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IN THE MIST OF THE MOUNTAINS
+----------------------------+
| |
| _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_ |
| |
| (Uniform with this volume) |
| |
| SEVEN LITTLE AUSTRALIANS |
| THE FAMILY AT MISRULE |
| THE LITTLE LARRIKIN |
| MISS BOBBIE |
| THE CAMP AT WANDINONG |
| THREE LITTLE MAIDS |
| THE STORY OF A BABY |
| LITTLE MOTHER MEG |
| BETTY AND CO. |
| MOTHER'S LITTLE GIRL |
| THE WHITE-ROOF TREE |
| THE STOLEN VOYAGE |
| |
+----------------------------+
[Illustration: "'I'm so sorry, chickies,' she said kindly." (Page 19.)]
IN THE MIST OF
THE MOUNTAINS
By
ETHEL TURNER
(Mrs. H. R. Curlewis)
_Author of "Seven Little Australians," "The Little Larrikin,"
"Miss Bobbie," etc., etc._
ILLUSTRATIONS BY J. MACFARLANE
LONDON
WARD LOCK & CO. LIMITED
1908
TO
H. R. C.
"They that have heard the overword
Know life's a dream worth dreaming."
_Henley._
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I Somewhat Contagious 9
II Treating of Larkin and his Commission 23
III Miss Bibby 31
IV The Famous Novelist 43
V Ante-prandial Visitors 55
VI A Grocery Order 60
VII Letters to a Mother 72
VIII Across the Rubicon 87
IX The Interview for the "Evening Mail" 96
X Anna enjoys Ill-health 112
XI Miss Bibby's Holiday 126
XII In Black and White 135
XIII An Interview with the Interviewer 144
XIV The Literary Microbe 156
XV "Out of the Mouths of Babes" 170
XVI Wooing the Muse 179
XVII Literature is Low 190
XVIII An Editing Pencil 197
XIX Max Runs Amuck 205
XX A Lesson in Discipline 216
XXI In Print at last 227
XXII A Master Mind 229
XXIII The Picnic at the Falls 243
XXIV At the Second Fall 259
CHAPTER I
SOMEWHAT CONTAGIOUS
It is October and the mountains are waking from their short winter
sleep.
It is October, the month of the moving mists.
Come and let us take a walk, not down Fleet Street with Dr. Johnson, but
up a mountain side with Nature,--nay, with God Himself. There is nothing
to see, absolutely nothing at all. You know that there are trees on
either hand of you, and that the undergrowth is bursting into the stars
and delicate bells of its springtime bloom. But your knowledge of this
is merely one of the services your memory does for you, for the mist has
covered it all away from sight.
You look behind you and your world is blotted out.
You look in front of you,--nay, you cannot look in front of you, for the
mist lies as a veil, actually on your face.
"I breathed up a whole cloud this morning," Lynn remarked once.
"I eated one--and it was nasty," said Max.
Still you continue to look in front of you as far as may be.
And the next moment the veil lifts,--clean up over your head perhaps,
and you see it rolling away on the wind to one side of you, yards and
yards of flying white gossamer, its ragged edges catching in the trees.
And now your gaze leaps and lingers, and lingers and leaps for miles in
front of you. You look downward and the ball of the earth has split at
your feet and the huge fissure has widened and widened till a limitless
valley lies there. You look down hundreds of feet and see like sprouting
seedlings the tops of gum trees,--gum trees two hundred feet high.
The far side of the valley shows a rolling mountain chain washed in in
tender shades of purple, paling nearer at hand to blue, the tender
indescribable mountain blue. Great jagged headlands hang perilously over
the deep, and the silver thread of a distant waterfall gleams here and
there down the face of the gorges of whose wonderful beauty the tourist
has heard and comes thousands of miles to see.
A billowy cloud, soft and dazzling as snow, has fallen from the sky or
risen with the mist, you are not sure which, and lies bewilderingly low
and lovely on the purple hills. Then there comes that damp, delicate
sensation on your face and all is mist again.
It is just as if a lovely girl now playfully hid her exquisite face with
the gauzy scarf twined round her head, and now showed it, each fresh
glimpse revealing a newer and tenderer beauty.
Lynn, who, though but eight, is given to quaint and delicate turns of
thought, calls it all "God's kaleidoscope."
Nearer to the station cluster the weatherboard business places of the
little township of Burunda. The butcher does a trade of perhaps two
sheep a week during the winter, but leaps to many a score of them when
"the strangers" begin to come up from the moist city at the first touch
of November's heat. The bakers--there are two of them--fight bitterly
for "the strangers'" custom.
All the winter a few decrepit-looking tarts and buns form the shop
window display of each. But when signs of life begin in the cottages the
battle starts.
"Seven for sixpence," Benson writes in red letters on a card in the
midst of his "drop" cakes.
"Eight for sixpence," Dunks retorts in larger type in the midst of _his_
heap of the popular confectionery.
"Nine for sixpence," is Benson's desperate challenge,--the cakes of
course shrinking somewhat in size.
The baker does not live who can afford to give ten for sixpence.
Benson has now to create new signs. "No second-class flour used in the
cakes of _this_ establishment," is one of his efforts.
Dunks caps it.
"No miserable counting out of currants in cakes baked _here_. Visitors
are invited to sample." And on his counter is a very fruity specimen cut
across. As a result of this competition "the strangers" may count on
quite respectable cakes for their tea.
There are two grocers--brothers, oddly enough, though not connected in
trade; steady, peaceable old men with whom brotherly love continues
despite trade rivalry.
But they possess a live young assistant each, and it is war to the knife
between these lads.
They fall on the startled stranger before he is fairly out of the train
and thrust before him the merits of their respective establishments.
Howie, the boy of Septimus Smith, is lean and lanky and can stretch a
long arm and a trade card for an amazing distance to just beneath your
nose. But Larkin is small and wiry and has a knack of squeezing himself
right into the midst of your mountain of luggage and children and
porters, and earnestly informing you that Octavius Smith keeps the best
bacon in the district, and promising you that if you deal with him, he,
Larkin, will bring your letters with him from the post office every
morning when he calls for orders.
It is said that the loser invariably fights the winner after these
contests unless there falls to his lot another passenger by the same
train. But if it happens that the luck is to neither,--that is, if all
are hotel or boarding-house visitors, or (an unforgivable thing in the
eyes of both) if the newcomers are people who bring their own groceries
from the metropolis, then the two go off almost friends and help each
other up with any boxes the train may have brought for them.
The Lomax children took a keen interest in the warfare, and always asked
Larkin, when he came for orders in the morning, how many of the new
people's custom he had secured.
For it was Larkin's trick of insinuating himself among the portmanteaus
and confused servants and children, and then talking rapidly of bacon
and letters, that had gained him Mrs. Lomax's custom when the family
first came to Burunda. That bewildered lady simply had to consent that
he might call to get him out of the knot of seemingly inextricable
confusion with which she had to deal.
There are two photographers, two shoe-menders, two house agents, two
visiting doctors.
It is conceivable that if a third man of any trade come along the
character of business in Burunda may entirely change. But while there
are but two of each, the chances are that any day the visitors may have
the quiet monotony of the place broken up by a civil war.
Not far from the station stand the hotels and the more modest
boarding-houses.
And then begin the cottages and villas--nearly all of them
weatherboard--of people who like to have a foothold a few thousand feet
in the air when summer's shroud of damp enwraps the Harbour city.
The Lomax children swung disconsolately on the gate of their summer
home. All they could see was the road in front of them, now clear, now
filled with flying mist, and their senses were wearied of it.
Might they go down the gully?
No, they might not go down the gully. Who had time on a busy day like
this, and Miss Bibby writing to New Zealand, to go trapesing down all
those rough places with them?
Couldn't they go alone?
No, they could not go alone. A nice thing it would be for the Judge's
children to be lost down a gully and sleeping out all night.
Well, might they go down to the waterfall? They couldn't get lost on
made paths and with picnickers everywhere.
No, they might not go down to the waterfall. What would the Judge say if
he heard his children had been down a dangerous place like that and no
one with them!
"Well, let us go up to the shops and the station. We've got twopence
between us, and we want to spend it, and besides----" But Pauline broke
off, recognizing it was worse than useless to explain to a person like
Anna the pleasure they could obtain from watching to see whether Howie
or their own Larkin got most of the customers by the excursion train.
But Anna was horrified at the idea.
"In those dusty clothes and with your sandals off! A nice condition for
the shopkeepers to see a Judge's children in!"
"Oh, hang a Judge's children," muttered Pauline, but not until Anna had
returned to the house.
"Wish daddy was a butcher," said Muffie.
"Not a butcher," said Lynn, who was sensitive and never could pass the
shop of hanging carcases without a shudder,--"but a baker would be
_very_ nice, and make drop cakes seven for sixpence. Oh, I _could_ eat
a drop cake,--couldn't you?"
"A Benson's one," said Pauline dreamily; "they're the sweetest."
"But there are more currants in Dunks's," said Muffie. "I shall spend my
penny there."
"You won't," said Lynn, who was subject to fits of pessimism, "you'll
never spend it. Anna will never have finished washing up. Miss Bibby
will never have finished writing to mamma. We'll never get up to the
shops. We'll have to stop shut up here _for ever_."
"But why," said Muffie, who was only six, and easily bewildered by
words, "why can't we do like always and ever when we come up here?"
"Why, indeed!" said Pauline with much bitterness.
Max, the only son of the Judge and aged just four, had a clear way of
his own of arriving at the cause of various effects.
"Wish a late big lecipice would fall on Anna," he said.
"Really, Max," said Lynn, whose unspent penny was burning a hole in her
temper, "you are getting too big to talk like that. Late big lecipice!
Say, _great big precipice._"
"I did," said Max indignantly,--"I'll push you off the gate in a
minute."
"You wouldn't dare."
"Oh, wouldn't I?"
"If you move your foot I'll jerk you off."
"Now, don't begin that," said Pauline, "you'll make him cough
again,--let him alone, Lynn."
"Well, he mustn't say he'll push me off," said Lynn. "I'm only trying to
teach him to talk prop'ly. This morning he asked Larkin to come and look
at his lee lowing in the lound. And I had to explain that he meant 'tree
growing in the ground.'"
Max was red with anger.
"I didn't say that," he shouted, "I said plain's anything lee lowing in
the _lound._"
He sent each of the difficult words from his mouth with a snap, as if he
were discharging them from a pistol that jammed.
But Lynn jeered again.
He could not jerk her from the gate, though he tried hard; eight years
old can effect a much firmer lodgment than four years. He sheltered
himself behind his weakness.
"You'll make _me_ cough in a minute," he said, and began to draw in his
breath.
"You'll make me cough," said Lynn.
"I cough worser than you," insisted Max.
"You don't,--I get _much_ redder," said Lynn.
"I go purple, Miss Bibby says so," said Muffie complacently.
"I go nearly lack in the face," said Max.
It was possible that Pauline, who being ten was always superior, would
have laid claim herself to some still darker shade of complexion but
that a diversion occurred at the moment.
One or two people carrying golf clubs had passed along the monotonous
road during the morning and Max had longed to be a caddie. Once a
woodcutter had gone along with his axe over his shoulder and Lynn had
been moved to recite--to the disgust of the others--"Woodman, spare that
tree." And once Larkin had flashed past on horseback, Howie tearing
along not far behind, it having come to their ears five minutes before
that a cottage far away through the bush was opened, its occupants
having come up by the night train.
"When I grow up," said Muffie enviously, "I'll be a grocer's boy."
"An' I'll be the other one," said Max, so filled with glorious visions
suddenly that he forgot his original intention of coughing.
But now there came briskly round the corner one of the big Burunda
wagonettes, overflowing with ladies and children and picnic baskets and
plainly bound for the waterfall.
"Why," said Lynn excitedly, "there are Effie and Florence."
"And Frank," cried Muffie joyously.
"Why," said one of the ladies in the wagonette, "there are the little
Lomaxes,--I didn't know they were up." She stopped the driver.
Lynn and Muffie and Max were for rushing out and charging bodily into
the vehicle, and indeed one of the ladies was beckoning encouragingly to
them all.
Lynn's swift imagination saw themselves borne joyously off to the loved
waterfall; she felt the very water of the cool delicious pools on her
hot feet.
But Pauline, with a look of absolute tragedy on her fair little face,
banged the gate and kept her brothers and sisters on the hither side of
it.
"We're contagious," she shouted.
"Wha-a-at?" said the lady.
"Whooping cough," said Pauline with extreme dejection in her tone, and
as if for a guarantee of her veracity Max was seized with a paroxysm
then and there, and Muffie followed suit.
"Oh, drive on!" cried the lady hastily to her man, and gave an alarmed
look at her own little flock. But she pulled up again fifty yards away
and came back on foot and stood a very respectable distance away from
the infected spot.
"I'm so sorry, chickies," she said kindly; "that's a wretched visitor
for the holidays. Have you been very bad?"
"I go nearly lack in the face," said Max, not without pride.
"Is mother with you?" said the lady, Mrs. Gowan by name, somewhat
anxiously, "and your father?"
"No," said Pauline sadly, "they've gone to New Zealand,--mamma got quite
ill with nursing us, and daddie got it too, and he wouldn't come up
here."
Muffie giggled. "People's laugh 'cause daddie's got it," she
volunteered.
"But in New Zealand, you see," explained Pauline gravely, "no one will
know him."
Mrs. Gowan smiled a little--as others had done. For indeed the thought
of a dignified Judge drawing in his breath and whooping on the bench
like a frightened child was not without its humorous side.
The poor Judge had become quite sensitive about the ridiculous complaint
his children had given to him, and after struggling with it pettishly
for some time, and the vacation coming along, he had finally proposed
the New Zealand trip to his wife, the children being sent to complete
their cure to the summer home he had long since built on the mountains.
"Well," said Mrs. Gowan, "I am really sorry, dears, for we could have
had such fun, all of us up here at the same time, couldn't we? But you
won't speak to Effie and Florence if you meet them anywhere, will you?
Even if they try to speak to you? I have such a dread of whooping
cough."
"Paul told you straight away off that we were contagerous," said Lynn, a
little hurt that after her sister's magnificent honesty such admonition
should be deemed necessary.
"Yes, I know, dear," said the lady, "and indeed I thank Pauline very
much for being so considerate. It is Effie and Florence I am thinking
of; they are so thoughtless, I am afraid they will try to come over to
you."
"You'd better not let them come down to this part of the road then,"
said Pauline sagely.
"But that's the difficulty," said Mrs. Gowan, "their uncle has taken
'Tenby'"--she waved her hand to the cottage opposite that had stood
irksomely monotonous with closed shutters and chained gate ever since
the Lomaxes had come to Burunda this year, "and of course they will
often want to come down to him to listen to his stories. He is Hugh
Kinross, you know."
They did not know, and even now the name was a name to them and nothing
more. Mrs. Gowan evidently took it for granted that even children must
have heard of her brother, the famous author.
"So you will help me, won't you, Pauline?" she said appealingly,--"you
won't let Max and Muffie run out and talk to them! And if they try to
come here you will send them away, won't you, dear?"
Pauline promised her co-operation, though indeed her heart sank at the
prospect of seeing her merry little friend Effie day after day as close
as the opposite fence and never as much as exchanging chocolates with
her.
"When is he coming?" she said heavily.
"To-morrow," said Mrs. Gowan--then she laughed--"but I think he would be
afraid to come, don't you, if he knew he was going to have four little
rackets like you for such near neighbours. He has come all this way to
be perfectly quiet and write his new book."
Lynn looked quite impressed.
"I think we'd better stop in the orchard," she said soberly.
Mrs. Gowan kissed her hand to them and went off laughing to her
wagonette.