"Hullo, girls!" said Hugh, coming out of the garden as they drew near the cottage, "I"ve got an idea."
[Ill.u.s.tration: GRIZZEL THREW IN A SMALL HANDFUL OF TEA]
Mollie turned to look at Hugh. He had grown a little taller, she thought, but was as clear-eyed and meditative as ever. And behind Hugh was the flower-garden, full of roses--thousands and thousands of roses, mostly pale pink. They were loose-petalled and exquisitely sweet. The children paused for a moment before going into the house, and all four sniffed up the delicate fragrance appreciatively.
"That"s my idea," said Hugh, with an extra loud sniff. "Scent! Let"s make attar of roses. It costs a guinea a drop to buy, and we could make bottles full. I"ve been examining the rose-bushes--they are simply packed full of buds behind the flowers. I have been reading about it. It"s quite easy to do; you merely have to extract the essential oil from the petals and there you are. I"ll show you after tea."
They pa.s.sed through the porch into the house. There was no hall; they walked straight into the sitting-room, where a table was spread with tea, and Miss Hilton, a rather faded-looking lady of middling age, was already seated behind the tea-pot.
"Go and wash your hands, children," she said, in a voice that matched her looks, "and smooth your hair. I am _surprised_ at you coming into the room like this. I don"t know what your visitor will think, I am sure. Children have _very_ different manners in England."
Mollie glanced round at the other three. She herself stood behind Miss Hilton and was therefore not within that lady"s line of vision.
She winked largely with her left eye, and a smile of relief travelled round the room.
Tea was a silent meal in spite of the festive damper, which was so good that Mollie thought it must have alleviated the unfortunate lot of the Children of Israel considerably. Hugh was thinking out his plan for making attar of roses; Prue was day-dreaming about nothing in particular, as she was too fond of doing; Grizzel"s mind was wandering away to golden bowls, golden cherries, and other possible and some quite impossible golden achievements; while Mollie listened to Baby, who carried on a long and intimate conversation with a family of bread-and-b.u.t.ter--otherwise the beddy-buts--which had found a temporary home upon her plate. Miss Hilton poured out tea absent-mindedly, and seldom spoke except to rebuke someone for putting elbows on the table.
As soon as the meal was over the children went into the garden again, and, once outside, their tongues began to move.
"I shall nab Baby"s bronchitis-kettle," Hugh announced, "and make a distiller, and we can begin to-morrow. You girls will have to help me, for I must watch the distilling all the time, and someone must keep me supplied with fresh rose-petals."
"I can"t do much, because I"m going to make jam," said Grizzel, "and I want Prue and Mollie to help me to gather cherries. I"ve got one or two new ideas"--Mollie thought the family seemed great on ideas-- "but, if you"ll solder up my jam tins, I"ll help with your attar."
"I"ll tell you what," said Prue, "we"ll have a secret breakfast."
"What"s a secret breakfast?" asked Mollie.
"You"ll see in a minute," Prue answered. "It"s a lovely thing. Then we"ll get up and pull the cherries and cut them open, and we can pick the roses afterwards, when they are warm and dry."
"Then we had better get the things ready now," said Grizzel.
So while Hugh went off to a little old hut, which served them for a playroom, to build up his distillery, the three girls set out to inspect the cherry trees, and engaged in the pleasing task of tasting a few cherries off each tree to decide which had the finest flavour.
"I think they are all absolutely topping," said Mollie. "I don"t know how you can tell which is best."
"What funny words you use," said Grizzel. "Topping!"
"Well--top-hole then, or ripping, or great, or first-cla.s.s, or jolly good."
Both hearers laughed. "You had better not let Miss Hilton hear you,"
said Prue, "or she will tell Mamma, and then you will have to write out "topping" a hundred times."
Grizzel led the way to the flower-garden, which was laid out on the terrace immediately below the cottage. A sanded path ran along by the rose-bed, which was banked up for two feet or so to keep the soil from washing down in the rainy season. Prudence and Grizzel stopped at a corner where, in a sheltered angle, lay a low pile of bricks built up four-square with a hollow centre.
"This is our fire-place," Prue explained to Mollie. "When we get up very early we make a fire here and boil tea and have a secret breakfast, because proper breakfast isn"t till nine o"clock when Miss Hilton is mistress, and we get so hungry--besides, it is a lark."
"Write out "lark" one hundred times, my dear Prudence," said Grizzel, in a voice so exactly like Miss Hilton"s that Mollie looked round with a start, and the other two laughed.
They gathered sticks, which they carried into the kitchen to be dried, Bridget being a good-natured conspirator, and they collected sugar, tea, and damper for their feast. Darkness falls early in Australia, and the children decided to go to bed in good time, so that they should waken fresh in the morning. Mollie thought that their bedroom was a delightful place, quite different from a London bedroom. It had a door to itself, with a flight of wooden steps leading down to the garden, so that the children could slip out without disturbing the household. Mollie thought this very romantic.
"You won"t think it very romantic if some old bushranger gets in through the night and shoots you dead," Grizzel cheerfully suggested.
"Be quiet, Grizzel," Prudence said reprovingly. "What is the use of frightening Mollie like that? You never saw a bushranger in your life."
But a London girl, who has been through a dozen air-raids without losing any nerve, is not likely to disturb herself over a possible but improbable bushranger, and indeed Mollie was blissfully ignorant on the subject in spite of Grannie"s tales; so she went to bed quite peacefully in the little camp-bed, and lay for a time watching the brilliant stars shine through the wide-open window. The lovely night scents floated in with the soft breeze, and Mollie could hear strange birds calling to their mates at an hour when most English birds are in bed and fast asleep.
The first rosy streaks of dawn saw the three girls making their morning toilet at the pump, where the water was cold even to the touch of English Mollie, but it was freshening, and they emerged from their splashes with pink cheeks and ravenous appet.i.tes. The "inventor" loved his bed and did not join in the morning revels. (So boys _were_ lazy lie-a-beds in Father"s young days, thought Mollie.)
Prudence and Mollie went straight to the cherry trees with their baskets, while Grizzel lighted the fire and prepared the secret breakfast. She called them before the first baskets were quite full.
The fire was burning cheerfully, sending long streamers of wood smoke into the morning air. On the bricks sat a billy-can full of water just on the boil, and, as it bubbled up, Grizzel threw in a small handful of tea, giving it a stir round with a cherry twig. She let it bubble again while she counted ten, then lifted the can to one side and put the lid on. She had begged a cup of warm, frothy milk from the milk-boy"s pail as he came up the hill. The damper was sitting on the hot bricks, and Grizzel had gathered a plateful of strawberries from the berry-bed at the foot of the hill.
They sat down on the sandy path, holding their mugs of steaming tea in one hand and their damper in the other, large juicy strawberries taking the place of jam. Mollie thought it was the most exquisitely delightful breakfast she had ever tasted in her life. The sun had risen and was sending his beautiful rays along the valley; they fell upon the roses and heliotrope in the garden and on the misty blue- green of the gum trees on the hill opposite. As the children munched in silent enjoyment, their eyes wandering here and there, one long shaft of light fell straight upon the patch of golden sand, so that it glittered as though it were the door to Aladdin"s cave. Prue reached out her hand and pulled down a branch of sweet-scented geranium, crushing a leaf and holding it to Mollie"s nose.
"Isn"t it nice here, Mollie?" she said.
"It"s perfectly heavenly," Mollie answered, with a sigh. "Why can"t all the world be as nice as this, and why do people _ever_ live in streets?"
They tidied up the remains of their breakfast, and were soon back at work in the cherry trees. By nine o"clock they had filled four baskets and had stoned more than half, and laid them in a shallow pan with sugar over them "to draw", as Grizzel explained. They cracked the kernels and took out the tiny white nuts, and last of all Grizzel added a good handful of gooseberries.
"That"s my idea," she said, "it will help the cherries to jell. I think I will pop in some red currants too."
"You _are_ clever," Mollie said admiringly. "I never in all my life saw a girl as young as you make jam."
"When I am grown up," Grizzel said, sucking her sugary fingers as she spoke, "I am going to have a fruit-farm and make immense quant.i.ties of jam to send home. Grandmamma says our jam is the nicest she has tasted, especially our peach and apricot. I am going to try grape jam too, and I shall preserve mandarin oranges whole, and pineapples, and figs."
Mollie suddenly remembered big tins of jam which used to arrive from Australia now and then, at a time when jam was very scarce and precious in London. She smiled to herself as she wondered if they had been Grizzel"s jams--they might have been. At any rate they must have come from beautiful gardens like this.
"If you do," she said to Grizzel, "put a picture of yourself and a cherry tree on the tin. It will look much prettier than "Campbell"s Jams"!"
This made the children laugh, and they went in to their second breakfast feeling very cheerful and what Mollie called "pleased with life". The lazy inventor made his appearance halfway through the meal, looking still rather sleepy. "Come and see my distillery," he said, when breakfast was over, "I fixed it up last night."
Hugh had set the bronchitis-kettle--always carried about with Baby, who was subject to croup--on the fire-place, and had fixed a long narrow jam-tin on to the end of the spout.
"I put the roses and water into the kettle," he explained, "and they boil, and the steam comes out and drops into this cold tin and condenses. Then, when we have enough, we boil that up and condense again. Then we skim the oil that rises to the top, and that is attar of roses. It is perfectly simple."
"It _sounds_ simple," said Mollie, "but--"
"But what?" asked Hugh, with a frown.
"Oh, I don"t know--just but," said Mollie, in a hurry. "I don"t know a thing about distilling; how many boilings will it take to collect a bottle of attar?"
"A good many, but you must not forget that a bottle holds a great many drops, and each drop is worth a guinea, so that a lavender- water bottle will hold about three hundred guineas" worth."
Mollie was greatly impressed. How easy it was to make fortunes in Australia! And how much pleasanter a way than Father"s way, which meant living in a street and sighing over bills, and not making much of a fortune after all.
The girls returned to the garden, and soon gathered enough petals for the first boiling. Hugh, in the meantime, lit the fire and fetched water from the rain-water tank. "It says water from a spring, in the book," he said, "but there"s nothing like rain-water really for this kind of work."
Soon Grizzel said she must go to her jam-making. Prudence stayed to help Hugh, and Mollie decided to hover between both fortune-building schemes, as she was too deeply interested in the results to wish to miss either. For an hour they worked hard, Mollie and Prudence bringing in fresh supplies of roses, rain-water, and logs of wood, for the fire had to be kept well stocked. The room got very hot, for Hugh would not allow any windows to be opened, and a good part of the steam managed to escape in spite of all his care. Indeed it seemed to Mollie that more steam got into the room than into the tin. After the third instalment of roses and water she asked if she could be spared to go and see how the jam was getting on.