A WAY TO WEALTH
“Do all that you know and try all that you don’t,
Not a chance must be wasted to-day.”
The very day after that winter Sunday’s talk Phyl and Dolly were most
mysteriously busy, and nothing Weenie could urge would make them allow
her to join them.
“We are not playing at all,” they said severely; “run away at once,
Weenie, we are doing something very important indeed.”
“You’re playing fairies, I _know_ you are,” contended Weenie. “I _will_
play with you.” She rushed after Dolly and hung on to her waist.
Dolly shook her off.
“Take no notice of her,” she whispered to Phyl; “she can’t guess what
we’re doing, and she’ll soon get tired and go away.”
They continued their work.
A disinterested observer would have imagined they were pretending they
were blind, for they were moving slowly up and down the room close to
the wall with their finger-tips feeling carefully all over the paper.
Sometimes one of them would rap on it with her knuckles, and the other
put her ear close to the place and listen carefully.
Weenie watched them enviously all the time.
“I know,” she said, “you’re playing you’re painting the house!”
When they had treated all four walls in this strange fashion they began
on the stuffed chairs—they were in the drawing-room—and kneeling down
in front of the two large ones and the sofa, they pushed their hands
down the part where the backs joined the seats. Strange things too they
brought up—buttons, several hairpins, a tiny pair of scissors lost for
months, quantities of fluff and dust, and a silver sixpence. Weenie was
quite excited at the various finds, but the elder girls took little
notice and continued their work. They pulled a little table up close to
the wall, climbed on it and peered behind every picture; they lifted
two or three rugs and looked underneath; Phyl even poked her arms up
the chimney, felt about and withdrew them black with soot.
As Dolly had foretold, Weenie’s patience was not equal to her
curiosity, and after a time she wandered away. But when the same
strange proceedings began again in the afternoon, and all that time
neither of her sisters would join in a single game, she became quite
frantic to discover the mystery.
At four o’clock in the afternoon their mother was lying down in a
bedroom with a headache.
Phyl and Dolly had treated every room in the house but that large front
bedroom in the same way as the drawing-room, and now they stood on the
threshold of that with pale lips but determined eyes.
“I don’t think we can do this one,” Dolly faltered, cold thrills
running through her at the remembrance that it was through this door
they had gone, slowly, and on tip-toe, two months ago, to kiss that
cold, quiet face on the pillow, and lay white roses and snowdrops on
the still breast.
Phyl’s eyes were drenched with tears at the same memory, and her
sensitive lips all a-quiver. But she turned the handle with a firm hand
and they went in.
Through the windows a cold spring wind was blowing, it was the only
thing of life in the quiet room. The bed was covered as of old with
the blue silk eiderdown quilt; the book-table, that had always been
disorderly with books and magazines and papers, was quite bare; the
great cushioned chair stretched out its empty arms as if bemoaning its
vacancy.
Dolly sobbed aloud and ran to a big bookcase that had been brought
here during the last long illness. Phyl, her tears falling like rain,
followed. They began at one end, and taking down the books, one after
the other, opened the covers, looked in them carefully, and then,
holding them by their backs, shook them gently. They put the finished
ones on the floor in stacks. Soon there were piles of them everywhere,
big dusty books long unopened, hard-worked volumes with their covers
dropping off, gaily bound new ones, dull thick ones with scientific
names; the stacks were three feet high in places, the atmosphere was
full of dust, but the sorrowful-faced, earnest-eyed little girls worked
on steadily with never a moment’s rest.
Then there came Weenie in search of them—Weenie, round-eyed,
open-mouthed at the terrible sacrilege in this quiet, strange room
where her father had lain dead.
“Oh!” she gasped.
“Go away,” said Dolly.
“G—go away at once,” said Phyl; “we’re not playing, Weenie.”
Weenie could see they were not; at all events it must be a very strange
game if they were, for their eyes still streamed.
She ran away, right down the passage to their own room where the mother
lay asleep.
“Oh, mama!” she cried, climbing up on the bed and patting her mother’s
cheeks to wake her.
Mrs. Conway’s eyes sprang open, and Weenie tugged vigorously at her
sleeve.
“Come on quickerly,” she said; “oh, ever so quickerly; naughty Phyl
and Dolly’s in dadda’s room, makin’ it awful drefful.”
The mother rose up and followed her, though her blinding headache would
hardly allow her to keep her eyelids open.
When she saw the havoc in the quiet place, she leaned against the
doorpost quite overcome.
[Illustration: “We’re not playing, Weenie.”]
“How could you?” she cried, her voice thrilling with pain—“how could
you?—how _could_ you?”
She gathered up her strength and tottered across the room; she began on
one of the heaps, replacing feverishly book after book.
“Oh, go away,” she said; “go away all of you.”
“Mama!” cried Dolly, catching at her hands, “oh, what is it, mama?”
“This room!” moaned the mother. “Oh, how _could_ you come here?”
She began to work at another heap—her trembling hands seized the top
book—_Martin Chuzzlewit_ it was. A paper-knife was stuck into the pages
enshrining Augustus Moddle’s proposal to Charity Pecksniff.
Not three months ago she had brought a smile to her husband’s face by
reading it to him one sleepless night. The memory was too much for her,
she dropped the volume and sank into a chair, her heart breaking afresh.
Phyl and Dolly rushed to her, knelt by her side, clasped her, kissed
her a thousand times, called her by tender names. When she saw their
passionate grief she calmed herself with a strong effort and sat up
again.
“There,” she said, with woful eyes, “there, my dear ones: hush, Phyl;
hush, hush, Dolly—I might have known my darlings did not mean to be
unkind,—they forgot where they were playing, didn’t they?”
Phyl’s very breath seemed to go.
“Playing?” she echoed in a strange voice.
“Oh!” cried Dolly, her sobs breaking forth afresh; “did you weally
think we were playing, mama?”
“Why,” faltered the mother, glancing round, “what were you doing then?
Tidying the book-shelves? Tell me, darlings.”
Phyl lifted her poor little golden head. “We were looking for the lost
will,” she whispered.
“The what?” said the mother, mystified.
“The will that is hidden,” whispered Phyl.
“But there isn’t such a thing,” the mother said; “it was safely put
away in father’s desk; the day uncle and Mr. Bright and all those
people came it was read.”
“But the other will,” said Dolly, “the one that was made before,
leaving lots of money to you.”
“My little sweethearts,” said the mother wearily, “what is it you mean?
I can’t understand you in the least.”
Phyl made an effort to be intelligible. “We thought,” she said, “if we
found another will that we needn’t be poor at all. People often hide
them in strange places, behind wainscotching and secret panels and
things, or in the loose covers of books. We’ve looked in all the other
rooms, but we thought it was most likely to be here, so—so we looked.”
The mother, with all the calls there had been on her time, had no idea
of the miscellaneous reading of her daughters; she would have been
amazed to know of the scores of stories they had read in Harriet’s _Bow
Bells_, and _Young Ladies’ Magazines_, and Penny Weeklies. Of course,
therefore, they were acquainted with all the delightful ways lost wills
were discovered in strange hiding-places, and immense properties
thereby restored to the heroes and heroines of the tales.
“Very likely there’s a secret back to father’s desk,” Dolly said;
“won’t you please look, mama? we didn’t like to touch that.”
Mrs. Conway’s head was too bad for her to fully enjoy the absurdity of
the serious-eyed children at the time, though she often smiled over it
in later years.
“You can put the books all back,” she said; “if fifty more wills were
discovered there would be no more money, dear ones, for the simple
reason there was nothing to leave.”
They went back to the nursery, sadness in their eyes at this summary
wrecking of all the romantic castles they had built.