I should be sorry if she did; I like the place to be an utter anachronism in our utilitarian twentieth century, just as it is. I don't mind the honeycomb of draughts. I can put up with the soft, cave-like gloom of it——
It was this gloom that prevented me from seeing, at first, that there was anybody in the kitchen but cook, who was busily beating up batter for light cakes in a big, yellow, white-lined bowl.
"Is the tea made?" I said.
It was not; the silver teapot, with the tea in it, was being heated on the hob.
I moved to take up the singing kettle. It was then that a tall man's form that had been sitting on a settle on the other side of the fire rose and came towards me.
The red glow of the fire through the bars shone on the silver buttons and on the laurel-green cloth and on the high boots of a chauffeur's livery. Of course! This was the man who had driven over the people who had come in the car.
But above the livery a voice spoke, a voice that I knew, a voice that I could hardly believe was speaking to me here.
"Allow me," said this softly inflected Irish voice.And the kettle was gently but firmly taken out of my hand by the hand of—the Honourable James Burke.
I gave such a start of surprise that it is a mercy I did not jolt against that kettle and send a stream of scalding hot water over the laurel-green-cloth-clad knees of the man before me.
And I said exactly what people always say in meloramas when they are surprised at meeting anybody—thus showing that melodrama is not always so utterly unlike real life.
I cried "You!"
"Myself," announced the Honourable Jim, smiling down at me as he deftly took the silver teapot from me and filled first that and then the hot-water jug on the tray that was already laid on the big table. "And what is all this emotion at the sight of me? Is it too much to hope that it's pleasure? Or is it just amazement?"
"I—I certainly never expected to s-see you," I spoke falteringly in my great surprise, "or—or like this!" I glanced at the gleam of the livery buttons. "May I ask what in the world you are doing in those clothes?"
"Is it my livery you mean? Don't you think it's rather neat?" suggested the Honourable Jim ingratiatingly. "Don't you consider that it suits me almost as well as the black gown and the apron and the doaty little cap suit Miss Million's maid?"
"But——" I gasped in amazement. "But why are you wearing a chauffeur's livery?"
"Isn't the reason obvious? Because I've taken a chauffeur's job."
"You, Mr. Burke?"
"Yes, I, Miss Lovelace!" he laughed. "Is there any reason you have to give against that, as you have against every other mortal thing that the unfortunate Jim Burke does?"
"I——Look here, I can't wait here talking," I told him, for just at this minute I caught the surprised glance of cook upon us both.
The spoon with which she beat up the batter was poised in mid-air as she listened to everything that this superior-looking lady's-maid and still more superior-looking chauffeur had to say to each other. "I must take the tea into the drawing-room."
He opened the kitchen door for me as I hastened away with the tray.
Gentleman-adventurer, bronco-buster, stoker, young gentleman of leisure, chauffeur! What next will be the rôle that the Honourable and Extraordinary Jim will take it into his head to play?
Chauffeur, of all things! Why chauffeur?
My head was still buzzing with the surprise of it all, when I heard the other buzz—the shrill, insistent, worrying buzz that is made by women's voices when a lot of them are gathered together in a strange house, and are all talking at once; "made" talk, small talk, weather talk, the talk that is—as Miss Vassity, for instance, would put it—"enough to drive any one to drink."
In the drawing-room where these callers were grouped I just caught a scrap here and a scrap there as I moved about with the tea-things. This sort of thing:
"And what do you think of this part of the country, Miss Million? Are you intending to make a long stay——"
"She seemed such a nice girl! Came to me with such a good character from her——"
"Never touch it. It doesn't suit me. In coffee I like just a very little, and my daughter's the same. But my husband"—(impressively)—"my husband is just the reverse. He won't touch it in coff——"
—"hope you intend to patronise our little Sale of Work, Miss Million, on the twenty-sixth? Oh, you must all come. And I'm still asking everybody for contributions to my——"
"Do shut up, Alice!" (fierce whisper from the young girl in navy-blue).
"Now we've got this new chauffeur we may hope for a little peace!" This languidly, from the lady in the uncountrified-looking hat. She, I suppose, is the Honourable Jim's employer. "Quite an efficient man, as far as one can judge, but——"
"Quite right, quite right. Far too many trees about the place. I like a good view. Plenty of space around a house.... Of course, you've only ten bedrooms here, Miss Million; ah, eleven? quite right. But at home.... Of course, I had a most lovely home in the——"
Wearisome gabble! I thought.
I caught an ineffable grimace on Miss Million's small, shrewd face behind the silver teapot. I bent down to add hot water to it. Under cover of my ministrations she murmured: "You see, I don't have to bust myself talkin' polite to this lot; nothing'll stop 'em. I say!Does that cook know enough to give a nice cup o' tea to the shaveer of her that came in the car, Smith?"
"I think the chauffeur knows enough to get one!" I murmured dryly. "Or anything else he——" Here I found I was the only person in the room who was talking.
A suddenly deathly silence had fallen upon the roomful of talking women, who all knew each other, even if they had never met their little hostess before. Something had "stopped 'em." The chatter and buzz of small talk left off with a click.
And that quite definite "click" was the opening of the drawing-room door upon an apparition such as none of them, I am certain, had ever seen in a drawing-room before.
Its brightly fair hair seemed to have "sprouted" not so much a hat as a grotesque halo of black, long, feathery wisps that surrounded a face with black eyes and a complexion "made-up" to be dazzlingly pink.
Its transparent corsage gave glimpses of fair and sumptuous shoulders and of much lingerie ribbon.
The frock was layer upon layer of folded ninon in different yellows, shading down from bright lemon yellows through chrome yellow and mustard colour to a kind of marigold tint at the hem, under which appeared scarlet silk stockings and tall, gilt boots with heels so high that the wearer was practically walking on her toes, à la Genée, as she made her startling entrance.
It was, of course, Miss Vi Vassity, in one of her mostsuccessful stage get-ups; the frock in which she sings her topical song—
"They've been there a long time now!"
with the usual verses about courting couples, and the Gorgonzola, and the present Government.
And she beamed round upon this gathering of natives of a quiet country neighbourhood with the same dazzling, prominent-toothed smile as she flashes from her friends in the front row of the stalls to her equally devoted gallery boys.
"No need for introductions, eh?" uttered London's Love, lightly, to the petrified-looking assembly.
I felt that I would have sacrificed another quarter's salary rather than have missed the look on the face of the acidulated lady who came in the car as Miss Vi Vassity perched herself lightly on the arm of the couch where she was sitting, and called to Nellie for the love of anything to give her a nice cup of tea.
"Does one good to see a few faces around me once again!" prattled on the artiste, while the two girls from the other side of the valley leant forward and devoured every detail of her appearance with gluttonous brown eyes.
Pure ecstasy was painted all over the plain ironic face of the tall girl with the thick black plait. I saw from the look of the hussy that she was "taking in" everything to reproduce it at home, in that white house on the hill. And presently there was plenty to reproduce.
For one of the rectoryish-looking party plucked upcourage to ask Miss Vassity "what she thought of this place."
That opened the floodgates!
Perched on the arm of the couch, England's Premier Comedienne proceeded to "hold the house" with her views on this mansion and its furniture.
"Not what I'd call a lively spot; still, there's always the pheasant and her little 'uns walking about on the lawn at three G.M., if you're fond of geology, and the rabbit on the tennis-court at eight o'clock sharp. That's about all the outdoor entertainment in this place," she rattled on.
"Indoors, of course, is a fair museum of curiosities. Continuous performance, eh, Nellie? The oil-lamps everywhere, with the collection of midges on all the bowls; those are very fine.
"Couldn't beat those at the Tower of London! And the back kitchen, with the water from the stand-pipe outside overflowing into the middle of the floor. Talk about Glimpses into the Middle Ages!
"What takes my fancy is the girls clinkin' to and from the scullery in those pattens they wear. Makes the floor look like nothing on earth but a bar-counter where glasses have been set down, doesn't it?"—this to the rector's wife.
"And the paint, too. And the wall-papers. Oo-er! And all the window-cords broken," enlarged the beaming apparition in all-yellow, whose personality invaded the room like a burst of brilliant sunshine through a thunder-cloud.
"Not to mention all the doors having to be proppedopen! No complete set of china anywhere. Wedges bitten out of every—er—blessed egg-cup! Pick up a bit of real Dresden, and the seccotined piece comes off in your hand.
"As for the furniture, well, half of it looks as if it had bin used for Harry Tate to play about with in a screaming new absurdity, entitled 'Moving,' or 'Spring-cleaning,' or something like——"
Here the acidulated voice of the lady who'd come in the motor broke in with some very rebukeful remark. Something to the effect that she had always considered everything so delightful that the dear Price-Vaughans had in the house——
"Pr'aps the dear What-Price-Vaughans," retorted the comedienne, "can get along with their delightful style of bathroom?"
"Oh, do tell us," implored the girl with the black plait, "what's the matter with that?"
"The bath, Kiddy? Absolutely imposs!" decreed London's Love. "Water comes in at the rate of a South-Eastern Dead-Stop. Turn one tap on and you turn the other off. Not to speak of there only being one bath, and that five sizes too small, dear. The Not-at-Any-Price-Vaughans must be greyhound built for slimness, if you ask me. It don't seem to fit our shrinking Violet, as you can imagine. Why, look at her!"
Quite an unnecessary request, as the fascinated, horrified eyes of the whole party had not yet left her sumptuous and bedizened person.
"Call it a bath?" she concluded, with her largest and most unabashedly vulgar wink. "I'd call it a——"
We weren't privileged to hear what she could call it, for at this moment the lady with the very towny hat rose with remarkable suddenness, and asked in a concise and carrying voice that her man might be told to bring round Miss Davis's car.
I slipped out to the kitchen and to Miss Davis's man, who, as I expected, had finished an excellent tea and the subjugation of cook at the same time.
"Your mistress would like the car round at once, please," I said, with a frantic effort not to smile as I caught the mischievous, black-framed, blue eyes of the Honourable Jim Burke.
He rose. "Good afternoon, ma'am, and thank you for one of the most splendid teas I've ever had in my life," he said in that flattering voice of his to cook, as she bustled out, beaming upon him as she went into the scullery.
"Good afternoon, Miss Smith"—to me. "You've never shaken hands with me yet. But I suppose this is scarcely the moment to remind you, when I've taken on a job several pegs below what I was when I saw you last——"
Of course, at that I had to give him my hand. I said: "But why are you Miss Davis's chauffeur?"
"Because I couldn't get a job with Miss Million," he told me simply. "She hasn't got a car of her own yet. Not that she'd have me, in any case—a man she'd found out deceiving her about her own relatives!"
"But why 'the job,' anyhow?"
"I must earn my living—honestly if possible," said the Honourable Jim with his wickedest twinkle.
"Also I'd made up my mind a little change of air in Wales would do me good just now, and I'd no friends who happened to be coming to these parts. It was these parts I'd set my heart on.
"The mountain scenery! Can you beat it? And when I saw the advertisement of that old trout upstairs there—I mean that elegant maiden lady with private means and a nice house and a car of her own—I jumped at answering it. The country round about is so romantic. That drew me, Miss Lovelace.... Well, I suppose I must be tooting her home."
He turned to the back entrance.
Then he turned to me once more and launched his most audacious bit of nonsense yet.
He said, softly laughing: "Ah! You know well enough why I'm here. It's to be near you, child."
What a good thing it is that I know exactly how to take this laughing, blarneying, incorrigible Irishman! What a blessing that I am not as poor little Miss Million was, who was utterly taken in by any blatantly insincere compliment that this young—well, I can say no worse than "this young Celt" chose to toss off!
So I just said lightly, "Too flattered!" and hurried away to hand the callers their wraps and umbrellas in the hall.
I'm glad I was in time to witness another rather priceless scene.
Namely, the entrance of Miss Vi Vassity into the hall with the other ladies, and her recognition of the big young man in the laurel-green livery, with the handsomeface so stolidly set under the peaked chauffeur's cap.
"Jim!" exclaimed the comedienne, in a piercing treble. "Well, whatever next? If it isn't my pal Jim Burke!"
"Just the sort of person one would expect her to have for a 'pal,' as she calls it," came in a not-too-soft aside from the owner of the car, then, haughtily, "Home, Burke."
"Yes, Miss," said the new chauffeur, as respectfully as I could have said it myself, and he touched his peaked cap to his mistress with a kind of side-effect of "Cheery O, Vi," to the brilliant figure standing gasping with astonishment upon the top step.
"Whateverin the wide world is young Jim up to now!" exclaimed London's Love, when at last the heavy hall door was closed upon the motoring ladies, the rectory party, and the two girls from across the valley.
Miss Million's face was rather more serious than usual.
"'Ere! I have an idea about that, Vi," she said. "And you, Smith, listen. It's just occurred to me." She glanced about the darkened hall with the stags' heads and the suit of armour.
"You know I shall never be able to trust that Mr. Burke again. He let me down. Now what if he's lettin' all of us down?
"F'rinstance, a young man like that, with heaps of friends with plenty of money, and always able to do as he likes up to now, what's he mean by suddenly taking on a situation as a common shoveer?"
"Ar!" responded England's Premier Comedienne, who has often made the stalls rock with laughter over the concentrated meaning which she can infuse into that one monosyllable long-drawn-out.
"Ar!" She turned upon me the wink that delights the gallery, then said dryly: "What'syouridea, Nellie?"
"Why, I believe he's no more nor less than a commonrobber and burglar! A sort of Raffles, like in that play," declared Miss Million in a soft, excited whisper.
"'Twouldn't surprise me a bit if he'd disguised himself like that, and gone into service with that frosty-face, stuck-up Miss Davis that was calling just because he wanted to get his footing in a wealthy house where there was heaps of valuables, and cetrer.
"Here's this Miss Davis got more than a bit of her own, evident! And did you notice the string o' pearls? She'll have more of those sort of things at home, I bet you," said Million, adding with impressive hoarseness, "I believe that's what he's after. Jewels!!"
"What? Jim?" Miss Vi Vassity gave a slow, enjoying laugh. "Him? Likerly!"
"Ah, he's got round you, Vi. I believe you've got a soft corner for him in your heart still, however much of a rotter the man is, but I'm off, dead off.
"More than that, it wouldn't surprise me," continued my mistress, still in her impressive tone, "if I'm not far off guessing who took the Rattenheimer ruby that me and Smith's in this fix about!"
"Ah, go on!" said Miss Vi Vassity, striking a match for her cigarette against the minnow-shaped sole of her gilt boot. "Are you goin' to go and believe that my pal Jim sneaked that and then saw you and her in trouble for it? Do you believe that, Smithie?"
"I don't," I said, without hesitation.
Miss Million said defiantly: "Think it over! Think it over! He was always in and out of the hotel, was that Mr. Burke. He was hobnobbing with the Rattenheimers and one and another all day long.
"And he wanted the money. We've proof of that! And he's none too particular about how he gets it! Why, you yourself, Vi. You know he owes you pounds and pounds and pounds at this minute that he's 'borrowed,' and goodness knows how he intends to pay you back!
"You know he's got the cheek of the Old Gentleman himself! And," concluded my young mistress, with a look of shrewdness on her face that I imagine must have been inherited from the late Mr. Samuel Million, "if he isn't the one who stole the ruby,who is?"
A violent ring at the hall-door bell made the finish to this peroration.
I opened the door to a small, freckle-faced telegraph boy.
"For Miss Smith," he said in the pretty, up-and-down Welsh accent that is such a rest after Cockney. I took the wire. I wondered if it was Aunt Anastasia again.
It wasn't.
It was something very much more exciting. The wire was signed "Reginald Brace," and it said: "I am coming down by the nine o'clock train to-night. Jewel mystery cleared up."
Oh, how can it have been cleared up? What is the solution of the mystery? To think that at least four and a half hours must elapse before we know!
Really, I do think Mr. Reginald Brace might have had pity on our burning curiosity and anxiety! I do think he might have given some hint, in this wire of his, as to who did really steal that wretched ruby!
"Well, s'long as it's all cleared up that it wasn't us that done it, that ought to be comfort enough to us," said my mistress philosophically, as I was fastening her into the blush-pink tea-gown for dinner. We've put dinner on an hour late since our visitor is coming down so late.
"Though, mark my words, Smith," she continued, "it wouldn't surprise me one bit if that young gentleman of yours from the bank brought down that mute-of-a-funeral from Scotland Yard to tell Miss Davis's new shoveer thathewas wanted by the police this time!"
"We'll see," I said, smiling.
For the Honourable Jim's faults may be as thick and as black as the hairs of the Honourable Jim's head. But of this other thing I feel he could not be capable.
"It used to be me that thought you was too hard on that Mr. Burke, Smith. Now here you are turning round and won't hear a word against the man," said my mistress, half laughing. "You're as pigheaded as Vi about it! And, talking about Vi, here's this packet of golden hairpins she's left in here; she was lookin' all over for them this afternoon. Better take them in to her now."
It was on this errand that I entered the spare room that has been assigned to London's Love.
She was sitting in a cerulean-blue dressing-jacket in front of the looking-glass, drawing a tiny brush, charged with lamp-black, across her eyelashes, and using "language," as she calls it, over the absence of electric lights by which to dress.
"I shall look a perfect sketch at dinner, see if Idon't. Not that it matters a twopenny dash, me not being the bill-topper in any sense in this revue," said England's Premier Comedienne cheerily. "It's the pretty little lady's-maid's charming scena with the young bank manager. Tell me, Smithie——" Here she turned abruptly round and looked at me sharply. "Been thinking over his proposal, have you? Going to take him, are you?"
"I—er——"
"I—er—shouldn't if I was you!"
"You wouldn't?" I said interestedly. "Why not?"
London's Love put down the make-up brush and scanned her own appearance in the glass. Then she got up as if to fetch a frock out of the wardrobe. But she paused, put a small, highly manicured but capable-looking hand on each of my shoulders, and said, holding me so: "You don't like him, Kiddy."
"Oh! But I do! So much!" I protested. "I think Mr. Brace is everything nice ... I think he would make such a splendid husband! He's so steady, and honourable, and sterling, and straight, and kind, and simple-minded, and reliable, and——"
"Ah! Poppycock!" cried the comedienne, with her loud, indulgent laugh. "You're just stringing off a list of aggravating things that a girl might put up with in a man if—if, mind you!—she was head over ears in love with him as well. But, great Pip! Fancy marrying a man for those things!
"Why, what d'you suppose it would be like? I ought to know," she answered herself before I, rather surprised, could say anything. "One of those 'sterling'young men that never gave his mother an hour's anxiety; one of those reliable, simple-minded fellers that you always knew what he was goin' to say an' do next; always came home to tea on the dot, and 'never cared to wander from his own fireside'—that's what I was talked into marryin' by my aunts when I was a kid of eighteen," said Miss Vi Vassity quite bitterly.
"Oh, were you?" I cried, astonished. "I never knew——"
"Yes, that was my first husband. Answered to the name of Bert—Albert. Very good position in the waterworks in our town at home," said London's Love.
"A real good husband he was. Lor', how he did used to aggravate me! It's a good many years ago, Smithie, and I've almost forgotten what he looked like. I can just call to mind the way he used to snuffle when he had a cold in the head; shocking colds he used to catch, but he would always get up and light the kitchen fire to get me an early cup o' tea, no matter what the weather was. That I will say for him. The man I remember, though—he was pretty different!"
There was a silence in the countrified-looking bedroom that the music-hall artiste had filled with the atmosphere of a theatrical dressing-room. Then England's Premier Comedienne went on in a softer, more diffident voice than I had ever heard from her.
"He was the young man that jilted Vi Vassity a good deal later on. A trick cyclist he was.... Small, but beautifully built fellow, supple as a cat. Bad-tempered as a cat, too! And shifty, and mean in little ways! A cruel little devil, too, but——"
She sighed.
"I fair doted on him!" concluded the Star simply. "Much I cared what sort of a rotter he was! It's the way a woman's got to feel about a man once in a lifetime. If she doesn't, she's been done out of the best that's going."
"But," I suggested, "she misses a good deal of pain?"
"Yes, and of everything else. Nothing else is worth it, Smithie. You can't understand what it was to me just the way his hair grew," said the comedienne who'd loved the trick cyclist. "Cropped close, of course, and black. Looked as if a handful of soot had been rubbed over his head. But soft as velvet to your lips. I used to tell him that. Never a one for talking much himself. He'd a trick of speaking almost as if he grudged you the words; curious, and shy, and my word! wasn't it fascinatin'? Then he'd give a little laugh in the middle of a sentence sometimes. That used to go to my heart, straight as a pebble into a pool. Yes, and it'd stay there, with the ripple stirring above it. Anybody would have loved his voice....
"But! Bless my soul alive!" she broke off into her loud, jovial, everyday tone again. "About time I left off maunderin' about when—other—lips, and threw some glad-rags on to me natural history! I'll wear the marmalade-coloured affair with the dangles.... Well! 'Marry the man you fancy,' as it says in the song, and don't let me go puttin' you off any of 'em, Miss Smith——"
But whether the Star did "put me off" by her reminiscencesof her trick cyclist with the charming, reluctant voice, or whether it is that I've slowly been coming round to the conclusion subconsciously in my own mind, I find that, however estimable he may be, I shall never be able to marry Mr. Reginald Brace.
No! Not if I have to go on being Miss Million's or somebody else's lady's-maid until I'm old and grey.
I somehow realised that with the first moment that I opened the door to the tall, mackintoshed figure—it was raining again, of course, outside—Miss Million, very pretty and flushed and eager in her rose-pink tea-gown, followed close upon my heels as I let Mr. Brace in, and behind her came Miss Vi Vassity, sumptuous in the orange satin that she calls "the marmalade-coloured affair."
And all three of us, without even bidding the young bank manager "Good evening," chorused together: "Tell us, for goodness' sake, tell us at once! Who did steal the Rattenheimer ruby?"
"Nobody!" replied Mr. Reginald Brace, in his pleasant but rather precise voice, and with his steady grey eyes fixed on me as I, in my inevitable cap and apron, waited to take his coat.
We all gasped "Nobody? What——Why——"
"The Rattenheimer ruby has not been stolen at all," replied Mr. Reginald Brace, smiling encouragingly upon us.
And then, while we all gaped and gazed upon him, and kept the poor wretched man waiting for his dinner, he went on to tell us the full history of the celebrated ruby.
It appears that an exquisite paste copy has been made of the priceless pendant, which the German-Jewish owners have kept by them to delude possible jewel thieves.
And now it is they themselves who have been deluded by the same wonderful replica of the celebrated gem!
For Mrs. Rattenheimer, it appears, imagined that it was the replica that reposed in her jewel-case, from which the original was missing after that fatal ten minutes of carelessness during which she left that jewel-case and her bedroom door at the Cecil unlocked.
But upon sending that replica to the experts to supplement the description of the missing ruby, she was told that an absurd mistake had been made. This, the supposed "copy," was none other than the celebrated ruby itself!
"And she didn't know her own property?" Vi Vassity's loud, cheerful voice resounded through the hall. "Why, the old girl will be the laughing-stock of London!"
"Yes. I think Mrs. Rattenheimer realises that herself," said Mr. Reginald Brace. "That is why she and her husband now intend to hush the matter up as much as possible; they do not mean to prosecute inquiries as to who took the replica."
"Don't they think we done that, then?" asked Miss Million loudly.
"They are dropping all inquiries," said Mr. Brace.
"Then I've a good mind to sue 'em for libel for the inquiries they made already," said Million heatedly. "I shall consult my——"
Here there was another ring at the bell.
"Talk of angels!" exclaimed my young mistress, as I opened the door to a second masculine figure in a dripping rain-coat, "why here he is, just the very person I was going to pass the remark about! It's my cousin Hiram!" And it was that young American who strode into the feeble light of the oil-lamps in the hall.
"I guess I must have been just a few yards behind you before I took the wrong turning to these antediluvian river-courses that they call roads," said Mr. Hiram P. Jessop to Mr. Brace, while he held Million's little hand with great tenderness. "Good evening, Cousin Nellie and everybody. If I may shed this damp macintaw, I've a few pieces of startling news——"
"For the sake of Lloyd George himself, come into the dinin'-room and let's have 'em while we're feeding," suggested Miss Vassity.
She grabbed an arm of each young man, and ran them into the room to the right that always smells of country churches.
"Part of the news concerns Miss Smith," added Mr. Jessop, over the upholstery of his shoulder.
"Then in the name of the Insurance Act let's all sit down together and hear it. Not so much nonsense about 'the maid.' We'll pretend we're at the 'Refuge,' and stretch for ourselves," decreed Vi Vassity, positively pushing me, in my cap and apron, down into the dining-room chair next to Mr. Reginald Brace in his correct tweeds.
"Now! One mouthful of tomato soup, and out with it—the news, I mean."
"To begin with, I guess they've found the jewel thief," announced Mr. Hiram P. Jessop. "That is, she's owned up. So real disgusted, I guess, to find she hadn't secured the genu-ine ruby.
"I've come straight on from Rats himself, who gave me the whole story. She brought round the other one with her own hands, and said she'd taken it for a bet. She always was eccentric.
"Well, I calculate you've got to believe a lady of title," concluded the young American between two spoonfuls of soup. "If you can't rely upon your old aristocracy to tell the truth in this country, who can you rely on?"
"Better ask the Honourable Jim!" laughed Miss Vi Vassity. "And now tell us who's the lady."
"Another acquaintance of yours, Miss Vassity," announced Mr. Jessop, giving the title with an air. "Lady Haye-Golightly!"
Another little buzz of comment greeted the name of the lady whom I had always called "the cobra-woman."
And then Mr. Jessop turned from this surprising theme to something that seemed nearer still to his heart. "Well, and, Cousin Nellie, here's a bit of good news. I guess that bomb-dropper of mine is a cinch. Your authorities over here are taking it up all right. They're going to use it all right!"
"Oh, are they, Hiram?" said my young mistress in the indulgent tone of a grown-up person discussing itstoys with some child. She always adopts this tone towards her cousin's invention. "And what do they think they're goin' to use it for, eh?"
The young American looked round the table at each of the faces turned towards him.
Then, in a detached tone, he made the announcement of that which was to make all the difference in the world to all of us.
"I guess they'll use it—in this coming war!"
Well, of course we'd seen "rumours of wars" in the day-old papers that had reached us in our wet Welsh valley. But a houseful of women recks little of newspaper news—or did reck little. It all seemed as far away, as little to do with us as, say, the report of some railway accident in Northern China!
Now the young inventor's simple words brought it home to us!
War—European war was at our very doors, and it seemed more than likely that England was going to join in, Mr. Jessop said.
He went on, quite quietly, to inform us that it would find him ready, he guessed. He'd sent in his application early to the Royal Flying Corps, and he guessed that next time we saw him he'd be an Army aviator all right, in training for using his own bomb-dropper——
Here his young cousin dropped her soup-spoon with a clatter.
"What?" cried Miss Million sharply. "You? If there is any war, shall you start fighting the Germans?"
"I should say so!" smiled Mr. Hiram P. Jessop. "Why, yes!"
"But you're American! Why ever on earth should you fight?" demanded Miss Million rather shrilly. "Nothing to do with you! You aren't English; you aren't Belgium! You belong to a—what's it?—a neutral nation!"
"I guess I'm not going to let that stand in my way any," said Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, "if there's a chance of getting in at those hounds!"
And I saw a curious change come over my mistress's small, bonny face as she regarded this man who—underno obligation to fight—felt he could not merely look on at a struggle between Right and Might.
It was not the sentimental, girlish adoration that she had turned upon her first fancy, the Honourable Jim.
It was the look of a real woman upon the man who pleases her.
This was not the only quick change which the war made.
For instance, who would have thought that those German Jews, the Rattenheimers, would ever have had to be interned in a camp in the middle of England, away from all their friends and all their jewel-collecting pursuits?
And who would have thought that Mr. Hiram P. Jessop—I beg his pardon! I mean Flight-Lieutenant H. P. Jessop, of the Royal Flying Corps, was responsible for the prompt and uncompromising manner in which that alien couple were "dropped upon" by the authorities. Well! I should like to hope that their imprisonment was at least half as uncomfortable as that night which my mistress and I passed—thanks to them—at Vine Street police-station! But no, I suppose that's too much to expect.
Then there's the change that has been brought about by the war in my young mistress herself.
At a time when all uniform is glorious, she herself has gone back to uniform, to her old, cast-aside livery of the print frock, the small white cap, the apron of domestic service!
I gasped when I first heard what she intended to take up, namely, the position of "ward-maid" in a bigLondon house that has been turned into a hospital for wounded officers.
"I must do something for them," she told me. "I feel I must!"
"Well, but why this particular thing?" I demurred. "If you wanted to you could take up nursing——"
"Nursin', nothing!" she retorted, in an idiom which she had borrowed from the Flight-Lieutenant. "To begin with, I've no gift that way. I know I haven't; a girl can feel that in her bones. Secondly, I ain't no training for it. I'm not one of these that imagine because it goes to their heart to see a pore fellow with a bandage round his head, well, they're a born nurse!"
"With your money," I told her, "you could provide that hospital with any number of indoor maids to do the work!"
"Yes. And how'd they do it? Not as I should," maintained the Soldier's-Orphanage-trained girl very proudly. "I know the ways o' some o' these townified maids; haven't I watched 'em all down Laburnum Grove? I'm going to make my 'bit' another way!"
From morn until dewy eve the girl who was once Miss Million, the heiress, works harder than ever she worked when she was my Aunt Anastasia's maid-of-all-work. Thursday is her afternoon off; Thursday sees her motoring in the Park, exquisitely got up in a frock and furs that were bought during the "shopping orgy" of the first week of her wealth. And——
She has thought it over once again, and she has promised to marry her aviator on his very first leave.
"Seemed to make all the difference, him being asoldier; seems to make anybody just twice the man they was before. And him just three times, seeing he'd no real call to go and fight, only he wanted to!" she admitted to me, when we were all packing up to come away from the house in Wales, where we had left the ventriloquist's wife in charge.
So that, if all's well, I shall yet have the task of attiring Miss Nellie Million in her shimmering bridal-gown and her filmy veil for that wedding of hers on which I had set my heart from the beginning.
Only—her bridesmaids will have to be Marmora, the Breathing Statue Girl, and the lively little Boy-Impersonator.
Vi Vassity and I will be debarred from that function, because we're both married women.
Yes! I am married, too!
But not to Mr. Reginald Brace.
For when he persisted, "Why are you so sure you could never care?"
I said frankly, "I hate to hurt you. But—Reginald, I don't like the way your hair grows."
He looked at me in utter bewilderment through the darkness-made-visible of those Welsh lamps.
He said: "But a man can't help the way his hair grows!"
"No. And a woman can't help the way she feels about it," I told him sadly but resolutely.
He saw at last that I meant I wasn't going to take him. He went—after saying all those things about remembering me as the sweetest girl he'd ever met, and if ever I wanted a friend, et cetera—all the pathetic,well-meant, useless things that I suppose a rejected man finds some comfort in.
He went back to a whirl of business at his bank, and he has stayed there ever since, "carrying on" his usual everyday job (the only sort of "carrying on" he knows, as Vi Vassity would say). In his way he is "on active service" too; doing his duty by his country. There is something the matter with his heart—besides his crossed-in-love affair, I mean—something that prevents him from enlisting. Very hard lines on him, to be quite young and otherwise fit, but doomed to remain a civilian. Of course there have to be some people as civilians still. We couldn't get on without any civilians at all, could we?
My lover joined as a trooper the day before war was officially declared.
And he came over to Miss Million's house in Wales to tell us of his plans the morning after Mr. Brace had gone off to town. He—the other man—was still in the laurel-green chauffeur's kit that he was so soon going to change for his Majesty's drab-coloured but glorious livery. And I was in my maid's black, with cap and apron, when I opened the door to him.
"Where's your mistress? In the drawing-room? Then come into the library, child," said the Honourable Jim Burke, "for it's you I've come to call upon."
"I've only a minute to spare you," I said forbiddingly, as I showed him into the square, rather mouldy-smelling library, with its wall of unread books and its family-portraits of dead and gone Price-Vaughans."And besides, I don't think a chauffeur ought to come to the front door and——"
"I shall not be a chauffeur a minute longer than it takes me to get out of this dashed kit," said the Honourable Jim. Then he told me about his enlisting for active service.
"It won't be much time I shall have before that regiment gets its orders," he said. "Time enough, though——"
He paused and looked hard at me. So hard that I felt myself colouring, and turned away.
He took a step after me. I felt him give a little pull at my apron-strings to make me look round.
"Time enough to get married, darling of my heart," said Jim Burke, laughing softly.
And he took me into his arms and kissed me; at first very gently, then eagerly, fiercely, as if to make up for time already lost and for all that time yet to come when we must be apart from each other.
This, if you please, was all the proposal that ever I had from the young man.
I know all his faults.
Unscrupulous; he doesn't care how many duller and stodgier people he uses to his own advantage. Insincere; except to his wife. To me he shows his heart!
Vain—well, with his attractions, hasn't he cause for it? Unstable as water, he shall not excel; except in the moment of stress and the tight corner where a hundred more trusted men might fail, as they did the day he won the Military Cross, when he took that Germantrench single-handed, and was found with the enemy, aghast, surrendering in heaps around him!
His dare-devil gaiety and recklessness are given value now by the conditions of this war. And I feel that he will come back to me unscratched at the end of the struggle, his career assured. It will be luck, his unfailing luck as usual—no merit of his!
Meanwhile I wait hopefully.
I feed my heart's hunger, as do so many other women, on pencilled scraps of letters scrawled across the envelope "on active service."
As for my living, I haven't gone back to Aunt Anastasia, nor have I yet solved the weighty problem of how a woman of my class and requirements is to live on the separation allowance. Now that Miss Million has gone back to her old work Mrs. James Burke has taken another job; well paid, and to a kindly mistress.
Miss Vi Vassity's "dresser" gave notice because she had been offered higher wages by a French dancer. And London's Love, who, she says, hates "to see any strange face putting the liquid white on her shoulders," offered the post to "little Smithie."
I accepted.
I live the queer, garish, artificially lighted life of the theatres now. I dress the hair and change the Paris frocks, and lace the corsets, and mend the pink silk fleshings of England's Premier Comedienne.
I am in her dressing-room now, busily folding and putting away her scattered, scented garments. Even from here I can catch the roar of applause that goes up from every part of the theatre as she comes on inthat dainty, impertinent travesty of a Highlander's uniform to sing her latest recruiting song, "The London Skittish."
To the right of her making-up mirror there stands a massively framed, full-length photograph of a slim lad's figure in black tights. It's the picture of that worthless trick cyclist, who was the love of Vi Vassity's life.
Ah, Vi! Do you think he is the only man whose cropped dark hair has felt like velvet beneath a woman's lips? The only man whose laugh has pierced a woman's heart "straight as a pebble drops into a pool"?
The woman knows better. I know some one who——
Suddenly I saw his dark head, his laughing face in the mirror before me.
Jim!
I thought I must be dreaming.
I turned; I met his black-lashed blue gaze.
His broad-shouldered, khaki-clad form filled up the narrow doorway of Vi Vassity's dressing-room.
"Child," he called in the inexpressibly soft Irish voice.
He held out his arms.
It was he—my husband.
I ran to him....
"Gently," he said, wincing ever so little. "Mind my shoulder, now. It's smashed—more or less completely."
I cried out, seeing now that the jacket hung like a dolman upon his shoulder. I faltered the thought thatwould come to any woman. Yes! However brave she was, however glad to let her man go out to do "his bit," there is a limit to what she is willing to lose ... and there are still young and strong and able-bodied civilians in England, untouched even by a Zeppelin bomb!
I said: "You can't—you can't be sent out again?"
"Bad cess to it, no," frowned my husband. "Don't look so relieved now, or I'll have to feel ashamed of you, Lady Ballyneck——"
"What d'you call me?" I asked, not comprehending. It was some minutes before I did understand what he said about his dad and his brother Terence, both "outed" the same day at Neuve Chapelle.
"And ourselves saddled with the God-forsaken castle and the estate, save the mark," said my husband, Lord Ballyneck, ruefully. "What we'll do with it until we let it to Miss Million at a princely rental (as I mean to) the dear only knows! It's a fine match you've made for yourself, child, though, when all's said. A title, at all events. Sure I might have done better for myself," he concluded, with his blue eyes, alive with mirth and tenderness, feasting on my face. "I might have done better for myself than Miss Million's maid!"
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