Little Folks (December 1884) Part 7

She watched them all go off under the bright blue sky, and then she turned round, and with her back to the window, faced the rather dingy, dull-looking schoolroom, and burst into a loud roar.

For Bab was only seven years old, and had not yet lost the first intensity of crying with which power every baby is born. She roared for two or three minutes, plenty of tears coming with the roar, after which she felt a good deal better.

"I'm such a little thing to be punished," she said to herself. "I don't think they ought to punish such a little thing as I am. I _must_ be young when people live to be as old as grandpapa, with wrinkles over every sc.r.a.p of his face, till it looks just like no face at all, only wrinkles."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "HOLDING HER DRESS UP" (_p. 344_).]

Then Bab examined her little round, rosy, pleasant face in a mirror over the fireplace.

"Not a single wrinkle," said she. "I must be _very_ young; but if they punish me this way, I shall _get_ wrinkles. I'm sure I shall, because I'm so _miserable_!"

I am afraid poor Bab often deserved to be punished. She was idle at her lessons and extremely saucy, and she was a quaint little thing, so that sometimes she seemed to be impertinent when she really did not intend it, though I must own that at other times she _did_ intend it as much as any other young lady seven years old possibly could. On the present occasion, when her governess scolded her for her idleness, she said she had not been idle, but had been making a charade; and then she began dancing about the schoolroom, and jumping on tables and chairs, and all the time shouting loudly, "Selina, guess--this is the charade--guess, Selina, guess! My first is what n.o.body should be, my second is what everybody should eat, and my whole is--oh,--Strict-ham, Strict-ham. Why don't you guess, Selina? Oh, why don't you?"

Miss Strictham marched her off in dire disgrace. The picnickers would be absent four hours, and during that time Bab was not to quit the schoolroom. Maria, the housemaid, would bring her dinner, and nurse would look in on her now and then, but she was not to have the younger children with her. She was to be a solitary prisoner in solitary confinement, and she was on her parole. Her aunt made her promise not to leave the room, and having done so, was content, for, as she said to Uncle Jem in rather a complaining way, "It is a very odd thing that Bab never tells a falsehood or breaks her promise. Robert and Selina both do sometimes, and yet they are so much better children. Isn't it odd?"

Having enjoyed a good roar, and feeling wonderfully refreshed thereby--for Bab was too proud to have shed a tear in Aunt Anastasia's and Miss Strictham's presence--the poor little thing got hold of her lesson-books and prepared to learn a French verb, some questions and answers in English history, and to do a sum in compound addition, and write a copy.

"As if it mattered to such a little thing as I am whether King John was a good man or a bad one, or what sort of a thing Magna Charta was!" said she, reproachfully, to her book; "as if it mattered to _any_body, indeed, when it was such an extremely long time ago! Eleven hundred and ninety-nine he came to the throne; and who'd care if he had never been born or never come to the throne? And _we're_ not barons, and _we've_ not got Magna Charta; and it's all nothing at all, but a great pity it ever happened, for if it hadn't happened, poor little children living hundreds and hundreds of years afterwards would not be troubled about it. I call it rubbish!" and with the word rubbish she tossed the little book up, and down it came with a broken back.

Bab picked it up and held it with one corner. When she saw the melancholy scrambling way in which the cover and the pages hung, she went off into irresistible shouts of laughter--for Bab's laugh was as loud and as hearty as her cry. Then she did her sums and wrote her copy, and after that Maria brought in her dinner.

Bab clapped her hands for joy when she saw what the tray contained, and then she began her dinner.

But now the lessons were over, the dinner was finished, and what was poor little Bab to do for the rest of the time?

She went round the room, casting out first her right hand and then her left, touching thus in turn everything in the apartment, but there was nothing more interesting than a pen-wiper, a schoolroom inkstand, or a grammar, so she called out "No, no, no" to everything, and then all of a sudden down came her hand on a big book with scarlet and white binding, and she gave a loud scream, a pirouet, and then said "Yes!"

Yes; I should think so. Why, it was Mr. Beresford's fairy book--the beautiful book he was showing them last night.

Then she seized on the precious book, brought it over with quite a struggle to the school desk, opened it there, and with elbows on table and cheeks on hands, gave herself over to perfect enjoyment. And so it was that we saw Miss Bab when our story began, sitting before the great book enjoying herself.

Such beautiful, lovely pictures went round every page, with a little verse set down right in the middle of the pictures. Fairies gorgeously coloured, all twining together or mixing themselves up with b.u.t.terflies till you scarcely knew which was which, and not one bit of white paper to be seen through or mid the brilliant creatures--actually a wide border of fairies and b.u.t.terflies, and nothing else, and the verse in the middle was also in illuminated letters.

In her eagerness, hanging over the book to read it, Bab happened to lean on the end of a pen standing up in art inkstand. She was too much interested to know what it was, but it came spluttering out, and a little speck of ink splashed on the white paper beyond the border.

"Oh, oh!" cried excited Bab; "is it not like some little bad fairy running along to hurt them?"

It was very hot, and Bab's eyes shut after she had said that, and when she opened them again she forgot the bad fairy, she was so shocked to see the splash of ink on the paper. And then she felt the sun warmer and warmer, and she shut her eyes once more.

"Look again," said a very little voice, but very sweet, oh, so sweet!

So she did look again. She saw all the beautiful painted fairies and b.u.t.terflies had risen up alive from the page, and were dancing and gliding round and round it, never pa.s.sing off the border to the outside or the inside. It was a lovely sight to see, and little Bab laughed and clapped her hands. Then a very grand and proud-looking fairy slipped out of the dance, and stationed herself in front, where she could take a good look at Bab.

"Little girl, why did you do that?" said the fairy, severely.

"Oh, what, please?" Bab was a brave child, but she did feel a little shaky and nohow just then.

"Brought the bad fairy Blackame to creep in among us and eat up our b.u.t.terflies."

And had Bab really the power to bring a fairy Blackame over there when she thought it was only a splash of ink? And she looked with a sort of terror on the bad fairy Blackame when she thought she had brought her, and could not send her away.

"Oh, fairy, fairy!" she cried, "do forgive me. But can that wretched little black splashy thing--for you really _can't_ call it a splash--eat your b.u.t.terflies when there are so many of you to fight for them, and they've got heaps and heaps of wings to fly away with?"

"But how can we manage that?" replied the fairy, sharply, "when we are too timid to fight and the b.u.t.terflies are too brave to fly away."

"Well, that _is_ inconvenient," sighed Bab; "but don't you think, since the b.u.t.terflies are so brave--how I do like them for being so brave!--don't you think they might fight a little?"

"b.u.t.terflies fight!" screamed the fairy. "Were b.u.t.terflies ever seen to fight since the first b.u.t.terfly? What will you say next? I think you are a very disagreeable little girl. First you bring down Blackame, and then you want to set all our dear pretty b.u.t.terflies fighting."

"It was you who said they were so brave," murmured Bab, half penitent and half injured.

"And pray, is there any reason why I should not be permitted to say that b.u.t.terflies are brave?" asked the fairy, with a sort of deadly politeness.

"And so much as I used to long to see a fairy!" sighed Bab to herself; "and now I really wish she would go away.

"What are you prepared to do about Blackame?--tell me," demanded the fairy, suddenly.

She made Bab jump, but Bab did not mind that; she was a straightforward child, and liked to go direct at a thing. She reflected, and then she faced the difficulty she had got into bravely, and replied in a grave, resolute way, "Anything you wish."

The fairy looked at her. "Why couldn't you say so before?" she said, very sharply. "It would have saved all this trouble."

Again Bab felt that it was not fair--she thought the fairy was unfairer even than Selina; _but_ she was a fairy, and besides that, Bab _had_ brought Blackame down upon them; so she said instantly, not meekly and humbly; for that was not her way--but in a resolute, hearty manner, that gave one confidence to see--"Just tell me, and I'll do it."

"_I'll_ tell you," said the fairy quite good-naturedly, "and _you'll_ do it. That's quite fair. Well now, the thing to do is this: go out in the evening with a long pole, and knock up high into the branches of the trees, and glance up and down, holding your dress out, and singing:--

'I'm the girl that brought him in, Blackame! What a rout!

Little birds that cannot sin.

Drive the wretched fellow out, Blackame;'

And then you'll see----" but what she was to see Bab never knew; something touched her, and then rushed with headlong sound through the window. The fairy was gone, and, stranger still, the bright beautiful book, with its b.u.t.terflies and fairies, was gone too.

She looked lazily round her, and, to her surprise, saw Selina standing at the other end of the table.

"Why are you home so early?"

"Home so early! It's half-past five, if you please. Why, you lazy little thing, you've been asleep all the time!"

Bab looked at the clock on the mantel-piece, and saw it was a quarter to six. _How_ quickly the time pa.s.ses when you are with fairies! She knew she had not been asleep, because she knew she had had the visit from the fairy, and she was so anxious to know what would happen next. About seven o'clock she thought she might go out with a long pole to the tree; and she supposed the fairies had put the book somewhere, till the birds should come and drive Blackame out of it, and she hoped very much Mr.

Beresford would not miss his beautiful book till then, when it would be clear from the black splotch which she now knew was not Blackame.

"Where is Robert?" asked Miss Selina. "He dashed out of the carriage and through here, and he must have gone out by the window. And you _must_ have been asleep, or you would have heard him."

Bab remembered the sound of the rush through the window, and she saw now a spill of ink just by the place where the book had been. But Robert could not have been there, because she was talking to the fairy at the very time, and she must have noticed him, and felt him greatly in the way.

When it was past seven o'clock, Bab slipped away, and took Mr.

Beresford's alpenstock out of the stand in the hall, and beat about the branches of the elms and horse-chestnuts, and danced and sang, holding her dress up, and did everything exactly as the fairy had told her to do, and as you will see her doing in the picture.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "SHE STOOD BY HIM."]