The Family at Misrule/Chapter 19

OOR little Nell,—it was almost pitiful to see how good she tried to be after her escapade. There was absolutely nothing she would not have done for Meg. She begged to be allowed to help in the housekeeping, offered to take the darning of Bunty's socks and Peter's terrible stockings as her own particular work, and sternly refrained from looking in her glass when it was not necessary for the straight set of her collar or respectable appearance of her hair.

She consulted Meg as to the best study she could take up—she said she felt ashamed to be so dreadfully ignorant.

"Why, I haven't read anything better than Jessie Fothergill and Rhoda Broughton this year," she said, in a tone of stern surprise at herself.

Meg suggested the "Essays of Elia," "The Professor at the Breakfast Table," "Sesame and Lilies," Lives of various poets.

"You can go then gradually to something deeper," she said. "I'm afraid you might be discouraged if you started on anything more solid just yet."

But Nellie's zeal was too tremendous for half measures.

During the morning of the day after the dinner party, Meg had occasion to go into the nursery for something or other during Miss Monson's hours, and with difficulty restrained a smile.

Nellie always studied—or pretended to—at a rickety-legged draught-table in the window. Her working materials hitherto had consisted of a chased silver pen that looked too elegant to write with, an ornamental inkstand with violet and red ink, a box of chocolates, a novel in brown paper covers, "Le Chien," highly dilapidated, and "Samson Agonistes," which she was supposed to be studying in detail.

This morning all was changed. There was black ink in the bottles, the silver pen was invisible, and a plain penny red one occupied its place on the stag's head. No trace of chocolates, no covered fiction at all. Instead, a pile of books selected from the study simply because they were the most solid looking and driest on the shelves. The choice had occupied Nellie for almost an hour; if any she took down had spaced matter, light-looking conversations, or broken-up paragraphs she instantly replaced them. She had finally selected and carried to the nursery, to Miss Monson's incredulous surprise, the following six: "Sartor Resartus," "The Wealth of Nations," "Marcus Aurelius," "Mazzini's Essays," the "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire," and Johnson's "Rasselas."

When Meg came in she was struggling with Carlyle, fingers at ears to keep him quite apart from the object lesson on Ants which Miss Monson was delivering to Poppet and Peter. In the afternoon she practised for two consecutive hours, not waltzes and scraps from the "Mikado" and "Gondoliers" and "Paul Jones" as usual, but Plaidy's technical studies and Czerny's Velocity Exercises and a fugue from Bach.

At night she took out a quantity of red wool that she found in a box, and began to crochet a petticoat for an old woman who lived in a tumble-down bark hut near the river, and had the reputation of being mother of two bushrangers who had been shot, sister to a famous murderer, and daughter of one of the early Botany Bay convicts.

But of course such an abnormal state of goodness could not be expected to continue uninterruptedly, at any rate in its early days. In less than a fortnight the silver pen made its reappearance, and violet ink crept back into one of the bottles. The crochet needle was slipped out of the sixth row of the petticoat and made to work fleecy white wool up into that pretty style of head wrap known as a "fascinator."

"Oh, I didn't do anything so very dreadful, after all," she said to herself, with the blunted memory of ten days. "Dear old Meg is always a little inclined to make mountains out of molehills."

At first there had been a little real fright mixed with the thought of the dinner-party. Five days after it was over, she was in at the chemist's spending eighteenpence of her allowance on a sweet little bottle of scent for Meg.

And one of the grooms from Trafalgar House came in with a prescription.

"The old lady's pretty bad," he said, in answer to a question of the chemist that Nell had not caught, "and two more of the maids are down."

Nellie lingered a few minutes, counted her change several times, examined the nail and tooth-brushes displayed in a glass case, and read an advertisement setting forth the merits of somebody's pills. The man said he would call back for the medicine in half an hour, and departed. Then she went back to the counter.

"Is it Mrs. Fitzroy-Browne who is ill?" she asked, remembering with a pang the poor old woman's wistful "I just wish you was my little girl!"

"Yes, she's down with scarlet-fever—several of the servants too," he said, and went to the gas to melt some sealing-wax.

The girl went home with a grave face. Apart from regret at the old lady's illness, there was the fear that she herself might have caught it. She went straight to her room and examined her tongue anxiously at the glass; then she held one wrist gravely with a finger and thumb, and asked herself if she felt feverish.

But the pulse was calm, the tongue healthily red,—she laughed at herself.

"I never felt better in my life," she said aloud.

After some deliberation she decided she would not tell Meg. "She'd only worry, and prepare herself for my immediate funeral," she thought. "I should be all over red spots by now if I had got it."

So that is how it happened, when ten days had gone and she still felt exuberantly well, that the silver pen returned and the fascinator was commenced. One could not wear sackcloth for ever.

She even borrowed "Comin' thro' the Rye" and "Joan" from a girl-friend; and "Rasselas" and "Sartor Resartus" slipped down behind the table and were forgotten.

But she had intended all the time to consult Alan. He had been away for almost a fortnight in Victoria, or she would have asked him before.

The afternoon he returned, and as soon as she could get him away from Meg, she asked him if he would come down into the garden with her, as she wanted to ask him something very particularly.

The young doctor laughed, and put himself very much at her service.

"I hope it's not about the style of hats in Melbourne," he said in mock alarm, as they went down the path; "for I culpably forgot to notice. If it's only sleeves, now, I can tell you—they're up to the ears, and a yard and a half wide."

"It's about the state of my health," she said sententiously,—"I wish to consult you professionally, Dr. Courtney!"

He put on a sympathetic look.

"The heart, I suppose?" he said.

But Nell stopped short in the summer-house.

"Don't be stupid!" she said. "Look here, Alan, have I, or have I not, got scarlet-fever?"

He could not help laughing. It seemed so absurd for a fine girl—the picture of health—to ask such a question.

"Your skin is cool—your pulse normal—your tongue fit for a health advertisement. If you have got it you're managing to conceal it very well," he said. "You might give me the recipe for my other patients."

"I was talking to some one who had scarlet-fever just after," Nell returned,—"that's all."

There was no fun in Alan's face now.

"When?" he said sharply.

"Oh, nearly a fortnight ago!"

"You've not got it, then," he said. "Did you change your things after?—take every precaution? How did it happen?"

She told him everything, blushing hotly at the surprise in his face when he heard she had been to Trafalgar House.

He looked exceedingly serious over it.

"There's no knowing what may be the end of it," he said, a frown of anxiety on his brow. "How could you do such a thing, Nellie? You might have known Meg's judgment would be good."

"But you say I haven't got it," the girl answered, resenting the elder-brotherly tone of reproof, "so there's no need for any more fuss."

"How do I know you did not bring it home with you and give it to one of the others?" he said shortly.

Nell looked aghast.

"Why, I couldn't do that, could I?" she said, with startled eyes. "I never dreamt any one but I could have got it."

"You ought not to have been allowed with the others," he said. "However, as things are, I daresay no harm has been done. No one has been complaining of headache or sore throat, have they?"

Nellie thought hard for a minute or two. She reviewed each member of the family rapidly in succession, and tried to remember if any one's appetite had failed at any meal lately, that was always the great test of health at Misrule.

"No," she said at last. Then she caught her breath.

"Essie had a headache this morning," she faltered. "Oh, but she fell down and bumped her head, so that accounts, and she ate four jam tarts yesterday when no one was in the room; that's the cause of hers, Alan, isn't it?—oh, you can see it is."

"I'll look at her," he said. "Does Meg know anything about all this?"

"I didn't like to worry her," Nellie answered, and followed him up the path like a criminal found out in blackest iniquity. She had never dreamed she was endangering the others. Poppet met them on the second path.

"Afternoon tea's ready, and Meg says aren't you two ever coming in. No, I don't want any, there's only gingerbread."

Alan felt her pulse, and asked to see her tongue.

"There's something alarming in a little girl who doesn't like gingerbread," he said; but there was a professional look in his eye.

"She never eats gingerbread," Nell exclaimed, almost indignant with him for having fears when the child looked so rosy.

"Poppet's all right," he said in a low tone, as they went on; and Nellie could have cried in her relief.

"Peter next," she said.

They went down into the paddock, where Peter was engaged in chasing a fat duck from end to end, without a thought in his mind of being cruel to it. He was hot, certainly, but that was the exertion of running and shouting.

"Is your throat sore?" Nellie burst out, before they fairly reached him.

"I thould think I can thout if I like," he said in an injured tone, taking her anxious query for sarcasm. Alan caught him by the back of his sailor coat.

"Mad, quite mad," he said—"only lunatics rush about like this. Hold him while we find out the symptoms, Nellie, and see whether we'll have to extract his teeth, or put his legs in plaster-of-Paris."

"He's all right too, I think," he said, when the released boy sprang away again after the duck, that was panting in a corner with one anxious eye on its enemy.

"Bunty's beautifully well," Nell said eagerly, as they went up to the house again. "You should just see him eat, Alan. And Pip is splendid, so is Meg, as you can see."

Meg was standing on the front verandah, a troubled look in her eyes.

"Oh, there you are!" she said.

"Here we are," said Nellie. She drooped her eyes guiltily. "Is the tea cold?"

But Meg did not answer her.

"I wish you'd come and look at Essie, Alan," she said. "She's been eating pastry, and it's upset her, poor little thing. I don't like her looks."

"Does her head ache?" Nellie asked with dry lips.

"She says her head aches, her throat aches, and her legs ache,—everything aches," was Meg's answer. "Esther always gives her aconite if she's out of sorts, Alan. I gave her five drops this morning: was that right?" "Quite," he said; "I'll go up and look at her now."

He went up the stairs behind Meg, a very grave look in his eyes.

And Nellie followed with a face as colourless as the great white roses she had stuck in her belt so lightheartedly half an hour ago.