"There, there!" said her master soothingly. "Your motherly heart would never turn away a poor orphan from our door!"
But Mrs. Barbara sniffed herself out of the room, and it was weeks before she reconciled herself to the new and disagreeable prospect.
Indeed, when poor, shivering Ah Lon arrived at Old Studley, the good woman nearly swooned at the spectacle of a little visitor arrayed in dark blue raiment consisting of a long, square-shaped jacket and full trousers, and a bare head stuck over with well-oiled queues of black hair.
"I thought as Mr. William wrote it was a girl, sir!" she gasped faintly, with a shocked face.
But the old professor was in ecstasies. All he could think of was the fact that under his roof was a being who could converse in pure Chinese; in truth, poor bewildered Ah Lon could not speak in anything else but her native tongue. He would have carried her off to his study and monopolised her, but Mrs. Barbara"s sense of propriety was fired.
"No, sir," she interposed firmly. "If that being"s the girl Mr. William sent she"s got to look as such in some of Miss Jinty"s garments and immediately."
So Ah Lon, trembling like a leaf, was carried off to be attired like a little English child.
"But as for looking like one, that she never will!" Mrs. Barbara hopelessly regarded the strangely-wide little yellow face, the singular eyes narrow as slits, and the still more singular eyebrows.
"Oh, never mind how she looks!" Jinty put her arms round the little yellow neck and lovingly kissed the stranger, who summarily shook her off. Perhaps Ah Lon was not accustomed to kisses at home.
It was a rebuff, and Jinty got many another as the days went on. Do what she could to please and amuse the little foreigner, Ah Lon shrank from her persistently.
[Ill.u.s.tration: HORRIBLE DREAMS OF MONSTERS AND DEMONS.]
All Jinty"s treasures, dolls and toys and keepsakes were exhibited, but Ah Lon turned away indifferently. The Chinese girl, in truth, was deadly home-sick, but she would have died rather than confess it, even to the professor, the only person who understood her speech. She detested the new, strange country, the queer, unknown food, the outlandish ways. Yet she was in many respects happier. Some of the old hardships of girl life in China were gone. Some old fears began to vanish, and her nights were no longer disturbed with horrible dreams of monsters and demons.
But of all things in and about Old Studley Ah Lon most detested Mike the raven, and Mike seemed fully to return her dislike. He pecked viciously at the spindly Chinese legs and sent Ah Lon into convulsions of terror.
"Ah well, bad as he is, Mike"s British same"s I am, and he do hate a foreigner!" said Mrs. Barbara appreciatively.
Time went on and Jinty began to shoot up; she was growing quite tall, and Ah Lon also grew apace. But, still, though the little foreigner could now find her way about in the language of her new country, she shut her heart against kind little Jinty"s advances.
"She won"t have anything to say to me!" complained Jinty, "she won"t make friends, Mrs. Barbara! The only thing she will look at is my pearl locket, she likes that!"
Indeed Ah Lon seemed never tired of gazing at the pearl-rimmed locket which hung by a slender little chain round Jinty"s neck, and contained the miniature of her pretty young mother so long dead. The little Chinese never tired of stroking the sweet face looking out from the rim of pearls.
"Do you say prayers to it?" she asked, in her stammering English.
"Prayers, no!" Jinty was shocked. "I only pray to our Father and to the good Jesus. Why, you wouldn"t pray to a picture?"
Ah Lon was silent. So perhaps she had been praying to the sweet painted face already, who could say?
It was soon after this talk that the two little girls sat in the study one morning. Ah Lon was at the table by the side of the professor, an open atlas between them and the old gentleman in his element.
But Jinty sat apart, strangely quiet.
Ah Lon, watching out of her slits of eyes, had never seen Jinty so dull and silent. And all that summer day it was the same.
"What"s amiss with my dear maid?" anxiously asked Mrs. Barbara, when bed-time came.
Then it all came out.
"I"ve lost my pearl-rimmed locket!" sobbed Jinty. "Ah Lon asked to look at it this morning the first thing; she always does, you know. And I took it off, and then Mike pecked my legs and Ah Lon"s so hard that we both ran away screaming, and I must have dropped the locket--and it"s gone!"
"Gone! That can"t be! Unless--unless----" Mrs. Barbara hesitated, and Jinty knew they were thinking the same thing. "Have you told Ah Lon, deary?"
"I did this afternoon, and she cried. I never saw her cry before!"
"Ah, jes" so! You can"t trust they foreigners. But I"ll sift this business, I shall!" vigorously said Mrs. Barbara.
But for days the disappearance of the locket was a mystery. In Mrs.
Barbara"s mind there was no doubt that Ah Lon had taken the coveted picture and concealed it in safe hiding. Jinty almost thought so too, and a gloom crept over Old Studley. "I dursn"t tell the master, he"s that wrapped up in the wicked little yellow-faced creature. I"ll step over to the parson and tell he," Mrs. Barbara decided, and arraying herself in her Sunday best, she sallied forth to the vicarage.
As she crossed the little common shouts and laughter and angry chatter fell on her ear.
A group of schoolboys, the parson"s four little sons, were closing in round a dark object.
"Why, if that isn"t our Mike! I never knew the bird to go outside of Old Studley before. What----"
"Oh, Mrs. Barbara, do come along here!" Reggie, the eldest of the four, turned his head and beckoned her.
[Sidenote: Mike"s Mishap]
"Here"s a nice go! We"ve run your Mike in, and see his fury, do! Our Tommy was looking for birds" eggs in the Old Studley hedge, and he saw a shine of gold and pulled out this! And Mike chased him, madly pecking his legs, out here to the common. And now he"s fit to fly at me because I"ve got his stolen goods. Look, do!"
Reggie doubled up with yells of laughter, and Mike, in a storm of fury, shrieked himself hoa.r.s.e.
But Mrs. Barbara stood dumb.
In a flash the truth had come to her.
Mike, not poor Ah Lon, was the thief. She tingled all over with remorseful shame as she crept home with the locket in her hand.
"Oh, and we thought you had stolen it, Ah Lon dear!" Jinty confessed, with wild weeping; but Ah Lon was placidly smoothing the precious little picture. It was enough for her that it had come back. "Grandpapa must know; he must be told!" went on Jinty, determined not to spare herself.
When the professor heard the whole story he was very quiet indeed. But a few days after he went up to London on a little visit, and when he returned he called Jinty into the study.
"This," he said, opening a case, "will perhaps make up to the friendless little stranger for your unjust suspicions!" He handed Jinty a pearl-edged locket with a painting of a Chinese lady"s head. "Chinese faces are so similar that it may serve as a remembrance of her own mother. And this, Jinty dearling, will keep alive in your memory one of our Lord"s behests!" From another case came a dainty silver bangle inside of which Jinty read, with misty eyes, the engraved words: _Judge not!_
But already their meaning was engraved on her heart; and--as time won Ah Lon"s shy affections--she and the little Chinese stranger grew to be as true sisters under the roof of Old Studley.
[Sidenote: The artistic life sometimes leaves those who follow it largely dependent upon the stimulus and the aid which the devotion of others may supply. Rembrandt was a case in point, and the story of his sister"s life is worth recalling.]
Rembrandt"s Sister
A n.o.ble Life Recalled
BY