[11]
Three Little Maids
There was the listening hush of midnight in the house. No light burned in any of the rooms, but through the windows, where the blinds were up, a woe-begone struggling moon shone palely.
The big bedroom at the front of the house was empty, and the moonbeams lay quiet on the smooth white counterpane of the canopied bed. Even in so faint a light it was plain to see the room was unused; the chairs and sofa held no heaps of flung-off clothes, the dressing-table appointments were in the most precise order, the chill air lay over everything, unbroken by the regular fall and rise of human breath.
The mother had taken the visitors’ room to sleep in ever since the day two months ago when Death had [12] walked whitely into that larger room and frozen with his strange breath the father of her youngest child.
The moon touched sadly now the face that lay in the smaller room, in that strangest of places wandered to by mortals—perfect dreamlessness.
Brown waves of hair strayed on the pillow, brown eyelashes lay motionless on cheeks where the lifeless tinge of grief knew itself for stranger, and was slowly giving way once more to the healthy life-colour that loved to dwell there. The contour of the face was at once grave and childish; an irresponsible flower-life of happiness would have accentuated certain lines about the nostrils and mouth into a look of spirited wilfulness, but the hard climbing of hills had been given to her instead, and the mouth at eight-and-twenty was wholesomely self-reliant.
Her youngest child, Weenie, was curled up beside her, a dark-haired morsel of four.
Across the landing, but rather lower down, was a third bedroom with a very tossed bed, where two little light-haired girls lay, their arms flung across each other, their curls tangled in the same heap.
From under the pillow of each peeped a book, but there were restrictions against reading in bed at night, and in the morning at eight and ten years old one is always so ready to get up that the volumes were merely put there for company. Against the wall stood a row of four dolls’ beds crowded with occupants, and, a little apart, a fifth one, quite empty.
[13]
The book of the younger girl, Dorothy, slipped
from the pillow and made a hard ridge for her neck to
lie on. She turned restlessly for a minute or two, and
tossed her head about, but the hardness did not move,
and she woke drowsily. Her slumber had been
uneasy, like her sister’s, most of the night, and the
waking instantly brought a dull sense of a certain
trouble in life. By the time she had blinked twice,
recollection had come and she sat up, gently disengaging
herself from the thin little arm across her
chest, and gazed, all her heart in her eyes, at the
empty miniature bed a moonbeam faintly discovered.
Then her gaze went to the windows, where the blinds were always left high up, that none of the sun’s first merry darts might be lost.
“Oh,” she said with a sudden gasp, horror in her eyes, “Phyl, Phyl, wake up at once.” She shook her hastily. Phyl’s face had almost a spiritual look in this faint light, so thin it was, so drained of colour the cheeks and lips.
“Whatever’s the matter?” she said, the impatience of a spoiled dreamland upon her.
“It’s snowing” said Dorothy, in a voice fraught with intensest emotion.
Phyl rolled comfortably over to her left side without the least unclosing of her heavy eyelids.
“Well, I don’t care,” she said, drowsily.
Dorothy shook her vigorously to bring her to reason. She was quite quivering with cold and grief [14] herself. “Don’t you remember?” she said. “Jennie and Suey are out all this time.”
Then indeed Phyl’s eyes sprang open, and the horror in her sister’s eyes showed equally strong in her own.
“Whatever shall we do?” she said.
They crept out of bed softly and stole through cold air to the window against which the little soft flakes were beginning to fall.
“H’sh!” Dorothy said, “we shall wake mother.” So they tiptoed and spoke in whispers.
Phyl was peering in an anguished way through a patch of glass she had rubbed clear of breath-mist, but the moon was growing more and more woe-begone now the snow-clouds were drifting down, and all it revealed of the garden were some vague shadows of trees and stretches of dark grass patched here and there with white.
“They’ll get galloping consumption at least,” Dorothy said in a choked voice.
Phyl drew a deep breath and moved to one of the chairs where their clothes lay neatly folded.
“I’m going to fetch Suey in,” she said.
“Oh,” gasped Dolly, whose mind had not travelled quite so far as this.
Phyl was slipping some petticoats on over her nightgown; she groped about and found one shoe and one boot for her feet.
“Are you coming?” she said. “P’raps you don’t care.”
[15]
Dorothy stumbled to her own chair and put on a
garment or two.
“I care more than you,” she said in a fierce whisper; “I’ve kept waking and waking all night, and you just went on being asleep.”
“That’s all you know,” Phyl said. “Why, I’ve been awake hours and hours, and all this time you were fast asleep. I don’t believe you were awake more than a minute.”
“Every time I was awake you were asleep, ’cause I heard you talking silly things,” said Dorothy indignantly.
[16]
“Every time I was awake you had your eyes
screwed up fast, so you must have been asleep,”
contended Phyl.
Dorothy was summoning a fresh argument, but Phyl’s tender thoughts fled out into the snow.
“Think how they’ll be shivering!” she said. “Come on, Dolly.”
They dragged the eider-down quilt off the bed, doubled it, and wrapped it round the shoulders of both of them, for they were quite alive to the cold. Then they stumbled off softly and awkwardly, thus pinioned together, along the passage, down the dark, still stairs, and to the side-door in the hall.
It was Phyl’s cold little hand that softly undid the bolt, while Dorothy, with impartial justice, held the wrap round the two pairs of shoulders. They crept down the steps, their loose shoes crushing the fresh-fallen snow in a way that alarmed them for a moment lest the house should be aroused. But then the keen mysterious terrors of the white-patched darkness assailed them and made them callous to all other fears.
What was that eerie-looking thing crouched there by the porch? Phyl whispered, in a would-be stout voice, that it was only a great heap of leaves old John had swept up; but both of them felt in their hearts it was pregnant with horrible spirit life. And that mournful sigh and whistle that came from among the bare-armed trees of the shrubbery? Dorothy said it [17] was only the wind, but the saying in no wise reassured either of them. They stopped and clung in terror to each other half-a-dozen times before they reached the spot for which they were bound—the bottom of the kitchen garden. Light feathery flakes lay on their hair, their breath congealed as it came from their blue lips, their teeth chattered loosely.
And yet none of these things quite killed the romance for them. Phyl even stood still one dreadful half-second.
“This really ought to have been part of their adventure; we oughtn’t to rescue them so soon,” she said gloomily, “it would have been an experience.”
But Dolly’s heart was bleeding, and she dragged on so determinedly that the other half of the quilt was forced to follow.
“Oh,” she said in a most poignant tone of grief, “they can’t go on having expewiences when it’s snowing, Phyl.”
Where the cabbages ended a row of rhubarb-plants divided the vegetables from the gooseberry-bushes. Beyond these was a rough bank covered with prickly bush, and beyond that again was a wild heap of quarried stone left from some repairing that had recently been done to the house.
“There they are,” Phyl said in a tremulous voice.
On the roughest ledge of stone, exposed to all the wind and weather, lay two dolls. The little girls’ hands went to them, never a moment confused as to [18] which belonged to which, and drew them with passionate thankfulness into the eider-down shelter.
“Suey’s soaking,” said Phyl, bitter reproach in her voice.
“Jennie’s dying, I think,” said Dorothy, with a great sob.
They wound the cumbersome quilt round the four of them and scuttled back to the house. Up-stairs again they crept, their boots in their hands, and their frozen feet bare to the bitter cold that crept about the floors. But how happy were their hearts now their darlings were safe in their arms!
“I think I’ll just light the candle,” Phyl said, “we can’t see how they look in the dark.”
She struck a match very very softly, and the pale light illuminated the room.
Dorothy was stripping off Jennie’s dripping frock as she sat on the edge of the bed. “We’ll have to wrap them in towels,” she said, “their night-gowns are in the nursery.”
So they seized a towel each and enveloped the sawdust bodies tenderly. It was agreed to be impossible to put them in the little bed against the wall after such an eventful night, so were snuggled down in their own bed, into which they crept once more.
“Ugh, how wet your hair is!” Dolly said, as Phyl’s damp light curls brushed her face again.
Then she sat up in dismay.
“You oughtn’t to have gone, Phyl,” she said; [19] “you’ll go and get another cold, and have to stay in bed.”
Phyl recollected her troublesome chest for the first time.
“Oh, I’ll dry my head and then I’ll be all right,” she said easily, and gave her hair a rub or two with the towel, that acted—both before and after the operation—as Suey’s night-gown.
But Dorothy was feeling still disturbed, for had she not promised her mother to help to look after this delicate Phyl and keep her from danger? She slipped out of bed once more, and went to the mantel-piece where stood the bottle of cod-liver oil, with which they had built Phyl up after her last attack.
“I won’t,” Phyl said, in a stormy whisper as the nauseous bottle was thrust before her.
“Oh, go on,” said Dorothy, “you’ll have a fwightful cold if you don’t, and wemember how fwitened mama gets.”
Phyl “wemembered,” and struggled nobly with herself. All her soul rose against taking the slimy, ill-looking stuff, but her heart went out to the poor mother, whose colour died and whose sweet mouth trembled at each fresh attack of hers.
“I can’t take it without a spoon,” she said in a piteous way.
“Here’s a doll’s plate,” said Dolly, “I’ll pour some on it and you can lick it off.”
[20]
Phyl groaned, but Dolly held the tiny plate close to
her mouth.
“Do wemember mama,” she adjured her.
So Phyl thrust out her shrinking tongue, licked the plate tolerably clean, and with much shuddering lay down again.