Читать книгу Carried by Storm - May Agnes Fleming - Страница 6
ОглавлениеHOW LITTLE OLGA GETS LOST.
ousin Frank!"
There is no reply. Stretched on the sun-steeped grass, his straw hat pulled over his face, his long length casting a prodigious shadow in the afternoon sunshine, Cousin Frank is leagues away in the lovely land of dreams.
"Frank! Cousin Frank! Frank Livingston! Oh, dear!" sighs Olga, impatiently. "No wonder he is asleep. It struck three this morning before—Frank! Oh! how stupid you are! Do, do wake up!"
Thus adjured, and further urged by the pointed toe of a most Cinderella-like shoe of blue kid, Frank consents to slowly and lazily open his handsome blue eyes.
"Oh!" she says, with a pout, "at last! You are worse than the Seven Sleepers. Here you have been fast asleep for the past two hours, and all that tiresome time I have been waiting here. I think it is horrid of you, Frank Livingston, to act so!"
"To act so! To act how, fairest of fairy cousins? What has your Frank, the most abject of thy slaves, Lady Olga, been doing now, to evoke your frown? There is no harm in taking a snooze on the grass, is there?" says Frank, with a prolonged yawn.
Miss Olga stands beside him, slim, straight, white, blonde, pouting, and very, very pretty.
"There is harm in never coming home until half-past three in the morning every night. If you didn't do that you wouldn't sleep on the grass all the next afternoon. What would mamma say?"
He rises suddenly on his elbow and looks at her. Pretty well this, for a demoiselle of eleven! She stands rolling the gravel with one blue boot-tip, her wide-brimmed leghorn shading her face, the long, almost flaxen ringlets falling to her slender waist, her delicate lips pouting, the light figure upright as a dart.
"Princess Olga," Frank says, after a pause and a stare, "what an uncommonly pretty little thing you are getting to be! I must make a sketch of you just as you stand; that sunshine on your yellow curls and white dress is capital! Do not stir, please, my sketch-book is here; I will dash you off in all your loveliness in the twinkling of a bed-post!"
Frank's sketch-book and Frank himself are never far apart. He takes it up now, as it lies at his elbow, selects a fair and unspotted page, points a broad black pencil, and begins.
"Just as you are—do not move. 'Just as I am, and waiting not, to rid myself of one—some sort of blot,'—how is it the hymn goes? And so you heard me come in last night? Now who would think such pretty little pink ears could be so sharp!"
"Last night!" pouts Olga; "this morning, you mean. Half-past three. I heard the clock strike."
"Don't believe the clock—it is a foul slanderer. Those little jeweled jimcracks that play tunes before they strike always tell lies. Did you tell mamma about it this morning, Olly?"
She flings back her head, and her blue eyes—very like Frank's own—kindle.
"Tell mamma! I am not a tell-tale, Cousin Frank."
The young fellow, sketching busily, draws a breath of relief.
"Most gracious princess, you are a little trump. I ask pardon. Turn your head just a hair-breadth this way. Ah! thanks—that will do. Well, now, Olga, I was out rather late; but I met some—some fellows, and we played a game or two, and so——"
"Were you up the village?"
"Yes, up the village. You see, Brightbrook is such a deadly-lively sort of place at the best, and a fellow must amuse himself a little in some way. And that reminds me—I have an engagement at five. What's the time, Olly? just look at my watch, will you?"
She obeys after a moment—a moment in which wistful longing and precocious pride struggle for mastery. Then she stoops and looks.
"A quarter of five. But you said——"
A pause.
"Well, I said——"
"You said—you promised Leo Abbott yesterday that you would drive me over there this afternoon, and we would have croquet and tea."
"Oh, did I?" carelessly. "Well, you must let me off, Olly, and make my excuses to little Leo. Upon my honor, I cannot manage it—awfully sorry all the same. But it need not keep you, you know; your papa will drive you, or Peters will."
Peters is head coachman, the safest of charioteers. Papa is always willing to drive his darling anywhere. But Olga Ventnor turns hastily away, and the childish eyes that look at the setting sun are full of tears she is too proud to let fall.
"There!" Frank says, after five minutes more devoted to the sketch; "there you are, as large as life, but not half so handsome. Here it is for a keepsake, Olga. When you are a tall, fascinating young lady—a brilliant belle, and all that—it will help to remind you of how you looked when a chickabiddy of eleven."
He tears out the leaf, scrawls under it, "Princess Olga, with the love of the most loyal of her lieges," and hands it to her. She takes it, her lips a little compressed, pique, pain in her eyes, plainly enough in spite of her pride, if he cares to look. But Frank has a happy knack of never looking, nor wishing to look, below the surface of things, and he has something to think of besides his little cousin's whims just at present.
"I am off," he says, jumping up. "And—look here, Olly—go to sleep like a good little thing when you go to bed, and don't lie awake o' nights in this wicked way counting the clock. It will bring gray hairs and wrinkles before you reach your twelfth birthday. You will wake up some morning and find, like Marie Antoinette, all these long curls turned from gold to silver in a single night."
He pulls out one of the long tresses, fine as floss silk, to an absurd length, as he speaks.
"And besides, I am going to reform, to turn over a new leaf, numbers of new leaves, to become a good boy, and go to bed at ten. So say nothing to nobody, Olly, and, above all, above everything, shut those blue peepers the moment your head is on the pillow, and never open them, nor the dear little pink ears, until six the next morning."
He gives the pink ear an affectionate and half-anxious tweak, smiles at the grave face of the child, flings his hat on, and departs.
The little girl stands watching him until he is out of sight, then, with a deep sigh that would have infinitely amused Master Frank could he have heard, turns for consolation to the drawing. Is she really so pretty as this? How clever Cousin Frank must be to sketch so—dash off things, as he calls it—all in a moment. She has it yet, yellow, faded, stored away among the souvenirs treasured most.
"Madame votre mere says will mademoiselle not come for one leetle walk before her supper?" says the high Norman sing-song voice of Jeannette, appearing from the house; "it will give ma'amselle an appetite for her tartine and strawberries."
"Very well, Jeannette. Yes, I will go. Here, take this up to my room. I will go on this way. You can follow me."
So, with a slow and lingering step, the little heiress of many Ventnors sets off. She is a somewhat precocious little girl, old-fashioned, as it is phrased, a trifle prim in speech and manner, except now and then when the wild child-nature bursts its trammels, and she runs, and sings, and romps as wildly as the squirrels she chases. Just at this moment she is under a cloud. Cousin Frank has wounded and disappointed her. He will not tell her where he goes or what he does all these long hours of absence.
"Up the village" is vague and unsatisfactory to a degree; he has broken his promise about taking her to Abbott Wood, and she likes to play croquet with Geoff and Leo Abbott. Frank's promises, she is beginning to discover, are very pie-crusty indeed; he makes them with lavish prodigality, and breaks them without a shadow of scruple. All these things are preying on Miss Ventnor's eleven-year-old mind for the first few minutes, and make her step lagging and her manner listless. Then a brilliant butterfly swings past her, and she starts in pursuit—then a squirrel darts out of a woodland path and challenges her to a race—then a tempting cluster of flame-colored marsh flowers catches her eye, and she makes a detour to get them—then she finds herself in a thicket of raspberry bushes, and begins to pluck and eat. Overhead there is a hot, hot sun, sinking in a blazing western sky like a lake of molten gold.
In these woody dells there are coolness and shadow, sweet forest smells, the chirp of birds, the myriad sounds of sylvan silence. A breeze is rising, too. She goes on and on, eating, singing, chasing birds and butterflies, rabbits and field mice, all live things that cross her path.
All at once she pauses. Where is Jeannette? She has been rambling more than an hour, she is far from home, the sun has set, she is tired, the place is strange, she has never been here before. Her dress is soiled, her boots are muddy; woods, trees, marshes are around her—no houses, no people. Oh! where is she—where is her bonne?
"Jeannette! Jeannette!" She stops and cries aloud: "Jeannette! where are you?"
Her shrill, childish voice echoes down the dim woodland aisles. Only that, and the gathering stillness of the lonesome evening in the wood.
"Jeannette! Jeannette! Jeannette!"
In wild affright the young voice peals forth its piteous cry. But only the fitful sighing of the twilight wind, only the mournful rustle of the leaves, only the faint call of the little mother birds in their nests, answer her. Then she knows the truth—she is lost!
Lost in the woods, far from any habitation, and night close at hand. Jeannette has lingered behind to gossip; she, Olga, has gone heedlessly on; now it is coming night; she is alone, and lost in the black, whispering, awful, lonely woods!
She stands still and looks around her. Overhead there is a gray and pearl-tinted sky, very bright still in the west, but with a star or two gleaming over the tree-tops. In the forest it is already pitch-dark. In the open, where she now stands, it will be light for half an hour yet. To the right spreads the pine woods, whispering, whispering mysteriously in the solemn darkening hush; to the left is a waste of dry and dreary marsh land, intermediate and blankly gray in the gloaming. No house, no living thing to be seen far or near!
