Robbery Under Arms Rolf Boldrewood (best way to read an ebook .TXT) đ
- Author: Rolf Boldrewood
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âWelcome to the Hollow, Miss Marston,â he said. âI canât say how charmed I am in one sense, though I regret the necessity which brought you here.â
âIâm glad to come, and only for poor fatherâs being so bad I could delight in the life here.â
âHow do you find your father?â
âHe is asleep now, and perhaps the rest will do him good.â
âHe may awake free from fever,â says Starlight. âI took the risk of giving him an opiate before you came, and I think the result has been favourable.â
âOh! I hope he will be better when he wakes,â says Aileen, âand that I shall not have to watch through another dreadful night of raving. I can hardly bear it.â
âYou must make your brothers take their share; itâs not fair to you.â
âThank you; but I feel as if I couldnât leave him to anybody but myself. He seems so weak now; a little neglect might kill him.â
âPardon me, Miss Marston; you overrate the danger. Depend upon it, your respected parent will be quite a different man in a week, though it may be a month or more before he is fully recovered. You donât know what a constitution he has.â
âYou have given me fresh hope,â she said. âI feel quite cheered upâ âthat is,â (and she sighed) âif I could be cheerful again about anything.â
Here she walked into the cave and sat down by father to watch till he awoke, and we all went out about our daily work, whatever it wasâ ânothing very wonderful, I daresay, but it kept us from thinking.
Starlight was right. As luck would have it, father woke up a deal better than when he laid down. The fever had gone away, his head was right again, and he began to ask for something to eatâ âleastways to drink, first. But Aileen wouldnât give him any of that, and very little to eat. Starlight had told her what to do in case he wanted what wasnât good for him, and as she was pretty middling obstinate, like himself, she took her own ways.
After this he began to get right; it wasnât easy to kill old dad. He seemed to be put together with wire and whipcord; not made of flesh and blood like other men. I donât wonder old Englandâs done so much and gone so far with her soldiers and sailors if they was bred like him. Itâs my notion if they was caught young, kept well under command, and led by men they respected, a regiment or a man-of-warâs crew like him would knock smoke out of any other thousand men the world could put up. Moreâs the pity there ainât some better way of keeping âem straight than there is.
He was weak for a bitâ âvery weak; heâd lost a deal of blood; and, try how he would, he couldnât stand up long at a time, and had to give in and lie down in spite of himself. It fretted him a deal, of course; heâd never been on his back before, and he couldnât put up with it. Then his temper began to show again, and Aileen had a deal to bear and put up with.
Weâd got a few books, and there was the papers, of course, so she used to read to him by the hour together. He was very fond of hearing about things, and, like a good many men that canât read and write, he was clever enough in his own way. When sheâd done all the newspapersâ âthey were old ones (we took care not to get any fresh ones, for fear sheâd see about Hagan and the others)â âshe used to read about battles and sea-fights to him; he cared about them more than anything, and one night, after her reading to him about the battle of Trafalgar, he turned round to her and says, âI ought to have been in that packet, Ailie, my girl. I was near going for a sailor once, on board a man-oâ-war, too. I tried twice to get away to sea, that was before Iâd snared my first hare, and something stopped me both times. Once I was fetched back and flogged, and pretty nigh starved. I never did no good afterwards. But itâs came acrost me many and many a time that Iâd been a different sort oâ chap if Iâd had my will then. I was allays fond oâ work, and there couldnât be too much fightinâ for me; so a man-oâ-war in those days would have been just the thing to straighten me. That was the best chance I ever had. Well, I donât say as I havenât had othersâ âplenty in this country, and good ones too; but it was too lateâ âIâd got set. When a manâs young, thatâs the time he can be turned right way or wrong. Itâs none so easy afterwards.â
He went to sleep then, and Aileen said that was the only time he ever spoke to her in that way. We never heard him talk like that, nor nobody else, I expect.
If we could have got some things out of our heads, that was the pleasantest time ever we spent in the Hollow. After father could be left by himself for a few hours we got out the horses, and used to take Aileen out for long rides all over the place, from one end to the other. It did her good, and we went to every hole and corner in it. She was never tired of looking at the great rock towers, as we used to call âem, where the sandstone walls hung over, just like the pictures of castles, till, Starlight said, in the evenings you could fancy you saw flags waving and sentinels walking up and down on them.
One afternoon we
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