Mistress Masham's Repose Read online

  The Vicar sat motionless, looking at the exhibit from behind his glasses, which reflected the light and hid the eyes, and the wrinkles on his thick neck gradually went brick red. He poked the Schoolmaster with his sermon pen, to make him move. He put back the lid with trembling fingers. He tied it up again. He produced a bottle of Ruby Wine which was kept for the Bishop, from a cupboard, and gave Miss Brown a whole glass.

  The window was open at the top, so that the Trapper could hear what they said.

  Miss Brown related how she had surprised the deputation late at night, when they had gone to relieve Maria, and how she had missed several of them, and how she suspected that there might be many more. She mentioned that these creatures were probably of fabulous value, better than any treasure chamber, and that in any case the supposed treasures must have come from them. She suggested that Barnum and Bailey, Lord George Sanger, or the Circus at Olympia would offer many thousand pounds apiece, if they could catch such oddities.

  Mr. Hater breathed one word: “Hollywood.”

  They thought it over slowly, sipping the Ruby Wine.

  “The money would have to be held in trust for Maria.

  “There would be nothing to prove that the creatures had not been found at the Vicarage.”

  “If they are human it may be illegal to sell them.”

  “They are not human.”

  “Not one word must be breathed about this discovery, Miss Brown, for fear of competition. Nothing must be mentioned until they are safely trapped.”

  “The child refuses to say where they live.”

  “Perhaps we can get the information from the midget you caught.”

  “He will not answer questions.”

  “I hope you did not ... punish Maria?”

  “Although she bit my finger most savagely, Mr. Hater, positively like a wild animal, I never raised my hand to her.”

  “Very wise.”

  “It crossed my mind that as she knew where they were ...”

  “M-m-m-m. You have not locked her up?”

  “She is in her room for the time being ...”

  “But can be set at liberty.”

  Miss Brown suddenly opened her bun face and let a kind of cackle out of it. It might have been the first time she had laughed in her life, and had a startling effect. Even the Vicar gave a wintry twinkle with his glass eyes.

  “How fortunate,” he said, “that she should visit them at night! The cloak of darkness, Miss Brown. She will never notice that she is being followed.”

  So they hurried off to Malplaquet, to arrange about Maria’s liberty. But first Mr. Hater took the Schoolmaster from the boot-box, which did not look too strong, and locked him in a metal cash-box which was used to store the offerings for the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge.

  Gradgnag only had to climb the creeper a little higher and to let himself down by the blind-cord. The key was beside the cash box. He was able to force it round. Miss Brown and the Vicar had scarcely reached the bottom of the village before their captive had been liberated. They were not at the North Front before the Schoolmaster and his deliverer had started the long trek home. Unfortunately, it would take them a couple of days.

  Maria, meanwhile, was surprised to find that she was not to be punished for biting. She was more than surprised, she was astonished, when they gave her the favorite pudding for luncheon (chocolate custard) and said that Cook need not be sacked. When they told her at tea-time that she was a good girl and might visit her “dear little fairy friends” whenever she pleased, she was more than astonished, she was deeply suspicious.

  When one comes to think of it, Miss Brown and Mr. Hater were pathetic creatures, not terrible ones. It was so long since they had forgotten about being young that they were powerless in Maria’s hands They were in the strong position of being able to bully her, of course, but their weakness was that they had no idea that she was twice as bright as they were. “Parents,” says the immortal Richard Hughes, who wrote the best book about children that was ever written, “finding that they see through their child in so many places the child does not know of, seldom realize that, if there is some point the child really gives his mind to hiding, their chances are nil.”

  “I wonder,” said Maria to herself, several times that day.

  For dinner they gave her lobster à l’Americaine, and a bombe glacée, after which she pretended that she was ready for bed.

  Miss Brown retired early.

  At midnight, Maria rose from her deceptive couch. She had lain on it religiously, to save up her energies, and was now in the pink of training. She went past Miss Brown’s door, with a bit more noise than usual, and made her lengthy way to the Chestnut Avenue. At the bottom of this, she paused and turned round for a look, knowing, like a good Indian, that she would have a dark background for her own body, while anybody who followed would be outlined against the moonlit sky.

  There they were, sure enough, actually in black cloaks.

  Maria grinned and went her way.

  The Wilderness had been a Japanese garden, or something of that sort, two hundred years before. It was now a labyrinth of rhododendrons, laurels, and assorted shrubs, with several useful features. One of these was that the original paths had become overgrown by the evergreens, but not entirely squashed out. There was generally a track of some sort, often as much as four feet high in clearance, like a tunnel, however much the leaves and branches met above that height. A person of ten could get along them fairly quickly, by shielding her face, while a person of later years was confronted by a swishy barrier from the chest up. Another advantage of the Wilderness was one which was shared by all jungles, and that was that a single traveler could get about in it more easily than two. When two people forced their way in single file, the branches, swinging back from the first of them, whacked the second in the face. There were other attractions. For instance, on account of the place having been abandoned to growth and wildness, it needed an expert to know which way the ghosts of paths were leading. It was like the Maze at Hampton Court, but worse: worse because the top of it was grown across with whipping branches.

  Maria waited till she was sure they could not miss her trail, then plunged into the rustling gloom.

  She did not go too far. After five minutes she sat down, and pricked her ears.

  It was pleasant, listening to Miss Brown and the Vicar, as they fought each other among the dark and oval leaves. “Hush!” “There!” “This way!” “That way!” “You crackle.” “No, I don’t.” “Which turn?” “M-m-m-m.”

  Half an hour later, knowing that they were soundly lost, Maria slipped away to bed.

  In the morning she was as fresh as paint. Miss Brown, who turned up for breakfast looking pale, with a scratched eye and twigs in her hair, asked for a bowl of bread and milk. The Vicar, who called in time to say their grace, asked hollowly for brandy neat. Maria, thanking them for all their kindness, begged for permission to take out her lunch in sandwiches, and to go exploring. They rolled their watery eyes, grinned horribly, and wished her joy.

  She went by Malplaquet-in-the-Mould to Maid’s Malplaquet, turned left through the parishes of Gloomleigh, Marshland, and Malplaquet St. Swithin’s, cut across the Northampton road for Bishop’s Boozey and Duke’s Doddery, skirted the famous fox covert at Monk’s-Unmentionable-cum-Mumble, doubled back from Bumley-Beausnort to Biggle, and ate her sandwiches in the gorse patch on the round barrow at Dunamany Wenches, overlooking the drovers’ road to Ort.

  Here she saw the sleuths go by.

  Staggering with fatigue, quarreling about the route, red-eyed from lack of sleep, Miss Brown and the Vicar tracked her doggedly on. Miss Brown had blisters on both feet, and the long heel from one of her shoes had become detached, causing her to roll as she walked, like a ship of the line in the famous gale of 1703. The Vicar, who had corns, limped behind her in dejection, humming out at intervals that they ought to have turned left at Dumbledum-Meanly. Miss Brown, with her nose in the air,
refused to listen, and Mr. Hater could be seen planning things he would like to do to her.

  Maria finished her sandwiches and enjoyed the summer weather. All the farmers of Dunamany Wenches were saving their hay. All the farm laborers of Dunamany Wenches were doing the same thing, criticizing the judgment of the farmers. All the iron spikes were charging up the elevators in endless squadrons, carrying the captive grass to the ricks. All the swarth turners were crig-a-rig-a-rig-rig-a-rigging round the edges of the fields, throwing up their bow waves of hay. All the horse rakes were threading the swarths, giving a stately clang each minute, as they delivered the rakeful to its place. All the headmen, who did the difficult part, were swishing the great mounds which they had collected in the arms of a thing like a snowplow, to the right position. All the publicans in the Green Man at Muddle, in the Malplaquet Arms at Pigseaton, and in the Duke’s Head at Biggleswesterleigh were tapping innumerable casks of bitter, which they knew would be required for the evening. Everybody everywhere was keeping a tight eye on His Majesty the Sun, for fear that He might take it into His head to thunder.

  The sun, so far as that went, was in a tyrant’s mood. He was burning so hard that Maria could almost see him twinkle, could almost see the javelins of radiation being hurled out in all directions, as he jingled and hammered away like a Siva with a thousand arms, on the cloudless anvil of the sky. She nearly panted as she lay there, on the sheep-nibbled grass, and her pursuers panted in good earnest, as they pottered off through Idiot’s Utterly, High Hiccough, Malplaquet Middling, and Mome.

  When they had disappeared, Maria dropped her nose into the thyme-smelling grasses; watched a stinking beetle, with wriggly tail and aromatic scent and shining armor, as he scuttled his way under some bird’s-foot trefoil; and was shortly fast asleep.

  In the afternoon, she woke in time to see them return. They were fifty yards apart, no longer on speaking terms, and this time the Vicar was in the lead. She hailed them and ran down the hill, to join the march. Somehow they did not seem too pleased to see her. They had to do their best to look delighted. She rallied their shattered energies with bright inquiries about their walk, and led them briskly home to dinner.

  After dinner, which was of fresh salmon followed by ices, Maria left them spread out in the drawing room, and rested on her own bed until dark. But as soon as Miss Brown had retired, she got up and trotted past the door. She could hear the tyrant groan aloud as she went by. She found the Vicar hiding behind a statue of Psyche in the Assembly Room, where he had taken his shoes off and gone to sleep on sentry-go, and she had to cough to wake him up. Then, while he creaked with exhaustion at the effort of getting his swollen feet into the shoes once more, she set her course for the North Front, for a change, and went by the Beech Avenue instead of the Lime one.

  This led her up the Arcadian Valley to the Newton Monument, which was a thing like Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, except that, instead of having a statue at the top, it had a small glass observatory with a broken telescope. A staircase led up the inside, which, being in memory of Newton, had exactly the same number of steps as there were days in the year.

  Maria turned the rusty key, entered the darkness of the little hall, and hid behind the stairs.

  Her detectives arrived soon after.

  Gasping and hissing from their various corns and blisters, weaving with exhaustion, leaning against each other to keep upright, the Vicar and Miss Brown edged the door open feebly and stood whimpering at the stairs.

  “How many steps?”

  Three hundred and sixty-five, point two five six four.”

  “Civil?”

  “Sidereal.”

  “Come,” he said finally. “Excelsior! They may be worth a thousand pounds apiece.”

  “Excelsior,” agreed Miss Brown. They tottered up the stairs.

  When they were well away, Maria let herself out, locked the door behind her, and went back to bed.

  In the morning, after an excellent breakfast of kedgeree, she took a circumbendibus through the Wilderness, as it was important not to be visible from above, and reached the Newton Monument before noon.

  Miss Brown was at the top of it, waving a petticoat out of the observatory window on the end of the telescope. The Vicar was at the bottom, hammering on the door and whining for help. As the park lands of Malplaquet were about twenty-five miles in circumference, and there was nobody left inside them except Cook, they had little hope of rescue. Horace Walpole had once described these grounds as “that Province which they call a garden.”

  Maria waited for some time, then carefully wriggled her way to the door, hidden by arches of rhododendron. She unlocked it softly, while the Vicar was still banging, and snaked into the shrubbery, to watch.

  The Vicar and Miss Brown continued at their tasks till luncheon. Then, suddenly growing maddened beyond endurance, the former seized the door handle to shake it, as a punishment for its contumacy. Of course it opened at once. His hum of fury brought Miss Brown stumbling down the stairs.

  Both prisoners assumed immediately that the door had been unlocked all the time. Each of them accused the other of not having tried to open it properly. When they at last dispersed in passion to their beds, they had determined to sleep it out till Doomsday, if necessary, whether Maria visited the hidden mannikins or not.

  That will teach them, she thought, to let young children out of bedrooms, so that they can track them to the secret places of their friends.

  CHAPTER XVII

  THESE matters were fun for Maria, and no doubt they were good for the characters of Miss Brown and of the Vicar, as well as being good for their physical training. But Maria had made the mistake of letting her amusements run away with her.

  She had forgotten her outposts, a thing which no general ought to do.

  The People were in a worse muddle than the Vicar was, because she had failed to explain what she was at.

  They did not know where their Schoolmaster was—they thought he was still a prisoner in the palace—and, from the few glimpses which they had caught of Maria’s wanderings, they had got the idea that she was trying to escape her persecutors, but that she had been followed and brought back.

  Maria ought to have gone to the island to explain, so soon as she knew that her pursuers had given in for the sake of rest; but she had been tired too. She rested, pleased with the lesson which she had given.

  In the evening, when Miss Brown and the Vicar had partly recovered, they sat before the fire in the North-northeast Drawing Room, with Maria sitting between them on the sofa. They were determined to keep her with them all the time, so that she could not snatch a rest between times on her own. The Vicar was showing her his photograph album.

  It contained several photographs of the Lake District, together with picture postcards of Wordsworth, Ruskin, and other worthies, with “A Present from Skiddaw” printed underneath. The portrait of Wordsworth had small views set round in panels, depicting a field of daffodils, forty cows feeding like one, etc., etc. There was a view of the Vicar and Miss Brown halfway up the Old Man of Coniston, and there was a photograph of some ladies bathing at Ramsgate in 1903 with the horizon at thirty degrees; but he hid it. All the pictures which were not of Wordsworth had their names and dates written under them in white ink: “Noodles, Pribby, Poo-Poo, me, and Mr. Higgins. Ambleside ’36,” or “Nurse Biggleswade (and dog). Kendal ’38.”

  On the other side of Maria sat Miss Brown, knitting. She had long, sharp, metal needles, which clicked.

  The fire was a small one, because it was summer. It was for ornament, not use. The room was comfortably furnished. The electric light shone cheerfully on the deep chairs and the coffee things, for it was after dinner, and the Vicar kept turning his pages with a rustle. He told them which was the window of the bedroom in the hotel which he had slept in, as if he had been Queen Elizabeth.

  They were at Keswick when the noise began.

  Outside the window, the acorn drums started to roll, the pipes began to
shrill, and hundreds of clear, high voices began to sing together boldly.

  “And shall the Schoolman die?

  And shall the Schoolman die?

  Five Hundred Men of Lilliput

  Will know the reason why.”

  They had come to the rescue of their countryman, whatever the odds against them might be.

  The moment the Vicar heard the song strike up, he grabbed Maria by a pigtail. Miss Brown grabbed the other one.

  The window was behind them.

  There she sat, unable to look round, and, from outside, the rescuers could not see that she was held. The back of the sofa hid everything except her head.

  The Vicar rose to the situation.

  He said, between his teeth, without looking round: “Miss Brown, please rise to your feet in a nonchalant manner, and saunter to the door. When you are out of sight of the window, you might peep from behind the curtains. Remember that the electric light is behind.”

  She gave him the other pigtail, and slunk off as instructed, on her mission.

  It was a wonderful scene which she described.

  The army was lined up, where the bars of light fell from the window across the terrace. There were the infantry in mouseskins standing at attention, their officers, in beetle breastplates, standing three paces to the front, with swords unsheathed. There were the cavalry, with the Admiral at their head—waving his saber and dressed in one of the ancient dresses of Captain John Biddel, so that he looked like Nelson. As with all Admirals, he sat his rat badly. There also were the archers, with their left feet forward as if they had been at Agincourt. Behind these, in orderly ranks, stood the Mother’s Union, the Ladies Loo Club, the Bluestockings, and other female organizations, all singing lustily and waving banners, which stated: “Votes for Maria,” “Down with Miss Brown,” “No Algebra without Representation,” “Lilliput and Liberty,” “No Popery” (this was for the Vicar), or “Schoolmasters Never Shall Be Slaves.” The A.D.C.’s were cantering up and down with messages; the bugles were blowing; the drummer boys were beating to quarters; the regimental standards were uncased; the band had changed over to “Malbroock s’en va-t-en guerre”; the swords and pikes and harpoons were flashing in the golden light; and, even as Miss Brown peeped, a flight of arrows was discharged against the window “as it had been snow.” “Huzza!” cried the infantry. “Death or Glory,” cried the cavalry. “The Admiral expects ...” cried the Admiral, but when one of the A.D.C’s had whispered to him behind his hand, he quickly changed it to the better phrasing: “Lilliput Expects That Every Man This Day Will Do His Duty.”