The Harriet Bean 3-Book Omnibus Read Free

out of date. So where they are today—heaven knows!”
    “But what happened?” I pressed. “You can’t have lost my aunts just like that.”
    He nodded sadly.
    “I did, I’m afraid. They’re all lost, every single one of them.”
    I asked him how it happened and he told me the story.
    “The farm we lived on really wasn’t very good. The soil was thin there, and the potatoes we grew were always very hard and tiny. The animals were thin too, just as we were. The cows all showed their ribs and it was a great effort for the hens to lay any eggs.
    “At last my poor parents—your grandparents—decided that we just could not go on. They called us all together and told us the bad news that they would have to sell the farm. If they got enough money from the sale, they might be able to buy a small shop in town,and we could live off that. I liked the idea at the time. For a boy who had spent all his life on a farm, the idea of living above a shop sounded very nice.
    “But things did not work out that way. When the farm was put up for sale, quite a few people came out to see it, but nobody seemed prepared to buy it for the price my father set. One or two people actually laughed when they saw how thin the soil was and how hungry the animals looked. And so your grandparents were forced to sell it for next to nothing to a man who was going to use it for no other purpose than to ride his horses over it. Our house—the house in which we had all been born and had grown up—was to have a wider door fitted and was then to be used as a stable for the horses. Oh, the shame of it!
    “What was worse, though, was that we could not afford to buy the shop after all. Your grandfather was now desperate. I saw him sitting in his chair near the kitchen stove, his head in his hands, thinking about the sadfate that had befallen us. I longed to be able to help my parents, but what could I do? I couldn’t get a job—I was too young for that—and nobody seemed willing to take on the girls.
    “At last, when the day came to leave the farm, your grandfather broke more bad news to us.
    “ ‘I’m very sorry,’ he said. ‘We are all going to have to split up. I just can’t afford to keep the family together anymore.’
    “It was a terrible, terrible blow, and I was so shocked by it that I almost did not hear what he then had to say. It seemed he had arranged for us to go and stay with various people all over the country. Some of the girls were to go to cousins; others were to go to live in a children’s home in a city a long way off.
    As the youngest, I was given the best choice. I was to live with my grandparents. Even this was a terrible fate. I did not want to leave Majolica, Veronica, and Harmonica, not to mention Thessalonika and Japonica. But I really had no choice, and that day I saidgood-bye to my sisters, fearing that I would never see them again. And I never have.”
    It seemed to me to be one of the saddest stories I had ever heard. As my father spoke, I could picture the day when they all left the farm. I had no idea what it was to have a brother or a sister—I had none—but I imagined that a brother or a sister must be the very best of friends, and to see all your brothers and sisters going off to a new home must be like losing all your best friends at once.
    My father ate the last crumb of his scone and sighed. I thought that he had come to the end of his story, but he suddenly looked up and went on.
    “There’s something else I should tell you,” he said. “When they realized that the family would have to split up, your grandparents decided that they would have a portrait of all the children painted. They got in touch with a painter who lived nearby and asked him whether he would do it. The painter was a rather temperamental man, and nobody could ever tell when he was likely to bedifficult, but he agreed, and we had the first sitting.
    “We dressed in our best clothes—which were all a bit threadbare, I’m afraid