Three little maids

[307]
CHAPTER XXIX
AND THEN NO MORE

Ted’s chuckle over the inference Freddie left for Dolly to draw from his remark gave place suddenly to an indignant shout.

A boy with a large parcel had just entered the gate, and had actually had the temerity to approach the house in the way Dolly had done, regardless of flower-borders. At the moment of Ted’s shout he was setting a desecrating foot recklessly down upon the pansy-bed that was the pride of the house.

Ted disentangled himself from the wiles of Weenie, who had occupied herself by chaining him to a garden-seat with trails of wild clematis.

“I’ll knock the good-for-nothing little beggar’s head off,” he said, and took a tempestuous step in the direction of the impertinent lad.

But Phyl was before him. One great gasp and choking cry she gave, then she broke away from the [308] tea-ring, rushed madly across the grass and flower-beds, and to the incredulous astonishment of the family fell upon the boy and his parcel and began to hug him in a way marvellous to behold.

Up rose the family to investigate. And lo! it too found itself rushing madly over the well-ordered pansy and primrose retreats, and also falling upon the parcel-carrying youth and hugging him.

Freddie was the first to recover himself.

“I’ll be undoing the parcel, Alf,” he said, “I’d like just to have a look at my drum.”

[309]
Then Alf laughed. He had been crying like a baby on his step-mother’s shoulder until now.

“That’s all the luggage I brought, the rest’s on the ship,” he said, and pulled the brown paper off his parcel.

“Chirrup, chirrup!” said the fat little yellow bird, and sang at the sweet sun that the dark paper had hidden away.

“Get some water, Weenie, and a bit of green; all the voyage I couldn’t get any green,” said Alf.

In through the gate came the doctor’s bicycle, and once again the pansies suffered from the wild impetuosity of humans. Nobody in the least believed their eyes, but each waited for the other to discredit the apparition.

“Oh, I know we’re dreaming,” said Dolly; “in a minute we’ll all wake up.”

“Oh, will we!” said Weenie contentedly. There had been no standing-room for her in the general rush, and she had fallen on the grass, and was still sitting there embracing the wanderer’s legs.

“If we do wake up,” said Alf, and there was a note of almost hysterical gladness in his voice, “I’ll take a dose of your prussic acid, father.”

The father’s arm was round his little son’s shoulder; he knew that nothing—no gold or promise of fame—could ever make him willingly let the lad go again.

“You shall stop at home now,—there, old fellow, [310] you shall never go back again,” he said from time to time, and little Alf continued to blubber happily.

“Just don’t ask me anything yet,” he said in a low tone to his father; “just be as if I’ve only come in from school, will you?”

And Dr. Wise, recognizing the state of tension the lad was in, forbade a single question being put to him.

But after dinner—there was Queen’s pudding, and the pyramid of icing did not go to Freddie—he pulled himself together and told his story.

After he had written that last of his letters to his family and told of his aunt’s sudden death, a strange thing had happened. He found at the bottom of the bird-seed tin, which she had delivered into his hands with so many injunctions, a sealed note.

“Here it is,” he said, and with a blurring of eyes took out gently from his waistcoat pocket the short letter written in the stiff, would-be German hand that had become part of herself.

The family read it silently, one after the other.

“But I wasn’t what she says at the end,” Alf said in a choking voice; “I’ve been a beast to her,—think how I used to make fun of her in my letters!”

But they who knew warm-hearted little Alf knew without telling just in what way he had been a comfort to the lonely, mistaken woman.

“Pater,” the boy said wistfully when the general conversation was loud, and the doctor so near he could hear a whisper, “I won’t be very much expense,—are you very vexed with me for chucking the money? I came back steerage, so I’ve got twenty-two pounds left out of the forty. That’ll pay for my food for a long time.”

But the doctor, who had always been rather an impetuous, improvident man, blew his nose as loudly as Herr Ollendorf was wont to do, and said—

“Hang the expense!” with great vigour. “Thank heaven, I’ve got you again, old lad,” he added; “your punishment is, you’ll stop here now, and be poor with the rest of us.”

A week later came a German letter. It was from the grandfather’s solicitors, and bore strange news. Alf was [313] his aunt’s heir. Everything she had she had left to him unconditionally. Not a very vast inheritance, it is true, for the poor little woman’s mania for beautiful clothes had greatly crippled a once handsome income. Still, three hundred a year would do many things, and at least keep away the terrible necessity of Alf being compelled to teach German for a living.

The letter went on to state the fact of the boy’s disappearance; inquiries had been made, and it seemed reasonable to conclude he had run away from his grandfather’s care, and sailed for Australia by the Barbarossa. “If this proved to be the case,” said the solicitors, “and if the boy had returned, or in process of time did return to his father, then his grandfather washed his hands of him for all time.”

The young reprobate leaned back when the reading of the letter reached this point, and sighed relievedly.

“That’s something to be thankful for,” he said; “every night I’ve dreamt he’d sent to get me back.”

“I’m afraid it’s a stony-hearted laddie,” Mrs. Wise said. “I don’t at all like to picture to myself that lonely old man.”

“But he never cared a dump for me—you ask him; why, he nearly used to get a fit sometimes if I came near him; he said I fidgeted so,” Alf said excitedly.

“He’s precious glad I cleared, I’ll bet; he only wanted some one to leave his rubbishy money to; the little mummies can have it, and welcome.”

“The who?” said the doctor.

[314]
“Oh, those kids in Egypt,” said Alfred.

Dolly was in the corner reading the “further” letter from her publisher-elect, and surely there was a smile wrapped up with the kindly note.

“Hello, Dolly looks as if she couldn’t help it,” said Richie, the speaker of slang.

“O-o-oh!” said Dolly ruefully, “neither I can.”

Down had come many of her card-castles; flat on the earth they lay. The publisher would give her a royalty, and a fair one, on every copy, but—

“I cannot entertain paying you such a sum for copyright,” he wrote; “you are entirely unknown as a juvenile writer, and your tale is very short. I can only offer you fifteen pounds for that; but should the book succeed as I expect, the royalties will total up no inconsiderable sum each year.”

“Fifteen pounds!” repeated Dolly in a disappointed tone. Last night she and Phyl had lain awake spending the two hundred pounds in most magnificent fashion; a trip to Stevenson’s Samoa for their mother, themselves, and Alf, being the choicest item on the list.

“Never mind,” said Freddie kindly, “I can do without the cricket things now, Dolly—Alf’ll get them for me; won’t you, Alf?” and he fondled his millionaire brother’s hand with the most respectful affection.

Dolly’s eyes went skimming along over the page to the agent’s disquisition on “Covers.” Russian leather and white parchment with rough edges were [315] impossible, it seemed. Mr. Ledman wrote at length, and with eloquence, of the beauties of gilt edges, and the chaste and elegant appearance of some appropriate floral emblem on a bright red, blue, or green ground. He said he proposed to include it in the well-known “Bluebell Series,” of which they had sold one million copies.

But Dolly was not entirely vanquished. She had carried with her for three long days the dear vision of sage-green Russian leather, severely plain and artistic, and the crude colouring of her shelf of “Bluebell Series” made her shudder. The voyage to the Happy Isles she relinquished with a sigh, and wrote that she accepted the offer of fifteen pounds and a royalty. But she added a most agitated couple of pages whereon she made known her undying hatred of covers of the “Bluebell” description.

The kindly agent soothed her in his next reply; she should not be in the “Bluebell Series,” he promised, and she should have the most artistic covers compatible with the fact that the book was for young readers. So she took heart again, and speedily forgot Vailima and the skies she might have seen, rough-edged parchment and everything in the world but the fact that flying forward, forward through the shouting seas was a ship, bearing in its breast that precious parcel of her very own writing, that London magic would turn into a book, a book, a book!