The sun was beginning to get tangled in a smear of cloud as they turned
out of the white lane into a green one. At the end of it was an old
gate, opening into a garden in the middle of the wood, as pretty as the
Garden of Eden. But this Eden also had its sorrows, for from somewhere
inside it a sturdy hullabalooing greeted their ears, interrupted with
the sound of small explosions.
“See, children,” said Sir John, “how deceptive is even the earthly
paradise in its promise of eternal joy. For of what more blessed and
lovely surroundings than these could any man dream? Yet he who dwells
here is the prey of grief. Let us look into this man's trouble.”
“Yes, sir,” said Dick, as a louder explosion than usual rent the air,
“for I doubt he's up to some mischief.”
So they went round a hedge of flowers, and found the miserable Adam of
this Eden seated in the middle of a small square of earth filled with
one of everything that could be thought of in a little space by a little
mind: such as one sweet pea and one spring onion, one lupin, one potato,
one broad bean, one double daisy, and one of whatever else you fancy.
But its four sides were framed in radishes, red and white, which an
extremely small boy, with the darkest brown eyes that ever smudged a
dark brown face with tears, was endeavouring to blow up with paper caps
full of gunpowder.
“Do you want those radishes up, sonny?” said Dick.
“'Ss!” hissed the little boy through his tears.
“What, all the lot?”
“'Ss!”
“You'll have a pain,” said Dick, beginning to pull up the radishes.
“Sha'n't eat 'em!” said the little boy.
“Don't you like radishes?” said Audrey. “_I_ do.”
“Then you eat 'em!” said the little boy.
“Thank you, sonny,” said Dick, “so we will; for radishes look pretty in
a red-and-white ring round a lettuce on a garland of cress.”
Saying which, he dropped a couple of handfuls in his bucket.
“Why were you blowing the radishes up?” asked Audrey tenderly, taking
the baby on her knee and drying his dirty face.
“'Cause they're _Hers_!” shouted the little boy, pointing suddenly at
the plank at the foot of the garden. “And she won't let me paddle
without grown-ups.”
And then he stuck his finger in his mouth, and stared from Dick to
Audrey, and abruptly rolled out of her lap and tumbled down the garden,
crying, “Sylvia! _they've come!_ so may I paddle _now_?”
Down the garden the company trooped after him; and standing on the plank
that lay over the brook, they saw the loveliest little creature in all
the kingdoms of the young; though whether she was sprung from the
kingdom of angels, of fairies, or of children none of them knew. For her
eyes were as merry as fairies and as sweet as angels, and the odd little
smiles that sat on her cheeks and in the corners of her mouth were both
tricksy and tender; and she had a lovely little body, clad in a single
blue-green garment that left her slender brown limbs bare to shoulder
and knee. She was standing with her feet close together and her head
bent, and her elbows lay straight by her sides, but her hands were
outstretched, palm uppermost, clasping the two ends of a hazel-fork,
which she held over the brook.
[Illustration: Color illustration of a woman in a blue dress and a small
child in an orange top walking across a wooden plank or bridge over a
stream in a wooded setting.]
“Wilf! Wilf!” said she. “How do I know if you can paddle till I know if
there's water here?”
And she fixed her eyes on the prong of the hazel-fork, and it began to
turn downwards, until at last it pointed directly at the brook flowing
under the plank. Then this child, for a child she was as well as a
sprite, glanced swiftly from the dark baby tugging her garment to the
people standing on the bank, and said, very seriously, but as though her
little mouth were pinching back some secret laughter, “Yes, there is
water here, and you may paddle if they will too.”
“Of course we will!” said Audrey, clapping her hands.
“Hurrah!” said Dick, swinging his bucket.
“Oh!” said Christie and
“Oh!” said Barbie, jumping for joy.
“It's very, very dangerous,” said Sylvia. “There are rapids and rocks,
and jungles that grow from bank to bank where you must crawl in the
water; and there are wrecks and whales and alligators and sea-serpents
and sirens and midges. You'll get bitten and drowned and dashed to
pieces and eaten up and put under a spell for ever and ever unless——”
“Unless what?” cried everybody.
“Unless I like,” said Sylvia, with her funny little smile.
By this time they were all barefoot, with their stockings and shoes
slung round their necks.
“Who's afraid?” cried Dick.
“Not me!” cried Audrey, Barbie, Christie and Wilf.
And Paul said “Umph!” and Emily “Cluck!” and Rufus “Miaow!” and Mike
“Wough! wough!”
“Follow me then!” cried the elfin Sylvia with a shrill sweet laugh; and
she dropped from the plank into the stony channel of the brook that was
sunk so deep between its banks of hazel and alder, with all their tangle
of undergrowth between, that it could scarcely be seen from the garden.
And after her splashed Wilf, and after him Barbie clutching Rufus, and
then Christie dragging Mike, followed by Audrey carrying Emily, with
Dick last of all and Paul tucked under his arm. They were all shouting
with glee.