Trade Wind Read Free Page A

big?”
    “Oh—bigger than America. And a lot wilder. They have lions and giraffes and elephants there, and apes and ivory, and—‘ men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders .’”
    “Like this?” enquired Hero, hunching her small shoulders up to her ears and dropping her chin into the front of her starched pinafore.
    “Maybe. Nobody really knows very much about the middle of Africa yet But people are finding out, and any day now a white man may climb the Mountains of the Moon or find King Solomon’s mines.”
    “Is Africa an island, Papa?”
    “No, it’s a continent.’ Barclay picked up a pencil and using it as a pointer said: “Look—these little bits round the edge are islands. That big one is Madagascar and these are the Comoro Islands. And this is Zanzibar, where the clove trees grow, and all kinds of other spices that Mrs Cobb puts in your Christmas cake.”
    Hero bent to stare at the minute speck as though searching for those spices, and presently she laid a small possessive finger on it and said firmly: “Then I shall choose that one, because it has a nice name and I should like my island to have a nice name.”
    “Zanzibar? Yes, it is a pretty name. A singing name. But what’s all this about your island?”
    “When I’m grown up I’m going to go there.”
    “Are you, my daughter? What for?”
    “To—to do something,” said Hero vaguely.
    “Going to pick yourself a pocket-full of cloves, eh. Hero?”
    Hero considered the question gravely. “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s that kind of work. I think,” she said making up her mind, “that I shall do something very good and useful. And very clever.”
    “Oh, you will, will you? You sure sound very certain about it, daughter. Let’s hope you ain’t going to take after your—” he checked himself abruptly. Had he really been about to say “your mother?” If so, he changed it, for after a brief pause he said instead, and with unnecessary heat, “—your Aunt Lucy. I don’t want you to grow up into a strong-minded little busybody. Or a prig. I don’t think I could stand it.”
    “What’s a prig, Papa?”
    “You are, when you talk like that!” said Barclay irritably. “I suppose that prissy, feather-headed milk-sop of a Penbury woman has been reading you improving books and filling your head with a lot of clap-trap about Good Works being the only thing worth doing. I might have known it from the way she dresses and the fact that your Aunt Lucy approves of her!”
    He paused to cast a mental eye over Miss Penbury and his sister Lucy, and suffered a sharp spasm of sheer panic. Lucy had approved of his marriage to Harriet, and Harriet herself would undoubtedly have approved of Miss Penbury…
    He said violently, and as though he were defying them all: “I’m damned if I’m going to have ‘em turn you into a priggish little do-gooder! I’ll get you another governess. A pretty one with a sense of humour, who’ll know how to keep you in order—which is more than Miss Penbury does! It looks to me as if I can’t do it soon enough.”
    But of course he had done nothing of the sort. It had been too much trouble and Barclay Hollis was an easy-going man who preferred to avoid trouble—and anything else that might interfere with his reading and riding and the pleasant placid routine of his life. Agnes Penbury stayed, and Hero grew up spoilt, strong-minded and undeniably priggish. And still firmly convinced that she would one day set sail for Zanzibar, though anyone less self-willed would have abandoned such an idea in her early teens: if only because of her father’s strongly expressed detestation of what he called ‘traipsing around’ (a term that apparently included everything from foreign travel to a journey involving more than a single night away from Hollis Hill).
    In later years it had taken all her powers of persuasion to coax him into travelling as far as Washington in order to stay with a Crayne cousin