“They’re spreading out now,” said John, who could see the white specks even without the telescope now that he knew where to look for them. “One white speck’s a long way ahead of the others.”
“They’re going up Brockstones,” said Nancy. “We can’t see the front ones now … There they are again. Going it like anything.”
The white spots far away, slipping into sight and out again among the screes and heather, dropping away into a dip, showing again now startlingly nearer on the moorland slopes, disappeared. Farther away one or two white spots, hounds wavering and at fault, could still be seen. Then these, too, vanished, and it was as if all the hounds had fallen over a precipice or been swallowed up in some hidden chasm in the fells. “We shan’t see them any more,” said Titty. But Nancy knew better.
“We shall see them again in a minute,” she said. “They must come through here, because the man with the drag did. They’ll be working up through the woods on the other side of the fell. We’ll see them again. Somewhere over there. They must come that way.”
“There’s one,” said Susan. “All by himself. By Trout Tarn. No. There’s another.”
Nancy grabbed the telescope. “Yes. There they are. Still together. Quick, quick! They’ll be here in a minute. Let’s go down and see them come over by the waterfall.”
“And put the parrot out of the way,” said Titty. “He’d never understand them.”
They hurried down from the rock and back to the camp, and for the second time that day, the ship’s parrot was banished into Peter Duck’s. They were only just in time.
“Look, look!” said Nancy.
A lean white hound with patches of yellow and black on his shoulders and flanks showed on the skyline at the side of the waterfall, and came leaping down over the rocks.
“Well done! Well done!” shouted Peggy.
“Be quiet! Be quiet!” said Nancy. “Don’t talk to him.”
The hound stopped by the bathing-pool, looked about him, and lapped the cool water.
“He ought not to have done that,” said Nancy.
He had hardly moved forward again before half a dozen more hounds came pouring down the rocks like the white water when the beck is in spate after rain. The leading hound was not more than a dozen yards ahead of them. “He must have lost forty or fifty yards by taking that drink,” said Peggy.
All these hounds took no notice whatever of the camp, but ran straight through it, down Swallowdale, and over the waterfall at the low end. It was only the later comers who stopped to look about them and hardly seemed to be taking the race seriously.
“You’re no good,” said Nancy to them. “Go on.”
“The others are miles ahead,” said Titty. “You’ll never catch them if you don’t hurry.”
These hounds, too, went on after the others and disappeared.
And then, suddenly, from far away below the moor, from the foot of the lake, came a new noise, a noise of yells and rattles and shrill whistles and screams and howls.
“It’s like parrots and monkeys all yelling together,” said Titty.
“Worse,” said Roger.
“That’s the owners of the hounds,” said Nancy. “They must have seen the first one in the distance. Listen! Oh, I wish we could see the finish.”
The noise rose higher and higher. There was a burst of cheering and then the shouts died away into silence.
“It’s over. Now all the owners are patting their hounds and giving them lumps of sugar and telling them how good they are.”
*
Nancy’s cheerful voice changed suddenly. “The great-aunt won’t be saying how good we are if we’re a minute late for supper. Come on, Peggy. What’s the time, John?”
John looked at his watch, but did not put the time into bells. It was far too serious for that.
“All three meals,” said Peggy.
“We’ve fairly done it this time,” said Nancy. “Come on. We’ll go by the road. It’s quicker, really. And someone may give us a lift. But we’re done, anyhow.”
The Swallows looked at each other. If Captain Nancy Blackett talked of using the road and even hoped for a lift from a native, things must be very bad indeed.
“It’ll be all right when you tell her about the hound-trail,” said John. “She’d understand you had to wait for that.”
“It’s no good talking to the great-aunt about hound-trails,” said Nancy. “Even the shipwreck made no difference to her.”
“And we really did mean to be back for dinner,” said Peggy.
“But you can tell her so,” said Titty.
“She’d only look at mother,” said Nancy.
“We’ll go with them as far as the road,” said Susan, jumping up.
“Yes,” said John. “Come along, Roger.”
“Never mind,” called Peggy over her shoulder. “Don’t bother.”
“We want some milk at the farm,” said Susan.
“And I want to give a rub to the mast,” said John.
Really, they wanted to be with their allies as long as they could. They would have liked to go with them all the way to Beckfoot to face the great-aunt herself.
“Aren’t you coming, Titty?” said John.
“Someone’s got to look after the fire unless we put it out,” said Susan, picking up the milk-can.
“I’ll stop,” said Titty. “I want to. Good night, Captain Nancy. Good night, Peggy.”
Nancy and Peggy were already hurrying down Swallowdale to go through the woods to the road that would take them along the shore of the lake back to Beckfoot and to all kinds of trouble. They went off at such a pace that the others had hard work to keep up with them.
As soon as they were all out of Swallowdale, Titty went straight to Peter Duck’s cave. She found it in darkness. The candle was out. She got a box of matches from her tent and went into the cave again. Yes, she had been quite right. The lantern had got very hot and had melted the candle too fast, and all round it on the ledge of rock that made a shelf was a mass of thick white candle-grease.
“It isn’t wax,” she said to herself, “but it’s good enough for the great-aunt. Anyway, it’ll have to do.”
CHAPTER XVIII
CANDLE-GREASE
IT was not that Able-seaman Titty knew very much of the mother of the Amazons. She had seen her only twice, once last year after the great storm on Wild Cat Island, when she had been full of chatter and jollity, and once this year sitting sadly in the carriage side by side with the great-aunt, while Nancy and Peggy sat on the other seat facing them, and looking not at all like pirates. It was not really of Mrs Blackett she was thinking. She was thinking of her own mother. When Nancy told of how the great-aunt had made Mrs Blackett cry, Titty thought of what she would feel if someone were to do that to mother, and in a moment she was feeling as if the great-aunt had made mother cry, so that there was nothing Titty would not have been ready to do to the great-aunt if only it would stop her. She did not know if the wax image would work, but it was worth trying, even with candle-grease, because there was nothing else that she could do.
She picked up the little lantern from the shelf of rock and the candle-grease that had oozed out and hardened all round it came away like a thick whitish plate stuck to the bottom of the lantern. Her match went out. But a little light came through the doorway, and after waiting a minute till her eyes had grown accustomed to the dark, she stooped low, and carefully shielding the lantern for fear of knocking it on something, she came out with the slab of candle-grease unbroken.
Outside in Swallowdale, sitting by the fire with the sticks crackling cheerfully, the clean blue smoke climbing up into the evening sky, and the parrot out of his cage and preening his breast feathers, she very nearly gave the thing up. Looking at the smooth, hard, oily slab of candle-grease which she had now broken off the lantern, she began to doubt if she could do it. What was the great-aunt like? She remembered the stiff, upright figure in the carriage, but could not see her face, try as she woul
d. Then she remembered the native images she had seen in a museum. After all, they weren’t very much like anything.
“It’s the name that matters,” she said to herself, “and the magic.”
The name would be easy. She would simply call the thing “great-aunt.” The magic would be more difficult. Just making a candle-grease doll and calling it “great-aunt” would hardly be enough. There would have to be a spell. Why, of course she knew the way to do it. She remembered the African and Jamaican stories told by her mother in the evenings, and how when the king’s wife died in the heat of the weather and the king he was real vexed, he sent for the Obeah woman who was the witch and had wrinkles deep as ditches on her brown face and told her to cast a spell so that nobody should use his queen’s name again, because his queen she was so beautiful. “And de Obeah woman, dat was de witch, she walk roun’ de room an’ roun’ de room an’ roun’ de room, castin’ one spell dat anybody who use dat name again dey dwop down dead dat minute …”
“Roun’ de room an’ roun’ de room an’ roun’ de room,” said Titty to herself, counting with a finger as she said it. “Three times round. That’s easy enough. And the cave ought to be a good enough room to do it in.”
She had trouble over the making of the image, even though she did not try to make a very good one. Candle-grease is not wax and the able-seaman soon found that she could do nothing with it unless it was warm and almost liquid. She had nothing to warm it in except the mate’s cooking pans. She did not much like using them, but decided that to save anybody’s mother from a great-aunt of this kind it would be right to use anything, and anyhow it would soon be over and she would be able to get the frying-pan (which seemed to be the best shape for melting candle-grease) clean and shiny again before Susan came back from Swainson’s farm.
She remembered that before frying anything the mate always put a little butter in the pan, so that nothing should stick to it. It was a good thing she remembered that, she thought, and by the time she had put the butter in the frying-pan and was warming it over the fire she felt she had been doing this kind of cooking all her life. As soon as the butter was properly melted and sizzling on the bottom of the pan she broke up the slab of candle-grease and dropped the bits in and tilted the pan first one way and then the other until the bits all melted and ran together again. There seemed to be very little candle-grease to make an image of. She got the other three lanterns out of the tents. There was only a stub of a candle-end in each, and there were plenty of new candles in one of the tin boxes. So she put the three candle-ends into the frying-pan with the stuff that was there already, added a little more butter and warmed it up again until, as she tilted the pan, the candle-grease poured round like thick sauce. Then, of course, the trouble was that it was too hot. She had to wait for it to cool. But the moment it was cool enough, she began scraping it up with a spoon, and presently had a good big lump of candle-grease, not quite too hot to touch, and was kneading it between her hands and keeping it moving from one hand to the other as if it were a hot potato.
She turned it quickly into a great-aunt. There was a small round blob for a head (“It’s no good trying to do snakey hair”) stuck on a long straight body, rolled between her hands, plumped down on a stone and made to stand upright, and then pinched in a little at the middle. The arms, too, were made separately and then stuck on. She scraped a little more candle-grease from round the edge of the frying-pan and used it to make two feet. They were not a success, so she squashed them together and made them into a hat instead, pressing it down on the blob that was meant for a head. There was no time to do much modelling. The candle-grease hardened too quickly as it cooled. Anyhow it was horrid to touch, but that, perhaps, was partly the fault of the butter. She gave the thing eyes, marking them in with a charred and blackened stick from the edge of the fire, and she scratched a slit of a mouth somewhere below the place where she would have liked to make a nose if the candle-grease head had still been soft enough.
The frying-pan smelt as nasty as it looked. There was no time to lose if it was to be cleaned and polished before the others came back. So Titty borrowed Susan’s torch out of her tent and hurried into the cave to get on with the spell. She did not think of it as Peter Duck’s. Nor did she think of asking Peter Duck to help. Peter Duck had nothing to do with magic. It was not the sort of thing in which he could be of any use.
She set the torch on the ground in the middle of the cave, pointing upwards so that it lit the roof, and then, holding the candle-grease doll before her, she walked three times round the cave, talking to the image as she walked.
“Be the great-aunt! Be the great-aunt! Be the great-aunt!”
Then, catching her breath, she ran hurriedly out into the sunlight. It was a comfort, after that, to see that the parrot had gone back into his cage and was eating a lump of sugar as if nothing special was going on.
The great-aunt, smelling horribly, now felt somehow different to her fingers. Had she really found the right spell? She almost wished the others would come back before anything else happened. Then she remembered what Nancy had said about Mrs Blackett crying and she bit her teeth tightly together. She was not going to stop now.
But the question was, what, exactly, ought she to do? It would be no good just pushing pins into the great-aunt’s legs and arms, or into her body, because if something went wrong with a leg or an arm, or if she were seriously ill, the great-aunt would be sure to stay at Beckfoot and be horrible to everybody until she felt better. Besides, perhaps it was true that only a real silver pin would be any good. What she wanted was just to make the great-aunt thoroughly uncomfortable, so that she would want to go away. Titty looked doubtfully at the image. If she rolled the image in the dust would it mean that the real great-aunt, away at Beckfoot, would suddenly throw herself on the ground and begin rolling about? That would be most worrying for Mrs Blackett.
Then she remembered reading in the book how the native wizards when they make the wax image of an enemy melt it slowly over a fire, and believe that as the image melts away so does their enemy lose strength until at last, when the whole image is melted, he dies.
Of course, the thing would be to melt the image just a very little, not enough to make the great-aunt ill, but just enough to make her feel not quite herself, and that she would be better in a more bracing air. Then she would pack her boxes and go away and everybody would be perfectly happy.
CANDLE-GREASE AUNT
She held the candle-grease doll out over the fire. Nothing happened except that the hand in which she was holding it grew very hot long before the doll seemed to feel the heat at all. She changed hands until that hand too was very hot. Then she changed hands again and this time, perhaps because she took hold of a part of the image that had been nearest to the heat, perhaps the wood shifted and a little flame licked up and burnt her fingers, perhaps just because the candle-grease was melting and slippery (how it was she never could explain to herself) the thing was gone, her fingers closed on nothing, there was a dreadful spluttering in the fire, yellow smoky flames shot up and a moment later, though Titty scattered the sticks in all directions trying to save her, no one could have told that a great-aunt had ever been there at all.
Titty’s first thought was that there would never be time to make another. But the next moment she had thought of something else, and, no longer an able-seaman, no longer even a negro witch, she burst into horrified tears.
“I didn’t mean to kill her,” she wailed. “I really didn’t.”
She saw the great-aunt, at Beckfoot, stricken suddenly, gasping for breath, dead. She saw Nancy and Peggy running along the lake road not knowing that when they came home they would find the blinds down in the windows of the house. Would they guess at once what she had done? What would they think? Even Nancy would think it was too much. It was all very well for the scuppers of a pirate ship to run with blood. This was different. The great-aunt dead, and dead in such a manner, was worse than the great-aunt alive even if she made Mrs
Blackett miserable and was spoiling the Amazons’ holidays. And she had done it. She felt as if she had tried to ring the bell quietly at the door of a big house and the bell was going on pealing and pealing as if it would never stop.
“I wish I’d never thought of it. But I didn’t mean to kill her. I didn’t. All I wanted was for her to want to go to the seaside.”
“Pretty Polly. Pretty Polly,” said the ship’s parrot, who had come to the end of his bit of sugar and was wondering if he had any chance of getting another.
Titty looked at him through her tears, and wondered suddenly if she had truly done anything at all. Had she just planned to make a great-aunt and to cast a spell …? She had often planned things until they seemed quite as real. But when she wiped her face with her hands she felt the smudge of sooty candle-grease. She saw the frying-pan waiting to be cleaned … the empty lanterns …. No. There was no doubt about it. The thing had really happened.
Just then the others came climbing up into Swallowdale.
“A farmer’s cart gave them a lift,” shouted the ship’s boy.
“They’re going to be awfully late just the same,” said John grimly. “I wish they hadn’t waited for the hound-trail. Hullo, Titty, whatever’s the matter?”
“What have you been doing to the fire?” said Susan. “And the frying-pan? And the lanterns? And what have you got on your face?”
“Roger, go and get some more wood out of Peter Duck’s,” said Captain John. “There’s some just inside the door.”
The moment the boy had gone into the cave, Titty poured out the dreadful truth.
“I’ve done it,” she said, “but I didn’t mean to kill her. She slipped in my fingers and got melted and burnt up.”
“Who did?” asked John.
“The great-aunt,” said Titty. “I made her out of candle-grease and I meant to melt her just a very little, but she slipped.”