CREAM AND COMPLIMENTS
IN a few minutes we were sitting opposite to each other at a pretty
table in the upper room. We were close to the window and could look down
on the Bond Street crowd of people and cars. In front of us was the
daintiest little tea that I had ever seen. This young man is, of course,
accustomed to ordering the sort of tea that women like?
"And this is the second time that you have poured out tea for me, Miss
Lovelace!" remarked the Honourable Jim Burke, as he took the cup from my
hand. "Admirable little hostess that you are, remembering not to ask me
whether I take sugar; storing up in your mind that what I like is a
cupful of sugar with a little tea to moisten it!"
This was quite true.
I felt myself blush as I sat there. Then I glared at him over the plate
of delicious cakes. The young man smiled; a nice smile, that one must
allow.
"You look like a little angry black pigeon now. You've just the
movements of a pigeon ready to peck at some one, and the plumage," he
said, with a critical blue eye on my close-fitting black jacket. "All it
lacks is just a touch of bright coral-red somewhere. A chain, now; a
charm on the bangle; a flower. It's to you I ought to have sent those
carnations, instead of to your----Do you call her your mistress, that
other girl? That one with the voice? Mad idea, the whole arrangement,
isn't it? Just think it over for a moment, and tell me yourself. Don't
you think it's preposterous?"
"I--er----"
I didn't know what to say. I bit into one of the little cakes that
seemed all chocolate and solidity outside. Inside it was all cream and
soft-heartedness and sherry flavouring, and it melted over on to the
crisp cloth.
"There, now, look what a mess you're making," commented the young
Irishman with the undeservedly pleasant voice. "Try one of these almondy
fellows that you can see what you're doing with. To return to you and
your masquerade as Miss Million's maid----"
"It is not a masquerade," I explained with dignity. "I don't know what
you mean by your--I am in Miss Million's service. I am her maid!"
"Have some strawberries and cream. Really fine strawberries, these,"
interpolated the Honourable Jim. "What was I saying--you her maid?
Wouldn't it be just as sensible if I myself were to go and get myself
taken on as valet by that other young fellow that was sitting there at
tea in her rooms yesterday--the bank manager, or whatever he was?
Curious idea to have a deaf-and-dumb chap as a manager."
Here I really had to bite my lips not to laugh again. Certainly poor Mr.
Brace had descended, like Mr. Toots, into a well of silence for the
whole of that afternoon. I daresay he thought the more.
"When I heard at the Cecil that all those boxes and things belonged to
the very young lady with her maid, naturally enough I thought I knew
which of the two was the mistress," pursued the Honourable Jim in a sort
of spoken reverie, eating strawberries and cream with the gusto of a
schoolgirl. "Then when I came up and saw the wrong one waiting on the
other, and looking like a picture in her apron----"
"Please don't say those things to me," I interrupted haughtily.
"Why not?"
"Because I don't like it."
"It's a queer disposition the Lovelace women must be of, then. Different
from the others. To take offence? To shy at the sound of a man's voice
saying how sweet they look in something they've got new to wear? I will
remember that," said Mr. Burke, still in that tone of reverie. With
every word he spoke I longed more ardently to feel very angry with this
young man. Yet every word seemed to make genuine anger more impossible.
Sitting there over his strawberries and cream, he looked like some huge,
irresponsible, and quite likeable boy. I had to listen to him. He went
on: "Then when I saw you as the maid, I thought you'd just changed
places for a joke. I made sure 'twas you that were Miss Million."
"What?" I cried.
For now I really was angry.
It was the same kind of hot, unreasonable, snobbish anger that surged
all over me when Million (my mistress) began to lose her habit of saying
"Miss," and of speaking to me as if I'd come from some better world.
Utterly foolish and useless anger, in the circumstances. Still, there it
was. I flushed with indignation. I looked straight at the Honourable Jim
Burke as I said furiously: "Then you really took me--me!--for the niece
of that dreadful old--of that old man in Chicago?"
"I did. But, remember," said Mr. Burke, "I'd never set eyes on that old
man."
"Ah! You admit that, then," I said triumphantly and accusingly, "in
spite of all that long story to Miss Million. You admit yourself that it
was all a make-up! What do you suppose Miss Million will say to that?"
The young fortune-hunter looked at me with perfect calm and said: "Who's
to tell her that I admitted I'd never seen her old uncle?"
"To tell her? Why!" I took up. "Her maid! Supposing I go and tell
her----"
"Ah, but don't you see? I'm not supposing any such thing," said Mr.
Burke. "You'll never tell, Miss Lovelace."
"How d'you know?"
"I know," he said. "Don't I know that you'd never sneak?"
And, of course, this was so true. Equally, of course, I was pleased and
annoyed with him at the same time for knowing it. I frowned and stared
away down Bond Street. Then I turned to him again and said: "You said to
me yesterday, 'What is your game?'"
"So I did. But now that I've found out you're not the heiress herself, I
know what your game is."
"What?"
"The same as mine," declared this amazing young fortune-hunter, very
simply. "Neither of us has a penny. So we both 'go where money is.'
Isn't that it, now?"
"No, no!" I said hotly. "You are hatching up an introduction to Miss
Million, deceiving her, laughing at her, plotting against her, I expect.
I'm just an ordinary lady's-maid to her, earning my wages."
"By the powers, they'll take some earning before you're done,"
prophesied the young Irishman, laughing, "mark my words. You'll have
your work cut out for you, minding that child let loose with its hands
full of fireworks. I feel for you, you poor little girl. I do, indeed."
"Really. You--you don't behave as if you did. People like you won't make
my 'work' any easier," I told him severely. "You know you are simply
turning Miss Million's head, Mr. Burke."
"Oh, you wrong me there," he said solemnly.
"I don't wrong you at all. I see through you perfectly," I said. And I
did. His mouth might be perfectly grave, but blue imps were dancing in
his eyes. "You are flattering and dazzling poor Mi--my mistress, just
because she has never met any one like you before!"
"Ah! You've met so many of us unprincipled men of the world!" sighed Mr.
Burke. "I daren't hope to impose on your experience, Miss Lovelace.
(We'll have two lemon water ices, please"--to the waitress.)
"No, but you are imposing on her," I scolded him, "with your--your
stories of knowing her uncle, and all that. And now you're----"
"Well, what are my other crimes?"
I took breath and said: "You're asking her out for drives in that coach
of yours----"
"Would to Heaven it were my coach," sighed Lord Ballyneck's youngest
son. "It belongs to my good pal Leo Rosencranz, that turn-out! I am
merely----"
"What I want to know is," I broke in very severely, "where is all this
going to lead to?"
He took the wafer off his ice before replying. Then he said very mildly:
"Brighton, I thought."
Isn't an Irishman the most hopeless sort of person to whom to try to
talk sense? Particularly angry sense!
"I don't mean the coach-drive," I said crossly. "You knew that, Mr.
Burke. I mean your acquaintance with my employer. Where is that going to
lead to?"
"I hope it's going to lead to mutual benefits," announced the Honourable
Jim briskly. "Now, since you're asking me my intentions like this, I'll
tell them to you. I've never before had the knife laid to my throat like
this, and by a bit of a chestnut-haired girl, too! Well, I intend to see
a good deal of Miss Million. I shall introduce to her a lot of people
who'll be useful, one way and another. Haven't I sent two friends of
mine to call on her this afternoon?"
"Have you?" I said.
So that was the reason Million insisted on my taking the afternoon off!
She didn't intend me to see his friends! I wondered who they were.
Mr. Burke went on: "Between ourselves, I intend to be a sort of Cook's
guide through life to your young friend--your employer, Miss Million. A
young woman in her position simply can't do without some philanthropist
to show her the ropes. Perhaps she began by thinking you might be able
to do that, Miss--Smith?" he laughed softly. He said: "But I shall soon
have her turning to me for guidance as naturally as a needle turns to
the north. I tell you I'm the very man to help a forlorn orphan who
doesn't know what to do with a fortune. Money, by Ishtar! How well I
know where to take it! Pity I never have a stiver of my own to do it
with!"
"You haven't?" I said.
"Child, I'm a pauper," he replied. "The descendant of Irish kings; need
I say more? There's not a page-boy at the Cecil who hasn't more ordinary
comforts in his home than I have. My father's the poorest peer in
Ireland. My brother's the poorest eldest son; and I--I tell you I can't
afford to spend a week at Ballyneck; the damp in the rooms would ruin my
clothes; the sound of the rats rompin' up and down the tapestry would
destroy my high spirits; and then where'd I be?"
I looked at him. He, too, then, was of the nouveaux-pauvres, the class
that is sinking down, down under the scrambling, upward-climbing feet of
the successful. But he took the situation in a different spirit from the
way in which my Aunt Anastasia took it. He frankly made what he could
out of it. He hoisted the Jolly Roger and became a pirate on the very
seas that had engulfed the old order.
Disgraceful of him.... One ought not to wish to listen to what he had to
say.
"Champagne tastes on a beer income; that's bad. But here's this
little--this little Million girl with a champagne income and no tastes
at all yet. I shall be worth half her income to her in consequence," he
announced. "I shall be able to give her priceless tips. Advice, you
know, about--oh, where to buy all the things she'll want. The cars. The
wines and cigars. (Even a grown-up woman isn't often to be trusted about
those.) The country house she'll have to take. What about Lovelace
Court, Miss Lovelace? Care to have her there, in case the people who
have got it want to turn out? I've no doubt I could wangle that for you,
if you liked."
I said, feeling bewildered, and flurried, and amused all at once: "What
is 'wangle'?"
The Honourable Jim Burke laughed aloud as he devoured his lemon water
ice.
"You'll know the meaning of that mystic verb before you have known me
very long," he said. "It's the way I make my living."
I looked at him, sitting there so debonair and showy in his expensive
raiment, talking so cynically in that golden voice. So typically one of
"our" world, as Aunt Anastasia prophetically calls it; yet so ready to
rub shoulders with every other kind of world that there may be--Jews,
theatrical people, hotel porters, pork-butchers, heiresses!
I asked, rather inquisitively: "Make your living how? What do you do?"
"People, mostly," said the Honourable Jim with a cheery grin.
No; there's no getting any truth or any sense out of a man like that.
Just before we rose from the tea-table I said to him: "And the end of it
all? I suppose you'll marry--I suppose you'll get Miss Million to marry
you!"
"Marry?" said Mr. Burke with a little quick movement of his broad chest
and shoulders. An odd movement! It seemed mixed up of a start, a
shudder, and a shaking aside of something. "Marry? A woman with a voice
like that? And hands like that?"
This touched my professional pride as manicurist and lady's-maid. I told
him: "Her hands are much better since I've been looking after them!"
"They must have been pretty rough-hewn," said Mr. Burke, candidly,
"before!"
"Of course, they were in a horrid state," I said unguardedly. "But yours
would be red and rough if you'd had to scrub and to wash up and to
black-lead fireplaces----"
"What? Had the little Million been doing all that before she came into
Uncle's money?" cried the Honourable Jim, with delighted interest
beaming all over his face. "Truth is stranger than cinema films! Tell me
on, now; where was this Dollar Princess in service?"
"With m----" I began. Then I shut my lips with a snap. What was
happening? This young man that I had meant to cross-examine was simply
"pumping" me! Not only that, but I was very nearly getting to the point
of being ready to tell him anything he asked. How had this come about?
Anyhow, it must not be. I put on a very forbidding look and said: "I
shall not tell you where Miss Million was."
"Haven't ye told me? She was with you or your relatives. If that isn't
the grandest joke!" chuckled this unsuppressable young man. "Don't
attempt to deny it, for I see it all now. Isn't it the finest bit of
light opera? Isn't it better than me wildest dreams? And how did she
shape, the heiress? What sort of a character would you give her? Was she
an early riser--honest, obliging? Could she wait at table? And is it a
bit of her own she's getting back now, setting you to hand round the
cups?" He laughed aloud. "Can't I see it all now--the pride of her? She
that was waiting on you, she's got you to skivvy for her now! Oh, I
wouldn't have missed this Drama of the Domestic Servant Problem! Don't
hope to keep me out of the stalls, Miss Lovelace, after this! It's in
the front row I shall be in future for every performance!"
With this alarming threat he finished his ice and laughed once more,
joyously. While I was debating what to say, he took up the conversation
again.
"Tell me, are you going to get Miss Million's hands to look exactly like
yours?" he asked, fastening his eyes on my fingers. I clenched my fists
and hid them away under the table. "Ah, but I noticed them at once. And
your voice? Are you going to teach her to speak exactly as you do?
Because, when that happens----" He paused (at last).
"Well?" I said, beginning to put on my new gloves. "When that happens,
what?"
"Why, then I shall certainly beg her to marry me," declared the
Irishman. "Faith, I'll go down on my knees to the girl then."
"Not until then?" I suggested. I was really anxious to get through this
baffling young man's nonsense. I wanted to find out what he really meant
to do about all this.
But he only shook his head with that mock-solemn air. He only said:
"Child, who knows what's going to happen to any of us, and when?"
Half the way back to the Cecil (Mr. Burke had hailed a taxi for me and
had then got into it with me) I was wondering what I am to say to my
mistress, Miss Million, about the happenings of my afternoon out. How am
I to break it to her that I spent nearly the whole of it in the society
of a young man against whom I have been warning her--Million--ever since
he first sent in his card?
"Does your Miss Million allow flowers?" Mr. Burke said cheerfully as we
whizzed down the Haymarket. "To you, I mean?"
It was an outrageous thing to say. But in that voice it somehow didn't
sound outrageous, or even disrespectful. The voice of the Celt, whether
Irish, Highland-Scottish, or Welsh, does always seem to have the soft
pedal down on it. And it's a most unfair advantage, that voice, for any
man to possess.
I said hastily: "Really, I don't think you need speak to me as if I were
a maid on her afternoon----"
Here I remembered that this was exactly what I was. And again I was
forced into reluctant laughter.
"You've no business to be taking the job on at all," said the young man
at my side in the taxi, quite gravely this time. "Was there nothing else
you could do, Miss Lovelace?"
"No; nothing."
"What about woman's true sphere? You ought to get married."
"Very easy to say that, for a man," I said. "How could I get married?"
Really earnestly he replied: "Have you tried?"
"No! Of course not!"
"You should," he said. He looked down at me in a curious, kindly way. He
said: "I've wangled things harder than that both for myself and my
friends. Men like a wife that can wear diamonds as if they belonged to
her; a wife that can talk the same language as some of their best
clients. Well! Here's a charming young girl, with looks, breeding, and a
fine old name. Can do!" he brought his flat hand down on the top of his
ebony cane, and added, "Have you a hatred of foreigners?"
"Foreigners?" I repeated, rather breathless again over the sudden
conversational antics of a young man who can't be serious for two
seconds together. "Foreigners? What for?"
"Why, for a husband! Supposing now that I were to introduce to you a
fellow I knew, a fellow with 'a heart of gold' and pretty well
everything else in metal to match it, like all these German Jews----"
I gasped: "You think I ought to marry a German Jew?"
"That's just the merest idea of mine. Startled you, did it? We'll
discuss it later, you and I. But it'll take time. Lots of time--and, by
Jove! There isn't any too much of that now," he exclaimed, glancing at
his wrist-watch as we passed the lions of Trafalgar Square, "if I'm to
get back to your--to our Miss Million----"
"Is she expecting you," I asked rather sharply, "again?"
"She is not. But here are these two friends of mine calling on her; and
I'm bound to put in an appearance before they leave. Rather so! I'm not
turning them loose on any new heiresses, without keeping my eye on what
they're up to," explained the Honourable James Burke with his usual
bland frankness. "So here I stop the taxi."
He got out. I saw him feel in all his pockets, and at last he took out
half a sovereign. (The last, I daresay.)
Then he turned to me. "I'll give you three minutes' start, child, to get
back to the hotel and into that cap and apron of yours. One more
word.... Go through the lounge, and you'll see the animals feeding. Go
on, man"--to the taxi driver: "The Hotel Cecil; fly!"