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Read Ebook: Above the French Lines Letters of Stuart Walcott American Aviator: July 4 1917 to December 8 1917 by Walcott Stuart
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Ebook has 1353 lines and 46243 words, and 28 pages
"Oh, wouldn't I?"
"If you move your foot I'll jerk you off."
"Now, don't begin that," said Pauline, "you'll make him cough again,--let him alone, Lynn."
"Well, he mustn't say he'll push me off," said Lynn. "I'm only trying to teach him to talk prop'ly. This morning he asked Larkin to come and look at his lee lowing in the lound. And I had to explain that he meant 'tree growing in the ground.'"
Max was red with anger.
He sent each of the difficult words from his mouth with a snap, as if he were discharging them from a pistol that jammed.
But Lynn jeered again.
He could not jerk her from the gate, though he tried hard; eight years old can effect a much firmer lodgment than four years. He sheltered himself behind his weakness.
"You'll make me cough," said Lynn.
"I cough worser than you," insisted Max.
"I go purple, Miss Bibby says so," said Muffie complacently.
"I go nearly lack in the face," said Max.
It was possible that Pauline, who being ten was always superior, would have laid claim herself to some still darker shade of complexion but that a diversion occurred at the moment.
One or two people carrying golf clubs had passed along the monotonous road during the morning and Max had longed to be a caddie. Once a woodcutter had gone along with his axe over his shoulder and Lynn had been moved to recite--to the disgust of the others--"Woodman, spare that tree." And once Larkin had flashed past on horseback, Howie tearing along not far behind, it having come to their ears five minutes before that a cottage far away through the bush was opened, its occupants having come up by the night train.
"When I grow up," said Muffie enviously, "I'll be a grocer's boy."
"An' I'll be the other one," said Max, so filled with glorious visions suddenly that he forgot his original intention of coughing.
But now there came briskly round the corner one of the big Burunda wagonettes, overflowing with ladies and children and picnic baskets and plainly bound for the waterfall.
"Why," said Lynn excitedly, "there are Effie and Florence."
"And Frank," cried Muffie joyously.
"Why," said one of the ladies in the wagonette, "there are the little Lomaxes,--I didn't know they were up." She stopped the driver.
Lynn and Muffie and Max were for rushing out and charging bodily into the vehicle, and indeed one of the ladies was beckoning encouragingly to them all.
Lynn's swift imagination saw themselves borne joyously off to the loved waterfall; she felt the very water of the cool delicious pools on her hot feet.
But Pauline, with a look of absolute tragedy on her fair little face, banged the gate and kept her brothers and sisters on the hither side of it.
"We're contagious," she shouted.
"Wha-a-at?" said the lady.
"Whooping cough," said Pauline with extreme dejection in her tone, and as if for a guarantee of her veracity Max was seized with a paroxysm then and there, and Muffie followed suit.
"Oh, drive on!" cried the lady hastily to her man, and gave an alarmed look at her own little flock. But she pulled up again fifty yards away and came back on foot and stood a very respectable distance away from the infected spot.
"I'm so sorry, chickies," she said kindly; "that's a wretched visitor for the holidays. Have you been very bad?"
"I go nearly lack in the face," said Max, not without pride.
"Is mother with you?" said the lady, Mrs. Gowan by name, somewhat anxiously, "and your father?"
"No," said Pauline sadly, "they've gone to New Zealand,--mamma got quite ill with nursing us, and daddie got it too, and he wouldn't come up here."
Muffie giggled. "People's laugh 'cause daddie's got it," she volunteered.
"But in New Zealand, you see," explained Pauline gravely, "no one will know him."
Mrs. Gowan smiled a little--as others had done. For indeed the thought of a dignified Judge drawing in his breath and whooping on the bench like a frightened child was not without its humorous side.
The poor Judge had become quite sensitive about the ridiculous complaint his children had given to him, and after struggling with it pettishly for some time, and the vacation coming along, he had finally proposed the New Zealand trip to his wife, the children being sent to complete their cure to the summer home he had long since built on the mountains.
"Well," said Mrs. Gowan, "I am really sorry, dears, for we could have had such fun, all of us up here at the same time, couldn't we? But you won't speak to Effie and Florence if you meet them anywhere, will you? Even if they try to speak to you? I have such a dread of whooping cough."
"Paul told you straight away off that we were contagerous," said Lynn, a little hurt that after her sister's magnificent honesty such admonition should be deemed necessary.
"Yes, I know, dear," said the lady, "and indeed I thank Pauline very much for being so considerate. It is Effie and Florence I am thinking of; they are so thoughtless, I am afraid they will try to come over to you."
"You'd better not let them come down to this part of the road then," said Pauline sagely.
"But that's the difficulty," said Mrs. Gowan, "their uncle has taken 'Tenby'"--she waved her hand to the cottage opposite that had stood irksomely monotonous with closed shutters and chained gate ever since the Lomaxes had come to Burunda this year, "and of course they will often want to come down to him to listen to his stories. He is Hugh Kinross, you know."
They did not know, and even now the name was a name to them and nothing more. Mrs. Gowan evidently took it for granted that even children must have heard of her brother, the famous author.
"So you will help me, won't you, Pauline?" she said appealingly,--"you won't let Max and Muffie run out and talk to them! And if they try to come here you will send them away, won't you, dear?"
Pauline promised her co-operation, though indeed her heart sank at the prospect of seeing her merry little friend Effie day after day as close as the opposite fence and never as much as exchanging chocolates with her.
"When is he coming?" she said heavily.
"To-morrow," said Mrs. Gowan--then she laughed--"but I think he would be afraid to come, don't you, if he knew he was going to have four little rackets like you for such near neighbours. He has come all this way to be perfectly quiet and write his new book."
Lynn looked quite impressed.
"I think we'd better stop in the orchard," she said soberly.
Mrs. Gowan kissed her hand to them and went off laughing to her wagonette.
TREATING OF LARKIN AND HIS COMMISSION
"Well," said Lynn, looking across at "Tenby," "I'm glad it's going to be lived in at last, poor thing. It makes me quite mis'rable to see it standing there in the sun with its eyes shut up tight as if it wanted to wake up on'y it darerunt."
"Like the Sleeping Beauty," said Pauline.
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