My Little Sister Part 10

"Well, you _are_ an extraordinary being--shutting yourself up with brown paper pasted over the windows----"

"----only the lower half, and none at all over the skylight."

"Sitting there behind brown paper, with the door locked!"

He laughed. "You see how necessary my precautions are."

"I believe you do something in there you're ashamed of."

"Well, I'm not very proud of what I do. Not yet."

She clutched Barbara's arm. "Babs," she said in a loud whisper, "he makes bombs."

"s.h.!.+ not so loud, please." Eric looked solemnly across the links to where Eddie Monmouth was giving Bettina her first lesson in hitting off.

"No, it isn't bombs," Hermione said, after a moment. "You make counterfeit money."

"If ever I make any money," Eric agreed, "it will have to be counterfeit."

One day, with Lady Barbara following anxious in her wake, Hermione came flying in to tell us she was hot on the trace of Eric Annan's secret. He was one of those horrible vivisectionists! The Bungalow was a torture chamber. She had gone to the station to meet someone, and there on the platform, addressed "E. Annan, Esq.," was a crate full of creatures--poor little darling guinea-pigs.

She taxed him with the guinea-pigs the moment he appeared.

"No wonder you paste thick brown paper over your windows. What do you do with all those poor darling guinea-pigs?"

He answered by asking her what she did with all her Chow dogs. I think he probably knew that Hermione bred these dogs. They took prizes at shows, and Hermione did a thriving trade in selling Chows to her friends, for sums that seemed to us extortionate. She bought jewellery with some of the proceeds, the rest she put in the bank.

But there was truth as well as evasion in the answer she gave Eric: "You know perfectly well the Chows are pets."

"Exactly; and what a wasted youth yours must have been if you never heard of keeping guinea-pigs."

"'Keeping them'--I used to have them to play with; but you know quite well you don't mean to 'keep' them."

"Not for ever. Very clever of you if you kept yours for ever."

Of course she hadn't been able to keep them beyond their natural span.

"But I never did anything horrible to them."

Then Lady Barbara, whose long upper lip seemed to have grown longer under the tension, behaved a little treacherously to her sister. In her anxiety to excuse whatever Eric might do, or have done, Barbara told, in her halting way, some family anecdotes about Hermione's teasing pets that had to be rescued from her clutches, and about certain birds and kittens, and a monkey, which had one and all succ.u.mbed.

Hermione tried to make light of these damaging revelations. "I was only a child."

But Lady Barbara gave her no quarter. It was only a year ago, Babs said, that Hermione had a horse killed under her in Scotland. "You were warned, too. You just rode him to death. And you know n.o.body gives the dogs such whippings as you do."

Hermione ignored the horse. To do her justice she hated to be reminded of that. But she defended whipping the dogs. If they weren't whipped now and then, they'd get out of hand.

"Why should they be 'in hand'?" Eric asked. "For _your_ pleasure. And profit. Not theirs." He spoke of the severity of training that broke in house-dogs, and I had my first glimpse of the difficulty of that point in ethics, the relation of human beings to domestic animals. Hermione was goaded into harking back to the guinea-pigs. Where was he going to keep them?

In hutches, or in enclosures in the field.

Hermione's eyes sparkled. She was glad she had counted them, she said.

"I shall just notice how long you keep them."

"Oh, when I've trained them, of course I shall dispose of them."

Hermione looked at him a moment, and then with her most beguiling air, she begged him not to tease her any more. "What do you really want them for?"

"Well," he said, "I'll tell you. I am trying an experiment. I expect, after all, to make my fortune."

Lady Barbara brightened at that. Eric went on briskly: "You know how fast guinea-pigs breed, and how close and clean they crop gra.s.s. Well, here is a great natural industry waiting to be exploited. My guinea-pigs are going to give an ocular demonstration to my farmer friends. My idea is, if I breed guinea-pigs and let them out in squads at so much a day----"

"But if you let them out," said Lady Barbara, innocently, "won't they run away? Ours did."

While Hermione was laughing, Eric promised to supply movable enclosures with his Guinea-Pig Squads. "When they've eaten one area clean, simply move the hurdles on. You'll see. There'll soon be a corner in guinea-pigs and a slump in lawn-mowers."

CHAPTER XI

AWAKENING

There was another flutter of excitement when Eric had his Chief a.s.sistant down from London. At last, somebody else was allowed to go into the Bungalow.

This extension of hospitality did not make the Bungalow seem more accessible, but distinctly less so. For the Chief a.s.sistant lived altogether in the Bungalow; and he must have liked living there, for he never wanted to take walks, or do anything but just stay in the Bungalow. He cooked his own meals and washed his own dishes. His speech was like the rest of him, and the most forthcoming thing he ever said, according to Mrs. Klaus, was "Good-morning." So not even Hermione could pump the Invaluable Bootle, as Eric called him. Hermione called him the Beetle, because he was a round-shouldered, brown young man, with goggle eyes and very long arms and legs.

Eric defended his a.s.sistant. Hermione once made the slip of saying of Mr. Bootle that he looked like the kind of person she could quite imagine taking a pleasure in doing innocent animals to death.

"I shouldn't have said Bootle was the least like you," Eric said, with a deadly suavity. She saw he had not forgotten Babs' stories, but he seemed very willing not to pursue the subject.

"Everything comes to an end sometime. Even you, Lady Hermione--not to speak of the rest of us. And some of us would be content enough to know our way of dying had left the world a little more enlightened than we found it."

I minded none of Hermione's audacities so much as her speaking of Eric as "Babs' property." "Poor old Babs," she said behind her sister's back--the best the Ugly Duckling of the family could hope for was a parson, or some professor-person.

We noticed the professor-person never stayed long if the Helmstones came.

That pleased me more than anything.

He was quite different when he was alone with us three. He was patient, and took some pains, I think, to make us understand that feeling of his about Scientific Research. He seemed to give us the key of the wonderful laboratory in London, where he "spent the greater part" of his life. I, too, came to feel it must be the most fascinating place in the world.

Not a place where men dealt only with dead matter, but where they "proved the spirit."

A friend of his had discovered things about X rays; a knowledge, Eric said, which had saved other men from death; and from what he thought was worse--long, hopeless suffering. His friend knew that he was running a risk with the X rays. He saw that the sores on his hands grew worse; they were eating in. A thumb and forefinger had to go, then the entire hand; presently, the other hand. His eyes---- Then he died.