He trotted off, parcel under arm, and the maniacs sent "Happy
Christmasses" after him.
"Nell O'Brien," Denis exclaimed, "that for your impertinent pate!"
The woolly rabbit bit her brow. A dog followed, a ball, an elephant, a
brush--then Molly burst out, "Mrs. J-J-Jelks!"
Mrs. Jelks received a fur monkey on her plump shoulder. She was wiping
her eyes, but her laughter was dying, killed by her disapproval of the
toy storm.
"Please, sir, I--couldn't afford to pay breakages! O dear! Well, it
was as good as a play, I do declare. I only come back because you was
getting too free with my goods. 'Ere's your biscuit, doggie." She bent
down slowly to K.K. Denis gazed at her back.
"Jelly, valley, and twenty-four year 'ave Jelks and me," he murmured
serenely.
Molly fled.
"Were you list'nin'?" Sheila Pat demanded.
"Did you think I'd leave my shop all that while, my dear? I've been
a-watching you through the spy-'ole. You've broke one or two things,
sir!"
"Oh, we'll buy them. We like 'em broken."
"Well, now, I've never 'eard anyone say that before. And you sold that
table and tea-set at half price--"
"Oh, that's all right! We'll pay the difference."
"I thought that was what you'd do, sir."
They began choosing toys again. Sheila Pat, on whom the fever of
bargain-hunting had descended, asked earnestly if Mrs. Jelks hadn't any
broken toys.
Mrs. Jelks nearly subsided on to a piled-up heap of pots and pans, under
the impression that they were a chair.
"Well," she gasped, "_more_ broken toys! Well, I never did!"
Molly crept back and took part in the choosing.
"I think that's all," Nell said at last.
"Yes, miss. I've kep' count. That'll be eleven and threepence."
"_How_ much?"
"Eleven and threepence, miss."
They began to laugh.
"Denis, we didn't mean to go beyond two or three shillings! I wouldn't
have thought if we'd bought _pounds'_ worth of fourpenny halfpenny
things, it could have come to that!"
Mrs. Jelks did not deliver goods at houses, and she had no brown paper.
So the O'Briens marched forth laden heavily with weird-shaped newspaper
parcels. It happened that Ted Lancaster, in a silk hat, long fawn coat,
and immaculate patent-leather boots, came strolling across their path.
Over a large and bulging Noah's ark up went Nell's head.
Hat in hand, he greeted them.
"You'll let me carry those parcels, Miss O'Brien?"
"No, thanks."
"Please let me; and you'll let me carry yours, too," to Molly, "won't
you?"
"Thank you," said Molly, shyly.
"Good for you, old chap! I did my best, but I've only one pair of arms,
don't you know," observed Denis.
"Newspaper parcels seem incongruous with you, somehow," said Nell,
unkindly.
He flushed up.
"Hand 'em over, Nell!" said Denis, frowning. "Don't keep us all
standing here!"
Nell walked on quickly.
"I like to carry them myself."
Ted spoke to Sheila Pat.
"Gigantic Atom, I bet anything you, too, prefer to carry your own
parcels?"
She nodded.
"But I'd like to hold your arm."
"Honoured, I'm sure."
Laboriously she freed her right hand and tucked it, and a lamb that had
escaped from a parcel, beneath his arm.
Nell had grown penitent. She turned a charming and rather pink cheek
towards him.
"I'm tired of carrying my parcels," she said plaintively.
"You'll let me? _Thanks_!"
They told him of their morning's shopping, and he listened with absorbed
interest.
Then Nell, who hated to have a grievance hidden away, brought hers out
reproachfully.
"I do think it was awfully nasty of you to go away and forget I was
keeping a place for you the other night."
He promptly dropped a parcel.
"Forget!" he exclaimed, standing on Noah, and surrounded by his
relations and his horses and his cows and his elephants and his trees.
"Why, Pennington took my place!"
"Oh, but that was only till you should come back."
"Fool!" he muttered savagely, and kicked Noah's aunt.
"Be careful, boy!" shrilled the Atom, who was picking up Noah and his
impedimenta.
"Sorry!" He stooped and helped her.
"So," said Mistress Nell, "you thought I broke my word!"
"I--I'm awfully sorry. I thought you'd forgotten."
"I never forget a promise."
"No, of course not! That is--I mean--I thought--hang it all, I was an
idiot!" He flung Noah's patriarchal oak into the box. "But when I saw
that fool of a Pennington--"
"He's not a fool. I don't see why you should call him names. And
hadn't you better hurry? We're obstructing the pavement."
"This--er--lady in the blue dressing-gown won't go in."
"I'll take her," volunteered the Atom.
Nell looked down into his face and laughed.
"Oh, that's all right!" he exclaimed, relieved.
"I say," Denis and Molly reappeared, coming back to look for them,
"aren't you ever coming?"
Ted, once more clasping the newspapered Noah's ark and other toys to the
bosom of his fashionable coat, walked on.
"Been to a concert with my aunt and cousins," he volunteered to Denis.
"Like it?"
He frowned.
"I like going to concerts alone," he observed ungallantly.
And Nell dimpled, as she mentally drew pictures.
He could not come in with them, as he was due somewhere else, but the
real regret in his face and voice prompted them to insist that he should
come very soon.
Up in the Stronghold Sheila Pat turned to Denis.
"I'm thinking you make very unrespectful friends, Denis O'Brien," she
remarked austerely. "That boy--" pause--"_pulled--my--pig-tail_!"
*CHAPTER XV*
Nell stirred energetically.
"Molly! Molly!"
"Yes!"
"Come and stir my toffee a minute. I want to run down and look at my
cakes."
"Oh, miss," Sarah greeted her with a relieved and beaming smile, "I'm so
glad you've come. I'm that afraid they'll burn! And I darsent open the
oven door, 'cause you told me not to."
"Don't they look good, Sarah?"
"'Aven't they risen splendid, miss?"
Sarah looked at the little golden cakes admiringly. "You can cook
beautiful! Those pitaters you showed me 'ow to do--they were
beautiful."
"Oh, potatoes!" She laughed. "They're our national dish, you know.
Sarah, is your mother better?"
"Yes, miss, and those books did cheer 'er you wouldn't believe, with all
the beautiful pictures of the birds and animals and flowers and trees
and reading about 'em; not," honestly, "that she reads all of 'em, her
not being a scholard, but there's one or two about the little birds and
'ow they builds their nests and all that that she's just read over and
over again, and she does enjoy the pictures--such a one she is for the
country ever since she went to Margate for a week on 'er 'oneymoon! And
she's that careful with them, miss!"
Nell nodded.
"Yes she is. I'm so glad--I do hate to have books mauled about."
Sarah grinned delightedly.
"This is how she does, miss. She gits out 'er black-edged handkercher
what she 'ad for father's funeral and Walter's and Gladys's,--what died,
you know,--and she puts it across the back of the book and round the
edges so as her fingers don't touch the pages at all, and she keeps the
book wrapped up in that funeral handkercher, and she says to the
children, 'If ever I ketch you a-touching of that handkercher, I'll beat
you till you're black and blue from head to foot!' So you see, miss,
that's 'ow it is."
Nell, twinkling over the contrast between Mrs. Jones's fierce words and
herself, a meek little thin woman with watery blue eyes and no control
over even her baby, gravely declared she did see, and then hurried up to
the Stronghold again.
"It really looks charming!" she said, standing on the threshold and
looking round the little, overcrowded room, with its pictures, its
books, its various treasures, its photographs, a good many of them in
beautifully carved Irish bog-oak frames, its two bronze jars with pink
chrysanthemums in them, its collection of bog-oak pigs of all sizes.
Jim O'Driscoll sat thoughtfully in the large cage that Denis had made
for him. He had discovered that, by stretching out his arm to its
uttermost length, he could reach a cushion on the sofa; that, by
wriggling in a finger, he could pull the feathers out, and he was very
happy.
"Poor Jimmy," Nell said as she passed him sitting innocently gazing
before him, "I wonder if you're getting used to earthquakes and
tornadoes that seize up your house and hurl it into darkness behind the
sofa! Aunt Kezia never used to come up here as she does now!"
Molly shouted out, "Oh!" and a crash drowned her voice.
In trying to fix some holly in a pot on a shelf, she had knocked the
shelf down, and with it a collection of pots, curious stones,
photographs, pigs.
Nell prognosticated, "Now Ted Lancaster will come," and dived under the
table after a curious old fossil she had found one day in the little
stream at the foot of Belmarknock Hill. She picked it up, and sat back
on her heels, lost in a sudden dream of that misty day when she had
found it. The dear mist! She remembered what a vivid emerald green the
grass had been--and the golden shafts of sunlight that fell athwart the
mist--and the deep blue sky behind it. She remembered how clearly the
reflection of herself and her red tam-o'-shanter had shown in the
stream--and down the hill Denis's voice, singing and shouting to his
dogs, had come to her....
Ted Lancaster stood within the doorway and looked round the room with
bewildered eyes.
Emerging from the lounge were a pair of long legs and a bit of skirt.
Up on a step-ladder, in the corner, he discerned the Atom. From beneath
the table trailed a piece of bright blue pinafore; that was all.
"I've told the handmaiden to hurry up with tea," came Denis's voice
behind him.
The legs beneath the lounge wriggled spasmodically, and out came Molly,
red and abashed. From the step-ladder descended the Atom, but Nell sat
on, serene and absorbed, beneath the table.
"Where's Nell?" shouted Denis. "I say, bet you knocked that shelf down,
old muddle-head! What ever's Nell sitting under the table for?"
Brought to the present, she crawled out.
"How-do-you-do?" she said in an absent sort of voice.
Ted looked at her. Her eyes were soft and looking far away; she quite
forgot to remember how queer he must have thought it to find her sitting
under the table. The suddenness of the change from the stream with its
music in her ears, and the hills and the mist before her eyes, to the
Stronghold was harsh, and made her feel bad. From her face he glanced
to the queer old fossil to which her fingers were clinging with
something of desperation in their hold, and he understood suddenly. He
turned his broad shoulders on her.
"What were you doing under that lounge, Miss Molly? And you, Miss Sheila
Patricia Kathleen O'Brien--surely you should not have been at the top of
those steps?"
Sheila Pat's great eyes fairly glowered at him.
"Sure, thin, I was never dhramin' you were a--a spoilsport! Go away!
It's easy to see now that you've never been in Ireland!"
"I've forbidden those steps to her," declared Denis, striving to look
severe. "Let's take them out, old man."
"I--I wish you wouldn't call me 'Miss Molly'!" blurted out Molly,
suddenly.
He looked at her surprised.
"It's awfully good of you," he said in his quiet voice, and Molly's hot
cheeks cooled. "I shall be awfully pleased to call you 'Molly,' Molly."
"You're not to call me Sheila Pat," declared the Atom, her pig-tail at
an acute angle.
"I should not think of taking such a liberty, Miss Sheila Patricia
Kathleen O'Brien."
"I've made some toffee," said Nell. "Are you fond of it? It's too soft
to eat yet," digging a knife into it.
"Oh, I say, is it at the stage where it pulls into long strips when you
try to bite it, and catches on your nose and mouth and everywhere?"
She nodded.
"Let me have a bit, will you? I haven't had it like that since I was a
kid and my old nurse used to make it."
Presently, with his teeth stuck together and his fingers all sticky, he
seemed supremely happy.
"_I_ prefer toffee the proper way," observed the Atom, nose in air.
"_I'm_ not a baby to want it all soft for my teeth!"
"Ah," said Ted, "you will soon, when your milk teeth begin to wabble
before they fall out."
The Atom was observed surreptitiously feeling her little white teeth.
"Nell," quoth Denis, "I've just washed my hands. Feed me, asthore.
Think I'm a little, little birdie--ah!"
He stopped abruptly, and his cheek shone round and tight over Nell's
liberal interpretation of his request. But, liberal as it was, it did
not seem to affect his appetite for tea. Nell's cakes all vanished;
more toast had to be made, and Ted called down a good deal of laughter
at his clumsiness over the business of toasting. Once Miss Kezia sent
Sarah up to request that there should be "less noise." Ted's face of
whimsical amusement delighted Nell.
Denis issued a mandate that it should be a "rhyming tea." He explained
to Ted:--
"You mustn't speak except in rhyme. Everything you say must rhyme
somehow--twig?"
"Oh, I say," Ted's eyebrows were stuck up. "I can't, you know! Never
made a rhyme in my life!"
"That's the fun!" declared Nell, and he pondered her cryptic utterance
ruefully.
It was "fun." Ted's awful and desperate rhymes made them shout with
laughter. He mournfully dubbed Denis a beastly poet, and eyed him with
reproach. Then suddenly his face cleared. With a bland gravity he
asked Nell to have a cake, and left the request rhymeless. To the
chorus of "Rhyme! Rhyme!" he responded amiably that he was speaking in
blank verse, and from the refuge of blank verse they could not move him.
In vain the Atom, her metre waxing wilder and wilder, as her indignation
grew, in vain she strove to shame him into rhyming. He gazed at her
with ever increasing enjoyment. To her madly rhyming vituperation he
responded with gentle obstinacy. And he stuck to his blank verse like an
Englishman, and a very unpoetical one.
"Oh!" exclaimed Nell, later on in the evening, "I want to show you
something. Now, you remember our broken purchases the other day?
Behold the legless doll!"
Ted gravely took it and examined a pair of somewhat shapeless, but plump
white linen extremities stuffed with wool.
"The shaftless cart! The paintless boat! The one-armed doll! The
headless lady! The three-legged cat!" One after another he examined
them. He was a good deal amused, but full of admiration; seeing which
Nell dragged out further examples of their art.
"Tell me what that is."
She held up a very corpulent, grey stuffed pincushion on four legs.
Ted stared uneasily.
"Be careful, old chap," warned Denis, from the armchair. "It's Nell's
pet admiration, and made by herself."
"A pig?" he queried uncertainly.
"Oh, 'tis the broth of a bhoy you are!" exclaimed Nell, in impulsive
triumph. "Now, then, Denis! Didn't I know all your scoffing was just
jealousy?"
"It's a splendid pig!" declared Ted, with enthusiasm. "Look at its
tail!"
"Do English pigs grow their tails on top of their off-hind legs?"
queried Denis.
"No; but little Irish girls grow 'em over their left shoulders!"
There was a spurt of appreciative laughter from an unwilling and
would-be dignified Atom.
"Look at my bear!" said Nell; "and oh, do look at Denis's effort!"
"Um! Is it an Irish animal?"
"No; you know what it is, you duffer!"
"An elephant, old man?"
"Try again!" dimpled Nell.
"A kangeroo?"
"You're getting nearer. It's something that hops."
"Hops? A lame giraffe?" He caught the cushion aimed at him by Denis.
"It's a--_robin_!" cried Nell.
"Great Scott!"
"What's this?" he picked up another work of art.
"That's a needle cushion," observed Denis. "It was going to be a cat,
but Molly's broken five needles into it already! Say, Lancaster, you
come over here and I'll show you a genuine work of art as compiled and
invented and built entirely by your humble servant!"
"Did you really make it?" He knelt down and studied the doll's house.
"Um--might be worse!"
"Four rooms," said Nell, thoughtfully. "Bedroom, kitchen, dining room,
drawing-room, or nursery?"
"Nursery," Denis decided. "Girls are always cranky over horrid wobbly
babies!"
"That's true," said Nell. "I mean," hastily, "girls do have the sense
to like nice little chubby babies, so a nursery it shall be!"
Kate Kearney came pattering softly up to Ted, and stood gazing into his
face. He picked her up.
"What d'you want, old girl?"
She lashed her tail; she wriggled her head into his shoulder; she eyed
him with innocent adoration.
"She's been up to something," observed Denis.
"Oh!" ejaculated Nell. "Oh, K.K.!" She held up a half-demolished grey
pig.
"'Oh! should you e'er meet this Kate Kearney,
Who lives on the banks of Killarney,
Beware of her smile, for many a wile
Lies hid in the smile of Kate Kearney.
Though she looks so bewitchingly simple,
Yet there's mischief in every dimple;
And who dares inhale her sigh's spicy gale,
Must die by the breath of Kate Kearney,'"
sang Denis. "The poor piggy inhaled her sigh this time."
When Molly and Sheila Pat had gone to bed, the others sat around the
fire and talked. Jim came down from the curtain rod, sat on the
hearth-rug, and gazed into the fire. Occasionally he glanced up with his
bright little eyes from one to another. He obviously took part in the
conversation. Nell began to feel that she had known Ted for years and
years. She discovered that he had no near relations except his father
and the aunt and cousins she had seen. Filling the gaps he left, she
made out that his father was absorbed in the game of speculation; that
he was always going to and fro between London and New York on business;
that Ted often did not even know his address.
When Ted departed, Denis went with him to the corner. Coming back alone,
he lifted his beautiful voice in "The Wearing o' the Green," and,
oblivious of the heads thrust from windows, strolled slowly towards his
gate.
Whereupon Miss Kezia was wroth on three counts: his being so absurd as
to have gone to the corner; his going with no coat or hat on; and his
singing in that disgraceful manner at that time of night in the streets.
Poor Denis! He had been used to sing always when he felt inclined at
Kilbrannan. Nell had often listened with delight to his voice as it
rang and echoed amongst their beloved hills. She had often joined in,
too.
All his excuse now was--"It's such a glorious moonlight night!" And he
went up unabashed to Nell. She was standing staring thoughtfully into
the fire.
"Denis," she said slowly, "all he could find to say good about his
father was that he 'gives him a jolly good allowance!'"
"Yes, poor beggar."
Silence.
"Denis, he seemed to enjoy it all so!"
"Yes."