CHAPTER XIIn Which There is a Prodigious Scandal AboutPink Flounces
In Which There is a Prodigious Scandal AboutPink Flounces
Noneever knew the share which Pamela had taken in Felicity Falcon’s last night on earth.
She had laid the slender figure as decently and respectfully as she could, on a couch, kissed the cold cheek once more, and walked out of the house.
Those who would find her in the morning must make what they could of the story. Pamela had her own life and those dependent on her to consider. She could not afford to be mixed up with a scandal.
Whether the chapel people to whose ranks the young preacher had belonged, were desirous of hushing up the evidence which might bring discredit upon them, or whether it were really believed that Mrs. Morgan had died of a heart-stroke brought on by grief did not transpire. They were buried together and given a very pious funeral with much preaching and psalm-singing.
The event made a profound impression upon Pamela; it revived the cruel emotions of her recent personal experience.
She had seen what love meant as never before; she understood its fearful supremacy, and how little anything else mattered beside it in life. There were times when she even envied Felicity Falcon; true, she had loved to desperation and death, but she had loved and been loved with a noble purity and faithfulness!
The memory of the young Welsh preacher’s dead face, radiantly innocent, and of the triumph, set in agony, ofthe actress’s countenance as she had last seen it, haunted her continually. Death had stamped on their mortal love the seal of eternity.
Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs had lain in wait, the whole warm June sunset hour, till Miss Pounce should emerge from the side-door of the shut-up shop; he followed the erect, briskly walking figure with due discretion, and only permitted himself to catch her up at the corner of Berkeley Square. Then he accosted her.
“Don’t, I do beseech you,” he cried, quickly forestalling the fierce repudiation in her eye, “don’t refuse to listen! I have not come after you to insult you, I haven’t, upon my honour! Pamela, I want to apologise. I want to ask your pardon.”
His tone was so imploring and respectful, he looked so eager, so gallant and handsome too, in the rosy amber light, as he bent towards her, bare-headed, that her weapon of pride seemed broken in her hand.
She tried to say with dignity: “There’s nothing more that I ever wish to hear from you, Mr. Bellairs,” but her voice faltered, and a sudden tear in each eye betrayed her.
“See,” he went on eagerly. “The gate of the garden there is open. Let us go in, and sit on that bench. Just for a little while! Five minutes! One minute!”
Pamela, shaking her head, and exclaiming: “No, sir. Nay, Mr. Bellairs, I cannot listen, ’tis impossible! ’Tis wrong! ’Tis folly!” nevertheless allowed herself to be drawn into the cool green tree-shadowed spot, and actually sat down on the suggested seat.
He did not as much as offer her his hand; yet his urgency drove her almost with a physical force.
“Oh, Pamela,” he cried, letting himself fall beside her, and clasping his hands and wringing them, “can you conceive what I felt when I heard that ’twas you—you!—oh, my generous girl—who paid my debt? Andto think how the first use I made of my liberty was to offend you so grossly.”
Pamela swallowed a sob.
“’Tis over and done with now, Mr. Bellairs. Let me forget.”
She tried to rise, but he caught a fold of her dress.
“One moment more, if you have a woman’s heart. Nay, you see how anxious I am not to presume. I will go on my knees if you like. Oh, Pamela, when I went to pay back my Lord his ninety-seven pound ten, out of that pocketful of money you know of, and he stared at me, and: ‘Why, man,’ says he, ‘I never thought to see you this morning! Her Ladyship was in one of her bad ways, and sure, if it was I had been in the sponging house, she’d not have out with a farthing! I’ve been but waiting for a better moment,’ says he. ‘Then who, in the name o’ God?’ cries I, cutting him short. Pamela, I lost no time in making mycongéto my Lord, and I ran all the way to that fellow Jobbins—I promise you! ‘For I’ll get to the bottom of this,’ I cried. ‘And ’twas a lady veiled,’ quoth he, and stuck to it, and the fool that I am, must needs think my cousin Kitty was playing a sort of game with me; ashamed not to pay for me, but, the stingy thing! mortal afraid lest I should ask her again! And I went back again to Hertford Street to make a further exhibition of myself.”
Here Pamela could not keep from laughter.
“You laugh! ’Tis all I deserve. Indeed, ’twas a monstrous absurd scene. But my Lady pretty soon convinced me that the magnanimity I ascribed to her was unknown to that bit of strass she calls her heart. By the Lord, I think I was mad that morning altogether! I hardly know how I got out of Hertford Street once more, and all the way down to Jobbins, for the thought had dawned! I’ve not so many friends, you see, Pamela! ‘A tall, fine figure of a lady,’ says he, ‘stepping as clean as your own sorrel filly, Mr. Jocelyn. And I caught,’ says he, ‘a gleam of hair under the veil—now, if you’llrun your eye down the row in there,’ says he, jerking his thumb towards his stables, ‘you’ll see, third from the door, a bit of a gloss on a hack’s back that’s just the same colour.’ And so I knew,” added Jocelyn, with a sudden drop from his tone of mimicry, into accents of real emotion.
Pamela set her teeth upon her trembling lip. She made a desperate effort after her usual fine air of independence.
“’Twas when we were friends, I’ll have you remember, Mr. Bellairs,” she said, with a toss of her head.
“Ah, but Pamela, let us be friends now,” he spoke with a boyish earnestness which made him infinitely more attractive than in his most dashing mood of sparkishness. “’Tis just for that I have sought you. I want your forgiveness. I want your friendship. Let me see you sometimes, as a friend, a most respectful friend, honoured by your acquaintance. I am a wretched, worthless fellow,” he went on, with a kind of bitter humility. “I can’t even pay you back your loan, now, Pamela. But grant me a chance. Let me show myself better than you have known me. ’Pon honour, it would give me something to hope for, just to think you’d let me see you now and again, in a kindly way; that you had not cast me altogether out of your life.”
It was the acknowledgment that he couldn’t pay her back that softened Miss Pounce’s obduracy towards him. She consented to forgive him, to consider him as a friend, even to admit the possibility that if they met—oh, quite accidentally!—on an off-day, she mightn’t refuse to take a stroll with him in the Green Park.
It would seem as if nothing had changed; as if she was the same too-trusting, foolish girl, and he the same sly, audacious villain; yet, as she determinedly parted from him and hurried out of the garden to her lodging, she knew that there had come a profound alteration into their relations.
Meanwhile the enmity excited in the bosoms of Miss Smithson and Miss Popple against the successful milliner was far from abating. Indeed, the mature young lady who had hoped for Pamela Pounce’s present position had an ever-gathering sense of grievance. What if she had a heavy hand? Were there not solid dowagers and others who preferred substance and money’s worth to your fly-away gossamer nothings?
Between these two important members of Madame Mirabel’s establishment, there had come to be a tacit understanding—though they were far too genteel and high-minded to indulge in anything like a conspiracy—that it was their bounden duty, in dear Madame Mirabel’s interests, to keep a sharp look-out on Miss Pounce, and report any proceeding of hers calculated to injure them.
“As, of course, my dear, poor Anna-Maria,” Clara Smithson would declare of her rich business relative, “is that good-natured that times and times I’ve had to step in, as it were, and save her from herself.”
Miss Popple was too tactful to request specification.
“La, you never say, dear!” she would exclaim, with unflagging emphasis. “And what a good thing it is that she’s got you, the poor kind creature! ’Tis what we all feel.”
The while her private thoughts would run contemptuously:
“As if every one didn’t know, you long-toothed old frump, that ’tis you Madame keeps on out of charity, and has the books regular checked by a spry young gentleman from the bank every Saturday night, private, or they’d be in the muddle of the world before the month was out!”
Miss Clara Smithson’s secret opinion of Miss Popple was probably no more complimentary, but it is in the nature of things that worthy individuals, working for a common cause, should sink personal feelings; and, therefore, when Miss Smithson made the appalling discovery in connection with the pink-flounced muslin of aSunday afternoon, it was Miss Popple to whom she confided it the first thing on Monday morning.
That Sunday afternoon being a remarkably fine day, Miss Smithson had accepted the offer of the married nephew in the Tobacco Trade, who was particularly civil to her in view of her reported savings, to drive with him in a hackney as far as Richmond Park, and partake of a choice refection of ale and winkles by the river-side. Now, as the hackney was rolling along the highway towards Richmond, they passed a cottage on the outskirts of the town, a quite superior cottage residence with an embowered garden, honeysuckle and roses. In this garden, upon a rustic chair, a young woman was seated with a child upon her lap. She wore a conspicuous dress of pink muslin. Her head, which was bent over the child, was bare, unpowdered, and clothed with a profusion of bright chestnut tresses. The child’s face, Miss Smithson was able to observe, was very dark, almost foreign-looking, and its little curly pate, coppery-red.
There was something familiar in the attitude of the young person in the flaring frock, and Miss Smithson, who was not a rapid thinker, puzzled over it most of the afternoon. Towards the end of her last glass of ale, neglecting the tempting offer of a final winkle which the devoted nephew was extending to her on his tie-pin, she clapped her hands and cried:
“I have it!”
Being asked to explain this strange diversion from the business of the hour, she declined, and it was only into the sympathetic bosom of Miss Popple that she now unfolded her theories.
“Pamela Pounce it was, my dear, as I’m a living sinner! There’s not another head like that on the town, I’ll swear! And a little black child on her lap, as bold as brass! Miss is so fashionable, too, as we all know. Foh, the hussy! It really,” said the virtuous Miss Smithson, “makes me shudder!”
And shudder she did, till Miss Popple thought she heard her bones rattle.
“I always said,” said Polly Popple, “that there was something mysterious about that young woman’s private life. Dark, did you say, dear? We all know the complexion of the young gentleman that used to come here after Miss Pounce. And she’s been seen with him in the Green Park again, most audacious of late. And what’s to be done now,” she cried in a virtuous passion, “to get her out of the house, and not have her contaminating us respectable females? Let’s to Madame Mirabel this moment!”
“Beware how you do such a thing!” exclaimed Miss Smithson, horror-struck. “Tut, Polly! We’ve got to get things a vast more circumspect before we take such precipitous action. The first thing to find out is whether Miss Pounce has a gown of that impudent colour.”
“I’ll ask her this minute!” exclaimed Popple, springing up from the little horsehair chair and making for the door.
“And if we do bring it home to her, Polly,” pursued Miss Smithson, clutching her friend’s fat wrist, “far be it from me to be hard on a fellow-creature, however perverted and brazen. I’d rather put the matter before Miss Pounce herself—ay, and before that good creature, her aunt, my Lady Kilcroney’s woman, who’s had a mort of trouble with her already—and get the abandoned gal to send in her resignation, rather than upset my cousin! Anna-Maria has a weak heart.”
Polly Popple pondered. Both prudent virgins exchanged a look. It dawned upon these sensitive consciences that Madame Mirabel might not be of their way of thinking; might, in fine, be disposed to put modes before morals, especially as custom was increasing every day and the fame of Pounce millinery spreading far and wide.
“Maybe you’re right,” said Polly thoughtfully. “Well, I’ll be back as soon as I can, dear, and let you know what I’ve drawn out of her.”
The showroom was empty of custom, the hour being still early, and Pamela, singing a little song under her breath, was engaged, with the bright energy which characterised her, in superintending the disposal of the wares. She had fanciful schemes of colour differing with each day, and subtly suited to the mood most likely to be engendered by the weather. Thus, on a cold, bleak autumn afternoon you might find a flamingo flame of feather calling you through the glass; and on a torrid July morning such as the present, the coolest and most ethereal creams and greys; or a rustic straw with a wreath of moon daisies that would set you dreaming of the country. Even such a creation was Miss Pounce now holding in her hand when, rather out of breath—for she was of a stout habit and a congested type of comeliness—Polly Popple came heavily up to her.
“And pray, Miss Pounce,” said the assistant, while, at the abruptness of the address, unpreceded by the usual “Good morning,” all the young ladies turned to stare—“pray, Miss Pounce, was you by any chance Richmond way yesterday?”
Polly was no diplomatist.
“And what’s that to you, Miss Popple?” responded Pamela. “As a matter of fact, I was; but ’tain’t none of your business, as I’m aware! Girls, what are you doing?”
Pamela scented mischief, and resented the tone of the question, which rang in unmistakable challenge. Nevertheless, she remained good-humoured.
“Perhaps,” said the other darkly, “’tis more my business than you think of. Might I further inquire if you was wearing a pink gown, miss?”
“Yes, Popple, I was. A pink gown, flounced to the waist, muslin. A sweet thing it is, and suits me uncommon. Perhaps you’d like to know if I wear a whitebouffandto it, and the style of hat?”
“Oh, never mind the hat, Miss Pounce! Since you are so obleeging as to permit me another question, mightI ask if you was a-setting in a garden a-holding of a child upon your lap?”
The colour flew like a flag to the head milliner’s cheek and fire to her eye. Then she abruptly turned her back upon the questioner, and the youngest assistant, who happened to be taking a hat out of a drawer, was surprised to see that she was struggling with a violent inclination to laugh.
“Ho!”
The ejaculation leaped with a world of horror from Polly’s lips.
Her superior wheeled back upon her.
“Yes, Miss Popple, I was sitting in a garden, and very pleasant it was among the roses; and I had a child upon my lap, the dearest, sweetest little creature that ever breathed, a perfect cherub! A girl, if you want to know, Miss Popple, and though dark, like to be a beauty.”
The young ladies tittered, though there were looks interchanged, too. And Pamela’s tone, tripped up with subterranean mirth, sounded to some of them rather hysterical.
Polly, after a dumb show of wounded female delicacy, expressively rendered, tottered from the room as if her legs could scarce carry so much horrified rectitude; and the incident apparently dropped. Indeed, Pamela regarded it merely as another of Popple’s nasty bits of spleen. A low-minded, common creature! As if her girls would be taken in by such vile suggestions! As if the life of Pamela Pounce, head milliner, was not as fresh and fair as her own face!
An episode which Pamela could not but consider as curious in the circumstances presently occurred and drove the very existence of Popple from her mind.
A carriage drew up to the door, early as it was—ten o’clock had not yet struck—and a customer entered, a short, dark young woman of a marked type of Spanish beauty, who walked with a bold cadence of the hips that set her maize silk panniers swinging, and a carriage ofthe head that you might call like that of a fawn, or of a serpent, as your feelings towards her prompted.
Pamela advanced in her most engaging manner.
“What can I do for you, madam?” She broke off. “Merciful heavens!” something within her cried. “I should know that face.”
The newcomer fixed her with beautiful, insolent eyes. There was a gleam of rubies in each delicate ear, and at the dusky round throat a red fire that came and went from a monstrous clasp of the same stones, half-hidden by laces.
“If you will show me a hat, all black, with black feathers,” began the lady. She had a slow voice, rich like cream, and an odd guttural aspiration of the consonants. “Something with the Spanish air.”
In her turn, she stopped short. The milliner had fallen back a pace, and was looking at her with horror.
“I think,” said Pamela, very low but very distinctly, “that you have entered this establishment by mistake.”
The foreign lady wheeled upon her. There was no doubt about it, with all her beauty she was viperish.
“Fool, my name is the Countess Sanquhar!”
“And a very fit name for you, too!” responded Pamela.
Upon which extraordinary observation she herself opened the door and stood until the visitor passed out.
You may be a beauty, and you may be the lawful wife of an English peer, but it is difficult to keep your dignity when you are turned out of a shop by a miserable working-woman as if you were the last of the last. Only by doing murder on her offender could the notorious Lady Sanquhar, who had been once the respected wife of an honest Spanish merchant, have redeemed the situation from utter ignominy. But as she could not do murder in actual fact, she only did it with her eyes, as, swaying more than ever, she went forth.
Pamela shut the door; the four assistants stared ather with one accord. They had not known such an exciting morning for a long time.
“Upon my word, Miss Pounce,” said Polly Popple, “you take a deal upon yourself, you do.”
Pamela sat down, rather white about the lips, breathing quickly through dilated nostrils.
“If it had got known that I’d sold as much as a feather to that creature,” she said, “Madame Mirabel might as well put up her shutters, for there’s not a lady of quality would have crossed the threshold of her showroom again.”