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MISS MILLION'S MAID
[Illustration: "_Why, she's going to ask me
down there, too, to one of
her week-end parties!_"]
Miss Million's Maid
A Romance of Love and Fortune
By BERTA RUCK
(Mrs. Oliver Onions)
AUTHOR OF
"His Official Fiancee," "In Another Girl's Shoes,"
"The Girls At His Billet," Etc.
[Illustration]
With Frontispiece
By E. C. CASWELL
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York
Published by arrangement with DODD, MEAD & COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE YOUNG MAN NEXT DOOR . . . . . . 1
II TWO GIRLS IN A KITCHEN . . . . . . 10
III A BOLT FROM THE BLUE . . . . . . . 17
IV THE LAWYER'S DILEMMA . . . . . . . 26
V MILLION LEAVES HER PLACE . . . . . . 31
VI ANOTHER RUMPUS! . . . . . . . . 36
VII MY DEPARTURE . . . . . . . . . 44
VIII I BECOME MILLION'S MAID . . . . . . 53
IX WE MOVE INTO NEW QUARTERS . . . . . . 60
X AN ORGY OF SHOPPING! . . . . . . . 67
XI AN OLD FRIEND OF THE FAMILY . . . . . 72
XII THE DAY OF THE PARTY . . . . . . . 82
XIII MY FIRST "AFTERNOON OUT" . . . . . . 96
XIV CREAM AND COMPLIMENTS . . . . . . 105
XV A DIFFERENT KIND OF PARTY . . . . . . 118
XVI A WORD OF WARNING . . . . . . . . 129
XVII REVELRY BY NIGHT . . . . . . . . 141
XVIII MY FIRST PROPOSAL . . . . . . . . 150
XIX WAITING FOR THE REVELLER . . . . . . 156
XX WHERE IS SHE? . . . . . . . . . 168
XXI AN UNEXPECTED INVASION . . . . . . . 180
XXII HER COUSIN TO THE RESCUE . . . . . . 191
XXIII I START ON THE QUEST . . . . . . . 206
XXIV WE SEEK THE "REFUGE" . . . . . . . 220
XXV FOUND! . . . . . . . . . . 231
XXVI MISS MILLION IN LOVE . . . . . . . 241
XXVII AN UNUSUAL SORT OF BEGGAR . . . . . . 255
XXVIII THE CROWDED HOLIDAY . . . . . . . 273
XXIX LOCKED UP! . . . . . . . . . 307
XXX OUT ON BAIL . . . . . . . . . 319
XXXI MILLION BUCKS UP . . . . . . . . 344
XXXII WALES FOREVER! . . . . . . . . 354
XXXIII MISS MILLION HAS AN IDEA! . . . . . . 372
XXXIV THE FORTUNES OF WAR . . . . . . . 384
CHAPTER I
THE YOUNG MAN NEXT DOOR
MY story begins with an incident that is bound to happen some time in
any household that boasts--or perhaps deplores--a high-spirited girl of
twenty-three in it.
It begins with "a row" about a young man.
My story begins, too, where the first woman's story began--in a garden.
It was the back garden of our red-roofed villa in that suburban street,
Laburnum Grove, Putney, S.W.
Now all those eighty-five neat gardens up and down the leafy road are
one exactly like the other, with the same green strip of lawn just
not big enough for tennis, the same side borders gay with golden
calceolaria, scarlet geranium, blue lobelia, and all the bright
easy-to-grow London flowers. All the villas belonging to the gardens
seem alike, too, with their green front doors, their white steps, their
brightly polished door-knockers and their well-kept curtains.
From the look of these typically English, cheerful, middle-class,
not-too-well-off little homes you'd know just the sort of people who
live in them. The plump, house-keeping mother, the season-ticket father,
the tennis-playing sons, the girls in dainty blouses, who put their
little newly whitened shoes to dry on the bathroom window-sill, and who
call laughing remarks to each other out of the window.
"I say, Gladys! don't forget it's the theatre to-night!"
"Oh, rather not! See you up at the Tennis Club presently?"
"No; I'm meeting Vera to shop and have lunch in Oxford Street."
"Dissipated rakes! '_We don't have much money, but we do see life_,'
eh?"
Yes! From what I see of them, they do get heaps of fun out of their
lives, these young people who make up such a large slice of the
population of our great London. There's laughter and good-fellowship and
enjoyment going on all up and down our road.
Except here. No laughter and parties and tennis club appointments at No.
45, where I, Beatrice Lovelace, live with my Aunt Anastasia. No gay
times _here_!
When we came here six years ago (I was eighteen) Aunt Anastasia was
_rigidly_ firm about our having absolutely nothing to do with the people
of the neighbourhood.
"They are not OUR kind," she said with her stately, rather thin
grey-haired head in the air. "And though we may have come down in the
world, we are still Lovelaces, as we were in the old days when your dear
grandfather had Lovelace Court. Even if we do seem to have dropped out
of OUR world, we need not associate with any other. Better _no_ society
than the wrong society."
So, since "our" world takes no further notice of us, we have no society
at all. I can't _tell_ you how frightfully, increasingly, indescribably
dull and lonely it all is!
I simply long for somebody fresh of my own age to talk to. And I see so
many of them about here!
"It's like starving in the midst of plenty," I said to myself this
evening as I was watering the pinks in the side borders. The girls at
No. 46, to the right of our garden, were shrieking with laughter
together on their lawn over some family joke or other--I listened
enviously to their merriment.
I wondered which of them was getting teased, and whether it was the one
with my own name, Beatrice--I know some of them by name as well as I
know them by sight, the pretty, good-humoured-looking girls who live in
this road, the cheery young men! And yet, in all these years, I've never
been allowed to have a neighbour or an acquaintance. I've never
exchanged a single----
"Good evening!" said a pleasant, man's voice into the midst of my
reverie.
Startled, I glanced up.
The voice came over the palings between our garden and that of No. 44.
Through the green trellis that my aunt had had set up over the palings
("so that we should be more private") I beheld a gleam of white
flannel-clad shoulders and of smooth, fair hair.
It was the young man who's lately come to live next door.
I've always thought he looked rather nice, and rather as if he would
like to say good morning or something whenever I've met him going by.
I suppose I ought not to have noticed even that? And, of course,
according to my upbringing, I ought certainly not to have noticed him
now. I ought to have fixed a silent, Medusa-like glare upon the
trellis. I ought then to have taken my battered little green
watering-can to fill it for the fourteenth time at the scullery-tap.
Then I ought to have begun watering the Shirley poppies on the other
side of the garden.
But how often the way one's been brought up contradicts what one feels
like doing! And alas! How very often the second factor wins the day!
It won the evening, that time.
I said: "Good evening."
And I thought that would be the end of it, but no.
The frank and boyish voice (quite as nice a voice as my soldier-brother
Reggie's, far away in India!) took up quite quickly and eagerly: "Er--I
say, isn't it rather a long job watering the garden that way?"
It was, of course. But we couldn't afford a hose. Why, they cost about
thirty shillings.
He said: "Do have the 'lend' of our hose to do the rest of them, won't
you?" And thereupon he stretched out a long, white-sleeved arm over the
railings and put the end of the hose straight into my hand.
"Oh, thank you; but I will not trouble you. Good evening."
Of course, that would have been the thing to say, icily, before I walked
off.
Unfortunately I only got as far as "Oh, thank you----" And then my
fingers must have fumbled the tap on or something. Anyhow, a great spray
of water immediately poured forth from out of the hose through the
roses and the trellis, right on to the fair head and the face of the
young man next door.
"Oh!" I cried, scarlet with embarrassment. "I beg your pardon----"
"It's quite all right, thanks," he said. "Most refreshing!"
Here I realised that I was still giving him a shower-bath all the time.
Then we both laughed heartily together. It was the first good laugh I'd
had for months! And then I trained the hose off him at last and on to
our border, while the young man, watching me from over the palings, said
quickly:
"I've been wanting to talk to you, do you know? I've been wanting to
ask----"
Well, I suppose I shall never know now, what he wanted to ask. For that
was the moment when there broke upon the peaceful evening air the sound
of a voice from the back window of our drawing-room, calling in outraged
accents:
"Beatrice! Bee--atrice!"
Immediately all the laughter went out of me.
"Y--yes, Aunt Anastasia," I called back. In my agitation I dropped the
end of the hose on to the ground, where it began irrigating the turf and
my four-and-elevenpenny shoes at the same time.
"Beatrice, come in here instantly," called my aunt in a voice there was
no gainsaying.
So, leaving the hose where it lay, and without another glance at the
trellis, in I dashed through the French window into our drawing-room.
A queer mixture of a room it is. So like us; so typical of our
circumstances! A threadbare carpet and the cheapest bamboo easy-chairs
live cheek-by-jowl with a priceless Chippendale cabinet from Lovelace
Court, holding a few pieces of china that represent the light of other
days. Upon the faded cheap wallpaper there hangs the pride of our home,
the Gainsborough portrait of one chestnut-haired, slim-throated
ancestress, Lady Anastasia Lovelace, in white muslin and a blue sash,
painted on the terrace steps at Lovelace Court.
This was the background to the figure of my Aunt Anastasia, who stood,
holding herself as stiff as a poker (she is very nearly as slim, even
though she's fifty-three) in her three-year-old grey alpaca gown with
the little eightpence-three-farthings white collar fastened by her pearl
brooch with granny's hair in it.
Her face told me what to expect. A heated flush, and no lips. One of
Auntie's worst tempers!
"Beatrice!" she exclaimed in a low, agitated tone. "I am ashamed of you.
I am ashamed of you." She could not have said it more fervently if I'd
been found forging cheques. "After all my care! To see you hobnobbing
like a housemaid with these people!"
Aunt Anastasia always mentions the people here as who should say "the
worms in the flower-beds" or "the blight upon the rambler-roses."
"I wasn't hobnobbing, Auntie," I defended myself. "Er--he only offered
me the hose to----"
"The thinnest of excuses," put in my aunt, curling what was left
visible of her lips. "You need not have taken the hose."
"He put it right into my hand."
"Insufferable young bounder," exclaimed Aunt Anastasia, still more
bitterly.
I felt myself flushing hotly.
"Auntie, why do you always call everybody that who is not ourselves?" I
ventured. "'Honour bright,' the young man didn't do it in a bounder-y
way at all. I'm sure he only meant to be nice and neighbourly and----"
"That will do, Beatrice. That will do," said my Aunt majestically. "I am
extremely displeased with you. After all that I have said to you on the
subject of having nothing to do with the class of person among which we
are compelled to live, you choose to forget yourself over--over a garden
wall, and a hose, forsooth.
"For the future, kindly remember that you are my niece"--
(impressively)--"that you are your poor father's child"--(more
impressively)--"and that you are Lady Anastasia's great-granddaughter"
--(this most impressively of all, with a stately gesture towards the
Gainsborough portrait hanging over the most rickety of bamboo tables).
"Our circumstances may be straitened now. We may be banished to an
odious little hovel in the suburbs among people whom we cannot possibly
know, even if the walls are so thin that we can hear them cleaning their
teeth next door. There is no disgrace in being poor, Beatrice. The
disgrace lies in behaving as if you did not still belong to our family!"
Aunt Anastasia always pronounces these last two words as if they were
written in capital letters, and as if she were uttering them in church.
"I am going to the library now to change my books," she concluded with
much dignity. "During my absence you will occupy yourself by making the
salad for supper."
"Yes, Auntie," I said in the resigned tone that so often covers seething
rebellion. Then a sudden thought struck me, and I suggested: "Hadn't
I--hadn't I better return that hose? It is simply pouring itself out all
over the lawn still----"
"I will return the hose," said my aunt, in the tragic tones of Mrs.
Siddons playing Lady Macbeth and saying "Give me the dagger!"
She stepped towards the back window.
I didn't feel equal to seeing the encounter between Aunt Anastasia in
her most icily formal mood and the young man with the nice voice, of
whom I caught white-and-gold glimpses hovering about on the other side
of the green trellis.
I knew she'd be rude to him, as only "our families" can be rude to those
whom they consider "bounders." He's nothing to me. I've never spoken to
him before this evening. I oughtn't to mind what he thinks about those
weird people who live at No. 45. I oughtn't to wonder what it was he was
just going to say to me.
So I fled out of the bamboo and heirloom furnished drawing-room, down
the narrow little oil-clothed passage, and into the kitchen with its
heartening smell of hot gooseberry tart and the cheerful society of
Million, our little maid-of-all-work. It's the custom of our family to
call the maid by her surname.
(At the same time I couldn't help wondering what that young man had been
going to say.)