The Happy Adventurers, Lydia Miller Middleton [mini ebook reader txt] 📗
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- Author: Lydia Miller Middleton
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“It looks oily; I guess there will be one drop.” He sniffed anxiously as he spoke. “And it does smell of roses too, by jiminy!”
They all sniffed in turn, and agreed that there really was an undeniable smell of roses. “And it might have only smelt of wet tin,” Hugh said. “Look here, Prue, don’t empty that little kettle. We’ll boil it up again and collect another drop. Put some more logs on the fire.”
Prudence looked at Hugh with a slightly exasperated expression; she was very hot and rather tired: “Hugh Campbell, you know as well as I do that there is nothing but tinny water left in that kettle. If you think anyone is going to pay a guinea a drop for scent called Wet Tin you are a goose. I wouldn’t buy it if it was the only scent in the world.”
Hugh was not discouraged. “My idea is right,” he said. “I shall make a larger distiller and try again. There’s plenty more roses. Next time we are by the sea I shall look for ambergris. It is found floating on the shores of warm countries, and all scent should have ambergris in it, properly speaking.”
“I shall try again too,” said Grizzel. “There’s plenty more cherries, and a new barrel of sugar came yesterday. After all, everybody has ups and downs when they are making fortunes. I’ll take good care never to burn my jam again.”
“I’m not really sure if attar of roses is worth while,” Hugh said thoughtfully, his eyes on the tiny milk-jug in his hand; “only rich people could afford to buy it. If you want to make a fortune it is better to make something that everyone wants, rich and poor. Soap might do.”
“Jam,” said Grizzel.
“I’m not sure if it is right to make fortunes at all,” said Mollie slowly.
“Why not?” asked the other three all at once.
“Because it doesn’t seem fair, somehow. Some people are so frightfully rich, and some people haven’t even enough to eat. My mother goes to the children’s hospital every week, and sometimes she takes me. You can’t think what some of the poor babies are like— and then you go outside and see rich, rich women in splendid motor-cars—I mean carriages,” she corrected herself, “and it does make you feel things aren’t fair, and I do like fairness.”
The Australian children were silent for a minute or two.
“But if no one was rich no one could give,” Grizzel said at last. “We know very rich people here, and they do lovely kind things. Mrs. Basil Hill sends us a packing-case of exquisite oranges every summer, and when she comes to see Mamma she almost always brings us a surprise packet—last time it was five pounds of the most beautiful sweets in Rundle Street, and the time before it was all Miss Alcott’s books.”
“But if everybody was the same, people wouldn’t have to give you things,” said Mollie. “You’d have them yourself.”
“Then we would never get a surprise,” said Grizzel, “and that would be horribly dull. Don’t you think it would be dull if everybody was exactly the same?”
“I suppose it would,” Mollie admitted, with a sigh, feeling that she had not presented her case attractively; “but I think they might be samer than they are.”
“There’s no use talking,” Hugh said decisively. “Australia is full of fortunes waiting to be made. I heard Papa say so. And the early bird gets the worm, and the better the bird the better it is for everyone all round.”
“Except the worm,” said Grizzel.
They all laughed. “I wish I had a brother instead of three sisters,” Hugh remarked, emptying the contents of the tiny milk-jug over a handkerchief which had once been clean. “A brother would be some use. Where’s yours?” he asked Mollie. “Did he get our message?”
This reminded Mollie of Dick’s letter, which impressed the Australians as much as it had impressed Mollie.
“So the next thing—the next thing–-” she repeated, looking round at the other three children. “What is the next thing to do?”
“We can’t tell you,” Prudence said, with a funny little smile, “you’ll have to fix it yourself in the end.”
“Cooo-eeeee!” sounded from the cottage.
*
“Cherry jam for tea to-day, fresh from the preserving-pan,” Aunt Mary was saying. “That will be a treat for you, Mollie, my dear.”
The Treasure-hunters or The Duke’s Nose
“Cherry jam is certainly very runny,” said Aunt Mary at tea-time.
“Do you put a handful of gooseberries into it?” Mollie asked rather dreamily, as she tried in vain to spread her scone tidily.
“Gooseberries! Why, no; I never thought of it. It might be quite a good idea.”
“Or red currants?” Mollie went on.
“Red currants! Bless the child! I didn’t know you were a cook, Mollie.”
“Neither I am,” said Mollie, rousing herself up to the fact that she was back in Chauncery, and must set a watch upon her tongue. Why was it, she wondered, that she forgot Chauncery so much more when she was with those other children than she forgot the children when she was at Chauncery? “I once heard a person say they put gooseberries and red currants into cherry jam, and I suddenly remembered,” she told Aunt Mary.
“Well, it is too late for cherries, but I will try it for the strawberries tomorrow. It will be quite an interesting experiment.”
Mollie resolutely pushed her thoughts about the cherry garden and its occupants into the background, and gave her whole mind to a game of patience with Grannie, who was getting a little tired of jig-saw. But when that was over, and Grannie was absorbed in casting on a stocking-top with an intricate pattern, while Aunt Mary wrote letters, she began again to think and wonder about her curious journey, which for some reason seemed less strange to-day than it had done yesterday. She pondered over ways and means to get Dick across, or over, or through, “or whatever you call it when you travel in Time”, she thought; “back might be the best word. I do wish I could tell Aunt Mary.”
She looked thoughtfully at her aunt, whose head was bent over her writing, the smooth bands of her silky, brown hair shining brightly in the lamp-light. No doubt some, perhaps most, grown-ups would scoff at her tale if she told it, Mollie thought. Grown-up people as a rule love best to jog along on well-trodden, safe, commonplace paths, and avoid adventurous by-ways, but Aunt Mary, Mollie felt sure, was an anti-jogger, so to speak, and would always choose adventures if she had a choice. “It’s funny to think,” Mollie reflected, “that she can’t be so very much younger than Mrs. Campbell is—was—is—was then. I suppose she is about thirty-five, and Mrs. Campbell forty or so—she looks—looked old enough to be Aunt Mary’s mother. Being good at games keeps her young; she can beat me to a frazzle at golf and tennis; and she is frightfully keen on aeroplanes; I’m sure she would fly if it weren’t for Grannie. I wonder why she never got married?”
Mollie had not yet come to the age of sentiment, but now and then she reached forward a little and surveyed its possibilities, and now she paused awhile to muse upon the subject of her aunt’s spinsterhood. Not for long, however; she decided that Aunt Mary must have had excellent reasons of her own for remaining single, and returned to the more pressing problem of how to get Dick into the Campbells’ garden. Finally she thought of a plan worth trying.
“Grannie, may I have the loan of one of your photographs?” she asked. “Dick has a way of copying them with a thing he has that makes them look like drawings, and the old-fashioned ones are the prettiest.”
“By all means, if he will be careful,” Grannie answered, nine-tenths of her mind being fixed on her new pattern and only one-tenth upon her grandchild’s peculiar fancy for Victorian photographs. So Mollie wrote a short letter to her brother, enclosing the group which had worked the magic charm for herself that afternoon. She put it into the evening post-bag with a sigh. “If that doesn’t do it I can’t think of anything else,” she said to herself.
It is remarkable how quickly one becomes used to a new routine. Already Mollie was making more use of her hands and head because she could not use her feet. She was fond of writing, and decided next morning to begin an account of her strange adventure while it was still fresh in her mind. In the intervals of other plans for her future career she had dreams of becoming a writer of books, but her difficulty hitherto had been that the usual sort of book is so ordinary, and she had never been able to think of anything remarkably unusual to write about. The autobiography of a person who could live in various periods of the Christian Era might turn out to be quite interesting, she thought, if only people would believe that it was true. The trouble was that most likely they would think she was inventing it, “and anyone can invent any old thing. And this is only the beginning of my adventures. When I have thoroughly learnt how to Time-travel I will go back much further—perhaps to the French Revolution, and watch people being guillotined.”
She scribbled diligently in the thick exercise-book, which Aunt Mary produced without once asking what it was wanted for. “It just shows—” Mollie murmured gratefully; “some people would have teased me to death.”
And so time passed, and half-past two came round again in the usual inevitable way, and Mollie lay expecting Prudence as calmly as though she were coming from next door. She had the album on her lap, and was turning the pages in search of a new photograph, when in the twinkling of an eye Prue was there.
“We don’t need that now,” she said, “but we must have Aunt Mary’s tunes. Where is she?”
“Oh dear, dear, I forgot!” Mollie cried in dismay. “I do believe Aunt Mary is making strawberry jam, and I went and told her about putting in gooseberries and red currants, and her head will be full of them and she will forget me!”
But the lullaby had not been forgotten. At that very moment the piano began—a tune Mollie knew well this time, for she had often heard the American soldiers sing it in London:
“Oh, darkies, how my heart grows weary, Far from the old folks at home”.
“Give me your hand—quick,” said Prue in a whisper.
*
Mollie found herself standing on a wide beach in the curve of a beautiful bay. Before her lay the sea, dark blue in the distance, a clear emerald green by the shore. To the right of her the beach stretched as far as she could see, firm yellow sand on the lower half, fine white silvery sand higher up. On the left it only ran for a couple of miles or so and then ended in rocks, over which the sea threw a cool white spray. Behind her, Mollie saw, when she turned, the line of the beach was followed by sandhills, some covered with low-growing scrub and some quite bare and treeless, shining like snow in the hot sunlight.
The children were all there. At a little distance from where she stood Mollie could see Hugh and Prudence, Hugh lightly clad in a swimming-suit, and Prue with
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