Pollyooly. Edgar Jepson

      Pollyooly Changes Her Address

      CHAPTER I

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      POLLYOOLY CHANGES HER ADDRESS

      "THE Lump shan't go into the workhouse—ever," said the angel child, with the red hair, firmly. Then after a pause she added even more firmly, "I won't let him."

      Mrs. Brown shook her shapely head: she was the wife of a policeman. The gloom on her so round and usually so cheerful face deepened; and she said despondently, "I don't know how you'll manage—you bein' so young, an' work that 'ard to git."

      "Aunt Hannah told me never to let the Lump go into the workhouse the last afternoon I saw her at the hospital; and I promised her he never should; and he shan't," said the angel child in the same tone of cold resolution. "I've got twenty-two shillings as it is."

      ​"An' that won't last long, Pollyooly, my dear," said Mrs. Brown gloomily.

      "But on Saturday there'll be another ten shillings—five shillings from Mr. Ruffin and five shillings from Mr. Gedge-Tomkins; and perhaps I'll go on doing their work for quite a long time," said Pollyooly, still undismayed.

      "That's too much to 'ope," said Mrs. Brown, her words and tone once more belying her naturally cheerful face.

      "They don't know that Aunt Hannah's dead," said Pollyooly.

      "They'll 'ear," said Mrs. Brown conscientiously, in the same comforting vein.

      "They won't hear from me," said Pollyooly curtly.

      "But if they know how bad she. was, they'll 'ave bin expectin' 'er to die," said Mrs. Brown.

      "They only know that she's ill. I didn't tell them that it was an accident, and how bad it was. And I'm not going to tell them she's dead. I'm going to go on doing her work just as long as I can," said Pollyooly in the same tone of cold resolution.

      "Lord, Pollyooly, what lies you'll have to tell! ​An' whatever would your Aunt Hannah have said to that? An' she so strict with you," said Mrs. Brown, raising her plump hands.

      "It isn't for me—it's for the Lump. And it's all there is to do," said Pollyooly with a touch of distress in her resolute voice. "And I shan't tell any lies, Mrs. Brown; I shan't really. If they ask me straight out if Aunt Hannah is dead, I shall tell them the truth."

      "What a row there'll be, when, they do find out," said Mrs. Brown.

      "I can't help that—there's the Lump," said Pollyooly. "Besides, I cook their breakfasts for them and clean their rooms quite well—ever so much better than that dirty old Mrs. Meeken does the floor below."

      "I must say that your aunt did bring you up to do things proper. And I expect you to do them two sets of chambers quite well. What's two sets of chambers, after all? And gentlemen too who never know whether a room's clean, or whether it isn't. I do 'ope as you'll keep the jobs a good long time. I don't see who's to tell the gentlemen that your Aunt Hannah's dead. But things do out so," said ​Mrs. Brown; and she surveyed the two children gloomily.

      Yet they were not of an appearance to cast a gloom on the faces of those who beheld them. Pollyooly was, to the eye, the genuine angel child. Her eyes were a deep blue; her mouth was shaped like Cupid's bow; the hue of wild roses stained faintly her pale cheeks; and her white skin was translucent like mother-of-pearl. Her chin was perhaps a little squarer than the chin of the conventional angel; and her red hair was further at variance with the Christmas-card tradition and ideal. But to the eye of persons of taste she was the genuine angel child.

      Even so was her little brother Roger, whose magnificent placidity had earned for him the name of "The Lump," the genuine cherub, with the round, chubby face, little curls, and Cupid's bow mouth of all the cherubs that the painters have limned, the sculptors carved. But in him also there was no slavish adherence to tradition: his curls, like Pollyooly's silken hair, were red.

      Pollyooly's black frock and the Lump's black tunic threw their clear complexions and delicate ​coloring into vivid relief. They had just returned from the funeral of their great-aunt, Hannah Bride. Five days earlier an enthusiastic motorist, engaged in a spirited effort to beat the speed-limit along the Thames Embankment, had knocked her down, and she had died of her injuries in St. Thomas' hospital.

      The motorist, one of the wealthy aliens who help so hard to make England what she should not be, on observing that he had knocked down a woman, beat the speed-limit to a frazzle in his passionate effort to escape the payment of a doctor's bill, and since it chanced that no one saw, or at any rate remembered, the number of his car, he made good that escape.

      Hannah Bride died none the more peacefully for the thought that she left a grand-niece of twelve and a grand-nephew of two to face the world with about a pound in money and some indifferent furniture. Yet she did not die in utter dismay, for she believed that Heaven would temper the wind to these two lambs shorn of their great-aunt; and she had great confidence in Pollyooly as the protector of the Lump.

      Mrs. Brown had helped Pollyooly draw her aunt's ​burial money from the insurance company, and had arranged the funeral. Now, on their return from it, she was giving the children the lavish tea the sorrowful occasion demanded.

      She and her husband, a rising young policeman, were the children's only friends in London, or indeed in the world. Mrs. Brown was a native of Muttle-Deeping, and had been in service at Deeping Hall when Hannah Bride was its housekeeper, in the days of Lady Constantia Deeping. Three years before Hannah Bride had retired to private life in a cottage at Muttle-Deeping, on her savings and a pension from Lady Constantia, in order that she might devote herself to the rearing of the Lump, whose mother had died in bringing him into the world.

      A year later misfortunes befell her. Lady Constantia Deeping died; and her heir, the Duke of Osterley, had marked his disapproval of the