She covered her face with her hands, for one of her quickly gathered tears was trembling on her lashes.
Mr. Gillet dropped the strap and the pipe, and looked across to her with tender eyes.
"I am more than twice your age, Miss Meg, old enough nearly to be your father--you will forgive me for saying all this, won"t you?
I was thinking, of my sister who died. I had another little sister, too, a year older, but she was hard--only event to her once.
She is one of the best women in England now, but her lips are severe.
Little Miss Meg, I could not bear the thought of you growing hard."
Half a dozen big tears had fallen down among the forks. Meg was crying because it was borne upon her what a very hateful creature she was. First Alan lectured her and spoke of his sister, and now this man.
He misinterpreted her silence.
"I have no right to speak to you like this, because my life has been any colour but white--that is it, isn"t it, Miss Meg?" he said with great sadness.
Meg dropped her sheltering hands.
"Oh, no," she said, "oh! how CAN you think so? It is only I am so horrid." She rummaged in her pocket and brought out the ribbon.
"Will you take it again?" she said--"oh, PLEASE, just to make me feel less horrid. Oh, please take it!"
She looked at him with wet, imploring eyes, and held it out.
He took it, smoothed its crumpledness, and placed it in his pocket-book.
"G.o.d bless you," he said, and the tone made Meg sob.
CHAPTER XX
Little Judy
Across the gra.s.s came a little flying figure, Judy in a short pink frock with her wild curls blowing about her face.
"Are you a candidate for sunstroke--where IS your hat, Miss Judy?"
Mr. Gillet asked.
Judy shook back her dark tangle:
"Sorrow a know I knows," she said--"it"s a banana the General is afther dyin" for, and sure it"s a dead body I shall live to see misself if you"ve eaten all the oranges."
Meg pushed the bag of fruit across the cloth to her, and tried to tilt her hat over her tell-tale eyes.
But the bright dark ones had seen the wet lashes the first moment.
"I s"pose you"ve been reading stupid poetry and making Meg cry?"
she said, with an aggressive glance from Mr. Gillet to the book on the gra.s.s. "You really ought to be, ashamed of yourselves, SICH behaviour at a picnic. It"s been a saving in oranges, though, that"s a mercy."
She took half a dozen great fat ones from the bag, as well as four or five bananas, and went back with flying steps to the belt of trees, where the General in his holland coat could just be seen.
He was calmly grubbing up the earth and putting it in his little red mouth when she arrived with the bananas.
He looked up at her with an adorable smile. "BABY!" she said, swooping down upon him with one of her wild rushes. "BABY!"
She kissed him fifty times; it almost hurt her sometimes, the feeling of love for this little fat, dirty boy.
Then she gathered him up on her knee and wiped as much of the dirt as possible from his mouth with the corner of his coat.
"Narna," he said, struggling onto the ground again; so she took the skin from a great yellow one and put it in his small, chubby hand.
He ate some of it, and squeezed the rest up tightly in his hands, gleefully watching it come up between his wee fingers in little worm-like morsels.
Then he smeared it over his dimpled face, and even rubbed it on his hair, while Judy was engrossed with her fifth orange.
So, of course, she had to whip him for doing it, or pretend to, which came to the same thing. And then he had to whip her, which did not only mean pretence.
He beat her with a stick he found near, he smacked her face and pulled her hair and b.u.mped himself up and down on her chest, and all in such solemn, painstaking earnestness that she could only laugh even when he really hurt her.
"Dood now?" he said at last anxiously. And she began to weep noisily, with covered face and shaking shoulders, in the proper, penitent way.
And then he put his darling arms round her neck and hugged her, and said "Ju-Ju" in a choking little voice, and patted her cheeks, and gave her a hundred eager, wide, wet kisses till she was better.
Then they played chasings, and the General fell down twenty times, and scratched his little knees and hands, and struggled up again.
and staggered on.
Presently Judy stood still in a hurry; there was a tick working its slow way into her wrist. Only its two back legs were left out from under the skin, and for a long time she pulled and pulled without any success. Then it broke in two, and she had to leave one half in for little Grandma and kerosene to extract on their return.
Two or three minutes it had taken her to try to move it, and when she looked up the General had toddled same distance away, and was travelling along as fast as ever his little fat legs would carry him, thinking he was racing her. Just as she, started after him he looked back, his eyes dancing, his face dimpled and mischievous, and, oh! so dirty..
And then--ah, G.o.d!
It is so hard to write it. My pen has had only happy writing to-do so far, and now!
"You rogue!" Judy called, pretending to run very quickly.
Then the whole world seemed to rise up before her.
There was a tree falling, one of the great, gaunt, naked things that had been ringbarked long ago. All day it had swayed to and fro, rotten through and through; now there came up across the plain a puff of wind, and down it went before it. One wild ringing cry Judy gave, then she leaped across the ground, her arms outstretched to the little lad running with laughing eyes and lips straight to death.
The crash shook the trees around, the very air seemed splintered.
They had heard it--all the others--heard the wild cry and then the horrible thud.
How their knees shook what blanched faces they had as they rushed towards the sound!
They lifted it off the little bodies--the long, silvered trunk with the gum dead and dried in streaks upon it. Judy was face downwards, her arms spread out.
And underneath her was the General, a little shaken, mightily astonished, but quite unhurt. Meg clasped him for a minute, but then laid him down, and gathered with the others close around Judy.