As time went on it grew so perilously easy to be deceitful! No one
thought of doubting them--no one thought of asking what they did when
they were left alone.
Day after day, as nurse's toiling figure disappeared up the wooden steps
on to the cliff, Dash and Dot burst round the corner of the rocks, and
almost without a word spoken, Susie's shoes and stockings were flung to
the winds, and she was scampering at headlong speed from pool to pool,
with Tom at her heels--like a wild creature, and in a condition that
would have fairly horrified poor nurse, who held that all well-conducted
young ladies, like the Queen of Spain, should have no visible legs!
Really, in her heart, Susie did not like the twins so very much. They
were wild and unkempt, and very boisterous; their twinkling black eyes
radiated mischief, but it was the sort of mischief that bewildered Susie
and rather frightened her. Nurse puzzled over her mangled stockings and
the hideous rents in her skirts, and Mrs. Beauchamp's patient fingers
grew stiff with darning; but whilst Susie flew about the rocks, careless
and dishevelled, she always forgot how sorry she was going to be
afterwards, and how uncomfortable her conscience was at night.
"I really won't go again," she said to herself time after time; and yet
the first sight of the twins splashing round the rocks scattered all her
good resolutions to the winds.
"I am glad I can trust you," her mother often said. "You are a comfort to
me."
"Troublesome comforts I should call them," nurse said; and, like many of
nurse's wise sayings, it was remembered by Susie, and left a little sting
in her memory.
This afternoon she came to the beach quite resolved to withstand
temptation, and to play demurely with the little ones. It had rained all
morning, and now Tom had gone to the town with his mother to buy some new
sand-shoes. For some time Susie was perfectly happy building castles of
sand and letting the rising tide flow into her moat. Nurse was indulgent
enough to waste a few of her valuable minutes in making a scarlet flag
and mounting it on a wooden knitting-pin, whilst Dick and Amy busily
ornamented its base with fan shells. Dick was the king, with Alick for
his knight--rather a top-heavy knight, with wayward legs--and Susie and
Amy were the besieging army, fighting with desperate courage as long as
they had breath.
Susie flung herself panting on the sand. "Isn't it funny, nurse," she
said, "that all the bad men were good kings, and all the good men had to
be beheaded?"
"I don't know much about any king, Miss Susie," said nurse, "except King
Henry the Eighth, and _his_ beheading was on the other side. He was a bad
man if you like, and I never had any patience with him."
"Oh, I forgot him," said Susie; "and I wouldn't say that King Edward was
a bad man exactly, though he is a good king; but he isn't what you would
call _prime_, is he?"
"Oh no, my dear, not prime," said nurse.
"And Charles the Second wasn't prime either," said Susie.
"I don't know about him, my dear," said nurse. "But to go back to King
Henry. I always felt very much for poor Annie Bullen. A monster of
iniquity I call him, dressed up in his ermine and fallals, and not a
policeman or a judge daring to say him nay."
"How nice it is that common gentlemen don't behave like kings!" said Amy.
"If I was a queen, I would throw my crown away when it was time for my
beheadal."
"No, you'd cry," said Dick solemnly.
"_I_ wouldn't," said Susie. "I'd march proudly out with my lovely hair
floating in the wind, and my swannish neck rising out of a black velvet
dress, and I'd stand on the block and say, 'I _will_ my limbs--that means
my legs and arms--to the four quarters of the country, and my heart to
the tyrant who broke it.'"
"Much he'd want it," said Tom disdainfully.
But Susie stood declaiming on the sand-hill, inspired by her own
eloquence, and gazed at with admiration by Amy for a courage she could
not match.
"O Susie, how brave you are!" she said. "They'd have to kill you to get
at it; you couldn't get at your heart till you were dead. I don't believe
I could ever be as brave as that. I know I should cry."
"It's called _weep_, my dear," said nurse, "when it's done by kings and
queens."
"Well, I should weep," said Amy. "And I make my wills quite differently
to Susie. I made a will this morning when it rained. You know you said
you were going to give me a paint-box on my birthday, nursie! Well, if I
live till my birthday, I'm going to leave it back to you in my will."
"You needn't trouble, Miss Amy," said nurse, "because if you don't live
till your birthday I can keep it."
"But that wouldn't be my _will_," said Amy, puzzled.
"But it would be your wish, my dear, which comes to the same thing."
"Well, mine would be my will, but it wouldn't be my wish," said Susie.
"It would be history, and things in history are never so bad as things
that happen to yourself."
"But it _would_ happen to yourself if it was _your_ legs and arms you
gave away," said Amy.
"And I dare say it was just as bad to have your head cut off a hundred
years ago as it would be to-day," said nurse--"I mean for the people
themselves."
"Do you think," said Susie, "that the Jews and people who had their teeth
pulled out by the king for fun felt it just as much as we do when we go
to the dentist?"
"_For fun!_" said Dick, in a horrified voice.
"Did they have gas?" said Amy.
"Gas!" said Susie, with a superior smile. "How silly you are, Amy! They
had no gas then--only candles, or perhaps lamps. And I don't see how they
could pull out teeth with lamps; do you?"
"No," said Amy, in a small, mortified voice.
"I daresay," nurse went on, as if there had been no interruption, "that
it would have been easier for Miss Susie to have been brave in a history
book than if the trial came to her here."
"I don't see why," argued Susie.
"Well, we are made so," said nurse. "Other people's trials are a deal
easier to bear than our own. Now you've been good children to-day, and
I'll make a surprise for tea as a reward. I'm going to leave you Master
Dick for an hour, Miss Susie; and you'll look after him well, and when I
wave you'll bring him in. Don't sit down any longer, but have a bit of
play on the sand; it's getting chilly, and it looks like more rain."
"All right," said Susie.
She was filled with light-hearted joy, and nurse's praise warmed her
heart; nurse so seldom praised her. She helped Alick's wilful legs to the
foot of the steps and watched him out of sight.
"I am so very glad I have made up my mind to be good," she said to
herself; "it is _perfectly easy_ if you make up your mind. I wish the
twins would come and want me to leave Dick, or go on the rocks, or do
something naughty. I would just stand here and look at them with my large
innocent eyes and my gentle smile, and I would say, '_Never_, twins!
Nurse has trusted him to me, and I have turned over a new leaf. I would
not touch the rocks with my bare feet, not for a king's ransom.'"
"Susie," cried Dick.
"Yes," said Susie impatiently.
"Come here, Susie," he said again--"quick, I'm so wet!"
"Oh, bother," said Susie.
She turned slowly, still inspired by her own eloquence; and there,
straight before her, as if they had walked out of the sunset, stood the
twins, with black hair waving, and bare, wet legs.
"Come on!" they shouted breathlessly. "It's a perfectly heavenly
afternoon for the rocks, but it's awfully late; you've kept us waiting an
hour whilst your nurse simply _clacked_."
"All right," said Susie.
It was really all wrong, but she had forgotten her promises, her
resolutions, her boasted courage. At the first demand of the enemy she
laid down her weapons and surrendered the fort, and in another moment
she too was flying bare-footed over the rocks, with Dick stumbling
laboriously after her.
"Susie"--his shrill, faint voice pursued her--"Susie, my shoes is wet;
come back!"
"Come on," cried Susie.
"My feet is tired. Susie, _it's Dick_."
But Susie was far ahead.
"Susie!" he called again.
Wet and miserable, he sat stolidly down upon a rock.
"If Susie leaves me I shall _weep_," he said out loud.