Ann was the kitchen-maid. She was coming with us, but not the cook, who was leaving to be married. "Mrs. Munt is, or used to be, a very good cook, and a very good sort of person altogether."
"Oh, thank you, sir," said Liddy very heartily. Mrs. Munt was a great relief to her mind, for the idea of Mary Ann's cooking on the days that "master" came down to Rosebuds had been weighing on it. To me the idea of Mrs. Munt brought back the thought of the mystery. If she had been there as long as grandpapa could remember, what must she not know?
I flew off to Tib with the news, but she did not receive it with much interest.
"An old cook!" she said disdainfully. "Why, that would spoil it all. It wouldn't matter so much for an ogre story, if we could fancy her a witch, but for an 'ancient times' one, it would never do."
"Oh, bother!" I exclaimed, "I don't want pretending. I want to know about it really. If you only wanted make-ups, you can always get things that will do for them. I am sure Miss Evans would have been a beautiful witch! Oh, Tib, aren't you glad she isn't coming any more?"
For Miss Evans had left off coming altogether. She was going to begin a school – how we pitied the scholars! – and had asked grandpapa to let her off at once. She came to say good-bye to us, and gave us each a present of a book – and, to our surprise, there were tears in her eyes when she kissed us! People are really very queer in this world – they never seem to care for things till they know they are not going to have them any more. We all felt rather ashamed that we couldn't cry too, and Tib said she was afraid we must have very little feeling, which made Gerald and me quite unhappy for a while.
All the same, we weren't at all in a hurry to hear of the new "Miss Evans."
CHAPTER III
"ROSEBUDS."
"To one who has been long in city pent,
'Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven."
suppose it is true, as older people say, that things very seldom turn out as one expects. Sometimes they are not so bad as one feels sure they will be – and very often, or almost always, they are not so nice as one has thought they would be, if one has been fancying and picturing a great deal about them. And any way, they are never quite what one expects. I am beginning to find this out for myself now – looking back, I can recollect very few nice things in my life that have turned out as nice as I had imagined them. But of these few, Rosebuds was one, and that has made me always remember with particular distinctness all about our first acquaintance with the dear little place. I think I could tell everything about our arrival there, exactly how each room looked, and what we had for tea – oh, how hungry we were that first evening! and I seem to feel again the feeling of the snowy white sheets and the sort of faint hay-ey – Tib said it was lavender – scent in our beds when we got into them that first night – very tired, but very happy.
What plans we made for the next day – how we settled to get up with the sun, to ramble about and see everything – and how, after all, we slept, of course, much later than usual! Still, it was a delicious waking. Do you know how beautiful a first waking in the real country is when you have been a long time in London? There is a sort of clear stillness in the air that you can feel, and then a cock crows – with quite a different crow from the poor London cocks, I always think, and hens cluck a little, just under your window perhaps; or, best of all, a turkey gobble-wobbles and some ducks quack – perhaps there is a rush of all together if your window happens to be not far from the poultry-yard, and the girl is coming out with the creatures' breakfast – and further off you hear a moo from some cows, and nearer, and yet more distant, the clear sweet notes of the ever busy little birds as they pass by on their way up to who knows where? Oh, it is too delicious – and when you hear all those sounds, as you are lying there still dreamy and sleepy, there is a sort of strangeness and fairy-ness– I must make up that word – that makes you think of Red Riding-hood setting off in the early morning to her grandmother's cottage, or of the little princess who went to live with the dwarfs to keep house for them.
But I must come back to the evening before – the evening, that is to say, of our arrival at Rosebuds. It had been a pouring wet day when we left London (it went on pouring till we were only about half-an-hour from our journey's end); and just at the last moment grandpapa had got a telegram which stopped his coming with us. He grumbled a little, but I don't think he had been looking forward with much pleasure to the journey in our company, and though we thought it our duty to look grave, and Tib said gently, "What a pity!" I don't think we minded much either. Indeed, to tell the real truth – and it isn't any harm telling it in here, as grandpapa will never see this story – I think it was his not being with us, and our feeling so lovelily free and unafraid, that made that first evening at Rosebuds so delightful.
And Mrs. Munt! – oh, yes, it had to do with Mrs. Munt. There never was anybody so nice as Mrs. Munt – there never could be!
But I must go straight on, and not keep slipping a little bit backwards, and hurrying on too far forwards, this sort of way. Well then, as I was saying, it rained and rained all through the three hours' journey, or at least two hours and a half of it, so that we all felt rather doleful and shivery, and Liddy began hoping there'd be no mistake about the carriage from the inn meeting us at the station, as grandpapa had told her it should. Poor Liddy was rather inclined to get nervous when she was thrown on her own resources.
"Never mind, nursey," we said, all three, to comfort her; "we can easily walk if it isn't there. You know grandpapa said it was only about half a mile, and we've got our big cloaks on – the rain wouldn't hurt us."
But Liddy still looked rather unhappy, till suddenly from her side of the railway carriage Tib called out, "It's clearing up – it's clearing up splendidly; and oh, Gussie! do look – there's such a lovely rainbow!"
So there was. I never before or since saw such a rainbow – it seemed a very nice welcome for us, and after all, Liddy's fears were quite without reason. For the queer old "one-horse fly" was waiting for us, and we all bundled into it and drove off without any mishaps, except that nurse was sure the packet of umbrellas had been left in the railway carriage, and stood shouting to the guard to stop after the train was already moving out of the station, which made us all laugh so, that we hadn't breath to tell her that it was all safe in the fly.
Though Rosebuds is almost in the village – at least, a very tiny bit out of it – it is some little way from the station, because for some reason that I've never found out, the station stands away by itself in the fields, as if it and the village had quarrelled and wouldn't have anything to say to each other. I dare say it's not a bad thing that it is so: the nice country-ness of it all would have been a little spoilt by the trains whistling in and out, and as it is, we scarcely hear it, as the railroad is low down and is hardly noticed. And the road from the station to the village is so pretty. I never, even now, go along it without remembering that first evening when we drove to Rosebuds in the clear brightness that comes after rain, the fields and the hedges glistening with the water diamonds, the little clouds hurrying away as if they were afraid of being caught, and over all the sort of hush that seems to me to follow a regular rainy day – as if the world were a naughty child that had cried itself to sleep with the tears still on its cheeks.
It is a hilly bit of road – first it goes down, and then it goes up, and when it comes into the village it does so quite suddenly. You see a high, ivy-covered wall, which is the wall of the church-yard, and then comes a row of sweet little alms-houses, and then the inn, and one by one all the village houses and shops in the most irregular way possible. Some one said once that it was more like an old German village than an English one, but I have never been in Germany, so I can't tell, only it certainly is very unlike everywhere else. We were so pleased to see it so queer and funny, that we kept tugging each other to look out, first at one side, and then at the other, and sometimes at both at once. Then we began wondering which of the houses, as we came to them, could be Rosebuds, and I think we would have been quite pleased whichever it was – they all looked so tempting and snug.
But we were all wrong in our guesses, for, as I said, Rosebuds