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Well, they were now prepared for all such eventualities, and he had not forgotten that they possessed, among other treasures, a box of books for rainy days. And a rainy day with Iris for company! What gale that ever blew could offer such compensation for enforced idleness? The morning sped in uneventful work. Iris did not neglect her cherished pitcher-plant.
First she saw a tiny rainbow in a dewdrop that hung on a blade of grass; then she watched a frisky calf come down to drink on the other side of the brook, and laughed to see him scamper away with his tail in the air. Close by grew a pitcher-plant; and a yellow butterfly sat on the edge, bathing its feet, Daisy said.
The colonel leaves his five thousand dollars, and draws on that, and for as much more as may be necessary in securing the crop. The commercial reader North who has had no dealings South will smile at the credulous merchant who entrusts his credit to such a full-blown, thirsty tropical pitcher-plant as the colonel, who carries childish extravagances in his very dress; but he will judge hastily.
And then, when rescue came, when Miss Deane became once more the daughter of a wealthy baronet, and he a disgraced and a nameless outcast ! He set his teeth and savagely struck at a full cup of the pitcher-plant which had so providentially relieved their killing thirst. "Oh, why did you do that?" pouted Iris. "Poor thing! it was a true friend in need.
As for Victoria Guion, French life, especially the old royalist phase of it, which offers no crevices on its creaseless bark in which a foreign seed can germinate, absorbed her within its tough old blossom as a pitcher-plant sucks in a fly. Henceforth the utmost she could do for her kith and kin was to force open the trap from time to time, so that Olivia, if she liked, could be swallowed, too.
The leafless acacias are also found here, as well as the Nepenthes distillatoria and the Cephalotus follicularis, two remarkable varieties of the monkey-cup or pitcher-plant; while many very beautiful ferns and flowering vines adorn the coasts and lave their graceful fringes in the blue ocean waves.
Thus we found how God has so bountifully provided this region with the greatest necessary of life, guarding with a thick shell the produce of the palm on the lower lands, and allowing the cool breeze of the mountains to temper the water collected in the cups of the pitcher-plant.
This was real delight, such as she had never imagined before, and she thought she could have studied the wonderful forms of those tropical plants for ever, if it had not been for the crowds of people, and for a little awe of Lord Marchmont, who had given her his arm, and who did not seem to know or care much even for the dove orchis or the zebra-striped pitcher-plant.
There were pools, too, in some places, where water-lilies had managed to plant themselves, and where colonies of mud-turtles lived undisturbed; and there were shady places by the sides of the pools, where the brown pitcher-plant held its cups of clear water, and the ghost-flower glimmered spectrally among the dead leaves of last year.
Not till this minute had Olivia ever considered that this reluctance on her part to be "well established" must have been something like a grief to her father, for he had never betrayed a sign of it. On the contrary, he had seemed to approve her decisions, and had even agreed with her in preferring the mistletoe to the pitcher-plant.
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