The Happy Adventurers, Lydia Miller Middleton [mini ebook reader txt] 📗

than a common house in a road. I do think Hugh is the cleverest boy I ever met.”

“This is nothing much,” Hugh said modestly, “you should see my raft—that is worth seeing. I have invented a way of arranging corks so that it will float in the severest storm. It could not sink if it tried, unless, of course, it became waterlogged. But I can only work at that when we are down at Brighton.”

“I wish my brother Dick could be a Time-traveller and come here,” sighed Mollie. “He would adore this tree, and the raft too.”

“How old is Dick?” Hugh asked with interest.

“He is my twin; we are thirteen and a half,” answered Mollie, quite forgetting that in the year 1878 Dick was still minus twenty-nine. “We do everything together in the holidays except football, and just now there isn’t any football, so Dick is rather bored at school. In term-time we hardly see each other at all, we are both so horribly busy. How do you find time to do all these things?”

“I don’t find it, I steal it,” Hugh answered. “If I waited to find time I should never have enough to be useful. To-day is a half-holiday, and I am supposed to be learning Roman history and writing out five hundred lines. But I’m not,” he added unnecessarily.

“Building is much more important than Roman history,” said Mollie decidedly, “and lines are absolutely rotten. I wonder why—”

“Hullo!” came a voice from below. “It’s me. I have finished my chain at last, and now I want to come up. Please come and hold the ladder, Prue.”

Prudence crept out, tripped lightly down the ladder, and stood beside her sister.

“Hold tight, Grizzel, and do remember to push and not pull; if you pull I can’t hold the ladder up.”

“I wish Hugh would cut steps in the tree-trunk like the blacks,” Grizzel complained, as she proceeded rather nervously to climb the ladder. “I do hate this old tobbely old green old thing.”

“I am going to make a rope-ladder and pull it up after me,” Hugh said, watching her from the door of his castle in the air. “I don’t want steps that everybody could climb. Look out, Griz, you are pulling—” he stretched out a hand as he spoke, and held the top of the ladder, while Prudence steadied it at the bottom, until Grizzel had safely negotiated “the green passage”, as Hugh called it, and crawled in at his little front door.

“It is very, very, very, very nice,” she said approvingly, “and it will make a lovely place to come and hate in when everybody is horrid. You can draw the curtains and shut the door, and light your lantern and sit here hating as long as you like, for no one can get up when you have your rope-ladder.”

“It would be rather stuffy,” Mollie said, looking at the thick blanket curtains. “If he went on hating very long he would be suffocated. I’d sooner have a tea-party myself, and pull all the tea up in baskets. The water would be the hard part.”

“The water is in that canvas bag,” Hugh pointed out; “Papa gave it to me; it’s the boiling that bothers me, because I don’t much like using a spirit-lamp in here.”

“Get an old biscuit-tin and fasten it up in the tree and put your spirit-lamp in that,” suggested Mollie the Guide. “Cut out the front; then you will have a nice little cave all safe and sheltered.”

“That’s a jolly good idea,” said Hugh; “I’ll do it tomorrow and we’ll have a party.”

A bell in the distance warned the children that it was time to go in and tidy up for tea. Grizzel, however, was far too much enthralled by the little house to want to come down so soon. “I don’t want any bread-and-butter tea,” she announced; “bring me three oranges and eleven biscuits, and the Swiss Family Robinson, and let me stay up here.”

Tea was laid in the dining-room, where they found Baby already seated in her high chair. She was a very pretty baby, with large dark eyes, silky golden hair, and a dear little mouth parting over two rows of tiny pearly teeth. She gurgled melodiously to her family in the intervals of dropping bits of jammy bread into her mug of milk, and watching them bob about with absorbed interest.

“Good old Mary! She’s made potato scones and almond gingerbread.” Hugh remarked approvingly. “If you’ve never tasted real Irish potato scones baked on a girdle, Mollie, you’d better chalk it up, as Bridget says. You split them in two, pop in a lump of butter, shut them up, and eat them. Too soon they are but a sweet dream of the past.”

“They’ll soon be a horrid dream of the future if you gobble them like that,” Prudence said warningly, “and you’ve forgotten Grizzel’s oranges; go and pull three fresh ones, and we’d better send her ginger cake.”

The gingerbread was baked in thin oblong squares frosted with white sugar, each child’s name being written on its own cake in pink letters. They were most fascinating, and Mollie was charmed to see one with her own name on it. The delightful part about this most unexpected visit, she thought, was the way everyone had apparently expected her. She could not help wondering how the invitation had been sent, but decided that it was better not to ask too many questions.

Hugh departed with Grizzel’s oranges, biscuits, and gingerbread, elegantly arranged in a green-rush basket, the Swiss Family Robinson forming the basis of the repast. He returned with a smile upon his face which disclosed two most engaging dimples.

“I’ve sneaked the ladder,” he said. “Won’t Frizzy Grizzy be pleased when she finds out! Ha ha! More scones, please.”

“She won’t mind,” Prudence answered placidly, “she knows someone will have to let her down before Mamma comes in. You’ve had enough jam, Baby darling; let Prudence take off your bib now and wash your handy-pandys. You can have half my gingerbread if you like, Hugh— hullo, there’s Papa!”

There was a sharp double knock at the front door, followed by the sound of someone entering. Prudence set Baby on her feet and bolted helter-skelter across the square hall, flinging herself into the arms of a stout man with a brown beard, who returned her embrace so warmly that Mollie wondered if he had been away from home for some time. He removed his tall silk hat, showing a head as thickly covered with curls as Grizzel’s, but the hair was dark and slightly touched with grey.

“Well, my chick-a-biddies,” he said, in a delightfully genial voice, beaming upon them all with the kindest blue eyes Mollie had ever seen, “and what has everybody been doing? And where is Grizzel?”

As he spoke he lifted Baby into his arms, ignoring the jammy little fingers, laid a hand on Mollie’s head, and looked round inquiringly for his missing daughter.

“She’s in my Nest,” Hugh replied, “it’s finished. Come and see it. You can’t climb into it yet, but it looks very nice from the outside. I think I’ll arrange a box to pull you and Mamma up in. The zinc-lined box the piano came in would do.”

“Thank you, my son,” said Papa kindly, “thank you, thank you. At the moment I am rather pressed for time. I have to meet Mamma at Mrs. Taylor’s at half-past five, and we are going to the town-hall to hear this wonderful new telephone, as they call it. They say that someone speaking from the post office at Glenelg will be perfectly audible in the town-hall here, a distance of six and a half miles. It sounds almost incredible. What will they discover next! Truly this is an amazing age, and you children may live to see men flying yet.”

Hugh had left his gingerbread, which lay forgotten on his plate, and stood before his father flushed with excitement:

“Take me with you, do, Papa,” he cried. “I’ll learn reams of Latin and get up at four o’clock and—”

“Well, get your hat and be quick then,” Papa interrupted indulgently. “Prue, my pet, look in my bag and you will find five parcels, one for each young robber. Be fair and amiable, my children. Come, Hugh. Good night, Papa’s little angel.” He kissed Baby, handed her over to Prudence, put on his hat again, and was off down the wide path between the cypress trees with Hugh hanging on his arm, in less than no time.

“Let’s watch from the gate,” said Prudence. “Bridget will take Baby. Hurry up, Mollie.”

They reached the foot of the garden just in time to see Papa’s tall hat disappear round the corner of the road. It was a lovely evening, and the girls lingered by the gate; the scent of violets and freesias rose from the flowerbed at their feet, and every now and again came a whiff of something else—something exquisitely fragrant and delicate.

“What’s that?” asked Mollie, with an unladylike sniff; “that lovely smell?”

“It’s wattle,” Prudence answered. “It’s in the fields over there. You can smell it for miles sometimes, in the country; it’s a nice smell. Let’s go and look at Papa’s parcels. He went to see Mrs. Macfarline at her toyshop to-day, and when he goes there he always brings something home. It’s a beautiful shop. Once I stayed with Lucy Macfarline from Saturday till Monday, and her mamma allowed us to play in the shop on Sunday; it was so funny, all dark and dim, and the dolls looking like little ghosts. We played with the toys on the shelves and had a lovely time. I love shops—oh, Mollie, we have forgotten Grizzel! She is up in the tree all this time! We must run and get her down. I hope Hugh hasn’t hidden the ladder—I wish he wouldn’t tease so.”

“All brothers do,” Mollie said philosophically. “Dick is simply the limit sometimes, but I do wish we could get him over here, Prudence. Do you think we could?”

“I’ll think. But first we must find that ladder.”

As they neared the tree Prudence called to her sister that they were coming, but got no answer. They jumped the low wall and stood underneath the tree, nearly dislocating their necks in their efforts to see some sign of life in the little house. But Grizzel neither answered nor showed herself, in spite of Prue’s eloquent description of Papa’s parcels and denunciations of their brother.

“Perhaps she is having her evening hate,” suggested Mollie.

“She does take awful fits of the sulks sometimes,” Prudence allowed, “but I don’t think she would be sulky with me just now; it wasn’t me that stole the ladder—oh bother that Hugh! We had better go and look for it as fast as we can. I wonder where he has hidden it?”

“It can’t be far away, because he was only gone for a few minutes at tea-time,” Mollie remarked sensibly. “Very likely it is simply lying on the ground behind the wall.”

That was precisely where it was, and without much trouble the girls got it into place again, and Prudence mounted quickly. She disappeared through the little door, but in one moment appeared again with a frightened face.

“She’s not here, Mollie. She’s gone.”

“Gone!” Mollie exclaimed incredulously. “She can’t be gone! How could she get down without the ladder? She must be up in the tree.”

“No, she isn’t. I can see every branch from here; there is not a single place where she could hide.”

“But she must be up there somewhere,” Mollie persisted. “If she had fallen out she would be lying round somewhere. There is no way she could get down without the ladder. She is so nervous.