Us | Page 2

admiring eyes on the treasures in the glass cupboards, to play bo-peep behind the thick silken curtains, even in his time faded to a withered-leaf green, to poke his tiny nose into the bowl of pot-pourri on the centre table, which made him sneeze just exactly as--ah! but I am forgetting--never mind, I may as well finish the sentence--just exactly as it made "us" sneeze now!
After the tap came a kind of little pattering and scratching, like baby taps, not quite sure of their own existence; then, had Grandpapa's and Grandmamma's ears been a very little sharper, they could not but have heard a small duel in words.
"You, bruvver, my fingers' bones is tired."
"I told you, sister," reproachfully, "us should always bring old Neddy's nose downstairs with us. They never hear us tapping."
Then a faint sigh or two and a redoubled assault, crowned with success. Grandmamma, whom after all I am not sure but that I have maligned in calling her deaf--the taps were so very faint really!--Grandmamma looks up from her netting, and in a thin but clear voice calls out, "Come in!"
The door opens--then, after admitting the entrance of two small figures, is carefully closed again, and the two small figures, with a military salute from the boy, a bob, conscientiously intended for a curtsey, from the girl, advance a step or two into the room.
"Grandmamma," say the two high-pitched baby voices, speaking so exactly together that they sound but as one. "Grandmamma, it's 'us.'"
Still no response. Grandmamma is not indifferent--far from it--but just at this moment her netting is at a critical stage impossible to disregard; she thinks to herself "wait a moment, my dears," and is quite under the impression that she has said it aloud; this is a mistake, but all the same "my dears" do wait a moment--several moments indeed, hand-in-hand, uncomplainingly, without indeed the very faintest notion in their faithful little hearts that there is anything to complain of--there are some lessons to be learnt from children long ago, I think,--while Grandmamma tries to secure her knots.
Look at them while they stand there; it is always a good plan to save time, and we have a minute or two to spare. They are so alike in size and colour and feature that if it had not been that one was a boy and the other a girl, there would have been no telling them apart. Before Duke was put into the first stage of boy-attire--what that exactly was in those days I confess I am not sure--they never had been told apart was the fact of the matter, till one day the brilliant idea struck Grandmamma of decorating little Pamela with a coral necklace. She little knew what she was about; both babies burst into howling distress, and were not to be quieted even when the unlucky beads were taken away; no, indeed, they only cried the more. Grandmamma and Nurse were at their wits' end, and Grandpapa's superior intelligence had at last to be appealed to. And not in vain.
"They must each have one," said Grandpapa solemnly. And so it had to be. In consequence of which fine sense of justice and firm determination on the part of the babies, they went on "not being told apart" till, as I said, the day came when Marmaduke's attire began to be cut after a different fashion, and by degrees he arrived at his present dignity of nankin suits complete. Such funny suits you would think them now--funnier even than Pamela's white frock, with its skirt to the ankles and blue-sashed waist up close under the arm-pits, for even if she walked in just as I describe her you would only call her "a Kate-Greenway-dressed little girl." But Marmaduke's light yellow trousers, buttoning up over his waistcoat, with bright brass buttons, and open yellow jacket to match, would look odd. Especially on such a very little boy--for he and Pamela, as they stand there with their flaxen hair falling over their shoulders and their very blue eyes gazing solemnly before them, wondering when either of the old people will think fit to speak to "us"--Pamela and he are only "six last birfday."
All this time Grandpapa is in happy--no, I won't say "happy," for the old gentleman is always, to give him his due, pleased to welcome the children to his presence, "at the right time and in the right manner," be it understood--in complete unconsciousness of their near neighbourhood. There was nothing to reveal it; they had not left the door open so as to cause a draught, for Grandpapa abhorred draughts; they were as still and quiet as two little mice, when mice are quiet that is to say. For often in the middle of the night, when my sleep has been disturbed