CHAPTER III.
THREE LITTLE TRAVELLERS

 
"What will she do for their laughter and plays,
Chattering nonsense, and sweet saucy ways?"
 

I will now try to go straight on with my story. But I cannot help saying I do not find it quite so easy as I thought. It is so very difficult to keep things in order and not to put in bits that have no business to come for ever so much longer. I think after this I shall always be even more obliged than I have been to people that write stories, for really when you come to do it, it isn't nearly so easy as you'd think, though to read the stories, it seems as if everything in them came just of itself without the least trouble.

I told you that after it was really settled and known, and all arranged about the goings away, things seemed to go on very fast. In one way they did and in one way they didn't – for now when I look back to it, it seems to me that that bit of time – the time when it was all quite settled to be and yet hadn't come – was very long. I hear big people say that children get quickly accustomed to anything. I think big people do too. We all – papa and mother, and the boys and I, and even Pierson and the other servants – got used to feeling something was going to come. We got used to living with people coming to see the house, and every now and then great vans coming from the railway to take away packing-cases, and an always feeling that the day – the dreadful day – was going to come. Of course I cannot remember all the little particular things exactly, but I have a very clear remembrance of the sort of way it all happened, so though I may not be able to put down just the very words we said and all that, still it is telling it truly, I think, to put down as nearly as I can the little bits that make the whole. And even some of the littlest bits I can remember the most clearly – is not that queer? I can remember the dress mother had on the last morning, I can remember just how the scarf round her neck was tied, and how one end got rumpled up with the way Tom clung to her, and hugged and hugged her with his arms round her, so tight, that papa had almost to force him away.

But in my usual way I am going on too fast – at least putting things out of their places. I do not think I in the least understood then, what I do so well understand now, how terribly hard it must have been for mother to leave us; how much more dreadful her part of it was than any one else's. I must have seemed very heartless. I remember one day when she was packing books and music and odd things that she would not of course have taken with her just for a journey, I said to her, "Why, mother, what a lot of books you are taking! And all those table-covers and mats and things – you never take those when we go to the sea-side." Papa was standing by and mother looked up at him. "Need I take them?" she said. "It is as if I were going to make a home out there, and oh, how can it ever be like a home? How could I wish it to be? The barer and less home-like the better I should like it."

Papa looked troubled.

"We have to think of appearances, you know," he said. "So many people will come to see you, and it would not do to look as if we took no interest in the place."

Mother said no more. She went on with her packing, and I think a good many big tears were packed among the things in that box.

I asked her one day how long she and papa would stay away. "Longer than we stay at the sea-side in summer?" I said. "Three months? – as long as that, mother? Any way you'll be home before our birthdays."

For, rather funnily, all our three birthdays came close together – all in one week. We thought it the most important time of the whole year, and we counted everything by the birthday week, and when mother didn't answer at once "Oh yes, we shall certainly be home by the birthday week," I felt quite astonished. But just then something or other put it out of my head, and I forgot to speak of it again. I can't think now how I could be so silly in some ways as I was then – it is so queer to remember.

Well – the day did come. We – the boys and I – were the first to leave our dear old home, even though our journey was to be such a short one – only three hours to London. Papa and mother were to start on their journey the next day, so we were not to see them again. They had been at Uncle Geoff's the week before, seeing the rooms we were to have, and settling everything; and I think they thought it was better not to see us again, after we were in his house, but to get the parting over in our old home. I suppose they thought we would get over it more quickly if the journey and the newness of it all was to come after, and I daresay they were right.

I can't tell you about the saying good-bye. It was so bad for us, though we could not understand it at all properly of course, that for mother it must have been awful. And then fancy the long day after we had all left. The empty nurseries, the sort of sound of quietness through the house – the knowing we should never, never more be all together in the old happy way – that we should be changed somehow before she saw us again. For three years (and poor mother knew it would be three years) is a long time at our ages, Racey would have learnt to speak plain, and Tom would be such a big boy that he would have got out of the way of "hugging," perhaps, and Audrey even, that was me, you know, might have forgotten her a little – all these thoughts must have gone through mother's mind that dreadful afternoon, when papa had taken us to the station and seen us off to London under Pierson's care. Oh poor little mother, she has told me all about it since, and I must say if ever I am a big lady and have children of my own, I hope these dreadful havings to go away won't happen to me.

Well – we were in the train. Our eyes were so red that any one might have seen something sad had happened to us, but we didn't care. Tom's eyes were the worst of all, and generally he would do anything rather than let his red eyes be seen; but to-day he didn't care, we were too full of being sorry to care whether people noticed our eyes or not. And at last when papa had kissed us all three once more for the very last time, reaching up to the railway-carriage window, and the boys and I holding him so tight that he was nearly choked; at last it was all over, all the last tiny endings of good-byes over, and we three were – it seemed to us as far as we could understand it in our childish way – alone in the world.

There was no one else in the railway-carriage – Pierson of course was with us – she had put off being married for two months, so that she could see us settled and get the new nurse into our ways, as she called it; she too had been crying, so that she was quite a fright, for her nose was all bumpy-looking with the way she had been scrubbing at it and her eyes. She was very kind to us; she took Racey on her knee, and let Tom and me sit close up to her; and if she had had three arms she would have put one round each of us I am sure.

"Poor dears!" she said, and then she looked so very sad herself that Tom and Racey took to comforting her, instead of expecting her to comfort them. I was sad really – three poor little things like us going away like that; away from everything we had ever known, away from our nice bright nursery, where everything a mother could do to make children happy our mother had done; away from our dear little cots, where mother used to kiss us every night; and our little gardens where we had worked so happily in the summer; away to great big London, where among the thousand faces in the street there was not one we had ever seen before, where other little boys and girls had their fathers and mothers, while ours were going far, far away, to strange countries where they would find no little boys and girls like their own, no Audrey and Tom and Racey.

I thought of all this in a half-stupid way, while I sat in the railway-carriage with my arm round Tom's neck and my head leaning on Pierson's shoulder. We had never cared very much about Pierson, but now that she was the only thing left to us, we began to cling to her very much.

"I am so glad you've not gone away, Pierson," I said, and Pierson seemed very pleased, for I didn't very often say things like that.

"Poor dear Miss Audrey," she said in return. "Poor dear," seemed the only words she could think of to comfort us with. And then we all grew silent, and after a while it began to get dark, for the days were short now, and Tom and Racey fell asleep, just sobbing quietly now and then in their breathing – the way little children do, you know, after they have been crying a good deal; and I sat quite still, staring out at the gloomy-looking country that we were whizzing through, the bare trees and dull fields, so different from the brightness and prettiness of even a flat unpicturesque landscape on a summer day, when the sun lights up everything, and makes the fresh green look still fresher and more tempting. And it seemed to me that the sky and the sun and all the outside things were looking dull because of our trouble, and that they were all sorry for us, and there seemed a queer nice feeling in thinking so.

And after a while I began making pictures to myself of what I would do to please mother while she was away; how I would be so good to Tom and Racey, and teach them to be so good too; how I would learn to be always neat, and how I would try to get on with music, which I didn't much like, but which mother was so fond of that she thought I would get to like it when I was bigger and had got over the worst part. And then I began thinking of the letters I would write to mother, and all I would say in them; and I wondered too to myself very much what Uncle Geoff would be like, for I had not seen him for some time, and I couldn't remember him properly at all; and I wondered what his house would be like, and what sort of a nursery we should have, and what our new governess would be like, and how everything in our new home would be. I went on wondering till I suppose my brain got tired of asking questions it couldn't answer, and without knowing that I was the least sleepy, I too fell fast asleep!

I was busy dreaming – dreaming that I was on board the ship with papa and mother, and that Uncle Geoff was a lady come to see the house; in my dream the ship seemed a house, only it went whizzing along like a railway, and that he had a face like Pierson's, and he would say "poor dear Miss Audrey," when another voice seemed to mix in with my dreaming. A voice that said —

"Poor little souls – asleep are they – all three? Which of them shall I look after? Here nurse, you take the boys, and I'll lift out Miss Audrey."

And "Wake up, Miss Audrey, my dear. Wake up. Here's your uncle come himself to meet you at the station. I had no idea, sir, we were so near London, or I'd have had them all awake and ready," said Pierson, who never had all her ideas in order at once.