A Terrible Tomboy Part 1

A Terrible Tomboy.

by Angela Brazil.

CHAPTER I

PEGGY AT HOME

'Good sooth! I know not be she wench or swain; Her face proclaims her one, her deeds the other!'

'Peggy! Peggy! where are you? Peggy! Aunt Helen wants you! Oh, Peggy, do be quick! Wherever are you hiding?'

Getting no response to her calls, the speaker, a pretty fair-haired girl of fifteen, flung her brown holland cooking-ap.r.o.n over her head, and ran out across the farmyard into the lightly-falling rain. She peeped into the cart-shed, where the hens were scratching about among the loose straw. Certainly Peggy was not there. She searched in the kitchen garden, but there was nothing to be seen except the daffodils nodding their innocent heads under the gooseberry-bushes. Round through the orchard she sped, bringing down a shower of cherry-blossom as she brushed against the low-growing trees, and greatly disturbing a robin, who was feeding a young family in a hole in the ivy, but without any sign of the truant. Here and there Lilian ran, hunting in all Peggy's favourite haunts--now peeping into a hollow yew-tree, now peering at the top of a ladder, now rummaging in the tool-shed, then back through the sand-quarry into the stack-yard, where there was a very good chance that the young lady might be hidden away in some snug little hole among the hay; but though Lilian got a tolerable amount of hay-seed into her hair, her efforts were fruitless, and she was just turning away, hot and out of breath, to give up the useless search, when the sound of a low, chuckling laugh attracted her to the barn.

The door was slightly ajar, and she peeped in.

On the floor among the straw sat a little boy of between eight and nine years old, gazing with rapturous delight into the rafters of the roof.

Following the direction of his eyes, Lilian glanced up, and beheld a sight which made her gasp with horror. The barn was a very large one, and was spanned by a great cross-beam, which ran across the whole length from one end to another. Mounted on this, fully fifteen feet above the ground, a small girl was slowly walking along, her gray eyes bright with excitement, her brown curls flying in wild disorder, and her arms stretched out on either side to balance herself as she went on her perilous journey.

Lilian gazed at her spellbound; she did not dare to speak or move, lest by some mischance the frail little figure should lose its nerve and come crashing down on to the stone floor below.

The child herself, however, did not seem to be troubled with the slightest fear, for she walked on as steadily as if the beam had been a plain turnpike road, giving a shout of triumph as she reached the cross-bar, and slid down the ladder on to the ground.

'Hurrah! hurrah!' cried Bobby, clapping his hands in an ecstasy of admiration.

Peggy turned round with a radiant face.

'It's perfectly easy!' she exclaimed; 'I could do it over again. Now, Bobby, you come up and try!'

But here Lilian's pent-up excitement and wrath burst forth.

'For shame, Peggy!' she cried. 'If you want to break your own neck, you shan't break Bobby's, at any rate! Don't you know what a horribly dangerous thing you have been doing? And the idea of your walking along there with your boot-lace dangling down in that way! You are really getting too old for these silly tricks; one can't look after you like a baby. Aunt Helen _would_ be angry if she heard of this!'

Peggy sat down on the bottom rung of the ladder. The triumph had faded from her face, and left something not nearly so pleasant to look at behind.

'All right,' she said defiantly; 'go along and tell Aunt Helen if you like! I don't care!'

'Peggy, how horrid you are! Do I ever tell? Didn't I wash and iron your pinafore yesterday, when you fell into the pig-trough, and n.o.body even suspected? I call you right-down mean to go saying things like that!'

And Lilian's pretty face flushed quite pink with righteous indignation.

Peggy had the grace to look rather ashamed of herself.

'No, Lil, you're a dear; you don't tell tales,' she said; 'and I haven't forgotten about the pinafore.'

'Promise me, then, that you won't go playing such mad pranks again, and leading Bobby into them, too?'

'All right--anything for a quiet life.'

'But promise, properly.'

'There! On my honour, I will never walk along that beam again, or let Bobby do it either. Will that suit you?'

Lilian heaved a sigh of relief, for whatever might be Peggy's sins and misdeeds, her word, once given, was not lightly broken.

'I've been looking for you everywhere,' she said. 'Aunt Helen sent me to fetch you in at once, and I've been such a long time in finding you. I'm afraid she'll be ever so cross.'

'What does she want me for?'

'To darn your stockings. Oh, Peggy, how could you go and hide all those pairs away under the dressing-table? It was really silly, for you might have known Aunt Helen would be sure to hunt them out; and now she's fearfully angry about it, and says you'll have to sit and mend away till they're all finished; and she won't let me help you, either.'

Peggy sighed philosophically.

'I suppose I shall have to come,' she said, getting up and shaking the straw out of her hair. 'Never mind; I'd really rather mend them all in one big heap than in a lot of little horrid pottering times; it spoils one's Sat.u.r.days so!'

'Aunt Helen said if I found Bobby he was to come in too, and learn his Latin,' continued Lilian, looking round. But that youth had prudently disappeared at the first hint of Sat.u.r.day duties, and was nowhere to be seen.

Peggy chuckled.

'I'm afraid you won't find him,' she remarked; 'and it's no use looking.

He's got the most lovely hiding-place in the world that he goes to when he doesn't want to be told to come in. I only found it out by accident myself, and I promised wild horses shouldn't wrench the secret from me.

Come along; we may as well go and get the scolding over.'

And the young lady tossed back her tangled locks, shook her fist at the antic.i.p.ated pile of darning; then, putting on an air of chastened and becoming meekness, as being most likely to soothe Aunt Helen's wrath, she marched st.u.r.dily into the house.

It was a beautiful old home into which Peggy entered, half castle, half farmhouse, with an air of having seen better days about it. The quaint timbered house, with its carved gables and red-tiled roof, was built in at one end into a kind of square tower or keep, with tiny turret windows and winding staircase, getting just a little ruinous in places, but held firmly together by ma.s.ses of ivy, which clung round it like a green mantle. Beyond the tower lay the remains of an abbey, more ancient than the keep. Most of it had been carried away to build the large barns and stables, but the foundations could still be plainly traced, with here and there part of a wall thickly covered with ivy, the ruins of a shattered column, a delicate little piece of window tracery, or a few steps of corkscrew staircase. There were rows and heaps of mossy stones covered with nettles and elder-bushes, with patches of green gra.s.s in between, where the cows grazed and the pigeons flew about, cooing gently. In the ivy the jackdaws were always busy, and the children had many a perilous climb trying to reach the coveted nests. The earliest primroses grew here, and beds of sweet violets under the ruined walls, and there were so many turns and corners and sheltered nooks that it made the grandest play-place in the world for anyone who loved a game at hide-and-seek.

On the other side of the house stretched the garden--such a sweet, old-fashioned garden, where roses, lilies, and gillyflowers were all mixed up with the currants and gooseberries and cabbages. It was somewhat neglected, it is true, but perhaps it looked none the less picturesque for that, and certainly no one would be disposed to quarrel with the beautiful ripe strawberries and the sweet little yellow gooseberries with the hairy skins, or the big red plums that hung upon the old brick walls.

Inside the house was large and roomy, with rambling pa.s.sages and odd little windows in unexpected corners. There was a large oak staircase, with wide, shallow steps, leading to a panelled gallery, where hung swords, and rusty armour, and moth-eaten tapestry, and many an ancient relic of the past; while in the best bedroom was a great carved four-post bed, hung with faded yellow curtains, where Queen Elizabeth herself was said to have slept in much state for two nights on her journey from Shrewsbury to Wrexham.

The big drawing-room had been shut up for many years; the Queen-Anne chairs and china-cabinets were swathed in wrappers, and the ornaments put away in boxes; but sometimes the children would steal in and open the shutters to look at the portraits which hung upon the oak-panelled walls--stately gentlemen with wigs and lace frills, whose eyes seemed to follow you about the room; haughty dames with powdered hair and patches; stiff little girls in hoops and mittens, and pretty young ladies attired as shepherdesses or cla.s.sic G.o.ddesses, with cupids and nymphs in the background.

The little blue drawing-room, which was always used instead, was a far more cheery apartment, with its sunny French window and fresh muslin curtains, and the blue chintz covers on the chairs. But of all the rooms I think the quaintest was the kitchen. It was by far the oldest part of the house; the great beams of the roof, roughly hewn out with an axe and black with age, had been a portion of the ancient castle, and so had the mullioned windows, with their deep, old-fashioned seats and diamond panes, filled with green, uneven gla.s.s. It looked a cheerful place, with its polished-oak dressers and shining bra.s.ses, and on a winter's evening, when the shutters were closed and the settle drawn close to the fire, it seemed the cosiest spot in the world; and Peggy and Bobby would often escape from the sober atmosphere of the dining-room to pull their little stools into the ingle nook, and listen to Nancy's wonderful tales of ghosts and goblins, which seemed twice as thrilling when the wind was howling like a banshee in the chimney, and rattling the doors till they could fancy that spirit fingers were tapping on the panels, and only waiting a chance to catch them in the dark pa.s.sages, and sent such cold shivers running down their backs that they grew almost too frightened to go to bed.

Below the house the meadow sloped down to a river, where a stone bridge led to the village, with its pretty thatched cottages and Norman church, whose square tower stood up like a beacon for the surrounding country; and away in the distance, tier upon tier, rose the Welsh mountains, fading from green to purple or from purple to misty mauve, till the last were lost in the hazy blue of the sky.

Gorswen Abbey, as Peggy's home was called, had been an important place in its time, and an air of sleepy grandeur seemed still to hang about the old walls, as if sometime it might rouse itself from its lethargy and take its part in the world again.

No one could remember when Vaughans had not lived at the Abbey. There were tombs in memory of them in a side transept of the church--stalwart Crusaders, lying with legs crossed and meek hands folded in prayer; stout Elizabethan squires and their dames, with ruffs round their necks, and rows of prim little kneeling children beneath them; full-faced Jacobean worthies in curled wigs, with sculptured cherubs weeping over extinguished torches; and there was a high old pew with a carved canopy over it, and an escutcheon bearing a coat of arms with a dragon on it, which, when Peggy was very little, she had always a.s.sociated with the dragon in the Book of Revelation, and had an uneasy feeling that its eye was upon her all service time, and if she did not behave properly it might come down in great wrath and devour her.

There had been Vaughans who fought in the Wars of the Roses, Vaughans who threw in their lot with King Charles and helped to beat Cromwell at Atherton Moor, Vaughans who had joined the Young Pretender's force, and had lost their heads as their reward. There was no end to the stories which the children could sometimes cajole out of old David, the farm-help, who had all the family history at his finger-ends.

But they had been a happy-go-lucky, spendthrift race, loving to ride to hounds and to entertain liberally better than to look after their affairs. Little by little the fine property had been wasted away, till, when Peggy's father succeeded to the estate, he found it to consist of scarcely more than the old house with the surrounding farm and woodlands, together with such a mult.i.tude of debts, mortgages, and other enc.u.mbrances, that it was truly a barren heritage. Robert Vaughan, however, was a man of strong will and much determination. Some of the grit of the old Crusaders was left in his blood, and instead of taking his solicitor's advice, and selling the place for what it would fetch, he resolved to farm the land himself, and by using every care and economy to free the property, and raise it to its former level in the county. He worked in his own fields, ploughing, harvesting, and reaping, toiling harder than any of his labourers, and living in as plain a manner as possible.

To those friends who thought he lost caste thereby he had always the same argument--that he saw no reason why the cultivation of fields should counteract the habits of refinement and good breeding to which he had been reared; that in the colonies educated gentlemen set to work to labour with their hands, and are thought none the worse of: so why not in England, where land is good and markets are plentiful, especially when it involved the keeping of a fine old property which had been in the family for so many hundreds of years?

Fortune, however, had been against him. Several bad seasons and a spell of disease among the cattle had made all the difference between profit and loss, and at the time this story begins Robert Vaughan realized that any unusual run of ill luck might bring matters to a crisis, and render vain the struggle of so many years. The children, however, knew little of the shadow which haunted their home, for they lived as yet in that happy thoughtless paradise which is the inheritance of true childhood, where a new rabbit in the hutch or an extra treat on a holiday is of far more importance than any grown-up affair.