Chapter IV: The 'little Mother'

'Kiss and be friends, like children being chid.'

It was unwritten law that thunder storms at the cottage should never travel to the house. But when Dot hurried up the drive and burst into the dining-room with a scarlet face and glowing eyes, the mother was afraid something was wrong.

'Why, it's Thursday, Dot!' she said, 'I was just coming down.'

Dot took off her wide brimmed hat and fanned herself for a moment.

'There was curry cooking in the kitchen,' she said; 'onions, pah!'

'How's the baby, why didn't you bring him?' asked the little mother.

'Oh, bother the baby,' said Dot.

'Is Larrie's neuralgia better?' the mother ventured after a little pause. And 'bother Larrie,' was Dot's wifely response.

The mother got out the twenty-seventh pair of boots she was knitting for baby, and worked two rows in silence. She wondered if it was Larrie's fault or Dot's. Larrie's she was sure. She wished Dot was her one little girl again, so she could take all the troubles for her.

'How did Peggie like the new soap I left her?' she said, anxiously flying from topics that made Dot's brows frown.

'Bother Peggie,' said Dot. 'She washed baby's nightgowns with it, and the whole world's placarded with advertisements that say don't. Idiot!'

'The oranges are ripening beautifully,' said the poor little mother.

Dot went over to her and kissed her passionately.

'You're the best woman in the world,' she said.

Tears of quick pleasure sprang into the mother's eyes.

'_My_ little girl,' she said softly.

She held Dot from her a minute, and scanned the flushed face with eyes that saw everything.

'I wish I was,' Dot said, in a stifled tone, 'just yours.'

Anger crept into the mother's big eyes. 'Has Larrie?'--she said, 'Larrie, has he--does he?'--indignation overcame her.

'Oh no,' said Dot, ashamed of so nearly infringing the law. 'Larrie's all right--what are you running your head against, small woman?'

'He is good to you?' suspiciously.

'_Very_ good.'

She got up and went to the piano. 'I came to have a good practice,' she said. 'One can't with baby about.'

She screwed up the stool, opened the lid, and got out a pile of music. Wagner was at the bottom of the canterbury, and she sought for him, and then attacked him with level brows.

By the time she had made ten mistakes, and the little mother's head was aching, there was the click of an opening gate.

'I--' said Dot, 'I--think I shall go home.' She jumped up and peeped through the Venetian. 'Baby may want me, and--and--if Larrie should happen to come in, you needn't say I've been; he thinks I walk too much.'

She gave her mother a hurried kiss on the top of her cap, and slipped out of the back door and across the paddocks to the train.

Larrie came down the hall with slow step. He sat down in Dot's old rocking-chair. 'Morning, mum,' he said, 'the oranges are looking lovely.' He was eating one he had plucked near the gate, but did not seem to be paying any attention to the taste of it.

The little mother regarded him with eyes full of severity, though she tried to hide it.

'Dot is not looking well,' she said, 'haven't you noticed? We mustn't let her do too much, we must be very careful of her, Larrie boy.'

Larrie looked a trifle disturbed for a minute, then righteous wrath prevailed over incipient anxiety. 'Why she doesn't do anything,' he said, '_anything_.'

'She's very young,' was the mother's reply.

'Oh, that's nothing,' said Larrie 'lots of girls of eighteen are married and do everything.'

'Not little tiny girls like Dot,' urged mother, 'you mustn't be hard on her, Larrie, she'll be all she should be in time.'

'But not if I don't teach her,' he insisted; 'why, how can she?'

'It comes of itself,' the mother answered.

But a dark look of recollective annoyance spread over Larrie's brow.

'She forgot baby's teething necklace three days last week, she's always forgetting things,' he said.

Then he too remembered the law, and ate the rest of his orange in silence.

'I wish you would not come down to the cottage quite so often,' was the remark with which he broke a meditation that had involved criss-crossed brows and five slow minutes. A little odd sound broke from the mother's lips. Larrie looked up and saw she was white under her brown and her eyes were piteous.

He crossed over to her with two swift steps. He knelt down beside her chair, and put both his arms round her thin waist.

'How dare you, mum, how _dare_ you have such thoughts!' he said. He kissed her several times in an eager, boyish way. 'You _know_ you could never come too often for me, you _know_ you are more to me than my own mother ever was. It's only Dot, don't you see? She's getting too dependent, mum. We'll have to let her stand alone a little more. Peggie spoils her, you spoil her--I even spoil her myself--mightn't it be a good thing to let her do things by herself for a change, just for a trial, mum? And she shall come here of course. Only, don't you come to the cottage for a bit, and do all the things she leaves undone in that quiet little way you have.'

'Not even Saturdays, Larrie? That's the hardest day.'

'No,' Larrie said. 'Be a good little mum and leave her to me.'

He stood up, all his six feet and odd inches, his young face grave, resolute, his eyes full of seriousness.

'He looks like a man fit to be trusted with his own wife,' the little mother told herself as she looked up at him.

Aloud, she said in a tone of wistful resignation. 'Very well, Larrie, you will be gentle with her, I know--she's such a little thing.'

Larrie walked home. He was thinking all the way of the new leaf he was about to turn. Dot had behaved in an altogether unforgivable manner. He must be firm with her, very firm, he told himself. He was inclined to spoil her, as he had said, and overlook her faults--but from now, he must show her, too, his displeasure at the disrespectful way she had treated him in the morning. Boxing a husband's ears!

The red burnt on his brow as he opened the gate, thinking of it and heard Dot trilling Amiens' song as she watered some sickly pelargoniums she was trying to grow.

'I must be firm, very firm,' Dot had told herself. 'No husband should order his wife about in the way Larrie ordered me. He is a little, just a little inclined to tyrannise, and I shall be laying up unhappiness for myself if I do not nip it in the earliest bud.'

When she saw his figure coming down the hill, she laid the baby down in the cot inside and bade Peggie give an eye to him. Then she popped on a clean muslin dress with forget-me-nots sprinkled all over it, tied the blue ribbons of her picturesque garden hat in a coquettish bow at the side of her chin, and when Larrie opened the gate she was flitting about the flower beds with an absurdly small red watering can in her hand and the gay little song on her lips. It certainly was provoking.

He had pictured her coming to his side with eyes all wet and sorry, and asking forgiveness for being so naughty and childish. He had decided to forgive her after a time, but to show her first, quietly and gravely, how much in error she had been. And now--

'Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly!
Then heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.'

and a whole gamut of lilts and trills of her own introduction.

Larrie closed his lips very tightly and strode past her into the house.

'I might have known she would turn into that kind of woman,' he muttered, casting off his straw hat in the dining-room. 'A man never knows a girl till he's married to her, she never shows herself in a true light before.'

He went into an adjoining bedroom for a linen coat to get cool in.

Baby was disporting himself in the high-sided cot; his little legs were bare and kicking against the pillows, his arms were bare, and his soft, sweet neck. Such a gurgle and chirrup of welcome he gave his father! He banged his heels on the iron, he gave a rapturous little leap, and said 'Googul, googul, googul.'

Larrie glanced half-shamefacedly through the window to make sure Dot could not see, and then he went over to the cot and said glad responsive 'googuls,' and submitted his crisp curls to the wee fingers, and tossed him about in his arms.

But when the dinner-bell rang he laid him down in a hurry, and moved out of the room. Only he could not quite call up the stern 'firm' manner again.

Dot sprang up the verandah steps, and went into the bedroom to take off her hat, and wash invisible gardening marks from her fingers.

'I won't quarrel,' she whispered to herself, 'but I must really show him I am not to be bullied. I will be _very_ firm.'

'Googul' said baby.

Such a mournful little googul! there were actually two tiny tears welling up in the blue wide eyes, for tossing and petting were joyful to him.

Dot shut the door. Then she said '_Baby_' in a tempestuous little way, and two quick answering tears sprang up in her own eyes as she lifted him up to her. It was such a lonely, reproachful little 'googul.' She sat down on the bed with him, and made his small heart gladsome again with kisses and baby-talk.

The door opened one inch--then wide.

'The curry coolin' as 'ard as it can, and master lookin' black, and 'ere you are,' said Peggie resentfully. 'Give 'im to me, the darling angel.'

Dot handed him over, and hurried into the dining-room.

'You're putting milk in, what are you thinking of?' Larrie said in an injured tone after two minutes' silence. Dot was actually thus spoiling the cup of tea he always drank brown and sugarful. Peggie had forgotten the slop basin. Dot got up to go to the cupboard which was near Larrie's end of the table.

'If you'll never be naughty again I'll forgive you,' she said in a whisper at his elbow. Her eyes were wet, sorry, pleading.

'You _dear_ little girl,' Larrie said. He laid down his knife and fork and put his arms round her waist, 'I was a perfect brute to you, it was all my fault.'

'No, mine,' said Dot.

'_Mine_,' insisted Larrie.