THE ADVENT OF THE ‘HIRELINGS’

From ‘The Christmas Hirelings’:  copyrighted by Harper and Brothers

Everything had been made ready for the little strangers.  There were fires blazing in two large bedrooms overhead—­rooms with a door of communication.  In one there were still the two little white beds in which Lilian and Sibyl had slept when they were children; poor Lilian, whose bed was in the English cemetery at Florence, under a white marble monument erected by her sorrowing husband, and whose sorrowing husband had taken to himself a second wife five years ago.  Every one knew where Lilian was lying, but no one at Penlyon Castle knew where Sibyl’s head had found rest.  All that people knew about the disobedient daughter was that her husband had died within three or four years of her marriage, worn to death in some foreign mission.  Of his luckless widow no one at Penlyon had heard anything, but it was surmised that her father made her an allowance.  He could hardly let his only daughter starve, people said, however badly she might have treated him.  Lady Lurgrave’s early death had been a crushing blow to his love and to his pride.  She had died childless.

* * * * *

Sir John had heard the carriage stop, and the opening of the hall door; and although he pretended to go on reading his paper by the lamp placed close at his elbow, the pretense was a poor one, and anybody might have seen that he was listening with all his might.

The footman had opened the hall door as the wheels drew near; it was wide open when the carriage stopped.  The red light from the hall fire streamed out upon the evening gray, and three little silvery voices were heard exclaiming:—­

“Oh, what a pretty house!”

“Oh, what a big house!”

And then the smallest voice of the three with amazing distinctness:—­

“What an exceedingly red fire.”

The carriage door flew open, and two little girls all in red from top to toe, and one little boy in gray, rolled out in a heap, or seemed to roll out, like puppies out of a basket, scrambled on to their feet and ran up the steps,—­Mr. Danby, slim and jaunty as usual, following them.

“Good gracious, how tiny they are!” cried Adela, stooping down to kiss the smaller girl, a round red bundle, with a round little face, and large dark gray eyes shining in the firelight.

The tiny thing accepted the kiss somewhat shrinkingly, and looked about her, awed by the grandeur of the hall, the large fireplace and blazing logs, the men in armor, or the suits of armor standing up and pretending to be men.

“I don’t like them,” said the tiny girl, clinging to Danby and pointing at one of these mailed warriors with a muffled red hand:  “they’re not alive, are they, Uncle Tom?”

“No, no, no, Moppet, they’re as dead as door-nails.”