. Far away where the horizon cut it off from further sight the red, inflamed eye of the sun was sinking down. A few spindly gum-trees showed black against the fierce-coloured surrounding sky, and nearer some of the black straggling colliery buildings lay athwart a cloud-patch of bruised purple.

A bullock-dray crept into sight; the lad had seen it on the road when it had looked like a toy procession; now it had come nearer and nearer, and the big patient beasts blinked wearily at the swinging gate as they passed.

“Hi!” called the boy to the drover. “You’re a nice one, two of your fires are out.”

[54]
]“No! are they?” said the man, drooping his whip and stepping closer to the animals.

“That one, and that one,” said the boy.

The man pulled some handfuls of gum-leaves from a tree by the roadside and felt in his pocket for his matches. A thin bar crossed each bullock’s back, and suspended from it on either side was a small iron pot, where a fire, generally of bark and pungent leaves, burnt ceaselessly to keep off the mosquitoes.

“I’ve never seen them worse,” said the man with a groan; “I’ve come five miles in a curtain of ’em—I suppose I’ve been so busy flicking myself I didn’t notice.”

“You should see them in our house,” said the boy.

“You should ha’ seen them on the station,” said the man.

“Didn’t I?” said the boy. “Wasn’t I there for the letters this morning? The train was an hour late again, and the men who were waiting for it made a fire on the platform and stood in the smoke.”

“It’s the most God-forsaken hole on the face of the globe,” said the man. “I’m cutting it—off on Monday; been here a month, and that’s four weeks too much. Well—so-long.”

He cracked his long whip and the team lumbered wearily off on its journey again.

“Clif,” called a tired voice from a side window, “are you there, Clif? I wish you’d come and take baby for me.”

[55]
]“I’m not there,” muttered Clif to himself, “I’m at the front. I mightn’t have heard.” He slipped off the gate and glided away into a stretch of scrubby bush adjacent. Then with a defiant look at the windows of the house behind he stalked off to his own particular den, or what his mother called his “sulking-place,” a hollow, hidden against the bank where the colliery railway ran. He flung himself down and kicked monotonously with his boot-heels on the pebbly ground. It was one of the days that came so often to him, when he was in fierce revolt with his surroundings, and wished himself or else all the rest of the world dead and buried.

He was a thin boy, between twelve and thirteen; his hair had a crisp wave in it that lent height to his forehead; his eyes were a deep blue, sombre, even sullen at times in expression; his mouth accentuated the sullenness.

Lying in his den he brooded again on his grievances, and the life with which he was so sorely out of joint. What he seemed to resent more than anything in the world was the number of children in their house, and the noise they made, and the way they had to be looked after. He was always being pressed into the service himself to rock a cradle or push a perambulator, for between himself and the delicate baby just short-coated were three other little boys, and his mother had but one pair of hands. They could not afford a nurse; they could not even afford a well-trained [56] ]servant—only a rough Irish girl for everything—for Dr. Wise, the father, was club doctor to the colliery, and the salary a miserable one.

Sunnymeade this desolate place was called—in native language it had been termed Moondi-Moondi, or Swamp Place, and surely of all misnomers given by Australians in lieu of the curiously applicable aboriginal names, Sunnymeade for such a place was worst.

Clif’s grievance to-day was caused by a rankling sense of injustice on his mother’s part. She herself was one of the most absolutely unselfish women in the world, and strove to make her children the same. But Clif had a keen sense of the rights of property. That afternoon he had finished a little boat, and with infinite labour had fitted it with a mast and two sails. He took it proudly in to show his mother and gain her praise.

She was rocking the fractious baby and keeping a watchful eye at the same time on Richie and Alf, whose combined ages only made eight years.

“Yes, very pretty,” she said,—“mind the fender, Richie—very pretty indeed—made it all by yourself, my son—you’re getting famously clever, aren’t you?—you’ll be building us a new house soon.”

This was not the appreciation Clif wanted—it sounded humouring, as if his mother were talking to Richie or Alf. He yearned for some one to notice intelligently that there was a real rudder fastened on [57] ]with a bit of wire, and that the bow was shaped for cutting through the water.

Baby stopped crying a moment and sucked his fist ravenously—perhaps his mother could attend now for a minute or two.

“If you notice,” he said shyly, “the rudder moves; I’ve tied a bit of wire to it, and if you pull it, it will guide the boat just where you want it to go.”

The mother glanced at it wearily.

“Beautiful,” she said. “I don’t know how you could think of it—Richie, get off that chair, do you hear me—get down at once—Clif, lift him down, and put his shoes on; he’s kicked them off.”

Clif fastened on the shoes and turned the chair upside down, so that it could not be climbed on again. Whereupon Richie devoted fresh attention to his eldest brother.

“Div Richie ze ickie boat,” he said coaxingly.

“I’m sure,” said Clif, and gathered it jealously to him.

Alf rushed up clamouring.

“I want to play with the boat,” he said.

“Here, cut—go and play,” Clif said, and lifted his boat for safety out of reach.

The afternoon had been terribly hot, and the poor little fellows, between sandflies and mosquitoes and heat, were cross and tired.

“[Wants ze boat,]” repeated Richie, his voice risen suddenly to crying pitch, and his eyes weeping tears. [58]
]“Give us the boat,” cried Alf in chorus.

Clif retreated towards the door, glowering at the idea of sacrilege.

“Clif,” said his mother, between the baby’s fresh screams, “don’t be selfish; lend the boat to your little brothers.”

Clif was quite pale.

“[Wants ze boat,—give us the boat.]”

“I have been three days making it,” he said; “it is my very own.”

“Well,” she returned wearily, “it is sweeter to make things for other people’s enjoyment than our own.”

But Clif was far too young and human to agree with this.

“It is mine,” he said obstinately, “my very own; I [59] ]won’t let them have it—let them play with their own toys.”

“Clif,” said the mother, and called him to her knee when she had lain baby face downward for a little time—she put her arm round him and looked at him with earnest, grieving eyes—“Clif, it breaks my heart to see you growing like this—I cannot have it—give the boat to your brothers for half-an-hour.”

Passion surged in the boy; a wave of red ran up into his very hair.

“You always say that—I never have my things to myself; when a thing’s mine, it’s mine—it isn’t any one’s unless I say,” he burst out excitedly. “I don’t take their things; they oughtn’t to take mine.”

“It’s very different,” Mrs. Wise said; “think how much older you are; a selfish boy grows into a selfish man. Clif, give up the little boat at once.”

Even in his anger, somewhere in his young complex nature there was something that told the boy he was not being properly treated. If he had been asked kindly to lend the toy, even if he had refused at first, he felt he would have been glad to do so afterwards, if once it were clearly established that the right of refusing or consenting lay entirely with him. But this disposal of his property roused a fury in his breast.

“Take it,” he said, and flung the toy he had worked at with eager pleasure so roughly on the ground at his brothers’ feet that it broke in two or three pieces—he [60] ]had only saved himself by a strong effort from flinging it at Alf’s round head.

“Clif!” cried his mother, something like despair in her voice—“Clif!”

But he had rushed away out of the room and house.

Mrs. Wise tucked the baby beneath her arm for a moment, and crossed to the bookcase with a sigh. She reached three books down from the top shelf—one a thin pamphlet, titled On the Training and Education of our Boys; the second, Human Buds, and our Responsibilities in the Grafting of Them; the third, Children, their Souls and Minds.

“Perhaps it is my fault,” she muttered. Then she went back to her rocking-chair and buried herself in the books so deeply that she was quite deaf to the fierce quarrel that took place between Alf and Richie, and even hardly heard her infant’s cries.

She was a small, slight woman with a sallow-coloured skin stretched tightly over her bones. Her eyes were dull blue, faded by the tear-washings of many a year; her hair was light and colourless, pinned away with absolute disregard for appearance. She wore the very gown she should have shunned—a drab cotton wrapper.

Put carefully away in her work-box there was a large miniature protected by glass and enclosed in a dainty case. It represented a very sweet-faced girl, with blue, happy eyes; red, slightly pouting lips; [61] ]rounded pink cheeks; and sunshiny hair all curls and waves. This was the same woman at eighteen, before she had run away from a luxurious home and married the handsome young medical student, to whose suit her parents would not listen.

She was never forgiven or even recognized again by her people. And the rain of life came down too heavily for the poor butterfly nature. For all these fourteen years Dr. Wise had never been anything but direly poor; strive as he would he could make no way against the heavy handicap his early, headstrong folly had given him. It was seven years before he dare spare the time and money to complete his course and take his degree, and the other seven had been spent in struggling for a foothold in the profession and trying to keep a shelter over the poor little wife and all the babies that had come.

The young wife had been at first bewildered by all the misfortunes, and by the rapidly increasing family that she had to manage, totally inexperienced as she was, almost single-handed.

Childish resentment followed, but only for a short time. This young husband of hers, who had become grave, and old, and one-purposed, before he was twenty-four, was doing all man could do: she could blame nothing but their own wilfulness. Ill health and the dragging years brought apathy to her; she went through the ceaseless duties mechanically; she bathed and dressed her children, and mended their [62] ]clothes when she had time; she cooked and dusted; she ate and slept.

But after Richie’s birth she had an illness that kept her helpless and a prisoner for six months. She lay in a private hospital in Sydney, for Dr. Wise dare not risk home-nursing for her in such a household as theirs was. He himself could only leave his practice to see her once a fortnight, for, apart from lost time, it cost over a pound for the railway-ticket; the children were brought to her twice only during all that time, for the heavy nursing had entirely emptied the family purse.

And during those long quiet months a sense—almost a terror—of her responsibilities was born in Mrs. Wise’s soul.

These five boys of hers—who would grow into men and help to make or mar the world—what was she doing to help them grow as they should? Sometimes she would wake in the night, a cold perspiration breaking out all over her poor little face at the thought of difficult Clif grown to manhood and going off, with swinging steps, down that hill whose descent is so easy. She felt so weak, so helpless; five little girls she perhaps might have managed; but five boys, with boys’ curious, rough, untractable natures—she trembled at the thought of going back to them.

When she rose from her bed at last, and the days of convalescence came, she crept to a book-shop one day, and with her veil down, and a strange trembling [63] ]hesitancy in her speech, asked if they had any books about training children. The man brought her Kindergarten Studies; The Youth’s Physical Manual; Recreation for the Young; The Care of the Child in Sickness and in Health.

But she turned the leaves feverishly, there was no help for her there.

“A book on the training of their—their moral characters, is what I want,” she said almost in a whisper, and after a long hunt the man found three dusty paper-covered books: Human Buds; Souls and Minds of Children; and Training and Education of Boys.

And these were the works she took back with her to Sunnymeade, to make life a harder problem than ever for herself.

Human Buds made a fine art of the training of children, and seemed to take for granted absolute wisdom and patience on the mother’s part. Mrs. Wise made her eyes red and her heart weary over the things in it she had left undone that she ought to have done. “Never correct a child while you are angry,” it said; “wait for calmness, and let mature reflection guide you as to the best punishment best fitted for the fault and for the offender.” In another place: “Beware how you crush the frail wings of a child’s imagination; but beware also how you foster the growth of them, for these Fancy Flights lead sometimes, in later life, to a strangely perverted sense of Truth and Honour.”

[64]
]In another: “These beautiful buds are your priceless gift; a life is not too long to give to watching them unfold, and patiently plucking off the leaves that spoil. Infinite patience, infinite wisdom, infinite love; these are the absolutely necessary tools of the Mother-Gardener.

“Example is your greatest weapon; every child is a copyist, you are its closest model. Strip yourself of your faults if you would not see them strengthening with the strength of your child.”

Dr. Wise laughed at the books good-humouredly, and tried to soothe the agitation they had caused the poor woman. Life was far too crowded with work and care and trouble for him to study beautiful aphorisms, or make an art of bringing up these children of his.

The lads had never known him to lie or break a promise, be ungentle towards anything weak, or lack courage when occasion wanted it. But they had seen him angry scores of times, had heard him swear, had even experienced injustice from him in his swift and hurried arbitration of their quarrels.

“Don’t worry your poor little head with things like these,” he said, and tried to take the book from her. “See the little vagabonds have lots of tubbing, knock them over if they’re impudent or tell lies, and don’t let the big ones bully the little chaps. They’ll come up all right.”

But she clung to the volumes and would not give them up, though she said no more to him.

[65]
]In her earnest desire to be “an example,” she made herself absolutely—almost irritatingly unselfish. She worried the little lads to death with talk and advice and admonitions. She fell into the error of “nagging” at them where once she had shrugged her shoulders; she made them learn “Noble Truths” by heart, a new one each week, to be repeated every day. She punished them conscientiously for every fault, both of omission and commission. A vicious feeling came to Clif every time he saw the blue binding of Human Buds, and our Responsibilities in the Grafting of Them. For he recognized how much it had to do with all the worrying rules of the household.

[66]
]CHAPTER VI
‘BROWNSES’ HOUSE’

About six o’clock in the evening Clif went back again from his “sulking-place.” His heart was a tender one when the crust that gathered there was pierced, and something brought back to him the exceeding weariness of the voice that had called out of the window: “Clif,—are you there, Clif?”

“I’ll go and rock that blessed kid for an hour,” was his shamefaced thought as he went up the weed-sown path again.

The cottage was a weatherboard one, with the galvanized iron roof that makes life a burden during the summer days. The doctor’s brass plate on the door was dull and smirched, the step was dirty, the children’s toys lay about the verandah—it was easy to see Mrs. Wise was no manager.

Clif went through the passage and out to the back verandah, where late in the day most of the family congregated, that being the place that caught the faint breeze of the evening. The mother was in her [67] ]rocking-chair, and baby was asleep in her arms. Ted, who was three years younger than Clif, sat at her feet deep in The Three Midshipmen. Alf, who was stout, and six, was eating a slice of water-melon—he had bitten deeper and deeper into it till the broad green rind encircled his merry little face from ear to ear. On the ground just below the verandah there was a slight depression that, after rain, sometimes held as much as half a foot of water, and made a pool as big as a hand-basin. Here Richie was fishing, as usual, with a bit of bread fastened to a hair-pin and tied to a string.

Clif tried to be a bit cheerful.

“Hullo,” he said as he passed, “any luck? Get any bites, Richie?”

“Ony free,” said Richie mournfully.

“[Why don’t you put salt] on the bread, old man?” Clif said; “you can’t expect to catch fish without.”

The little boy got up eagerly and trotted off to the kitchen to beg the necessary article. And Clif caught sight of a bit of his boat at the edge of the water, with the sail in the mud. He looked away from it quickly but with a queer feeling in his throat.

“Go and get your tea, Clif,” his mother said. “Lizzie left it at the end of the dining-room table.”

Her voice was very cold.

“Don’t you want me to rock baby?” he said awkwardly.

“He is asleep.”

“I’ll tell the kids a story if you like.”

[68]
]“They are playing quite happily.”

“Shall I help Lizzie get the baths?”

“No, thank you.”

Human Buds said that silent displeasure was often the hardest punishment a mother could inflict.

The boy sighed and went off into the dining-room.

“[Why don’t you put salt on the bread, old man?]”

“Dry bread, I s’pose,” he muttered.

But there was a nicer tea than usual—bread-and-honey, plum-jam, a bit of gingerbread, and a slice of melon.

He eyed it uncomfortably, then after a struggle went out again to the verandah.

[69]
]“I heard when you called,” he said, red in the face; “you’d better take those things away.”

“What things?” said his mother as coldly as ever. “I know you heard me.”

“There’s some cake and melon on the table,” said Clif.

Alf went so red they both knew whose doing it was.

“I only thought we’d go halves,” he said apologetically.

His mother kissed him.

“If Clif’s conscience will let him eat it, he may,” she said.

Clif went in again with heavy step, took a slice of bread-and-honey, and started out again for his den.

But there followed after him Alf with the rejected dainties.

“Go on,” he said, “she said you could; it’s awful nice, Clif.”

“I don’t want it,” said Clif.

“It’s got currants and peel in,” said the tempter.

Clif dare not look at it; cake was a great treat to him, and his mouth was melting for it.

“I don’t want it,” he repeated.

Then Alf’s patience gave way; he had waited a very long time, but human endurance would go no further. He said nothing, but Clif, just in front, heard his teeth crunching on the crisp melon, and was able to guess the exact moment the last crumb of cake disappeared.

[70]
]“Was it that sugary sort of melon?” he could not help asking with anxiety in his eyes.

“Y-yes,” admitted Alf unwillingly, and Clif sighed.

“I can spell platypus,” volunteered the younger lad, in haste to get away from unpleasant subjects. Then he suddenly gave a hop of joy. “Guess what,” he said; “I nearly forgot, and you don’t know, do you?”

“What?” said Clif.

“‘Brownses’ House’ is empty again,” said the little boy; “p’raps some one nice will come.”

“Brownses’ House” was a rather pretty cottage with a garden, the back fence of which adjoined their own. It possessed the distinction of being one of the three—their own and the clergyman’s being the other two—houses that formed the aristocracy of Sunnymeade. The rest of the population consisted of miners, and tradespeople who had come to supply their wants.

Clif’s brow lightened a little.

“Let’s go and look,” he said, and they went and stood for half-an-hour gazing at the shut-up cottage.

It was the one place in Sunnymeade that had any “possibility” about it; everything else in the dreary village being plain, common fact.

The miners and their families lived in the monotonous ugly cottages dotted up and down the streets. Sometimes new ones came, sometimes old ones went away. It was all one to the little Wises; the children of the men were more than usually uncouth and rough, [71] ]and Mrs. Wise would not allow her boys to go among them.

The clergyman had been a fixture here for untold years; he had a married daughter keeping house for him, and two grand-children, a stolid boy of seven, and an equally stolid girl of nine.

But at “Brownses’ House” people came and went as often as once a year, and there was always just the possibility that some one with a companionable family might some day come. One time Clif’s spirits had been raised to the highest pitch of excitement and happiness by the sight of a boy of about thirteen looking over the dividing fence. He had never had a suitable companion of his own age, and his heart almost stood still with its shock of happiness. They made friends at once, and for a month life was ideal to Clif; they rode their rough ponies together, they got up a cricket club, they climbed trees, they swam and read and talked together.

But the boy’s father had come to see if “Moondi-Moondi” would be a suitable place in which to start a law practice, and in less than a month he had shaken the dust of it off his feet, and “Brownses’” was empty again.

There had been other waves of excitement connected with it; the Brownes themselves, owners of the little place, had come up to try to spend an economical summer in it. But the mosquitoes had driven them back again in a week. Three or four [72] ]other families had taken the cottage at different times, but no one stayed permanently.

“Wonder how long it’ll be empty this time,” Clif said, peering in the windows and finding even the furniture had gone this time.

“’Bout a month I ’spect,” Alf said; “don’t you hope a boy like Alec comes again?”

But it was destined to stand with dusty, blindless windows, and empty echoing rooms, and tangled garden for just eight months—until the right people wanted it.

[73]
]CHAPTER VII
A WAY TO WEALTH

“Do all that you know and try all that you don’t,

Not a chance must be wasted to-day.”

The very day after that winter Sunday’s talk Phyl and Dolly were most mysteriously busy, and nothing Weenie could urge would make them allow her to join them.

“We are not playing at all,” they said severely; “run away at once, Weenie, we are doing something very important indeed.”

“You’re playing fairies, I know you are,” contended Weenie. “I will play with you.” She rushed after Dolly and hung on to her waist.

Dolly shook her off.

“Take no notice of her,” she whispered to Phyl; “she can’t guess what we’re doing, and she’ll soon get tired and go away.”

They continued their work.

A disinterested observer would have imagined they were pretending they were blind, for they were moving [74] ]slowly up and down the room close to the wall with their finger-tips feeling carefully all over the paper. Sometimes one of them would rap on it with her knuckles, and the other put her ear close to the place and listen carefully.

Weenie watched them enviously all the time.

“I know,” she said, “you’re playing you’re painting the house!”

When they had treated all four walls in this strange fashion they began on the stuffed chairs—they were in the drawing-room—and kneeling down in front of the two large ones and the sofa, they pushed their hands down the part where the backs joined the seats. Strange things too they brought up—buttons, several hairpins, a tiny pair of scissors lost for months, quantities of fluff and dust, and a silver sixpence. Weenie was quite excited at the various finds, but the elder girls took little notice and continued their work. They pulled a little table up close to the wall, climbed on it and peered behind every picture; they lifted two or three rugs and looked underneath; Phyl even poked her arms up the chimney, felt about and withdrew them black with soot.

As Dolly had foretold, Weenie’s patience was not equal to her curiosity, and after a time she wandered away. But when the same strange proceedings began again in the afternoon, and all that time neither of her sisters would join in a single game, she became quite frantic to discover the mystery.

[75]
]At four o’clock in the afternoon their mother was lying down in a bedroom with a headache.

Phyl and Dolly had treated every room in the house but that large front bedroom in the same way as the drawing-room, and now they stood on the threshold of that with pale lips but determined eyes.

“I don’t think we can do this one,” Dolly faltered, cold thrills running through her at the remembrance that it was through this door they had gone, slowly, and on tip-toe, two months ago, to kiss that cold, quiet face on the pillow, and lay white roses and snowdrops on the still breast.

Phyl’s eyes were drenched with tears at the same memory, and her sensitive lips all a-quiver. But she turned the handle with a firm hand and they went in.

Through the windows a cold spring wind was blowing, it was the only thing of life in the quiet room. The bed was covered as of old with the blue silk eiderdown quilt; the book-table, that had always been disorderly with books and magazines and papers, was quite bare; the great cushioned chair stretched out its empty arms as if bemoaning its vacancy.

Dolly sobbed aloud and ran to a big bookcase that had been brought here during the last long illness. Phyl, her tears falling like rain, followed. They began at one end, and taking down the books, [76] ]one after the other, opened the covers, looked in them carefully, and then, holding them by their backs, shook them gently. They put the finished ones on the floor in stacks. Soon there were piles of them everywhere, big dusty books long unopened, hard-worked volumes with their covers dropping off, gaily bound new ones, dull thick ones with scientific names; the stacks were three feet high in places, the atmosphere was full of dust, but the sorrowful-faced, earnest-eyed little girls worked on steadily with never a moment’s rest.

Then there came Weenie in search of them—Weenie, round-eyed, open-mouthed at the terrible sacrilege in this quiet, strange room where her father had lain dead.

“Oh!” she gasped.

“Go away,” said Dolly.

“G—go away at once,” said Phyl; “[we’re not playing,] Weenie.”

Weenie could see they were not; at all events it must be a very strange game if they were, for their eyes still streamed.

She ran away, right down the passage to their own room where the mother lay asleep.

“Oh, mama!” she cried, climbing up on the bed and patting her mother’s cheeks to wake her.

Mrs. Conway’s eyes sprang open, and Weenie tugged vigorously at her sleeve.

“Come on quickerly,” she said; “oh, ever so [77] ]quickerly; naughty Phyl and Dolly’s in dadda’s room, makin’ it awful drefful.”

The mother rose up and followed her, though her blinding headache would hardly allow her to keep her eyelids open.

When she saw the havoc in the quiet place, she leaned against the doorpost quite overcome.

“[We’re not playing, Weenie.]”

“How could you?” she cried, her voice thrilling with pain—“how could you?—how could you?”

She gathered up her strength and tottered across the room; she began on one of the heaps, replacing feverishly book after book.

“Oh, go away,” she said; “go away all of you.”

[78]
]“Mama!” cried Dolly, catching at her hands, “oh, what is it, mama?”

“This room!” moaned the mother. “Oh, how could you come here?”

She began to work at another heap—her trembling hands seized the top book—Martin Chuzzlewit it was. A paper-knife was stuck into the pages enshrining Augustus Moddle’s proposal to Charity Pecksniff.

Not three months ago she had brought a smile to her husband’s face by reading it to him one sleepless night. The memory was too much for her, she dropped the volume and sank into a chair, her heart breaking afresh.

Phyl and Dolly rushed to her, knelt by her side, clasped her, kissed her a thousand times, called her by tender names. When she saw their passionate grief she calmed herself with a strong effort and sat up again.

“There,” she said, with woful eyes, “there, my dear ones: hush, Phyl; hush, hush, Dolly—I might have known my darlings did not mean to be unkind,—they forgot where they were playing, didn’t they?”

Phyl’s very breath seemed to go.

“Playing?” she echoed in a strange voice.

“Oh!” cried Dolly, her sobs breaking forth afresh; “did you weally think we were playing, mama?”

“Why,” faltered the mother, glancing round, [79] ]“what were you doing then? Tidying the book-shelves? Tell me, darlings.”

Phyl lifted her poor little golden head. “We were looking for the lost will,” she whispered.

“The what?” said the mother, mystified.

“The will that is hidden,” whispered Phyl.

“But there isn’t such a thing,” the mother said; “it was safely put away in father’s desk; the day uncle and Mr. Bright and all those people came it was read.”

“But the other will,” said Dolly, “the one that was made before, leaving lots of money to you.”

“My little sweethearts,” said the mother wearily, “what is it you mean? I can’t understand you in the least.”

Phyl made an effort to be intelligible. “We thought,” she said, “if we found another will that we needn’t be poor at all. People often hide them in strange places, behind wainscotching and secret panels and things, or in the loose covers of books. We’ve looked in all the other rooms, but we thought it was most likely to be here, so—so we looked.”

The mother, with all the calls there had been on her time, had no idea of the miscellaneous reading of her daughters; she would have been amazed to know of the scores of stories they had read in Harriet’s Bow Bells, and Young Ladies’ Magazines, and Penny Weeklies. Of course, therefore, they were acquainted with all the delightful ways lost wills were discovered [80] ]in strange hiding-places, and immense properties thereby restored to the heroes and heroines of the tales.

“Very likely there’s a secret back to father’s desk,” Dolly said; “won’t you please look, mama? we

didn’t like to touch that.”

Mrs. Conway’s head was too bad for her to fully enjoy the absurdity of the serious-eyed children at the time, though she often smiled over it in later years.

“You can put the books all back,” she said; “if fifty more wills were discovered there would be no more money, dear ones, for the simple reason there was nothing to leave.”

They went back to the nursery, sadness in their eyes at this summary wrecking of all the romantic castles they had built.

[81]
]CHAPTER VIII
THE PITILESS LONDON STREETS

Unbolstered in such ways of hope, their thoughts flew to wild extremes; Phyl was ill again, and was confined to bed; the harsh biting winters always caught at her poor little chest, and four or five times from November to March they were obliged to keep her a week or more safely amongst the blankets. Dolly was of course always her faithful companion and slave at such times, and the days never dragged; if those two had been set down on a desert island for a year, their quaint resources and strange imaginings would have filled every day to the brim with action and enjoyment.

And this time they had a limitless subject for discussion.

They had climbed up their own particular beanstalk of imagination, and peeped into the land of poverty wherein soon their feet were to walk.

Dolly went about as much as she could, unobserved, without her boots.

[82]
]“They’ll wear out quickly enough twamping about the stweets,” she said. “I’ll take good care of them now.”

Weenie slipped hers off. “Le’s take our stockings off too, Dolly,” she said, “then they won’t get worned out.”

“Oh,” said Dolly, “stockings are cheap, I think—besides we could go without them altogether; the little girls who came selling holly had no stockings on at all.”

Phyl, tied to bed, could not economize in this way, but when Harriet ran up with her eleven o’clock lunch-tray she only ate half the bread to her beef-tea, and did not touch the arrowroot biscuits. “Here,” she said, gathering them up carefully, “put them in the box quickly, Dolly, before Harriet comes back, or she’ll make me eat them.”

Dolly got out the old bonnet-box, that until the last few days had held their patches of materials for dolls’ clothes. It was half full of broken victuals,—bits of cake, bread, a jar with butter in it, quite a quantity of sugar that they had saved instead of having it in their tea; even a couple of mutton-chops.

This was to provide against the coming days when they would be starving in the streets of London, and was to be brought out as a beautiful surprise to their mother when she was tired out one day and hopeless of getting food for dinner.

Phyl and Dolly sketched the future with dark [83] ]enjoyment on their faces, and Weenie listened aghast.

Their mother, of course, would strive to earn a livelihood by singing in the snowy London streets, Weenie in her arms, themselves beside her trying to sell bunches of violets or watercress, or even shoelaces. Sometimes the passers-by would put pennies into their mother’s hand, or buy their own wares, but sometimes no one would take any notice of them at all, and they would go home at length to a dark, damp cellar, and divide a crust of bread amongst them, and sleep on the old floor beneath sacks.

At this point in the pleasing prospect Weenie used to cry dismally, and their own eyes would fill with tears of self-pity.

They would pursue it a little further, however; their clothes would grow more and more ragged, and the wind would whistle through them, and chill them to the bone; they would all be barefoot, their boots having worn out and their stockings gone long since; and they would all have such hacking coughs that the passers-by, hurrying away to their rich, luxurious homes, would occasionally fling them a glance of pity. And at last a benevolent old gentleman would be passing by, and touched at their distress would put his hand hastily in his pocket and bring out a coin which he would slip into their mother’s hand with the words, “Here’s a shilling for you, my poor woman,” and when he got some distance away they would [84] ]discover he had given them a sovereign in mistake. And the mother would sternly put away the temptation to buy food and clothes for her starving children with it, and bid Phyl and Dolly run after him and tell him of the mistake. And they would catch him at last, and tendering the glittering gold back to him would tell him of his error. And he would be so overcome with their honesty that he would take them by the hand and go back to their mother and ask questions of her,—what was her name?—why was she in such great distress? And when he heard the name he would lean up against the lamp-post quite overcome; and when they asked him what was the matter he would answer that he was their father’s long-lost brother, and had been searching for them for years, as he was immensely wealthy and did not know what to do with his money. And thereupon he would adopt them all, and they would all live happily to the end of their days.

“Then why doesn’t mama tell Dadda’s bruvver now?” demanded the practical Weenie.

Phyl and Dolly glanced at her impatiently. That the father had no brother, long-lost or otherwise, was a detail they had not troubled about.

“Oh, well, it’ll be an uncle or a cousin,” they said, and ran on painting the brilliant future life they would lead, in colours as glowing as they had painted the other days dun.

It was on the first day that Phyl was up again that [85] ]they actually learned the great news. At tea-time Mrs. Conway ran into the nursery for a moment. She had been busy with the lawyer most of the afternoon, and now he and her own brother were staying for the evening that yet more business might be talked.

“I want you all to be very quiet and good,” she said; “play here all the time, Phyl mustn’t be in the draughts, and no one is to come running into the breakfast-room under any pretext.”

“Mayn’t we even come to dessert?” said Dolly. This had always been their privilege.

“There is no dessert,” said the mother. “There is nothing but a very small leg of mutton, and an apple-pie, and some custards. Tell Harriet, Dolly, to look in the store-room, I think there is just one more pot of red currant-jelly for the meat.”

She went to the door, then came back; her cheeks were flushed, her crinkly hair pushed back from her forehead as if with much and difficult thinking.

“Before you go to bed to-night you shall know everything,” she said; “till then be good little chickies, and don’t let me see a bit of you.”

But there were four hours to bed-time,—how could they make the time endurable, confined within the limits of these four walls?

Yet on ordinary occasions it was a most resourceful room.

It was fairly large and well lighted, with a window [86] ]that had what all nurseries should have,—a deep, broad window-seat. Of necessary furniture there was nothing beyond a table, four or five chairs, an old horse-hair sofa, and two large cupboards. And all of it, by the earnest request of the three remaining inhabitants, was crowded down to one end, in order to leave the other quite bare for play. Phyl and Dolly had begged an old clothes-horse, and had coaxed Harriet into nailing some material over it. The big corner it had screened off from the room was entirely sacred to them; and Weenie, when they retired within it and extended no invitation to her, had no other course left but to stay outside and make a disturbing noise. For she was such a destructive small morsel that Mr. and Mrs. Conway, in the interests of the two to whom dolls were living breathing beings and the centres of passionate affections, had been obliged to join the coalition against her in this respect, and say she must not touch that corner without permission. They sought to recompense her for the interdict by giving her boxes of wooden and tin soldiers, boats and horses, and they begged the two elder little maids to be unselfish and not abuse the privilege.

Inside the screen the floor-space was covered with an old hearth-rug. The most imposing article of furniture was the bedstead. Mr. Conway had had it made by a carpenter three Christmases ago, and Mrs. Conway had made the clothing. Surely there never [87] ]was so beautiful a thing. It was made of cedar, and was large enough to accommodate at a pinch four dolls, seeing the habit of these diminutives is to lie perfectly straight and not sprawl about like humans. The head and foot were slightly carved, it had prettily-turned pillars, and beneath the mattress were white laths. The bed itself was of feathers, and the casing of blue Belgian tick exactly like “grown-up” beds. Then there came an under-blanket with a red button-holed edge, a beautiful sheet, two sweet tiny pillows in frilled pillow-cases, another sheet, another blanket (this one prettily stitched), and, crowning glory of all, a patchwork counterpane made of lovely bits of silk, and lined delicately with pale pink. There were even nightdress pockets, edged with lace, to lay upon it in the daytime.

Phyl and Dolly went to their corner to see their large families into bed as one means of filling the time this evening.

They folded all the tiny garments in stacks, and inducted even the most battered and headless specimens of dollhood into nightgowns.

“The sheets are very dirty,” Dolly said; “we quite forgot, Phyl, it was washing day to-day. How’d it be if we do it now? We can dry the things on the fire-guard.”

But Phyl had covered up the last of her offspring, and was bringing out a tattered copy of The Arabian Nights.

[88]
]“I think we’d better read,” she said, “then the time will go very quickly.”

“Well, wait for me a second,” Dolly said, hastily plaiting up the long golden hair of Constance, the one fashionable doll of the assembly. Then they lay down together on the hearth-rug, the book between them, and their chins propped in their hands.

“Oh,” said the little lonely person outside the screen, “I’ve nosing to do, Dolly, le’s wash the things and hang them upon the line? Le’s come in, Phyl?”

“Hide the best little cups,” whispered Phyl to Dolly.

“She’ll bweak the mangle,” whispered Dolly to Phyl,

“don’t let’s get it out.”

“No, I won’t,” said the maligned young person, entering.

“Where’s the tubs and the bucket?—le’s play, I’m Jane. An’ I must have the mangle, Dolly.”

Phyl and Dolly sighed. They had their own particular ways of turning the garments inside out, and soaking and rinsing them; they knew just what things were worn then and needed gentle rubbing; it was a real hardship to remember their mother’s words and let the careless little one in to help.

“It’s a very small wash this week,” Phyl said; “I don’t think I shall put even Suey’s pinafores in.”

“When you look at them, the sheets and pillow-cases aren’t so very dirty,” Dolly said.

[Plate]
]

“‘I tell you it’s only a small wash this week,’ Phyl said.”
Three Little Maids] [[Page 89]

[89]
]They gave Weenie two or three print frocks and a heap of under-linen.

“The tub isn’t half full, dive me some more,” said the young washerwoman, tucking her sleeves up to her shoulders, tying her handkerchief round her head, and turning up the front of her dress to look business-like.

“[I tell you] it’s only a small wash this week,” Phyl said.

“I know,” said Weenie, pouting, “you fink I won’t get your old clothes clean.”

Without a doubt they did think so.

“Wash those first,” Dolly said; “p’waps we’ll find some more soon.”

Weenie gathered up the things indicated, and one other thing, and went off to the end of the room to the window-seat that was used as a laundry.

She dragged both the tubs with her, and insisted upon being given possession of the mangle. When they demurred she looked at them reproachfully.

“I fought you promised mummie on Sunday that you would be good to me,” she said.

So they sighed and gave it up to her—even tried to dole out the necessary stores with a show of cheerfulness—the pat of soap, the microscopic blue-bag, the soda, starch, and infinitesimal pegs. Then they fell down to their book again. The Prince of Persia was making his first visit to the palace of Schemselnihar, and how those children revelled in the gorgeous [90] ]colouring of the scene! The unstinted wealth of adjectives acted like intoxicants to their senses. They were not lying down face downwards on a hearth-rug in England; they were far away in that brilliant East, in a noble saloon the dome of which was supported by a hundred pillars of marble white as alabaster. The bases and chapiters of the pillars were adorned with four-footed beasts and birds of different sorts, gilded. In every space between the columns was a little alcove adorned in the same manner, and great vessels of china, crystal, jet, porphyry, agate, and other precious materials garnished with gold and jewels. The windows looked into the most delicious garden. Ten black women came towards them, carrying with much difficulty a throne of massy silver, curiously wrought; then twenty handsome ladies richly appareled alike, and playing on instruments. Lastly Schemselnihar herself, easily distinguished from the rest by her majestic air, as well as by a sort of mantle of a very fine stuff of gold and sky-blue, fastened to her shoulders over her other apparel, which was the most magnificent that could be imagined. It was of purple. . . .

“Ugh!” said the voice of the distant washerwoman, “ah, ugh!” There was a sound of the spilling of much water, and the falling of something.

Phyl and Dolly scrambled to their feet and rushed out, to find Weenie’s wash had been much more extensive than bargained for.

[91]
]They were allowed to use the water from an old “puzzle” jug that stood on one of the cupboards, but Harriet had been careless enough this evening, with the demands of “company” on her mind, to leave her bowl of washing-up water on the table, and Weenie had utilized that instead, since it was warm.

She had washed all the dolls’ clothes in it, they hung over the fire-guard, grey and greasy: there were two ancient wool antimacassars that were kept on the sofa when they were not doing duty as wraps for dolls or “ladies,”—she had washed them also and turned the water a queer shade of green. When she found her own pinafore was stained from the running wool she took it off and washed it too: when she found her white woollen frock was in the same condition she struggled out of it and dipped it in the basin and soaped and rinsed it vigorously, standing all the time on a chair. The clattering sound was caused by the chair slipping aside, and “down tumbled baby and white frock and all.”

Phyl and Dolly scolded energetically, as became elder sisters.

Then suddenly Phyl gave a scream of absolute horror and flew to the fire-guard. Hanging over it to dry, its gay colours running streakily into each other, its delicate lining turned a nondescript hue, was their cherished dolls’ counterpane.

“What’s the matter?” said Weenie wonderingly.

But Phyl and Dolly had burst into tears and [92] ]rushed together for the first overwhelming minute of bitter sorrow.

Weenie ran to them confidently, perfect joy on her face.

“The mangle isn’t broked,” she said, “it’s nosing but the handle tomed off. Mover’ll stick it on again; don’t cry, Dolly.”

Then they looked at her innocent face more in anger than in sorrow. Phyl even pushed her roughly away.

“You’re a bad, wicked, horrid girl,” she said.

Weenie lost her balance and staggered against Dolly.

“You’re a howid, wicked, bad girl,” said Dolly, and pushed her back.

The return push gave her into Phyl’s power again. That young person caught her by her bare shoulders and gave her a slight shake.

“How dare you touch our things?” she said.

Dolly ran to her and gave her another little shake.

“How dare you touch our things?” she said.

Weenie burst into tears, the heartbroken tears of injured innocence. She had not dreamed of doing injury to the counterpane; it had seemed a beautiful thing to her to take it surreptitiously and wash it so well for them; she had thought they would be delighted when they saw it fresh and clean, for they had been saying the lining was getting dirty for a long time.

[93]
]She flung herself down in a miserable shivering heap on the floor.

But the elder girls left her alone, and took their anger and the counterpane behind the screen.

She cried for nearly ten minutes before their wrath cooled. Then the pitifulness of her sobbings suddenly softened their hearts. They ran out to her.

“Poor old Weenie,” Dolly said; “never mind, Weenie, it doesn’t matter.”

Weenie clung to her convulsively, she had sobbed herself quite ill.

Phyl ran to the press where the clothes were kept and found a frock and pinafore; she was reproaching herself bitterly for the blue little arms and chattering teeth.

“Darling little Weenie,” she said, “here, let Phyl put this on—don’t cry so, baby sweet,—we aren’t angry a bit now, are we, Dolly? It doesn’t matter a scrap, does it, Dolly?”

“Not a scwap,” said Dolly eagerly.

They pulled her to the fire, and Phyl leaned perilously over the guard and poked till the flames leaped up warmly; they rubbed her perishing little hands, they petted and kissed her and called themselves all sorts of names for being so unkind to her.

“We’ll do anything, Weenie—anything,” said Phyl distractedly, when the convulsive sobbing still continued.

[94]
]Weenie was sufficiently recovered to press the advantage.

“Give me the l-little m-mangle for my ownty own,” she said.

They promised to her cheerfully.

“An’ le’s make ice-cream an’ have a p-p-party.”

They set to work to obey her.

They spread tea-towels over two chairs and laid out their best dinner-set that contained a soup-tureen and a sauce-boat in addition to the usual things. Phyl made soup of three currants and weak tea, Dolly cut an apple into thin slices, arranged them in slanting piles on a small plate, and called it bread-and-butter.

Weenie herself stirred flour-and-water and sugar together into a lump of dough and then stuck four currants into it; that was the pudding. Phyl mixed sugar-and-water together for sauce.

Then came the chef-d’œuvre. They listened at the door to make sure no footsteps approached; then Dolly stealthily opened the window, leaned out and got a handful or two of snow from the creeper outside. They put it on a plate and stirred sugar into it; then they reached down the precious bottle of cochineal their mother had given them, and coloured it a pale, lovely pink.

They dressed all the dolls in their very best and brought them to the feast. Even Weenie’s “Molly Coddles” was hunted up and introduced into a [95] ]garment. She was Weenie’s only doll—a gaunt, wooden one with a black painted head and vividly red cheeks.

In the beginning she had possessed the jointed wooden legs and arms that are usually found on her species; but Weenie had thought them troublesome and pulled them off. The stump of a body and the big head she used variously as a horse, a hammer, a ship, and a missile. Dolly to-day, however, wrapped the poor wreck in Jennie’s second-best party cloak, and she was propped up at the table among her betters.

How delicious was that pink ice-cream, eaten off inch-wide plates, with microscopic tin spoons! What delicate flavour that soup had, especially when Phyl chopped up very small a leaf of the outside creeper and made the effect still more realistic? Nothing could have been more enjoyable than that rather dirty-looking ball of dough, yclept a pudding, with the sweet sauce, also coloured pink, poured over it.

Weenie was beamingly happy again, and Phyl and Dolly were enjoying themselves so intensely that all thought of the counterpane faded from their minds.

“But, oh,” cried Phyl, “I don’t think Suey ought to have another ice-cream, she’s had five, and it was only yesterday she had whooping-cough and perelsis.”

“Give it to my old Molly Coddles,” said Weenie, and kissed her poor puppet in an unusual burst of [96] ]tenderness,—“poor old Molly, I wisht you’d let her sleep in the bed with Jennie and Suey,—she hasn’t got nowhere to sleep.”

The door opened and the mother came in.

Weenie greeted her hilariously.

“Come an’ have some ice-cream, mummie,” she cried, “twickerly, twickerly, or Molly ’ll eat it all.”

“[We are going to Australia.]”

But Phyl and Dolly dropped their dolls and rushed to their mother with parted lips and eagerly questioning eyes.

Mrs. Conway’s face was a little pale, but her hair was no longer pushed back, and worry-wrinkles had smoothed themselves from the forehead. [97]
]Her eyes looked brave and calm and smiling, there was no fear in them at all.

“Oh, what is it?” Phyl cried; “it is a big, big thing, I know, I know.”

The mother sat down in a chair while they pressed round her.

“Yes, it is rather a big thing,” she said. “In one month, little girls, [we are going] to Australia.”

[98]
]CHAPTER IX
TRAVELS IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES

Surely this was a great step Mrs. Conway had decided, almost by herself, upon taking? To cut herself adrift from friends and relatives, to leave this land of her birth, and her father’s and children’s births, to cross those thousands and thousands of miles of sea and to start life entirely afresh in some strange country, a solitary woman with three little children depending upon her for their very bread.

Sometimes her heart grew faint at the thought of the immensity of her responsibilities. Then to strengthen herself she would sum up the reasons that urged her to take such a step.

Phyl’s increasing delicacy had made the doctor look very grave.

During the last illness of Mr. Conway and while death actually hovered about the place he had seen the uselessness of suggesting any change for the frail little girl. But now that all was over and the mother was desolately free, he told her, gently enough, but [99] ]with no hesitation, that if she remained in England her eldest daughter could not live.

Every winter found the chest more and more weak and exposed to the inclement weather. The slight colds that Dolly and Weenie caught and flung off so easily were each of them in Phyl’s case a menacing danger.

Mrs. Conway contended, day after day, with the problem. If she were rich she could fly off with her darling at the approach of winter to Southern France or the warm slopes of Italy.

But how could a widow, almost destitute, contend against so fierce and relentless a foe as the English climate?

When all business affairs had been wound up and all legalities finished with, she found there remained to her nothing in the world but the four hundred pounds left of Phyl’s and Dolly’s little fortune. She was pondering on the possibility of eking out an existence on that in some cheap French village, when the treacherous November wind caught the child again, and made the doctor more and more convinced that the young life would not flicker very much longer unless some radical change were wrought.

“The only hope I can hold out to you, Mrs. Conway,” he said at last, “is that you should take the little girl for a long sea voyage. And keep her away for all time from these vile winters.”

Mrs. Conway explained her straitened means, and [100] ]how four hundred was the whole of her worldly wealth.

“Well, many would be glad of that amount,” he said thoughtfully; “of course you will have to work for your children, but that”—he looked at her quiet, resolute face and her mouth’s firm lines—“I know you are prepared for. Has Australia ever suggested itself to you?”

Mrs. Conway gasped a little at the boldness of the idea, but the doctor had so much to say in favour of the new land, the chances for work there, the climate, the voyage that would give Phyl a new lease of life, that when he went away she sat thinking, thinking for hours.

She did not ask many people’s advice; the friend and lawyer of the family, her brother, and one or two other relatives and friends, came to the quiet Warwickshire home and went into the matter gravely with her; no one actually advised against it since poor Phyllida’s life seemed at stake, but no one was very sanguine. Still there seemed no other thing on earth to be done, and in one more week Mrs. Conway had gathered up her courage and finally decided upon the step.

It took quite a long time that first night to make the children’s queer little heads realize all that the wonderful statement meant. Then Weenie was the only one who chattered; Phyl and Dolly, with eyes lustrous with excitement, only gazed at each other [101] ]silently while the splendid thing revolved in their heads.

“Just like the Swiss Family Wobinson,” Dolly said at last in a low, odd voice. “Oh, Phyl, don’t you hope we’ll be wecked?”

“Oh, thank you, Dolly, but I think we’ll ask to be excused luxuries like that,” said Mrs. Conway. “I thought you objected so strongly a week ago to starving to death—where would be the difference?”

“Oh!” Dolly said, “of course I didn’t mean I hoped we’d get dwowned. Only just wecked on a dear little island where there were cocoa-nuts and things.”

But Mrs. Conway asked to be spared even that small diversion.

“I only wish we could go over in a train,” she said ruefully, for she had an unconquerable horror of the sea, though the small ones never knew it.

Then she started up to go back to the letters and other work that pressed so heavily.

“It is nearly nine,” she said, “all of you run to bed at once. But I suppose you would never go to sleep without a little more talk. Phyl, if I leave you my watch, will you make Weenie wrap up and get into my bed at ten, and go to sleep yourselves—faithfully now?”

Phyl promised to send Weenie off.

“And I’ll shut my eyes hard,” she said, “but I shall never go to sleep again, shall you, Dolly?”

“Never,” said Dolly with a deep breath.

[102]
]Once in bed they reviewed the situation from every possible—and impossible—standpoint. They had to picture the ship and the idea of themselves, not the personages of romance they so often were, but their ordinary every-day selves, sailing and sailing away over blue waters to a land where the sun shone always. They had to consider what dolls, books, and clothes they would take; they had to wonder what cousin this and Alice and Nellie that would think. They had to giggle quietly at the idea of going to sleep in bunk beds, one on top of the other, and to shudder pleasurably at the thought of storms, and whales, and ships on fire, water-spouts, and similar dangers that they doubted not lay in wait for those who went down to the sea in ships.

They had to piece together their meagre information of that far-away country of the sun, and make a tangible place of it. But so difficult this proved, Dolly slipped on her blue felt slippers and bright red dressing-gown and stole down the landing to the small book-room, where were stored the atlases and the Book of Travels in Foreign Countries.

The only atlas she could find, however, in the hurry was an American one her father had often laughed at, and had wondered in what way he had come possessed of it. It began with a very large and complete map of N. America; then followed one of S. America, then there came a succession of twenty or thirty pages of the various States, [103] ]even some of the smallest, least important ones, with all the most insignificant towns and villages carefully marked.

Somewhere near the end of the book the compiler seemed to recollect there was a little continent called Europe, and he struck in a bald map of it, with the British Islands lurking indistinctly to the west. Asia and Africa too he seemed to include incidentally, but Australia had been quite beneath his notice, and only occurred as an almost unmarked island in the last map of all, Oceana.

The little girls were not much wiser after a study of this remarkable work: so they plunged into Travels in Foreign Countries in the thirstiest way, quite heedless that the edition was one of the early fifties, and had been prized by their father chiefly for that fact. Strange things they learned from it; the natives were chocolate-coloured and fought with boomerangs; bushrangers troubled the country greatly; these were white outlaws, they found, who hid in the bush and then made raids on the stations.

“You’d hardly think they’d be civilized enough there for railways, would you?” Phyl remarked by the way. Gold mines it seemed were very plentiful; the children paused to dilate on how pleasant a thing it would be, when money was running short, to go outside the thatched hut (they had agreed they would build this themselves, with perhaps a little aid from [104] ]some friendly native), and dig with a “tomahawk” for a few minutes till a nugget or two was unearthed.

Sheep, too, seemed numerous—also snakes and strange-looking birds called emus; an unearthly-looking thing with an unearthly name—Ornithorhynchus paradoxus, or the duck-billed platypus; a strange unfinished-looking beast with two long legs at the back, the rudiments of two other legs at the front, and half-way down its great length a pouch containing a wee edition of itself nibbling a bit of grass—“kangaroo or wallaby” said the note underneath,—“a harmless animal for all its looks; indeed, it is frequently kept by squatters’ children for a pet just as English children keep cats.”

“How would you like that for a pet, instead of Old Pussy Long Tail, Weenie?” said Phyl, displaying it.

But Weenie was so wofully tired and excited and unhinged that she burst into frightened tears, and declared her intention of hiding in the cellar instead of going on the ship.

The distraction brought Phyl back to England and remembrance again. She put a hasty hand out for the watch, and her horrified eyes found the hands at a quarter to eleven.

“It was only half-past nine when I looked last,” she gasped, “and it was only about ten minutes ago.”

“P—waps the hour-hand has slipped down,” suggested Dolly anxiously.

[105]
]Phyl leaned over the table and blew the light out hastily.

“For goodness’ sake let’s say our prayers at once,” she said. “What will mother say when we tell her? Weenie, kneel up here quickly, pet, and then run off to your own bed.”

Weenie tumbled up wearily on the pillow.

“Bless me and everybody, God, and let me find my sreepence again; that’s all, please, Phyl.”

Dolly saw her into the other room, tucked the clothes round her and left her asleep before she could cross back again and begin her own devotions. Strange prayers these small girls prayed.

They had a regular formula, in which “Our Father” came first and made them feel reverence, yet also fear, for the all-powerful God. Then they said the “Gentle Jesus” of their younger days, and loved with a warm, living love that tender Shepherd who “in the Kingdom of His grace, gives a little child a place.”

And then came prayers begging for blessings individually for a number of relations and friends in an ascending order of affection.

As, for instance— “Bless Jane and Harriet (or Hay’at) and cook and old John; bless dear cousins Edith and Mary and Maurice and dear little Cousin Annie, and let poor Alice Partridge’s back get better soon. Bless dear Aunt Margaret and dearest Aunt Ella, and—bless Aunt Anne” (the honest young tongues could not say dear to this severe, unbending [106] ]sister of Mr. Conway’s). “Bless darling, darling little Weenie, and Dolly (or Phyl). Bless darling, darling, precious, sweet little mother, and make her quite well and strong on earth and very happy.” (They added the “on earth,” for they knew, alas! that, like both the fathers they had lost, she might be “well and strong” and yet not be on earth.) And such was their horror now of death and the pain for the ones left behind, that they added, sometimes with trembling lips, “And pray, dear Lord, don’t let any of us die by ourselves, but let us all fall dead together.”

A petition or two then came of a purely private nature, for Christ was a tender Father to them, and they put up their wants in perfect faith, however trivial they were.

“Oh, please,” Dolly would pray, “if it is not wrong to ask, dear Jesus, will you let me say my R’s quite stwaight like everybody says them.” This was her keenest trouble.

“Let me,” was Phyl’s petition at one time, “have quite straight hair, dear God, and a nose like Clara Cameron’s. And let us be good to mama, and grow up very quickly, and be able to do plenty of work to help her.”

Such long prayers Phyl used to say; the two always knelt at the same time by the side of their bed, and began together, but Dolly had always finished first. She used to glance sideways at Phyl [107] ]and wish she too could think of so many things to say. And Phyl—surely it could not have been just to show the superiority of her extra years—used to kneel motionless with her pale face bent over her pale hands so long that Dolly’s respect for her increased almost nightly. She used to try and try herself to think of other things to add to keep her praying just as long as her sister, but after many vain efforts gave it up, and added instead at the very end of all her prayers—“And please, dear Jesus, let me have said everything Phyl has said.”

To-night when prayers were finished, and they lay down with their arms around each other as usual, they could not get to sleep, for their broken promise pressed so heavily on their consciences they felt they could not wait until morning to confess to their mother. So after a time of silent tossing and sighs—they would not infringe further by any speech—Phyl sat up.

“You’ll just have to go down and tell mama now, Dolly,” she said. “I’d like to go myself, only I suppose it would worry her a lot if I got another cold.”

So Dolly slipped out of bed and crept down-stairs, this time forgetful of the warm dressing-gown and gay blue shoes.

“[Mama,]” she whispered, creeping like a white ghost across the room where her mother sat surrounded with papers, “we forgot, we’re very sowy, we’ve bwoken our pwomise.”

[108]
]Mrs. Conway’s colour had flown at the soft footsteps and the sudden voice. But the forgiveness was given very soon, for she remembered being a child herself, and had not forgotten how mysteriously time used then to fly away. She wrapped her daughter round in a big shawl. “Are you sleepy, Dolly?” she said.

“[Mama, we forgot,—we’re very sowy.]”

Dolly’s wide eyes and eager lips gave quick denial.

“I want one of my girlies to-night,” the poor mother said, and her lips trembled so and her eyelashes were so wet, Dolly knew just how lonely and grieving and anxious she was. So they sat on the sofa and had a little talk, and a cuddle, and they kissed each other often, and said low, tender things [109] ]to each other just as lovers might have done, and the ache in the mother’s heart passed away.

“Phyl will have gone to sleep without you,” Mrs. Conway said at last—“I think you must go now, sweetheart; I will come too, myself, when I have put these papers away.”

But Dolly petitioned to stay till that was done, and watched with unweary eyes till the litter had all gone.

Then “Mama,” she said suddenly, and it was not relevant to anything that had been said that evening, or indeed for days, but only to a want that had pressed sorely at her heart for two months, “shall we have new dresses to go to Australia in?”

Mrs. Conway smiled.

“I think it is highly probable they will be necessary,” she said; “I saw Phyl’s elbow nearly through her house-frock this morning.”

“Oh, mama!”—and the child rushed and buried her face on her mother’s arm again—“Oh, mama, need I take my grey one?”

The mother was much surprised. “That pretty little frock,” she said; “it is the nicest you have, dear, and not half worn out, is it?”

“N—no,” said Dolly, but a painful red was in her cheeks.

“Oh, please, please, mama, don’t let me take it,—oh, couldn’t you give it away now? I’ve had it for long enough, and long enough—oh, please, mama.”

[110]
]“But what is the matter with it that you dislike it so?” said Mrs. Conway, puzzled.

Dolly’s voice was very low. “It isn’t black,” she said.

“But it has a black sash, and black trimmings,” said Mrs. Conway.

“Phyl’s is all black,” Dolly whispered.

“But what of that, my little girl?”

Dolly’s head pressed closer. “It seems as if I don’t care as much as Phyl,” she whispered, and one tear fell right over her gold-brown lashes and down her cheek.

Then the mother understood the frequent pain she had unknowingly caused the child by a small economy she had practised when the mourning was made.

Dolly had had a grey frock trimmed with blue, and at the time of Mr. Conway’s death it was almost new. Phyl’s blue and crimson and brown frocks had all been laid aside, and also Dolly’s other coloured ones. But the grey one the mother had told the dressmaker to take the blue from, and substitute black, and it would make a useful house-frock.

Years after when Dolly looked back to her childish days that trouble was clearest remembered of all. But she had said nothing then, for the mother had said it would “save a little.”

But to contemplate taking it to Australia with her broke down her fortitude, and for the first time Mrs. Conway understood what a real grief it had been.

[111]
]“To-morrow we will send it to Mrs. Jones for her little girl,” she said; “why didn’t you tell me before, darling?”

But Dolly only clung closer and spoke no word, and they went to bed together.

[112]
]CHAPTER X
THE LAST CHRISTMAS IN ENGLAND

In after days the last month spent in England seemed like a dream to the children. There was a fortnight during which packing-cases and new flat cabin-trunks came to the house, and were filled with a multitudinous collection of things. When all the stacks of garments, little and big, were ready, Mrs. Conway went in and out of the different rooms, the little girls at her heels, fingering an ornament here she felt she must take, a book there, looking with moist eyes at a picture that had looked down on her most of her life. Yet she did not wish to cumber herself with unnecessary luggage, so the selection had to be a small one. There were two tall silver candlesticks, snuffer-dish, and snuffers she could not leave behind.

“My mother gave them to me when I was married, and said I was to give them to my eldest daughter when she married,” she said, “for her mother had given them to her, and before that, her mother had given them to her.”

[113]
]“Oh, of course you must take them,” said Phyl, and felt added dignity that she had one of her wedding presents before her.

“The cake-basket is not quite so old; but that shall be for Dolly,” the mother said, and lifted up the silver basket Dolly had always admired ardently.

There were tears in Weenie’s voice.

“When I gets married,” she said, “what’s you got for me?”

Mrs. Conway found a cream-jug with a handsome handle.

“Did Dranma’s Dranma’s have it?” was Weenie’s critical question.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Conway.

“Zen I won’t have it,” said Miss Weenie. “Don’t want nasty old fings for my wesing present. Want nicey new fings.”

So the mother found a butter-dish that possessed the necessary qualification, and, to make the gift larger, a silver folding fruit-knife that Mrs. Conway had always used was added to it.

“Now I have wedding presents for you all,” she said; “so no more silver, except spoons and forks.” Only a few books were to go, she said, just one small boxful. They might choose twelve each, and she herself would select the rest.

A whole day flew, of course, in the choosing, and then the stacks carried into the big bedroom for packing were frequently disarranged for some change to [114] ]be made, so hard was the decision. Amongst those finally packed were The Wide, Wide World, a little brown, shabby volume that was Phyl’s chiefest treasure, and the first book she had possessed, Little Women, Alice in Wonderland and In the Looking-Glass, Ivanhoe, Andersen’s Fairy Tales, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, two or three other books of Fairy Tales, Robinson Crusoe, Readings with the Poets, Jessica’s First Prayer, Macaulay’s Lays of Rome, The Swiss Family Robinson, The Lamplighter, Misunderstood, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Scottish Chiefs, The Arabian Nights, an annual or two, Little Wideawake, which was Dolly’s first book, and a volume or two of Sunshine.

The stack of dull-covered lesson-books was a small one, and such was the mother’s pre-occupation she did not notice. There were Mangnall’s Questions and Stepping Stones, books so heartily hated, their sense of duty was too keen to leave them behind. There was Mary’s Grammar, that once they had been attached to by the seeming innocence of its stories, but that on further acquaintance they mistrusted entirely as being a species of powder in jam. There was Butter’s Spelling Book, and a blue geography in the question and answer form. Also a very thin atlas, and the one of the two table-books they possessed that did not contain “weights and measures.”

The days leapt along; the last boxes were corded. All good-byes to friends had been said. “Yesterday [115] ]was Monday,” Phyl said once in surprise, “and now to-day’s Saturday!” and even the mother agreed with her.

There came the final move. The boxes went early, then breakfast came—a strange meal, eaten without a table-cloth, and with cups and plates that no longer belonged to them—breakfast with a world grey to blackness out-of-doors, and within a fire that refused to burn up so early, and gas that flickered as if to help the melancholy effect. Then a four-wheeled cab for the long drive to the station; the backward, fearful glance of the three at the old, quiet, dull-coloured house, and Harriet standing waving there, red-eyed; then the forward, eager one at the thought of the life a-stretch.

A long journey in the express train to London. Phyl had learned its rate was sixty miles an hour, and was staggered by the announcement, for ordinary trains she found ran only thirty to forty.

“We’ll have to catch hold of something very hard,” she told her sisters, drawing a long breath at the beginning, “or we’ll be whirled out of our seats and choked, I expect.”

All three were somewhat disappointed to find none of these things happened, and that the locomotion seemed very little different from that to which they had been accustomed on their visits to the seaside. The roar and lights of a great station, where it seemed one half of the world was rushing to catch trains, [116] ]and the other half had come to see them off and wave good-bye; then a stuffy big cab again.

One night in the big, quiet hotel, where the elder little maids had stayed once before in wealthier days on a visit to the great capital, the hotel that seemed so fascinating a fairyland to them, they had brought it into their play for months afterwards, and shed their fairy wings in order to play chambermaids and waiters. Indeed, there had been a Sunday evening when Dolly, brought to book for her sins, had grown pink with shame, and told how “when it was sermon time and she couldn’t understand, she couldn’t help thinking how lovely the church would be to play ‘hotel’ in.” And Phyl, equally pink, had confessed also to imagining she was the boy chalking the number of each bedroom on the boots outside.

“If the pews hadn’t had numbers on like those bedrooms, I shouldn’t have thought of it,” she added excusingly.

Breakfast at the big hotel, a white world just becoming soiled and smirched outside. A dignified waiter behind the chairs of the three little maids.

“Devilled kidneys, chops and tomato-sauce, York ham, eggs aux Champignons, or fried soles?” he says rapidly to Dolly. Dolly gives a slight gasp. It has been the unalterable rule of her life to let Phyl decide questions like these. Once even when she and Phyl were invited out to tea, and she was asked first what she would have, she grew red and hesitated, and [117] ]finally said in a very shy whisper, “I’ll wait and see what Phyl has, please.”

“Devilled kidneys, chops and tomato-sauce, York ham,” begins the man again.

“Fried soles,” says Phyl, who has deliberated thoughtfully.

“Fwied soles,” says Dolly, relievedly.

“[Fried soles, an’ egg, an’ chop, an’ devilly,]” says Weenie.

[“Fried soles,] an’ egg, an’ chop, an’ devilly,” says Weenie.

But after breakfast the mother goes off to find a lodging much less expensive for the last ten days. They take an omnibus and drive towards the East End to a tall shabby house that says “Apartments,” and stands in a row of others in a long, quiet, [118] ]shabby street. It is not very far away from the Docks, a most necessary qualification, for every day now they all go to look over the great ships that lean against the black wharves as if resting before they fight their way over the seas again.

Mrs. Conway had fancied that being poor people now they could go with the poor third-class across those seas, and so save many pounds out of those few hundreds of hers. But when she sees it, and the motley crowd of nationalities assembled there on a departing boat, she shrinks from such a step. The shipping agent she has approached is kindly and interested in the young widow and her little girls. He tells her it is impossible for her to contemplate it. She must go second-class; but he will stretch a point, and imagine Weenie is two years younger than she is—in fact, he will allow the three children to go on one adult ticket.

“But I isn’t two years younger than I is,” Weenie says agitatedly. Her sharp ears have heard the conversation, and she fears she is to be deprived of some of her rights.

“Yes you are,” says the gentleman solemnly. “You are only two, and a very fine little girl for your age.” And he writes out the necessary papers.

The fortnight shortens; in three days it will be Christmas; in seven days they sail. They go to see some inexpensive sights—the Crystal and Alexandra Palaces, the Zoo, Madame Tussaud’s, the Tower of [119] ]London, with the wonderful armour and the Crown Jewels.

Christmas Day. The landlady has intimated to all her boarders that she expects them to dine out in respect for the day, and allow her some rest. Mrs. Conway and the children muffle up to their eyes. All that can be seen of Phyl are two excited blue eyes and the curl or two that peep from under the seal-cap.

Outside there is no snow, only a black drift here and there. A heavy yellow fog obscures everything. Once Weenie strays, and is quite lost for the space of three minutes, during which the greatest excitement and anxiety prevail; finally she is found again, weeping bitterly, not six feet away. After that they all hold each other carefully and walk four abreast, not a difficult thing, for most of the world is cosily indoors to-day.

They go to St. Paul’s and hear the Christmas anthem. The great solemn place is not a quarter full; the air hangs chill and strange; the light is dim in the far-away aisles and pews, but near the altar gas is burning.

When the great organ rolls vibratingly through all the place, and the far-off voices of the choristers rise to the huge domed roof and die away, Phyl and Dolly grip each other’s hands very tightly, their throats swell, and they badly want to cry; though why they have no idea. But Weenie sniggers during most of the service, for she has put one of the little flat [120] ]hassocks on top of another, and, standing on the erection, tries to imagine she is as tall as her mother.

“These funny little hassocks are much smaller than those at our old church,” she announced audibly, once.

Out in the dreary streets again. The emotional mood of Phyl and Dolly has passed, and they profess themselves dying of hunger, and enter into a pleasurable discussion as to what they will have to eat.

Mrs. Conway has supposed that plenty of restaurants will be open, and that they will be able to get a dinner “Christmassy” enough to satisfy the children, and still inexpensive. But up and down streets they go, anxiously scanning signs, and not one of the places is open; the mother’s heart begins to fail her. She has been obliged to forego hung stockings, Christmas-tree,—all the bright merriment of the season. Surely she will not have to let her little ones go without their dinner.

“It won’t matter about holly and burning fire around the dish for once, if we can only have the pudding,” Phyl remarks; half-an-hour ago she had said pudding without those accompaniments was not pudding at all.

“We could do without vegetables and things if only they could let us have turkey, or fowl, or something,” said Dolly.

Weenie begins to cry for sheer need of something to eat.

Up streets, down streets—the mother dare not go [121] ]too far afield for fear of losing her bearings entirely in this thick wretched fog—and all this part of the world shows blank shuttered windows and inhospitably closed doors. At last they find a place where the door, though not open to invite customers, is ajar.

There is a delicious fragrance of roast goose in the foggy air outside, and they all sniff it luxuriously.

The mother pushes open the door, and they troop after her in eager anticipation. But the shopkeeper is far from pleased at this advent.

“I am not prepared for customers to-day,” she says shortly, “the door was left open by accident.”

“But I can smell roast goose,” Phyl says, excitedly.

“So can I,” says Dolly.

“An’ me,” cries Weenie.

“Surely you can prepare a meal of some kind for us,” says the mother. “I will pay you well for your trouble”—she has grown quite reckless.

“If there is plenty of goose, we can do without pudding,” says Phyl.

“The goose is cooked to order,” the woman returns. “There’s a party of gents coming in, and the vegetables and pudding is for them too.”

“They wouldn’t miss a leg or two,” Phyl says imploringly. “Oh, surely they don’t want it all!”

“There are five of them,” says the woman inexorably. “I couldn’t possibly touch it, nor yet break the pudding.”

Weenie begins to cry afresh.

[122]
]“I wants my dinner,” she says again and again and again between her tears.

“Have you nothing at all in the house?” poor Mrs. Conway says. “Is there nowhere near you could send for anything? My little girls are quite hungry.”

The woman seems to find it hard to understand how it comes about that they are hungry and wandering about on such a day; they are well-dressed, and very warmly wrapped up. But when the mother begs her again to do her best to get them a meal, she consents reluctantly.

“You’ll have to take the back room,” she says, “the gents have engaged the front one.”

“We don’t mind if it’s the kitchen,” says Dolly joyously, “do we, Phyl?”

They are led into a room full of small oil-clothed tables, with a common-looking cruet, a jug of water, and a glass bowl filled with lumps of sugar in the centre of each. The children try the tables one after the other, and finally seat themselves at a round one that holds a dirty menu-card.

In the interval during which the woman goes very reluctantly to “do her best,” they study this card, and speculate as to what the “best” will be.

“If they have three soups, roast beef, curry and veal pie, custard-pudding and fritters, on common days,” says Phyl, “surely they can find something nice when it’s Christmas Day.”

[123]
]“But the woman says she has nothing at all in her pantry,” the mother says.

“She said she’d send to the butcher’s by the back door,” contends Dolly.

“But what could she get there to cook quickly?” says the mother; “you wouldn’t like to wait for a joint of beef to be cooked, would you? I am greatly afraid it will be nothing better than chops.”

And nothing better it is, after a weary twenty minutes’ wait. The little girls’ faces fall greatly when the harassed-looking woman appears with a tray that contains nothing more than a dish of rather burnt-looking chops, and a plate loaded with potatoes. But they brighten when the mother requests that instead of one large one, four little tea-pots shall be brought, so that each may pour out for herself.

For pudding, they have hastily stewed prunes, a box of figs, plenty of bread-and-butter, and strawberry-jam. And so hungry has the chill air made them, they are surprised to find they have greatly enjoyed their Christmas dinner.

They go back to the boarding-house early in the afternoon. There are no fires in sitting-room or dining-room, so they betake themselves to their bedroom and light the gas, and cuddle close together and talk of Australia.

And one more Christmas Day is a thing of the past.

[124]
]CHAPTER XI
‘GOING DOWN TO THE SEA IN SHIPS’

“Phyl,” said an urgent whisper very early one morning—“oh, Phyl, do wake up, you don’t know what you’re missing.”

Phyl opened a very sleepy pair of eyes and found Dolly’s face at a curious distance above her. A red swollen face it was—almost a purple in fact

“Your eyes ’ll drop out in a minute,” was the elder sister’s remark, delivered sleepily. And indeed there seemed some danger of that horrible accident happening, for Dolly had leaned her body so far out of her top bunk that her head was not very far from Phyl’s.

“Well, wake up then,” she said.

“You come down here,” Phyl said, her eyes fast shut again.

“Oh,” said Dolly, “yours is a horrid berth, come up here, Phyl, there are the loveliest, wonderfullest things to see.”

Then Phyl remembered they were at last, after all [125] ]the weeks and weeks of anticipation and waiting, actually at sea, and was amazed to think that she could have been unwilling to wake. In a twinkling she flung back the clothes, and climbed the mahogany ladder that reached to Dolly’s berth.

The two rough golden heads come very close together as they peep out of the port-hole. “The loveliest, wonderfullest things” were one moment the middle of the grey-green waves, and the next a glimpse of grey rain.

“Isn’t it lovely?” Dolly said, rapturously.

Phyl’s only but perfectly satisfactory answer was a deep-drawn sigh of intense happiness.

“What woke me,” whispered Dolly, “was, I felt somebody’s arm stretched across me, and it was the thin steward that gave Weenie the crystallized fruit, and he just screwed up the window and walked out again.”

“He should have sent the stewardess in,” said Phyl, with a becoming sense of propriety. “I wonder why he shut it; last night they said we might leave it open.”

“P’waps we’re in deeper water now,” suggested Dolly.

The whispering had not wakened either the mother or Weenie. There was a berth just above Mrs. Conway’s, but it had not been disturbed; Weenie was a prey to queer tremors of fear that first strange night, so Mrs. Conway slept with her in her arms. The dear [126] ]dark head was cuddled close up to the mother’s shoulder, the dark eyelashes lay peacefully on the round cheeks, the red babyish lips were apart. The mother was fast asleep, one protecting arm round her youngest daughter.

“They won’t wake for long enough and long enough,” said Dolly; “let’s get dressed and have a peep outside.”

They put their clothes on awkwardly; it was a difficult thing to manage, both sitting there in that top berth, but they dare not trust the floor, for last night, undressing, they had made a great noise in tumbling about. At last they were ready, and softly opening the door, they stole out into the long strange saloon. For some time they hung close to their own door, there were so many stewards moving backwards and forwards preparing the many tables for breakfast, that they felt timid. But at last confidence came to them, and having found with their eyes the steps that led up to the deck, they shyly let their feet follow. They went up timidly, and backwards—a friend having told them that was the proper way to descend, and they imagined for themselves it must consequently be the best mode of ascent. The awkward mode of progression took some time, and a boy in a nautical cap, who had been worrying the stewards, laughed aloud at them.

They had both secretly imagined a scene of wonderful beauty would burst upon their delighted eyes [127] ]as soon as they gained the deck. Phyl’s mental vision had included a bright blue sea with whales spouting in various parts, albatrosses flying overhead, and perhaps a majestic iceberg in the distance. Dolly had a dear notion that there would be islands dotted about with cocoanut palms waving gracefully, and black people rowing about in little boats.

And oh! such a woefully dull picture they saw! They were barely out of the mouth of the Thames; the sea was grey, the sky grey, the coast dingy. There were numbers of other boats near—fishing-smacks with brown patched sails, long untidy-looking schooners, two or three big steamers coming in, all their gay paint washed off, one with a mast broken, and a very storm-beaten air about her.

Phyl gulped down a tear, the corners of Dolly’s smiling mouth fell down, down.

Then “Oh!” Phyl cried, “just look, Dolly, see the sailors sitting up there on the mast! Oh! look, there goes another one—did you ever see any one climb like that?”

Dolly’s mouth corners came up at this interesting sight.

“What are they doing?” she said; “are they going to put sails up?”

Phyl always assumed knowledge, even though she had it not.

“What do we want with sails?” she said, “this is a steamship, Dolly, you goose. I expect those sailors [128] ]have to sit up there for punishment, that’s the way captains always punish sailors when they’ve been doing anything wrong.”

“He—he—he!” laughed the fiendish boy in a nautical cap behind them.

They both looked greatly agitated, for they had an unconquerable dread of boys, and they hurried off to the furthermost end of the deck, though there was no longer any shelter there.

“Let’s get up these steps quickly, Phyl,” whispered Dolly, “he’s coming after us.”

They went up hurriedly, even forgetting to walk backwards. Up here there was another pleasant deck, with awnings stretched against the sun and rain: they decided this should be the place where they would always play.

“We could make the loveliest little kitchen in this corner,” Dolly said, running to a tempting place under the companion-ladder that led to the bridge.

“Let’s go up these other steps,” said Phyl

, “it’s so high up there we might see lots of things we can’t see down here.”

They began the ascent, but Dolly, who was behind, caught sight of a notice that said passengers were forbidden to go on the bridge.

She grasped Phyl’s frock in a tumult of fear to drag her back, and at the same time a short red-haired man with a blue coat trimmed with gold lace and gold buttons, and a cap with a gold and red sort [129] ]of emblem, paused in his walk up and down above, and noticed them.

“What are you doing here?” he said, and his voice was so used to shouting in the wind that it thrilled them with horror, it sounded so loud and fierce. “If you don’t go back at once I shall put you in irons.”

Go back at once! They fairly fell down the remaining steps and scudded across the deck like a pair of terrified rabbits. The officer himself smiled as he looked after their flying curls, and remembered the momentary look of terror on the faces that had looked up at him.

They stood still to recover themselves in the sheltered corner that Dolly had thought would make so ideal a kitchen. Their faces were quite pale at the thought of their narrow escape, and their knees were trembling dreadfully.

“Well,” said a voice behind them, and turning, they saw the dreadful boy, “I wouldn’t be you kids for anything—a nice thing you’ve let yourselves in for.”

“W—what?” said Phyl, trying to stand her ground.

“He only said if we didn’t go back he w—would——” said Dolly, with teeth almost chattering.

The boy came closer to them and spoke in a lower tone, for there were a couple of apprentices near. “You’re second-class passengers, aren’t you?” he said.

“Yes,” said Phyl.

[130]
]“Very well,” said the boy, “[you’re trespassing,]—this is the first-class deck.”

Fresh horror came into their eyes; they had just escaped one danger to be plunged into another.

“We didn’t know,” they said, “no one told us not to come.”

“You ought to have known,” the boy said, “the captain won’t take that excuse, I can assure you—you’ll be sentenced like the rest of them.”

“[You’re trespassing,—this is the first-class deck.]”

“What’ll they do to us?” Phyl said, with a hunted glance around.

The boy shrugged his shoulders and gave a low whistle.

“You saw some men sitting across one of the yardarms [131] ]this morning,” he said; “that’s the usual punishment for trespassing on the first-class deck without leave. P’raps though as you’re only girls they won’t make you go so far as the mast,—see that rather low spar-yard up there; I believe that’s the one kept for children.”

Dolly was trembling so violently, Phyl put her own shaking arm round her waist to sustain her; but the boy was looking in front of him and did not notice the exceeding fright. Phyl touched his arm. “No one has seen us—perhaps we could slip down the steps before the captain gets here.”

“Not a bit of it,” said the cruel boy; “I can’t see the law broken in this way, I’m going to give you in charge to one of the officers there.”

A moan of despair broke from Dolly’s pale lips, the tears burst from out her eyes.

“We shall fall in the sea and be drowned,” she said chokingly, “we can’t climb a bit.”

“Well, my crikey!” said the boy, and the next minute Dolly found his arm was round her shoulder, and he was patting her and talking very fast and eagerly. “There, don’t cry, little kid; of course I was only having a lark with you,” he said; “I never thought you’d swallow it. Of course no one will say a word to you—how were you to know the decks? Here, come along, and I’ll show you the barometer and heaps of other things.”

[132]
]But Phyl and Dolly, though reassured, were anxious not to trespass a moment longer.

“We’d better get down on our own deck now,” they said nervously, and Phyl added, “Are you first-class?”

“Oh! the captain’s my pater,” the lad said. “I have a bunk in his cabin, and have my meals anywhere; it’s better fun third, but the grub’s better first.”

“We’d really rather go,” said Phyl, edging towards the companion at the sight of an officer approaching. “Mam—mother will be looking for us.”

“Is she a little lady in black?” said the boy. “I saw her looking all over the decks below and asking the bo’sun questions. I thought she’d lost her box.”

But Phyl and Dolly had sprung away from him, and were rapidly descending the steps backwards.

[133]
]CHAPTER XII
AUSTRALIA

“Yesterday now is a part of forever

With glad days and sad days and bad days that never

Shall visit us more with their bloom and their blight,

Their fulness of sunshine or sorrowful night.”

The disappointment of Phyl and Dolly in Australia was very bitter.

They were actually in Sydney now, dwelling in furnished rooms, while their mother looked about her and tried to put her plans into execution. It was mere chance that made her choose Sydney rather than any of the other cities; it lay at the end of the vessel’s journey for one thing, and thus added an extra four or five days to the exquisite voyage; for another she was a beauty lover, and had heard of the harbour’s glories all her life; since all places now seemed equally without advantage, financially, to her, she thought she might at least bring her children up where Nature had been most royal.

But Phyl and Dolly were so saddened at the sight of the place, when, once through the frowning Heads, [134] ]they bore slowly down the far-famed waters to the Quay, that they could never afterwards say honestly that their first impressions of the harbour had filled them with rapturous admiration.

All the voyage they had whispered, whispered together, hanging dreamily over the vessel’s side in the tropics; cuddled up wrapped in a rug when the freezing wind made the sailors say an iceberg must be at hand; shut in the cabin when the storms drove the other passengers to the saloon and privacy was impossible. Whispered, whispered, whispered, till a fairy Australia was firmly builded in their heads.

And there was no one to tone down the colouring of their skies for them, or to laughingly crop feet off their towering mountains, and set their notions of gold fields and kindred things aright, for no one knew of the strange building.

Those years of laughing ridicule, when the two were suddenly set down in a large family, had flung them back entirely upon themselves, and filled them with a shyness and reserve that lasted all their lives. Of all the evils the sun looked down upon, the worst seemed to them being laughed at; they would have endured tortures rather than have allowed those big boys and girls to know anything of their ways; they had a vague, shamed feeling that they were rather ridiculous atoms, but how to alter themselves they did not know. Life would have been insupportable if they never “pretended,” and played nothing more [135] ]uneventful than “Chasings” and “Hide-and-seek” and “Hunt the Slipper.” So they shrank together—even, in these matters, from their mother, who had been so busy that last year or two she could not follow them up to their absurd heights. In all the other joys and griefs of their lives they went direct to her; but in the whispering and pretending there was Phyl for Dolly and Dolly for Phyl, and the doors locked firmly on the world.

There was no one therefore to correct the perspective when they drew their plans of Australia.

When they steamed round Bradley’s Head, and Sydney spread itself before their roughly-awakened senses, they both grew from that moment just a little older and sadder, and more like children who see life only as it is.

No chocolate-coloured beings, clad in bright, scanty garments, darted down to a yellow beach and pushed off in strange boats to welcome their ship; no kangaroos leapt back into the thick forests near the water’s edge startled at their approach; no birds of brilliant plumage filled the air with colour and music. On the hill-slopes around there fed no million sheep, there waved no palms, there sprang no dazzling flowers. Nowhere lay a field dug into holes, the greenness of its grass showing up brilliantly the careless heaps of sparkling nuggets.

Merely a city stretched athwart the sky. Ordinary men and women, just such as had been left behind in [136] ]London, walked and stood and bustled about the Quay. Every-day warehouses, dull and dingy, crowded to left and right; above them, where the hills rose, thousands upon thousands of shops and houses—alas! for the cherished wigwams—were massed together, with church-spires and town-hall towers breaking up their regular level just as they did in London and other English towns. Afterwards, when the first keen edge of the disappointment had worn off, they tried to excuse the harbour city for its manifold shortcomings.

“Of course,” Phyl said, “since there are such a dreadful lot of people here already they must have houses to live in; we ought to have thought of that, Dolly.”

“And as such lots of ships come in, I s’pose they can’t help having wharves and things,” Dolly said.

The presence of the Quay, with its bustling reminiscences of the London docks in place of the yellow and white beaches thick with shells, she was finding hardest of all to forgive.

“And I s’pose they had to have trams and trains,” sighed Phyl.

“But wouldn’t you think there’d be just one or two aboriginals left?” said Dolly with saddened eyes.

Disillusion

was Mrs. Conway’s portion also.

She also had had her secret imaginings. She had been certain that everywhere there were places where a school had merely to be started to prove at once a [137] ]success. She felt sure that wealthy squatters were in continual need of governesses for their children, and only too willing and anxious to pay them a hundred or a hundred and fifty pounds a year for their services. She imagined her business training of the last two years would easily fit her for one of the secretaryships that are such rare and precious orchids in England, but as every new arrival knows—or at all events imagines—grow on every bush in Australia. The awakening was very rough and sharp.

A month slipped past; another one trod on its heels and tripped away mockingly. The tiny account in the bank grew less and less, for small girls must have enough to eat and a comfortable shelter for their heads. No one took the faintest notice of the repeatedly advertised statement that a well-educated lady offered her services as governess, or amanuensis; unless, indeed, it was some one who smiled a little at the faith and ignorance displayed by the well-educated lady in daring to value her services at £120 a year.

Yet on less than that sum Mrs. Conway knew it would be impossible to live. Indeed she could plainly see that, even if she succeeded in obtaining such a salary, she would have to make repeated incursions into that poor two hundred pounds, which was her one plank between the waters of the whirlpool where so many struggled for a little time and sank.

The prospect grew gloomier and gloomier; the [138] ]little wrinkle of worry that the voyage had smoothed away came back on the mother’s brow; Phyl and Dolly read the Situations Vacant column in the newspaper every morning over her shoulder, and with eyes as preternaturally grave as hers. Even Weenie had a knowledge that the position was a serious one.

There came a temporary help from a shy, silent man who was boarding in the same house. He belonged to a firm of big drapers in the city and had taken an unobtrusive interest in the efforts of the young widow to obtain employment.

“Of course you wouldn’t go into a shop,” he said to her one morning with nervous abruptness.

“If you mean my pride wouldn’t let me, you are wrong,” said Mrs. Conway; “I have entirely pocketed that. But it needs experience and reference from former employers—no one would have me.”

He told her of a temporary vacancy that had occurred in his own establishment; the lady who was head of one of the departments had fallen ill, and had been sent away for three months. If Mrs. Conway liked to come with him at once he would introduce her to the firm and could indeed promise her the work; he himself would undertake to teach her speedily the details of her position; what they chiefly wanted was a well-dressed, tactful person to be present in the show-room always to govern the young women who served, and in general to look [139] ]after the interests both of the firm and customers. The present head was drawing a salary of five pounds a week, but he was afraid the firm would not give more than three pounds to any one lacking experience—would Mrs. Conway consider that sufficient?

Mrs. Conway replied by hastening away with a tight feeling in her throat to put on her bonnet and gloves. She told him as they went along the street how she had been offered twenty-six pounds a year the day before at a registry office as governess for six children, and that that was the only genuine offer she had had.

“But this is not all roses,” said the quiet man, “it is spirit-breaking work at times.” He had at one time cherished hopes of entering one of the liberal professions himself.

“I have three little girls,” said the widow, hastening along.

She held the post until the permanent head of the department was restored to health; the children went daily to a cheap school near, and they lived quietly and economically in furnished rooms for the three months. Phyl and Dolly were grown up before they learned just what spirit-breaking work it had been; the little mother was always so bright and full of gaiety for them they had no idea at the time that it was even unpleasant.

Then just when the old wearying search for work was starting again, the silent man found a similar [140] ]position, though at a smaller salary, in a far-away country town.

Away they went with the boxes and bags that held everything they could call their own in all this new strange continent.

They unpacked their possessions and prepared to settle down to life under this fresh aspect. But in two months came a startling blow—the country firm went bankrupt. Not one penny of her salary for those eight weeks could the widow obtain, and in addition she was forced to sustain all the travelling expenses which, it had been promised, would be reimbursed to her.

“Write to Mr. Blair, mama,” said Phyl hopefully at this crisis; “he’ll soon find you something to do.”

But even this help was now cut off; the silent man had written a letter to the widow since she had been in this inland town and begged her to return and marry him; he found it impossible to fill the blank her absence caused.

Mrs. Conway sighed deeply as she wrote her gentle but decided refusal; this good plain man’s advice had been of such service to her, and now she could no longer ask it.

Then while still in the little town and looking almost hopelessly towards the return to Sydney, the local house-agent, with whom she had had some transactions, approached her.

He had a cottage to let in a small township not [141] ]more than fifty miles away; there was an excellent opening, he said, for a good private school there; indeed, excepting a half-time public school there was no other for miles around.

Mrs. Conway eagerly adopted the suggestion; teaching seemed delightful work after these five months of “spirit-breaking,” and hitherto she had been afraid to attempt a school because, in every instance she had inquired about, a heavy sum had been necessary for the purchase. But here was, as the agent said, a town with a population of five thousand souls and not a single private school; and here was to let a comfortable cottage with two acres of garden and five rooms for the ridiculous rent of fifteen shillings a week.

Mrs. Conway signed the lease for a year—the agent professed himself unable to let for a shorter period—and she spent some of her hoarded “safety money” in the purchase of the necessary piano and furniture.

“I really think the sun is going to shine on us at last, little girls,” she said.

[142]
]CHAPTER XIII
MOONDI-MOONDI

“With fire and fierce drought on her tresses

Insatiable summer oppresses

Sere woodland and sad wildernesses,

And faint flocks and herds.”

Moondi-Moondi, Sunnymeade yclept, lay parched and panting beneath the sun of another summer. Dr. Wise’s cottage showed little change; perhaps the walls were dirtier, certainly there were more pencillings, and the amateur scribblings of small fingers upon the verandah posts and fences. You still fell over small boys in whatever part of the house you essayed to walk, and Human Buds, and our Responsibilities in the Grafting of Them, still stood in its now well-worn cover in a place on the book-shelves convenient for reference.

Mrs. Wise had gone out for the day—a very rare occurrence. She had driven off in the old buggy with the doctor and her youngest baby to a station twenty miles away, to see some one who was staying there, and had been at school with her.

[143]
]She had left Clif with strict injunctions to take good care of Alf and Richie, for it was Lizzie’s washing-day, and who else was there to put to the task?

But quite early in the morning Teddie came rushing back to the house with round eyes and a most red, excited face.

Clif was lying, face downwards, on the floor in the dining-room, with Scott’s Pirate for companion, and, as might be imagined, his charges were following, unchecked, their own sweet wills. This morning this happened to be scratching “capital A’s,” which they had just learned to make, on the seats and backs of the chairs.

“Oh, guess,” cried Teddie, bursting in, “guess what, Clif!”

“What?” said Clif, but the Pirate’s doings were too engrossing for him to lift his eyes.

“‘Brownses’ is taken,” said Teddie, “and it’s a school that’s coming.”

Clif dropped his book and drew a great breath. School was what he had ardently desired for almost two years. It had seemed so babyish, so unmanly, to be kept hanging about home each and every day, doing a few simple tasks amid all manner of interruptions, for his father and mother to correct, pushing the perambulator up and down the paths or the road, forced to play most of his time in the dull patch of ground, called by courtesy the garden, so that he [144] ]might keep a watch on those restless spirits, Richie and Alf.

He got up, quite trembling with excitement.

“Let’s go and look,” he said, and the next minute was scrambling over the fence that separated the two orchards.

No wonder Teddie had been excited at the change that had taken place at “Brownses” since the day before. All the windows were flung open, the almost obliterated “To Let” notice had gone, and a woman, who lived near, was scrubbing away at the dirty floors.

The lads fairly fell upon her with their questions: “When was the school coming? Which was going to be the school-room? Had the teacher got maps and a black-board? Did she teach out of Little Arthur’s History, or The Royal, and would they have arithmetic every day?”

[The woman ran them] out of the house at last with her broom and locked herself in, and they were forced to walk around outside and make conjectures about the things they could not find out.

At mid-day dinner, Lizzie was very irate over their neglect of their two little brothers.

“That Richie went under the house after the cat,” he said, “and it had a snake in its mouth.”

This was so every-day an occurrence, that Clif was not in the least conscience-stricken.

“Old Blackeye wouldn’t have let him touch it,” he [145] ]said; “she always takes jolly good care no one gets a show to take it from her.”

“Well, Alf lighted a newspaper,” the girl continued, “he might have set hisself afire. You’ll just stop here this afternoon, Master Clif, and look after them, or I’ll tell the Missus.”

[The woman ran them out of the house with her broom.]

Clif cudgelled his brain to think of something that would keep them safely amused while he and Ted explored further. Whatever happened he felt he must be on the scene every day now when the train came in, for the woman had said that the new people might come any day. Ted was equally convinced that he must, so there could be no relegating duty. At last he hit on a plan, and told Lizzie he was going to take [146] ]the small ones out with him, which quite satisfied the girl. He told Teddie his idea, and between them they purloined one of the clothes-lines, some gingerbread, a bottle of jam, and a newspaper or two.

Then they set off with their troublesome charges. A quarter of an hour’s walk away, at the head of the swamp creek, there were a number of pools of water, very shallow at this dry time of the year. Clif selected an isolated one that was far enough from the bush to be tolerably safe from snakes, and yet close enough to be hidden from the road. He helped the little lads to undress, and he put their clothes in safety on the bough of a tree—part of his responsibility was to keep them from ruining their clothes. Round each of their naked little waists he tied a length of rope which he made fast to the tree. He told them they were wild Indians, imprisoned for scalping whites, but that he had begged the king to give them enough freedom to bathe when they liked, as wild Indians went mad if they didn’t. He put the gingerbread, the bottle of jam, and a spoon close to them, and he rapidly made a fleet of paper boats for them to sail.

The little lads were capering with delight at the novel game, and hardly noticed when the big boys slipped away.

“That’s great,” said Clif as they went back; “they can’t get into a bit of harm, ’cause they can’t go past the length of the rope anywhere. And they can’t hurt their blessed clothes; and they can’t get drowned [147] ]’cause the water’s not up to their knees; and they can’t catch cold, it’s so hot. Come on, the train must be nearly in.”

“Tell you,” said Ted, “let’s hide in their garden and watch them; they’d only stop at the station a minute or two, and they’d see us if we followed.” Their mother had impressed it upon them very clearly the last time the tenants moved into this house, that people hated little boys to stand about and stare when they were moving, and that nice gentlemanly boys would not think of even peeping through the cracks of the fence.

Clif found his brother’s suggestion good.

“Near the side-room window there’s a tank, we could squeeze down in the place where it doesn’t touch the wall and see everything,” he said.

“Come on,” said Ted, “I can hear the train.” And they swarmed over the fence with no further ado.

For nearly an hour they crouched patiently in their uncomfortable position before there was anything to see. Ted was just suggesting this could not be the day, but at last there came rumbling along the old patched-up cart of the blacksmith, the only one obtainable at short notice. An idler, not more than half sober, walked beside it—the only man obtainable at short notice. No one in the place had known the new teacher was coming so soon, or there would have been quite an army to offer help, for the people were kindly. But it happened that the Sunday-school picnic was [148] ]taking place a mile or two away, and the village was deserted. Behind the cart walked a little lady in black, with two little light-haired girls beside her, and a little dark-haired one running in front.

They turned in at the gate. The boys wondered what made the lady look as if she were going to cry as she gazed at the forlorn empty cottage. The scrubbing woman had gone—indeed, so anxious to get to the picnic had she been, she had not finished the work, meaning to come back to it at night; the windows, though thrown up, had still a year’s dirt upon them; there was a bucket of dirty water in the narrow hall; in the kitchen there was a heap of old fish- and jam-tins and other rubbish.

The man was unloading the cart under protest; the boys watched him bump in some packing-cases and flat cabin-boxes, a few chairs, two mattresses, and a bundle of bed-laths. The little girls kept running to and fro with the lighter bags and articles.

“Where is the rest of the beds?” said the lady, looking in dismay at the now almost empty cart.

“Must ha’ left it at the station,” said the man laconically. He tipped the cart at an angle and slid the piano-case off on to the footpath.

“Have to get two men to lift that in,” he said, “can’t shift a piano by myself; ten bob, please, mum.”

The lady seemed afraid of him, and hurriedly gave him his half-sovereign to get rid of him. He climbed [149] ]into his cart and went bumping off down the road again.

The forlorn little procession trailed slowly into the cottage and to the very room beneath the window of which the boys were crouching. The mother sat down on a packing-case, struggled to smile and say something cheerful, but found it impossible and burst into tears instead, and the three tired, dispirited little girls joined in heartily.

“Whatever’s up with them?” said Teddie, uneasily.

“They’re in black,” whispered Clif, “some one’s dead.”

“Come, Phyl, come, Dolly, this will never do,” said the mother, drying her eyes after a little time, “we must make the best of it, little daughters, and first of all we must get something to eat or we shall all be ill.”

The little girls mopped their eyes and looked round mournfully.

“What can we get?” Phyl said.

“There are some of the sandwiches left,” said Dolly, but there was no enthusiasm in her tone.

“There’s a little box of groceries at the top of this packing-case,” Mrs. Conway said; “I put it there ready for an emergency, so we shall have tea and sugar and butter, but I certainly don’t know what we shall do for milk and bread.”

Weenie began to cry again dismally—hunger always reduced her to tears more speedily than anything else.

[150]
]“I wants some ben an’ milk,” she said, lapsing into the phrase of her babyhood.

Clif stirred uneasily.

“I could get a loaf and some milk out of our kitchen in a minute,” he whispered to Ted, “but p’raps they wouldn’t take it if they thought we’d been peeping.”

“Let’s drop them through the window, and run away,” Ted suggested.

“You stop there,” Clif said, squeezing himself stealthily out of the hiding-place. He crept along close to the house lest one of the little girls should glance out the window and see him, and he climbed the fence and reached his own kitchen in safety. He took the jug of milk that had been set aside for tea and one of the two loaves of bread, and went back, carefully slipping the jug through a broken paling and dropping the loaf over in advance of himself.

Teddie reported that the lady was nearly crying again and the littlest girl had hardly stopped a minute. They had gone into the kitchen to see about a fire, and found it worse than any place in the house. And next, they had hunted all over the house for the water-tap, and at last the biggest little girl had gone outside and had noticed the tank. But, when they tried it, it was quite empty.

“They almost saw me, too,” wound up Ted, “I couldn’t help breathing once, and the middlest girl said, ‘Oh, come away quickly, I’m sure there’s a frog there.’”

[151]
]“Are they in this room yet?” asked Clif.

The little boy nodded.

“The lady’s trying to open one of the boxes, and she can’t,” he said.

Clif slipped along the ground to the front; the door was shut, but one of the windows was open, so very very softly he climbed through, set the jug and loaf on the floor, and retreated with heart beating rapidly.

The spice of excitement and daring was making the blood dance in his veins. He pictured them going into that room with pleasure and surprise: it would seem to them as if fairies had been there. He crept round the house, looking for fresh worlds to conquer for them.

“How are they getting on?” he whispered to Teddie, who was still peeping through the creeper round the window with absorbed eyes.

“She’s found the kettle,” reported Teddie, “it was in the little box, but she can’t get the big one open; she’s trying to light a fire now in the fire-place with the bits of wood the woman left and a newspaper; she says the kitchen’s too dirty to go into.”

Clif peeped in, and a few moments’ watching sufficed to show him that the fire would never burn—he was an authority on fire-making. The lady was on her knees by the open fire-place; in the middle of it she had put two or three small blocks of wood, and on the top of this a newspaper crumpled up. Again and [152] ]again she put a match to it, again and again the paper caught, flared up, died down. Then she and two of the little girls puffed at it with their lips till the tears ran down their cheeks with the smoke and heat; the wood would crackle a moment, show red for a minute or two, then die out to sulky blackness.

“And even if it does burn,” said Phyl, “what is the use of it without water?”

The lady rose from her knees at last.

“I must go and ask help from some one,” she said; “there are two or three cottages not very far down the road, perhaps there may be some one there who would help a little.” She added a little bitterly: “In England a new-comer would not have to go out in search for help, some neighbour would have been to offer it. You may come with me, Phyl, we may have to carry the water back.”

On their way up the hall they saw the bread and milk, and their exceeding surprise and pleasure satisfied even Clif.

“We shall get some tea after all,” they said, and hurried off with lighter hearts.

Dolly and Weenie, left behind, grew nervous in the strangely silent place, and Clif perceived the fact. “Gr-r-r-r-r!” he said at the window, and made a few more sounds calculated to terrify, an act that caused Teddie the greatest amazement, it seemed such wanton cruelty.

Dolly seized Weenie’s hand.

[153]
]“L-l-let’s go and wait at the gate,” she said, and they fled away together.

It was then that Clif established himself in the place as a good fairy; he thought it a great pity that people should be foolish enough to object to little boys looking on, for he could have helped much better if he had been admitted openly to the house. He sent Teddie off to their own pump with the kettle and bade him bring back the axe. He had a fire burning in a very few minutes, and the kettle sitting in a most comfortable and ordinary way upon it; with the axe and a hammer he broke the lids of two of the packing-cases, and was just starting on a third, when he heard the footsteps coming back along the path.

He had only just time to scramble out of the window again with Teddie’s help, before the new people were actually in the house.

More weary and dispirited than ever sounded the voices; they had been able to make no one hear, it seemed, though they tried at four cottages; every place was quite shut up.

“There’s a house at the back of this,” said Phyl, who had been looking round; “I wonder would it be any use trying there,—why,—how,—look at the fire!”

They had reached the doorway by this time, and all sprang across the room to the wonderful sight.

“There’s even water in the kettle,” Phyl said, the first to break the silence of surprise.

Mrs. Conway looked round a little nervously.

[154]
]“This is all very strange,” she said; “there must be some one in the house; I—I can’t understand it all.”

Dolly grew a little pale.

“P’waps it’s a haunted house,” she whispered, “p’waps there are spiwits in it.”

“Nonsense,” said her mother; “at all events it’s a very practical and kindly spirit.” She went out and looked in every room; Dolly was able to testify no one had been in or out of the gate, for she and Weenie had stood there all the time.

“But there was a vewy dweadful noise once,” she said, with a glance of fear over her shoulder.

Mrs. Conway raised her voice so that it would go through all the little cottage.

“Is any one there?” she said. “Is any one in the house? if so, will they please speak?”

“P’raps she won’t mind us,” whispered Teddie; “go on, say yes, they’re getting frightened.”

Some brown wavy hair and a thin boy’s face, very red and ashamed of itself, showed at the open window.

“It’s only me,” he said, with extreme depreciation in his tone, “and my brother Teddie.”

Mrs. Conway held out a welcoming hand.

[“Come in,”] she said, “you have been very kind, little boys. Can you get down there all right? This is Teddie, is it? And what is your name? Clif? Clif Wise? What made you take such a funny way of doing good to us?”

[Plate]
]

“‘Come in,’ she said, ‘you have been very kind little boys’”
Three Little Maids] [[Page 154]

[155]
]Clif grew redder than ever. He had climbed down at her request, and Teddie had followed him, but he was very anxious now to depart by way of the door.

“We’ll have to go now,” he said at last, after a minute or two’s silence, during which Phyl and Dolly had studied him critically. “Come on, Ted.”

But Mrs. Conway threw herself upon his protection in such a way that he felt a most pleasurable thrill of manliness.

“If you would stay and help me for a little time I should be very glad,” she said; “you see everything is so new and strange to us, we don’t know where to turn for anything. For instance, where can we get water from?—everything here seems empty.”

“You can get it at Johnson’s, the baker’s,” Clif said, “or over at Green’s, the cottage with the painted roof, down the road. If you give me threepence I’ll go and buy you a bucketful.”

“Threepence!” cried Mrs. Conway; “you don’t mean to tell me water costs anything?”

Clif soothed her shyly.

“Not often,” he said; “in the winter you never have to buy it, and sometimes in the summer there is enough, but whenever there is a drought like this, everybody buys their drinking water from the people who have big wells and tanks, and get what they want for washing or baths from the pools at the head of the Swamp.”

[156]
]The poor little lady looked quite stunned under this fresh blow. Surely this was a very dreadful wilderness she had lighted upon.

“I—I think we had better have tea at once,” she said faintly. Phyl had unpacked some cups and saucers, Dolly had found the butter, Weenie was eating ravenously at the packet of sugar.

Phyl darted an ungrateful glance at their small benefactors; she considered they need not have worried her mother about things like this the first evening, and she thought it quite time they retired, since there seemed nothing more they could do now but stand and stare.

While her mother stooped down to make the tea she slipped up to them.

“Is it easier for you to go by the front door or the back?” she said, not loud enough however to be heard by her mother.

“The back,” said Clif

, slow however to see they were dismissed, so interested was he in watching proceedings.

“Good-bye,” said the little girl with an insinuating smile; she could hardly have done it better if she had been a society woman.

Clif

stared at her a moment—he had purposed staying here and helping for hours.

But then he got very red and backed suddenly out of the doorway, pulling Teddie after him.

“Where are the little boys?” said the mother when [157] ]she turned round; “how strange of them to go so suddenly!”

“It will be much nicer to have tea without them,” Phyl said, establishing herself calmly on a hat-box; “I never saw anything like the way they stared.”

“They were very nice little boys indeed,” said her mother warmly.

At that moment the very nice little boys were standing arraigned before their justly irate parents, who, driving home late in the day, had heard such pitiful crying not far from the roadway, they had gone in search of it, and had found the poor little forgotten Red Indians. Red Indians in very truth, for they were smeared from head to heel with the crimson jam.

“It might have killed the poor little things,” said their mother in great agitation.