ANOTHER RUMPUS!
"OH!" I said--and felt myself blushing scarlet at the memory of all the
absurd little incidents that were between me and this stranger. The
incident of the garden-hose, and of my giving him a shower-bath with it
the other evening; and how Aunt Anastasia had poured added cold water
over him in a metaphorical manner of speaking. Then came the memory of
how we had met the next morning on the top of the 'bus when I was
chaperoning Million to her lawyer's. And of how the young man, chastened
by my aunt's best iced manner the night before, wouldn't even have said
"Good morning" unless I had addressed him. It was all very absurd, but
confusing.
He said, in that pleasant voice of his: "Good afternoon! I wish to
return some property of yours."
"Of mine?" I said, puzzled. I wondered whether a bit of lace of ours or
something of that sort had blown out of the window of No. 45 into the
garden of No. 44.
But the young man, putting his hand into his jacket pocket, took out and
held in the palm of his hand the "property." It was an oval silver
brooch, bearing in raised letters the name "Nellie." The young man said,
"I noticed it on the top of the 'bus just after you got off the other
morning; you must have dropped it----"
"Oh! Thank you so much," I began, taking the brooch. "It isn't mine, as
a matter of fact, but----"
"Oh," he said pleasantly, "you are not 'Nellie'?"
Then he hadn't heard Aunt Anastasia calling me in that very rasping
voice the other evening.
"No," I said, "'Nellie' is our maid; at least she was our maid."
"Oh, really?" he said, very interested.
He has a delightful face. I don't wonder Million said he was just what
she meant by "the sort of young gentleman" that she would like to marry.
Then a thought struck me.
Why not?
Men have married their pretty cooks before now. Why shouldn't this nice
young man be Million's fate? He certainly did seem interested in her. It
would be a regular King-Cophetua-and-the-Beggar-Maid romance. Only,
owing to her riches, it would be Million's rôle to play Queen Cophetua
to this young man, who was too poor to go into the Army. So, feeling
quite thrilled by the prospect of looking on at this love story, I said:
"Would you like to send the brooch on to--to--er--to Miss Nellie Million
yourself?" You see, I thought if he knew where to take it, he would
probably go at once to the Hostelry for Cats of Independent Means and
see Million, and find out about her being now a young lady of
leisure--and--well, that might be the beginning of things!
So I smiled at him and added in my most friendly voice, "Would you like
me to give you the address?"
It was at this moment--this precise moment before he'd even had time
to answer--that Aunt Anastasia, back from her visit to her friend, came
up the tiny garden path behind him.
Yes, and this was the scene that met her gaze: her niece, her poor
brother's child, Lady Anastasia's great-granddaughter (who had already
been reproved for forgetting that she belonged to "OUR FAMILY"),
standing at the front door of her abode to repeat the offence for which
she had been taken to task--namely, "talking to one of the impossible
people who live about here!" The way in which Aunt Anastasia stalked
past the young man was more withering than the most annihilating glance
she could have given him.
To me she said, in a voice that matched her look: "Beatrice, come into
the house."
I went into the drawing-room.
She followed me.
Then the storm broke!
Of all the many "rows" I've had since I came to live with Aunt
Anastasia, this did, as Million would have said, "take the bun."
"Beatrice!" She threw my name at me as if it had been a glove thrown in
my face. "Beatrice! Little cause as I have to think well of you, I did
at least trust you!"
"You've no reason, Auntie," said I, holding myself as stiff as she did
(which was pretty ramroddy). "You've no reason not to trust me."
"What?" A bitter little laugh. "No sooner is my back turned, no sooner
have I left you alone in the house, than you betray my confidence. How
do I find you, after all that I said to you only the other evening on
this same subject? Standing there on the doorstep, just as if you'd been
poor Million, poor little gutter-bred upstart, preparing to receive----"
"I wasn't 'preparing to receive' anybody!" hotly from me.
"No?" with icy satire from Aunt Anastasia. "You were not even going to
ask the young man in? You stood there, like a scullery-maid indulging in
a vulgar flirtation with a policeman."
"I wasn't, I wasn't."
"I heard you giving him an address where he could write to you,
doubtless?"
"Write to me? It was nothing of the kind," I took up, ready to stamp
with rage. "It was--it was Million's address I was going to give to that
young man."
"A likely story! Million, indeed!"
"You don't believe me? How dare you not, Aunt Anastasia? Look! Here's
the proof!" And I held out to her the oval silver brooch with the raised
"Nellie" upon it.
"Look! This is Million's brooch. She dropped it on the 'bus the other
morning. And the young man from next door found it. And he came round to
return it----"
"Yes. As soon as he had made certain, or had been assured, that you
would be alone," declared my Aunt Anastasia, with unyielding accusation
in every angle of her. "To return Million's brooch! Oh, Beatrice, you
must think me very unsophisticated!" The thin lips curled. "This is an
excuse even thinner than that about the garden-hose the other evening.
No doubt there have been others. How long have you been carrying on this
underhand and odious flirtation with that unspeakable young cad?"
"Auntie!" I felt myself shaking all over with justifiable indignation. A
flirtation? I? With that young man! Why, why--when I'd such honourable
intentions of securing him, as her "gentleman" lover, for our newly made
heiress, Million! I simply boiled over with righteous rage. I said,
"You've no right to make such a suggestion."
"Beatrice! You forget to whom you are speaking."
"I don't. But I'm twenty-three, and I don't think you need go on
treating me as if I were a schoolgirl, refusing to listen to what I have
to say. Allowing me no liberty, no friends----"
"Friends! Is that why you make your own in this hole-and-corner
fashion?"
"I shouldn't be to blame if I did!" I declared hotly. "You don't realise
what my life is here with you. It's all very well for you to live in the
past, pondering over the dear departed glories of our family. But at my
age one doesn't care twopence for an illustrious past. What one wants is
something to do, and to be--and to enjoy--in the present! I don't see
why it should be enough for me to remember that, even if I am poor, I am
still Lady Anastasia's great-granddaughter. It isn't enough! It's the
most futile sort of existence in the whole world--living up to an old
pedigree when you haven't even got money enough to buy yourself the
right kind of shoes. You sneer at Million for being what you call
nouveau-riche. It isn't half as humiliating and ridiculous as being what
we are--nouveau-pauvre!"
"Beatrice, I think you have gone mad, to say such things."
"Do you? I haven't. I've been thinking them inside me for
months--years," I told her violently. The oval mirror on the opposite
side of the wall from that Gainsborough portrait of Lady Anastasia
showed a queer picture; the picture of a tall, angular, grey-haired and
aristocratic-looking spinster in steel-grey alpaca, coldly facing a
small, rumpled-looking girl (myself) with the tense pose, the bright
flush, and the clenched hands of anger. "And now I can't--I can't stand
this sort of thing any longer----"
"May I ask what you intend to do?"
"To go!" I had only that instant thought of it. But once the words were
out of my mouth I realised that it was the only thing in the world to
do. Hadn't Million said so only this morning when she bade me good-bye?
"You ought to clear out of this house.... You ought to have a fair old
bust-up, Miss Beatrice. And then you ought to bunk!"
Well! "The fair old bust-up" I'd had, or was having. The next thing was
"to bunk"!
Aunt Anastasia regarded me with cold eyes and a still more contemptuous
curl of the lip.
"You will go, Beatrice? But how? To what?"
"To earn my own living----"
"What? There is nothing that you can do."
"I know," I admitted resentfully. "That's another grudge I have against
our family. They never have had to 'come down into the market-place.'
Consequently they wouldn't adapt themselves to the new conditions and
fit themselves for the market now. They'd rather stand aside and
vegetate in a mental backwater on twopence a year, thinking, 'We are
still Lovelaces,' and learning nothing, nothing. Talk about 'The Idle
Rich'! They are not such cucumbers of the ground as 'The Idle Poor'!
I've been trained to nothing. Lots of the girls who live along this road
have taken up typewriting, or County Council cookery, or
teaching--things that will give them independence. I have nothing of the
sort to fall back upon. I might take care of little children, perhaps,
but people like Norland nurses at a hundred a year nowadays. Or I might
find a post as a lady's maid----"
"What?"
"Well, you taught me to pack and to mend lace, Auntie! And I can do
hair--it's the only natural gift I've got," I said. "Perhaps I might get
them to give me a chance in some small hairdresser's to begin with."
"You are talking nonsense, and you do not even mean what you say,
child."
"I mean every word of it, and I don't see why it should be nonsense," I
persisted. "It isn't, when these other girls talk of making a career for
themselves somehow. They can get on----"
"They are not ladies."
"It's a deadly handicap being what our family calls a lady," said I.
"I'm going to stop being one and to have something like a life of my own
at last."
"I forbid you," said Aunt Anastasia, in her stoniest voice, "I forbid
you to do anything that is unbefitting my niece, my brother's child, and
Lady Anastasia's great-granddaughter!"
"Auntie, I am past twenty-one," I said quite quietly. "No one can
'forbid' my doing anything that is within the law! And I'm going to take
the rest of my life into my own hands."