[Frontispiece:
“‘There they are,’ Phyl said, in a tremulous voice.” (Page 17.)]
Three Little Maids
BY
ETHEL TURNER
(Mrs. H. R. CURLEWIS)
AUTHOR OF ‘SEVEN LITTLE AUSTRALIANS,’ ‘THE LITTLE LARRIKIN,’
‘THE CAMP AT WANDINONG,’ ETC.
“O to be young again!
O to have dreams and dreams!
And to talk in the gardens of Wonderland
With stars and flowers and streams!”
_W. A. MacKenzie._
WARD, LOCK & CO., LIMITED
LONDON, MELBOURNE AND TORONTO
TO
MY TINY DAUGHTER
Here is a chain for you, sweet,
Hold up your soft hands to catch it;
Pansy and white marguerite,
_You_ will think nothing can match it.
But you will say, Are they true?
All of the flowers in the chain, dear?
Did they all grow up with you,
Or some of them just in your brain, dear?
Count true the white marguerite,
Pansies—as false I must own them.
Life, it may well be, my sweet,
Had not so fair to you grown them.
E. S. C.
_Mosman’s Bay
Sydney_
CONTENTS
PART I.—PLAY DAYS
CHAP. PAGE
I. TWELVE O’ THE CLOCK 11
II. PRETENDING 21
III. FAMILY MATTERS 35
IV. A WINTER SUNDAY 41
V. WHICH RUSHES FOURTEEN THOUSAND MILES AWAY 53
VI. ‘BROWNSES’ HOUSE’ 66
VII. A WAY TO WEALTH 73
VIII. THE PITILESS LONDON STREETS 81
IX. TRAVELS IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES 98
X. THE LAST CHRISTMAS IN ENGLAND 112
XI. ‘GOING DOWN TO THE SEA IN SHIPS’ 124
XII. AUSTRALIA 133
XIII. MOONDI-MOONDI 142
XIV. TRYING TO LIVE 158
XV. ‘A LITTLE FOLDING OF THE HANDS TO SLEEP’ 165
XVI. THE END OF PLAY DAYS 175
PART II.—SCRIBBLING DAYS
CHAP. PAGE
XVII. RHYME AND RHYTHM 187
XVIII. TEN AT TABLE 194
XIX. GWENDOLEN TREVALLION AND A SOLDIER BRAVE AND TRUE 208
XX. THE ‘GERMAN SAUSAGE’ LAND 218
XXI. ‘GOOD-BYE, GOOD-BYE!’ 226
XXII. THE WRITING-ROOM 234
XXIII. ENTIRELY EDITORIAL 242
XXIV. NEWS FROM THE FATHERLAND 253
XXV. THE TRIALS OF WEENIE 266
XXVI. MORE LETTERS 276
XXVII. FINANCE AND FASHION 285
XXVIII. ONE GLORIOUS HOUR 294
XXIX. AND THEN NO MORE 307
PART I
PLAY DAYS
Three Little Maids
CHAPTER I
TWELVE O’ THE CLOCK
“What’s done cannot be undone; to bed, to bed, to bed.”
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 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.
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 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.”
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.”
[Illustration: “They’ll get galloping consumption at least.”]
“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.
“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 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 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; “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.”
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.