Part 5

Tom declared it had in some mysterious way to do with the little creature's welfare, and that it was a kind of conscience--a Small People's conscience, perhaps. But Joan said she believed it was something more than that, if there was any meaning in the words of the song the dinky old woman in the bal-bonnet had sung.

But, whoever was right, there was no doubt that the Pail showed its approval or disapproval of whatever Ninnie-Dinnie did! If the little maid was especially helpful and kind, the Pail became a lovely shade of silver and gray, and its letters stood out in glittering distinctness; but if she was lazy, or spoke rudely to her foster-parents, it grew darker than hornblende, and its characters were hardly visible.

This strange property of the Pail made Joan feel quite creepy when she first discovered its peculiarity, which she happened to do one day when Ninnie-Dinnie was very fractious and would do nothing she was bidden. She got used to it in time, and was even glad it showed its pleasure, or otherwise, in the manner it did.

She often told her husband that, when the little maid was particularly kind to her when he was at the bal, the Pail would laugh all over its sides.

Ninnie-Dinnie was now in her eighth year, counting the year she was brought to the cottage, and a dear, useful little maid she was; and no one to beat her anywhere for work, Tom declared, particularly when her size was considered.

The child was very small, so small that she could still sleep in the basket cradle she came in--and did too, for the simple reason that she was wakeful all night if she slept anywhere else.

Both Tom and Joan were sometimes troubled at her size. For she never seemed to grow bigger or fatter, whatever they gave her to eat, and they feared she would always be a little Go-by-the-ground. [25] Joan, however, consoled herself that perhaps she was an off relation of the dear Little People.

Although Ninnie-Dinnie was exceedingly tiny, she was very sharp, and asked more questions in a day than they could answer in a year. She wanted to know the why and wherefore of everything--what the moor-flowers were made of, and who lived inside the great grey carns, and what made Carn Kenidzhek hoot--was it the giant who lived inside it?--and much besides that neither Tom nor Joan could answer, because they did not know themselves.

Tom said she was wise beyond her years, and all owing to her being moped in the cottage so much, and that she ought to be out of doors more. Joan quite agreed with him, and suggested that he should take her with him sometimes over the moor, only stipulating that she was not to go as far as the mine-works.

Tom considered this a splendid idea; and so, every now and then, when Ninnie-Dinnie was willing, she accompanied him part of the way, and as there was only one road leading back to the cottage, she easily found her way home alone.

One day, when the child had reached the place where the miner generally sent her back, she begged to go with him all the way to the bal; and as he was rather weak where his womenfolk were concerned, he willingly consented.

When they reached Ding Dong, with its hundreds of busy workers, the little maid grew very frightened, and fled back across the moor, in the direction of home, as fast as her legs could take her.

The miner, as he watched her running away, rather reproached himself for bringing her so far; and he wondered, as he put the tin into the furnace to be smelted, whether she got home all right.

'So you did take our Ninnie-Dinnie to the bal?' was his wife's greeting when he got home that evening. 'I've been terribly wisht [26] without her all day.'

'You don't mean to say the little dear haven't come back?' cried Tom. 'That is terrible news, sure 'nough! She didn't stop a minute at the bal, and tore off home like a skainer.' [27]

'I've never clapt eyes on her since she went out with 'ee this morning!' cried Joan, greatly distressed. 'I do hope nothing has happened to her. Perhaps she has been an' gone an' tumbled down into one of the Old Men's workings [28] out there on the moor.'

Tom went as white as a sheet at the bare thought of the possibility, and he started off at once to look for the child, leaving his poor wife more troubled than she had ever been since Ninnie-Dinnie came.

He was gone a little over an hour, when, to Joan's thankfulness, he returned with the child.

He found her, he said, not far from the beaten track, sitting at the foot of a carn waiting for him to come for her.

She told him she had lost her way, and that as she was sitting on the griglans, [29] an ugly little man with long ears like a Skavarnak [30] came up to her, and because she was afraid of him and would not go into his little house under the carn, he was very angry. She did not know what would have happened to her if a little old woman in a sunbonnet had not come along just then, and took her to the place where Tom found her. She told her to sit where she was till Daddie Trebisken came to fetch her, which he would be sure to do after sunset. In the mean-time she was to say her own name backwards seven times if the Long-Eared came near her again. She also told her that Ninnie-Dinnie, if she cared to believe it, was her real name spelt backwards with an 'n' left out; and she said she must never go out on the lonely moors without taking the Pail, made out of old Cornish tin, with her.

It was ever so long before Joan got over her fright about Ninnie-Dinnie, and for weeks she would not hear of her going out on the moors. But, as time deadens all things, she got over her nervousness, and when April came, and the broom and the gorse were in flower, making the great brown moor yellow-gold, and scenting all the air with peach-like fragrance, she was willing that the little maid should go with her husband once more. And Tom willingly took her.

As they were going out of the door, something fell on the Pail standing on the dresser, and the child, remembering the injunction of the little old woman about the Pail, turned back to get it.

'What shall I bring 'ee home, Mammie Trebisken?' she asked, looking at her foster-mother; and Joan, hearing the lark singing faintly in the distance, replied laughingly:

'You shall bring me home a pailful of lark's music, my dear.'

'You do knaw the little maid can't bring 'ee that,' cried Tom impatiently. 'I should think she was all the music you wanted now.'

'So she is, bless her!' said his wife. 'I was only joking.'

'Nevertheless, I will bring you home this Pail full of lark's music,' said Ninnie-Dinnie, with great seriousness; and putting her tiny hand into Tom's big one, they started off, and Joan watched them out of sight.

When the miner and the child got about half-way to the mine, scores of larks were up in the blue air singing, and their little dark bodies waving to and fro in the rapture of their song, till it seemed to the miner as if their melody was trickling down all over him, and Ninnie-Dinnie declared it was.

As they stood listening, one of the larks began to descend, singing as it came.

'Now is the time if you want to catch the lark's music for Mammie Trebisken,' laughed Tom, watching the bird's descent. 'There it is, just over thy soft little head. Up with thy Pail, my dear!'

And Ninnie-Dinnie, with her face as grave as the great boulders lying amongst the golden-blossomed furze and the feathery fronds of the Osmunda, lifted the Pail above her head, and as she did so the strange letters under its rim stood out and glowed like white fire.

'Little lark, little lark, give me thy music!' she chanted in a voice as clear and sweet as linnets' fluting. 'Little lark, little lark, give me thy song!' and the small bird twirled down towards her singing wilder and sweeter as it came, until it hovered over the uplifted Pail.

'The dear little lark has given me its music and its song to make Mammie Trebisken's heart glad,' said the child, as the lark dropped on the thyme-scented turf at her feet.

'Pretending, are 'ee, an?' laughed Tom.

'No!' cried Ninnie-Dinnie. 'Listen!'

And the miner, putting his ear close to the Pail, heard, to his unspeakable amazement, a lark singing quite distinctly, yet rather faintly, as it were singing far away.

'Jimmerychry! [31] Can it be believed?' he exclaimed. ''Tis magic, an' I don't half like it. An' I don't think the dear little bird do nuther,' looking down at the lark, who was trailing its wings on the ground in that distressful way birds have when their wee nestlings are in danger. 'Give it back its own, that's a dear little maid.'

'I can't,' said Ninnie-Dinnie. 'Mammie Trebisken can only do that; and I don't think she will want to, for the song in the Pail will make all her heart sing.'

She covered the Pail with her pinafore as she spoke, and the little lark disappeared into a brake of flaming gorse.

There was no time to bandy words, Tom told himself, as he was late for his work, and he left the child to go back to their cottage without any more protesting. But he did not feel very comfortable as he strode on his way to the mine.

It was late in the morning when Ninnie-Dinnie got home, and Joan was beginning to be troubled at her long absence when she came in.

'Have 'ee brought the lark's music along with 'ee?' she asked, as the child set the Pail on the red-painted dresser.

'Yes,' said Ninnie-Dinnie; 'and at sundown you will hear it.'

Joan, thinking it was all make-believe, laughed, and said she would keep her ears open to listen.

When the shadows of the great grey carns stretched over the heather and the sun sunk over the moor, the Pail began to move slightly on the dresser, and a sound came out like grass moved gently by the wind, which at once drew Joan's attention to it. Then, to her amazement, it shook all over, and there poured forth from it such a gush of melody that almost took her breath away. It was like lark's music, she said, with a strain of sweeter, wilder music added to it, and which, somehow, reminded her of the flute-like voice of the little old woman in the bal-bonnet, who sang that rude rhyme when she brought them their dear little Ninnie-Dinnie. She sat in her elbow-chair entranced, and the queer child sat at her feet, apparently entranced too!

The melody, which at first came from the depths of the Pail, or the turfy ground, it was hard to say which, rose higher and higher, until it sounded like a bird singing its heart out in the soft azure of an evening sky.

Joan never knew how long she listened to that fetterless song; she only knew she awoke to the fact that the sky's little songster, the Pail, or whatever it was, had stopped singing, that daylight was leaving the moor, and that a small dark shadow was slowly stealing across her window.

'Why, it is a little bird, surely,' she said, speaking to the tiny maid at her feet. 'The light of our fire have attracted it from its sleeping-place--poor little thing!'

'P'r'aps it is the little lark come for its music and its song,' suggested Ninnie-Dinnie, fixing her gaze on the bird, which was now fluttering against the panes and uttering a tiny note of distress.

'I never thought of that,' said Joan. 'I hope it haven't. I couldn't give it back its song and its music for the world!'

As she was speaking, the Pail on the dresser was again agitated, and out of it rushed another entrancing melody, until all the cottage was full of music, and Joan said it was raining down upon her head from the oaken beams. But through the melody could be distinctly heard a little voice, which was the lark's voice:

'Give me back my music! Give me back my song!'

'My Aunt Betsy!' cried Joan. 'Whoever heard of a bird talking before?'

'Are you going to give the little lark what it wants?' asked Ninnie-Dinnie, watching the bird, which was still fluttering against the bottle-green pane.

'No!' said Joan decidedly. 'I don't think I ought. It do make my heart young an' happy again.'

'I was hoping you would like to give back the lark its music and its song,' said Ninnie-Dinnie.

'Whatever for, cheeld-vean?' [32] Joan asked.

'Because,' answered the child, 'I have been wondering what the lark's little mate will do if he hasn't his song to sing to her now she is sitting on her pretty eggs out on the grass.'

'Why, make another song, of course, you foolish little knaw-nothing!' cried Joan, laying her pain-twisted fingers on the child's elfin locks.

'It has no music to make a song with; it gave it all to me to take home to my dear Mammie Trebisken,' said the little maid.

Once more the lark's song came out of the Pail, and Joan said it was sweeter and wilder and freer than even the second time. As she listened intently she was carried to her courting days, when she and Tom took their Sunday walks through the growing corn and flaming poppies to hear the larks sing. Then as the songster came earthward again and its music died away into the silence of the years, or into the Pail, she was too bewildered to say which, there appeared on the threshold of the door the little lark, which, as she looked at it, trailed its wings and piped: 'Give me back my music! Give me back my song!' and its sad cry went right down into her pitiful heart.

'I was a selfish body to want to keep what didn't belong to me,' she cried, and she told Ninnie-Dinnie to give it back what it wanted.

'I can't give back: you only can do that,' said the little maid. 'I can only bring you what you ask.'

The wee bird in the doorway again made itself heard: 'Give me back my music! Give me back my song!' and so distressful was its pleading that she clutched the child's shoulder and went at once to the dresser, and, almost before she knew it, she was standing at the door with the Pail in her hand.

'Take your music and your song, you poor little dear,' she said in her tenderest voice to the bird; 'and go along home to your mate, and make her as happy as you have made my heart this day.'

She turned the Pail over on its side as she spoke, and the lark flew into it; and in a minute or less it was out again and away into the semi-darkness, singing its own ecstatic song as it went!

Tom came up the road as it flew off; and as she waited there by the door for him to help her back to her chair, the little old woman's rhyme came back to her, the last line of which floated through her brain:

'To give her a treasure From out of the blue. When she shall know too 'Tis better to give than to keep my pednpaley!'

A year and four months went by, and Joan was quite helpless again--as helpless as when the babe was brought to her--and but for that babe, now to childhood grown, she did not know what she would have done. Her man was not so young as he was, and had a great deal more to do at the mine, and therefore less time to devote to woman's work. But thanks to Ninnie-Dinnie's careful training, his services in this respect were not required. The little maid now did all the work of the small cottage, and the cooking too--even to making the hoggans for Tom's dinner. Besides which, she waited on her dear Mammie Trebisken hand and foot, and made the poor sufferer's life as happy as possible under the circumstances. Tom wondered how she did it all, 'and such a dinky little soul too--not much bigger than a little pednpaley itself,' he said.

Ninnie-Dinnie did not go out on the moor all this time, and nothing Joan could say would make her. But when July came, and the blackberry brambles were in flower, and the great moors began to look beautifully purple with the bloom of the heather, she cast wistful glances out of the window, and one bright morning she asked Tom to take her with him a little way.

Her eye caught the darkening look of the Pail as she was putting on her sunbonnet, and she thought the look meant she must take it with her, and she did.

'What shall I bring you home?' she asked, looking over her shoulder at Joan as she and Tom were going out of the door; and the invalid, catching sight of a sunbeamed pool lying high on the heath, said, with a laugh:

'You shall bring me home a pailful of sunbeams from the pool I can see from my chair.'

'A pack of nonsense!' cried Tom. 'As well ask for the moon. I should have thought that our Ninnie-Dinnie,' resting his huge hand on the child's head, 'was all the sunbeam you wanted now.'

'So she is, Tom, when you ent here,' cried the woman, smiling tenderly at both her dears.

'All the same,' said Ninnie-Dinnie, 'I will bring you home a pailful of sunbeams if I can.'

When she and Tom reached the pool, they stopped and looked in, or tried to, for they could not see its bottom for sunbeams, which rippled all over its surface in tiny waves of light.

'Now is your chance to get that pailful of sunbeams thy foolish old Mammie Trebisken axed 'ee to get,' said the miner.

'It is,' said Ninnie-Dinnie in her grave old woman's manner; and, leaning over the pool, she held the Pail over the side and cried: 'Little brown pool, give me thy sunbeams! Little brown pool, give me thy light!' and, to Tom's amazement (he ought not to have been astonished at anything by this time), he saw the light leave the pool and flow into the Pail!

When the moor-pool had given all its sunbeams, and the water was a darker brown than a sparrow's back, Ninnie-Dinnie stood up and looked into her Pail, and Tom looked too, and saw nothing.

'It is full of emptiness,' said he, laughing.

'It is full of the dear little Pool's sunbeams to make Mammie Trebisken's eyes glad,' insisted the child; and covering the Pail very carefully with her pinafore, she went down towards the cottage, and Tom watched her until she was hidden behind a great boulder of granite, and then he too went on his way.

Ninnie-Dinnie did not get home till quite late in the afternoon, and when Joan asked her where she had been so long, she said a little Skavarnak would not let her come before, and that he stood in the path barring the way, till a dinky little woman in a bluish cloak came over the moor, and then he sped away through a hole in a carn.

'What a funny thing!' said Joan; 'hares generally keep out of folks' way. He must be different from other little hares.'

'I am sure he must be,' she said, setting the Pail on the dresser.

'Have 'ee brought the sunbeams?' asked Joan, turning her gaze to the bucket.

'Yes; and by-and-by, when the sun begins to set, you will be able to see them.'

Joan, thinking her Ninnie-Dinnie was pretending--for she saw when the child came into the kitchen that the Pail contained nothing--only laughed.

When the great round sun dropped down to his setting, the crippled woman, happening to turn her face to the dresser, saw a tongue of white flame rise out of the Pail, and on its tip burnt a ruby star!

It startled her almost out of her senses at first; but as it did not grow bigger, but only increased in beauty, she gazed at it with wondering delight.

As the evening darkened over the moor, and the Hooting Carn was dim in the distance, the light in the Pail grew exceedingly beautiful, and took all manner of shapes and colours, and made the room where Joan sat as lovely as the dear Small People's Country, Ninnie-Dinnie said--how she knew, it did not occur to her foster-mother to inquire.

''Tis magic!' cried the woman, looking round the room, 'an' I don't understand it one bit.'

'P'r'aps,' said the child softly, 'it is the dear Little People's way of showing how grateful they feel for your kindness to your little Ninnie-Dinnie.'

'I haven't been kinder than I ought,' began Joan; 'and--'tis raining, surely,' she broke off, as a trickle of water fell on her ear. ''Tis queer, too! There's no sign of wet weather in the sky.'

The child went to the window and looked out.

'There is a tiny stream of water coming down the road,' she said. 'I believe 'tis the little brown Pool coming for its sunbeams.'

'Don't be silly!' cried Joan.

'It is,' said the little maid, looking out again, 'and it has made itself into a dark ring outside our door.'

As she was speaking, a rippling voice broke out:

'Give me back my light! give me back my sunbeams!'

'I won't,' said Joan irritably. 'Why should I, when it is making my little place look handsome? I haven't seen anything like it in all my born days!'

'I was hoping you would give back the poor little brown Pool its shine,' said Ninnie-Dinnie, with a pleading look in her eyes. 'The little flowers that live in the Pool will die without light, and the dear little Sundews will have no silver beads to tip their red spikes.'

'Whatever did 'ee bring me home a pailful of sunbeams for, if you want me to give it away again?' asked the woman still more irritably.

'You asked me to bring you the brown Pool's sunbeams,' said the child gently. 'I did but do what you asked.'

The light in the Pail was redder and brighter than the red planet Mars in his rising or the sun in his setting, and all in the room was a lovely crimson glow, and Joan, as she gazed at the Pail again, heard the rippling voice outside her door: 'Give me my light! give me my sunbeams!' and it continued rippling its demand until the woman's kind heart was troubled.

'Poor little Pool!' she said to herself at last. 'I expect it is feeling as wisht without its light as I was before my Ninnie-Dinnie came in the costan. 'Tis wrong to want to keep what will brighten something else. I don't s'pose even a little moor-pool can be happy and bear flowers on its bosom without sunbeams and light,' and she told the child to give back the Pool its own.

'I can't,' said Ninnie-Dinnie. 'Only you can do that. Lean on me,' offering her tiny arm, 'and I'll help you to get the Pail to give the dear little Pool its sunbeams.'

Joan was greatly amused that a dinky little maid like her, scarcely bigger than a large doll, could support a great helpless body like herself to walk across the floor; and she laughed, and, as she laughed, the Pool cried again in such a beseeching voice that she unwittingly put her hand on the child's shoulder, and immediately found herself at the door, with the Pail in her hand, before she knew!

'I give 'ee back your brightness, dear little Pool,' she said, 'and much obliged I am to 'ee for letting me have it here in my little room. Now go along home to where you belong, amongst the griglans.' [33] And the little Pool took its shine and left, twisting and twirling its way back to its place, shining and rippling as it went.

'The pool will shine all the more brightly to-morrow for having given you its sunbeams,' said the child, as she helped Joan back to her chair.

A few days after Ninnie-Dinnie had brought the pailful of sunbeams, she again asked to go with Tom over the moors, and Tom willingly took her.

'What impossible thing is Mammie Trebisken going to ask you to bring back to-day?' said the miner in joke as the child went to the dresser for the Pail.

'The only thing I should like to have brought home to me to-day is that nasty little Skavarnak which frightened my Ninnie-Dinnie,' said Joan. 'If she do catch un an' bring un home in the Pail, I won't be willing to let him get out of it again in a hurry!'

'Do you really want the Little Long-Eared?' asked the child, with a curious look in her eyes.

'Of course I do. I s'pose he won't be so easy to get into the Pail as the lark's music or the pool's sunbeams.'

'Not nearly so easy,' responded Ninnie-Dinnie. 'And even if I can get him into the Pail, you won't like to keep him, and you must until----'

She did not finish what she was going to say, as Tom was in a hurry to be off, and they left the invalid greatly wondering whatever the little maid could mean.

The sun was rising when Tom and his little foster-child reached a part of the great moor where a road turned towards Ding Dong, and where they saw a hare sitting on his haunches cleaning his whiskers.