"I didn"t exactly come, you brought me; and I can only stay a moment."
"Well," Mollie said, after a short silence, "the other thing is: Can I bring d.i.c.k? He would love this place and this Time--somehow you seem to have more room than we have, and you are not so frightfully busy. We never have _enough_ time; I think your hours must be longer than ours," she went on, with a sigh. "I simply cannot get all the things squeezed in that I want to do. I often wish the days were thirty hours long."
"You weren"t wishing that when I came," Prudence said, with a little laugh. "I don"t know about d.i.c.k; you can"t bring him unless he wants to come--of his own accord, I mean."
Mollie pondered a little, and then sighed again: "It will be rather hard. He doesn"t want anything frightfully except football, and there isn"t any just now. Perhaps we could make him want to come; couldn"t Hugh invent some way? It was only one chance in a hundred-- in a thousand, perhaps, that made me talk to your photograph. Let us ask Hugh."
"We can ask," Prudence agreed, "but his head is going to be packed full of telephone now, and he won"t think or speak of anything else for days. That"s the way he is; we get rather tired of it sometimes, especially when we have to help. Grizzel collected four hundred corks for his raft. She grubbed in the ashpit, and among the empty beer-bottles--" Prudence sighed in her turn.
The two girls met Hugh at the white gate on his return from school, and Mollie seized the first opportunity to make her request.
"I don"t know," Hugh answered thoughtfully; "there ought to be a way. I believe there is a way _somewhere_ to do everything, if you can only find it. It"s mostly a question of looking long enough. And a thing is always in the last place you look for it--naturally. I am going to make a telephone; if I could make one long enough--" he paused.
They were strolling up the wide, cypress-bordered path as they talked, and Mollie"s wandering gaze fell upon a low mound at the foot of one of the cypress trees.
"What"s that?" she asked, coming to a standstill. "It looks like a cat"s grave."
It was a grave sure enough, and crowned with a bunch of pansies. A small headstone had been made from the lid of an old soapbox, on which was printed the following inscription:
HERE LITH THE LONGEST DANDY LION CHANE IN THE WURLD
"It"s Grizzel," said Prudence; "why on earth has she gone and buried her beautiful chain?"
Grizzel joined the group and answered for herself:
"Mollie said the poor flowers would be forgotten. I should hate to be forgotten, so I lifted them all up and buried them. I bought a yard of lovely yellow muslin when I was out yesterday and made a beautiful shroud. That cypress tree is rather big for such a little grave, but it"s the littlest in the garden."
No one smiled. "It was a wonderful chain," Mollie said, remembering her view from the Look-out, "I wish I could make something that would reach from here to my brother d.i.c.k. I wish we had wireless. I wonder if "willing" would be any good. Have you ever played willing?
We join hands and will with all our might that d.i.c.k would come here."
"It sounds easy," said Hugh, always ready for a new experiment, "much easier than making a telephone; we might as well try."
So they joined hands and wished. As they loosened hands again a shrill cry above their heads made them all look up--it was a parrot flying low across the garden, its brilliant plumage shining in the evening sunlight like jewels. "It"s my parrot!" Mollie exclaimed, "it met me by the gate yesterday."
Mollie sat up. The rain was still splashing on the window-panes, but Aunt Mary was drawing the curtains, and a cheerful little fire had been lighted. There was a pleasant tinkle of china as tea-cups were settled on the tray.
"Have I been asleep?" she asked incredulously. (It surely was not all a _dream_!)
"A beautiful sleep," Aunt Mary answered; "and now tea, and after tea--you shall see what you shall see."
CHAPTER III
The Fortune-makers or The Cherry-garden
Mollie was rather silent at tea-time. She could not help thinking of those other children in that long-ago far-away garden. Were they real? Or had it all been a dream? It _must_ have been a dream, she thought--such things do not happen in real life--it was impossible that it should have been true. And yet, never before had she dreamt anything so clearly, so "going-on" as she expressed it to herself.
She longed to tell Aunt Mary all about it, but the memory of her vow restrained her. If nothing further happened, in course of time she would feel free to tell of her wonderful experience, but in the meantime she must have patience. She racked her brains to think of some roundabout way of introducing the subject of Australia and the year 1878, but could not get past her vow--it seemed to block the way in every direction.
So she ate her little triangles of toast--made in a particularly fascinating way peculiar to Grannie"s housekeeping--without enjoying the scrunch, scrunch between her teeth so much as usual. Even the early strawberries and cream found her somewhat absent-minded.
But after tea was cleared away and the room tidied up, Aunt Mary disappeared for a short time and returned with her hands behind her back. She stood before Mollie, and in a solemn voice chanted the following words:
"Neevie neevie nick nack, Which hand will ye tak?
Tak the right or tak the wrong, I"ll beguile ye if I can."
This was too interesting to be ignored. Mollie sat up and became her ordinary self again. She looked critically at Aunt Mary"s arms, shoulders, and eyes, but got no information from any of these. Then she laughed:
"I _won"t_ have the wrong, please, I"ll have the right."
Aunt Mary laughed too. "You are too clever, Miss Mollie. That is not the way _I_ did neevie-neevie when I was young." She brought her right hand round as she spoke, and in it was a charming box, large, varnished, and clamped at the corners with bra.s.s. She laid it on Mollie"s lap, and watched the sliding lid being pulled out by a pair of impatient hands. It was a beautiful jig-saw puzzle.
"Oh, where _did_ you get it?" Mollie cried joyfully. "I _adore_ jig- saw puzzles. You are a lovely, lovely aunt!" and she held out her arms for a hug and a kiss.
"Well," said Aunt Mary, smiling with pleasure at the success of her surprise, "I remembered how fond you are of jig-saws, so yesterday, as soon as you had fallen asleep, I wired to Hamley"s. I was not sure if it would arrive to-day, so I did not tell you. Now, let us see what it is--a map! Oh, dear me, I hope you won"t find a map dull!"
Grannie, who loved jig-saws almost as much as Mollie did, had drawn up a substantial table to the sofa and seated herself beside it.
"Dull!" she said reprovingly, "I hope not indeed. Maps are the most interesting puzzles one can have. What is it a map of?"
"We"ll soon find that out," said Mollie, laying a very jagged section upon the table and studying it with interest. "What funny names--Weeah! Where"s that? It sounds like China."
Grannie had also possessed herself of a section, and was scrutinizing it through her spectacles. "I"ll need my reading-gla.s.s, Mary, my dear," she said; "my old eyes cannot see this tiny print."
A silver-handled reading-gla.s.s was brought, and Grannie considered her section again: "The Yarra," she read out, "I wonder if you can tell me where the Yarra is, Mollie?"
"Never heard of it," said Mollie, shaking her head. "Yankalilla.
Where"s that? Goomooroo, Wanrearah, Koolywurtie. _What_ names! I am glad I am not a railway guard in this place, wherever it may be."
"Aha, Miss Mollie, I am cleverer than you are with all your Oxford and Cambridge examinations!" Grannie exclaimed triumphantly, "for I can tell you where the Yarra is--it is the river upon which Melbourne is built, and Melbourne is the capital of Victoria, and Victoria is a colony in Australia."
"Australia!" Mollie exclaimed, a little startled. "How funny--I mean how interesting!" It was certainly rather odd, she thought, that her difficulty should be solved so promptly, for now, of course, she might ask as many questions as she pleased and no one would wonder at her sudden interest in our distant colonies. In the meantime Grannie and Aunt Mary were both too much engrossed in the puzzle to notice the rather peculiar expression on Mollie"s face, and soon she too became absorbed in the puzzle under her eyes, and forgot for the moment the stranger puzzle in her mind.
When Mollie"s breakfast-tray came up next morning, the first thing she saw on it was a letter from d.i.c.k. She seized it and tore it open.
"DEAR MOLL,
"I"ve had the rummest experience you ever. Young Outram says it was -pyh- -psy- -pysh---ghosts, you know. He says I must tell you _exactly_ what happened and not leave out anything, because quite small things might turn out to be most important. Young Outram is great on ghosts and Spirits, he says it is because he was born in the East. It happened like this. Y.O. and me were sitting together at our desk, which is at the back beside the window. It is a very good desk. Old Nosey was talking about _Macbeth_--or perhaps it was _Paradise Lost,_ I am not sure of this point, because sometimes he does one and sometimes the other, according to the mood he is in.
But it was one of them. Y.O. and I were making a list of Probable Players in next term"s 1st XV, and we both said "Jenkyns will have left", at the same time, so we hooked little fingers and said Kipling, and were wishing a wish when all of a sudden, _without the slightest warning_ there appeared, sitting on _our desk,_ the most absolutely top-hole parrot I ever saw in my life. We sat staring, because, you see, we never saw the beast fly in, and if it flew through the window we _must_ have seen it, because of my arm being on the window-sill. While we were still staring I _distinctly_ heard your voice say, "Do come here, d.i.c.k." Just those words and then no more. Then the parrot vanished absolutely, tail and everything, though it was the finest parrot"s tail I ever saw in my life. I can tell you, Moll, it made me sit up hearing you like that. Y.O. said my freckles came out like a rash because I got almost pale under them. I wish I"d seen myself. Then we made the astonishing discovery that none of the other chaps had seen the parrot, in fact they say it is a c.o.c.k-and-bull story, but we are sitting tight because of the phyc-thingummy. Young O. says that whatever it is he has to be in it too, because most probably it was owing to his peculiar Indian ghostiness that we saw it at all. I don"t quite agree, but anyhow that"s what he says, and he"d better be in. Please write by return of post if you can explain this phenomenon. We hope you aren"t dead.
"Yours affec.,
"d.i.c.k."
Mollie read this letter through twice, then laid it down and ate her egg and toast without thinking much of what she was doing. She felt rather startled again; things were certainly queerish. Either her vivid dream had penetrated to d.i.c.k"s brain--and such experiences were not altogether unknown between the twins--or else--or else Prudence really _had_ come yesterday, and there was something in that story of the Time-travellers. So the experiment had worked too.
She remembered the brilliant parrot.