CHAPTER II
HER BIRTHDAY
Gentle Pug took the doll, and, in the moments when she was not setting neat stitches or baking custards, played with it prettily. Meantime Merrylips went romping her own way, and soon had forgotten both the doll and the godmother that had sent it.
This godmother Merrylips knew only by name, as the Lady Sybil Fernefould, her mother's old friend, a dread and distant being to whom, in her mother's letters, she was trained to send her duty. She had never seen Lady Sybil, nor, after the gift of the doll, did she wish to see her.
Through the summer days that followed Merrylips was busy with matters of deeper interest than dolls and godmothers. She rode on the great wains, loaded with corn, that lumbered behind the straining horses to the barns of Walsover. She helped to gather fruit—plums and pears and rosy apples. She watched her father's men, while they thrashed the rye and wheat or made cider and perry. She shaped a little mill-wheel with the four-penny whittle that Munn, true to his promise, at last had sent her, and set it turning in the brook below the paddock.
Almost in a day, it seemed to her, the time slipped by, till it was two months and more since she had been so angry at her godmother's gift. Michaelmas tide was near, and by a happy chance all three of her tall brothers were home from Winchester School and from college at Oxford.
It was a clear, windy day of autumn in the first week of their home-coming,—the very day, so it chanced, on which Merrylips was eight years old. She was sitting on the flagstones of the west terrace of Walsover, eating a crisp apple and warding off the caresses of three favorite hounds, Fox and Shag and Silver, while she watched her brothers playing at bowls.
They had thrown off their doublets in the heat of the game, and their voices rang high and boyish.
"Fairly cast!"
"A hit! A hit!"
Indeed, they were no more than boys, those three big brothers. Tall Longkin himself, for all his swagger and the rapier that he sometimes wore, was scarcely eighteen. Munn, a good lad in the saddle but a dullard at his book, was three years younger, and Flip, with the curly pate, was not yet turned thirteen.
But to Merrylips they were almost men and heroes who had gone out into the world, though it was but the world of Winchester School and of Oxford. With all her heart she loved and believed in them, those tall brothers. How happy she felt to be seated near them, pillowed among the dogs and munching her apple, where at any moment she could catch Munn's eyes or answer Flip's smile! She thought that she should be happy to sit thus forever.
While she watched, the game came to an end with a notable strong cast from Longkin that made her clap her hands and cry, "Oh, brave!"
Then the three, laughing and wiping their hot foreheads on their shirt-sleeves, came sauntering to the spot where Merrylips sat and flung themselves down beside her among the dogs.
"Give me a bite of thine apple, little greedy-chaps!" said Munn, and cast his arm about Merrylips' neck and drew her to him.
"To-morrow, lads," said Longkin, who was stretched at his ease with his head upon the hound Silver, "say, shall we go angling in Walsover mead?"
"Take me!" cried Merrylips, with her mouth full. "Oh, take me too, good Longkin!"
"Thou art too small, pigwidgeon," said Flip.
"I ben't," clamored Merrylips. "I can trudge stoutly and never cry, I promise ye. I be as apt to go as thou, Flip Venner. Thou hast but four years the better of me."
"Ay, but I am a lad, and thou art but a wench," said Flip.
He had had the worst of the game with his elder brothers, poor Flip! So he was not in the sweetest of humors.
"I care not!" Merrylips said stoutly. "Where thou canst go, Flip,Ican go!"
At this they all laughed, even that tall youth Longkin, who was growing to stand upon his dignity.
"Come, Merrylips!" Longkin teased. "What wilt thou do an Flip get him a long sword and go to war? 'Tis likely he may do so."
"And that's no jest," cried Flip, most earnestly. "Father saith an the base Puritan fellows lower not their tone, all we that be loyal subjects to the king must e'en march forth and trounce 'em."
"Then Heaven send they lower not their tone!" added Munn. "I be wearied of Ovid and Tully. Send us a war, and speedily, that I may toss my dreary book to the rafters and go trail a pike like a lad of spirit!"
"So you'll go unto the wars, you two?" Longkin kept on teasing. "Then hang me if Merrylips shall not make a third! 'Hath as good right as either of ye babies to esteem herself a soldier."
Then Flip and Munn cast themselves upon the scoffing eldest brother and mauled him gloriously in a welter of yelping dogs. Like a loyal heart Merrylips tossed by her apple and ran in to aid the weaker side, where she cuffed Flip and tugged at Munn's arm with no mean skill.
But in the thick of the fray she got a knock on the nose from Flip's elbow, and promptly she lost her hot little temper. She did not cry, for she had been too well trained by those big brothers, but she screamed, "Hang thee, varlet!" and hurled herself upon Flip.
She heard Longkin cry, "Our right old Merrylips!"
Through the haze that swam before her eyes, which were all dazzled with the knock that she had got, she saw Flip's laughing face, as he warded her off, and she raged at him for laughing. Then, all at once, she heard her shrill little voice raging in a dead stillness, and in the stillness she heard a grave voice speak.
"Sybil! Little daughter!"
Merrylips let fall her clenched hands. Shamefacedly she turned, and in the doorway that opened on the terrace she saw Lady Venner stand.
"Honored mother!" faltered Merrylips, and stumbled through a courtesy.
All in a moment she longed to cry with pain and shame and fright, but she would not, while her brothers looked on. Instead she blinked back the tears, and at a sign from her mother started to follow her into the house.
"If it like you, good mother, the fault was mine to vex the child," said Longkin.
But the mother answered sternly, "Peace!" and so led Merrylips away.
In the cool parlor, where the long shadows of late afternoon made the corners as dim as if it were twilight, Lady Venner sat down on the broad window-seat. Merrylips stood meekly before her, and while she waited thus in the quiet, where the terrace and the dogs and the lads seemed to have drawn far away, she grew aware that her hair was tousled, and her hands were soiled and scratched. She was so ashamed that she cast down her eyes, and then she blushed to see how the toes of her shoes were stubbed. Stealthily she bent her knees and tried to cover her unmaidenly shoes with the hem of her petticoat.
"Little daughter," said Lady Venner, "or haply should I say—little son?"
Then, in spite of herself, Merrylips smiled, as she was always ready to do, for she liked that title.
Straightway Lady Venner changed her tone.
"Son I must call you," she said gravely, "for I cannot recognize a daughter of mine in this unmannered hoiden. For more than two months, Sybil, I have made my plans to send you where under other tutors than unthinking lads you may be schooled to gentler ways. What I have seen this hour confirmeth my resolve. This day week you will quit Walsover."
"Quit Walsover—and Munn and Flip and Longkin?" Merrylips repeated; but thanks to the schooling of the unthinking lads, her brothers, breathed hard and did not cry.
"You will go," said Lady Venner, "to your dear godmother, Lady Sybil, at her house of Larkland in the Weald of Sussex. She hath long been fain of your company, and in her household I know that you will receive such nurture as becometh a maid. Now go unto my woman and be made tidy."
In silence Merrylips courtesied and stumbled from the room. Just outside, in the hall, she ran against Munn, who caught her by the sleeve.
"What's amiss wi' thee?" he asked. "Did our mother chide thee roundly, little sweetheart?"
"I be going hence," said Merrylips, and blinked fast. "I be going to mine old godmother—she that sent me a vild mammet—and I know I'll hate her fairly! Oh, tell me, dear Munn, where might her house of Larkland be? Is't far from Walsover?"
"A long distance," said Munn; and his face was troubled for the little girl he loved.
"Is't farther than Winchester?" Merrylips urged in a voice that to his ears seemed near to breaking.
He was an honest lad, this Munn; and though he did not like to say it, spoke the truth.
"Ay, dear heart," he said, "'tis farther even than Winchester thou wilt go, but yet—"
Merrylips tossed back her flyaway hair.
"Tell that unto Flip!" she cried. "He hath been but unto Winchester, and now I'll go farther than Winchester! I'll journey farther than Master Flip, though he be a lad and I but a wench!"
She lifted a stanch little face to her brother, and smiled upon him, undismayed.