A Pair of Clogs, Amy Walton [the little red hen read aloud .TXT] 📗

round at him; "do you really mean to say that you don't recognise the child?"

"Certainly not, my dear; I never saw it before to my knowledge."

"Why, _of course_ it's the gypsy child we saw yesterday. And now you see I was right."

"What an awful thing!" exclaimed Mr Vallance. He sat down suddenly on the handle of a wheel-barrow close by, in utter dejection. "Then they've left it here on purpose!"

"Of course they have," said Mrs Vallance; "and you see I was right, don't you?"

"I don't know what you mean," said the vicar getting up again, "by being _right_. Everything's as wrong as it can be, I should say."

"I mean, that she doesn't belong to those gypsies. I was sure of it."

"Why not?" asked her husband helplessly.

"Because no mother would have given up a darling like this--she would have died first."

Mrs Vallance had taken the child on her knee while she was speaking and opened the old shawl: baby seemed to like her new position, she leaned her curly head back, stretched out her limbs easily, and gazed gravely up at the distracted vicar.

"Well," he said, "whoever she belongs to, there are only two courses to be pursued, and the first is to try and find the people who left her here. If we can't do that, there only remains--"

"What?" asked his wife looking anxiously up at him.

"There only remains--the workhouse, my dear Priscilla."

Priscilla pressed the child closer to her and stood upright facing him.

"Austin," she said, "I couldn't do it. You mustn't ask me to. I'll try and find her mother. I'll put an advertisement in the paper; but I won't send her to the workhouse. And _you_ couldn't either. You couldn't give up a little helpless child when Heaven has laid it at your very threshold."

Mr Vallance strode quickly up and down the garden path; he foresaw that he would have to yield, and it made him very angry.

"Nonsense, my dear," he said testily; "people are much too fond of talking about Heaven doing this and that. That ill-looking scamp of a gypsy fellow hadn't much to do with Heaven, I fancy."

"Heaven chooses its own instruments," said Priscilla quietly; and Mr Vallance made no answer, for he had said that very same thing in his last sermon.

"I'll have those tramps looked after at any rate," he said, rousing himself with sudden energy. "I'll send Joe one way, and drive the other way myself in the pony-cart. They can't have got far yet."

He hurried out of the garden, and Mrs Vallance was left alone with her prize. It was almost too good to be true. Already her mind was busy with arrangements for the baby's comfort and making plans for her future--the blue-room looking into the garden for the nursery, and the blacksmith's eldest daughter for a nurse-maid, and some little white frocks and pinafores made; and what should she be called? Some simple name would do. Mary, perhaps. And then suddenly Mrs Vallance checked herself.

"What a foolish woman I am!" she said. "Very likely those horrible people will be found, and I shall have to give her up. But nothing shall induce me to believe that she belongs to them."

She kissed the child, carried her into the house, and fed her with some bread and milk, after which baby soon fell into a sound sleep. Mrs Vallance laid her on the sofa, and sat near with her work, but she could not settle at all quietly to it. Every moment she got up to look out of the window, or to listen to some sound which might be Austin coming back triumphant with news of the gypsies. But the day went on and nothing happened. The vicarage was full of suppressed excitement, the maids whispered softly together, and came creeping in at intervals to look at the beautiful child, who still clasped the little clog in her hands.

"Yonder's a queer little shoe, mum," said the cook, "quite a cur'osity."

"I think it's a sort of toy," replied Mrs Vallance, for she had never been to the north of England and had never seen a clog.

"Bless her pretty little 'art!" said the cook, and went away.

It was evening when Mr Vallance returned, hot, tired, and vexed in spirit. His wife ran out to meet him at the gate, having first sent the child upstairs.

"No trace whatever," he said in a dejected voice.

"Dear me!" exclaimed Priscilla, trying not to look too pleased, and just then a casement-window above their heads was thrown open, a white-capped head was thrust out, and an excited voice called out, "Ma'am! Ma'am!"

"Well, what?" said Mrs Vallance, looking up alarmed.

"It's all come off, mum--the brown colour has--and she's got a skin as white as a lily."

Mrs Vallance cast a glance of triumph at her husband, but forebore to say anything, in consideration of his depressed condition; then she rushed hurriedly upstairs to see the new wonder.

And thus began baby's life in her third home, and she brought nothing of her own to it except her one little clog.


STORY ONE, CHAPTER 2.

WENSDALE.

The village of Wensdale was snugly shut in from the rest of the world in a narrow valley. It had a little river flowing through it, and a little grey church standing on a hill, and a rose-covered vicarage, a blacksmith's forge, and a post-office. Further up the valley, where the woods began, you could see the chimneys of the White House where Squire Chelwood lived, and about three miles further on still was Dorminster, a good-sized market-town. But in Wensdale itself there was only a handful of thatched cottages scattered about here and there round the vicarage. Life was so regular and quiet there that you might almost tell the time without looking at the clock. When you heard cling, clang, from the blacksmith's forge, and quack, quack, from the army of ducks waddling down to the river, it was five o'clock. Ding, dong from the church-tower, and the tall figure of Mr Vallance climbing the hill to read prayers--eight o'clock. So on throughout the day until evening came, and you knew that soon after the cows had gone lowing through the village, and the ducks had taken their way to bed in a long uneven line, that perfect silence would follow, deep and undisturbed.

In this quiet refuge Maggie's baby grew up for seven years, under the name of Mary Vallance. She was now nine years old. As she grew the qualities which had shown themselves as a baby, and made Perrin call her as "orty as a duchess," grew also, though they were kept in check by wise and loving influences. To command seemed more natural to her than to obey, and far more pleasant, and this often caused trouble to herself and others. True, nothing could be more thorough than her repentance after a fit of naughtiness, for she was a very affectionate child; but then she was quite ready on the next occasion to repeat the offence--as ready as Mrs Vallance was to forgive it. Mary was vain, too, as well as wilful; but this was not astonishing, for from a very little child she had heard the most open remarks about her beauty. Wensdale was a small place, but there were not wanting unwise people in it, who imagined that their nods and winks and whispers of admiration were unnoticed by the child. A great mistake. No one could be quicker than Mary to see them, to give her little neck a prouder turn, and to toss back her glittering hair self-consciously. So she knew by the time she was nine years old that she had beautiful hair and lovely eyes, and a skin like milk--that she walked gracefully, and that her feet and hands were smaller and prettier than Agatha Chelwood's. All this strengthened a way she had of ordering her companions about imperiously, as though she had a right to command. "No common child," she often heard people say, and by degrees she came to think that she was very _un_common indeed--much prettier and cleverer than any of the other children. "You've no call to be so tossy in your ways, Miss Mary," said Rice, the outspoken old nurse at the White House; "handsome is as handsome does." But Mary treated such a remark with scorn.

If the little clog, standing on the mantel-piece in her bed-room, could have spoken, what strange and humbling things it would have told her! For to belong to poor people would have seemed dreadful to Mary's proud spirit. As it could not, however, she remained in ignorance of her real condition, and even in her dreams no remembrance of her real mother, or of the gypsies and her playfellows Bennie and Mossy, ever came to visit her.

Things at Wensdale had not altered much since Mary had been left there as a child of two years old. The roses still flourished in the vicarage garden under Mr Vallance's loving care, and he still thought them much finer than Chelwood's. At the White House there were now three children in the nursery and four in the school-room, of whom the eldest was a girl of ten named Agatha. These were Mary's constant companions; she joined them in some of their lessons and in all their pleasures and plans of amusement. Not a picnic or a treat of any kind took place without her, and though quarrels were not unknown, Mary would have been very much missed on these occasions. It was she who invented the games and gave names to the various playgrounds in the woods; she could climb well, and run swiftly, and had such a daring spirit of adventure that she feared nothing. In fact, her presence made everything so much more interesting, that, by common consent, she was allowed to take the lead, and no expedition was considered complete without her. Perhaps her contrast to the good, quiet, brown Agatha, who was so nearly her own age, made her all the more valued. Agatha was always ready to follow, to give up, to yield. She never tore her frocks, always knew her lessons, was always punctual; but she never invented anything, and had to be told exactly what to say in any game requiring imagination. So it came to pass naturally that Mary was at the head of everything, and she became so used to taking the command that she sometimes did so when it was neither convenient nor becoming. There were indeed moments when even Jackie, her most faithful supporter among the Chelwood children, rebelled against her authority, and found it poor fun for Mary always to have her own way and arrange everything.

Jackie was nine years old, and felt in himself a large capacity for taking the lead: after all, why _should_ Mary always drive when they went out in the donkey-cart, or settle the place for the fire to be made when they had a picnic, and choose the games, and even order about Fraulein Schnipp the governess? Certainly her plans and arrangements always turned out well, but still it became tiresome sometimes. Jackie grew restive. He had a quarrel with Mary, who flew down the