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

“Oh dear—so am I, horribly frightened!” Mollie exclaimed. “I never saw a snake in my life except in the Zoo.” “Then how do you know you are frightened of them?” Grizzel asked. “You only have to be a little firm with them and they won’t do you any harm. I have lived in Australia for years and years and have never once been bitten.”

“I hope I will never meet one when I am alone,” Mollie said, shaking an unconvinced head.

While the other children counted their balls, dried their hands, and tied on their sunbonnets, Mollie stood still and gazed about her. The country she saw looked strange and unfamiliar to her eyes. So far as she could see there seemed to be few trees but gum trees, with their monotonous foliage and gaunt grey trunks, so different from the mossy trunks at home in English woods. Here and there one had fallen, and lay like a giant skeleton on the ground. On all sides were hills, not very high, but rolling one behind the other like waves, some wooded and some bare of trees and covered only with short grass and rough boulders. Over everything was the same beautiful clear sunlight that had impressed Mollie so much on her first visit, and the air was warm and soft. She thought of the dull street at home in North Kensington, with brick houses all crowded up together and dingy little backyards, and she wished that her family could come and live in this wide and sunny country.

As she stood, a cry came across the valley.

“Coo-eee! Cooo-eeeee!”

“There’s Bridget calling for tea,” said Prudence. “Come on quick; I’m as hungry as a hunter, and Biddy said she would make some damper, because we are rather short of bread.”

“What is damper?” asked Mollie, as she followed the other two down the hill. “Is it wet bread?”

“Don’t you know what damper is?” Grizzel asked, with round eyes. “It is unleavened bread—you know, like the Children of Israel ate. Sometimes we find manna too, lying underneath the trees, but I don’t like it much. I am glad I am not a Child of Israel,” she added; “I don’t like that old Moses. Do you?”

“I haven’t thought about him very much,” Mollie confessed; “I suppose he was all right in his own way.”

“He was so fond of Thou shalt not,” Grizzel objected, “and I can’t bear thou shalt nots. If I had made the commandments I should have said ‘Thou oughtest not to commit murder, but if thou doest thou shalt be hung’. Don’t you think that would be more interesting?”

“No, I don’t,” Mollie answered decidedly, “I like things to be short and plain like Thou shalt not steal. Then you know where you are.”

Prudence looked disapprovingly at her sister. “You should not talk like that, Grizzel; it is flippant, and you know what Papa says about flippancy.”

Grizzel made a face but did not answer, and they went on in silence till they reached the foot of the hill. They crossed the little creek by stepping-stones, and walked slowly up the winding path, the vines with their ripening grapes on the one side, and on the other great cherry trees, laden with the largest and reddest cherries that Mollie had ever seen in her life. They hung down temptingly among the green leaves, dangling their little bunches in the most inviting way imaginable, some scarlet, some black, and some almost white, but all ripe and luscious. The children stretched up their hands and pulled some, which tasted as good as they looked.

“I’m going to make cherry jam tomorrow,” Grizzel said, dropping her stones on the ground and carefully pushing them into the soil with the heel of her boot. “I’m going to make the first beginnings of my fortune.”

“What fortune?” asked Mollie, throwing her stones away in the careless fashion of people who are accustomed to buying their fruit in shops.

“My jam fortune,” Grizzel answered. “Every year Mamma sends a case of jam home to Grandmamma, and this year I am going to put in twelve tins of my very own jam, and Grandmamma will sell it and put the money in the bank for me. She promised she would if I was a good girl, and I’ve been as good as it is possible for a human being to be.”

“But can you make really-truly jam?” Mollie asked incredulously— Grizzel looked so small and young to be a maker of real jam in shoppy tins.

“Grizzel is a beautiful cook,” said Prudence, with an air of great pride. “You wait till you taste her herring-shape, and her parsnip sauce. Mamma says that cooks are born, not made, and that Grizzel is born and I’m not made.”

Mollie felt an immense respect for Grizzel. Cooking was not her own strong point, as her Guide captain had informed her in plain language more than once, and in any case food at home was too precious for children to experiment with except under supervision— there could be no playing about with fruit and sugar for instance. She began to think that if there were some things she could teach these forty-years-ago children, there were also some things she could learn from them—a thought which would have given her mother much pleasure could she have seen into her daughter’s mind at that moment.

“Hullo, girls!” said Hugh, coming out of the garden as they drew near the cottage, “I’ve got an idea.”

[Illustration: GRIZZEL THREW IN A SMALL HANDFUL OF TEA]

Mollie turned to look at Hugh. He had grown a little taller, she thought, but was as clear-eyed and meditative as ever. And behind Hugh was the flower-garden, full of roses—thousands and thousands of roses, mostly pale pink. They were loose-petalled and exquisitely sweet. The children paused for a moment before going into the house, and all four sniffed up the delicate fragrance appreciatively.

“That’s my idea,” said Hugh, with an extra loud sniff. “Scent! Let’s make attar of roses. It costs a guinea a drop to buy, and we could make bottles full. I’ve been examining the rose-bushes—they are simply packed full of buds behind the flowers. I have been reading about it. It’s quite easy to do; you merely have to extract the essential oil from the petals and there you are. I’ll show you after tea.”

They passed through the porch into the house. There was no hall; they walked straight into the sitting-room, where a table was spread with tea, and Miss Hilton, a rather faded-looking lady of middling age, was already seated behind the tea-pot.

“Go and wash your hands, children,” she said, in a voice that matched her looks, “and smooth your hair. I am surprised at you coming into the room like this. I don’t know what your visitor will think, I am sure. Children have very different manners in England.”

Mollie glanced round at the other three. She herself stood behind Miss Hilton and was therefore not within that lady’s line of vision. She winked largely with her left eye, and a smile of relief travelled round the room.

Tea was a silent meal in spite of the festive damper, which was so good that Mollie thought it must have alleviated the unfortunate lot of the Children of Israel considerably. Hugh was thinking out his plan for making attar of roses; Prue was day-dreaming about nothing in particular, as she was too fond of doing; Grizzel’s mind was wandering away to golden bowls, golden cherries, and other possible and some quite impossible golden achievements; while Mollie listened to Baby, who carried on a long and intimate conversation with a family of bread-and-butter—otherwise the beddy-buts—which had found a temporary home upon her plate. Miss Hilton poured out tea absent-mindedly, and seldom spoke except to rebuke someone for putting elbows on the table.

As soon as the meal was over the children went into the garden again, and, once outside, their tongues began to move.

“I shall nab Baby’s bronchitis-kettle,” Hugh announced, “and make a distiller, and we can begin tomorrow. You girls will have to help me, for I must watch the distilling all the time, and someone must keep me supplied with fresh rose-petals.”

“I can’t do much, because I’m going to make jam,” said Grizzel, “and I want Prue and Mollie to help me to gather cherries. I’ve got one or two new ideas”—Mollie thought the family seemed great on ideas— “but, if you’ll solder up my jam tins, I’ll help with your attar.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Prue, “we’ll have a secret breakfast.”

“What’s a secret breakfast?” asked Mollie.

“You’ll see in a minute,” Prue answered. “It’s a lovely thing. Then we’ll get up and pull the cherries and cut them open, and we can pick the roses afterwards, when they are warm and dry.”

“Then we had better get the things ready now,” said Grizzel.

So while Hugh went off to a little old hut, which served them for a playroom, to build up his distillery, the three girls set out to inspect the cherry trees, and engaged in the pleasing task of tasting a few cherries off each tree to decide which had the finest flavour.

“I think they are all absolutely topping,” said Mollie. “I don’t know how you can tell which is best.”

“What funny words you use,” said Grizzel. “Topping!”

“Well—top-hole then, or ripping, or great, or first-class, or jolly good.”

Both hearers laughed. “You had better not let Miss Hilton hear you,” said Prue, “or she will tell Mamma, and then you will have to write out ‘topping’ a hundred times.”

Grizzel led the way to the flower-garden, which was laid out on the terrace immediately below the cottage. A sanded path ran along by the rosebed, which was banked up for two feet or so to keep the soil from washing down in the rainy season. Prudence and Grizzel stopped at a corner where, in a sheltered angle, lay a low pile of bricks built up four-square with a hollow centre.

“This is our fire-place,” Prue explained to Mollie. “When we get up very early we make a fire here and boil tea and have a secret breakfast, because proper breakfast isn’t till nine o’clock when Miss Hilton is mistress, and we get so hungry—besides, it is a lark.”

“Write out ‘lark’ one hundred times, my dear Prudence,” said Grizzel, in a voice so exactly like Miss Hilton’s that Mollie looked round with a start, and the other two laughed.

They gathered sticks, which they carried into the kitchen to be dried, Bridget being a good-natured conspirator, and they collected sugar, tea, and damper for their feast. Darkness falls early in Australia, and the children decided to go to bed in good time, so that they should waken fresh in the morning. Mollie thought that their bedroom was a delightful place, quite different from a London bedroom. It had a door to itself, with a flight of wooden steps leading down to the garden, so that the children could slip out without disturbing the household. Mollie thought this very romantic.

“You won’t think it very romantic if some old bushranger gets in through the night and shoots you dead,” Grizzel cheerfully suggested.

“Be quiet, Grizzel,” Prudence said reprovingly. “What is the use of frightening Mollie like that? You never saw a bushranger in your life.”

But a London girl, who has been through a dozen air-raids without losing any nerve, is not likely to disturb herself over a possible but improbable bushranger, and indeed Mollie was blissfully ignorant on the subject in spite of Grannie’s tales; so she went to bed quite peacefully in the little camp-bed, and lay for a time watching the brilliant stars shine through the wide-open window. The lovely night scents floated