[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.