Transcriber's note: Unusual and inconsistent spelling is as printed.
[Illustration: "She was aghast at the sight."]
CHRISTINA AND THE
BOYS
By
AMY LE FEUVRE
_Author of "Two Tramps," "Probable Sons," etc._
ILLUSTRATED BY GORDON BROWNE
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
PUBLISHERS LONDON
Printed in 1906
Butler and Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. "AND IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN ME!"
CHAPTER II. "FEAR DWELLS NOT HERE"
CHAPTER III. "THEY SAY I'M CODDLING YOU!"
CHAPTER IV. "THE UNITED KINGDOM"
CHAPTER V. TWO HIGHWAYMEN
CHAPTER VI. "DEFYING THE HUNT"
CHAPTER VII. A WINTER PICNIC
CHAPTER VIII. "I WAS MADE RICH TO HELP THE POOR"
CHAPTER IX. THE GHOST
CHAPTER X. "HOW COULD I HELP GOING?"
CHAPTER XI. IN LONDON
CHAPTER XII. LOST IN A FOG
CHAPTER XIII. MISS BERTHA'S BONNET
CHAPTER XIV. "MY DAD IS GOING TO DIE"
CHAPTER XV. SUSY IN SERVICE
CHAPTER XVI. "IT IS ONLY THE SELFISH WHO ARE COWARDS"
CHRISTINA AND THE
BOYS
CHAPTER I
"AND IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN ME!"
"AND it might have been me!"
Christina's eyes were big with horror as she clasped her tiny hands
round her knees, and stared into the fire in front of her.
She was in her father's library: a large dimly-lighted room with books
lining the shelves on the walls from top to bottom. It was an afternoon
in early autumn; the last rays of the setting sun were stealing in
through a stained glass window and colouring the dingy writing-table
with red and blue patches. It was a silent, unused room; but it seemed
as if it wanted wise spectacled scholars in it, and not a small
pale-faced child in a short frock and white frilled pinafore.
Yet she looked as if she were quite at home there, and indeed she was.
The library was her ideal of bliss.
Christina's father had been abroad since her mother's death, which took
place when she was born. She had been brought up entirely by her old
nurse, and though Bracken Towers held innumerable rooms of every sort
and size, Christina had been limited to her two nurseries. She lived in
them entirely and it was only during the last year that she had made
acquaintance with the library.
Mrs. Hallam, the housekeeper, had always seemed to Christina to be the
real owner of the house. She was a tall, severe-looking woman, with
sharp eyes, and a still sharper tongue. Nurse was the only privileged
person who drank tea with her in her private sitting-room. Christina
was never allowed in there. Mrs. Hallam made no secret of her dislike
to children.
"They either are so forward and unmanageable that they'll be upsetting
and spoiling all one's personal possessions, or else they'll sit by as
dumb as a dog, and take in all you'll be remarking and repeat it to the
first person they come across."
This was her verdict when Nurse one day wanted Christina to accompany
her to tea, and she had never tried to take her again.
It was a happy day when Christina found herself in the library. It was
the only room that nearly always had a fire, and she had been passing
the door when the housemaid was going in to light it.
"Is this Mrs. Hallam's room?" asked the child innocently.
And Emily, the housemaid, had laughed at her.
"Come in and see it. 'Tis your father's wish that it should always be
kept well aired. He does set store on his books so! Mr. Tipton says
'tis most vallyble library, and 'tis to keep the books from getting
damp we have so many fires."
So Christina had stolen shyly in, and looked with awe and wonder at
the treasures it contained. And then from awe she passed to wistful
longing, and when Nurse one day said lightly, "If you're a good girl
and put every book back where you find it, you can read them," she had
joyfully taken advantage of this permission, and had made the library
her retreat whenever Nurse was "called away on business" from the
nursery.
The books in the library proved an inexhaustible pleasure to the little
maiden. There were old books and new books; books with pictures,
books without. An illustrated series of Froissart's "Chronicles" kept
her entranced for two months, and now, on this particular day, she
had seized an old "History of France" and had been following, with
breathless interest, the fortunes and fate of Jeanne d'Arc.
She shut her book up with a little shiver when she read of the
heroine's shameful death. And there, upon the hearthrug, she was
doing what she always did after reading about any heroine of fiction:
transferring herself—Christina, aged eight—into the circumstances and
position of the heroine.
"And it might have been me!"
Christina had a very big conception of what ought to be done, and a
very tremulous and small opinion of her own courage.
Slaughter of any kind was abhorrent to her. The death of a fly on
a window pane, a mouse in a trap, or a bird in the garden, was the
occasion for a flood of tears and much lamentation. Now she murmured to
herself:
"If I had heard the voice, I should have had to get a sword and go; I
should have been obliged to lead the soldiers into battle and kill; I
should have been wicked if I had said no; and oh, I couldn't, couldn't
have done it! And it might have been me!"
Tears began to crowd into her eyes. She shook her curly head, and
unclasping her hands, she knelt on the rug, and with closed eyes put up
this passionate prayer:
"Please God, never send a voice to me to tell me to fight in battle. I
shall be a coward, I shan't be able to do it. O God, never tell me to
kill anybody! And oh, please, never turn me into a Joan of Arc!"
After which prayer she dried her eyes and was slightly comforted.
She did not turn again to her book. The tragic fate of the maid of
France was too vivid and real to be easily effaced. It was almost a
relief when she heard her nurse call her. She trotted upstairs and met
her at the nursery door. That good woman had a perturbed look on her
round good-tempered face.
"Come in, Miss Tina, and hear what I've got to tell you. Me and Mrs.
Hallam have both been struck down by a letter—such news, and so little
time to prepare; but we have had rumours, and I always said the master
would never come home again till he got a lady to come with him. 'Tis
eight years this coming Christmas that your sweet mother was taken, and
'tis not to be wondered at. And now you'll have to prepare yourself
to meet your father and a stepmother all at once, and that not a day
later than next Saturday. There will be change here at last. Me and
Mrs. Hallam have lived so quiet that it has quite upset us; but 'tis
only natural and right after all, and I'm not the kind of ignorant,
uneducated person to be speaking to you against a second mother. She
may be the very one to slip into your mother's shoes, and she may not,
but we'll hope for the best."
Christina looked up at her nurse with big eyes.
"I don't understand," she murmured. "Is father coming home?"
"Yes, and he's bringing a new wife, and a room has got to be prepared
for a young gentleman; but who or what he is, me and Mrs. Hallam can't
make out. Now you be a good girl and stay quiet up here, for I've
promised to help Mrs. Hallam in unpacking some of the glass and china,
and getting the drawing-room put to rights."
Nurse was bustling away, when Christina called after her imploringly:
"May I go to see Miss Bertha?"
"No. I can't spare any one to take you, and it is too damp and cold for
you to be out to-day. Stay in the nursery like a good child."
Nurse was a picture of an old woman. Round and ruddy, with silver hair
smoothed under her big cap, she looked the embodiment of health and
content. Yet she suffered from many twinges of rheumatism, and had
an old-fashioned horror of open air. The nursery was like a hothouse
in the winter time, and Christina was consequently delicate, and
peculiarly susceptible to cold.
The child stood at the large window when Nurse had left her, and looked
out with some wistfulness across the park towards the goal of her
desire. It was a tiny cottage, originally one of the park lodges, but
owing to the alteration of the drive which once ran past it, was now
let to a single lady, and stood in half an acre of ground, railed off
from the surrounding park.
Christina heaved a sigh. She breathed hard on the panes of glass, and
traced some letters with her finger.
"I'm afraid of fathers and mothers," she acknowledged to herself. "I
don't know what they're like. Emily's father isn't kind to her, she
says, and I've seen some mothers in the village who slap their little
boys. I wish I could tell Miss Bertha."
Suddenly she gave a scream of delight.
"Here she is walking up the drive, and I do believe Dawn is with her!
Oh, I hope, I hope they're coming to see me. And I forgot Dawn's
father. He is kind; oh, I do hope my father will be like him!"
She was not long left in doubt. A very short time afterwards the
nursery door opened, and a little old lady, accompanied by a
rosy-cheeked, fair-haired boy; came forward.
"We thought we should find you in, dear," Miss Bertha said, "and as
Dawn is spending the day with me, I brought him along."
Christina's pale cheeks became pink with excitement. She and Dawn
rushed at each other, Dawn with such impetus that he brought her to the
ground.
Christina was too happy to mind her fall. She clung to Miss Bertha.
"Father is coming home with a mother," she announced, and if Miss
Bertha showed no surprise, Dawn was stricken dumb.
Miss Bertha slipped off her tweed cloak, and drew up a chair to the
fire. She then took Christina on her lap, and Dawn flung himself down
on the hearthrug, rolling himself over on his back, and pillowing his
curly head on his arms behind it.
"You haven't got a mother," he remarked with dancing eyes. "You and me
are just the same."
"I s'pose mothers can be made," said Christina thoughtfully.
"Yes," said Miss Bertha cheerily, "and a very happy thing it is to have
a new mother. I heard the rumour, Childie, so I just ran along to tell
you what a good thing it will be."
"What will she do?"
Christina's little face looked anxious with care.
"Perhaps what I am doing now. She will talk to you and love you and
take care of you."
"Nurse does that."
Christina's tone was a little doubtful.
"Ah! You wait and see!" said Miss Bertha, nodding her head. "Fathers
and mothers are like nobody else! If I had mine alive now, how happy I
should be!"
There was a little silence, which Dawn broke.
"My mother is alive though we can't see her. She takes care of dad and
me. And my toad has lost himself, Tina; and Porky, the big black pig,
was killed the day before we came from London. And Miss Bertha's given
me some lily bulbs for my garden!"
Christina's eyes shone.
"I wish Nurse would let me garden in winter. She says it's too cold.
And oh, Miss Bertha, do you like Joan of Arc?"
The little maid's brain was too full of her heroine to forget her.
For the next half-hour the old lady and the children talked of the
past, with its superstitions and heroism, and then dark settled down,
and Nurse came in, and Christina's friends departed. She watched them
wistfully from the window, then she ate her tea, feeling a sense of
importance and superiority over her boy friend.
"I'm not going to be alone any more. I shall have a father and mother
too, and Dawn won't have so much as me!"
She was full of curiosity over the expected arrivals, but Nurse could
give her very little information. When she was in bed, she lay awake
picturing her new mother.
"She will be in black velvet with feathers, like the picture in the
hall; and she will move very soft, and will speak like Miss Bertha when
she reads the Bible; and I—oh, I shall be frightened of them both, and
I wish they weren't coming!"
Down went her head under the bedclothes.
The unexpected and unknown always had terrors for Christina. It seemed
to overwhelm her now. Two strange people coming to take possession of
the great unused rooms downstairs, people who would have full control
of her actions; who might be kind, but might equally be cruel; people
who would pass her on the stairs, invade her nursery, inhabit the
library, and might even forbid her to cross its threshold. At this
thought Christina lifted up her voice and wept aloud.
She cried herself to sleep, and was astonished to wake the next morning
and find herself looking forward with pleasure to what had been a
dreadful nightmare to her the night before.
The morning was bright and sunny. Nurse was in the best of spirits.
"Miss Bertha said she would like to have you over to lunch to-day
as we are all so busy, so Connie will walk down with you soon after
breakfast. Be a good child, and be ready to come back at three o'clock,
for 'tis too cold for you to be out after that."
Christina's cheeks got rosy red. It was going to be a golden day
indeed! Nurse so seldom let her out of her sight, and Connie, the
nursery maid, could tell such lovely stories!
When she started down the drive—a little bundle of wraps and furs with
a Shetland veil over her face to shield her from the wind—she felt as
if she never wanted to go back to the nursery again. It was a frosty
morning. Connie held her hands tight so that she might not slip, and
talked without stopping of the master and mistress so soon returning.
There were no stories to-day.
"Indeed, Miss Christina, my head is too full of what's coming. The
house will be full of company. Lords and ladies and dooks and duchesses
have visited here in times past, so Mrs. Hallam says, and I'm just
longin' to catch sight of them. There will be dinner parties and balls,
and company every day, and 'tis time this dull old house was shook up."
Christina looked quite scared.
"Will I have to see them all?"
"Yes, you'll be dressed up in your best clothes and go down in the
drawing-room, and you'll have to speak pretty to all of 'em; and I hope
Nurse will let me go down and fetch you up a time or two, for I shall
catch sight o' the dresses and the jools, and hear the music agoing!"
Christina heaved a deep sigh.
"I shall never be able to speak, never!" she ejaculated with a shake of
her head.
They reached Miss Bertha's little cottage. She was out in her garden
looking at her bed of violets, but greeted Christina warmly, and took
her into her sitting-room.
Miss Bertha's sitting-room was a paradise to the lonely child. It was
furnished with a bright old chintz, and was crowded with everything
that could bring joy to a child's heart. There was a stuffed squirrel
under a glass case, some queer china figures on a shelf, ivory
chess-men, Indian books with coloured illustrations of natives and
animals on rice paper. There was a small cabinet of curiosities from
all parts of the world; for Miss Bertha had had a brother who was a
sailor, and who used to bring her many a queer treasure. There was a
model of a heathen temple, an Indian puzzle box, a Chinese doll, a
stuffed snake, and some bottled scorpions. Christina was never tired of
looking at them all.
Connie took off her walking things and then departed.
Miss Bertha stirred the fire into a bright blaze, produced some
knitting, and then prepared herself to listen. All children laved her
because she let them talk, and though Christina was shy and silent as a
rule, Miss Bertha enjoyed her full confidence.
"What is a coward, Miss Bertha?"
The old lady's keen eyes looked at the child before she replied:
"One who has no courage."
"Is it wicked to be a coward? Because I'm pretty sure I'm one."
Miss Bertha shook her head at her.
"I haven't seen any signs of it, Childie. There are different kinds
of cowardice and different kinds of courage. Tiny girls like you are
naturally not so fearless as boys. I would rather be afraid of the dark
myself than afraid to speak the truth. It is cowardly to tell a lie."
"I haven't any courage," said Christina pitifully, with a quivering
under-lip. "If I heard a voice like Joan of Arc did, I should put my
fingers in my ears and not listen to it. I couldn't have ridden into
battle as she did! I'm afraid of everything, Dawn says I am, and every
day I get more things to be afraid of. I'm—I'm afraid of father and
mother!"
Her voice faltered. She slipped down from her chair and buried her face
in Miss Bertha's black merino gown.
Miss Bertha stroked the soft curly head tenderly.
"That fear won't last long. It is only because they are strangers.
Don't think too much about your fears, they are mostly shadows."
"Dawn says a coward ought always to be kicked."
Miss Bertha laughed outright.
Christina raised her head with big tearful eyes. "Oh, please, Miss
Bertha, why did God make me a coward? I'm sure I've always been one
ever since I was a tiny baby."
"No, darling, God never made you a coward; and if you think you are not
as brave as you ought to be, ask Him to make you brave."
Christina dried her eyes, and jumping up clasped her arms round Miss
Bertha's neck.
"It wouldn't be too difficult for God, would it?" she asked, hope
dawning in her eyes.
"No, it would be quite easy. Shall we ask Him now to take away all fear
of meeting your father and mother?"
Miss Bertha was the only person who talked to Christina about good
things. She seemed to live so close to God herself that she brought
every one she knew close to Him too. Christina's nurse often wondered
at the knowledge her little charge seemed to have of God and of His
love and power. She was not a religious person herself, but as a
matter of duty heard Christina say her morning and evening prayers,
and on Sunday afternoons would read her a chapter out of the Bible.
Beyond this she never went, and Christina looked upon Miss Bertha as
the only one who could solve her childish perplexities and religious
difficulties. For the little girl was a thinker beyond her years, and
her brain was far stronger than her body.
She was quite accustomed to Miss Bertha's custom of getting down
upon her knees at any moment of the day to speak to the One whom she
loved and followed; and now, as the grey and golden heads were bowed
together, Christina's burden disappeared. She jumped up almost joyfully.
"And now, please, Miss Bertha, may I have your dear little Chinese doll
to nurse?"
She was a child again for the time, and her merry chatter and laughter
brought a corresponding light and gladness into the face of her old
friend.