How such an odd and curious notion had ever come into Miss Rawlings’s
mind, not even Miss Rawlings herself could have said. When had it come?
She could not answer even that question either. It had simply stolen in
little by little like a beam of sunshine into a large room.
Not of course into an empty room, for Miss Rawlings had many things to
think about. She was by far the most important person in the Parish, and
everyone—from Archdeacon Tomlington and his two curates, Mr. Moffat and
Mr. Timbs, down to little old Mrs. Ort the hump-backed charwoman who
lived in the top attic of a cottage down by Clopbourne—or, as they
called it, Clobburne—Bridge, everyone knew how _practical_ she was.
But once that sunny beam had begun to steal into Miss Rawlings’s mind
and into her life, it had lightened up with its precious gold everything
that was there. It was nevertheless a fantastic notion, simply because
it could not possibly be true. How could Miss Rawlings ever have lost a
little girl if there had never been any little girl to lose? Yet that
exactly was Miss Rawlings’s idea. It had flitted into her imagination
like a nimble, bright-feathered bird. And once it was really there, she
never hesitated to talk about it; not at all.
“My little girl, you know,” she would say with a little emphatic nod and
a pleasant smile on her broad face. Or rather, “My little gal”—for she
always pronounced the word as if it rhymed with Sal—the short for Sarah.
This, too, was an odd thing; for Miss Rawlings had been brought up by
her parents with the very best education, and seldom mispronounced even
such words as Chloe or Psyche or epitome or misled. And so far as I
know—which is not very far—and apart from shall and pal and Hal, there
is not a single word of one syllable in our enormous English language
that is pronounced like Sal; for Pall Mall, of course, is pronounced
Pell Mell. Still, Miss Rawlings did talk about her little girl, and she
called her, her little gal.
It never occurred to anybody in the Parish—not even to Mr. Timbs—to
compare the Little Gal to a gay little bird or to a beam of sunshine.
Mrs. Tomlington said indeed that it was merely a bee in Miss Rawlings’s
bonnet. But whether or not, partly because she delighted in bright
colours, and partly because, in fashion or out, she had entirely her own
taste in dress, there could not be a larger or brighter or flowerier
bonnet for any bee to be _in_. Apart from puce silk and maroon velvet
and heliotrope feathers and ribbons and pom-poms and suchlike, Miss
Rawlings’s bonnets invariably consisted of handsome spreading
flowers—blue-red roses, purple pansies, mauve cineraria—a complete
little garden for any bee’s amusement. And this bee sang rather than
buzzed in it the whole day long.
You might almost say it had made a new woman of her. Miss Rawlings had
always been active and positive and good-humoured and kind. But now her
spirits were so much more animated. She went bobbing and floating
through the Parish like a balloon. Her _interest_ in everything seemed
to have first been multiplied by nine, and then by nine again. And
eighty-one times anything is a pretty large quantity. Beggars, gipsies,
hawkers, crossing-sweepers, blind men positively smacked their lips when
they saw Miss Rawlings come sailing down the street. Her heart was like
the Atlantic, and they like row-boats on the deep—especially the blind
men. As for her donations to the Parochial Funds, they were first
doubled, then trebled, then quadrupled.
There was, first, for example, the Fund for giving all the little
parish girls and boys not only a bun and an orange and a tree at
Christmas and a picnic with Veal and Ham Pie and Ice Pudding in
June, but a Jack-in-the-Green on May-day and a huge Guy on
November the 5th, with Squibs and Roman Candles and Chinese
Crackers and so on. There was not only the Fund for the Delight of
Infants of Every Conceivable Description; there was also the
Wooden-Legged Orphans’ Fund. There was the Home for Manx and Tabby
Cats; and the Garden by the River with the willows for Widowed
Gentlewomen. There was the Threepenny-Bit-with-a-Hole-in-It
Society; and the Organ Grinders’ Sick Monkey and Blanket Fund, and
there was the oak-beamed Supper Room in “The Three Wild Geese” for
the use of Ancient Mariners—haggis and toad-in-the-hole, and plum
duff and jam roley-poley. And there were many others. If Miss
Rawlings had been born in another parish, it would have been a sad
thing indeed for the cats and widows and orphans and organ monkeys
in her own.
With such a power and quantity of money, of course, writing cheques was
very much like just writing in birthday-books. Still you can give too
much to any Fund; though very few people make the attempt. But Miss
Rawlings was a practical woman. Besides, Miss Rawlings knew perfectly
well that charity must at any rate _begin_ at home, so all this time she
was keeping what the Ancient Mariners at the “Three Wild Geese” called a
“weather eye” wide open for her lost Little Gal. But how, it may be
asked, could she keep any kind of an eye open for a lost Little Gal,
when she didn’t know what the lost Little Gal was like? And the answer
to that is that Miss Rawlings knew perfectly well.
She may not have known where the absurd notion came from, or when, or
why; but she knew that. She knew what the Little Gal looked like as well
as a mother thrush knows what an egg looks like; or Sir Christopher Wren
knew what a cathedral looks like. But as with the Thrush and Sir
Christopher, a good many little things had happened to Miss Rawlings
first. And this quite apart from the old wooden doll she used to lug
about when she was seven, called Quatta.
One morning, for example, Miss Rawlings had been out in her carriage and
was thinking of nothing in particular, just daydreaming, when not very
far from the little stone bridge at Clobburne she happened to glance up
at a window in the upper parts of a small old house. And at that window
there seemed to show a face with dark bright eyes watching her. Just a
glimpse. I say _seemed_, for when in the carriage Miss Rawlings rapidly
twisted her head to get a better view, she discovered either that there
had been nobody there at all, or that the somebody had swiftly drawn
back, or that the bright dark eyes were just too close-together flaws in
the diamond-shaped bits of glass. In the last case what Miss Rawlings
had seen was mainly “out of her mind.” But if so, it went back again and
stayed there. It was excessively odd, indeed, how clear a remembrance
that glimpse left behind it.
Then again, Miss Rawlings, like her great-aunt Felicia, had always
enjoyed a weakness for taking naps in the train, the flowers and plumes
and bows in her bonnet nodding the while above her head. The sound of
the wheels on the iron lines was like a lullaby; the fields trailing
softly away beyond the window drowsed her eyes. Whether asleep or not,
she would generally close her eyes and at least appear to be napping.
And not once, or twice, but three separate times, owing to a screech of
the whistle or a jolt of the train, she had suddenly opened them again
to find herself staring out (rather like a large animal in a field) at a
little girl sitting on the opposite seat, who, in turn, had already
fixed _her_ eyes on Miss Rawlings’s countenance. In every case there had
been a look of intense, patient interest on the little girl’s face.
Perhaps Miss Rawlings’s was a countenance that all little girls are apt
to look at with extreme interest—especially when the owner of it is
asleep in the train. It was a broad countenance with a small but
powerful nose with a round tip. There was a good deal of fresh colour in
the flat cheeks beneath the treacle-coloured eyes; and the hair stood
out like a wig beneath the huge bonnet. Miss Rawlings, too, had a habit
of folding her kid-gloved hands upon her lap as if she was an image.
None the less, you could hardly call it only “a coincidence” that these
little girls were so much alike, and so much like the face at the
window. And so very much like the real lost Little Gal that had always,
it seemed, been at the back of Miss Rawlings’s mind.
Not that there had ever been any kind of a ghost in Miss Rawlings’s
family. Her family was far too practical for that; and her mansion was
most richly furnished. All I mean is that each one of these little girls
happened to have a rather narrow face, a brown pigtail, rather small
dark brown bright eyes and narrow hands, and except for the one at the
window, they wore round beaver hats and buttoned coats. No; there was no
ghost _there_. What Miss Rawlings was after was an absolutely real
Little Gal. And her name was Barbara Allan.
This sounds utterly absurd. But so it had come about. For a long
time—having talked about her Little Gal again and again to the
Archdeacon and Mrs. Tomlington and Mr. Moffat and other ladies and
gentlemen in the Parish, Miss Rawlings had had no name at all for her
small friend. But one still summer evening, there being a faint red in
the sky, while she was wandering gently about her immense drawing-room,
she had happened to open a book lying on an “occasional” table. It was a
book of poetry—crimson and gilt-edged, with a brass clasp—and on the
very page under her nose she had read this line:
“Fell in love with Barbara Allan.”
The words ran through her mind like wildfire. Barbara Allan—it was _the_
name! Or how very like it! An echo? Certainly some words and names _are_
echoes of one another—sisters or brothers once removed, so to speak.
Tomlington and Pocklingham, for example; or quince and shrimp; or
angelica and cyclamen. All I mean is that the very instant Miss Rawlings
saw that printed “Barbara Allan,” it ran through her heart like an old
tune in a nursery. It _was_ her Little Gal, or ever so near it—as near,
that is, as any name can be to a thing, viz., crocus, or comfit, or
shuttlecock, or mistletoe, or pantry.
Now, if Miss Rawlings had been of royal blood and had lived in a
fairy-tale; if, that is, she had been a Queen in Grimm—it would have
been a quite ordinary thing that she should be seeking a little lost
Princess, or badly in need of one. But except that her paternal
grandfather was a Sir Samuel Rawlings, she was but very remotely
connected with royalty. Still, if you think about it, seeing that once
upon a time there were only marvellous Adam and beautiful Eve in the
Garden, that is in the whole wide world, and seeing that all of Us as
well as all of the earth’s Kings and Queens must have descended from
them, _therefore_ all of Us must have descended from Kings and Queens.
So too with Miss Rawlings. But—unlike Mrs. Tomlington—she had not come
down by the grand staircase.
Since then Miss Rawlings did not live in a fairy-tale nor in Grimm, but
was a very real person in a very real Parish, her friends and
acquaintances were all inclined in private to agree with Mrs. Tomlington
that her Little Gal was nothing but a bee in her bonnet. And that the
longer it stayed there the louder it buzzed. Indeed, Miss Rawlings
almost began to think of nothing else. She became absent-minded, quite
forgetting her soup and fish and chicken and French roll when she sat at
dinner. She left on the gas. She signed cheques for the Funds without
looking back at the counterfoils to see what she had last subscribed.
She gave brand-new mantles and dolmens away to the Rummagers; ordered
coals from her fishmonger’s; rode third class with a first class ticket;
addressed a postcard to Mrs. Tomfoolington—almost every kind of
absent-minded thing you can imagine.
And now she was always searching: even in the house sometimes; even in
the kitchen quarters. And her plump country maids would gladly help too.
“No, m’m, she ain’t here.” “No, m’m, we ain’t a-seed her yet.” “Lor’,
yes’m, the rooms be ready.”
Whenever Miss Rawlings rose from her chair, she would at once peer
sharply out of the window to see if any small creature were passing in
the street beyond the drive. When she went a-walking, she was frequently
all but run over by cabs and vans and phaetons and gigs, because she was
looking the other way after a vanishing pigtail. Not a picture-shop, not
a photographer’s could she pass without examining every single face
exhibited in the window. And she never met a friend, or the friend of a
friend, or conversed with a stranger without, sure enough, beginning to
talk about Young Things. Puppies or kittens or lambs, perhaps, first,
and then gradually on to little boys. And then, with a sudden whisk of
her bonnet, to Little Girls.
Long, long ago now she had learnt by heart the whole of “Barbara Allan”:
“... She had not gane a mile but twa,
When she heard the dead-bell ringing,
And every jow that the dead-bell gied,
It cryed, _Woe to Barbara Allan!_
‘O mother, mother, make my bed!
O make it saft and narrow!
Since my love died for me to-day,
I’ll die for him to-morrow.’”
Oh dear, how sad it was; and you never knew! Could it be, could it be,
she cried one day to herself, that the dead, lovely Barbara Allan of the
poem had got by some means muddled up in Time, and was in actual fact
_her_ Little Gal? Could it be that the maiden-name of the wife of Miss
Allan’s father had been Rawlings?
Miss Rawlings was far too sensible merely to wonder about things. She at
once enquired of Mr. Moffat (who had been once engaged to her dearest
friend, Miss Simon, now no more) whether he knew anything about Barbara
Allan’s family. “The family, Felicia?” Mr. Moffat had replied, his
bristling eyebrows high in his head. And when, after a visit to the
British Museum, Mr. Moffat returned with only two or three pages of
foolscap closely written over with full particulars of the ballad and
with “biographical details” of Bishop Percy and of Allan Ramsay and of
Oliver Goldsmith and of the gentleman who had found the oldest
manuscript copy of it in Glamis Castle, or some such ancient edifice,
and of how enchantingly Samuel Pepys’s friend, Mrs. Knipp, used to sing
him the air—but nothing else: Miss Rawlings very reluctantly gave up all
certainty of this. “It still might be my Little Gal’s family,” she said,
“and on the other hand it might not.” And she continued to say over to
herself with infinite sorrow in her deep rich voice, that tragic stanza:
She had not gane a mile but twa,
When she heard the dead-bell ringing,
And every jow that the dead-bell gied,
It cryed, _Woe to Barbara Allan!_
And “Oh no! not Woe,” she would say in her heart.
Soon after this, Miss Rawlings fell ill. A day or two before she took to
her bed, she had been walking along Laburnum Avenue, and had happened to
see the pupils of the Miss Miffinses’ Young Ladies’ Seminary taking the
air. Now, the last two and smallest of these pupils—of the Crocodile, as
rude little boys call it—were walking arm in arm with the nice English
mistress, chattering away like birds in a bush. Both of them were rather
narrow little creatures, both wore beaver hats beneath which dangled
brown pigtails. It was yet one more astonishing moment, and Miss
Rawlings had almost broken into a run—as much of a run, that is, as
being of so stout and ample a presence she was capable of—in order to
get a glimpse of their faces.
But, alas! and alack! the wrought-iron gates of the school were just
round the corner of Laburnum Avenue, and the whole Crocodile had
completely disappeared into the great stone porch beyond by the time she
had come in sight of the two Monkey-Puzzles on the lawn, and the brass
curtain bands to the windows.
Miss Rawlings stood and gazed at these—for the moment completely
forgetting polite manners. The hurry and excitement had made her hot and
breathless: and the wind was in the east. It dispirited her, and instead
of ringing the bell and asking for the Miss Miffinses, she had returned
home and had at once written an invitation to the whole school to come
to tea the following Sunday afternoon. In a moment of absent-mindedness,
however, she left the note on her little rose-wood secretaire beside the
silver inkstand that had belonged to Sir Samuel. And two days
afterwards—on the Friday, that is, the month being February—she had been
seized with Bronchitis.
It was a rather more severe attack than was usual for Miss Rawlings,
even in foggy November, and it made Miss Rawlings’s family physician a
little anxious. There was no immediate danger, he explained to Nurse
Murphy; still care is care. And Miss Rawlings, being so rich and so
important to the Parish, he at once decided to invite an eminent
Consultant to visit his patient—a Sir James Jolliboy Geoghehan who lived
in Harley Street and knew more about Bronchitis (Harley Street being
also in a foggy parish) than any other medical man in Europe or in the
United States of America (which are not usually foggy places).
Fortunately, Sir James took quite as bright and sanguine a view of his
patient as did Miss Rawlings’s family physician. There Miss Rawlings
lay, propped up against her beautiful down pillows with the frills all
round, and a fine large pale blue-ribboned bed cap stood up on her large
head. She was breathing pretty fast, and her temperature, according to
both the gentlemen’s thermometers, was 102.6.
A large copper kettle was ejecting clouds of steam from the vast
cheerful fire in the vast brass and steel grate, with the Cupids in the
chimneypiece. There were medicine bottles on the little table and not
only Nurse Murphy stood grave but brave on the other side of the bed,
but, even still more Irish Nurse O’Brien also. Now, the more solemn
_she_ looked the more her face appeared to be creased up in a gentle
grin.
Miss Rawlings panted as she looked at them all. Her eye was a little
absent, but she too was smiling. For if there was one thing Miss
Rawlings was certain to do, it was to be cheerful when most other people
would be inclined to be depressed. As she knew she was ill she felt
bound to be smiling. She even continued to smile when Sir James
murmured, “_And_ the tongue?” And she assured Sir James that though it
was exceedingly kind of him to call it wasn’t in the least necessary. “I
frequently have bronchitis,” she explained, “but I never die.” Which
sounded a little like “rambling.”
When Sir James and the family physician had gone downstairs and were
closeted together in the gilded Library, Sir James at once asked this
question: “What, my dear sir, was our excellent patient remarking about
a Miss Barbara Allan? Has she a relative of the name?”
At this Miss Rawlings’s family physician looked a little confused. “No,
no; oh dear no,” he exclaimed. “It’s merely a little fancy, a caprice.
Miss Rawlings has a notion there is a little girl belonging to her
somewhere—probably of that name, you know. Quite harmless. An
aberration. In fact, I indulge it; I indulge it. Miss Rawlings is a most
able, sagacious, energetic, philanthropic, practical, generous,
and—and—humorous lady. The fancy, you see, has somehow attached itself
to the _name_ Barbara Allan—a heroine, I believe, in one of Sir Walter
Scott’s admirable fictions. Only that. Nothing more.”
Sir James, a tall man, peered down at Miss Rawlings’s family physician
over his gold pince-nez. “I once had a patient, my dear Dr. Sheppard,”
he replied solemnly in a voice a good deal deeper but not so rich as
Miss Rawlings’s, “who had the amiable notion that she was the Queen of
Sheba and that I was King Solomon. A _most_ practical woman. She left me
three hundred guineas in her will, for a mourning ring.” He thereupon
explained (in words that his patient could not possibly have understood,
but that Dr. Sheppard understood perfectly), that Miss Rawlings was in
no immediate danger and that she was indeed quite a comfortable little
distance from Death’s Door. Still, bronchitis _is_ bronchitis; so let
the dear lady be humoured as much as possible. “Let her have the very
best nurses, excellent creatures; and all the comforts.” He smiled as he
said these words, as if Dr. Sheppard was a long-lost brother. And he
entirely approved not only of the nice sago puddings, the grapes, the
delicious beef-juice (with toast _or_ a rusk), the barley water and the
physic, but of as many Barbara Allans as Miss Rawlings could possibly
desire. And all that he said sounded so much like the chorus of “Yeo,
ho, ho,” or “Away to Rio,” or “The Anchor’s Weighed,” that one almost
expected Dr. Sheppard to join in.
Both gentlemen then took their leave, and Dr. Sheppard having escorted
Sir James to his brougham (for this was before the days of machine
carriages), the two nurses retired from the window and Miss Rawlings
sank into a profound nap.
In a few days Miss Rawlings was much, much, much better. Her temperature
was 97.4. Her breathing no more than twenty-four or five to the
minute—at most. The flush had left her cheeks, and she had finished
three whole bottles of medicine. She devoured a slice from the breast of
a chicken and said she enjoyed her sago pudding. The nurses _were_
pleased.
Now, naturally, of course, Miss Rawlings’s illness increased her anxiety
to find Barbara Allan as quickly as ever she could. After all, you see,
we all of us have only a certain number of years to live, and a year
lasts only twelve calendar months, and the shortest month is only
twenty-eight days (excluding Leap Year). So if you want to do anything
badly it is better to begin at once, and go straight on.
The very first day she was out in Mr. Dubbins’s invalid chair she met
her dear friend Mr. Moffat in Combermere Grove, and he stood conversing
with her for a while under the boughs of almost as wide a spreading
chestnut-tree as the village blacksmith’s in the poem. Mr. Moffat always
looked as if he ought to have the comfort of a sleek, bushy beard. If he
had, it is quite certain it would have wagged a good deal as he listened
to Miss Rawlings. “What I am about to do, my dear Mr. Moffat, is
advertise,” she cried, and in such a powerful voice that the lowest
fronds of the leafing chestnut-tree over her head slightly trembled as
they hung a little listlessly on their stalks in the spring sunshine.
“Advertise, my dear Felicia?” cried Mr. Moffat. “And what for?”
“Why, my dear old friend,” replied Miss Rawlings, “for Barbara Allan to
be sure.”
Mr. Moffat blinked very rapidly, and the invisible beard wagged more
than ever. And he looked hard at Miss Rawlings’s immense bonnet as if he
actually expected to see that busy bee; as if he even feared it might be
a Queen Bee and would produce a complete hive.
But after bidding him good-bye with yet another wag of the bonnet and a
“Yes, thank you, Dubbins,” Miss Rawlings was as good as her word. She
always was. Three days afterwards there appeared in the _Times_, and in
the _Morning Post_, and in the _Daily Telegraph_, and five days later,
in the _Spectator_, the following:
WANTED as soon as possible, by a lady who has lost her as long
as she can remember, a little girl of the name (probably) of
Barbara Allan, or of a name that _sounds_ like Barbara Allan.
The little girl is about ten years old. She has a rather
three-cornered shaped face, with narrow cheek-bones, and bright
brown eyes. She is slim, with long fingers, and wears a pigtail
and probably a round beaver hat. She shall have an _exceedingly_
happy home and Every Comfort, and her friends (or relatives)
will be amply rewarded for all the care and kindness they have
bestowed upon her, for the first nine years or more of her life.
You should have seen Miss Rawlings reading that advertisement over and
over. Her _Times_ that morning had a perfume as of the spices of
Ambrosia. But even Miss Rawlings could not have hoped that her
advertisement would be so rapidly and spontaneously and abundantly
answered. The whole day of every day of the following week her beautiful
wrought-iron gates were opening and shutting and admitting all kinds and
sorts and shapes and sizes of little girls with brown eyes, long
fingers, pigtails and beaver hats, _about_ ten years of age. And usually
an Aunt or a Step-mother or the Matron of an Orphanage or a Female
Friend accompanied each candidate.
There were three genuine Barbara Allans. But one had reddish hair and
freckles; the second, curly flaxen hair that refused to keep to the
pigtail-ribbon into which it had been tied; and the third, though her
hair was brown, had grey speckled eyes, and looked to be at least
eleven. Apart from these three, there were numbers and numbers of little
girls whose Christian name was Barbara, but whose surname was Allison or
Angus or Anson or Mallings or Bulling or Dalling or Spalding or
Bellingham or Allingham, and so on and so forth. Then there were
Marjories and Marcias and Margarets, Norahs and Doras, and Rhodas and
Marthas, all of the name of Allen, or Allan or Alleyne or Alyn, and so
on. And there was one little saffron-haired creature who came with a
very large Matron, and whose name was Dulcibella Dobbs.
Miss Rawlings, with her broad bright face and bright little eyes, smiled
at them all from her chair, questioned their Aunts and their
Stepmothers, and their Female Friends, and coveted every single one of
them, including Dulcibella Dobbs. But you _must_ draw the line
somewhere, as Euclid said to his little Greek pupils when he sat by the
sparkling waves of the Ægean Sea and drew triangles in the sand. And
Miss Rawlings felt in her heart that it was kinder and wiser and more
prudent and proper to keep strictly to those little girls with the
three-cornered faces, high cheek-bones, “really” bright brown eyes and
with truly appropriate pigtails. With these she fell in love again and
again and again.
There was no doubt in the world that she had an exceedingly motherly
heart, but very few mothers could so nicely afford to _give it rein_.
Indeed, Miss Rawlings would have drawn the line nowhere, I am afraid, if
it had not been for the fact that she had only ten thousand pounds or so
a year.
There were tears in her eyes when she bade the others good-bye. And to
everyone she gave not one bun, not one orange, but a _bag_ of oranges
and a _bag_ of buns. And not merely a bag of ordinary denia oranges and
ordinary currant buns, but a bag of Jaffas and a bag of Bath. And she
thanked their Guardianesses for having come such a long way, and would
they be offended if she paid the fare? Only one was offended, but then
her fare had cost only 3_d._—2_d._ for herself, and 1_d._ (half price)
for the little Peggoty Spalding she brought with her. And Miss Rawlings
paid _her_ sixpence.
She kept thirty little ten-year-olds altogether, and you never saw so
many young fortunate smiling pigtailed creatures so much alike. And Miss
Rawlings, having been so successful, withdrew her advertisements from
the _Times_ and the _Morning Post_ and the _Daily Telegraph_ and the
_Spectator_, and she bought a most beautiful Tudor house called Trafford
House, with one or two wings to it that had been added in the days of
Good Queen Anne, and William and Mary, which stood in entirely its own
grounds not ten miles from the Parish boundary. The forest trees in its
park were so fine—cedars, sweet chestnuts, and ash and beech and
oak—that you could only get a glimpse of its chimneys from the entrance
to the drive.
Things _are_ often curious in this world, and coincidences are almost as
common as centipedes. So Miss Rawlings was more happy than surprised
when, on looking over this mansion, she counted (and to make sure
counted again) exactly thirty little bedrooms, with some larger ones
over for a matron, a nurse, some parlour-maids, some housemaids, some
tweeny-maids and a boy to clean the button-boots and shoes. When her
legal adviser explained to her that this establishment, what with the
little chests-of-drawers, basins and ewers, brass candlesticks, oval
looking-glasses, mahogany beds, three-legged stools, dimity curtains,
woolly rugs, not to speak of chiffoniers, what-nots, hot-water bottles,
soup ladles, and so on and so forth; not to mention a uniform with brass
buttons for the man with whiskers at the park gate, would cost her at
least six thousand a year, that bee in Miss Rawlings’s bonnet buzzed as
if indeed it _was_ a whole hive gone a-swarming.
“Well, now, my dear Mr. Wilkinson,” she said, “I made a little estimate
myself, being a _business_ woman, and it came to £6,004 10_s._ 0_d._ How
reasonable! I shall be over four pounds in pocket.”
So, in a few weeks everything was ready; new paint, new gravel on the
paths, geraniums in the flower-beds, quilts as neat as daisies on a lawn
on the mahogany beds, and the thirty Barbara Allans sitting fifteen a
side at the immensely long oak table (where once in Henry VIII’s time
monks had eaten their fish on Fridays), the matron with the corkscrew
curls at the top and the chief nurse in her starched cap at the bottom.
And Miss Rawlings, seated in the South bow-window in an old oak chair
with her ebony and ivory stick and her purple bonnet, smiling at her
Barbara Allans as if she had mistaken Trafford House for the Garden of
Eden.
And I must say every single pigtail of the complete thirty bobbed as
merrily as roses in June over that first Grand Tea—blackberry jelly,
strawberry jam, home-made bread, plum cake, the best beef-dripping for
those who had not a sweet or a milk tooth, Sally Lunns, heather honey,
maids-of-honour, and an enormous confection of marchpane, with cupids
and comfits and silver bells and thirty little candles standing up in
the midst of the table like St. Paul’s Cathedral on the top of Ludgate
Hill in the great city of London. It was a lucky thing for the Thirty’s
insides that Grand Teas are not every-day teas.
[Illustration: “THAT FIRST GRAND TEA”]
And so, when all the thirty Pigtails had sung a Latin grace put out of
English by Mr. Moffat and set to a tune composed by a beloved uncle of
Miss Rawlings, who also was now no more, the Grand Tea came to an end.
Whereupon the Thirty (looking themselves like yet another Crocodile with
very fat joints) came and said good night to Miss Rawlings, though some
of them could scarcely speak. And as Miss Rawlings knew that not _all_
little girls like being kissed by comparative strangers, she just shook
hands with each, and smiled at them as if her motherly heart would
almost break. And Dr. Sheppard was Medical Adviser to the thirty little
Pigtailers, and Mr. Moffat came every other Sunday to hear their
catechisms.
And this was the order of the day with the Pigtails in their home. At
half-past seven in Summer, and at nine in Winter, the boy in buttons
rang an immense bell, its clapper tied round with a swab of cotton-wool,
to prevent it from clanging too sonorously. This great quiet bell was
not only to waken from their last sweet dreams the slumbering Pigtails
in their little beds, but to tell them they had yet another half-hour
between the blankets before they had to get up. Then, hair-brushes,
tooth-brushes, nailbrushes, as usual. Then, “When morning gilds the
sky,” and breakfast in the wide white room with the primrose curtains
looking out into the garden. And if any Pigtail happened to have been
not quite so good as usual on the previous day, she was allowed—if she
asked for it—to have a large plateful of porridge, with or without salt,
for a punishment. No less than ninety-nine such platefuls were served
out in the first year—the Pigtails were so high-spirited. Still, it can
be imagined what a thirty-fold sigh of relief went up when breakfast on
December 31st was over and there hadn’t been a hundredth.
From nine _a.m._ to twelve _p.m._ the Pigtails were one and all
exceedingly busy. Having made their beds they ran out into the garden
and woods: some to bathe in the stream, some to listen to the birds,
some to talk and some to sing; some to paint and some to play, and some
to read and some to dance, and some just to sit; and some, high up in a
beech-tree, to learn poems, to make up poems and even to read each
other’s. It all depended on the weather. The sun shone, the rooks cawed,
the green silken leaves whispered; and Miss Rawlings would stand looking
up at them in their venturous perch as fondly as a cat at its kittens.
There was not at last a flower or a tree or an insect or a star in those
parts—or a bird or a little beast or a fish or a toadstool or a moss or
a pebble that the little Pigtails did not know by heart. And the more
they knew them the more closely they looked at them, and the more
closely they looked at them the more they loved them and the more they
knew them—round and round and round and round.
[Illustration: “HIGH UP IN A BEECH-TREE TO LEARN POEMS”]
From twelve to one there were “Lessons”; then dinner, and tongues like
jackdaws raiding a pantry for silver spoons. In the afternoon those who
went for a walk towards the stranger parts, went for a walk. Some stayed
at home in a little parlour and sang in chorus together like a charm of
wild birds. Some did their mending and darning, their hemming and
feather-stitching, and some did sums. Some played on the fiddle, and
some looked after their bullfinches and bunnies and bees and guinea-pigs
and ducks. Then there were the hens and the doves and the calves and the
pigs to feed, and the tiny motherless lambs, too (when lambs there were)
with bottles of milk. And sometimes of an afternoon Miss Rawlings would
come in and sit at a window just watching her Pigtails, or would read
them a story. And Dr. Sheppard asseverated not once, but three times
over, that if she went on bringing them sweetmeats and candies and
lollipops and suckets to such an _extent_, not a single sound white
ivory tooth of their nine hundred or so would be left in the Pigtails’
heads. So Miss Rawlings kept to Sundays.
At five was tea-time: jam on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; jelly on
Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays; and both on Sundays. From six to
seven there were “Lessons,” and when the little Pigtails were really
tired, which was always before nine, they just slipped off to bed. Some
of them had munched their supper biscuits and were snug in bed indeed
even before the rest had sung the evening hymn. And the evening hymn was
always “Eternal Father”—for being all of them so extremely happy they
could not but be “in peril on the deep.” For happiness in this world may
fly away like birds in corn, or butterflies before rain. And on Sundays
they sang “Lead, kindly light” too, because Miss Rawlings’s mother had
once been blessed by the great and blessed Cardinal Newman. And one
Pigtail played the accompaniment on her fiddle, and one on the
sweet-tongued viola, and one on the harpsichord; for since Miss Rawlings
had read “Barbara Allan” she had given up pianofortes. And then, sleepy
and merry and chattering, they all trooped up to bed.
So this was their Day. And all night, unseen, the stars shone in their
splendour above the roof of Trafford House, or the white-faced moon
looked down upon the sleeping garden and the doves and the pigs and the
lambs and the flowers. And at times there was a wind in the sky among
the clouds; and at times frost in the dark hours settled like meal
wheresoever its cold brightness might find a lodging. And when the
little Pigtails awoke, there would be marvellous cold fronds and
flowerets on their windowpanes, and even sometimes a thin crankling slat
of ice in their water-jugs. On which keen winter mornings you could hear
their teeth chattering like monkeys cracking nuts. And so time went on.
On the very next June 1, there was a prodigious Garden Party at
Trafford House, with punts on the lake and refreshments and lemonade
in a tent in the park, and all the Guardianesses and Aunts and
Stepmothers and Matrons and Female Friends were invited to come and
see Miss Rawlings’s little Pigtails. And some brought their sisters,
and some their nieces and nephews. There were Merry-go-Rounds, Aunt
Sallies, Frisk-and-Come-Easies, a Punch and Judy Show, a Fat Man, a
Fortune-Teller, and three marvellous acrobats from Hong Kong. And
there were quantities of things to eat and lots to see, and
Kiss-in-the-Ring, and all broke up after fireworks and “God Save the
Queen” at half-past nine.
The house, as I keep on saying, was called Trafford House, but the
_Home_ was called “The Home of all the little Barbara Allans and such
like, with Brown Eyes, Narrow Cheekbones, Beaver Hats, and Pigtails,
Ltd.” And it was “limited” because there could be only thirty of them,
and time is not Eternity.
And now there were only three things that prevented Miss Rawlings from
being too intensely happy to go on being alive; and these three were as
follows: (_a_) She wanted to live always at the House—but how could the
Parish get on without her? (_b_) What was she going to do when the
Pigtailers became 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, etc., and grown-up? And (_c_)
How could she ever possibly part with any of them or get any more?
For, you see, Miss Rawlings’s first-of-all Barbara Allan was aged 10,
and had somehow managed to stay there. But because, I suppose, things
often go right in this world when we are not particularly noticing them,
and don’t know how, all these difficulties simply melted away at last
like butter in the sun.
In the first place, Miss Rawlings did at last (in 1888, to be exact, one
year after Queen Victoria’s first Jubilee), did, I say, at last go to
live at the Home of all the little Barbara Allans and such like with
Brown Eyes, Beaver Hats, and Pigtails, Ltd. She was called The Matron’s
Friend, so as not to undermine the discipline. When her Parish wanted
her, which was pretty often, the Parish (thirty or forty strong) came to
see her in her little parlour overlooking the pond with the punts and
the water-lilies.
Next, though how, who can say, the little Pigtails somehow did not grow
up, even though they must have grown older. Something queer happened to
their Time. It cannot have been what just the clocks said. If there
wasn’t more of it, there was infinitely more _in_ it. It was like air
and dew and sunbeams and the South Wind to them all. You simply could
not tell what next. And, apart from all that wonderful learning, apart
even from the jam and jelly and the Roast Beef of Old England, they went
on being just the right height and the right heart for ten. Their brown
eyes never lost their light and sparkle. No wrinkles ever came in their
three-cornered faces with the high cheek-bones; and not a single grey or
silver hair into their neat little pigtails that could at any rate be
seen.
Next, therefore, Miss Rawlings never had to part with any of them or to
search or advertise for any more.
Yet another peculiar thing was that Miss Rawlings grew more and more
like a Pigtail herself. She grew younger. She laughed like a
school-girl. Her face became a little narrower, even the cheek-bones
seemed not to be so wide. As for her bonnets, as time “went on,” they
grew up instead of broadwise. And when she sat in Church with the
Thirty, in the third pew down from Mrs. Tomlington’s, you might almost
have supposed she herself was a widish pigtail, just a little bit
dressed up.
It is true that in the very secretest corner of her heart of hearts she
was still looking for the one and only absolute little Barbara Allan of
her life-long day-dream; but that is how things go. And the thought of
it brought only a scarcely perceptible grave glance of hope and enquiry
into her round brown eyes. But underneath—oh dear me, yes—she was almost
too happy and ordinary and good-natured and homely a Miss Rawlings to be
telling this story about at all.
We all die at last—just journey on—and so did Miss Rawlings. And so did
the whole of the Thirty, and the matron, and the chief nurse, and Mr.
Moffat, and Dr. Sheppard, and the Man with whiskers at the park gates,
_and_ the Boy who cleaned the button-boots; parlour-maids, tweeny-maids,
Mrs. Tomlington and all.
And if you would like to see the Old House and the little graves, you
take the first turning on the right as you leave the Parish Church on
your left, and walk on until you come to a gate-post beyond the
mile-stone. A path crossing the fields—sometimes of wheat, sometimes of
turnips, sometimes of barley or oats or swedes—brings you to a farm in
the hollow with a duck-pond, guinea-fowl roosting in the pines at
evening, and a lovely old thatched barn where the fantailed doves croon
in the sunshine. You then cross the yard and come to a lane beside a
wood of thorn and hazel. This bears a little East, and presently after
ascending the hill beyond the haystack you will see—if it is still
there—The Home of all the little Barbara Allans and such like with Brown
Eyes, Beaver Hats and Pigtails, Ltd.
And not very far away is a little smooth-mown patch of turf with a
beautiful thatched wall round it, which Mr. Moffat consecrated himself.
And there, side by side, sleep the Little Thirty, with their pigtails
beside their narrow bones. And there lie the tweeny-maids, the
parlour-maids, the Man with whiskers at the park gate, and the Boy who
cleaned the button-boots. And there Miss Rawlings, too. And when the
last trump sounds, up they will get as happy as wood-larks, and as sweet
and fresh as morning mushrooms. But if you want to hear any more about
_that_, please turn to the Poems of Mr. William Blake.
[Illustration]
THE
PERFECT HOST
(_From Lady Trenchard’s Visitor’s Book_)