Chapter V: Part 5

“Oh, so its name’s Lucy, is it?” said Tabitha. “You horrid little frump. Then you tell her from me that if _I_ catch her anywhere about, I’ll scratch her eyes out.”

After another pinch or two, and a good “ring-of-the-bells” at Jean Elspeth’s plait, Tabitha had gone downstairs to her father.

“Papa,” she said, “I am sorry to interrupt you, but I think poor Elspeth must be ill or in a fever. She is ‘rambling.’ Had we better give her some Gregory’s powder, or some castor-oil, do you think?”

Mr. MacKnackery had been worried that morning by a letter about a gold mine, something like that which poor Euphemia so many years afterwards was to receive from the Four Lawyers, though it was less worrying than that. But when _he_ was worried he at once tried to forget his worry. Indeed, even at sight of what looked like an ugly letter, he would begin softly whistling and smiling. So it was almost with a sigh of relief that he pushed the uncomfortable letter into a drawer and climbed the stairs to the nursery.

And when Jean Elspeth, after crying a little as she sat on his knee, had told him about Lucy, he merely smiled out of his dark eyes, and, poking his finger and thumb into a waistcoat pocket, had pulled out, just as if it had been waiting there especially for this occasion, a tiny little gold locket with a picture of a moss-rose inside, which he asked Jean Elspeth to give to Lucy the very next time she came again. “My dear,” he had said, “I have my Lucy, too, though I never, never talk about her. I keep her ‘for best.’”

As for Tabitha, he thanked her most gratefully that morning at luncheon for having been so thoughtful about her sister. “But I fear, my child,” he said, “you must be fretting yourself without need. And for fretting there is nothing so good as Gregory’s powder. So I have asked Alison to mix a good dose for you at bedtime, and if you are very generous, perhaps Jenny would like to lick the spoon.”

The very moment he turned his face away, with as dreadful a grimace as she could manage, Tabitha had put out her long pale tongue at Jean Elspeth—which was about as much use as it would have been to put out her tongue for their old doctor—Dr. Menzies—after he had gone out of the room.

Whenever Jean Elspeth thought of those far-away years she always began to day-dream. And whenever she began to day-dream Lucy was sure to seem more real to her than at any other time. The gravel path, the green lawn, the distant hills vanished away before her eyes. She was lost as if in a region of light and happiness. There she was happy awhile. But cold spattering rain-drops on her cheeks soon called her back to herself. A dark cloud had come over the world, and for the first time a dark dread came into her mind of what Euphemia’s letter might mean.

She turned sharply on the little green seat almost as if she had been caught trespassing. And at that instant she could have vowed that she actually saw—this time with her real naked eye—a child standing and looking at her a few paces beyond. It was mere make-believe, of course; but what most surprised Jean Elspeth was that there should be such a peculiar smile on the child’s face—as if she was saying: “Never mind, my dear; whatever happens, whatever they say, I am going to be with you more than _ever_ before. You just see!”

And then, not for the first time in her life Jean Elspeth felt almost ashamed of having a phantom friend. When they were all in such trouble, was it quite fair to Euphemia and Tabitha? Was it even quite right? She actually went so far as to turn away in the opposite direction, and would have hastened straight back to the house if, at that moment, she had not heard a small, curious fluttering behind her. She turned her head on her shoulder, but it was to find only that a robin had stolen in on her to share her company, and was now eyeing her with his bead-black eye from his perch on the green seat which she had but just vacated.

For lunch that day the butler brought in a small soup-tureen of porridge. When he had attended to each of the ladies, and had withdrawn, Euphemia explained to Jean Elspeth precisely what the lawyer’s letter meant. It was a long letter, not only about the gentlemen who had failed to find water enough for their waterworks in Armenia, but also about some other gentlemen in Madagascar whose crops of manioc and caoutchouc had almost as suddenly failed. Jean Elspeth did not quite grasp the details: she did not quite understand why the lawyers had ever taken such a fancy to caoutchouc: but she did perfectly understand Euphemia’s last sentence: “So you see, Elspeth, we are ruined!”

And would you believe it? Once more Jean Elspeth said the wrong thing. Or rather it was her voice that was wrong. Far away in it was the sound as of a bugle bugling at break of day. “And does that mean, Euphemia, that we shall have to _leave_ Stoneyhouse?”

“It means,” said Tabitha tartly, “that Stoneyhouse may have to leave _us_.”

“In either case we are powerless,” added Euphemia. And the tone in which Euphemia uttered these words—sitting there straight and erect, with her long white face, in her sleek grey silk morning gown with its pattern of tiny mauve flowers—brought tears, not to Jean Elspeth’s eyes, but to somewhere deep down inside her. It was as if somebody was drawing water out of the very well of her heart.

“It is the disgrace,” said Tabitha. “To have to turn our backs, to run away. We shall be the talk, the laughingstock of the county.”

“Laugh at us because we are ruined!” cried Jean Elspeth.

But this time Tabitha ignored her. “This is the house,” she said, “our noble grandfather built for us. And here I will die, unless I am positively driven out of it by these systematic blood-suckers.”

“Tabitha!” cried Euphemia. “Surely we should not demean ourselves so far even as to call them by their right name.”

“Systematic blood-suckers,” cried Tabitha fiercely. “I will sell the very rings off my fingers rather than be an exile from the house where I was born. And _he_—_he_ at least shall never witness the ruin into which our father’s folly has betrayed us.”

She rose from her seat, and mounting on one of the maroon damask chairs that, unless guests were present, were accustomed to stand in a demure row along the wall, she succeeded, after one or two vain attempts, in turning the immense gilt portrait of her grandfather with its face to the wall.

Then tears really came into Jean Elspeth’s eyes. But they were tears of anger rather than of pity. “I think,” she said, “that is being intensely unkind to father.”

“By this time,” said Tabitha sternly, “I should have supposed that you would have given up the notion that you are capable of thinking. What right have you to defend your father, pray, simply because you take after him?”

Jean Elspeth made no answer. Her father continued to smile down at her from his nail—though it was not a very good portrait, because the painter had been unable to get the hair and the waistcoat quite right. And if—even at this unhappy moment—Jean Elspeth had had her porridge spoon in her hand, she would certainly have given it a little secret wave in his direction.

But he was not to smile down for very long. The Miss MacKnackeries’s grandfather continued to hang with his face to the wall. But the two other portraits, together with the wardrobes, coffers, presses, sideboards, bead-mats, bureaus, and even the Indian work-boxes, were all taken off in a few weeks, to be sold for what they would fetch. And Euphemia now, instead of five, wore but one ring, and that of turquoises.

In a month all the servants, from the butler to Sally McGullie, and all the gardeners were gone. Mrs. O’Phrump alone remained—first because she was too stout to be likely to be comfortable in any new place, and next, because she was not greedy about wages. That was all. Just Mrs. O’Phrump and the gardener’s boy, Tom Piper, whose mother lived in the village, and who slept at home. But he was a lazy boy, was Tom Piper, and when he was not fast asleep in the tool-shed, he was dreaming in the deserted orchard.

It was extraordinary to be alive and to be living in so empty a house. The echoes! Why, if you but walked alone down a corridor, you heard your own footsteps tap-tapping after you all the way down. If by yourself, in “your ain, ain company,” you but laughed out in a room, it was like being the silver clapper of a huge hollow bell. All Stoneyhouse seemed empty now; and yet perhaps the emptiest place of all was the coach-house.

And then the stables. It was simply astonishing how quickly stray oats, that had fallen by chance into the crannies, sprang up green among the cobblestones in front of their walls. And if for a little while you actually stood in the stables beside one of the empty mangers, the note of a bird was like the sound of a hundred. And you could almost see ghostly horses with their dark eyes looking round at you out of their long narrow heads, as if to say: “So this is what you have done with us!”

Not that Jean Elspeth had very much time to linger over such experiences. Somehow, she seemed to have grown even smaller in the empty house. But she was ten times more active. And, though she tried not to be selfish by showing it, she was more than ten times happier. Between Jean Elspeth herself and the eagle-surmounted gateposts, indeed, she now secretly confessed that she had always hated Stoneyhouse. How very odd, then, that the moment it ceased to be a place in which any fine personage would care to stay a moment, she began to be friends with it. She began to pity it.

No doubt Tabitha was right. Their grandfather would assuredly have “turned in his grave,” in her own words, at the sound of those enormous vans, those hideous pantechnicons, as their wheels ground down the gravel in the lingering twilight evenings. And yet, after all, that grandfather had been born—a fact that very much shocked Tabitha, whenever her father had smilingly related it—that grandfather had been born in a two-roomed cottage so minute that, if only you could have got it through the windows, it would have fitted quite comfortably into the great dining-room at Stoneyhouse.

There was not a single bawbee then in his breeches pocket, and having been such a good man, as both Euphemia and Tabitha agreed, he did not need a bawbee now. _Would_ he then—once the pantechnicons were out of the way—would he, thought Jean Elspeth, have been so very miserable to see all this light in the house and to hear all these charming echoes?

There were other advantages, too. It was easy to sweep the dining-room now; and much easier to dust it. There was peace in its vacancy, and it was not stagnant. And one day, more out of kindness than curiosity, after busily whisking over its gilt frame with her feather cornice-broom, Jean Elspeth climbed on to a chair, and, tilting it, looked in at the portrait. A spider had spun its web in one corner, but otherwise (it was almost disappointing) the picture was unchanged. Nor had Mr. MacKnackery yet taken his watch out of his pocket even though (for his three granddaughters at any rate) the time was now, so to speak, long past twelve.

Jean Elspeth had had ridiculous thoughts like these as long as she could remember. But now they came swarming into her mind like midsummer bees into a hive. Try as she might, she could not keep them all to herself, and though on this account alone Tabitha seemed to dislike her more than ever, Euphemia seemed sometimes to wish for her company. But then, Euphemia was by no means well. She had begun to stoop a little, and sometimes did not hear what was said to her. To watch her visibly grow older like this gave Jean Elspeth dreadful anxiety. Still, in most things she confessed to herself almost every dawn, looking down from her upper window, she was far far happier than when Stoneyhouse stood in all its glory.

Indeed, there was no time to be anything else; and even if there had been a complete cupboard _full_ of neat packages of time _saved_, she would have used them all up in a week. Euphemia, being so poorly, did very little. She helped to make the beds and to do the mending. Only the mending, for, fortunately, the making of any new clothes would be unnecessary for years and years to come; they had so many old ones. Tabitha did what she could manage of the lighter work, but although she had a quick tongue, she had slow, clumsy hands. And it is quite certain, though nobody, of course, would have been so unkind as to say so, that she would never have got even as low wages as Sally McGullie, if she had been in need of a place.

Mrs. O’Phrump did the cooking; but sat on one chair in the kitchen for so many hours together that she became almost like a piece of furniture—the heaviest piece in the house. For the cooking of water-porridge and potatoes does not require very much time, and that was pretty much all that the Miss MacKnackeries had to eat, except for the eggs from Jean Elspeth’s three Cochin-Chinas. And Mrs. O’Phrump needed most of these, as there was so much of her to sustain. As for the apples and pears in the orchard, since Mrs. O’Phrump was too stout to stoop to make dumplings, Jean Elspeth, having two wonderful rows of small sharp teeth, shared these with Tom Piper—though _he_ had all the stomach-aches.

All the rest of the work fell to Jean Elspeth. She slaved from morning till night. And to slave the more merrily, she had taught herself to whistle. She never asked herself why she was so happy. And no doubt it was chiefly by contrast of having been so cramped-in, and kept-under, and miserable in days gone by.

Still, certain things did now happen in Stoneyhouse that had not happened before, and some of these may have helped. For one thing, Jean Elspeth had always dreaded “company.” Dressing-up made her feel awkward. The simplest stranger made her shy. She would have much preferred to say Boh to a goose. None came now, except Dr. Menzies, who of his kindness sometimes called to feel Euphemia’s pulse and look at her tongue.

Jean Elspeth, too, had never liked servants, not because they were servants, but because Euphemia and Tabitha seemed to think that they oughtn’t to be talked to much. Just given their orders. Now Jean Elspeth could easily have given everything else in the world: but not orders. And if there ever _had_ been an interesting creature in Stoneyhouse, even though she was so stupid in some things, it was Sally McGullie.

Then, again, Jean Elspeth, being by nature desperately untidy, never showed it now. For it’s all but impossible to be untidy in a room that contains only a table and three chairs!

There hung within it a marvellous bush of Traveller’s Joy.
]

Then, yet again, Jean Elspeth, before the gentlemen in Armenia and Madagascar had been disappointed in their waterworks and caoutchouc, had had very little to do. She was scarcely even allowed to read. For Tabitha was convinced that most reading was a waste of time, if not worse. And somehow, improving books had never the least bit improved Jean Elspeth. But now she had so many things to do that it was a perfect joy to fit them all in (like the pieces of a puzzle). And the perfectest joy of all was to scramble into her truckle bed, which had formerly been Sally McGullie’s bed, and, with a tallow candle stuck by its own grease to the left hand knob, to read and read and read.

The hours she spent like this, with no living company but mice and moths and bats and scritch-owls! When her upper parts in the winter were cold, she put her skirt over the quilt. One thin blanket, indeed, is not much comfort on cold nights, when one is lying up North there, almost in positive view of the Grumpy Ones. And for her feet, she used to boil some water in a kettle and fill a wine bottle.

This, of course, broke a good many bottles; and it was an odd thing that until there was only one left, Tabitha (whose feet were like slabs of ice) refused to think of such a vulgarity. And _then_ she changed her mind. And medicine-bottles are too small.

Apart from all this, queer things now happened in Stoneyhouse. Little things, but entrancing. The pantechnicon men, for example, had broken a window on a lower staircase as they were heaving down old Mr. MacKnackery’s best wardrobe. A pair of robins in the springtime noticed this hole, and decided to build their nest in a nook of the cornice. Jean Elspeth (with her tiny whistling) was accepted as the bosom friend of the whole family.

There was too a boot cupboard, one too far from the kitchen for Mrs. O’Phrump to use. Its window had been left open. And when, by chance, Jean Elspeth looked in one sunny afternoon, there hung within it a marvellous bush of Traveller’s Joy, rather pale in leaf, but actually flowering there; and even a butterfly sipping of its nectar. After that, not a day passed more but she would peep in at this delicate green visitor, and kiss her hand. It was, too, an immense relief to Jean Elspeth to have said goodbye for ever to lots of things in the house that seemed to her to have been her enemies ever since she was a child.

She wandered up into rooms she had never seen before, and looked out of windows whose views had never before lain under her eyes. Nor did she cease to day-dream, but indulged in just tiny ones, that may come and go, like swifts, between two ticks of a clock. And although, of course, Tabitha strongly disapproved of much that delighted Jean Elspeth now, there was not nearly so much time in which to tell her so.

Besides, Jean Elspeth was more useful in that great barracks of a place than ten superior parlourmaids would have been. She was more like a little steam-engine than a maiden lady. And, like a steam-engine, she refused to be angry; she refused to sulk; and she usually refused to answer back. But when nowadays she _did_ answer back, her tongue had a sting to it at least as sharp (though never so venomous) as that of the busy bee.

And last, but not least, there was the _outside_ of the house. As soon as ever Mr. McPhizz and his undergardeners had departed with their shears and knives and edging-irons and mowing-machines, wildness had begun to creep into the garden. Wind and bird carried in seeds from the wilderness, and after but two summers, the trim barbered lawns sprang up into a marvellous meadow of daisies and buttercups, dandelions, meadowsweet and fools’ parsley, and then seeding dock and thistle and feathery grasses. Toadflax, bindweed, convolvulus crept across the terrace; Hosts of the Tiny blossomed between the stones. Moss, too, in mats and cushions of a green livelier than the emerald, or even than a one-night-old beech-leaf. Rain stains now softly coloured the white walls, as if a stranger had come in the night and begun to paint pictures there. And the roses, in their now hidden beds, rushed back as fast as ever they could to bloom like their wild-briar sisters again.

And not only green things growing. Jean Elspeth would tiptoe out to see complete little families of rabbits nibbling their breakfast or supper of dandelion leaves on the very flagstones under the windows. Squirrels nutted; moles burrowed; hedgehogs came beetle-hunting; mice of every tiny size scampered and twinkled and danced and made merry.

As for the birds—birds numberless! And of so many kinds and colours and notes that she had to sit up half the night looking out their names in the huge bird-book her father had given her on her eleventh Christmas. This was the one treasure she had saved from the pantechnicon men. She had wrapped it up in two copies of _The Scotsman_, and hidden it in the chimney. She felt a little guilty over it at times, but none the less determined that the Four Lawyers should never hear of _that_.

It was strange, exceedingly strange, to be so happy; and Jean Elspeth sometimes could hardly contain herself, she was so much ashamed of it in the presence of her sisters. Still, she drew the line, as they say, at Lucy.

And that was the strangest, most curious thing of all. After the dreadful shock of the Four Lawyers’ letter, after the torment and anxiety and horror, the pantechnicons and the tradespeople, poor Tabitha and Euphemia—however brave their faces and stiff their backs—had drooped within, like flowers in autumn nipped by frost. In their pride, too, they had renounced even the friends who would have been faithful to them in their trouble.

They shut themselves up in themselves more than ever, like birds in cages. They scarcely ever even looked from the windows. It was only on Sundays they went out of doors. Euphemia, too, had sometimes to keep to her bed. And Jean Elspeth would cry to herself, “Oh, my dear, oh, my dear!” at sight of Tabitha trailing about the house with a large duster and so little to dust. To see her sipping at her water-porridge as if she were not in the least hungry, and as if it was the daintiest dish in Christendom, was like having a knife stuck in one’s very breast.

Yet, such was Tabitha’s “strength of mind” and hardihood, Jean Elspeth never dared to comfort her, to cheer her up, to wave her spoon by so much as a quarter of an inch in _her_ direction.

In these circumstances it had seemed to Jean Elspeth it would be utterly unfair to share Lucy’s company, even in her hidden mind. It would be like stealing a march, as they say. It would be cheating. At any rate, it might hurt their feelings. They would see, more stark than ever before, how desolate they were. They would look up and realize by the very light in her eyes that her old playmate had not deserted her. No. She could wait. There was plenty of time. She would keep her wishes down. And the little secret door of her mind should be left, not, as it once was, wide open, but just ajar.

How, she could not exactly say. And yet, in spite of all this, Lucy herself, just as if she were a real live ghost, seemed to be everywhere. If in her scrubbing Jean Elspeth happened to glance up out of the window, as like as not that fair gentle face would be stealthily smiling in. If some moonlight night she leaned for a few precious sweet cold moments over her bedroom sill, as like as not that pale phantom would be seen wandering, shadowless, amid the tall whispering weeds and grasses of the lawn.

Spectres and ghosts, of course, may be the most forbidding company. But Lucy was nothing but gaiety and grace. The least little glimpse of her was like hearing a wild bird singing—even the Southern nightingale, though without those long, bubbling, grievous notes, that seem to darken the darkness. Having this ghost, then, for company, how ever much she tried not to heed it, all that Jean Elspeth _had_ to do in order just to play fair—and she did it with all her might—was not to _look_ for Lucy, and not to _show_ that she saw her, when there she was, plain to be seen, before her very eyes. And when at last she realized her plot was succeeding, that Lucy was gone from her, her very heart seemed to come into her mouth.

And so the years went by. And the sisters became older and older, and Stoneyhouse older and older too. Walls, fences, stables, coach-house, hen-house, and little lodge crept on steadily to rack and ruin. Tabitha kept more and more to herself, and the sisters scarcely spoke at mealtimes.

Then at last Euphemia fell really ill; and everything else for a while went completely out of Jean Elspeth’s life and remembrance. She hadn’t a moment even to lean from her window or to read in her bed. It was unfortunate, of course, that Euphemia’s bedroom was three stair-flights up. Jean Elspeth’s legs grew very tired of climbing those long ladders, and Tabitha could do little else than sit at the window and knit—knit the wool of worn-out shawls and stockings into new ones. So she would stay for hours together, never raising her eyes to glance over the pair of horn-rimmed spectacles that had belonged to her grandfather, and now straddled her own lean nose. Dr. Menzies, too, was an old man now, and could visit them but seldom.

Jean Elspeth seldom even went to bed. She sat on a chair in Euphemia’s room and snatched morsels of sleep, as a hungry dog snatches at bits of meat on a butcher’s tray. It was on such a night as this, nodding there in her chair, that, after having seemed to fall into a long narrow nightmare hole of utter cold and darkness, and to have stayed there for centuries without light or sound, she was suddenly roused by Euphemia’s voice.

It was not Euphemia’s usual voice, and the words were following one another much more rapidly than usual, like sheep and lambs running through a gate. Daybreak was at the window. And in this first chill eastern light Euphemia was sitting up in bed—a thing she had been unable to do for weeks. And she was asking Jean Elspeth to tell her who the child was that was now standing at the end of her bed.

Euphemia described her, too—“A fair child with straight hair. And she is carrying a bundle of gorse, with its prickles and flowers wide open. I can smell the almond smell. And she keeps on looking and smiling first at me, and then at you. Don’t you _see_, Elspeth? Tell her, please, to go away. Tell her I don’t want to be happy like that. She is making me afraid. Tell her to go away at once, please.”

Jean Elspeth sat there shivering, like a snail in its shell. The awful thing was to know this visitor must be Lucy, and yet not to be able to see her—not a vestige, nothing but the iron bed and the bedpost, and Euphemia sitting there, gazing. How, then, could she tell Lucy to go away?

She hastened across the room, and took Euphemia’s cold hands in hers. “You are dreaming, Euphemia. _I_ see nothing. And if it is a pleasant dream, why banish it away?”

“No,” said Euphemia, in the same strange, low, clear voice. “It is not a dream. You are deceiving me, Elspeth. She has come only to mock at me. Send her away!”

And Jean Elspeth, gazing into her sister’s wide light eyes, that now seemed deeper than the deepest well that ever was on earth, was compelled to answer her.

“Please, please Euphemia, do not think of it any more. There is nothing to fear—nothing at all. Why, it sounds like Lucy—that old silly story; do you remember? But I have not seen her myself for ever so long. I couldn’t while you were ill.”

The lids closed gently down over the wide eyes, but Euphemia still held tight to Jean Elspeth’s work-roughened hand. “Never mind, then,” she whispered, “if that is all. I had no wish to take her away from you, Elspeth. Keep close to me. One thing, we are happier now, you and I.”

A fair child with straight hair.
]

“Oh, Euphemia, do you mean that?” said Jean Elspeth, peering closer.

“Well,” Euphemia replied; and it was as if there were now two voices speaking: the old Euphemia’s and the low, even, dreamlike voice. “I mean it. There is plenty of air now—a different place. And I hope your friend will come as often as she pleases. There’s room for us all.”

And with that word “room,” and the grim smile that accompanied it, all the old Euphemia seemed to have come back again, though a moment after she had dropped back upon her pillow and appeared to be asleep.

Seeing her thus still once more, Jean Elspeth very, very cautiously turned her head. The first rays of the sun were on the window. Not the faintest scent of almond was borne to her nostrils on the air. There was no sign at all of any company. A crooked frown had settled on her forehead. She was cold through and through, and her body ached, but she tried to smile, and almost imperceptibly lifted a finger just as if it held a teaspoon, and she was waving it in her own old secret childish way to her father’s portrait on the wall.

Now and again after that Jean Elspeth watched the same absent far-away look steal over Euphemia’s face, and the same smile, dour and grim, and yet happy—like still, deep water under waves. It was almost as if Euphemia were amused at having stolen Lucy away.

“You see, my dear,” she said suddenly to Jean Elspeth one morning, as if after a long talk, “it only proves that we all go the same way home.”

“Euphemia, please do not say that,” whispered Jean Elspeth.

“But why not?” said Euphemia. “So it is. And _she_ almost laughing out loud at me. The hussy!”...

None of their old friends knew when Euphemia died, so it was only Dr. Menzies and his sister who came to Stoneyhouse for the funeral. And though Jean Elspeth would now have been contented to do _all_ the work in the house and to take care of Tabitha and her knitting into the bargain, they persuaded her at last that this would be impossible. And so, one blazing hot morning, having given a little parting gift to Tom Piper and wept a moment or two on Mrs. O’Phrump’s ample shoulder, Jean Elspeth climbed with Tabitha into a cab, and that evening found herself hundreds of miles away from Stoneyhouse, in the two upper rooms set apart for the two ladies by Sally McGullie, who had married a fisherman and was now Mrs. John Jones.

Jean Elspeth could not have imagined a life so different. It was as if she had simply been pulled up by the roots. Whenever Tabitha could spare her—and that was seldom now—she would sit at her window looking on the square stone harbour and the sea, or in a glass shelter on its narrow front. But now that time stretched vacantly before her, and she was at liberty if she pleased to “pretend” whenever she wished, and to fall into day-dreams one after another, just as they might happen to come, it was just life’s queer way that she could scarcely picture Lucy now, even with her inward eye, and never with her naked one.

It was, too, just the way of this odd world that she should pine and long for Stoneyhouse beyond words to tell. She felt sometimes she must die—suffocate—of homesickness, and would frown at the grey moving sea, as if that alone were the enemy who was keeping her away from it. Not only this, but she saved up in a tin money-box every bawbee which she could spare of the little money the Four Lawyers had managed to save from the caoutchouc. And all for one distant purpose.

And at length, years and years afterwards, she told Mrs. Jones that she could bear herself no longer, that—like the cat in the fairy-tale—she must pay a visit, and must go alone....

It was on an autumn afternoon, about five o’clock, and long shadows were creeping across the grasses of the forsaken garden, when Jean Elspeth came into sight again of Stoneyhouse, and found herself standing some little distance from the gaunt familiar walls by a small pond that had formed itself in a hollow of the garden. Her father had delighted in water, and, making use of a tiny stream that coursed near by, had made a jetting fountain and a fishpond. The fountain having long ceased to flow and the pond having become choked with water-weeds, the stream had pushed its way out across the hollows, and had made itself this dank dark resting-place. You might almost have thought it was trying to copy Jean Elspeth’s life in Sally Jones’s seaside cottage. On the other hand, the windows of the great house did not stare so fiercely now; they were blurred and empty, like the eyes of a man walking in his sleep. One of the chimney-stacks had toppled down, and creepers had rambled all over the wide expanse of the walls.

Jean Elspeth, little old woman that she now was, in her small black bonnet and a beaded mantle that had belonged to Euphemia, stood there drinking the great still scene in, as a dry sponge drinks salt water.

And after hesitating for some little time, she decided to venture nearer. She pushed her way through the matted wilderness of the garden, crossed the terrace, and presently peered in through one of the dingy dining-room windows. Half a shutter had by chance been left unclosed. When her eyes were grown accustomed to the gloom within, she discovered that the opposite wall was now quite empty. The portrait of her grandfather must have slowly ravelled through its cord. It had fallen face upwards on to the boards beneath.

It saddened her to see this. She had left the picture hanging there simply because she felt sure that Euphemia would so have wished it to hang. But though she wearied herself out seeking to find entry into the house, in order, at least, to lean her grandfather up again against the wall, it was in vain. The doors were rustily bolted; the lower windows tight shut. And it was beginning to be twilight when she found herself once more beside the dark-watered pond.

All this while she had been utterly alone. It had been a dreadful and sorrowful sight to see the great house thus decaying, and all this neglect. Yet she was not unhappy, for it seemed with its trees and greenery in this solitude to be uncomplaining and at peace. And so, too, was she. It was as if her whole life had just vanished and flitted away like a dream leaving merely her body standing there in the evening light under the boughs of the heavy chestnut-tree overhead.

And then by chance, in that still hush, her eyes wandered to the surface of the water at her feet, and there fixed themselves, her whole mind in a sudden confusion. For by some strange freak of the cheating dusk, she saw gazing back at her from under a squat old crape bonnet, with Euphemia’s cast-off beaded mantle on the shoulders beneath it, a face not in the least like that of the little old woman inside them, but a face, fair and smiling, as of one eternally young and happy and blessed—Lucy’s. She gazed and gazed, in the darkening evening. A peace beyond understanding enwrapt her spirit. It was by far the oddest thing that had ever happened to Jean Elspeth in all the eighty years of her odd, long life on earth.

ON WHINNEY MOOR
_By BLANCHE WINDER_

On the bracken hill
Whinney Moor way
You may see a strange sight
Any time o’ day.
A green tall man
With a crooked knee
Goes trot-trot-trot
Unceasingly.
He lifts each foot
High on the hill,
He steps and he steps,
Yet he stays quite still.
From his either ear
A ring hangs down
In a silver disc
Like a big half-crown.
Long ribbons float
Round his crooked knee
Green as the leaves
Of an alder-tree.
Green are his breeches,
Green is his hat,
With a great gold buckle
Wide and flat.
His puffing breath
And his quick loud feet
Sound like a farmer
Threshing wheat.
On a bending stalk
A pipit stares
And forgets to sing.
The rough brown hares
That squat so flat
In the long deep grass
Wonder why he takes
Such a while to pass.
But the still grey sheep,
That look like stones,
Never lift a head
From the sunburnt downs
As this green tall man,
With the crooked knee,
Goes trot-trot-trot
Unceasingly.

His goblin feet
As they strike the ground
Are turning the big world
Round and round!
Round goes Stony Hill
And wide Merrow Down,
Stately Windsor Castle
Noisy London town!
Round goes England
From Deeside to Penzance,
Round goes Scotland
And round goes France,
Turned and turned
As fast as can be
By the green tall man
With the crooked knee
And the goblin feet
You may see any day
You happen to pass
Whinney Moor way.

The rough brown hares
That squat so flat.
]

THE BLACKSMITH _By B. K. PYKE_

All the night
And all day long
I hark to the sound
Of the blacksmith’s song.

Red his fire—
The bright sparks fly
To dance with stars
In the joyous sky.

The bright sparks fly.
]

SARAH BYNG WHO COULD NOT READ AND WAS TOSSED INTO A THORNY HEDGE BY A
BULL _By HILAIRE BELLOC_

Some years ago you heard me sing
My doubts on _Alexander Byng_.
His sister SARAH now inspires
My jaded Muse, my failing fires.
Of Sarah Byng the tale is told
How though the child was twelve years old
She could not read or write a line.

Her sister Jane, though barely nine,
Could spout the Catechism through
And parts of Matthew Arnold too,
While little Bill, who came between
Was quite unnaturally keen
On _Athalie_, by _Jean Racine_.

But not so Sarah! Not so Sal!
She was a most uncultured girl
Who didn’t care a pinch of snuff
For any literary stuff
And gave the classics all a miss.
Observe the consequence of this!
As she was walking home one day,
Upon the fields across her way
A gate, securely padlocked, stood,
And by its side a piece of wood
On which was painted plain and full

Alas! The young illiterate
Went blindly forward to her fate,
And ignorantly climbed the gate!

· · · · ·

Now happily the Bull that day
Was rather in a mood for play
Than goring people through and through
As Bulls so very often do;

He tossed her lightly with his horns
Into a prickly hedge of thorns,
And stood by laughing while she strode
And pushed and struggled to the road.

· · · · ·

The lesson was not lost upon
The child, who, since, has always gone
A long way round to keep away
From signs, whatever they may say,
And leaves a padlocked gate alone.
Moreover she has wisely grown
Confirmed in her instinctive guess
That letters always bring distress.

THE END

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

● Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained. ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_. ● Images without captions use the HTML alt text supplied by the transcriber in place of a caption.