CHAPTER I

THE BECKONING HILLS

Just across the water they lay, such a little way beyond the opposite bank of the broad, golden river. If you sat on the old wall at the foot of the garden you could see the whole long range of them, so tantalizingly near, so altogether unattainable. True, you always had the river; you had merely to run down the hill, scramble across a meadow and through a gap in the hedge, and it was there, with all its many moods, awaiting you. True, also, a very little walk would bring you to the hilly forest country, but then both river and forest were part of the everyday life and how can you find romance or adventure except you go out to seek it in the Unknown?

For it was the Unknown that attracted the three children, more especially the two elder ones. Not only the hills themselves in their shadowy, mystic beauty, but what lay beyond them--the great open, unexplored world where adventure would surely come leaping towards you. To find the open world, to know Adventure! For how could anything interesting ever happen if you just played in a garden or a paddock, or strained your eyes down the river or across the hills, simply wondering, wondering?

There was more than one influence at work on the children to stir them to action. To begin with, there was that wander-blood in their veins that had sent their young Uncle Val wandering over the face of the earth. And then there was the river, the broad, gleaming river--an everyday river, of course, but was it not rushing swiftly to the sea and the open world? Had not Uncle Val himself told them how it had called men to great adventures? Sir Walter Raleigh, for instance. Sir Walter Raleigh, Billy's hero, was perhaps the biggest influence of all at work on the children. For, though this was not Devonshire, he had at one time inhabited the beautiful old house above the Gleam in which the children lived. Probably it was he who had whispered to Uncle Val of the Unknown, but whether that was so or not Uncle Val, in his brief home visits, was never tired of telling the children of the noble gentleman who had left his presence in the riverside house. He would make them see pictures of Sir Walter seated in the oak-panelled dining-room with perhaps Sir Francis Drake and other adventurers as his guests, planning their expeditions into the unexplored world; or again, sauntering slowly down the drive and pausing at the white gate to look with half-closed eyes down the Gleam towards the sea, sniffing the salt in the wind that blew up the river, hearing its call to him as it soughed through the tall elms along the drive.

And then there was Stevenson. It was Aunt Letty who was responsible for introducing them to him and inspiring them with love and admiration for the man who was known in Samoa by that pretty name Tusitala. At least, Nancy, whose imagination quickly leaped towards any word that had poetry in it, any new and interesting word, found it pretty; indeed, there were many words in the passages Aunt Letty read to them from Stevenson that appealed to her. Caryatides! That was a word to make poetry of inside yourself and repeat over and over again until you had made it your very own.

Billy, on the other hand was more interested in Stevenson the man than in Stevenson the writer. His adventures in the _Arethusa_, his wanderings with Modestine, above all, perhaps, his life in those fascinating South Sea Islands appealed strongly to Billy. And the chief charm about all the adventures lay in the fact that they were _real_; they were not just a story book; Stevenson had actually lived what he described, had gone out to meet adventure just as he, Billy, longed so passionately to do.

Things came to a head one evening, while they were watching old Daddy Petherham drifting down the tide towards the sea.

"Wouldn't you think he'd get tired of fishing round here every day?" said Billy. "Wouldn't you s'pose he'd just have to go a little further and a little further and then right out to sea? Wouldn't you think he'd want to know what it's like out there and sail away till he came to other countries and foreign people? _I_ should if I were Daddy Petherham."

"No, not if you were Daddy Petherham you wouldn't," Nancy replied. "I'm sure he wouldn't like not to sit in his doorway and smoke and watch his grandchildren playing. And wouldn't it be funny not to see him sitting sometimes on the bench outside the 'Anchor' shaking his head in that funny way of his at the young fishermen? It's queer, but I always think of Daddy Petherham as part of Nestcombe; he's kind of grown into it."

"Well," Billy replied, "_I_ shouldn't want to live in a village till I'd grown to be one of the fixtures, would you?"

"No," Nancy replied thoughtfully, "I don't _think_ I should. I--I want, I want--oh, it's not easy to put into words just what I want."

"I know what _I_ want," Billy replied, decidedly. "I want to have adventure, lots of it, and how can we if we just stay here? Don't you both feel," he added eagerly, "that we must have one? Let's go somewhere. We haven't got a boat so we can't sail away as Daddy Petherham could if he wanted to, but--but _how_ shall we go, Nancy?"

Nancy, who had been seeing visions of the wants that would not go into words ("dweaming dweams," as she used to call them when she was a little girl), came back to earth and stared at Billy.

"Do you mean it _really_, Billy?" she asked slowly.

"Do you mean a long, long way?" little Mavis added. "And see lots and lots of pretty places?"

"Yes, really and truly, a long, long way--where we've never been before!"

Now, it is quite probable that neither Nancy nor Mavis felt at that moment any imperative need in them to leave their happy home, for Mavis was a "home" child and Nancy, with her vivid imagination, could leave it at will to wander in a "Never Never Land," but if Billy wanted to go, why, then of course they wanted to go, too, for that one should do anything important without the other two was as impossible as for old Daddy Petherham not to sit year in, year out, smoking by his cottage door.

And, since it was decided that something must be done, both the girls entered with eager interest into Billy's plans.

"Would it do for us to have kind of travels with a donkey?" Nancy asked. "We've got Ladybird. There aren't any mountains, but there are the hills over there. Oh, Billy, I would _like_ to see the other side of the hills; I kind of feel there's some wonderful land hidden away behind them. Could we get as far, do you think? It's a long way, isn't it? We'd have to go to Gleambridge and cross the river there and _then_ we'd begin to be in the hills, wouldn't we? Oh, Billy, could we ever get there?"

Gleambridge, the county town, was a quite familiar place to the children. It is one thing to go there by train with grown-ups on shopping expeditions, but to go by road through unexplored country towards a city that is the gateway of the land of your dreams--that is something quite different. The train journey leads you to tailors and drapers and dentists, well, and perhaps to cakes and ice-creams, and yes, of course, the cathedral; but the dusty, winding road leads you straight to a world of romance, out of which rises the fair tower of the cathedral, and beyond it and above it and around it the entrancing hills. Should they, could they go?

Thus it was decided. They would go for a week; not longer, as little Mavis thought that quite long enough to be away from "Muvee." They would leave a note of explanation assuring the grown-ups that there was no need to worry, and they would take Ladybird, their very own donkey, with them. This, of course, would occasion a re-christening ceremony, for though "Ladybird" was the nicest name imaginable for a little home donkey, for one who was to seek with them the open world nothing but "Modestine" would satisfy the young adventurers.