CHAPTER XWHERE IS NUMBER SIX?
“Come, go wadin’; Molly, please come,” coaxed Donald, pulling at his sister’s skirt before the English girls were out of hearing.
“Yes, in a minute, little brother.”
Molly lingered to tell the fish-wife in painstaking French that they were sorry to have interrupted her netting.
The woman puzzled over Molly’s words as Molly and Pauline had previously puzzled over her own, for the language of Paris is far different from thepatoisof Normandy.
“She looks as black as the boat-house,” observed roguish Pauline, at the same time glancing tenderly at the old peasant, as if paying her a compliment.
“You sha’n’t guy the poor woman, Polly; that’s shabby,” expostulated her comrade. “But tell me how to make her understand what I said.”
“Smile at her, Molly, and shake your head at Donald, then at the seine. See how that will work.”
Apparently it worked well. The fish-wife smiled at Molly in return and spread out the seine to show that it was uninjured.
“It’s a minute now!” cried Donald at the end of his scanty allowance of patience. “Please go, Molly, please, please!”
“We’re going this very second, Donny; but what a little tease you are!” returned his sister, taking his chubby hand in hers.
Then, bidding adieu to the matron of the quaint, thatched cottage, they all walked down to the beach in the direction pointed out by Miss Edith.
The cobble-stones were rounded and smoothlike paper-weights, and moved beneath their feet with every step. Molly was obliged to support her little brother very carefully to prevent his stumbling, and he dragged so heavily upon her arm that she reached the pool quite fatigued.
Once there, divested of shoes and stockings, and with his sailor trousers rolled above the knee, Donald skipped about in the shoal water, laughing and screaming at the top of his little lungs.
“It’s ’most as good as bavin’,” he called to Weezy. “Come wade wiv me!”
“Pretty soon,” replied Weezy, seating herself upon the rough ledge that separated the pool from the ocean, and beginning to unbutton her boots.
At the second button her hand was arrested by a shout from the summit of the cliff that rose abruptly at her side. It was Kirke’s voice, as clear and shrill as a trumpet.
“Come up here, all of you! Come up and see the ruins!”
Pauline sprang in haste from her perch on a rock, crying,—
“We’ll do it, Molly, won’t we? I’m on tiptoe for it.”
All the morning she had been longing to explore this ancient Roman fortress, of which the boys had talked the night before. Her imagination had been revelling in its half-buried donjon, its secret passages and its mouldering lookout, from which, according to Kirke’s extravagant statement, they could “almost see the north pole.”
And now was the very time to visit the old gray walls; yes, the very time, for her father and Paul and Kirke were wandering up there photographing the ruins, and could help Molly and herself over the risky places. It was a damper to her enthusiasm when Molly sorrowfully replied,—
“You and Weezy can go, Polly, but I can’t; I can’t leave Donald.”
“There’d be no fun without you, Molly.” Pauline made a wry face. “Can’t we take Donald up with us?”
“Not peaceably, I’m afraid,” whispered Molly with a sage smile. “Certainly not just yet.”
“Supposing heshouldcry a little; that wouldn’t hurt him,” persisted Pauline, hard-hearted in her eagerness.
Molly flushed an indignant crimson. “I’m not going to drag my little brother out of the water for anybody,” she retorted quickly. “I think ’twould be a burning shame, when he loves it so and has hardly been in it two seconds.”
Donald entertained the same opinion, and when Pauline essayed by sweet words to coax him upon dry land, he retreated with all speed to the middle of the pool. This, thoughscarcely nine feet across and but four inches in depth, was an ocean to him; and from its secure centre he shook his wilful little head at his would-be captor.
His sisters smiled indulgently; but Pauline betrayed an impatience that wounded Molly.
“I want to see the ruins as much as Polly does,” she reflected; “but I won’t cheat Donald of his little rights.”
Then a bright idea occurred to her. “I’ve a great mind, Pauline, to ask Kirke to come down here and stay with Donny while we go up there.”
And she bent her neck backward to gaze to the top of the dizzy height. Upon the side where they stood and also upon the side fronting the ocean the cliff was almost perpendicular.
“Oh, do ask him!” returned Pauline. “He and Paul have been through the fortress twice, and we haven’t seen so much as the shed.”
“I’dscream to him and ask him, Molly,” said Weezy, ever free with advice.
“Come up—to see—the ru-ins!” repeated Kirke on a higher key, wondering why they vouchsafed no reply.
“Answer him, Molly, do, or he’ll crack the ears of France,” cried Pauline at her elbow.
Molly laughed.
“Take pity on me, Miss Ready-wit, and stop being so funny,” she entreated, proceeding to make a speaking-tube of her hands, and calling energetically to Kirke, “Will you—come down—to look out—for Donald?”
Though sweet and full, her tones were not very strong. “Look out” was all that Kirke could distinguish of her sentence. “Can’t hear,” he vociferated; “speak louder.”
“We’ll go—if you’ll—look out—forDon!” shouted Molly explosively, nearly splitting her throat. “Will youdo it?”
“Of course I will! Come right along!”thundered Kirke, who had caught a word here and a word there and had “jumped” at his sister’s meaning. She wanted him to go with her to the Lookout, that tumble-down tower overlooking the sea. He was sure that was what she wished, for she was always turning giddy in high places and clinging to him, afraid to take a step by herself.
So, not to vex her with needless questions, Kirke simply waved his hand to put an end to the talk, and went back to the lofty tower to mount anew the broken steps within; for he wanted to decide how far up it would be safe for Molly and Pauline and Weezy to climb.
Meanwhile the girls below expected at any moment to see him descending the winding path that led from the chalk cliffs to the fishing village. When he failed to appear, Pauline bethought herself of the secret passages she had heard of. Probably he had chosen oneof these to shorten the distance. Why, of course he had, and there was no knowing just where he would come out.
“He must be here soon, Molly,” said Pauline impatiently, “and it’s getting hotter and hotter. Why can’t we be going on slowly?”
“Will you keep Donald happy till Kirke gets here, darling?” asked Molly, smiling at her sister. “If you will, I’ll give you a nickel.”
“I’ll give you another, and that’ll be a dime,” added Pauline.
Weezy gladly consented to the bargain. She was filling a scrap-book with paper flags of all nations, and a dime would purchase several of these.
“You can run to overtake us, you know, Weezy, as soon as Kirke comes,” called Molly from the entrance of the path. “Tell him not to let Donald wade too long.”
“I won’t forget,” screamed Weezy, as thetwo girls passed from her view behind a bend in the hill.
At their last glimpse of Donald, he was standing outside the pool with Weezy, looking at some peasant women who were washing at the margin of the beach. The women were kneeling with their backs to the children, rubbing the clothes white upon the smooth stones.
Twenty minutes may have elapsed, and Pauline and Molly were approaching the dry moat, that half surrounded the hoary fortress, when they were startled by piercing shrieks from Weezy, following one another in quick succession.
Shrieking in their turn to Captain Bradstreet and Paul above them, they rushed madly down the descent, and as they drew near the foot, met Weezy herself, sobbing wildly,—
“Donald’s drownded. I know he’s drownded.”
And choking with grief and terror, she faltered out her pitiful story:—
Tired of waiting for Kirke, she had left Donald for “just a teeny second,” and skipped away to look at the kneeling washer-women. On her return the child had vanished, and his little blue sailor-suit lay in a tumbled heap upon the brink of the pool.
“Donny had been teasing again to go in bathing, and I wouldn’t let him go,” wailed his despairing little sister; “so I s’pect when I wasn’t there he skipped into the ocean all alone by himself. Donald, Don-ald,whereare you? Oh, dear, dear. I wish I was dead!”
“Run to the inn, Weezy, for papa and mamma; run as fast as you can,” cried Molly, in a husky voice.
The sympathetic peasant women, having discovered the cause of the outcry, had deserted their washings and clattered in theirhob-nailed shoes toward the base of the cliff, near the tell-tale garments. Here the water was deeper than on the beach in front of the boat-house, and it dashed over a ledge worn into many chambers. The peasants were pointing to these deep chambers with gloomy looks, and muttering low to one another, when Mr. and Mrs. Rowe and Weezy came flying from the inn, and met Captain Bradstreet and the boys upon the shore.
Though pale with anguish, Mrs. Rowe had shed no tears. But when her eyes fell upon the little empty sailor-suit, she gathered it in her arms with the bitter cry, “O Donald, my little Donald, come back to your poor mamma!”
Then it was that something unexpected happened—something which changed her mourning into gladness. A little golden head shot suddenly up from behind a neighboring rock, and a shrill little voice cried out,“Here I is, mamma. Oh, please come qui-ck.”
Everybody jumped as if an earthquake had swallowed the cliff.
“It’s Donald, it’s Donald! I didn’t drown him at all!” shouted Weezy, dancing up and down in frantic joy.
Her mother had rushed behind the sheltering rock to embrace her lost baby.
“Oh, my sweet, cold darling,” she cried, pressing the wet child to her breast; “how could you frighten mamma so?”
“Didn’t mean to, truly. Was only just a-bavin’,”—here disobedient Donald hung his head,—“and Weezy comed back, and then I runned and hid,—just for fun, mamma!”
“But after that, Donald dear, you heard people call to you. Why didn’t you answer them and tell them where you were?”
Here I is, Mamma“Here I is, Mamma”Page142
“Here I is, Mamma”Page142
“Here I is, Mamma”
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Donald snuggled closer to his mother’s breast. “I hadn’t a bit o’ clo’es on, mamma,don’t you know?” he whispered; “not a single bit o’ clo’es on! S’pose I wanted the queer old womens to see?”
Mrs. Rowe answered him with a kiss. And when she had hurried on his dry garments, she yielded him up to his father and the rest of the family to be loved and petted, as if he had been a very good instead of a very mischievous little fellow.