Yours sincerely, M. Woolcot.
"P.S.--I must ask you, please, not to kiss me. I should be very angry indeed if you did. I don"t like kissing at all."
She wrote the last paragraph in a nervous hurry for she had a dread that he might fulfil his promise, if she did not forbid him as soon as they met. Then she slipped it into an envelope and addressed it to A. Courtney, Esq., it never having even occurred to her for a moment that there was anything at all strange or unconventional in a young girl making such a point that the meeting should be in the dark.
Next she wrote a few lines of explanation to Aldith, and told her to be sure to be in the paddock by half-past eight, and she (Meg) would slip out when the children were going to bed and unlikely to notice.
And then she went out into the garden to find messengers for her two notes. Little Flossie Courtney had been spending the afternoon with Nellie, and Meg called her back from the gate just as she was going home, and, unseen by the children, entrusted the note to her.
""Give it to your brother Andrew the minute he comes from school,"
she whispered, popping a big chocolate at the same time into the little girl"s mouth. Bunty was next bribed, with a promise of the same melting delicacies, to run up to Aldith"s with the other letter, and Meg breathed freely ago feeling she had skilfully averted the threatening danger attendant on the evening meeting.
But surely the notes were fated! Bunty delivered his safely enough to the housemaid at the MacCarthys", and in answer to the girl"s question "s"posed there was an answer, girls always "spected one to nothing."
Aldith was confined to her room with a sudden severe cold, and wrote a note to her friend, telling her how she was too ill to be allowed out, and had written to Mr. Graham, and Mr. Courtney, too, postponing the walk for a week.
Now this note, in its pale pink triangular envelope, was transferred to Bunty"s pocket among his marbles and peanuts and string. And, as might be expected, he fell in with some other choice spirits on the return journey, and was soon on his knees by the roadside playing marbles.
He lost ten, exclusive of his best agate, fought a boy who had unlawfully possessed himself of his most cherished "conny," and returned home with saddened spirits an hour later, only to find as he went through the gate that he had lost Aldith"s dainty little note.
Now Meg had promised him eight chocolate walnuts on his return, and if this same boy had one weakness more p.r.o.nounced than others, it was his extreme partiality for this kind of confectionery, and he had not tasted one for weeks, so no wonder it almost broke his heart to think they would be forfeited.
"I know she"ll be stingy enough to say I haven"t earned them, just "cause I dropped that girl"s stupid letter," he said to himself, miserably, "and I don"t suppose there was anything in it but "Dearest Marguerite, let us always tell each other our secrets"; I heard her say that twice, and of course she writes it, too."
Then temptation came upon him swiftly, suddenly.
By nature Bunty was the most arrant little storyteller ever born, and it was only Judy"s fearless honesty and strongly expressed scorn for equivocation that had kept him moderately truthful.
But Judy was miles away, and could not possibly wither him up with her look of utter contempt. He was at the nursery door now, turning the handle with hesitating hands.
"What a time you"ve been," said Meg from the table, where she was mending a boxful of her gloves. "Well, what did she say?"
Just at her elbow was the gay _bonbonniere_ containing the brown, cream-encrusted walnuts.
"She said, "All right,"" said Bunty gruffly.
Meg counted the eight chocolates out into his little grimy hand, and resumed her mending with a relieved sigh. And Bunty, with a defiant, shamed look in his eyes, stuffed the whole of the sweets into his mouth at once, as if to preclude the possibility of a sudden repentance.
The other note was equally unfortunate. Little Flossie went home, her thoughts intent upon a certain Grannie bonnet Nell had promised to make for her new doll.
"Gween with pink stwings," she was saying softly to herself as she climbed the steps to her own door.
Alan was lying on the veranda lounge, smoking his black pipe.
"Gween what?" he laughed--"guinea-pigs or kangaroos?"
"Clawice Maud"s bonnet," the little girl said, and entered forthwith into a grave discussion with him as to the colour he thought more suitable for that waxen lady"s winter cloak.
Then she turned to go in.
"What"s that sticking out of your wee pocket, Flossie girl?" he said, as she brushed past him. She stopped a second and felt.
"Oh, nearly I didn"t wemember, an" I pwomised I would--it"s a letter for you, Alan," she said, and gave Meg"s poor little epistle up into the very hands of the Philistine.
CHAPTER VIII
A Catapult and a Catastrophe
"Oh, sweet pale Margaret, Oh, rare pale Margaret, What lit your eyes with tearful power?"
The dusk had fallen very softly and tenderly over the garden, and the paddocks, and the river. There was just the faintest wind at the waters edge, but it seemed almost too tired after the hot, long day to breathe and make ripples. Very slowly the grey, still light deepened, and a white star or two came out and blinked up away in the high, far heavens. Down behind the gum trees, across the river, there was a still whiter moon; a stretch of water near was beginning to smile up to it. Meg hoped it would not climb past the tree-tops before eight o"clock, or the long paddocks would be flooded with light and she would be seen.
At tea-time, and during the early part of the evening, she was preoccupied and inclined to be irritable in her anxiety, and she snubbed Bunty two or three times quite unkindly.
He had been hovering about her ever since six o"clock in almost a pitiable way.
It was characteristic of this small boy that when he had been tempted into departing from the paths of truth he was absolutely wretched until he had confessed, and rubbed his little unclean hands into his wet eyes until he was "a sight to dream of, not to tell."
Pip said it was because he was a coward, and had not the moral courage to go to sleep with a lie on his soul, for fear he might wake up and see an angel with a fiery sword standing by his bedside. And I must sorrowfully acknowledge this seemed a truer view of the case than believing the boy was really impressed with the heinousness of his offence and anxious to make amends.
For the very next day, if occasion sufficiently strong offered, he would fall again, and the very next night would creep up to somebody and whimper, with his knuckles in his eyes, that he had "t--t--told a s--s--story, boo--hoo!"
By seven o"clock this particular evening he was miserably repentant; several tears had trickled down, his cheeks and mingled with the ink of the map he was engaged upon for Miss Marsh. He established himself at Meg"s elbow, and kept looking up into her face in a yearning love-and-forgive-me kind of way that she found infinitely embarra.s.sing; for she had begun to suspect, from his strange conduct, that he had in some way learned the contents of her note, and was trying to discourage her from her enterprise.
The more he gazed at her the redder and more uncomfortable she became.
"You can have my new c--c--catapult," he whispered once, giving her a tearful, imploring look, that she interpreted as an entreaty to stay safely at home.
At last the clock had travelled up to eight, and the children being engaged in a wordy warfare over the possession of a certain stray dog that had come to Misrule in the afternoon, she slipped out of the room un.o.bserved. No one was in the hall, and she picked up the becoming, fleecy cloud she had hidden there, twisted it round her head, and crept out of the side door and along the first path.
Down in the garden the ground was white with fallen rose leaves, and the air full of their dying breath; a clump of pampas gra.s.s stood tall and soft against the sky; some native trees, left growing among the cultivated shrubs, stretched silver-white arms up to the moon and gave the little hurrying figure a ghostly kind of feeling. Out of the gate and into the first paddock, where the rose scent did not come at all, and only a pungent smell of wattle was in the thin, hushed air. More gum trees, and more white, ghostly arms; then a sharp movement near the fence, a thick, sepulchral whisper, and a stifled scream from Meg.
"Here"s the c--c--c--catapult, M--Meg; t--take it," Bunty said, his face white and miserable.
"You little stupid! What do you mean coming creeping here like this?" Meg said, angry as soon as her heart began to beat again.
"I only w--wanted to p--p--please you, M--M-Meggie," the little boy said, with a bitter sob in his voice.
He had put both his arms round her waist, and was burying his nose in her white muslin dress. She shook him off hastily.
"All right; there--thanks," she said. "Now go home, Bunty; I want to have a quiet walk in the moonlight by myself."
He screwed his knuckles as far into his eyes as they would go, his mouth opened, and his lower lip dropped down, down.
"I t--t--told y--y--you a b--b--big st--st--story;" he wept, rocking to and fro where he stood.
"Did you? Oh, all right! Now go home," she said impatiently.
"You always ARE telling stories, Bunty, you know, so I"m not surprised. There-go along."