Once upon a time there were three sisters, the Misses MacKnackery—or,
better still, the Miss MacKnackeries. They lived in a large, white,
square mansion called Stoneyhouse; and their names were Euphemia,
Tabitha, and Jean Elspeth. They were known over Scotland for miles and
miles, from the Tay to the Grampians—from the Tay to the Grumpy Ones, as
a cousin who did not like Euphemia and Tabitha used to say.
Stoneyhouse had been built by the Miss MacKnackeries’s grandfather, Mr.
Angus MacKnackery, who, from being a poor boy with scarcely a bawbee in
his breeches pocket, had risen up to be a wealthy manufacturer of the
best Scotch burlap, which is a kind of sacking. He made twine, too, for
tying up parcels. He would have made almost anything to make money. But
at last, when he was sixty-six, he felt he would like to be a gentleman
living in the country with a large garden to walk about in, flowers in
beds, cucumbers in frames, and one or two cows for milk, cream, and
butter.
So he sold his huge, smoky works and warehouse, and all the twine and
burlap, hemp, jute, and whalebone still in it, for £80,000. With this
£80,000 he built Stoneyhouse, purchased some fine furniture and some
carriages and horses, and invested what was over.
Jean Elspeth, when she was learning sums, and when she had come to
Interest—having sometimes heard her father and mother speak of her
grandfather and of his fortune, and how he had invested it—just to
please her governess, Miss Gimp, thought she would make a sum of it. So
she wrote down in her rather straggly figures in an exercise book:
£80,000 @ £4 per centum per annum
= £80,000 × 4 ÷ 100 = £52,000.
It was the first really enjoyable sum she had ever done. And yet Miss
Gimp was a little put about when Jean Elspeth showed it to her father.
Still, Mr. MacKnackery, senior, had been a really rich man, and
regretted that the gentleman who bought his factory never could
afterwards make such fine burlap as himself, nor even such admirable
twine.
He lived to be eighty, and then he died, leaving his money to his son,
Robert Duncan Donald David, Jean Elspeth’s father. And when _he_ died,
his dear wife Euphemia Tabitha being dead too, he left all that was over
of the £80,000 (for, alas and alas! he had lost a good part of it) to
his three daughters: Euphemia, Tabitha, and Jean Elspeth.
When Jean Elspeth was old enough to breakfast with the family in the big
dining-room with the four immense windows, she used to sit opposite the
portraits of her grandfather, her father, and her mother. They hung in
heavy handsome gilt frames on the wall opposite the windows. And while
in her high chair she gobbled up her porridge—and gobbled it up quickly,
not so much because she liked it as because she hated being put in the
corner for not eating it—she would sit and look at them.
Her grandfather’s was by far the largest of the three portraits, and it
hung in the very middle of the lofty wall, under the moulded ceiling. He
was a stout and imposing man, with bushy whiskers and cold bright blue
eyes. The thumb and first finger of his right hand held a fine thick
Albert watch-chain, which the painter had painted so skilfully that you
could see it was eighteen-carat gold at a single glance. So he hung, for
ever boldly gazing.
What was more, her grandfather always looked exactly as if he was on the
point of taking out his watch to see the time; and Jean Elspeth had the
odd notion that, if he ever did succeed in so doing, its hands would
undoubtedly point to a quarter to twelve. But she could no more have
told you why, than she could tell you why she used to count each
spoonful of her porridge, or why she felt happier when the last spoonful
was an odd number.
The portrait of her father was that of a man much less stout and
imposing than her grandfather. He was dark, and smiling, and he had no
whiskers. But Jean Elspeth had loved him dearly, and each morning when
she had finished her breakfast (and if nobody was looking) she would
give a tiny little secret wave of the spoon towards him, as if he might
be pleased at seeing her empty plate.
On the other side of her grandfather’s portrait hung a picture of her
mother. And the odd thing about this picture was that, if you looked
long enough, you could not help seeing—as if it were almost the ghost of
Jean Elspeth—her very own small face, peeping out of the paint at you,
just like a tiny little green marmoset out of a cage all to itself in
the Zoo. Jean Elspeth had discovered this when she was only seven; but
Euphemia and Tabitha had never noticed it at all.
[Illustration: A delicate, lightly colored illustration of a young girl
wearing a patterned dress and bonnet, standing and looking up at a
framed portrait of a woman hanging on a wall.]
They knew they were far less like their mother (who had been a Miss
Reeks MacGillicuddy of Kelso) than their grandfather, and they were
exceedingly proud of _that_. As for Jean Elspeth, they didn’t think she
was like any of the family at all. Indeed, Euphemia had more than once
remarked that Jean Elspeth had “no deegnity,” and Tabitha that “she
micht just as weel ha’ been a changeling.” Even now, when they were
elderly ladies, they always treated her as if she were still not very
far from being a child, though, after all, Jean Elspeth was only five
years younger than Tabitha.
But then, how different she was in looks! For while Tabitha had a long
pale face a little like a horse, with mouse-colored hair and green-grey
eyes, Jean Elspeth was dark and small, with red in her cheek and a tip
to her nose. And while Tabitha’s face changed very little, Jean
Elspeth’s was like a dark little glancing pool on an April morning.
Sometimes it looked almost centuries older than either of her sisters’,
and then, again, sometimes it looked simply no age at all.
It depended on what she was doing—whether she was sitting at seven
o’clock dinner on Great Occasions, when the Bults and the McGaskins, and
Dr. Menzies were guests, or merely basking idly in the sunshine at her
bedroom window. Jean Elspeth would sometimes, too, go wandering off by
herself over the hills a mile or two away from the house. And _then_ she
looked not a minute older than looks an elf-child, or a whinchat,
perched with his white eyebrow on a fuzz-bush near a lichenous
half-hidden rock among the heather.
However sad, too, she looked, she never looked grim. And even though (at
dinner parties) she parted her hair straight down the middle, and
smoothed the sides over as sleek as satin, she simply could not look
what is called “superior.” Besides, she had lips that were the colour of
cherries, and curious quick hands that she was sometimes compelled to
clasp together lest they should talk even more rapidly than her tongue.
Now in Stoneyhouse nobody—except perhaps the tweeny-maid and the
scullery-maid, Sally and Nancy McGullie, who were cousins—ever talked
_much_. It was difficult even to tell exactly how wise and sagacious and
full of useful knowledge Euphemia and Tabitha were, simply because they
so seldom opened their mouths, except at meals. And never to sing.
This, maybe, was because it is impossible to keep order if everybody’s
tongue keeps wagging. It wastes time, too, for only very few people can
work hard and talk hard both at the same time. And in Stoneyhouse
everything was in apple-pie order (except the beds), and nobody ever
wasted any time.
And yet, although time was never wasted, nobody seemed to be very much
the better off for any that was actually “saved.” Nobody had ever
managed to pack some of it up in neat brown-paper parcels, or to put it
in a bank as Mr. MacKnackery, senior, had put his money, or to pour it
into jars like home-made jam. It just went. And in Stoneyhouse (until,
at least, Euphemia one morning received a certain letter) it went very
very slowly. The big hands of its clocks seemed to be envious of the
little ones. They crept like shadows. And between their “tick” and their
“tock” at times yawned a huge hole, as dark as a cellar. So, at least,
Jean Elspeth fancied.
[Illustration:
Jean Elspeth would sometimes go wandering off by herself over the
hills.
]
One glance at Stoneyhouse, even from the outside, would tell you how
orderly it was. The four high white walls, with their large square slate
roof fixed firmly on top of them, stood stiff as bombardiers on
extremely solid foundations, and they on even solider rock. No tree
dared cast a shadow upon them, no creeper crept. The glossy windows,
with their straight lines of curtains behind them, just stared down on
you as if they said, “Find the faintest speck or smear or flaw in us if
you can!” And you hadn’t the courage even to try.
[Illustration: A delicate, lightly colored illustration of a woman in a
floral dress and bonnet standing at a vanity table, reaching toward a
small object while a piece of clothing lies on the floor.]
It was just so inside. Everything was in its place. Not only the great
solid pieces of substantial furniture which Mr. MacKnackery had
purchased with his burlap money—wardrobes, coffers, presses,
four-posters, chests-of-drawers, sideboards, tables, sofas, chairs—but
even all the little things, bead-mats, footstools, candle-snuffers,
boottrees, ornaments, knick-knacks, Euphemia’s silks and Tabitha’s
water-colours. There was a place for everything, and everything was in
its place. Yes, and kept there.
_Except_ in Jean Elspeth’s room. She could never learn to be tidy, not
even in her sums. She was constantly taking things out, and either
forgetting to put them away again, or putting them away again in their
wrong places. And do you suppose she blamed herself for this? Not at
all. When she lost anything and had been looking for it for hours and
hours—a book, or a brooch, or a ribbon, or a shoe—she would say to
herself, laughing all over, “Well now, there! That _Lucy_ must have
hidden it!” And presently _there_ it would be, right in the middle of
her dressing-table or under a chair, as if it had been put back there
just for fun.
And who was this “_Lucy_”? There couldn’t be a more difficult question;
and Jean Elspeth had never attempted to answer it. It was one of those
questions she never even asked herself, at least, not out loud. This,
perhaps, was because she hated the thought of hurting anybody’s
feelings. As if Lucy—but, never mind!
It was Lucy, at any rate, who so unfortunately came into that dreadful
talk over the porridge on the morning when the fatal letter came to
Euphemia. It arrived just like any other letter. The butler, with his
mouth as closely shut as usual, laid it beside Euphemia’s plate. Judging
from its large white envelope, nobody could possibly have thought it was
as deadly as a poison and sharper than a serpent’s tooth. Euphemia
opened it, too, just as usual—with her long, lean forefinger, and her
eyebrows lifted a little under her grey front of hair. And then she read
it, and turned to ice.
It was from her lawyer, or rather from her Four Lawyers, for they all
shared the same office, and at the foot of the letter one of them had
signed all their four names. It was a pitch-black letter—a thunderbolt.
It said at the beginning that the Miss MacKnackeries must expect in
future to be less well off than they had been in the past, and it said
at the end that they were ruined.
You see, Euphemia’s grandfather had lent what remained of his £80,000
(after building Stoneyhouse and buying furniture, cucumber-seed, horses,
cows, and so on) to the British Government, for the use of the British
nation. The British Government of that day put the money into what were
called the Consolidated Funds. And to show how much obliged they were to
Mr. MacKnackery for the loan of it, they used every year to pay him
interest on it—so many shillings for every hundred pounds. Not so much
as £4 per centum, as Jean Elspeth had put down in her sum, but as much
as they could afford—and that was at least 1,000,000 bawbees. There
couldn’t have been a safer money-box; nor could Mr. MacKnackery’s income
have “come in” more regularly if it had come in by clockwork. So far the
British Government resembled Stoneyhouse itself.
But the Miss MacKnackeries’s father was not only a less imposing man
than their grandfather, he had been much less careful of his money. He
delighted in _buying_ things and giving presents, and the more he spent
the more he wanted to spend. So he had gradually asked for his money
back from the British Government, using some of it and lending the rest
to persons making railways and gasworks in foreign parts, and digging up
gold and diamonds, and making scent out of tar, and paint which they
said would never wear off or change colour, and everything like that.
These persons paid him for helping them like this a good deal more than
the Consolidated Funds could pay. But then gasworks are not always so
_safe_ as the British nation. It is what is called a speculation to lend
gentlemen money to help them to dig up diamonds or to make waterworks in
Armenia, which means that you cannot be perfectly sure of getting it
back again. Often and often, indeed, the Miss MacKnackeries’s father had
not got _his_ money back.
And now—these long years after his death—the worst had befallen. The
Four Lawyers had been suddenly compelled to tell the Miss MacKnackeries
that nearly every bit left of their grandfather’s savings was gone; that
their bright gold had vanished like the glinting mists of a June
morning. They had for some time been accustomed to growing less and less
rich; but that’s a very different thing from becoming desperately poor.
It is the difference between a mouse with a fat slice of cheese and a
mouse without a crumb.
Euphemia, before opening the letter, had put on her pince-nez. As she
read, the very life seemed to ebb out of her countenance, leaving it
cold and grey. She finished it to the last word, then with a trembling
hand took the glasses off her nose and passed the letter to Tabitha.
Tabitha could still read without spectacles. Her light eyes passed
rapidly to and fro across the letter, then she, too, put it down, her
face not pale, but red and a little swollen. “It is the end, Euphemia,”
she said.
Jean Elspeth was sitting that morning with her back to the portraits,
and at the moment was gently munching a slice of dry toast and Scotch
marmalade (made by the Miss MacKnackeries’s cook, Mrs. O’Phrump). She
had been watching a pied wagtail flitting after flies across the smooth
shorn lawn on the white stone terrace. Then her gaze had wandered off to
the blue outline of the lovely distant hills, the Grumpy Ones, and her
mind had slid into a kind of day-dream.
Into the very middle of this day-dream had broken the sound of Tabitha’s
words, “It is the end, Euphemia”; and it was as if a trumpet had uttered
them.
She looked round in dismay, and saw her sisters, Euphemia and Tabitha,
sitting there in their chairs at the table, as stiff and cold as statues
of stone. Not only this, which was not so very unusual, but they both of
them looked extremely unwell. _Then_ she noticed the letter. And she
knew at once that this must be the serpent that had suddenly bitten her
sisters’ minds. The blood rushed up into her cheeks, and she
said—feeling more intensely sorry for them both than she could possibly
express—“Is there anything wrong, Euphemia?”
And Euphemia, in a voice Jean Elspeth would certainly not have
recognized if she had heard it from outside the door, replied, “You may
well ask it.” And then in a rush Jean Elspeth remembered her strange
dream of the night before, and at once went blundering on: “Well, you
know, Euphemia, I had a dream last night, all dark and awful, and, in
it, _there_ was _Lucy_ looking out of a crooked window over some water.
And she said to me——”
[Illustration:
She knew that Lucy was somewhere close beside her.
]
But Tabitha interrupted her: “I think, Elspeth, neither myself nor
Euphemia at this moment wish to hear what Lucy, as you call her, said in
your dream. We have received exceedingly bad news this morning, that
intimately concerns not only Tabitha and me, but even yourself also. And
this is no time for frivolity.” And it sounded even more tragic in her
Scots tongue.
Jean Elspeth had not meant to be frivolous. She had hoped merely, and if
but for a moment, to turn her sisters’ minds away from this dreadful
news that had come with the postman, and to explain what her dream had
seemed to promise. But no. It was just her way. Whenever she said
anything to her sisters, anything that came from the very bottom of her
heart, she always made a muddle of it. It sounded as small and
meaningless as the echo of a grasshopper’s chirrup against a bare stone
wall. They would look at her out of their green-grey eyes, down their
long pale noses, with an expression either grim or superior, or both. Of
course, too, at such a moment, any mention of Lucy was a dreadfully
silly mistake. Even at the best of times they despised Jean Elspeth for
such “childishness,” and now it must seem like a hideous joke.
For there never was and there never could be any _real_ Lucy. It was
only a name. And yet Jean Elspeth still longed to find any word of hope
or comfort that would bring back a little colour into poor Euphemia’s
cheeks, and make her look a little less like an image in marble. But no
word came. She had even failed to hear what her sisters were saying. At
last she could bear herself no longer.
[Illustration:
She would sometimes sit on one flower-pot, and she would put another
flower-pot for Lucy.
]
“I am sure, Euphemia, that you would like to talk the letter over with
Tabitha in quiet, and that you will tell me if I can be of any help, I
think I will go out into the garden.”
Euphemia bowed her head. And though, by trying to move it with as little
noise as possible, Jean Elspeth made her heavy chair give a loud screech
on the polished floor, she managed to escape at last.
It was a cold, clear spring morning, and the trees in the distance were
just tipped with their new green buds. The gardeners were already
mapping out their rows of plants in the herbaceous borders, in
preparation for the summer. There never was a garden “kept” so well. The
angles of the flower-beds on the lawn—diamonds and lozenges, octagons,
squares, and oblongs—were as sharp as if they had been cut out of
cardboard with a pair of scissors. Not a blade of grass was out of
place.
If even one little round pebble pushed up a shoulder in the gravel path,
up came an immense heavy roller and ground him back into his place. As
for a weed, let but one poke her blunt green nose above the black mould,
she would soon see what happened.
The bright light from the sky streamed down upon the house, and every
single window in the high white wall of it seemed to be scornfully
watching Jean Elspeth as she made her way down to a little straight
green seat under the terrace. Here, at least, she was out of their
sight.
She sat down, folded her hands in her lap, and looked straight in front
of her. She always so sat when she was in trouble. In vain she tried to
compose and fix her mind and to _think_. It was impossible. For she had
not been there more than a moment or two before she knew that Lucy was
haunting somewhere close beside her. So close and so much on purpose, as
it were, that it was almost as if she wanted to whisper something in her
ear.
[Illustration:
She was sitting in a corner by the large cupboard.
]
Now it has been said that Lucy was only a name. Yet, after all, she was
a little more than that. Years and years ago, when Jean Elspeth was only
seven, she “sort of” made Lucy up. It was simply because there was no
one else to play with, for Tabitha was five years older, and at least
fifty-five times more sensible and intelligent and grown-up. So Jean
Elspeth had just pretended.
In those days she would sometimes sit on one flower-pot on the long hot
or windy terrace, and she would put another flower-pot for Lucy. And
they would talk, or rather she would talk, and Lucy would look. Or
sometimes they sat together in a corner of the great bare nursery. And
sometimes Jean Elspeth would pretend she was holding Lucy’s hand when
she fell asleep.
And the really odd thing was that the less in those days she tried to
“pretend,” the more Lucy came. And though Jean Elspeth had never seen
her with what is called her naked eye, she must have seen her with some
other kind of eye, for she knew that her hair and skin were fairer than
the fairest of flax, and that she was dressed in very light and
old-fashioned clothes, though she could not say _how_ old-fashioned.
Another queer thing was that Lucy always seemed to come and appear
entirely out of nothing, and entirely of herself, when anything very odd
or unexpected or sad or very beautiful happened, and sometimes just
before they happened. That had been why she had told Euphemia her dream
of the night before. For though everything else in the dream had been
dark and dismal, and the water had roared furiously over its rocks,
breaking into foam like snow, and Jean Elspeth had been shaken with
terror, Lucy herself appearing at the window had been more beautiful
than moonlight and comforting as a star.
It was a pity, of course, that Jean Elspeth had ever so much as
mentioned Lucy at all. But that had been years and years ago and then
she could not really help doing so. For Tabitha had crept up behind her
one morning—it was on her eighth birthday—while she was sitting in a
corner by the large cupboard, with her back to the nursery door, and had
overheard her talking to someone.
“Aha! little Miss Toad-in-the-hole; and who are _you_ talking to?”
Tabitha had asked.
Jean Elspeth had turned cold all over. “Nobody,” she said.
“Oh, Nobody is it? Then you just tell me Nobody’s name,” said Tabitha.
And Jean Elspeth had refused. Unfortunately, she had been wearing that
morning a high-waisted frock, with sleeves that came down only to the
elbow, and though Tabitha, with nips and pinches of her bare skinny arm
could not make Jean Elspeth cry, she had at least made her tell.
“Oh, so its name’s Lucy, is it?” said Tabitha. “You horrid little frump.
Then you tell her from me that if _I_ catch her anywhere about, I’ll
scratch her eyes out.”
After another pinch or two, and a good “ring-of-the-bells” at Jean
Elspeth’s plait, Tabitha had gone downstairs to her father.
“Papa,” she said, “I am sorry to interrupt you, but I think poor Elspeth
must be ill or in a fever. She is ‘rambling.’ Had we better give her
some Gregory’s powder, or some castor-oil, do you think?”
Mr. MacKnackery had been worried that morning by a letter about a gold
mine, something like that which poor Euphemia so many years afterwards
was to receive from the Four Lawyers, though it was less worrying than
that. But when _he_ was worried he at once tried to forget his worry.
Indeed, even at sight of what looked like an ugly letter, he would begin
softly whistling and smiling. So it was almost with a sigh of relief
that he pushed the uncomfortable letter into a drawer and climbed the
stairs to the nursery.
And when Jean Elspeth, after crying a little as she sat on his knee, had
told him about Lucy, he merely smiled out of his dark eyes, and, poking
his finger and thumb into a waistcoat pocket, had pulled out, just as if
it had been waiting there especially for this occasion, a tiny little
gold locket with a picture of a moss-rose inside, which he asked Jean
Elspeth to give to Lucy the very next time she came again. “My dear,” he
had said, “I have my Lucy, too, though I never, never talk about her. I
keep her ‘for best.’”
As for Tabitha, he thanked her most gratefully that morning at luncheon
for having been so thoughtful about her sister. “But I fear, my child,”
he said, “you must be fretting yourself without need. And for fretting
there is nothing so good as Gregory’s powder. So I have asked Alison to
mix a good dose for you at bedtime, and if you are very generous,
perhaps Jenny would like to lick the spoon.”
The very moment he turned his face away, with as dreadful a grimace as
she could manage, Tabitha had put out her long pale tongue at Jean
Elspeth—which was about as much use as it would have been to put out her
tongue for their old doctor—Dr. Menzies—after he had gone out of the
room.
Whenever Jean Elspeth thought of those far-away years she always began
to day-dream. And whenever she began to day-dream Lucy was sure to seem
more real to her than at any other time. The gravel path, the green
lawn, the distant hills vanished away before her eyes. She was lost as
if in a region of light and happiness. There she was happy awhile. But
cold spattering rain-drops on her cheeks soon called her back to
herself. A dark cloud had come over the world, and for the first time a
dark dread came into her mind of what Euphemia’s letter might mean.
She turned sharply on the little green seat almost as if she had been
caught trespassing. And at that instant she could have vowed that she
actually saw—this time with her real naked eye—a child standing and
looking at her a few paces beyond. It was mere make-believe, of course;
but what most surprised Jean Elspeth was that there should be such a
peculiar smile on the child’s face—as if she was saying: “Never mind, my
dear; whatever happens, whatever they say, I am going to be with you
more than _ever_ before. You just see!”
And then, not for the first time in her life Jean Elspeth felt almost
ashamed of having a phantom friend. When they were all in such trouble,
was it quite fair to Euphemia and Tabitha? Was it even quite right? She
actually went so far as to turn away in the opposite direction, and
would have hastened straight back to the house if, at that moment, she
had not heard a small, curious fluttering behind her. She turned her
head on her shoulder, but it was to find only that a robin had stolen in
on her to share her company, and was now eyeing her with his bead-black
eye from his perch on the green seat which she had but just vacated.
For lunch that day the butler brought in a small soup-tureen of
porridge. When he had attended to each of the ladies, and had withdrawn,
Euphemia explained to Jean Elspeth precisely what the lawyer’s letter
meant. It was a long letter, not only about the gentlemen who had failed
to find water enough for their waterworks in Armenia, but also about
some other gentlemen in Madagascar whose crops of manioc and caoutchouc
had almost as suddenly failed. Jean Elspeth did not quite grasp the
details: she did not quite understand why the lawyers had ever taken
such a fancy to caoutchouc: but she did perfectly understand Euphemia’s
last sentence: “So you see, Elspeth, we are ruined!”
And would you believe it? Once more Jean Elspeth said the wrong thing.
Or rather it was her voice that was wrong. Far away in it was the sound
as of a bugle bugling at break of day. “And does that mean, Euphemia,
that we shall have to _leave_ Stoneyhouse?”
“It means,” said Tabitha tartly, “that Stoneyhouse may have to leave
_us_.”
“In either case we are powerless,” added Euphemia. And the tone in which
Euphemia uttered these words—sitting there straight and erect, with her
long white face, in her sleek grey silk morning gown with its pattern of
tiny mauve flowers—brought tears, not to Jean Elspeth’s eyes, but to
somewhere deep down inside her. It was as if somebody was drawing water
out of the very well of her heart.
“It is the disgrace,” said Tabitha. “To have to turn our backs, to run
away. We shall be the talk, the laughingstock of the county.”
“Laugh at us because we are ruined!” cried Jean Elspeth.
But this time Tabitha ignored her. “This is the house,” she said, “our
noble grandfather built for us. And here I will die, unless I am
positively driven out of it by these systematic blood-suckers.”
“Tabitha!” cried Euphemia. “Surely we should not demean ourselves so far
even as to call them by their right name.”
“Systematic blood-suckers,” cried Tabitha fiercely. “I will sell the
very rings off my fingers rather than be an exile from the house where I
was born. And _he_—_he_ at least shall never witness the ruin into which
our father’s folly has betrayed us.”
She rose from her seat, and mounting on one of the maroon damask chairs
that, unless guests were present, were accustomed to stand in a demure
row along the wall, she succeeded, after one or two vain attempts, in
turning the immense gilt portrait of her grandfather with its face to
the wall.
Then tears really came into Jean Elspeth’s eyes. But they were tears of
anger rather than of pity. “I think,” she said, “that is being intensely
unkind to father.”
“By this time,” said Tabitha sternly, “I should have supposed that you
would have given up the notion that you are capable of thinking. What
right have you to defend your father, pray, simply because you take
after him?”
Jean Elspeth made no answer. Her father continued to smile down at her
from his nail—though it was not a very good portrait, because the
painter had been unable to get the hair and the waistcoat quite right.
And if—even at this unhappy moment—Jean Elspeth had had her porridge
spoon in her hand, she would certainly have given it a little secret
wave in his direction.
But he was not to smile down for very long. The Miss MacKnackeries’s
grandfather continued to hang with his face to the wall. But the two
other portraits, together with the wardrobes, coffers, presses,
sideboards, bead-mats, bureaus, and even the Indian work-boxes, were all
taken off in a few weeks, to be sold for what they would fetch. And
Euphemia now, instead of five, wore but one ring, and that of
turquoises.
In a month all the servants, from the butler to Sally McGullie, and all
the gardeners were gone. Mrs. O’Phrump alone remained—first because she
was too stout to be likely to be comfortable in any new place, and next,
because she was not greedy about wages. That was all. Just Mrs. O’Phrump
and the gardener’s boy, Tom Piper, whose mother lived in the village,
and who slept at home. But he was a lazy boy, was Tom Piper, and when he
was not fast asleep in the tool-shed, he was dreaming in the deserted
orchard.
It was extraordinary to be alive and to be living in so empty a house.
The echoes! Why, if you but walked alone down a corridor, you heard your
own footsteps tap-tapping after you all the way down. If by yourself, in
“your ain, ain company,” you but laughed out in a room, it was like
being the silver clapper of a huge hollow bell. All Stoneyhouse seemed
empty now; and yet perhaps the emptiest place of all was the
coach-house.
And then the stables. It was simply astonishing how quickly stray oats,
that had fallen by chance into the crannies, sprang up green among the
cobblestones in front of their walls. And if for a little while you
actually stood in the stables beside one of the empty mangers, the note
of a bird was like the sound of a hundred. And you could almost see
ghostly horses with their dark eyes looking round at you out of their
long narrow heads, as if to say: “So this is what you have done with
us!”
Not that Jean Elspeth had very much time to linger over such
experiences. Somehow, she seemed to have grown even smaller in the empty
house. But she was ten times more active. And, though she tried not to
be selfish by showing it, she was more than ten times happier. Between
Jean Elspeth herself and the eagle-surmounted gateposts, indeed, she now
secretly confessed that she had always hated Stoneyhouse. How very odd,
then, that the moment it ceased to be a place in which any fine
personage would care to stay a moment, she began to be friends with it.
She began to pity it.
No doubt Tabitha was right. Their grandfather would assuredly have
“turned in his grave,” in her own words, at the sound of those enormous
vans, those hideous pantechnicons, as their wheels ground down the
gravel in the lingering twilight evenings. And yet, after all, that
grandfather had been born—a fact that very much shocked Tabitha,
whenever her father had smilingly related it—that grandfather had been
born in a two-roomed cottage so minute that, if only you could have got
it through the windows, it would have fitted quite comfortably into the
great dining-room at Stoneyhouse.
There was not a single bawbee then in his breeches pocket, and having
been such a good man, as both Euphemia and Tabitha agreed, he did not
need a bawbee now. _Would_ he then—once the pantechnicons were out of
the way—would he, thought Jean Elspeth, have been so very miserable to
see all this light in the house and to hear all these charming echoes?
There were other advantages, too. It was easy to sweep the dining-room
now; and much easier to dust it. There was peace in its vacancy, and it
was not stagnant. And one day, more out of kindness than curiosity,
after busily whisking over its gilt frame with her feather
cornice-broom, Jean Elspeth climbed on to a chair, and, tilting it,
looked in at the portrait. A spider had spun its web in one corner, but
otherwise (it was almost disappointing) the picture was unchanged. Nor
had Mr. MacKnackery yet taken his watch out of his pocket even though
(for his three granddaughters at any rate) the time was now, so to
speak, long past twelve.
Jean Elspeth had had ridiculous thoughts like these as long as she could
remember. But now they came swarming into her mind like midsummer bees
into a hive. Try as she might, she could not keep them all to herself,
and though on this account alone Tabitha seemed to dislike her more than
ever, Euphemia seemed sometimes to wish for her company. But then,
Euphemia was by no means well. She had begun to stoop a little, and
sometimes did not hear what was said to her. To watch her visibly grow
older like this gave Jean Elspeth dreadful anxiety. Still, in most
things she confessed to herself almost every dawn, looking down from her
upper window, she was far far happier than when Stoneyhouse stood in all
its glory.
Indeed, there was no time to be anything else; and even if there had
been a complete cupboard _full_ of neat packages of time _saved_, she
would have used them all up in a week. Euphemia, being so poorly, did
very little. She helped to make the beds and to do the mending. Only the
mending, for, fortunately, the making of any new clothes would be
unnecessary for years and years to come; they had so many old ones.
Tabitha did what she could manage of the lighter work, but although she
had a quick tongue, she had slow, clumsy hands. And it is quite certain,
though nobody, of course, would have been so unkind as to say so, that
she would never have got even as low wages as Sally McGullie, if she had
been in need of a place.
Mrs. O’Phrump did the cooking; but sat on one chair in the kitchen for
so many hours together that she became almost like a piece of
furniture—the heaviest piece in the house. For the cooking of
water-porridge and potatoes does not require very much time, and that
was pretty much all that the Miss MacKnackeries had to eat, except for
the eggs from Jean Elspeth’s three Cochin-Chinas. And Mrs. O’Phrump
needed most of these, as there was so much of her to sustain. As for the
apples and pears in the orchard, since Mrs. O’Phrump was too stout to
stoop to make dumplings, Jean Elspeth, having two wonderful rows of
small sharp teeth, shared these with Tom Piper—though _he_ had all the
stomach-aches.
All the rest of the work fell to Jean Elspeth. She slaved from morning
till night. And to slave the more merrily, she had taught herself to
whistle. She never asked herself why she was so happy. And no doubt it
was chiefly by contrast of having been so cramped-in, and kept-under,
and miserable in days gone by.
Still, certain things did now happen in Stoneyhouse that had not
happened before, and some of these may have helped. For one thing, Jean
Elspeth had always dreaded “company.” Dressing-up made her feel awkward.
The simplest stranger made her shy. She would have much preferred to say
Boh to a goose. None came now, except Dr. Menzies, who of his kindness
sometimes called to feel Euphemia’s pulse and look at her tongue.
Jean Elspeth, too, had never liked servants, not because they were
servants, but because Euphemia and Tabitha seemed to think that they
oughtn’t to be talked to much. Just given their orders. Now Jean Elspeth
could easily have given everything else in the world: but not orders.
And if there ever _had_ been an interesting creature in Stoneyhouse,
even though she was so stupid in some things, it was Sally McGullie.
Then, again, Jean Elspeth, being by nature desperately untidy, never
showed it now. For it’s all but impossible to be untidy in a room that
contains only a table and three chairs!
[Illustration:
There hung within it a marvellous bush of Traveller’s Joy.
]
Then, yet again, Jean Elspeth, before the gentlemen in Armenia and
Madagascar had been disappointed in their waterworks and caoutchouc, had
had very little to do. She was scarcely even allowed to read. For
Tabitha was convinced that most reading was a waste of time, if not
worse. And somehow, improving books had never the least bit improved
Jean Elspeth. But now she had so many things to do that it was a perfect
joy to fit them all in (like the pieces of a puzzle). And the perfectest
joy of all was to scramble into her truckle bed, which had formerly been
Sally McGullie’s bed, and, with a tallow candle stuck by its own grease
to the left hand knob, to read and read and read.
The hours she spent like this, with no living company but mice and moths
and bats and scritch-owls! When her upper parts in the winter were cold,
she put her skirt over the quilt. One thin blanket, indeed, is not much
comfort on cold nights, when one is lying up North there, almost in
positive view of the Grumpy Ones. And for her feet, she used to boil
some water in a kettle and fill a wine bottle.
This, of course, broke a good many bottles; and it was an odd thing that
until there was only one left, Tabitha (whose feet were like slabs of
ice) refused to think of such a vulgarity. And _then_ she changed her
mind. And medicine-bottles are too small.
Apart from all this, queer things now happened in Stoneyhouse. Little
things, but entrancing. The pantechnicon men, for example, had broken a
window on a lower staircase as they were heaving down old Mr.
MacKnackery’s best wardrobe. A pair of robins in the springtime noticed
this hole, and decided to build their nest in a nook of the cornice.
Jean Elspeth (with her tiny whistling) was accepted as the bosom friend
of the whole family.
There was too a boot cupboard, one too far from the kitchen for Mrs.
O’Phrump to use. Its window had been left open. And when, by chance,
Jean Elspeth looked in one sunny afternoon, there hung within it a
marvellous bush of Traveller’s Joy, rather pale in leaf, but actually
flowering there; and even a butterfly sipping of its nectar. After that,
not a day passed more but she would peep in at this delicate green
visitor, and kiss her hand. It was, too, an immense relief to Jean
Elspeth to have said goodbye for ever to lots of things in the house
that seemed to her to have been her enemies ever since she was a child.
She wandered up into rooms she had never seen before, and looked out of
windows whose views had never before lain under her eyes. Nor did she
cease to day-dream, but indulged in just tiny ones, that may come and
go, like swifts, between two ticks of a clock. And although, of course,
Tabitha strongly disapproved of much that delighted Jean Elspeth now,
there was not nearly so much time in which to tell her so.
Besides, Jean Elspeth was more useful in that great barracks of a place
than ten superior parlourmaids would have been. She was more like a
little steam-engine than a maiden lady. And, like a steam-engine, she
refused to be angry; she refused to sulk; and she usually refused to
answer back. But when nowadays she _did_ answer back, her tongue had a
sting to it at least as sharp (though never so venomous) as that of the
busy bee.
And last, but not least, there was the _outside_ of the house. As soon
as ever Mr. McPhizz and his undergardeners had departed with their
shears and knives and edging-irons and mowing-machines, wildness had
begun to creep into the garden. Wind and bird carried in seeds from the
wilderness, and after but two summers, the trim barbered lawns sprang up
into a marvellous meadow of daisies and buttercups, dandelions,
meadowsweet and fools’ parsley, and then seeding dock and thistle and
feathery grasses. Toadflax, bindweed, convolvulus crept across the
terrace; Hosts of the Tiny blossomed between the stones. Moss, too, in
mats and cushions of a green livelier than the emerald, or even than a
one-night-old beech-leaf. Rain stains now softly coloured the white
walls, as if a stranger had come in the night and begun to paint
pictures there. And the roses, in their now hidden beds, rushed back as
fast as ever they could to bloom like their wild-briar sisters again.
And not only green things growing. Jean Elspeth would tiptoe out to see
complete little families of rabbits nibbling their breakfast or supper
of dandelion leaves on the very flagstones under the windows. Squirrels
nutted; moles burrowed; hedgehogs came beetle-hunting; mice of every
tiny size scampered and twinkled and danced and made merry.
As for the birds—birds numberless! And of so many kinds and colours and
notes that she had to sit up half the night looking out their names in
the huge bird-book her father had given her on her eleventh Christmas.
This was the one treasure she had saved from the pantechnicon men. She
had wrapped it up in two copies of _The Scotsman_, and hidden it in the
chimney. She felt a little guilty over it at times, but none the less
determined that the Four Lawyers should never hear of _that_.
It was strange, exceedingly strange, to be so happy; and Jean Elspeth
sometimes could hardly contain herself, she was so much ashamed of it in
the presence of her sisters. Still, she drew the line, as they say, at
Lucy.
And that was the strangest, most curious thing of all. After the
dreadful shock of the Four Lawyers’ letter, after the torment and
anxiety and horror, the pantechnicons and the tradespeople, poor Tabitha
and Euphemia—however brave their faces and stiff their backs—had drooped
within, like flowers in autumn nipped by frost. In their pride, too,
they had renounced even the friends who would have been faithful to them
in their trouble.
They shut themselves up in themselves more than ever, like birds in
cages. They scarcely ever even looked from the windows. It was only on
Sundays they went out of doors. Euphemia, too, had sometimes to keep to
her bed. And Jean Elspeth would cry to herself, “Oh, my dear, oh, my
dear!” at sight of Tabitha trailing about the house with a large duster
and so little to dust. To see her sipping at her water-porridge as if
she were not in the least hungry, and as if it was the daintiest dish in
Christendom, was like having a knife stuck in one’s very breast.
Yet, such was Tabitha’s “strength of mind” and hardihood, Jean Elspeth
never dared to comfort her, to cheer her up, to wave her spoon by so
much as a quarter of an inch in _her_ direction.
In these circumstances it had seemed to Jean Elspeth it would be utterly
unfair to share Lucy’s company, even in her hidden mind. It would be
like stealing a march, as they say. It would be cheating. At any rate,
it might hurt their feelings. They would see, more stark than ever
before, how desolate they were. They would look up and realize by the
very light in her eyes that her old playmate had not deserted her. No.
She could wait. There was plenty of time. She would keep her wishes
down. And the little secret door of her mind should be left, not, as it
once was, wide open, but just ajar.
How, she could not exactly say. And yet, in spite of all this, Lucy
herself, just as if she were a real live ghost, seemed to be everywhere.
If in her scrubbing Jean Elspeth happened to glance up out of the
window, as like as not that fair gentle face would be stealthily smiling
in. If some moonlight night she leaned for a few precious sweet cold
moments over her bedroom sill, as like as not that pale phantom would be
seen wandering, shadowless, amid the tall whispering weeds and grasses
of the lawn.
Spectres and ghosts, of course, may be the most forbidding company. But
Lucy was nothing but gaiety and grace. The least little glimpse of her
was like hearing a wild bird singing—even the Southern nightingale,
though without those long, bubbling, grievous notes, that seem to darken
the darkness. Having this ghost, then, for company, how ever much she
tried not to heed it, all that Jean Elspeth _had_ to do in order just to
play fair—and she did it with all her might—was not to _look_ for Lucy,
and not to _show_ that she saw her, when there she was, plain to be
seen, before her very eyes. And when at last she realized her plot was
succeeding, that Lucy was gone from her, her very heart seemed to come
into her mouth.
And so the years went by. And the sisters became older and older, and
Stoneyhouse older and older too. Walls, fences, stables, coach-house,
hen-house, and little lodge crept on steadily to rack and ruin. Tabitha
kept more and more to herself, and the sisters scarcely spoke at
mealtimes.
Then at last Euphemia fell really ill; and everything else for a while
went completely out of Jean Elspeth’s life and remembrance. She hadn’t a
moment even to lean from her window or to read in her bed. It was
unfortunate, of course, that Euphemia’s bedroom was three stair-flights
up. Jean Elspeth’s legs grew very tired of climbing those long ladders,
and Tabitha could do little else than sit at the window and knit—knit
the wool of worn-out shawls and stockings into new ones. So she would
stay for hours together, never raising her eyes to glance over the pair
of horn-rimmed spectacles that had belonged to her grandfather, and now
straddled her own lean nose. Dr. Menzies, too, was an old man now, and
could visit them but seldom.
Jean Elspeth seldom even went to bed. She sat on a chair in Euphemia’s
room and snatched morsels of sleep, as a hungry dog snatches at bits of
meat on a butcher’s tray. It was on such a night as this, nodding there
in her chair, that, after having seemed to fall into a long narrow
nightmare hole of utter cold and darkness, and to have stayed there for
centuries without light or sound, she was suddenly roused by Euphemia’s
voice.
It was not Euphemia’s usual voice, and the words were following one
another much more rapidly than usual, like sheep and lambs running
through a gate. Daybreak was at the window. And in this first chill
eastern light Euphemia was sitting up in bed—a thing she had been unable
to do for weeks. And she was asking Jean Elspeth to tell her who the
child was that was now standing at the end of her bed.
Euphemia described her, too—“A fair child with straight hair. And she is
carrying a bundle of gorse, with its prickles and flowers wide open. I
can smell the almond smell. And she keeps on looking and smiling first
at me, and then at you. Don’t you _see_, Elspeth? Tell her, please, to
go away. Tell her I don’t want to be happy like that. She is making me
afraid. Tell her to go away at once, please.”
Jean Elspeth sat there shivering, like a snail in its shell. The awful
thing was to know this visitor must be Lucy, and yet not to be able to
see her—not a vestige, nothing but the iron bed and the bedpost, and
Euphemia sitting there, gazing. How, then, could she tell Lucy to go
away?
She hastened across the room, and took Euphemia’s cold hands in hers.
“You are dreaming, Euphemia. _I_ see nothing. And if it is a pleasant
dream, why banish it away?”
“No,” said Euphemia, in the same strange, low, clear voice. “It is not a
dream. You are deceiving me, Elspeth. She has come only to mock at me.
Send her away!”
And Jean Elspeth, gazing into her sister’s wide light eyes, that now
seemed deeper than the deepest well that ever was on earth, was
compelled to answer her.
“Please, please Euphemia, do not think of it any more. There is nothing
to fear—nothing at all. Why, it sounds like Lucy—that old silly story;
do you remember? But I have not seen her myself for ever so long. I
couldn’t while you were ill.”
The lids closed gently down over the wide eyes, but Euphemia still held
tight to Jean Elspeth’s work-roughened hand. “Never mind, then,” she
whispered, “if that is all. I had no wish to take her away from you,
Elspeth. Keep close to me. One thing, we are happier now, you and I.”
[Illustration:
A fair child with straight hair.
]
“Oh, Euphemia, do you mean that?” said Jean Elspeth, peering closer.
“Well,” Euphemia replied; and it was as if there were now two voices
speaking: the old Euphemia’s and the low, even, dreamlike voice. “I mean
it. There is plenty of air now—a different place. And I hope your friend
will come as often as she pleases. There’s room for us all.”
And with that word “room,” and the grim smile that accompanied it, all
the old Euphemia seemed to have come back again, though a moment after
she had dropped back upon her pillow and appeared to be asleep.
Seeing her thus still once more, Jean Elspeth very, very cautiously
turned her head. The first rays of the sun were on the window. Not the
faintest scent of almond was borne to her nostrils on the air. There was
no sign at all of any company. A crooked frown had settled on her
forehead. She was cold through and through, and her body ached, but she
tried to smile, and almost imperceptibly lifted a finger just as if it
held a teaspoon, and she was waving it in her own old secret childish
way to her father’s portrait on the wall.
Now and again after that Jean Elspeth watched the same absent far-away
look steal over Euphemia’s face, and the same smile, dour and grim, and
yet happy—like still, deep water under waves. It was almost as if
Euphemia were amused at having stolen Lucy away.
“You see, my dear,” she said suddenly to Jean Elspeth one morning, as if
after a long talk, “it only proves that we all go the same way home.”
“Euphemia, please do not say that,” whispered Jean Elspeth.
“But why not?” said Euphemia. “So it is. And _she_ almost laughing out
loud at me. The hussy!”...
None of their old friends knew when Euphemia died, so it was only Dr.
Menzies and his sister who came to Stoneyhouse for the funeral. And
though Jean Elspeth would now have been contented to do _all_ the work
in the house and to take care of Tabitha and her knitting into the
bargain, they persuaded her at last that this would be impossible. And
so, one blazing hot morning, having given a little parting gift to Tom
Piper and wept a moment or two on Mrs. O’Phrump’s ample shoulder, Jean
Elspeth climbed with Tabitha into a cab, and that evening found herself
hundreds of miles away from Stoneyhouse, in the two upper rooms set
apart for the two ladies by Sally McGullie, who had married a fisherman
and was now Mrs. John Jones.
Jean Elspeth could not have imagined a life so different. It was as if
she had simply been pulled up by the roots. Whenever Tabitha could spare
her—and that was seldom now—she would sit at her window looking on the
square stone harbour and the sea, or in a glass shelter on its narrow
front. But now that time stretched vacantly before her, and she was at
liberty if she pleased to “pretend” whenever she wished, and to fall
into day-dreams one after another, just as they might happen to come, it
was just life’s queer way that she could scarcely picture Lucy now, even
with her inward eye, and never with her naked one.
It was, too, just the way of this odd world that she should pine and
long for Stoneyhouse beyond words to tell. She felt sometimes she must
die—suffocate—of homesickness, and would frown at the grey moving sea,
as if that alone were the enemy who was keeping her away from it. Not
only this, but she saved up in a tin money-box every bawbee which she
could spare of the little money the Four Lawyers had managed to save
from the caoutchouc. And all for one distant purpose.
And at length, years and years afterwards, she told Mrs. Jones that she
could bear herself no longer, that—like the cat in the fairy-tale—she
must pay a visit, and must go alone....
It was on an autumn afternoon, about five o’clock, and long shadows were
creeping across the grasses of the forsaken garden, when Jean Elspeth
came into sight again of Stoneyhouse, and found herself standing some
little distance from the gaunt familiar walls by a small pond that had
formed itself in a hollow of the garden. Her father had delighted in
water, and, making use of a tiny stream that coursed near by, had made a
jetting fountain and a fishpond. The fountain having long ceased to flow
and the pond having become choked with water-weeds, the stream had
pushed its way out across the hollows, and had made itself this dank
dark resting-place. You might almost have thought it was trying to copy
Jean Elspeth’s life in Sally Jones’s seaside cottage. On the other hand,
the windows of the great house did not stare so fiercely now; they were
blurred and empty, like the eyes of a man walking in his sleep. One of
the chimney-stacks had toppled down, and creepers had rambled all over
the wide expanse of the walls.
Jean Elspeth, little old woman that she now was, in her small black
bonnet and a beaded mantle that had belonged to Euphemia, stood there
drinking the great still scene in, as a dry sponge drinks salt water.
And after hesitating for some little time, she decided to venture
nearer. She pushed her way through the matted wilderness of the garden,
crossed the terrace, and presently peered in through one of the dingy
dining-room windows. Half a shutter had by chance been left unclosed.
When her eyes were grown accustomed to the gloom within, she discovered
that the opposite wall was now quite empty. The portrait of her
grandfather must have slowly ravelled through its cord. It had fallen
face upwards on to the boards beneath.
It saddened her to see this. She had left the picture hanging there
simply because she felt sure that Euphemia would so have wished it to
hang. But though she wearied herself out seeking to find entry into the
house, in order, at least, to lean her grandfather up again against the
wall, it was in vain. The doors were rustily bolted; the lower windows
tight shut. And it was beginning to be twilight when she found herself
once more beside the dark-watered pond.
All this while she had been utterly alone. It had been a dreadful and
sorrowful sight to see the great house thus decaying, and all this
neglect. Yet she was not unhappy, for it seemed with its trees and
greenery in this solitude to be uncomplaining and at peace. And so, too,
was she. It was as if her whole life had just vanished and flitted away
like a dream leaving merely her body standing there in the evening light
under the boughs of the heavy chestnut-tree overhead.
And then by chance, in that still hush, her eyes wandered to the surface
of the water at her feet, and there fixed themselves, her whole mind in
a sudden confusion. For by some strange freak of the cheating dusk, she
saw gazing back at her from under a squat old crape bonnet, with
Euphemia’s cast-off beaded mantle on the shoulders beneath it, a face
not in the least like that of the little old woman inside them, but a
face, fair and smiling, as of one eternally young and happy and
blessed—Lucy’s. She gazed and gazed, in the darkening evening. A peace
beyond understanding enwrapt her spirit. It was by far the oddest thing
that had ever happened to Jean Elspeth in all the eighty years of her
odd, long life on earth.
[Illustration: A delicate, lightly colored illustration showing a woman
in a dark, floral-patterned dress and a bonnet standing at the grassy
edge of a pond, looking down at a small figure or object partially
submerged in the water.]
[Illustration: A stylized, whimsical illustration of a man dressed in
historical-style clothing, including a hat and puffed breeches, dancing
or leaping high above a landscape with hills and a small village in the
distance.]
ON WHINNEY MOOR
_By BLANCHE WINDER_
On the bracken hill
Whinney Moor way
You may see a strange sight
Any time o’ day.
A green tall man
With a crooked knee
Goes trot-trot-trot
Unceasingly.
He lifts each foot
High on the hill,
He steps and he steps,
Yet he stays quite still.
From his either ear
A ring hangs down
In a silver disc
Like a big half-crown.
Long ribbons float
Round his crooked knee
Green as the leaves
Of an alder-tree.
Green are his breeches,
Green is his hat,
With a great gold buckle
Wide and flat.
His puffing breath
And his quick loud feet
Sound like a farmer
Threshing wheat.
On a bending stalk
A pipit stares
And forgets to sing.
The rough brown hares
That squat so flat
In the long deep grass
Wonder why he takes
Such a while to pass.
But the still grey sheep,
That look like stones,
Never lift a head
From the sunburnt downs
As this green tall man,
With the crooked knee,
Goes trot-trot-trot
Unceasingly.
His goblin feet
As they strike the ground
Are turning the big world
Round and round!
Round goes Stony Hill
And wide Merrow Down,
Stately Windsor Castle
Noisy London town!
Round goes England
From Deeside to Penzance,
Round goes Scotland
And round goes France,
Turned and turned
As fast as can be
By the green tall man
With the crooked knee
And the goblin feet
You may see any day
You happen to pass
Whinney Moor way.
[Illustration:
The rough brown hares
That squat so flat.
]
[Illustration: A decorative, symmetrical illustration featuring a
central, somewhat abstract face surrounded by swirling, leaf-like
ornamentation, with a small figure dancing atop a globe positioned below
the face.]