Short Stories for Children Read online

  Whenever Miss Rawlings rose from her chair she would at once peer sharply out of the window to see if any small creature were passing in the street beyond the drive. When she went a-walking she was frequently all but run over by cabs and vans and phaetons and gigs, because she was looking the other way after a vanishing pigtail. Not a picture-shop, not a photographer’s could she pass without examining every single face exhibited in the window. And she never met a friend, or the friend of a friend, or conversed with a stranger, without, sure enough, beginning to talk about Young Things. Puppies or kittens or lambs, perhaps, first, and then gradually on to little boys. And then, with a sudden whisk of her bonnet, to Little Girls.

  Long, long ago, now, she had learned by heart the whole of ‘Barbara Allan’:

  She had not gane a mile but twa,

  When she heard the dead-bell ringing,

  And every jow that the dead-bell gied,

  It cryed, Woe to Barbara Allan!

  ‘O mother, mother, make my bed!

  O make it saft and narrow!

  Since my love died for me today,

  I’ll die for him tomorrow.’

  Oh, dear, how sad it was; and you never knew! Could it be, could it be, she cried one day to herself, that the dead lovely Barbara Allan of the poem had got by some means muddled up in Time, and was in actual fact her Little Gal? Could it be that the maiden-name of the wife of Miss Allan’s father had been Rawlings!

  Miss Rawlings was far too sensible merely to wonder about things. She at once inquired of Mr Moffatt – who had been once engaged to her dearest friend, Miss Simon, now no more – whether he knew anything about Barbara Allan’s family. ‘The family, Felicia?’ Mr Moffatt had replied, his bristling eyebrows high in his head. But when, after a visit to the British Museum, Mr Moffatt returned with only two or three pages of foolscap closely written over with full particulars of the ballad and with ‘biographical details’ of Bishop Percy and of Allan Ramsay and of Oliver Goldsmith and of the gentleman who had found the oldest manuscript copy of it in Glamis Castle, or some such ancient edifice, and of how enchantingly Samuel Pepys’s friend Mrs Knipp used to sing him that air – but nothing else – Miss Rawlings very reluctantly gave up all certainty of this. ‘It still might be my Little Gal’s family,’ she said, ‘and on the other hand it might not.’ And she continued to say over to herself, with infinite sorrow in her deep rich voice, that tragic stanza:

  She had not gane a mile but twa,

  When she heard the dead-bell ringing,

  And every jow that the dead-bell gied,

  It cryed, Woe to Barbara Allan!

  And ‘Oh, no! Not Woe,’ she would say in her heart.

  Soon after this Miss Rawlings fell ill. A day or two before she took to her bed she had been walking along Combermere Avenue, and had happened to see the pupils of the Miss Miffinses’ Young Ladies’ Seminary taking the air. Now the two last and smallest of these pupils – of the Crocodile, as rude little boys call it – were walking arm in arm with the nice English mistress, chattering away like birds in a bush. Both of them were rather narrow little creatures, both wore beaver hats beneath which dangled brown pigtails. It was yet one more astonishing moment, and Miss Rawlings had almost broken into a run – as much of a run, that is, as, being of so stout and ample a presence, she was capable of – in order to get a glimpse of their faces.

  But, alas and alack, the wrought-iron gates of the School were just round the corner of Combermere Avenue; and the whole Crocodile had completely disappeared into the great stone porch beyond by the time she had come in sight of the two Monkey-Puzzles (or araucarias) on the lawn, and the brass curtain-bands to the windows.

  Miss Rawlings stood and gazed at these, for the moment completely forgetting polite manners. The hurry and excitement had made her hot and breathless – and the wind was in the east. It dispirited her, and, instead of ringing the bell and asking for the Miss Miffinses, she had returned home and had at once written an invitation to the whole school to come to tea the following Sunday afternoon. In a moment of absent-mindedness, however, she had left the note on her little rosewood secretaire beside the silver inkstand that had belonged to Sir Samuel. And two days afterward – on the Friday, that is, the month being February – she had been seized with Bronchitis.

  It was a rather more severe attack than was usual for Miss Rawlings, even in foggy November, and it made Miss Rawlings’s family physician a little anxious. There was no immediate danger, he explained to Nurse Murphy; still care is care, oh yes. And, Miss Rawlings being so rich and so important to the Parish, he at once decided to invite an eminent Consultant to visit his patient – a Sir James Jolliboy Geoghehan, who lived in Harley Street and knew more about Bronchitis (Harley Street being also in a foggy parish) than any other medical man in Europe or in the United States of America (which are not usually foggy places).

  Fortunately Sir James took quite as bright and sanguine a view of his patient as did Miss Rawlings’s family physician. There Miss Rawlings lay, propped up against her beautiful down-pillows with the frills all round, and a fine large pale-blue-ribboned Bed Cap stood up on her large head. She was breathing pretty fast and her temperature, according to both the gentlemen’s thermometers, was 102·6. As for her pulse, Sir James fastened his eyes so close upon the Bed Cap that he forgot to count it; and he laid down her wrist without a word.

  A large copper kettle was ejecting clouds of steam from the vast cheerful fire in the vast brass and steel grate, with the Cupids in the chimneypiece. There were medicine bottles on the little table, and not only Nurse Murphy stood on the other side of the bed, but Nurse O’Brien also. And the more solemn she looked the more her face appeared to be creased up in a gentle grin.

  Miss Rawlings panted as she looked at them all. Her eye was a little absent, but she too was smiling. For if there was one thing Miss Rawlings was certain to be, it was to be cheerful when most other people would be inclined to be depressed. As she knew she was ill she felt bound to be smiling. She even continued to smile when Sir James murmured, ‘And the tongue?’ And she assured Sir James that, though it was exceedingly kind of him to call, it wasn’t in the least necessary. ‘I frequently have bronchitis,’ she explained, ‘but I never die.’

  When Sir James and the family physician had gone downstairs and were closeted together in the gilded library, Sir James at once asked this question: ‘What, my dear sir, was our excellent patient remarking about a Miss Barbara Allan? Has she a relative of the name?’

  At this Miss Rawlings’s family physician looked a little confused. ‘No, no; oh dear, no!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s merely a little fancy, a caprice. Miss Rawlings has a notion there is a little girl belonging to her somewhere – probably of that name, you know. Quite harmless. An aberration. In fact, I indulge it; I indulge it. Miss Rawlings is a most able, sagacious, energetic, philanthropic, practical, generous, and – and – humorous lady. The fancy, you see, has somehow attached itself to the name “Barbara Allan” – a heroine, I believe, in one of Sir Walter Scott’s admirable fictions. Only that. Nothing more.’

  Sir James, a tall man, peered down at Miss Rawlings’s family physician over his gold pince-nez. ‘I once had a patient, my dear Dr Sheppard,’ he replied solemnly, in a voice a good deal deeper but not so rich as Miss Rawlings’s, ‘who had the amiable notion that she was the Queen of Sheba and that I was King Solomon. A most practical woman. She left me three hundred guineas in her will for a mourning ring.’ He thereupon explained – in words that his patient could not possibly have understood, but that Dr Sheppard understood perfectly – that Miss Rawlings was in no immediate danger and that she was indeed quite a comfortable little distance from Death’s Door. Still, bronchitis is bronchitis; so let the dear lady be humoured as much as possible. ‘Let her have the very best nurses, excellent creatures; and all the comforts!’ He smiled as he said these words, as if Dr Sheppard were a long-lost brother. And he entirely approved, not only of the nice sago puddings, the grapes,
the bee-ootiful beef-juice (with toast or a rusk), the barley water and the physic, but of as many Barbara Allans as Miss Rawlings could possibly desire. And all that he said sounded so much like the chorus of some such old sea-song as Yeo-ho-ho, or Away to Rio, or The Anchor’s Weighed, that one almost expected Dr Sheppard to join in.

  Both gentlemen then took their leave and, Dr Sheppard having escorted Sir James to his brougham, for this was before the days of machine carriages, the two nurses retired from the window and Miss Rawlings sank into a profound nap.

  In a few days Miss Rawlings was much, much, much better. Her temperature was 97.4, her breathing no more than twenty-four or -five to the minute. The flush had left her cheeks, and she had finished three whole bottles of medicine. She devoured a slice from the breast of a chicken and even enjoyed her sago pudding. The nurses were pleased.

  But, if anything, Miss Rawlings’s illness seemed to have increased her anxiety to find Barbara Allan as quickly as ever she could. After all, you see, we all of us have only a certain number of years to live, and a year lasts only twelve calendar months, and the shortest month is only twenty-eight days, excluding Leap Year. So if you want to do anything badly it is better to begin at once, and go straight on.

  The very first day she was out in Mr Dubbins’s invalid chair she met her dear friend Mr Moffatt in Combermere Grove, and he stood conversing with her for a while under the boughs of almost as wide a spreading chestnut tree as the village blacksmith’s in the poem. Mr Moffatt always looked as if he ought to have the comfort of a sleek bushy beard. If he had, it is quite certain it would have wagged a good deal as he listened to Miss Rawlings. ‘What I am about to do, my dear Mr Moffatt, is advertise,’ she cried, and in such a powerful voice that the lowest fronds of the leafing chestnut tree over her head slightly trembled as they hung a little listlessly on their stalks in the spring sunshine.

  ‘Advertise, my dear Felicia?’ cried Mr Moffatt. ‘And what for?’

  ‘Why, my dear old friend,’ replied Miss Rawlings, ‘for Barbara Allan, to be sure.’

  Mr Moffatt blinked very rapidly, and the invisible beard wagged more than ever. And he looked hard at Miss Rawlings’s immense bonnet as if he actually expected to see that busy bee; as if he even feared it might be a Queen Bee and would produce a complete hive.

  But after bidding him good-bye with yet another wag of the bonnet and a ‘Yes, thank you, Dubbins,’ Miss Rawlings was as good as her word. She always was. Three days afterwards there appeared in the Times and in the Morning Post and in the Daily Telegraph, and five days later in the Spectator, the following:

  WANTED as soon as possible, by a lady who has lost her as long as she can remember, a little girl of the name (probably) of Barbara Allan, or of a name that sounds like Barbara Allan. The little girl is about ten years old. She has a rather three-cornered-shaped face, with narrow cheekbones, and bright brown eyes. She is slim, with long fingers, and wears a pigtail and probably a round beaver hat. She shall have an exceedingly happy home and Every Comfort, and her friends (or relatives) will be amply rewarded for all the care and kindness they have bestowed upon her, for the first nine years or more of her life.

  You should have seen Miss Rawlings reading that advertisement over and over. Her Times that morning had a perfume as of the spices of Ambrosia. But even Miss Rawlings could not have hoped that her advertisement would be so rapidly and spontaneously and abundantly answered. The whole day of every day of the following week her beautiful wrought-iron gates were opening and shutting and admitting all kinds and sorts and shapes and sizes of little girls with brown eyes, long fingers, pigtails, and beaver hats, about ten years of age. And usually an aunt or a stepmother or the Matron of an Orphanage or a Female Friend accompanied each candidate.

  There were three genuine Barbara Allans. But one had reddish hair and freckles; the second, curly flaxen hair that refused to keep to the pigtail-ribbon into which it had been tied; and the third, though her hair was brown, had grey speckled eyes, and looked to be at least eleven. Apart from these three, there were numbers and numbers of little girls whose Christian name was Barbara, but whose surname was Allison, or Angus, or Anson, or Mallings, or Bulling, or Dalling, or Spalding, or Bellingham, or Allingham, and so on and so forth. Then there were Marjories and Marcias and Margarets, Norahs and Doras and Rhodas and Marthas, all of the name of Allen, or Allan, or Alleyne, or Alyn, and so on. And there was one little saffron-haired creature who came with a very large Matron, and whose name was Dulcibella Dobbs.

  Miss Rawlings, with her broad bright face and bright little eyes, smiled at them all from her chair, questioned their aunts and their stepmothers and their Female Friends, and coveted every single one of them, including Dulcibella Dobbs. But you must draw the line somewhere, as Euclid said to his little Greek pupils when he sat by the sparkling waves of the Aegean Sea and drew triangles on the sand. And Miss Rawlings felt in her heart that it was kinder and wiser and more prudent and proper to keep strictly to those little girls with the three-cornered faces, high cheek-bones, ‘really’ brown eyes, and truly appropriate pigtails. With these she fell in love again and again and again.

  There was no doubt in the world that she had an exceedingly motherly heart, but very few mothers could so nicely afford to give it rein. Indeed, Miss Rawlings would have drawn the line nowhere if it had not been for the fact that she had only Ten Thousand Pounds or so a year.

  There were tears in her eyes when she bade the others good-bye. And to everyone she gave, not one bun, not one orange, but a bag of oranges and a bag of buns. And not merely a bag of ordinary Denia oranges and ordinary currant buns, but a bag of Jaffas and a bag of Bath. And she thanked their Guardianesses for having come such a long way, and would they be offended if she paid the fare? Only one was offended, but then her fare had cost only 3d. – 2d. for herself, and 1d. (half price) for the little Peggoty Spalding she brought with her. And Miss Rawlings paid her sixpence.

  She kept thirty little ten-year-olds altogether, and you never saw so many young fortunate smiling pigtailed creatures so much alike. And Miss Rawlings, having been so successful, withdrew her advertisements from the Times and the Morning Post and the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator, and she bought a most beautiful Tudor house called Trafford House, with one or two wings to it that had been added in the days of Good Queen Anne, and William and Mary, which stood in entirely its own grounds not ten miles from the Parish boundary. The forest trees in its park were so fine – cedars, sweet chestnuts, and ash and beech and oak – that you could only get a tiny glimpse of its chimneys from the entrance to the drive.

  Things are often curious in this world, and coincidences are almost as common as centipedes. So Miss Rawlings was more happy than surprised when, on looking over this mansion, she counted – and to make sure counted again – exactly thirty little bedrooms, with some larger ones over for a matron, a nurse, some parlour-maids, some housemaids, some tweeny-maids, and a Boy to clean the button-boots and shoes. When her legal adviser explained to her that this establishment, what with the little chests-of-drawers, basins and ewers, brass candlesticks, oval looking-glasses, dumpy beds, three-legged stools, dimity curtains, woolly rugs, not to speak of chiffoniers, whatnots, hot-water bottles, soup ladles, and so on and so forth – not to mention a uniform with brass buttons for the man with whiskers at the park gate – would cost her at least Six Thousand a year, that bee in Miss Rawlings’s bonnet buzzed as if indeed it was a whole hive gone a-swarming.

  ‘Well, now, my dear Mr Wilkinson,’ she said, ‘I made a little estimate myself, being a business woman, and it came to £6004 10s. 0d. How reasonable! I shall be at least four pounds-ten in pocket.’

  So in a few weeks everything was ready – new paint, new gravel on the paths, geraniums in the flower-beds, quilts as neat as daisies on a lawn on the dumpy beds, and the thirty Barbara Allans sitting fifteen a side at the immensely long oak table (where once in Henry VIII’s time monks had eaten their fish on Fridays), the matron wit
h the corkscrew curls at the top and the chief nurse in her starched cap at the bottom. And Miss Rawlings seated in the south bow-window in an old oak chair, with her ebony and ivory stick and her purple bonnet, smiling at her Barbara Allans as if she had mistaken Trafford House for the Garden of Eden.

  And I must say every single pigtail of the complete thirty bobbed as merrily as roses in June over that first Grand Tea – blackberry jelly, strawberry jam, home-made bread, plum cake, the best beef-dripping for those who had not a sweet or a milk tooth, Sally Lunns, heather honey, maids-of-honour, and an enormous confection of marchpane, with cupids and comfits and silver bells and thirty little candles standing up in the midst of the table like St Paul’s Cathedral on the top of Ludgate Hill in the great city of London. It was a lucky thing for the Thirty’s insides that Grand Teas are not everyday teas.

  And so, when all the thirty Pigtails had sung a Latin grace put out of English by Mr Moffatt and set to a tune composed by a beloved uncle of Miss Rawlings’s, who also was now no more, the Grand Tea came to an end. Whereupon the Thirty – looking themselves like yet another Crocodile with very fat joints – came and said good-night to Miss Rawlings, though some of them could scarcely speak. And as Miss Rawlings knew that not all little girls liked being kissed by comparative strangers, she just shook hands with each, and smiled at them as if her motherly heart would almost break. And Dr Sheppard was Medical Adviser to the thirty little Pigtailers, and Mr Moffatt came every other Sunday to hear their catechisms.

  Miss Rawlings had never been much attached to rules and regulations for other people, though she kept faithfully to a few for herself. She loved everyone to be free and everything to be easy, considering how hard most things are. And this was the Order of the Day with the Pigtails in their Home.