Dream Days | Page 4

to jump round it with
shouts of triumph. Selina looked on grimly, with knitted brow; she was
not yet fully satisfied. "Can't you get any more sticks?" she said
presently. "Go and hunt about. Get some old hampers and matting and
things out of the tool-house. Smash up that old cucumber frame
Edward shoved you into, the day we were playing scouts and Mohicans.
Stop a bit! Hooray! I know. You come along with me."
Hard by there was a hot-house, Aunt Eliza's special pride and joy, and
even grimly approved of by the gardener. At one end, in an out-house
adjoining, the necessary firing was stored; and to this sacred fuel, of
which we were strictly forbidden to touch a stick, Selina went straight.
Harold followed obediently, prepared for any crime after that of the
pea-sticks, but pinching himself to see if he were really awake.
"You bring some coals," said Selina briefly, without any palaver or
pro-and-con discussion. "Here's a basket. I'll manage the faggots!"
In a very few minutes there was little doubt about its being a genuine
bonfire and no paltry makeshift. Selina, a Maenad now, hatless and
tossing disordered locks, all the dross of the young lady purged out of
her, stalked around the pyre of her own purloining, or prodded it with a
pea-stick. And as she prodded she murmured at intervals, "I knew there
was something we could do! It isn't much--but still it 's something!"
The gardener had gone home to his tea. Aunt Eliza had driven out for
hers a long way off, and was not expected back till quite late; and this
far end of the garden was not overlooked by any windows. So the
Tribute blazed on merrily unchecked. Villagers far away, catching sight
of the flare, muttered something about "them young devils at their
tricks again," and trudged on beerwards. Never a thought of what day it
was, never a thought for Nelson, who preserved their honest pint-pots,
to be paid for in honest pence, and saved them from litres and decimal
coinage. Nearer at hand, frightened rabbits popped up and vanished
with a flick of white tails; scared birds fluttered among the branches, or
sped across the glade to quieter sleeping-quarters; but never a bird nor a

beast gave a thought to the hero to whom they owed it that each year
their little homes of horsehair, wool, or moss, were safe stablished
'neath the flap of the British flag; and that Game Laws, quietly
permanent, made la chasse a terror only to their betters. No one seemed
to know, nor to care, nor to sympathise. In all the ecstasy of her
burnt-offering and sacrifice, Selina stood alone.
And yet--not quite alone! For, as the fire was roaring at its best, certain
stars stepped delicately forth on the surface of the immensity above,
and peered down doubtfully--with wonder at first, then with interest,
then with recognition, with a start of glad surprise. They at least knew
all about it, they understood. Among them the Name was a daily
familiar word; his story was a part of the music to which they swung,
himself was their fellow and their mate and comrade. So they peeped,
and winked, and peeped again, and called to their laggard brothers to
come quick and see.
***
"The best of life is but intoxication, and Selina, who during her brief
inebriation had lived in an ecstasy as golden as our drab existence
affords, had to experience the inevitable bitterness of awakening
sobriety, when the dying down of the flames into sullen embers
coincided with the frenzied entrance of Aunt Eliza on the scene. It was
not so much that she was at once and forever disrated, broke, sent
before the mast, and branded as one on whom no reliance could be
placed, even with Edward safe at school, and myself under the distant
vigilance of an aunt; that her pocket money was stopped indefinitely,
and her new Church Service, the pride of her last birthday, removed
from her own custody and placed under the control of a Trust. She
sorrowed rather because she had dragged poor Harold, against his
better judgment, into a most horrible scrape, and moreover because,
when the reaction had fairly set in, when the exaltation had fizzled
away and the young-lady portion of her had crept timorously back to its
wonted lodging, she could only see herself as a plain fool, unjustified,
undeniable, without a shadow of an excuse or explanation.
As for Harold, youth and a short memory made his case less pitiful than

it seemed to his more sensitive sister. True, he started upstairs to his
lonely cot bellowing dismally, before him a dreary future of pains and
penalties, sufficient to last to the crack of doom. Outside his