The Happy Adventurers by Lydia Miller Middleton (hardest books to read .txt) 📕
Mollie looked about her with curious eyes, wondering where she was.Not in England, of that she was sure--there was a different feel inthe air, colours were brighter, scents were stronger, and thatradiant parrot would never perch itself so tranquilly upon anEnglish fence.
Then she saw, coming down the path, a girl of about her own age,dressed in a brown-holland overall trimmed with red braid, high tothe throat, and belted round the waist. She wore no hat, and herhair fell over her shoulders in plump brown curls. By her side paceda large dog, a rough-haired black-and-white collie with sagaciousbrown eyes. He lea
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Ah, Jerry! There had been that affair of Jerry’s eldest brother and the guns. Ten wounds. Both legs shot off. “Stick it out, you chaps.” The very last words he spoke in this world, sweeter in Jerry’s ear, Dick knew, than the finest poetry ever written. He gathered himself together and went on. It would never do to begin a habit of not sticking it out. For, wherever he was, he was always Dick Gordon to himself—a person for whom he wished to have a considerable amount of respect.
He wished that the orange grove, so cool and lovely by day, did not look so dark and mysterious by night.
At last! Here was the old tree. Now for it. He stepped round, prepared to enter the empty hollow regardless of possible snakes or blacks, when he heard a sound that made the hair rise on his head and the back of his neck feel queer, for it was unmistakably a child crying inside the tree. The child of the murdered woman, he thought. So the blacks were near—perhaps inside the tree at this very moment. The idea flitted across his mind that there was an extraordinary difference between reading about a thing and experiencing it. As the child’s sobs continued he shrunk together— he would rather meet an enemy in the open and be shot at twenty times than face these savage and mysterious blacks—and then he suddenly decided that, if there were a child there, he must go and look for it and do his best, blacks or no blacks.
But at that very instant the crying stopped and turned to speaking:
“Please, God, let there be a miracle. Just this once, God. I’m sorry, God; I’ll be good if you’ll make a miracle. Only this once. I am very, very sorry.” The crying began again.
“Grizzel!” exclaimed Dick, his fears all vanishing like darkness before light. “How on earth did she get there? She’ll be frightened into fits if she sees me.” He moved back a little distance and stopped to think. The best plan would be to call her softly, he decided.
“Grizzel! Where are you, Grizzel? Are you there, kiddy? It’s Dick calling. Are you in your tree? I’m coming—look out!”
[Illustration: DICK STARTED VIOLENTLY]
He came up to the hollow opening and looked in. It was Grizzel sure enough, in her little dressing-gown, her face blotched with tears and her curls crushed and tumbled. Dick put an arm round her: “Don’t cry, kiddy; the diamond is all right.”
“Oh, Dick, I did hope there might be a miracle,” she sobbed, burying her head on his shoulder. “I’m so sorry. My poor little diamond, all those years and years shut up in the ground! It had just one look at the sun and then I threw it back. Oh, Dick, if God would only make a miracle this once and put my diamond back!”
Dick felt a choky sensation in his throat as the thin little arm tightened round his neck.
“It’s all right, Grizzel,” he whispered, “we’ll find the diamond— let my arm loose a moment.” He groped round, and in another minute the stone was in his hand. He turned it over, and a pale-green ray darted out, more unearthly than ever in the moonlight.
Grizzel gave a cry as he laid it on her palm. “My diamond! The miracle! I thought it would happen! I just thought God hadn’t forgotten the way! Oh, Dick, I am so glad! I am so glad! My own dear little diamond!”
Dick had not the heart to explain at the moment that there had been no miracle, and Grizzel was far too preoccupied with her own joy and relief to wonder what had brought Dick to her tree just then; and besides, he thought vaguely, one never knows.
“We must be going in,” he said; “it’s ever so late and we’ll be cotched. How on earth did you get out?”
“Down the back stairs. The others were asleep, but I could not sleep, thinking of my little diamond in the cold river—” at that moment a wild shriek rang out again, and Dick started violently.
“It’s only a curlew calling to his friend,” Grizzel said, creeping out of the hollow. “They scream exactly like people being killed, but it’s only their way; they mean to be kind.”
Dick drew a long breath. A wild bird and a crying child! Suppose he had gone back! Thank goodness he hadn’t, but it was a near shave.
The boy and girl walked happily along, hand in hand. They had reached the slip-rail and were climbing over, when a tall man appeared from the garden of Drink Between.
“Grizzel! What in the wide creation are you doing here at this hour of night, or rather morning? Do you know it is nearly one o’clock? And what are you doing, young man?”
“Oh, Mr. Fraser—it’s Mr. Fraser,” she explained, turning to Dick, and such a confused tale followed, in which crystals, goldmines, diamonds, wickedness, and miracles were all jumbled together, that Mr. Fraser decided that a glass of milk, a biscuit, and bed, had better pave the way to a fuller explanation next day.
Ah Kew let them in with a wise smile and several nods of his head, and soon both Dick and Grizzel were sleeping as soundly as the other four Time-travellers.
“It is a green diamond,” Mr. Fraser pronounced next morning, “but what its value is we cannot tell until it is cut and polished. Then it will belong to Grizzel, to have and to hold till death do them part. If you really have found a diamond-mine, youngsters, something will have to be done about shares. Who finds keeps, you know. We’ll have the place properly surveyed and see what happens. But don’t begin counting your chickens too soon—these Australian diamond-mines are tricksy things; you never know how they are going to pan out. Wait a bit before you plan what to do with your fortune.”
Mollie, Dick, and Jerry suddenly felt very sad as they remembered that they were out of this stroke of luck. Whatever happened, Fortune was not preparing to smile on them, at least not in a way that would be of any immediate practical use to them when they got back to London. And a fortune apiece would have come in so very handy just now—just forty years hence, that is. The boys made up their minds to investigate this matter of fortunes in the colonies directly they got home.
Hugh tossed up his hat and caught it again: “We’ll be jolly rich,” he cried. “The Mater will get her trip home, and the Pater needn’t worry about bills and subscription lists any more, and I’ll get that camera—oh, ‘hard times, hard times, come again no more!’”
*
Mollie sat up. The clock was still ticking minutes into hours, hours into days, days into weeks and months and years.
“Oh dear,” she said, “I do wonder—”
“Wonder what, my Molliekins?” asked Aunt Mary, preceding Hester with the tea-tray.
“I wonder,” Mollie repeated, and then began to laugh. “I don’t suppose you ever bit like red-hot nippers, did you, Aunt Mary?”
The Grape-Gatherers or Who was Mr. Smith?
Aunt Mary had gone up to London to do some shopping, and when Mollie came downstairs next morning she found Grannie installed in the drawing-room, instead of in the morning-room as usual, with another old lady who had come to spend the day.
“Mrs. Pell and I were at school together,” she explained, as she introduced her grandchild, “and that was not yesterday,” she added, as she settled Mollie in an easy-chair with the lame foot up on a cushioned frame. “My dear husband used this when he had gout,” she continued, tucking a warm shawl round Mollie’s bandages and large bedroom slipper. “It was made in the village under his own directions, and is most ingeniously constructed. Poor, dear Richard was such an active man; he could not endure to lie on a sofa, and I had the greatest difficulty in keeping him to his bed even when his attacks were severe.”
Mrs. Pell shook her head as she looked admiringly at the foot-rest. “James was the same, he hated a sofa and would always sit in a chair. Not that he was so active, but he was stout, and stout people are more comfortable sitting up than lying on their backs.”
Mollie coughed. She had either to cough or to laugh, which, of course, would never have done.
“My dear, I trust you have not caught cold,” Grannie said anxiously. “Perhaps we should close the window. Your Aunt Mary has a perfect craze for open windows, and I sometimes think there is a draught in this room.”
“No, no, Grannie,” Mollie protested; “I have not got the least bit of cold, and I love the open window; it is so warm to-day. It was only a tickle; I get them sometimes—tell me about when you and Mrs. Pell were at school, please.”
The two old ladies smiled at each other over their spectacles.
“That was not yesterday,” Grannie repeated. “You would think very poorly of our school. We had no games, no gym-dress, no examinations such as you have; but we learnt the use of the globes very thoroughly, and we spoke French, so that we were not at a loss when we went to Paris later on. Our dancing was much more graceful than the foolish gambols with their ridiculous titles which you young people call dancing nowadays. Fox-trot, indeed! And bunny-hug. And rag-time. I never heard such names in my life! We danced the Highland schottische, and the quadrille, and Sir Roger de Coverley. And do you remember your famous curtsy, Esther? And how Madame made you show off on parents’ day?”
“Indeed I do!” Mrs. Pell answered briskly. “I believe I could do it now, this moment. I have been wonderfully free of rheumatism this year.”
“Do, do,” Mollie begged, overlooking the insult to her beloved fox-trot in her anxiety to see a real old-fashioned curtsy.
Mrs. Pell laid her knitting on one side, rose from her chair, and walked to the middle of the room. She shook her somewhat ample black silk skirt into place, tilted her chin to an angle that gave her a decidedly haughty expression, and stood facing Grannie and Mollie.
“You must imagine yourselves to be our beloved Queen Victoria and our beautiful and gracious Alexandra, Princess of Wales,” she said, looking so elegant and distinguished that Mollie suddenly felt rather small and shy, while Grannie, on the other hand, drew herself up into what was presumably the attitude of Her late Majesty.
Mrs. Pell lifted her skirts with an easy turn of her pretty hands and wrists, pointed a charming foot, so small that it made Mollie gasp, and began to sink slowly down. Down, down, down she swept, her skirt billowing out around her, her shoulders square, her head erect—down till she all but touched the floor, and how she kept her balance was a perfect miracle; then slowly up, with an indescribably graceful curve of neck and elbows, till once more she stood erect, pleased and triumphant, a pretty pink flush on her cheeks.
Grannie clapped her hands. “There, Miss Mollie! That was how we were taught to curtsy! There’s nothing resembling a fox about that!” she exclaimed, as Mrs. Pell took her seat again and resumed her knitting.
“It was perfectly lovely,”
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