The Happy Adventurers Part 22

His story was not at all an uncommon one: a love-affair, a selection of angry parents, lack of money, eternal vows, and a young man in search of a fortune. He had been told that fortunes lay about loose in Australia.

"Not that I mind working," he said. "I like work all right, but it's so slow, and we are getting older all the time. I rather fancied a vineyard; our parents are great on their cellars and might come round to a vineyard and wine. I spent some time in France before coming here, but it was hopeless. They won't look at a foreigner in their wine concerns. As a matter of fact I have some hopes of my own governor relenting. I am his only son, and he is getting tired of keeping me at arm's length. There's nothing really in the way; only he had another wife in view for me, and Margaret's father had another husband. _He_ is rather a cantankerous old party. Too much port wine is what is the matter with them both, that's my opinion; they're turning gouty."

As Mr. John Smith talked he pulled his watch out of his pocket and sprung it open. In the back lay a tiny photograph.

"That's Margaret," he said.

The others bent over the faintly tinted portrait of a young girl, pretty and smiling, her wavy hair rippling on either side of a smooth brow. Mollie glanced at it absent-mindedly; the back of her brain, she felt, was moving to the front; in another moment it would be there.

Mr. Smith looked affectionately at the pretty face. "That is my little girl," he repeated, "and I--I ought to tell you--you are so kind--my name is not really John Smith. I dropped my real name because I wanted to dodge my governor--teach him a lesson, you know, not to play fast and loose with his only son--poor old governor! I have written to him since I came to Silver Fields. My real name is--

Suddenly Mollie began to laugh. It had come in a flash--the long chair, the bandaged foot on a foot-rest, the watch with its back open, the tattooed anchor and rope on a lean wrist, and above all a pair of dark eyes (so like d.i.c.k's) crinkled up in a kindly smile: "You don't blow hard enough, little Polly," someone was saying, "try again." The hair above the dark eyes was white, but Mollie knew.

"It's so _funny_," she cried, as they all looked at her, Prudence anxiously inquiring if she had "got it again". "I'm all right, Prue, but it's so funny. _I_ know who you are," she laughed again, turning to Mr. Smith. "Your name isn't John Smith at all. You are poor dear Richard. Who was so active. With the gout. And you are--you are my--"

"Hush, Mollie!" said Prue.

Mollie sat up. She was still laughing. Aunt Mary stood beside her in hat and coat, her hands full of cardboard boxes from Buszard's.

Grannie sat at the tea-table, and opposite her was old Mrs. Pell, who had put on her bonnet because it would soon be time for her to go. They all looked at Mollie, who continued to laugh.

"It's nothing," she said. "It is only a fit of giggles. I have them sometimes."

"Give the dear child her tea, Mary," said Grannie. "Her nerves are a little highly strung; her grandfather used to laugh just like that-- poor dear Richard!"

CHAPTER VII

The Aeronauts or The Fateful Stone

"Aunt Mary, how old is Time?" asked Mollie.

She was resting on her sofa in the garden, after her first attempt at a short walk. She had been wondering how her young grandpapa had got on with his sprained ankle, and longed to ask questions about him, but dared not venture even on the simplest. It was so easy to forget and ask too much. The day was rather hot, and the couch had been drawn into the shade of a great copper-beech. Mollie lay on her back, gazing up through the silky red foliage at the blue sky.

Somewhere a thrush was singing, practising his flute-like phrases with conscientious care.

"I think he must be trying for a scholars.h.i.+p," said Mollie. "How old is Time?" she repeated, bringing her gaze down from the tree-tops to Aunt Mary's hands, busy as usual with needlework.

"How old is Time?" Aunt Mary echoed. "What do you mean exactly by Time?"

"I mean, how long is it since days began--morning and afternoon and evening?"

"Untold millions of years," her aunt answered. "I don't suppose that anyone could say exactly how many, and in any case when we speak of Time we mean Time on our own earth; what an astronomer would say I don't know."

"How do you know that it is millions of years old?" Mollie asked.

"In the Bible it says that the evening and the morning were the first day in the year 4004 B.C. That is only five thousand, nine hundred and twenty-four years ago."

"You are asking terribly big questions," Aunt Mary said, with a smile. "It would take a long time to explain how men learnt to know the age of the world, and I am afraid I am hardly equal to the task.

It is only about seventy years since geologists began to suspect that our earth was far older than they had supposed, I have some simple books which I think you could understand if you tried; and if you learn to take an interest in geology you need never be dull again as long as you live. You will find 'tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything'."

"That would be very nice," Mollie said politely but not enthusiastically; "but just now I only want to know how old Time is.

Millions and millions of years," she repeated to herself rather dreamily. "If you took forty from millions and millions it wouldn't make any difference worth mentioning. It makes even Adam seem almost as near as last week. And this morning I said I hadn't time to darn a hole in my stocking. I wonder if Eve said she had no time. Were there any people before Adam, Aunt Mary?"

Aunt Mary shook her head. "Ask the wise thrush," she said; "his ancestors are older than mine."

"Are they really!" Mollie exclaimed. "Did that thrush's ever-so- great-grandfather sing in the Garden of Eden?"

Aunt Mary only answered with a smile, and Mollie listened again to the thrush, her thoughts wandering back to the times of forty years ago. Quite a little time, she mused. No wonder they were so little different, considering all things, from our own. She had thought that the children of those days must be frightfully dull, and terribly strictly kept; but on the whole they were, in some ways, less dull--or more exciting--and certainly had more liberty, than the children of to-day. Perhaps, however, that was Australia, where there was so much more room than there was in England. She wondered how d.i.c.k and Jerry were getting on to-day, and wished for the hundredth time that she could see them and talk things over. They had each other to talk to, but she had no one.

"Have you any diamonds, Aunt Mary?" she asked presently. "I should like to see some diamonds; and rubies and emeralds and topazes and opals and pearls and amethysts and sapphires, and all the precious stones you've got."

"Bless my soul, Mollie! Do you think I am the Queen of Sheba!" Aunt Mary exclaimed. "Grannie has some old-fas.h.i.+oned jewellery locked away in a drawer, but the family diamonds are nothing to go to law about. The only diamond I possess," she went on, "is a green diamond in a ring that someone gave me long, long ago. Long ago," she repeated with a sigh, letting her work drop into her lap and gazing at something that Mollie could not see, for it was the distant past.

Mollie gave a violent start. A green diamond! In a ring! Long, long ago. How very extraordinary! She dared not ask any questions, but she examined her aunt with new and critical interest, from the s.h.i.+ning coils of smooth brown hair to the slim ankles and neat buckled shoes. No, she decided, that hair could never have been red and ringletty; besides, Grizzel's eyes were blue and round like a kitten's, while Aunt Mary's were dark brown and long-shaped. Very pretty eyes, Mollie suddenly discovered. Also, Aunt Mary was too young. Forty years ago Grizzel was eight or nine years old, which would make her nearly fifty now. Mollie paused for a moment to picture to herself a fifty-year-old Grizzel, but, failing utterly in the attempt, she continued her meditations on her aunt. Aunt Mary was certainly a considerable distance from that venerable age.

Mollie wondered again why she had never married, and who had given her that ring. She sighed impatiently. She wished that she was not bound down by that promise; but she was, hard and fast. It would be better not to think about the green diamond just now. When she got back to forty years ago she would keep her eyes open; it was not at all unlikely, considering all things, that Aunt Mary had had an Australian lover, and it might be possible to do a kind act somehow or other. What the effect would be if 1920 meddled about with the affairs of 1880 Mollie had ceased worrying over. It was altogether too puzzling.

Aunt Mary remained a little absent-minded all the morning, and when the time came for Mollie to go to sleep that afternoon she could hear a new tone in Aunt Mary's voice when she began to sing:

"O bay of Dublin! my heart you're troublin', Your beauty haunts me like a fevered dream, Like frozen fountains that the sun sets bubblin My heart's blood warms when I but hear your name; And never till this life pulse ceases, My earliest thought you'll cease to be; Oh! there's no one here knows how fair that place is, And no one cares how dear it is to me!"

"If Aunt Mary goes on like this, Prue will certainly find me howling my eyes out," Mollie said to herself. "Talk of might-have-beens and never-will-bes! Grandpapa should hear his own daughter singing! Why did I go and mention green diamonds to her!" She shut her eyes tight to keep the tears from falling. The plaintive tune went on, and when a small soft hand crept into her own her cheeks were wet. She kept her eyes closed and held tight to the little hand!

She was standing in a wide, brick-floored veranda with a steeply sloping roof. The open sides were wreathed with morning-glories, their deep-blue petals wide-spreading to the early sun. Painted tubs, full of scarlet and purple fuchsias, stood in a row beside the railing; coco-nut matting, rough and brown, lay in strips across the red brick floor, and at either end of the veranda stood a deal table. One was covered with books, toys, and work-baskets. At the other sat Bridget, sh.e.l.ling peas. She was singing:

"How often when at work I'm sittin', An' musin' sadly on the days of yore, I think I see my Katey knittin', An' the children playin' by the cabin door; I think I see the neighbours' faces All gathered round, their long-lost friend to see, Oh! though no one here knows how fair that place is, Heaven knows how dear my poor home was to me."

As she sang the last word she lifted the corner of her ap.r.o.n to dry her eyes, and saw Mollie.

"Is it yourself, Miss Mollie, or is it your ghost? May the Lord look sideways on me ould plaid shawl! You gave me a start then, for 'twas only this minute I looked to see an' there was no one there at all."

"It's me," said Mollie, swallowing down a few last tears and wondering if she was speaking the truth--perhaps it _was_ her ghost!

"Where's everybody?"

"They're all dressin' themselves for the balloonin', an' may the Lord preserve Master Hugh an' keep his bones from breakin'. 'Tis a temptin' o' Providence an' his mother sailin' on the salt seas, poor soul. The way the death-watch has been tickin' on me this wake past is something cruel."

"What's the ballooning?" Mollie began, but before Bridget could answer Prudence appeared at the house door, dressed in festive pink muslin and a white hat wreathed with rosebuds.

"Come along, Mollie," she said, "and don't listen to Bridget croaking. If I died every time she hears my death-watch tick, or sees my shroud in a candle, there would be a whole cemetery full of my graves by this time. There's a yellow muslin frock for you."

They had reached the girls' bedroom, which Mollie recognized as the first of the rooms she had slept in. They were back in the house with Hugh's tree and the yellow-carpeted garden. She looked admiringly at the pretty muslin frock on the bed. It was white, powdered over with tiny dots of pale yellow, and made with filmy flounces reaching to the waist; a frilled fichu, or "cross-over" as Prue called it, came over the front of the little bodice, falling slightly below the waist and tied behind with pale-yellow ribbons. A wide white hat was wreathed with primroses and green leaves. It was indeed a charming frock, and so modern that Mollie thought she might have worn it at home without anyone being surprised at anything except her unusual smartness. Prudence and Grizzel wore dresses fas.h.i.+oned in precisely the same way, but Prue's muslin was sprigged with pink rosebuds, while Grizzel's dots were green.

"Come along, my rainbow," said Papa. "If we are late we won't get a good place."