CHAPTER IIIn Which Miss Pamela Pounce is orderedto Pack
In Which Miss Pamela Pounce is orderedto Pack
Pamela Pouncesat with a bunch of cowslips in one hand and the lid of the ribbon box in the other; she had fallen into a profound muse.
It was the cowslips, though they were but artifice, which had set her active brain thus suddenly and idly day-dreaming. They had brought her back with a rush to the old farm where she had been born and brought up. The whole surroundings of her exile had vanished. She was no longer in the big, bare, stuffy, untidy workroom at the back of Madame Eglantine’s celebrated Paris hat shop: in the centre of snippets and straws, feathers, fringes, flowers and other fashionable fripperies; under the glare of the skylight; with the patter and gabble of French voices, the click of scissors, the long-drawn sighs or quick pants of energetic stitching, the rustle of crumpled silks, in her ears, and in her nostrils the indescribable atmosphere of theatélier, as it was called. An apartment hermetically sealed to the outer airs, save what might penetrate of them through the opening of its doors; redolent of the gums of artificial flowers, of last year’s and this morning’s succulent cookery—Monsieur Ildefonse, the husband of Madame Eglantine, liked a point of garlic in most dishes—and of the faint sickly scents of hair powder and fine lady’s perfumes which hung about the whole establishment. There were other odours in the workroom besides, of which the less said the better. It was little wonder that Pamela Pounceshould now and again feel her splendid vitality slacken; that she should have considerably fined down from a country buxomness since she had joined Madame Eglantine’s staff.
But the bunch of cowslips had brought her away—far away from it all for a blissful moment.
She was back again at home. The exquisite freshness of an early summer morning on the Kentish downs encompassed her. Her young bosom lifted with ecstasy. Oh! the breath of England: pungent of the sea, sweet of the moorland herbs, free from the hills and whispering of the woods, was there ever anything like it? There was a fragrance of breadmaking too from mother’s oven, and a lovely reek of burning weeds where father was busy over the potato fields!
Pamela started. A voice, sharp as a pen-knife, had recalled her to reality.
“Ah, Meess”—she went by no other name in this French servitude, either from her employer or her sister workers. It was an unconscious tribute to a certain fine apartness of character, as well as to her British independence. “Ah, Meess,” cried Madame Eglantine, “is this how I find you? Asleep with your eyes open! My faith, is this how you conduct yourself in the thick of the business hours? And the Marquise who expects that hat by noon!”
Pamela opened her day-dreaming eyes full upon the speaker, gave an inaudible sigh and a small ironic smile. She did not start or blush or show any sign either of flurry or vexation at the acrid accent of the rebuke, she was too completely mistress of herself for that. Her hand hovered over the ribbon box; then with a decisive movement she nipped a shimmering purple roll and began to draw out its darkly radiant lengths.
“Purple!” ejaculated Madame Eglantine, surprised into a quite amiable tone; “purple for that blonde Marquise who is not yet twenty! And she means to wear all white muslins with lace in floods. Did I not tellyou so? That ribbon I bought forMadame la Gouvernante—it is for dowagers——”
She broke off and stared.
Pamela had twisted and snipped and pinched and the hat was trimmed in what her famouspatronneherself would have described as “un tour de main.” She now held it up on her balled hand, and turned it slowly from side to side.
“But it is a stroke of genius!” exclaimed the little Frenchwoman. She hated Pamela, but she was above all an artist. “No, no, do not touch it again, no one must touch it! You have a thousand times reason. Blue or green or pink—anyone with the ordinary mind would have blended me the banal pretty-pretty with those cowslips. The Marquise would have been but one of a score of shepherdesses, no more distinguished than a dragée box for a baptism! But now——”
She paused and waved her hands before the delight of the mental picture. A small, dusky woman with very bright eyes and extraordinarily swift movements, she was like some quick furry animal of the mouse tribe; a greater contrast to the fair, large, composed English girl could hardly be imagined; yet on one point these two were singularly akin. Both were geniuses in the same restricted yet fascinating realm of art.
If there were a creature on earth capable of stepping straight off into the shoes of Madame Eglantine, first milliner in the world of Fashion, it was Pamela Pounce, the British yeoman’s daughter!
Perhaps it was this consciousness of her rival’s merits which made the Frenchwoman, while too acute of intellect not to recognise them, regard her clever apprentice with feelings which approached detestation. Yet she was soon to find another cause.
“I’d better put in the stitches myself, I suppose, M’dame?” said Pamela tranquilly. She spoke French fluently by this time, with a pronounced if not unpleasing British accentuation. “The young ladies are so fondof sewing things to death. It’s like a hand on pastry,” she went on meditatively, as she bit her thread, and flung a cool, tantalising glance at the irate ring of countenances about her. “You have, or you haven’t got it, and no one to blame.”
“That will do, Meess. There is too much conversation here, Mademoiselle Panache!” Madame hopped spitefully from Pamela upon the directress, who, sitting large, square and sallow at the centre table, dispensing materials, had permitted herself a gratified smile over the snubbing of the English girl. For a moment or two there was silence in the over-lighted, under-ventilated apartment. The season was early July; a blazing white sunshine was pouring down through the casements which their muffed glass but feebly mitigated.
Then the little angry, sharp-toothed mouse that was the bland, coaxing, fluent Eglantine of the showroom found a fresh grievance.
“My God, Mademoiselle Anatoline, are you making a bouquet or tying bristles on a broomstick? And Heaven pardon me, Mademoiselle Eulalie, but if those hands of yours have been washed since—since—— What have you been doing with those hands,ma fille? Blacking the boots or scratching your head?”
Anatoline, who was large and fat and fair, became an apoplectic purple; and Eulalie, who was the colour of a lemon with hair like a raven’s wing, turned a shade more livid than nature had made her.
There was a titter, beginning sycophantically upon the lips of Mademoiselle Panache. But Pamela’s smooth face, white where it was not delicately carnation, might have been that of a handsomely tinted statue. She cut her thread, tweaked one of the shimmering purple loops, and once again putting the hat on her clenched hand, gave it a little shake. The creation was complete!
Madame’s swift beady eye rolled in her direction.
“Give yourself the trouble to bring that upstairs to theshowroom, Meess,” she ordered. “Madame D’Aimargues said she would call, herself, before midday, to try it on before it was sent. I will join you presently and you had better remain, in case there were required an alteration.”
“Bien, M’dame,” Pamela responded with some alacrity. She might get a whiff of good open air as she went up the stairs. There might even be a window ajar in the showroom. Such a miracle had been known to occur on a very hot day.
Monsieur Ildefonse, Eglantine’s husband, was sitting in the little glass cage off the back showroom, pompously referred to as theBureau. This individual had once been a very noted personality; no other, actually, than the French Queen’s appointed coiffeur; in consequence sought after to frenzy by every woman with the smallest pretension to Fashion. Fine ladies had had their heads dressed at six o’clock in the morning, nay, even three days before some special assembly at Court.
To be able to say, with a toss of flying vaporous curls, exquisitely redolent ofPoudre à la Maréchale: “In effect, my dear one, Ildefonse’s last idea, what do you think of it? It is succeeded.Hein?” To be responded to, perchance, with a cry of envy and despair: “Ildefonse! You managed to get Ildefonse!” And to know your interlocutor, younger than you perhaps, and prettier, yet altogether at a disadvantage, “a positive frump, my dear,” under less skilful hands, that had been to reach, in verity, the very needle-peak of feminine triumph, a few years ago.
But star succeeds to star; one Monsieur Charles was Court twiddler, curler, crimper, frizzer, and general head artist. For Monsieur Ildefonse had come into a heritage and retired. Not a fallen star, therefore; merely astronomically removed to another hemisphere! He shone now, though, it may be added, with a doubtful radiance, in a restricted connubial circle; in other words, he sat at home and totted up accounts for his clever, money-makingspouse; made bargains for her with flower manufacturers and mercers, and bullied the stewards of great houses when Madame la Duchesse or Madame la Connétable forgot to remember such insignificances as the settlement of bills.
Unanimously the workgirls adored him, with the single exception of Pamela; and the relations between Madame Eglantine and her consort, characterised in public by the most touching demonstrativeness, were regarded as the very romance of matrimony. But Pamela, who had come under the glance, more often than she cared, of Monsieur Ildefonse’s slyly roving eye, had her private opinion.
She shuddered from him as she had shuddered from the fat, sleek, brown slugs that came out after rain on the garden walls at home.
As a little girl she would explain: “’Tain’t that I’m afraid, you see, but it makes me creep.”
She could have found no better words in which to describe the effect upon her of the fascinating Monsieur Ildefonse.
There was a midday lull, this scorching day, even in Madame Eglantine’s thriving establishment. It was late season, too, and save for orders like that of the little Marquise D’Aimargues, for such as were privileged to join in the pastimes of Royal haymaking and churning, or a stray wedding order, business was slack, and the great little milliner herself was preparing for that round of the most noted watering places, with “just a few models” in her baggage, which was her thrifty fashion of spending the holidays.
Pamela cast, in passing, a hasty glance between the green curtains of theBureau, to assure herself that her pet aversion was safely employed.
He had removed his wig on account of the heat, and she turned her eyes quickly away from the revolting spectacle of his close-cropped bristling black head and the roll of olive fat at the back of his neck above the embroidered collar of his blue cloth coat.
The pink, be-padded, be-wreathed, be-gilded, be-mirrored, be-draped salons of Madame Eglantine were empty. Pamela walked slowly into the middle of the front room and hesitated. Her own charming shape was reflected from every possible angle. Down below, the wholePlaceseemed asleep; a buzz of flies within and without, a lazy footfall on the shady side and a distant rumble emphasised the universal drowsiness.
When Madame la Marquise’s coach came along there would be a prodigious clatter to wake them all up. Pamela knew that she was quite safe. It’s all very well to trim a hat. You never know what it’s like till you’ve tried it on.
Very deliberately she divested her glossy chestnut hair of its discreet cap, loosened the swelling waves a trifle more on either side of the firm rose-tinted ivory of her face.
“If a dash of powder was for poor girls like me, I wouldn’t be too bad-looking. I’d say that for myself,” she thought, and firmly set the hat of the Marquise at the right angle over her radiant brow.
Well, it was a complete success. Like every true artist she was doubly critical of herself, but Pamela had to admit that she could find no flaw in her own taste and that the wide-brimmed curving Italian straw with its bold sweep of purple ribbon, and its hanging bunches of cowslips was a remarkably fine set-off for the glory of her amber hair and the audacious brilliance of her complexion. Without a tinge of envy or discontent she surveyed herself thoughtfully.
“Upon my word, Pamela Pounce, my girl!”—she was fond of addressing herself mentally; as it were her strong reasonable mind to her agreeable body. “You would have held your own with the best of them if it had been the fancy of Providence to set you in the aristocracy. Ugh!”
With a piercing scream she started out of her complacent reflection.
A horrible olive-hued, leering face appeared over her shoulder in the mirror; a blue-clothed arm stole round her waist.
Pamela swung herself free, whisked the hat off her head ready to use it as a weapon should Monsieur Ildefonse pursue his advances.
In the dead pause the quick rustle of Madame Eglantine’s light summer flounces were heard on the stairs.
Instantly the ex-hairdresser’s countenance lost its satyr smiles, and became composed into its usual mask of smooth propriety.
“Is that you,mon Agneau rose?” he cooed.
“Yes, yes, it is I,petit rat de mon cœur,” she replied.
These endearments having perfunctorily passed between them, Madame halted on the threshold and sent the glitter of her swift glance from her spouse to her apprentice.
“I took the liberty of trying on the hat what I’ve just trimmed, M’dame,” said Pamela then in her brazen way.
She wasn’t going to put it into Monsieur Ildefonse’s power to tell on her behind her back, or worse still, to pretend to be shielding her. She knew his slimy ways.
“You do well to call it a liberty,” said Madame Ildefonse, showing all her small pointed teeth as if she wanted to bite Pamela. She was panting a little, and there was a sort of whiteness about her nostrils that pointed to considerable if repressed emotion. “But let it pass. You were giving your opinion, I presume, my cabbage-stalk?”
“Meess very naturally wished me to admire your exquisite taste,ma tendre biche,” he responded. “‘No one,’ says she to me, ‘but Madame Eglantine could have made this inimitable, this absolutely original and distinguished combination, all the while retaining the stamp of the most high tone.’”
Monsieur Ildefonse was very glib of tongue.
“A-ah!” said Madame, smiling horribly. “You and Meess flatter me in your private conversations.”
“My charmer, how can I console myself in yourabsence, except by——” he broke off, for at that moment, with sounds of pomp, a thunder of hoofs, a crash and a clatter, the street woke up indeed, as Miss Pounce had prognosticated. And Madame D’Aimargues drove up in her four-horsed coach.
Madame Eglantine cast off her rage, as one may divest oneself of a garment, to be re-assumed at the chosen moment; Monsieur Ildefonse, with a relieved shrug of his huge shoulders, began to retire, cat-footed, to his den.
“Remain as you are, Meess,” commanded the milliner, now entirely concentrated on the exigencies of her business.
She shook out her flounces and summoning the bland business smile to her features cast a swift glance at the nearest mirror before taking two steps to greet her valuable patroness.
It was that glance at the mirror which precipitated the catastrophe. By some counter-reflection, Madame Eglantine’s jealous eyes caught a vision of Ildefonse, her husband, her cabbage, the little rat of her heart, pausing in his turn to cast a final ogle upon the abandoned, the sly, the seductive, the shameless Meess!
Eglantine beheld that ogle. She swallowed her emotion. She was above allfemme d’affaires. Everything must give way before the profit of the moment. She could wait.
The little Marquise, blonde and slim and rouged, ethereal yet vivid, fluttered in, fanning herself, tried on her hat, chattered, laughed, approved, exclaimed upon the heat, and, still fanning herself, departed, leaving on Pamela’s mind the impression of a glittering butterfly, as lovely, as useless, and as impalpable. You could crush her, thought the girl, between finger and thumb.
Her serious lambent gaze had hardly followed the radiant apparition to the door, when the explosion burst forth.
It was all the more devastating for having been withheld.
Wanton! Hussy! Baggage! Designing intriguing slut!Meess de Malheur!What was Pamela, after all, but a stray apprentice, and an English one at that, flung upon her, Madame Eglantine’s, benevolence for the sake of old friendship, living on charity, abeggar!Cette Lydie, how she had haggled! But if such wickedness had been paid for in all the gold of false Albion, Madame Eglantine would not have kept her, to the destruction of her domestic happiness!
“Meess, you pack this day.”
She further added a flood of vituperation, to which Pamela, all her pretty carnations dead on her white cheeks, listened in a fixed silence.
When the Frenchwoman had run herself out of breath on a high scream, Pamela answered her in English, which the whilom Bath milliner spoke brokenly, but understood perfectly. “That’ll do, M’dame. I’m as pleased to get out of this place as ever you can be to see the back of me. As for that fat husband of yours, I wouldn’t touch him with a pair of tongs. And as for yourself, I’d not remain a moment longer than I can help with one as doesn’t know the meaning of truth, and would take an honest girl’s character away out of pure spite and malice. And don’t you dare,” pursued Pamela, with a swelling voice, “say anything against my character, or as sure as there is justice in Heaven, I’ll bring your business about your ears. I’ll tell that old cat, my Aunt Lydia, what’s happened, that you caught your horrid old Ildefonse ogling me in the glass, and that you haven’t that trust in him—and sure, I’m with you there, for he ain’t fit to be trusted the length of your apron, and so I tell you fair—you haven’t that trust in him that you could have another moment of peace with me under your roof. God help you; I don’t blame you! Give me the price of my ticket home, and I’ll see Aunt don’t get at you over the indenture.”
For all her courage, for all the longing which thethought of England brought her, the heart of Pamela Pounce was heavy as lead. She knew that, at the Kentish farm, things were going badly with the yeoman; she knew that she dared not add the burden of her penniless self to that which rested on his shoulders. She knew that odious as it would be, that abominably as her relative would abuse of the situation, there would be nothing for it, but to throw herself again on her Aunt Lydia’s family feeling, as soon as the Dover coach landed her in London town.
Her aunt was now with her mistress in Hertford Street, back from the Wells, according to the latest reports, and that was one bit of luck; another was, that judging by the tone of the letter just received by Madame Eglantine with an order for hats, my Lady Kilcroney’s maid was in the highest exultation over her mistress’s royal promotion.