"You little rascal!" cried the girl; and then she caught sight of Hildegarde. "Oh, I beg your pardon!" she cried, hastily. "I didn"t know,--I was looking for my brother--"
"Oh, please come up!" cried Hildegarde, running to the fence.
"Please come over! Oh, you mustn"t hang by your hands that way; you"ll get splinters in them. You are Miss Merryweather, and I am Hildegarde Grahame; so now we are introduced, and let me help you over, do!"
Hildegarde delivered this breathlessly, and held out both hands to help the stranger; but the latter, with a frank smile and a nod, drew herself up without more ado, perched on the top of the fence, then sprang lightly to the ground.
"Thank you so much!" she said, warmly, taking Hildegarde"s outstretched hand. "Of course I didn"t know I was trespa.s.sing, but I"m glad I came. And oh, what a lovely place! I didn"t know there was such a place out of a book. Oh, the hedges! and the brook! and the trees! How can it be real?"
Hildegarde nodded in delight. "Yes!" she said. "That is just the way I felt when I first saw the place. It was some time before I could feel it right to come here without apologizing to the ghosts."
"Your ancestors" ghosts?" said Bell Merryweather, inquiringly.
"Aren"t they your own ghosts? Haven"t you lived here always?"
Hildegarde explained that the place had belonged to a cousin of her mother"s, who left it to her at his death.
"Oh!" said Miss Merryweather; then she considered a little, with her head on one side. Hildegarde decided that, though not a beauty, the new-comer had one of the pleasantest faces she had ever seen.
"On the whole," the girl went on, "I am rather glad that my theory was wrong. The truth is less romantic, but it makes you much more real and accessible, which is, after all, desirable in a country neighbourhood."
"Do tell me what you mean!" cried Hildegarde.
Miss Merryweather laughed.
"If you are quite sure you won"t mind?" she said, tentatively.
"Well, your place is so beautiful,--even apart from this--this--bower of nymphs,--it is so shadowed with great trees, and so green with old turf, that when I saw you this morning walking under the tree, I made up a romance about you,--a pretty little romance. You are quite sure you don"t mind? You were the last of an ancient family, and you were very delicate, and your mother kept you in this lovely solitude, hoping to preserve your precious life. And now," she burst into a clear peal of laughter, in which Hildegarde joined heartily, "now I see you near, and you are no more delicate than I am, and you are not the last of an ancient family. At least, I hope you are not," she cried, growing suddenly grave.
"Oh! do you like to make romances?" cried Hildegarde, with ready tact waiving the last question. "It is my delight, too. No, I am not in the least delicate, as you say, and we have only been here two years, my mother and I; yet it seems like home, and I hope we shall always live here now. And are you beginning to feel at all settled in,--I don"t know any name for your house; we have called it just the "Yellow House" as it had no special interest, being uninhabited. But I suppose you will give it a name?"
"If we can decide on one!" said Bell Merryweather, laughing. "The trouble is, there are so many of us to decide. I want to call it Gamboge: brief, you see, and simple. But one boy says it must be Chrome Castle, and another votes for Topaz Tower; so I don"t know how it will end."
"When I was a little girl," said Hildegarde, "I had a book, the dearest little book, called "Pumpkin House." It was about--"
"Oh, DID you have "Pumpkin House?"" cried Bell Merryweather, eagerly. "Oh! wasn"t it a darling? And didn"t you think you never could be perfectly happy till you could live in a pumpkin? And to think of my forgetting it now, just when the opportunity has come!
Of course we shall call the new home Pumpkin House!"
"Will the others like it?" asked Hildegarde.
"They"d better!" said Bell. "And they will, of course. It was only because we had not found the right name that we did not agree.
Thank you so much, Miss Grahame! Oh, I must go now, for I have fifty thousand things to do! But,--I am so glad to have met you."
"And I to know you," cried Hildegarde, warmly. "I hope we shall see a great deal of each other. We shall come to call in due form, as soon as you are ready to receive visitors. But meanwhile, allow me to present you with the freedom of the fence and of the Ladies"
Garden. See! our two boys are deep in confidences already."
In truth, the black head and the red one were laid close together, and the two round faces wore the same look of deep importance.
"Mine are green and white," said Will. "That is Austrian, but I have them Crusaders a good deal of the time."
"Mine are blue," said Hugh, "and sometimes they are Americans, and sometimes they are Greeks and Trojans. Will you be my friend, and shall we fight great fights together?"
"All right," said Will Merryweather, shyly.
"We will plan a campaign," cried Hugh, his eyes shining with ardour.
"Yes; but now you must come in to your music lesson," said Hildegarde, taking his hand, and frowning at herself for feeling another little pang, as Hugh"s face turned toward his new acquaintance.
"Read the Talisman?" cried Will. "I"ll be Saladin, and you be Richard."
"Come along, Will," said his sister, taking him by the shoulders and marching him toward the fence.
"Lots of sand that will do for Palestine!" "Plains of Marathon over beyond the stone wall!" "Turbans and lances!" "Horsetail helmets and real armour!"
Still shouting, Will was pitched bodily over the fence by his stalwart sister, while Hugh went away holding Hildegarde"s hand, and looking backward as he pa.s.sed.
"We will fight!" he said, giving a little leap of joy. "Our necks shall be clothed with thunder, and we shall say, "Ha! ha!" among the trumpets. And will you bind my wounds, Beloved?" he added, looking up in Hildegarde"s face. "And will you give me my shield, and tell me to come back with it or upon it? Will you do that? The cover of the washboiler will do beautifully for a shield."
"So it will!" said Hildegarde; and they went into the house together.
CHAPTER III.
PUMPKIN HOUSE.
When Mrs. Grahame and Hildegarde went to call on their new neighbours, two days after the meeting in the garden, they found them already entirely at home, the house looking as if they had always lived in it. The furniture was plain, and showed marks of hard usage; but there were plenty of pictures, and the right kind of pictures, as Hildegarde said to herself, with satisfaction; and there were books,--books everywhere. In the wide, sunny sitting-room, into which they were ushered by a pleasant-faced maid, low bookcases ran all round the walls, and were not only filled, but heaped with books, the volumes lying in piles along the top. The centre-table was a magazine-stand, where Saint Nicholas and The Century, The Forum and The Scientific American jostled each other in friendly rivalry. Mrs. Merryweather sat in a low chair, with her lap full of books, and had some difficulty in rising to receive her visitors. Her hearty welcome a.s.sured them that they had not come a day too soon, as Mrs. Grahame feared.
"My dear lady, no! I am charmed to see you. Bell has had such pleasure in making friends with your daughter. Miss Grahame, I am delighted to see you!" and Mrs. Merryweather held out what she thought was her hand, but Hildegarde shook instead a small morocco volume, and was well content when she saw that it was the "Golden Treasury."
"Bell has had such pleasure that I have been most anxious to share it, and to know you and your daughter. Shall we be neighbourly? I am the most unceremonious person in the world. Dear me! isn"t there a chair without books on it? Here, my dear Mrs. Grahame, sit down here, pray! It is Dr. Johnson himself who makes room for you, and you must excuse the great man for being slow in his movements."
With a merry smile, she offered the chair from which she had just removed a huge folio dictionary. Hildegarde found an ottoman which she could easily share with a volume of Punch, and Mrs.
Merryweather beamed at them over her spectacles, and said again that she was delighted to see them.
"We are getting the books to rights gradually," she said, "but it takes time, as you see. I have to do this myself, with Bell"s help. She will be down in a moment, my dear. We have established an overflow bookcase in a cupboard upstairs, and she has just gone up with a load. Ah! here she is. Bell, my dear, Mrs. and Miss Grahame. So kind of them to come and see us!"
Bell shook hands warmly, her frank, pleasant face shining with good-will. "I am so glad to see you!" she cried, sitting down by Hildegarde on a pile of Punches. "I hoped you would come to-day, even if the books are not in order yet. They are so dear, the books; they are part of the family, and we want to be sure that they have places they like. I suppose Punch ought by rights to go with people of his own sort--if there is anybody!--but one wants him close at hand, don"t you think so? where one can take him up any time,--when it rains, or when things bother one. Do you remember that Leech picture?" and they babbled of Punch, their beloved, for ten minutes, and liked each other better at every one of the ten.
"Bell, I want Mrs. and Miss Grahame to see our other children,"
said Mrs. Merryweather, presently. "Where is Toots, and where are the boys?"
"Toots is upstairs, poor lamb!" Bell replied. "When Mary came to tell me of our visitors" arrival I was just putting away Sibbes"s "Soul"s Conflict," and various other dreadful persons whom you would not let me burn; so I dumped them in Toots"s arms, and ran off and left her. Being a ""bedient old soul," she is probably standing just where I left her. I will go--"
But at this moment Toots appeared,--a girl of fifteen, tall, shy and blushing, and was introduced as "my daughter Gertrude." She confessed, on interrogation, that she had dropped Sibbes"s "Soul"s Conflict" out of the window, and was on her way to pick it up.
"Why didn"t you drop it down the well?" asked her sister. "It is so dry, I am sure a wetting would do it good!"
"Sit down, my dear!" said Mrs. Merryweather, comfortably. "One of the boys is sure to be about, and will bring in the book. Sibbes IS a little dry, Bell, but very sound writing, much sounder than a good deal of the controversial writing of--bless me! what"s that?"