A LONG AGO ADVENTURE
We were very busy and happy the next morning getting all our things
settled, and making the summer kitchen look as pretty as we could. We
had brought one or two folding chairs and some rugs and table-covers to
brighten it up, and it did look very nice indeed.
It was a good thing we were taken up that way, for--wasn't it
provoking?--that first day it took it into its head to rain! All the
morning at least, though it cleared up about our dinner-time. But it was
very tiresome, for though it was quite mild, it was of course damp under
foot, and nurse wouldn't hear of us going a nice scrambly walk as we had
planned. And she would come with us. I daresay she was right, but it was
a bore.
'Which way shall we go, Jack?' said Anne, when we were all ready to
start and nurse had satisfied herself that the girls had all got their
thickest boots on, and waterproofs and umbrellas in case it came on to
rain again.
Nurse had been consulting Mrs. Parsley, I'm sure.
'We must keep to the high-road,' she said. 'It dries up very quickly as
it's a sandy soil.'
'Anne wasn't asking you, nurse,' said Serry rather pertly. 'She was
asking Jack.'
'All the same, Miss Serena, I must do my duty,' said nurse. 'I am in
charge of you, and your mamma wouldn't be pleased if I let you all go
stravaging over the wet fields to get bad colds and pleurisys and
newmens, and what not.'
'Newmens,' said Anne, 'what _do_ you mean?'
But nurse was put out, and wouldn't explain. It wasn't till some time
after that we found out she meant that bad kind of cold on your chest
that cows have so often, as well as people.
I tried to smooth nurse down, and I frowned at Serry, who was just in a
humour to go on setting her up.
It was a pity to start so grumpily on our first walk, but things never
do go quite right for long in this world, do they?
'I'll tell you what we can do,' I said; 'we can see the church. It's
just a nice little walk by the road from here--you'd like that, wouldn't
you, Anne?'
'Yes,' said Anne, 'I like old churches.'
'So do I,' said Maud.
'Are there places you could hide in, in this church,' said Serry, 'like
in the old church at Furzely? Whenever I go there I can't help thinking
what lovely hide-and-seek we might have there.'
'Miss Serry,' said nurse, quite shocked, 'I think you should have
different ideas from that in your mind when you go to church.'
And of course we all thought so too. But it isn't much use taking up
anything Serry says, seriously. She _is_ so scatter-brained.
We had a nice enough walk after all. The road was beginning to dry up,
except at the side next the wood where the trees dripped on to it, for
the trees were really soaking. And we soon got nurse into a good humour
again; she's never cross for long. We made plans about all the nice
things we'd do, if only the weather would be really fine--tea in the
woods and things like that, you know.
'But it's early in the season still, my dears, you must remember,' said
nurse. 'It's not often you can plan for much out-of-doors before June is
near its end.'
'And then July is always a rainy month, people say,' said Anne. 'I do
think England's horrid for the weather being so uncertain.'
'Well, indeed,' said nurse, 'take it all in all, I think I'd rather have
our climate up in the north. It's cold, to be sure, a great part of the
year, but the summer is summer while it lasts. And then you know where
you are; in winter you can hap yourselves up and make the best of it,
while here in the south it seems to me that every day you have to think
if it's warm or cold, or what it is, all the year round, summer and
winter alike.'
I forget if I told you that nurse is Scotch. She hasn't really been in
Scotland since she was quite little, but she's very proud of it, and
she's very fond of using funny words, like 'stravaging.'
'They say the air here is like Scotland,' I said, 'so fresh and moor-y.
So you should like it, nurse. And you know there's a place here that
they send little ill children to from London; I can show you the house,
we can see it up above when we get to the church.'
And, funnily enough, just as we got close to the village we came upon a
little party of the convalescent children going a walk. They were all
dressed alike--the girls in brown frocks and red cloaks and brown hats,
and the boys in some sort of corduroy. And there was a sort of servanty
looking person with them, and also a lady; just for half a moment I
wondered if it was Miss Cross-at-first, but it wasn't. This one was
quite different; she was short and round-faced, and extremely
good-natured looking. She smiled at us as she passed us. And the
children all looked very happy.
'You see they've come a walk along the wood like us,' said Maud,
'because I daresay it's wet in their garden too.'
'I'd like to go to see them very much,' said Anne. 'What a pity it isn't
Miss Cross-at-first with them! And mums never remembered to write to
Cousin Dorothea to ask if it could have been her you saw in the church
that day.'
'I'm certain it was,' I said. 'I don't need Cousin Dorothea or anybody
to say so. But I'd like to know if she's gone away or if she's coming
back again. They say girls--ladies, I mean--take it in turns to come and
look after the children.'
'Perhaps Mrs. Parsley could find out for us,' said Anne. 'You know,
nurse, we want to have some of the children at tea at the farm before we
go. Mother said she daresayed we might.'
'It's time enough, Miss Anne, to talk about what you'll do before you
go, seeing as you're scarcely come,' said nurse, rather grumpily. She's
not very fond of things to do with poor children; she's always afraid of
our catching illnesses. 'And it would be no kindness to ask any other
children to come to see you at present. As likely as not they'd be
getting the whooping-cough.'
We hadn't thought of that; it was rather a disappointment.
We had got to the church by now, and we all went in. It didn't look
quite so pretty as the day I had seen it first, for there was no
sunshine coming in through the coloured windows and lighting up the
queer old tablets and figures here and there. Still it looked very nice,
and Anne and Maud admired it very much. So did Serry, only she said
she'd have liked it better with high pews and curtains to draw round the
big square ones. Just fancy that!
'You _couldn't_ think it was nicer like that,' I said.
'Not prettier, but there must have been such jolly corners and
hiding-places,' said Serena. Her head was full of hiding. 'There'd be
nowhere to hide in this church. You'd be seen in a minute.'
'Nobody wants to hide in church,' I said; 'that's not what people come
for.'
'They _might_ though,' said Serena; 'that's to say, supposing any one
got locked up in a church all night, they'd like to have some
comfortable corner to creep into where nobody could get at them.'
'But there'd be nobody _to_ get at them,' said Anne. 'I don't say I'd
like at all to be shut up in a church all night; still, the best of it
would be you'd know you were safe from anybody.'
Serry didn't seem convinced.
'I don't know,' she said. 'There might be--well, bats and owls and
things like that, and then there'd be _feelings_. You'd be sure to fancy
there were people or things there, and it wouldn't be half so
frightening if you could get into a pew with a carpet, and make a bed of
the cushions and hassocks.'
'Eh,' said nurse all of a sudden, 'you put me in mind, Miss Serry, of an
old story my mother told me when I was a child.'
'Oh, do tell it us,' cried Maud.
But nurse said we must wait, of course, till we were out of the church.
Nurse has quite proper feelings about churches, though, when she was
little, she belonged to the Scotch kirk, you know, which is different.
She said she'd tell us the story either on the way home or after tea
when we were all sitting together in our kitchen-parlour, for it was too
damp an evening for us to go out again.
And at first we thought we'd have the story on the way home, but then we
settled we'd wait till the evening. For there were plenty of things to
amuse us going home; I had to show them the post office and the
shops--we went farther down the village on purpose,--and I don't think
stories are ever quite so nice when people are walking as when they're
sitting still.
We all felt quite hungry when we got back to the farm, and we were very
glad that it was nearly tea time. Nurse was very pleased, for Anne and
Maud had never got back their good appetites since they'd been ill,
though Serry had never lost hers all through--I don't much think
_anything_ would make Serry lose her good appetite,--and of course _I'd_
kept all right.
After tea we helped nurse to clear away. We always did that at Mossmoor,
for you see mums had promised Mrs. Parsley that we should give as little
trouble as possible,--it wasn't as if she had been a lodging-house
keeper, and she had only one servant who was rather rough and clumsy.
We liked doing it too, and dear Mrs. Parsley was even better than her
word about making us as comfortable as she possibly could. There was
scarcely a day that she didn't do something 'extra' to please us. This
very evening she had made us some lovely kind of scones for tea. She
said they were a kind she had learnt to make up in the north, and she
'wanted to make us feel at home; it must be a bit lonely just at first,
and such a wet day to begin.'
Wasn't it sweet of her?
Well, as I said, we did justice to the scones, and when tea was over and
all nicely tidied up, we brought our chairs near the fire. For it was
chilly after the rain, and we were glad of a fire. And nurse got out her
knitting--nurse has always got socks for me or stockings for the girls
on hand,--and we began to feel very jolly. We _had_ felt a very little
lonely, perhaps almost an atom homesick, I think, with the dull morning
and the strangeness and the not having father and mother and Hebe, even
though everything was so nice.
'Now for your story, nurse,' said I. 'I hope it's been growing into a
very big one all this time we've been waiting for it.'
'No, indeed, Master Jack,' said nurse, 'it's nothing of the kind. It's
scarce to be called a story at all, and but little worth listening to.'
But we made her tell it all the same. I'm not going to try to write it
in Scotch words, for I don't know Scotch a bit, and I'm not sure that
nurse knows much either, as she's been in England ever since she was
very young. So I'll just tell it straight off; anyway it'll be the sense
of what she said, though she did put in some extra Scotch words. I think
she's rather proud when we have to ask her to explain them.
NURSE'S STORY.
'It was my mother that told it me,' said nurse, 'for it happened to
herself when she was a little girl. She lived at home with her father
and mother and brothers in a good-sized cottage on the Muirness estate,
for my grandfather was one of the head men on the place, which belonged
to old Sir Patrick Muir. They were a good way--five miles or so--from
even a village, and I daresay double as far from the nearest town, which
was only a small one. But in those days people were content with
stay-at-home lives, and they didn't feel dull or lonely even in very
out-of-the-way places. It is a good while ago since my mother was a
child. She was not young when she married, and she was nearly forty when
I was born, and I'm getting on for that myself now. My grandmother had
been rather above my grandfather, for she was the daughter of a
well-to-do man who farmed his own land. When my mother was a child these
old folk were still living, and their little place was very near
Muirness; indeed, I believe it was bought several years ago by Sir
Herbert, old Sir Patrick's grandson, and now belongs to the big estate.
'My mother was a great favourite with her grandfather and grandmother,
for she was the only granddaughter, all the others being boys. She used
often to go over to Oldbiggins Farm to stay for a day or two; and her
grandmother was very fond of having her from a Saturday to a Monday to
take her to church with them on Sunday, and send her back early on
Monday morning in time to go to school. My mother didn't care for these
visits as much as for week-day ones, for her grandmother used to take
her to church on Sunday morning and keep her there straight on through
the afternoon service too, which was really too much for a child. Her
mother was not so strict, and understood better about children's
feelings; and she used always to let mother and her brothers go home
after the morning service, even if she stayed on for the afternoon
herself. It was five miles away, so it was a long walk, but the old
people used to drive in a cart there and back; for if they hadn't done
so, they wouldn't have been able to go to church at all.
'One Saturday afternoon--it was late in the autumn--mother's grandmother
sent over to say that she wanted Maggie, that was mother's name, to come
to stay till Monday, and she should drive to church and back with her on
the Sunday--the 'Sabbath-day' was what they called it always. Maggie
didn't want much to go, but her mother didn't like to refuse; the old
people were kind, and it wouldn't do to vex them. So the child was sent
off. She was about eight years old.
'"Mayn't I come home with my brothers after the morning church is done?"
she said. But her mother shook her head. For some reason they were not
going till the afternoon. I think somebody was ill.
'"If I can get in the afternoon, I'll look out for you, and you can come
home with me then, dearie," she said. "Tell your grandmother I'd like
to have you back to-morrow evening if she doesn't mind."
'The Sunday evenings at Oldbiggins were rather hard upon a child too,
for, on the top of the two long services, the old grandfather always
read out a very long sermon, difficult for any one to understand, as he
read very feebly, and the words were often puzzling.
[Illustration: 'Her grandmother ... went quietly out of the pew without
a notion but that the child was beside her.'--c. x. p. 153.]
'So, with the hope of getting home again before the Sunday evening,
little Maggie started. She was a gentle, quiet child, and the old people
had no idea but that she was quite happy and liked the long hours in the
church as much as they did. She went to church alone with her
grandmother and the farm-man who drove the cart, and they took with them
a packet of bread-and-butter, or bread-and-jam maybe--what was called "a
piece"--to eat outside the church between the two services. There was
only an hour between them. Maggie looked out for her own people before
she and her grandmother went back into the church again, but they must
have been a little late, and the old lady liked to be in her place in
good time, so the child did not see them. But she thought to herself
she'd be sure to meet them after church, and this thought kept her
quiet, though she couldn't possibly get a glimpse of them from her
corner of the high pew, even if she had dared to look about. She must
have been very tired, and she had cried in bed the night before, and I
daresay the cold air outside made it feel warm in the church, anyway
this was what happened. The poor little thing fell fast asleep. And her
grandmother, who was very blind except with her glasses on--and she
always took them off and put them away when the last psalm had been
sung--went quietly out of the pew without a notion but that the child
was beside her.
'When Maggie woke it was quite dark, the church had been shut up ever so
long; there was no evening service. At first she thought she was in bed,
and that the clothes had tumbled off her, then feeling about, she found
she had her frock and cape and bonnet on, and everything near her was
hard and cold, not like bed at all. And by bits it all came back to her
mind--her last waking thoughts in church, and how she was hoping to see
her mother,--and she began to take in where she was. I've always thought
it was really dreadful for her, and she must have been a brave, sensible
child-- I know she grew up a brave, sensible woman. For, though she
couldn't help crying at first with loneliness and cold and the queer
sort of fear, she soon settled to do the best she could. There was some
moonlight coming in at one window, though not much, but enough to make
her see where the pulpit was, and up into the pulpit Maggie climbed,
because she had an idea she'd be safer there; and it certainly was
warmer, for it was a sort of little box with a door to it, and there
were one or two stools and cushions and some red cloth hanging round the
top, which Miss Maggie ventured to pull down and wrap round her. And
there she composed herself to sleep, and sleep she did, in spite of her
loneliness and hunger--oh, I forgot to say she found a wee bit of her
"piece" still in her pocket,--till the sunshine woke her up the next
morning, for luckily it was a bright mild day. Then down she came, and
walked up and down the aisles as fast as she dared, considering it was a
church, to get her cramped legs warm again, and just as she was thinking
what she was to do to get out, the door opened, to her delight, and in
came the man who had care of the church--what we call a verger--followed
by the old body who cleaned and swept it.
'They _were_ astonished, as you can fancy; such a thing had never
happened before within the memory of man.
'Old Peter took her off with him to his cottage, and his wife gave her
some hot breakfast, and then he borrowed a cart and drove Maggie
home--straight home to Muirness, not to Oldbiggins. It was home Maggie
wanted to go, you may be sure, and when Peter heard the story, he
declared her granny deserved a good fright for not looking after her
better.
"P'raps she thought I'd run off to mother and the boys," said Maggie.
'And that was just what it turned out to be.
'The old lady, instead of being frightened, was very angry. She had
stayed talking to some friend at the church door, and somehow her
daughter and the boys had fancied she and Maggie had driven off, not
seeing them about. Maggie's mother was in a hurry to get home to the one
that was ill, and just thought the little girl had gone back quietly
with her grandmother till the next morning. And when the granny had
missed the child, _she_ thought Maggie had run off to her mother--for
some one called out that Mistress Gray and her children had driven
off,--and was too offended to send to Muirness to ask!
'And at home they hadn't missed her of course. So, after all, Maggie
wasn't made much of a heroine of, for all she'd been so brave and
sensible.
'But I'm sure she never minded that, so glad was she to be in her own
dear home again, safe and sound. And you may be sure her mother petted
her enough to make up all she could for the poor little thing's
disagreeable adventure. It was talked of through the country-side for
many a day after that. Maybe it is still.'
'And I hope they never let her go back to that horrid old grandmother
again,' said Anne.
'Nay, my dear, she wasn't so bad as that. But old people have their
ways.'
'I think our gran is _much_ nicer than that,' said Maud in her clear
little voice.
And I'm sure we all agreed with her.
But we all thanked nurse very nicely for telling us the story, which was
really very interesting.
And it gave us a good deal to talk about.