Polly: A New-Fashioned Girl by L. T. Meade (the lemonade war series .txt) 📗
- Author: L. T. Meade
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“I am going to find Polly and the others,” said Dr. Maybright. “It’s a pity no older person in the house followed them; but so many can scarcely come to harm. It is Polly I am anxious about—they cannot have discovered her, or they would be home before now.”
The Doctor left the nursery, ran down-stairs, put on his hat, and went out. As he did so, he heard the dubious, questioning kind of cough which Mrs. Cameron was so fond of making—this cough was accompanied by Scorpion’s angry snarling little bark. The Doctor prayed inwardly for patience as he hurried down the avenue in search of his family. He was absolutely at a loss where to seek them.
“The broad meadow only leads to the high-road,” he said to himself, “and the high-road has many twists and turns. Surely the children cannot have ventured on the moor; surely Polly cannot have been mad enough to try to hide herself there.”
It was a starlight night, and the Doctor walked quickly.[Pg 67]
“I don’t know where they are. I must simply let instinct guide me,” he said to himself; and after walking for three quarters of an hour instinct did direct him to where, seated on a little patch of green turf at one side of the king’s highway, were three solitary and disreputable-looking little figures.
“Father!” came convulsively from three little parched throats; there was a volume in the cry, a tone of rapture, of longing, of pain, which was almost indescribable. “Father’s come back again, it’s all right now,” sobbed Firefly, and immediately the boys and the little girl had cuddled up to him and were kissing him, each boy taking possession of a hand, and Firefly clasping her arms round his neck.
“I know all about it, children,” explained the Doctor. “But tell me quickly, where are the others? where is Polly?”
“Oh, you darling father!” said Firefly, “you darling, you darling! let me kiss you once again. There, now I’m happy!”
“But tell me where the others are, dear child.”
“Just a little way off. We did get so tired, and Helen said that Polly must have gone on the moor, and she said she must and would follow her.”
“We were so tired,” said Bunny.
“And there was a great nail running into my heel,” explained Bob.
“So we sat down here, and tried to pretend we were gipsies,” continued Firefly. “The moon was shining, and that was a little wee bit of comfort, but we didn’t like it much. Father, it isn’t much fun being a gipsy, is it?”
“No, dear; but go on. How long is it since you parted from the others?”
“Half an hour; but it’s all right. Bunny, you can tell that part.”
Bunny puffed himself out, and tried to speak in his most important manner.
“Nell gave me the dog-whistle,” he said, “and I was to whistle it if it was real necessary, not by no means else. I didn’t fancy that I was a gipsy. I thought perhaps I was the driver of a fly, and that when I blew my whistle Nell would be like another driver coming to me. That’s what I thought,” concluded Bunny. But as his metaphors were always extremely mixed and confusing, no one listened to him.
“You have a whistle?” said the Doctor. “Give it to me. This is a very dangerous thing that you have done, children. Now, let me see how far I can make the sound go. Oh, that thing! I can make a better whistle than that with my hand.”
He did so, making the moor, on the borders of which they stood, resound with a long, shrill, powerful blast. Presently faint sounds came back in answer, and in about a quarter of an hour Helen and her three sisters, very tired and faint, and loitering in their steps, came slowly into view.
Oh, yes; they were all so glad to see father, but they had not seen Polly; no, not a trace nor sound could be discovered to lead to Polly’s whereabouts.
“But she must not spend the night alone on the moor,” said the Doctor. “No, that cannot be. Children, you must all go home directly. On your way past the lodge, Helen, desire Simpkins and George to come with lanterns to this place. They are to wait for me here, and when they whistle I will answer them. After they have waited here for half an hour, and I do not whistle back, they are to begin to search the moor on their own account. Now go home as fast as you can, my dears. I will return when I have found Polly, not before.”
The moon was very brilliant that night, and Helen’s wistful face, as she looked full at her father, caused him to bend suddenly and kiss her. “You are my brave child, Nell. Be the bravest of all by taking the others home now. Home, children; and to bed at once, remember. No visiting of the drawing-room for any of you to-night.”
The Doctor smiled, and kissed his hand, and a very disconsolate little party turned in the direction of Sleepy Hollow.
If ever there was a girl whose mind was in a confused and complex state, that girl was Polly Maybright. Suddenly into her life of sunshine and ease and petting, into her days of love and indulgence, came the cold shadow of would-be justice. Polly had done wrong, and a very stern judge, in the shape of Aunt Maria Cameron, was punishing her.
Polly had often been naughty in her life; she was an independent, quick-tempered child; she had determination, and heaps of courage, but she was always supposed to want ballast. It was the fashion in the house to be a little more lenient to Polly’s misdemeanors than to any one else’s. When a very little child, Nurse had excused ungovernable fits of rage with the injudicious words, “Poor lamb, she can’t help herself!” The sisters, older or younger, yielded to Polly, partly because of a certain fascination which she exercised over them, for she was extremely brilliant and quick of idea, and partly because they did not want her to get into what they called her tantrums. Father, too, made a pet of her, and perhaps slightly spoiled her, but during mother’s lifetime all this did not greatly matter, for mother guided the imperious, impetuous, self-willed child, with the exquisite tact of love. During mother’s lifetime, when Polly was naughty, she quickly became good again; now matters were very different.
Mrs. Cameron was a woman who, with excellent qualities, and she had many, had not a scrap of the “mother-feel” within her. There are women who never called a child their[Pg 69] own who are full of it, but Mrs. Cameron was not one of these. Her rule with regard to the management of young people was simple and severe—she saw no difference between one child and another. “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” applied equally in every case, so now, constituting herself Polly’s rightful guardian in the absence of her father, she made up her mind on no account to spare the rod. Until Polly humbled herself to the very dust she should go unforgiven. Solitary confinement was a most safe and admirable method of correction. Therefore unrepentant Polly remained in her room.
The effects, as far as the culprit was concerned, were not encouraging. In the first place she would not acknowledge Mrs. Cameron’s right to interfere in her life; in the next harshness had a very hardening effect on her.
It was dull in Polly’s room. The naughtiest child cannot cry all the time, nor sulk when left quite to herself, and although, whenever Mrs. Cameron appeared on the scene, the sulks and temper both returned in full force, Polly spent many long and miserable hours perfectly distracted with the longing to find something to do. The only books in the room were Helen’s little Bible, a copy of “Robinson Crusoe,” and the Dictionary. For obvious reasons Polly did not care to read the Bible at present. “Robinson Crusoe” she knew already by heart, but found it slightly amusing trying to make something of the sentences read backwards. The Dictionary was her final resource, and she managed to pass many tedious hours working straight through it page after page. She had got as far as M, and life was becoming insupportable, when about the middle of the day, on Monday, she was startled by a cautious and stealthy noise, and also by a shadow falling directly on her page. She looked up quickly; there was the round and radiant face of Maggie glued to the outside of the window, while her voice came in, cautious but piercing, “Open the window quick, Miss Polly, I’m a-falling down.”
Polly flew to the rescue, and in a moment Maggie was standing in the room. In her delight at seeing a more genial face than Aunt Maria’s, Polly flung her arms round Maggie and kissed her.
“How good of you to come!” she exclaimed. “And you must not go away again. Where will you hide when Aunt Maria comes to visit me? Under the bed, or in this cupboard?”
“Not in neither place,” responded Maggie, who was still gasping and breathless, and whose brown winsey frock showed a disastrous tear from hem to waist.
“Not in neither place,” she proceeded, “for I couldn’t a-bear it any longer, and you ain’t going to stay in this room no longer, Miss Polly; I nearly brained myself a-clinging on to the honeysuckle, and the ivy-roots, but here I be, and now we’ll both go down the ladder and run away.”[Pg 70]
“Run away—oh!” said Polly, clasping her hands, and a great flood of rose-color lighting up her face.
She ran to the window. The housemaid’s step-ladder stood below, but Polly’s window was two or three feet above.
“We’ll manage with a bit of rope and the bedroom towels,” said Maggie, eagerly. “It’s nothing at all, getting down—it’s what I did was the danger. Now, be quick, Miss Polly; let’s get away while they’re at dinner.”
It did not take an instant for Polly to decide. Between the delights of roaming the country with Maggie, and the pleasure of continuing to read through the M’s in Webster’s Dictionary, there could be little choice. On the side of liberty and freedom alone could the balance fall. The bedroom towels were quickly tied on to the old rope, the rope secured firmly inside the window-sill, and the two girls let themselves swing lightly on to the step-ladder. They were both agile, and the descent did not terrify them in the least. When they reached the ground they took each other’s
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