HEADACHE AND HEARTACHE.
“Look where the healing waters run,
And strive and strain to be good again.”
Poor little Nell,—it was almost pitiful to see how good she tried to
be after her escapade. There was absolutely nothing she would not have
done for Meg. She begged to be allowed to help in the housekeeping,
offered to take the darning of Bunty’s socks and Peter’s terrible
stockings as her own particular work, and sternly refrained from
looking in her glass when it was not necessary for the straight set of
her collar or respectable appearance of her hair.
She consulted Meg as to the best study she could take up—she said she
felt ashamed to be so dreadfully ignorant.
“Why, I haven’t read anything better than Jessie Fothergill and Rhoda
Broughton this year,” she said, in a tone of stern surprise at herself.
Meg suggested the “Essays of Elia,” “The Professor at the Breakfast
Table,” “Sesame and Lilies,” Lives of various poets.
“You can go then gradually to something deeper,” she said. “I’m afraid
you might be discouraged if you started on anything more solid just
yet.”
But Nellie’s zeal was too tremendous for half measures.
During the morning of the day after the dinner party, Meg had occasion
to go into the nursery for something or other during Miss Monson’s
hours, and with difficulty restrained a smile.
Nellie always studied—or pretended to—at a rickety-legged draught-table
in the window. Her working materials hitherto had consisted of a
chased silver pen that looked too elegant to write with, an ornamental
inkstand with violet and red ink, a box of chocolates, a novel in brown
paper covers, “Le Chien,” highly dilapidated, and “Samson Agonistes,”
which she was supposed to be studying in detail.
This morning all was changed. There was black ink in the bottles, the
silver pen was invisible, and a plain penny red one occupied its place
on the stag’s head. No trace of chocolates, no covered fiction at all.
Instead, a pile of books selected from the study simply because they
were the most solid looking and driest on the shelves. The choice
had occupied Nellie for almost an hour; if any she took down had
spaced matter, light-looking conversations, or broken-up paragraphs
she instantly replaced them. She had finally selected and carried to
the nursery, to Miss Monson’s incredulous surprise, the following
six: “Sartor Resartus,” “The Wealth of Nations,” “Marcus Aurelius,”
“Mazzini’s Essays,” the “Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire,” and
Johnson’s “Rasselas.”
When Meg came in she was struggling with Carlyle, fingers at ears to
keep him quite apart from the object lesson on Ants which Miss Monson
was delivering to Poppet and Peter. In the afternoon she practised for
two consecutive hours, not waltzes and scraps from the “Mikado” and
“Gondoliers” and “Paul Jones” as usual, but Plaidy’s technical studies
and Czerny’s Velocity Exercises and a fugue from Bach.
At night she took out a quantity of red wool that she found in a
box, and began to crochet a petticoat for an old woman who lived in
a tumble-down bark hut near the river, and had the reputation of
being mother of two bushrangers who had been shot, sister to a famous
murderer, and daughter of one of the early Botany Bay convicts.
But of course such an abnormal state of goodness could not be expected
to continue uninterruptedly, at any rate in its early days. In less
than a fortnight the silver pen made its reappearance, and violet ink
crept back into one of the bottles. The crochet needle was slipped out
of the sixth row of the petticoat and made to work fleecy white wool up
into that pretty style of head wrap known as a “fascinator.”
“Oh, I didn’t do anything so very dreadful, after all,” she said to
herself, with the blunted memory of ten days. “Dear old Meg is always a
little inclined to make mountains out of molehills.”
At first there had been a little real fright mixed with the thought
of the dinner-party. Five days after it was over, she was in at the
chemist’s spending eighteenpence of her allowance on a sweet little
bottle of scent for Meg.
And one of the grooms from Trafalgar House came in with a prescription.
“The old lady’s pretty bad,” he said, in answer to a question of the
chemist that Nell had not caught, “and two more of the maids are down.”
Nellie lingered a few minutes, counted her change several times,
examined the nail and tooth-brushes displayed in a glass case, and read
an advertisement setting forth the merits of somebody’s pills.
The man said he would call back for the medicine in half an hour, and
departed. Then she went back to the counter.
“Is it Mrs. Fitzroy-Browne who is ill?” she asked, remembering with a
pang the poor old woman’s wistful “I just wish you was my little girl!”
“Yes, she’s down with scarlet-fever—several of the servants too,” he
said, and went to the gas to melt some sealing-wax.
The girl went home with a grave face. Apart from regret at the old
lady’s illness, there was the fear that she herself might have caught
it. She went straight to her room and examined her tongue anxiously at
the glass; then she held one wrist gravely with a finger and thumb, and
asked herself if she felt feverish.
But the pulse was calm, the tongue healthily red,—she laughed at
herself.
“I never felt better in my life,” she said aloud.
After some deliberation she decided she would not tell Meg. “She’d only
worry, and prepare herself for my immediate funeral,” she thought. “I
should be all over red spots by now if I had got it.”
So that is how it happened, when ten days had gone and she still felt
exuberantly well, that the silver pen returned and the fascinator was
commenced. One could not wear sackcloth for ever.
She even borrowed “Comin’ thro’ the Rye” and “Joan” from a girl-friend;
and “Rasselas” and “Sartor Resartus” slipped down behind the table and
were forgotten.
But she had intended all the time to consult Alan. He had been away for
almost a fortnight in Victoria, or she would have asked him before.
The afternoon he returned, and as soon as she could get him away from
Meg, she asked him if he would come down into the garden with her, as
she wanted to ask him something very particularly.
The young doctor laughed, and put himself very much at her service.
“I hope it’s not about the style of hats in Melbourne,” he said in mock
alarm, as they went down the path; “for I culpably forgot to notice. If
it’s only sleeves, now, I can tell you—they’re up to the ears, and a
yard and a half wide.”
“It’s about the state of my health,” she said sententiously,—“I wish to
consult you _professionally_ Dr. Courtney!”
He put on a sympathetic look.
“The heart, I suppose?” he said.
But Nell stopped short in the summer-house.
“Don’t be stupid!” she said. “Look here, Alan, have I, or have I not,
got scarlet-fever?”
He could not help laughing. It seemed so absurd for a fine girl—the
picture of health—to ask such a question.
“Your skin is cool—your pulse normal—your tongue fit for a health
advertisement. If you have got it you’re managing to conceal it very
well,” he said. “You might give me the recipe for my other patients.”
“I was talking to some one who had scarlet-fever just after,” Nell
returned,—“that’s all.”
There was no fun in Alan’s face now.
“When?” he said sharply.
“Oh, nearly a fortnight ago!”
“You’ve not got it, then,” he said. “Did you change your things
after?—take every precaution? How did it happen?”
She told him everything, blushing hotly at the surprise in his face
when he heard she had been to Trafalgar House.
He looked exceedingly serious over it.
“There’s no knowing what may be the end of it,” he said, a frown of
anxiety on his brow. “How could you do such a thing, Nellie? You might
have known Meg’s judgment would be good.”
“But you say I haven’t got it,” the girl answered, resenting the
elder-brotherly tone of reproof, “so there’s no need for any more fuss.”
“How do I know you did not bring it home with you and give it to one
of the others?” he said shortly.
Nell looked aghast.
“Why, I couldn’t do that, could I?” she said, with startled eyes. “I
never dreamt any one but I could have got it.”
“You ought not to have been allowed with the others,” he said.
“However, as things are, I dare-say no harm has been done. No one has
been complaining of headache or sore throat, have they?”
Nellie thought hard for a minute or two. She reviewed each member of
the family rapidly in succession, and tried to remember if any one’s
appetite had failed at any meal lately, that was always the great test
of health at Misrule.
“No,” she said at last. Then she caught her breath.
“Essie had a headache this morning,” she faltered. “Oh, but she fell
down and bumped her head, so that accounts, and she ate four jam tarts
yesterday when no one was in the room; that’s the cause of hers, Alan,
isn’t it?—oh, you can see it is.”
“I’ll look at her,” he said. “Does Meg know anything about all this?”
“I didn’t like to worry her,” Nellie answered, and followed him up the
path like a criminal found out in blackest iniquity. She had never
dreamed she was endangering the others. Poppet met them on the second
path.
“Afternoon tea’s ready, and Meg says aren’t you two ever coming in. No,
I don’t want any, there’s only gingerbread.”
[Illustration: “PETER WAS ENGAGED IN CHASING A FAT DUCK.”]
Alan felt her pulse, and asked to see her tongue.
“There’s something alarming in a little girl who doesn’t like
gingerbread,” he said; but there was a professional look in his eye.
“She never eats gingerbread,” Nell exclaimed, almost indignant with
him for having fears when the child looked so rosy.
“Poppet’s all right,” he said in a low tone, as they went on; and
Nellie could have cried in her relief.
“Peter next,” she said.
They went down into the paddock, where Peter was engaged in chasing a
fat duck from end to end, without a thought in his mind of being cruel
to it. He was hot, certainly, but that was the exertion of running and
shouting.
“Is your throat sore?” Nellie burst out, before they fairly reached him.
“I thould think I can thout if I like,” he said in an injured tone,
taking her anxious query for sarcasm.
Alan caught him by the back of his sailor coat.
“Mad, quite mad,” he said—“only lunatics rush about like this. Hold him
while we find out the symptoms, Nellie, and see whether we’ll have to
extract his teeth, or put his legs in plaster-of-Paris.”
“He’s all right too, I think,” he said, when the released boy sprang
away again after the duck, that was panting in a corner with one
anxious eye on its enemy.
“Bunty’s _beautifully_ well,” Nell said eagerly, as they went up to the
house again. “You should just see him eat, Alan. And Pip is splendid;
so is Meg, as you can see.”
Meg was standing on the front verandah, a troubled look in her eyes.
“Oh, there you are!” she said.
“Here we are,” said Nellie. She drooped her eyes guiltily. “Is the tea
cold?”
But Meg did not answer her.
“I wish you’d come and look at Essie, Alan,” she said. “She’s been
eating pastry, and it’s upset her, poor little thing. I don’t like her
looks.”
“Does her head ache?” Nellie asked with dry lips.
“She says her head aches, her throat aches, and her legs
ache,—everything aches,” was Meg’s answer. “Esther always gives her
aconite if she’s out of sorts, Alan. I gave her five drops this
morning: was that right?”
“Quite,” he said; “I’ll go up and look at her now.”
He went up the stairs behind Meg, a very grave look in his eyes.
And Nellie followed with a face as colourless as the great white roses
she had stuck in her belt so lightheartedly half an hour ago.