Christina and the boys

"AND IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN ME!"

"AND it might have been me!"

Christina's eyes were big with horror as she clasped her tiny hands round her knees, and stared into the fire in front of her.

She was in her father's library: a large dimly-lighted room with books lining the shelves on the walls from top to bottom. It was an afternoon in early autumn; the last rays of the setting sun were stealing in through a stained glass window and colouring the dingy writing-table with red and blue patches. It was a silent, unused room; but it seemed as if it wanted wise spectacled scholars in it, and not a small pale-faced child in a short frock and white frilled pinafore.

Yet she looked as if she were quite at home there, and indeed she was. The library was her ideal of bliss.

Christina's father had been abroad since her mother's death, which took place when she was born. She had been brought up entirely by her old nurse, and though Bracken Towers held innumerable rooms of every sort and size, Christina had been limited to her two nurseries. She lived in them entirely and it was only during the last year that she had made acquaintance with the library.

Mrs. Hallam, the housekeeper, had always seemed to Christina to be the real owner of the house. She was a tall, severe-looking woman, with sharp eyes, and a still sharper tongue. Nurse was the only privileged person who drank tea with her in her private sitting-room. Christina was never allowed in there. Mrs. Hallam made no secret of her dislike to children.

"They either are so forward and unmanageable that they'll be upsetting and spoiling all one's personal possessions, or else they'll sit by as dumb as a dog, and take in all you'll be remarking and repeat it to the first person they come across."

This was her verdict when Nurse one day wanted Christina to accompany her to tea, and she had never tried to take her again.

It was a happy day when Christina found herself in the library. It was the only room that nearly always had a fire, and she had been passing the door when the housemaid was going in to light it.

"Is this Mrs. Hallam's room?" asked the child innocently.

And Emily, the housemaid, had laughed at her.

"Come in and see it. 'Tis your father's wish that it should always be kept well aired. He does set store on his books so! Mr. Tipton says 'tis most vallyble library, and 'tis to keep the books from getting damp we have so many fires."

So Christina had stolen shyly in, and looked with awe and wonder at the treasures it contained. And then from awe she passed to wistful longing, and when Nurse one day said lightly, "If you're a good girl and put every book back where you find it, you can read them," she had joyfully taken advantage of this permission, and had made the library her retreat whenever Nurse was "called away on business" from the nursery.

The books in the library proved an inexhaustible pleasure to the little maiden. There were old books and new books; books with pictures, books without. An illustrated series of Froissart's "Chronicles" kept her entranced for two months, and now, on this particular day, she had seized an old "History of France" and had been following, with breathless interest, the fortunes and fate of Jeanne d'Arc.

She shut her book up with a little shiver when she read of the heroine's shameful death. And there, upon the hearthrug, she was doing what she always did after reading about any heroine of fiction: transferring herself—Christina, aged eight—into the circumstances and position of the heroine.

"And it might have been me!"

Christina had a very big conception of what ought to be done, and a very tremulous and small opinion of her own courage.

Slaughter of any kind was abhorrent to her. The death of a fly on a window pane, a mouse in a trap, or a bird in the garden, was the occasion for a flood of tears and much lamentation. Now she murmured to herself:

"If I had heard the voice, I should have had to get a sword and go; I should have been obliged to lead the soldiers into battle and kill; I should have been wicked if I had said no; and oh, I couldn't, couldn't have done it! And it might have been me!"

Tears began to crowd into her eyes. She shook her curly head, and unclasping her hands, she knelt on the rug, and with closed eyes put up this passionate prayer:

"Please God, never send a voice to me to tell me to fight in battle. I shall be a coward, I shan't be able to do it. O God, never tell me to kill anybody! And oh, please, never turn me into a Joan of Arc!"

After which prayer she dried her eyes and was slightly comforted.

She did not turn again to her book. The tragic fate of the maid of France was too vivid and real to be easily effaced. It was almost a relief when she heard her nurse call her. She trotted upstairs and met her at the nursery door. That good woman had a perturbed look on her round good-tempered face.

"Come in, Miss Tina, and hear what I've got to tell you. Me and Mrs. Hallam have both been struck down by a letter—such news, and so little time to prepare; but we have had rumours, and I always said the master would never come home again till he got a lady to come with him. 'Tis eight years this coming Christmas that your sweet mother was taken, and 'tis not to be wondered at. And now you'll have to prepare yourself to meet your father and a stepmother all at once, and that not a day later than next Saturday. There will be change here at last. Me and Mrs. Hallam have lived so quiet that it has quite upset us; but 'tis only natural and right after all, and I'm not the kind of ignorant, uneducated person to be speaking to you against a second mother. She may be the very one to slip into your mother's shoes, and she may not, but we'll hope for the best."

Christina looked up at her nurse with big eyes.

"I don't understand," she murmured. "Is father coming home?"

"Yes, and he's bringing a new wife, and a room has got to be prepared for a young gentleman; but who or what he is, me and Mrs. Hallam can't make out. Now you be a good girl and stay quiet up here, for I've promised to help Mrs. Hallam in unpacking some of the glass and china, and getting the drawing-room put to rights."

Nurse was bustling away, when Christina called after her imploringly:

"May I go to see Miss Bertha?"

"No. I can't spare any one to take you, and it is too damp and cold for you to be out to-day. Stay in the nursery like a good child."

Nurse was a picture of an old woman. Round and ruddy, with silver hair smoothed under her big cap, she looked the embodiment of health and content. Yet she suffered from many twinges of rheumatism, and had an old-fashioned horror of open air. The nursery was like a hothouse in the winter time, and Christina was consequently delicate, and peculiarly susceptible to cold.

The child stood at the large window when Nurse had left her, and looked out with some wistfulness across the park towards the goal of her desire. It was a tiny cottage, originally one of the park lodges, but owing to the alteration of the drive which once ran past it, was now let to a single lady, and stood in half an acre of ground, railed off from the surrounding park.

Christina heaved a sigh. She breathed hard on the panes of glass, and traced some letters with her finger.

"I'm afraid of fathers and mothers," she acknowledged to herself. "I don't know what they're like. Emily's father isn't kind to her, she says, and I've seen some mothers in the village who slap their little boys. I wish I could tell Miss Bertha."

Suddenly she gave a scream of delight.

"Here she is walking up the drive, and I do believe Dawn is with her! Oh, I hope, I hope they're coming to see me. And I forgot Dawn's father. He is kind; oh, I do hope my father will be like him!"

She was not long left in doubt. A very short time afterwards the nursery door opened, and a little old lady, accompanied by a rosy-cheeked, fair-haired boy; came forward.

"We thought we should find you in, dear," Miss Bertha said, "and as Dawn is spending the day with me, I brought him along."

Christina's pale cheeks became pink with excitement. She and Dawn rushed at each other, Dawn with such impetus that he brought her to the ground.