MAKING straight for Miss Letitia, the jumping bundle of dimples, gold curls, short knickers and waggling pinafore, came with a wild bound into that lady’s arms.
“Oo-ee!” he once more exclaimed—“Vi’lets!”
And, discovering a bunch of those sweet blossoms half-hidden in the folds of Miss Leslie’s soft lace necktie, he burrowed his little nose into them with delighted eagerness,—then looking up again, and smiling angelically, he repeated in a dulcet murmur, “’Es! Vi’lets! Oo’ is vezy sweet, zoo Kiss-Letty!”
Miss Letitia pressed him to her breast, patted him, smoothed his tousled locks, and took off his loosely-hanging pinafore, thereby disclosing his whole chubby form, clad in what city tailors euphoniously term a ‘small gent’s Jack Tar.’
“Well, Boy!” she said, her gentle voice trembling with quite a delicious cooing sweetness—“how are you to-day?”
“Me vezy well,” answered Boy placidly, twining round his dumpy fingers a long delicately-linked gold chain which ‘Kiss-Letty’ always wore—“Vezy well ’sank ’oo!” (this with a big sigh). “Me awfoo’ bozzered” (bothered) “’bout Dads! Poo Sing! Vezy—vezy ill!”
And Boy conveyed such a heartrending expression of deep distress into his beautiful blue eyes, that Miss Letitia was quite touched, and was almost persuaded into a sense of pity for the degraded creature who was “putting a thief into his mouth to steal away his brains,” in the opposite room.
“You see, Letitia,” murmured Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir with a fat complacent smile—“You see just how Boy takes it? He and his father are the most perfect friends in the world!”
Good Miss Leslie looked as she felt,—pained and puzzled. How was she to broach the idea she had of adopting Boy, if he was already considered by his stupid mother to be a sort of stop-gap or “buffer” between herself and the drunken rages of her “honourable” lord and master? She resolved to temporize.
“I have been wondering,” she began gently, as she settled the little fellow more comfortably on her lap “whether you would let Boy come and stay with me for a few days——”
“Stay with you!” exclaimed Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir—and so surprised was she that she actually lifted her bulky form an inch or two out of its sunken attitude in the arm-chair—“With you, Letitia? A child like that? Why, you would not know in the least what to do with him!”
“I think I should,” submitted Miss Letty, with a little smile,—“Besides, of course you could send Gerty with him if you liked. But I do not think it would be necessary. I have an excellent maid who is devoted to children;—and then he could have a large room to play about in—and——”
“Oh, it would never do!—never—never!” declared Boy’s mother, shaking her head with a half-reproachful, half-compassionate air. “You see, my dear Letitia, it is not as if you were married and had children of your own. You wouldn’t understand how to manage Boy a bit.”
“You think not?” said Miss Letty patiently. “Well—perhaps I might be a little ignorant—but would you let me try?”
“I could not—I really could not!” and Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir smoothed her floppy blouse over her massive bosom with a protective pat of her large hand. “Boy would simply break his heart without me. Wouldn’t you, Boy?”
Boy thus adjured, looked round enquiringly. He had been busy arranging “Kiss-Letty’s” gold chain in loops and twists, such as pleased his fancy, and thus employed, had failed to follow the conversation.
“How wouldn’t Boy?” he demanded.
“Boy wouldn’t like to leave Muzzy,” explained Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir unctuously—“would he?”
Boy was still meditatively concerned with the looping of the gold chain.
“Leave Muzzy?” he queried. “Wha’ for?”
“What for?” echoed his mother. “To go with Miss Letty—all by your own self—and no kind good Muzzy to take care of you!”
Boy stopped twisting the gold chain. Things began to look serious. He put one rosy finger into his rosier mouth, and started to consider the question. “No kind good Muzzy to take care of you.” Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir was her own trumpeter on this occasion. That she was a “kind good Muzzy” was entirely her own idea. If Boy had been able to express himself with thorough lucidity, he would most probably have given the palm for “kindness and goodness,” and “taking care of him,” to the servant Gerty, rather than to Muzzy. But his little heart told him he ought to love his Muzzy best of all—and yet—how about “Kiss-Letty”? He hesitated.
“Me loves Muzzy vezy much,” he murmured, lowering his pretty eyes,—while his sensitive little underlip began to quiver—“But me loves Kiss-Letty too. Me would like out wiz Kiss-Letty!”
And having thus taken courage to declare his true sentiments, he felt more independent, and raised his golden head with a curious little air of defiance and appeal intermingled. Just then a diversion occurred in the entrance of the servant Gerty, carrying a jug.
“Oh, here is the milk at last!” said Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir, with a sigh of relief. “Now we can have tea. Gerty, what do you think?—here is Miss Leslie wanting to take Boy to stay with her for a few days! Did ever you hear of such a thing!”
Gerty sniffed her usual sniff, which as she gave it, almost amounted to an enigma.
“I should let him go, ’m, if I were you, ’m,” she said, whereat Miss Letty could have embraced her. “He ain’t doin’ no good ’ere, with the master on in his tearin’ tantrums an’ swillin’ whisky fit to bust hisself, an’ really there’s no tellin’ what might happen. Oh yes, ’m,—I should let him go, ’m!”
“Would you really?” and Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir rose and lolled herself lazily along to the tea-table—“Well!—Do you want him to-day, Letitia?”
“Why, yes, I can take him at once,” replied Miss Leslie, quite trembling with excitement, and commending Gerty to all the special favours of providence for the evident influence she exerted on the flabby mind of her mistress—“Nothing will please me better.”
“Such a funny notion of yours!” smiled Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir, hovering over the tea-things like a sort of large loosely-feathered bird. “You are such a regular old maid, Letitia, that I should have thought you wouldn’t have had a child messing about in your beautiful house for the world. However, if you really want him, take him,—but you must have him alone—I can’t spare Gerty.”
Gerty smiled broadly.
“Oh, Miss Leslie won’t want me, ’m,” she cheerfully declared. “Master Boy don’t give no trouble. Shall I put his clothes together, ’m? He ain’t got nothing but his white flannel sailor-suit and two little shirts and nightgowns.”
Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir sighed wearily.
“Oh dear, don’t bother me about such things!” she said. “Just make a brown-paper parcel of what you think the child will want for a week, and put it in Miss Leslie’s brougham. You came in your brougham, Letitia? Of course. Yes. That will be all right. Put it all in the brougham, Gerty.”
“Yes, ’m. Shall I bring in Master Boy’s hat and overcoat in here?”
“Certainly. Dear me, what a fuss!” Here Gerty promptly left the room. “One would think the child was going to the wilds of Africa! Do you take sugar, Letitia? Yes? Ah, you are not inclined to be at all stout, are you?”—this with a somewhat envious glance at Miss Leslie’s still perfectly graceful and svelte figure—“No, I should think you must be nearly all skin and bone. Now, I can never take sugar. I put on flesh directly. Here is your tea. Boy, do you want any more milk?”
Boy had, during the past few minutes, remained in a condition of bland staring. Vague notions that his “wanting out” with Kiss-Letty was going to be a granted and accomplished fact, pleased his little brain, but he had no skill to discourse on his sensations, even in broken language. He was however too happy to require any extra feeding. He therefore declined the offer of ‘more milk’ with a negative shake of his gold curls, and after a little further consideration, clambered off Miss Letitia’s knee and went to his mother.
“Me goin’ out wiz Kiss-Letty?” he inquired with a solemn air.
“Yes. You are going to stay with her in her grand big house, away from poor Muzzy”—replied the ‘poor Muzzy’ in question, taking a large mouthful of bread-and-butter and swallowing it down with a gulp of tea. “And I hope you’ll be a good boy.”
“’Ope me be a goo’ boy!” he echoed thoughtfully. “’Ess! Me tell Dads?”
Miss Letitia looked startled,—Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir smiled.
“No. You had better not tell Dads. He is ill, you know. When you come back he will be quite well.”
“Sink so?” queried Boy dubiously.
“Think so? Of course I think so. Now don’t stand staring there. Here’s your picture-book,—look at that till Gerty brings you your hat and coat.”
Boy took the interesting volume offered him, docilely, but without enthusiasm. He knew it well. Its torn covers,—the impossible beasts and birds depicted within it,—the extraordinary jumble of rhymes which Gerty would read to him at odd moments, and which he would afterwards think about in pained silence,—all these things worried him. There was a large and elaborately ornamented B in the book, and—twisted in and out its curly formation—were two designs which were utterly opposed to each other,—a cricket-bat and a bumble-bee. The ‘poetry’ accompanying it said—
Fetch me the BAT
To kill the RAT.
After this ferocious couplet came the flamboyant coloured drawing of a large yellow flower, unlike any flower ever born in any field of the wide world. The yellow flower being duly considered as a growth of distinct individuality, other two lines appeared—
Look here and see
The BUMBLE-BEE.
This particular page of his “picture-book” had often puzzled Boy. When Gerty had first read to him—
Fetch me the BAT
To kill the RAT,
he had at once asked,—
“Where rat?”
Gerty had sought everywhere all over the ornate capital letter and the other designs on the page for the missing animal,—but in vain. Therefore she had been reluctantly compelled to admit the depressing truth,—
“There ain’t no rat, Master Boy dear!”
“Why no rat?” pursued Boy, solemnly.
Driven to desperation, a bright idea suddenly crossed Gerty’s brain.
“I ’xpect it’s cos it’s killed,” she said,—“See, Master Boy! It’s ‘a bat to kill a rat.’ And the rat’s killed!”
“Poo’ rat!” commented Boy thoughtfully—“Gone! Poo’—Poo’ rat!—gone altogezzer!”
He sighed,—and refused to ‘look here and see, the Bumble-bee.’ He really wished to know who it was that had asked for a bat to kill a rat, and why that unknown individual had been so furiously inclined. But he kept these desires to himself; for he had an instinctive sense that though Gerty was all kindness, she was not quite the person to be trusted with his closest confidences.
Just now he went into a corner, picture-book in hand, and sat, watching his ‘Muzzy’ and ‘Kiss-Letty’ taking tea together. Muzzy’s back was towards him, and he could not help wondering why it was so big and broad? Why it was so difficult to get round Muzzy for example? He had no such trouble with Kiss-Letty. She was so slim and yet so strong,—and once, when she had lifted him up and carried him from one room to the other, he felt as though he were ‘throned light in air,’ so easy and graceful had been the way she bore him. Now Muzzy always took hold of him as if he were a lump. Not that he argued this fact at all in his little mind,—he was simply thinking—thinking,—yes, if the sober truth must be told, he was thinking quite sadly and seriously how it happened that Muzzy was ugly and Kiss-Letty pretty! It was such a pity Muzzy was ugly!—for surely it was ugly to have red blotches on the face, and hair like the arm-chair stuffing? Such a pity—such a pity for Muzzy? Such a pity too for Boy! Ah, and such a pity it is for all idle, slovenly women who “let themselves go” and think their children ‘take no notice’ of indolence, dirt, and discordant colours. The sense of beauty and fitness was very strong in Boy. Where he got it was a mystery,—it was certainly not a heritage derived from either of his parents. He did not know that ‘Kiss-Letty’ was many years older than ‘Muzzy,’—but he did know that she was ever so much more charming and agreeable to look at. He judged by appearances,—and these were all in ‘Kiss-Letty’s’ favour. For in truth the elderly spinster looked a whole decade younger than the more youthful married woman. Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir, though she took life with such provokingly indifferent ease, ‘wore’ badly,—Miss Leslie, despite many concealed sorrows and disappointments, wore well. Her face was still rounded and soft-complexioned,—her eyes were bright and clear,—while her figure was graceful and her dress choice and elegant. Boy indeed thought ‘Kiss-Letty’ very beautiful, and he was not without experience. Several well-known “society beauties” of the classed and labelled sort, who are hawked about in newspaper ‘fashionable’ columns as wearing blue or green, or “looking lovely in white,” and “stately in pink”—were wont to visit Captain the Honourable and Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir on their ‘at-home’ days, and Boy was always taken into the drawing-room to see them,—but somehow they made no impression on him. They lacked something—though he could not tell what that something was. None of them had the smile of Kiss-Letty, or her soft dove-like glance of eye. Peering at her now from his present corner Boy considered her a very angel of loveliness. And he was actually going away with her, to her ‘grand big house,’ Muzzy said. Boy tried to think what the ‘grand big house’ would be like. The nearest approach his imagination could make to it was Aladdin’s palace, as pictured in one of the ‘fairy landscapes’ of a certain magic lantern which a very burly gentleman, a Major Desmond, had brought to him at Christmas. Major Desmond was a large, jovial, white-haired, white-moustached personage, with a rollicking mellow laugh, and an immense hand which, whenever it was laid on Boy’s head, caressed his curls with the gentleness of a south wind touching the petals of a flower. Muzzy’s hand was hard and heavy indeed compared to the hand of Major Desmond. Major Desmond was a friend of Kiss-Letty’s,—that was all Boy knew about him,—that and the magic-lantern incident. Ruffling and crinkling up the pages of the too-familiar ‘picture book’ mechanically, Boy went on with his own little quaint sequence of thought,—till suddenly, just as Muzzy and Kiss-Letty had finished their tea, a dull crash was heard in the opposite room, accompanied by a loud oath—then came silence. Boy trotted out of his corner, his little face pale with fright.
“Oh Poo’ Sing!” he cried. “Dads ill!—Dads hurted! Me go to Dads!”
“No—no!” and Miss Letty hastened to him and caught him in her arms—“No, dear! Wait a minute! Wait, darling! Let Mother see first what is the matter.”
Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir had risen, and was about to open the door and make some casual inquiry, when Gerty came in, somewhat pale but giggling.
“It’s only master, ’m,” she said. “His foot tripped, and down he fell. He ain’t hurt hisself. He don’t even trouble to get up—he’s just a-sittin’ on the floor with the whisky-bottle as comfoble as you please!”
Miss Letty shuddered as she listened, and clasped Boy more warmly to her heart, placing her gentle hands against his ears lest he should hear too much.
“Papa’s all right, Boy dear,” she said.—“He has just let something fall on the floor. See?”
“Zat all?” queried Boy with an anxious look.
“That’s all. Now”—and Miss Letitia took his dumpy wee hand in her own and led him across the room—“come along, and we’ll have a nice drive together, shall we? Gerty, have you got Master Boy’s things?”
“Yes, ’m.” And Gerty, flopping down on both knees in front of the little fellow, pulled a miniature overcoat round his tiny form and stuck a sailor-hat (marked ‘Invincible’ on the ribbon) jauntily on his head—“There you are, Master Boy, dear! Ain’t you grand, eh? Going away visiting all by your own self! Quite like a big man!”
Boy smiled vaguely but sweetly, and turned one of the buttons on his coat round and round meditatively. Quite like a big man, was he? Well, he did not feel very big, but on the contrary particularly small—and especially just now, because Muzzy was standing upright, looking down upon him with a spacious air of infinite and overwhelming condescension. Surely Muzzy was a very large woman?—might not one say extra large? Boy stretched out his hand and grasped her skirt, gazing wistfully up at the bulk above him,—the bulk which now stooped, like an over-full sack of wheat toppling forward, to kiss him and bid him good-bye.
“Remember, you’ve never been away from me before, Boy,”—and ‘Muzzy’ spoke in a kind of injured tone—“so I hope you will be good and obedient, and keep your clothes clean. And when you get to Miss Leslie’s house, don’t smear your fingers on the walls, and mind you don’t break anything. You know it won’t be as it is here, where you can tumble about as you like all day and play——”
“Oh, but he can!” interposed Miss Leslie hastily—“I assure you he can!”
“Pardon me, Letitia, he can not”—and Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir swelled visibly with matronly obstinacy as she spoke—“It is not likely that in your house you can have wooden soldiers all over the floor. It would be impossible. Boy has very odd ways with his soldiers. He likes to ‘camp them out’ in different spots of the pattern on the carpet—and of course it does make a place untidy. When one is a mother, one does not mind these things”—this with a superior and compassionate air—“but you, with your precise notions of order, will find it very trying.”
Miss Leslie protested, with a little smile, that really she had no particularly ‘precise’ notions of order.
“Oh yes, you have,” declared Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir emphatically—“Don’t tell me you haven’t, Letitia,—all old maids are the same. Then there is that dreadful Cow of Boy’s,—the thing Major Desmond gave him, along with the magic lantern,—he can do without the lantern, of course—but I really am afraid he had better take his Cow!”
Miss Letitia laughed—and a very pretty, musical little laugh she had.
“Oh, by all means let us have the Cow!” she said gaily. “Where is it, Boy?”
Boy looked up, then down,—to the east, to the west, and everywhere into the air, without committing himself to a reply. Gerty came to the rescue.
“I’ll fetch it,” she said briskly. “I saw it on Master Boy’s bed a minute ago.”
She left the room, to return again directly with the interesting animal in question—quite a respectably-sized toy cow with a movable head which wagged up and down for a long time when set in motion by the touch of a finger. It had a blue ribbon round its neck, and Boy called it ‘Dunny.’ He welcomed it now as he saw it with the confiding smile of long and experienced friendship.
“Ullo Dunny!” he said—“Wants out wiz Boy? Tum along zen!” And receiving the pasteboard quadruped in his arms he embraced it with effusion.
“It is most absurd!” said Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir grandiosely—“Still it would be rather awkward for you, Letitia, if he were to start crying for his Cow!”
“It would indeed!” and the laughter still lighted up Miss Letitia’s soft eyes with a keen and merry twinkle—“I would not be without the Cow for worlds!”
Something in her voice or smile caused Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir to feel slightly cross. There was an unmistakable air of youth about this “old maid”—a sense of fun and a spirit of enjoyment which were not in ‘Muzzy’s’ composition. And ‘Muzzy’ straightway got an idea into her head that she was “out of it,” as it were,—that Miss Letitia, Boy and ‘Dunny’ all understood each other in a manner which she could never grasp, and knew the way to a fairy-land where she could never follow. And it was with a touch of snappishness that she said,—
“Well!—if you are going, hadn’t you better go? My husband will probably be coming in here soon,—and he might perhaps make some objection to Boy’s leaving——”
“Oh, I won’t run the risk of that!” answered Miss Leslie quickly. “Come along, Boy!—say good-bye to Mother!”
Holding his ‘Cow’ with one hand to his breast, Boy raised his pretty little face to be kissed again.
“Goo’ bye, Muzzy dee-ar!” he murmured—“’Ope Dads better soon! Kiss Dads for Boy!”
This was his parting message to the drunkard in the next room,—and having uttered it, he drew a long breath as of one who prepares to plunge into unknown seas, and resigned himself to ‘Kiss-Letty,’ who led him gently along, accommodating her graceful swift step to his toddling movements, through the hall and outside to her brougham, where the footman in attendance, smiling broadly at the sight of Boy, lifted the little fellow in, and seated him cosily on the soft cushions. Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir and the servant Gerty watched his departure from the house door.
“I will take every care of him!” called Miss Letitia, as she followed her small guest into her carriage—“Don’t be at all anxious!”
She waved her hand,—the footman shut the door, and mounted the box,—and in another minute the smart little equipage had turned the corner of Hereford Square and disappeared. Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir remained for a few seconds on the steps of her house, airing herself largely, and patronising with a casual glance the clear blue of the afternoon sky.
“What a vain old woman that Miss Leslie is!” she remarked to Gerty—“Really she tries to pass herself off as about thirty!”
Gerty sniffed, as usual.
“Oh, I don’t think so, ’m!” she said—“I don’t think she tries to pass herself off as anything, ’m! And I wouldn’t never call her vain. She’s just the real lady, every inch of her, and of course she can’t help herself lookin’ nice. And what a mercy it is for Master Boy to be took away just now!—for I didn’t like to mention it before, ’m, but I don’t know what we’re goin’ to do with the Cap’en,—he’s goin’ on worse than ever,—an he’s bin an’ torn nearly every mossel of his clothes off,—an’ a puffeckly disgraceful sight he is, ’m, lyin’ sprawled on the floor a-playin’ ‘patience’!”