Dido and Pa Read Online Free Page B

guess Dido was quite right.
    She was so displeased with her father that she said nothing to him about having carried the king's train during the coronation ceremony.

    When Simon returned to the stable yard, followed this time by his aged groom, Matthew Mogg, he found the table cleared, the plates removed, and a drunken carter sitting on
    ***
    the bench where Dido had been, with his head resting on the table beside a mug of mountain dew.
    "Where's the young lass who was sitting here?" asked Simon.
    "Lass? Lass? I never see no lass," replied the man blearily.
    "A skinny young girl in a sheepskin coat? Dressed as a boy?"
    "Sheepskin coat? I hain't seen so much as a moleskin coat," yawned the carter, and, making a pillow from his smock, he laid his head on the table once more and began to snore.
    "Rackon thee's lost her, Mester Simon," gloomily pronounced old Mogg. "And dang me if I fathom why that lad yonder told thee the gray mare was lame, when 'er be fit and flighty as a flea."
    "Curse it! I hope no mischief has come to Dido!" worried Simon looking vainly about the stable yard for her. "Do you go that way, Matthew, and ask everybody you pass, and I'll try this way. Perhaps she just strolled out to look at the dancing."
    But, ask as they might, no word or trace of Dido was to be found. She seemed to have vanished like a bubble, like a drop of dew, as if she had never been there.
    And, in the carriage beside her father, Dido, fairly tired out by her long day's adventures and somewhat stifled by the copious, heavy fumes of Vosper's Nautical Cut, gradually slid down sideways against the lumpy horsehair upholstery of the carriage and drifted off into uneasy slumber.

2
    When Dido next opened her eyes, she was startled to see that the night was nearly over; the squares of black sky outside the carriage windows were now paling into a stormy gray. A high wind buffeted the coach as it rolled along, and rain slapped at the windowpanes.
    Sitting up straight and peering out to her right, Dido could see, far away, a band of lemon-yellow light where the sun was halfheartedly trying to rise under a threatening pile of lumpy black cloud. The landscape faintly shown by the yellow light was also a surprise to Dido—and not a pleasant one: she had expected to see fields or woods, but what met her eyes in place of these was a desolate region of brick railway viaducts, small market gardens crisscrossed by black ditches and half-made roads; there were tall sheds, factory chimneys, and clumps of houses that seemed to have escaped briefly from the city and now be waiting for it to catch up with them.
    In the light of a rainy dawn this no-man's-land, neither city nor country, looked wholly dreary and forlorn.
    "Bless us, Pa," said Dido, "where in the world are you taking us? Where's Penny? I thought you said we hadn't far to go? But at this pace we must 'a' come forty mile and more?"
    "Humph—awrrrk—aaargh—beg pardon? Whazzat you say, my chaffinch?" croaked her father.
    Mr. Twite, in the harsh morning light, presented almost as dismal a spectacle as the glum landscape outside the carriage window. His red wig hung awry, the mustache dangled sideways from his stubbly lip, his cheeks were drawn and gray, his eyes bloodshot and gummy.
    "I said, Pa, that it's a plaguy long way you're taking me to Penny's place. I thought you said it was only a mile or so?"
    He stared at her for a moment or two, working his face about as if getting it into order for the day while he collected his thoughts and put them in position.
    "Ar, humph—yr sister Penny—yes, quite so. That is to say—well. I must acknowledge, my eucalyptus—Deuce take it, how I do
long
for a mug of organ grinder's oil—"
    "You must acknowledge
what,
Pa?"
    Mr. Twite said rapidly. "'N speakingof—yrsister-Penny—beenguiltyof—very slight diggle-gression from fact."
    "You told a lie, Pa."
    "Not a
lie,
" said Mr. Twite. "No, not a lie. Different person, is all. Different deathbed. Arrrh