CHAPTER III.
A PASSAGE AT ARMS.
"Oh the day when thou goest a-wooing,
Philip, my king."
MEG was a little "put out," as it is popularly called, this evening,—she was not generally so short with the young ones. The good fit had worn away during the endless process of darning, and she had jumped up at last, stuffed all the work into the gaping stocking-bag, and said to herself that eldest sisters were mistaken and wrongful institutions.
But that did not give Baby Essie her tea, nor yet put her lively little ladyship to bed; and since Esther was out, there was no one else to undertake it.
And when that was done Pip came in and asked her in his off-hand manner to "just put a stitch in that football blazer."
The stitch meant a hundred or two, for it was slit from top to bottom.
And then Esther came home—a quieter Esther, an Esther of less brilliant colouring than you used to know, for there are not many "fast colours" beneath Australian skies—and with her the Captain, grown more short-tempered with the lapse of years, and an income that did not grow with his family. And again it was "Meg."
The seltzogene was empty. The Captain asked some one to tell him what was the use of having a grown-up daughter—he could not answer the question himself.
The lamb was a shade too much cooked, and the Golden Pudding a shade too little. He wanted to know whether Meg considered it below her to superintend domestic matters. In his young days girls, etc., etc. She went from the dinner-table at the end of the meal with hot cheeks.
"I never chose to be eldest—I was made so; and I don't see I should be scapegoat for everything!" she said, sitting down on the arm of the lounge on which lay six feet of the superior sex in the shape of Pip.
There was a wrathful look in her blue eyes, and she had ruffled her fair hair back in a way she always did in moments of annoyance.
"Why don't you make that conceited little chit help?" Pip said between puffs at his cigar.
"Nellie!" ejaculated Meg in surprise.
"Yes, Nellie," said Pip. He looked across to where she was making a picture beautiful to the most critical eye in a hammock a yard or two distant. "Is her only mission in life going to be looking pretty?"
"Oh," Meg said, "she's too young, of course, Pip. Why, she's only fifteen, though she is so tall! Oh, of course it can't be helped—only it's annoying. But what have you got your best trousers on for, Pip, again, and that blue tie? You had them last night and the night before!"
Pip's handsome face coloured slowly.
"You've got a fair amount of cheek of your own, Meg," he said, collecting the cigar ash in a little heap very carefully, and then blowing it away with equal industry. "I wonder when you'll learn to mind your own business. I should imagine I'm old enough to choose my own clothes."
"Only she's a horrid, vulgar girl, that's all," Meg said slowly, and colouring on her own account. "Pip, I don't know how you can, really I don't—a common little dressmaker. Oh yes, we know all about it; Peter saw you last night, and Poppet the night before."
"Peter be—Poppet be—— What the deuce do you mean spying after me?" stormed Pip, sitting upright and looking wrathfully at his sister. "If I choose to take a walk with a pretty girl, is it any concern of yours?"
[Illustration: " 'PRETTY!' SAID NELL—'PRETTY! WHY, SHE BLACKENS HER EYEBROWS, I'M CERTAIN.' "]
"Pretty!" said Nell, who had come up at his raised voice,—"pretty! Why, she blackens her eyebrows, I'm certain; and you should have seen her hat last Sunday—a green bird, some blue, lumpy plush, and a bunch of pink chiffon."
"Upon my word," said Pip,—he was white with anger, and his eyes blazed,—"upon my word, I've got two nice sisters. Trust a girl for running down another pretty one. You're jealous, that's what it is, because you know you can't hold a candle to her."
"Her father sells kerosene and butter—he's a grocer!" Nellie said, with a fine swerve of her delicate lips. "Upon my word, Pip, I should think, with all the pretty girls there are about here, you might fall in love with a lady."
"She is a lady," Pip contended hotly. "She works with her needle, perhaps—she's not been brought up in selfish idleness like you girls—but her manners are a long sight better than yours, and she'd blush to say small-minded things like you do."
It occurred to Meg that it was small-minded, and she said no more.
But there was nothing Nellie enjoyed more than a sparring match with her eldest brother when the advantage was on her side, and had he not called her a conceited chit?
"There's one thing—you'd get your groceries at a reduction," she said meditatively. "I think their sardines are only 5½d. a tin; they'd let you have them for 5d. perhaps, considering all you've spent in chocolates and eight-button gloves. Meg, I did think that packet of lovely gloves in his bedroom was for his dear little sisters, until——"
"Until you forfeited them by your abominable behaviour!" Philip cried jesuitically.
But Nellie gave him a pitying glance. "Until I saw the size was too utterly impossible for the hands of ladies,—o-o-h, Pip, don't, you hurt me—ah-h-h, you're bruising my arm—stop it, Pip!"
Pip was twisting her soft, muslin-covered arms back in the torturous way boys learn at school, and in a minute she was compelled to call for mercy.
"Down on your knees!" he cried, forcing her down into that humble position. "Now, apologise for all the caddish things you've said about Miss Jones; begin at once,—now, one, two, three—say, 'I apologise.'"
"Never!" screamed Nell, struggling desperately; "I'll die first,—o-o-h, ah-h-h, oh—'I—I—I apologise'—you donkey!"
"More than that,—'I should be glad to be half as beautiful and good and lady-like.'"
"'B-beautiful and good and l-l-lady-like," repeated Nell, with a gasp and a cry between each word. "Oh, Meg, make him stop!"
"'I only said those caddish things because I was jealous of her superiority'—hurry up, now!" A scientific turn accompanied his sentence.
"'C-caddish things because I was jealous—superiority,'—oh, Pip! Meg! somebody, quick—he's half killing me!" Tears of pain and mortification had started to her eyes.
"Let her go, Pip," Meg said; "you really hurt." She pulled at his arm, and he released his victim, who fell in a heap on the floor, and said he was "a h-h-horrid w-wretch, and she w-wished she had no brothers."
Pip picked up his hat and settled his pale blue tie, which had become somewhat disarranged.
"Good-night; I hope you'll learn and inwardly digest your lesson, my child," he said, going out upon the gravel.
But Nellie sprang to her feet, and called after him all down the path till he reached the gate, "Candles, sardines, needles and pins, size nine gloves! ask her what she blacks her eyebrows with!"
Meg was looking troubled. She was sitting on the lounge he had quitted, and her fair brows were knitted beneath the soft, straying hair.
"Nell dear, it is vulgar," she said, "and it is small. I don't know where the distinction of ladies comes in if we say things like that. Perhaps the little dressmaker really wouldn't."
"But we are ladies," Miss Elinor said, her small head in the air,—"nothing can alter that. Our father is a gentleman, our mother was a lady—we are ladies."
"Not if we act like servant girls," Meg said quietly. "If you found a bit of glass under all the conditions you'd expect to find a diamond, and yet it didn't shine like a diamond, then it wouldn't be a diamond, would it?"
"Now don't get elder-sistery and moralous," said Nell; albeit she was a trifle ashamed, for she prided herself certainly upon being a little lady to her boot toes. "Meg, I thought of doing up that white crepon Esther gave me into a kind of evening dress, just for little evenings, you know, at the Baileys or Courtneys, or anywhere, or when we have people here. Would you make the body as a blouse with big frills over the shoulders, or with a yoke and gathered into the waist? The blouse way would be easier, for there's no lining, you know."
"Oh, the blouse, I think," Meg said, half abstractedly. "Do you know if Poppet has gone to bed, Nell? I don't think I saw her come in, and her cough was bad last night."
"I don't know. Meg, I'll give you half-a-crown for that silver belt of yours; I've got a little money left in my allowance yet, and you never wear it. Half-a-crown would buy you a new book, or one of those burnt straw sailor-hats, and the belt would look lovely with the white dress." The younger girl looked persuasively at the elder.
"But I gave seven-and-sixpence for it," Meg objected, "and it's nearly new."
"But you never wear it—what's the good of a thing you don't wear?" contended Nellie, who had set her heart upon it. "If you think it's too little, say two shillings and that light blue blouse of mine that you like."
Meg put the blouse on mentally.
"Well, I like myself in pale blue," she said; "yes, I'll do that—only I hope it's not torn or anything. Oh! and Nell, I think you might go and see if Poppet is in the garden; I've done ever so much to-day, and you've only been reading."
But Nellie was comfortably in the hammock again among the cushions.
"Oh, Poppet never does anything I tell her," she said; "you'd better get her yourself—all the children mind you more than me, you have so much more patience, Megsie."
So it was Meg who had disturbed the important tête-à-tête between Bunty and his little sister; Meg who had separated them abruptly, almost unkindly, at a crisis of great moment; and Meg who had seen the little girl actually into bed, and administered a dose of eucalyptus against the cough.
But it was also Meg who went down in the drawing-room presently, and played Mendelssohn's tender, exquisite Love Song, and a rippling, laughing little bit of Grieg, and a Sonata of Beethoven's, to a father half asleep on the sofa and a young man very wide awake on a neighbouring chair.
And it was Poppet who made hay, and crept along the passage in her little nightgown to the room where Bunty was sitting with his head on his arms and misery in his eyes.
And it was Poppet who, after torrents of abuse and vituperation from the unhappy lad, succeeded in extracting a promise that he should own up everything bravely in the morning, and not shirk his punishment whatever it was.