THE CROWDED HOLIDAY
WE have now been staying for two crowded days at the "Refuge." It has
certainly been the most extraordinary holiday of my life. A quite
indescribable one, too!
For when I try to put down in words my impression of what has been
happening, I find in my mind nothing but the wildest jumble of things.
There's a background of sun-lit, open country, wide blue sky patrolled
by rolling white clouds, green downs strewn with loose flint, chalk
wastes on which a patch of scarlet poppies stands out like a made-up
mouth on a dead white face of a pierrot, glimpses of pale cliff beyond
the downs, and of silver-grey Channel further still.
These things are blurred in a merry chaos with so many new faces!
There's the drowsy, good-natured, voluptuous face of "Marmora, the
breathing statue-girl," as she lounged in the deck-chair in the shadow
of the lilacs, crunching Mackintosh's toffee-de-luxe and reading "The
Rosary." The tiny, vivacious face of the Boy-Impersonator. The shrewd
face of Vi Vassity, the mistress of the "Refuge," melting into
unexpected tenderness as she bends over the new baby that belongs to the
ventriloquist's wife, the little bundle with the creasy pink face and
the hands that are just clusters of honeysuckle buds....
So many sounds, too, are mixed up with this jumble of fresh impressions!
Rustling of sea winds in the immemorial elm trees. Buzzing of bees in
the tall limes all hung with light-green fragrant tassels! Twittering of
birds! Comfortable, crooning noises of plump poultry in the back yard of
the "Refuge."
Through all these sound the chatter and loud laughter of the "resting"
theatrical girls with their eternal confidences that begin, "I said to
him just like this," and their "Excuse me, dears," and their sudden
bursts of song. How the general rush, and whirl, and glitter, and
clatter of them would make my Aunt Anastasia feel perfectly faint!
Eight or ten aspirins, I should think, would not be enough to restore
her, could she but have a glimpse of the society into which Lady
Anastasia's great-granddaughter is now plunged.
And in such an "infra dig." position, too!
For I am not "an artist," as they all are! I am distinctly quite below
them! I am in domestic service. A "dresser" of the girl whom all of them
call "Nellie" when they are not using the generic "dears" and "darlings"
to her. And yesterday I heard the Serio-singer with the autumn-foliage
hair telling the stout lady (whose place in life seems to be swinging on
a trapeze in emerald-green tights and with a parrakeet perched on each
wrist) "That that little Smith was quite a nice, refined sort of little
thing, very different from the usual run of girls of that class. They're
so common, as a rule. But this one--well! She's the sort of girl you
didn't mind sitting down with, or saying anything in front of.
"Her and Nellie Million seemed to be more like two sisters than mistress
and maid, what I can see of it," said the washed-out-looking Serio, who
"makes up," Million says, with dark brows and well-defined scarlet lips
until she must be quite effective, "on."
"There's something very queer about those two girls, and the way they
are together," added the Serio. (One really can't help overhearing these
theatrical voices, and all the windows were wide open.) "There's that
gentleman cousin of Nellie's, who always calls the other girl 'Miss'
Smith. D'you notice, Emmie? He treats her for all the world as if she
were a duchess in disguise! It might be her he was after, instead of the
other one?"
"With Americans," said the green-tights-and-parrakeets lady
impressively, "it's a fair puzzle to know what they are 'after'!"
She, I know, has toured a good deal in the States. So she ought to know
what she is talking about. But Mr. Hiram P. Jessop is the only American
of whom I can say that I have seen very much.
Each day he has driven over from Lewes, that drowsy old town with one
pricked-up ear of a castle on a hill; and he spends hours and hours
talking to the little cousin whom I really think he sincerely likes.
"And, mind you! I am not saying that I don't like him," Miss Million
confided to me last night as I was brushing her hair. "Maybe I might
have managed to get myself quite fond of him, if--if," she sighed--"I
hadn't happened to meet somebody else first. I don't see any manner of
use in getting engaged to one young man when it is another that you
fancy. Simply asking for trouble, that is. Haven't I read tales and
tales about that sort of thing?"
I sighed as I tied a bit of pink ribbon round the ends of Miss Million's
dark plaits. If only she hadn't happened ever to meet that incorrigible
Jim Burke!
"You haven't heard from him, Miss Million?" I suggested. "You haven't
seen anything of him since he went off after lunch the day I came over
with your cousin?"
"I tell you what it is, Smith. You have got a down on him! Always had,
for some reason," said Miss Million quite fretfully. She got up from the
chair in front of the looking-glass and stood, a defiant little sturdy
figure in the new crepe-de-chine nightie with the big silken "M" that I
had embroidered just over her honest heart. "You are always trying to
make out that the Hon. Mr. Burke is not to be trusted, or somethink. I
am sure you are wrong."
"What makes you so sure of that?" I asked rather ruefully.
"Well, it isn't likely I should take a fancy to any one I didn't think I
could trust," said Miss Million firmly. "And as for his not having been
here this last day or two, well! I don't think anything of that. A
gentleman has got his business to attend to, whatever it may be. Hasn't
he?"
I said nothing.
"I am not fretting one bit just because he has not been to see me,"
maintained Miss Million stoutly, in a way that convinced me only too
well how her whole heart was set upon the next time she should see the
Hon. Jim. "It would not surprise me at all if he just turned up for that
picnic on the cliffs that we are all going to to-morrow. I know Vi told
him he could come to that. I bet he will come. And in those tales,"
added Miss Million, "it is very often at a picnic that the hero chooses
to go and ask the young lady to marry him!" She concluded with an
inflection of hope in the voice that Mr. Hiram P. Jessop had said was so
pretty.
Poor Mr. Jessop! He may win Million's fortune for his aeroplane
invention. But good-bye to his chances of the heiress herself if the
Hon. Jim does turn up to-morrow.
The Hon. Jim Burke did turn up. But not at the picnic, exactly.... Let
me tell you about it from the beginning. The picnic was to take place on
the cliffs near Rottingdean. Some of the "Refugettes" walked, looking
like a band of brightly dressed, buoyant-spirited schoolgirls on a
holiday. Two of the party, namely, Mr. Jessop and his cousin, my
mistress, motored in the little two-seater car that he had kept on to
stay with him in Lewes. Others had hired donkeys, "for the fun of the
thing." Marmora, the Twentieth-Century Hebe, and her friend, the
Boy-Impersonator, had been very sweet and friendly in their offers to me
to join the donkey-riding party. But for some reason I felt I wanted to
be quiet. I had one of those "aloof" moods which I suppose everybody
knows. One feels not "out of tune" with one's surroundings, and
disinclined for conversation. The girls and Miss Vi Vassity and my
mistress and the one man at the picnic, namely, Mr. Jessop, all seemed
to me like gaily coloured pictures out of some vivacious book. Something
to look at! After the noisy, laughing lunch, when the party had broken
up into chattering groups of twos and threes, and were walking farther
down the cliffs, I felt as if I were glad that for a few minutes this
gay and amusing book could be closed. I didn't go with any of them. I
pleaded tiredness. I said I would stay behind and have a little rest on
the turf, in the shadow of Miss Vi Vassity's bigger car that had brought
over the luncheon things.
The party melted away. I watched them disappear in a sort of moving
frieze between the thymy turf and the hot, blue sky. Then I made a couch
for myself of one of the motor-rugs and a gay-coloured cushion or two. I
had taken off my black hat and I curled myself up comfortably in a long
reverie. My thoughts drifted at last towards that subject which they
accuse girls' thoughts (quite unjustly!) of never leaving.
The subject of getting married! Was I or was I not going to get married?
Should I say "Yes" or "No" to Mr. Brace when that steady and reliable
and desirable young Englishman returned from Paris, and came to me for
his answer? Probably "Yes." There seemed no particular reason why it
should not be "Yes." I quite like him, I had always rather liked him. As
for him, he adored me in his honest way. I could hear again the
unmistakable earnestness in his voice as he repeated the time-honoured
sentiment, "You are the one girl in the world for me!"
Why should I even laugh a little to myself because he used a rather
"obvious" expression?--an expression that "everybody" uses. If you
come to that, nobody else has ever used it to me! And I don't believe
that he, Mr. Reginald Brace, has ever used it before. It would not
surprise me at all if he had never made love, real, respectful,
with-a-view-to-matrimony love, to any other girl but me.
Very likely he's scarcely even flirted with anybody else.
Something tells me that I should be the very first woman in this man's
life.
Now isn't that a beautiful idea?
No other woman in the world will have taught him how to make love.
Any girl ought to be pleased with a husband like that! She would not
have to worry her head about "where" he learnt to be so attractive, and
sympathetic, and tactful, and companionable, and to give all the right
sort of little presents and to say all the right kind of pretty things.
She would not have to feel that he must have been "trained" through love
affairs of every kind, class and age. She would not have to catch, in
his speech, little "tags" of pointed, descriptive, feminine expression;
she wouldn't have to wonder: What girl used he to hear saying that? Ah,
no! The wife of a man like Mr. Reginald Brace wouldn't be made to feel
like purring with pleasure over the deft way he tied the belt of her
sports coat and pinned in her collar at the back or put her wrap about
her shoulders at the end of the second act--she wouldn't have to
remember: "Some woman must have taught him to be so nice in these
'little ways' that make all the difference to us women...."
There'd be none of all this about Mr. Brace. I should be the first--the
one--the only Love! Oughtn't that thought to be enough to please and
gratify any girl?
And I am gratified....
I must be gratified.
If I haven't been feeling gratified all this time, it's simply because
I've been so "rushed" with the worry of Miss Million's disappearance,
and of all that business about the detective, and the missing ruby. (I
wonder, by the way, if we have heard the last of all that business?)
Anybody would like a young man like Mr. Brace! Even Aunt Anastasia, when
she came to know him. Even she would rather I were a bank manager's wife
than that I went on being a lady's-maid for the rest of my life....
"And, besides, I'm not like poor Million, who's allowed her affections
to get all tangled up in the direction of the sort of young man who'd
make the worst husband in the world," I thought, idly, as I turned my
head more comfortably on the cushion. "Poor dear! If she married Mr.
Jessop, it would be better for her. But still, she would be giving her
hand to one man, while her heart had been--well, 'wangled,' we'll say,
by another. How dreadful to have to be in love with a man like that
mercenary scapegrace of a Jim Burke! How any girl could be so foolish as
to give him one serious thought----"
Here I gave up thinking at all. With my eyes shut I just basked, to the
tune of the bees booming in the scented thyme about me and the waves
washing rhythmically at the foot of the tall white cliff on the top of
which our noisy party had been feasting.
It was nice to be alone here now, quite alone.... The washing of the
waves seemed presently to die away in my ears. The booming of the bees
in those pink cushions of thyme seemed to grow fainter and fainter....
Then these sounds began to increase again in a sweet, and deep, and
musical crescendo. Very pretty, that chorus of the bees!
I kept my eyes shut and I listened.
The refrain seemed actually to grow into a little rhythmic tune.
Then--surely those were words that were fitted to the tune? Yes! I
caught the words of that tender old Elizabethan cradle song:
"Gol-den slum-bers kiss your eyes!"
For a second I imagined that the Serio-girl had stolen up, and, thinking
I was asleep, had begun to sing me awake.
Then I realised that it was a man's voice that crooned so close behind
my ear.
Quickly I opened my eyes and turned.
I found myself looking straight into those absurdly brilliant, dark-blue
eyes, fringed by those ridiculously long black lashes of Miss Million's
adored, the Hon. Jim. So he'd come!
Hastily I sat up, with my hands to my hair.
"It looks very nice as it is, Miss Lovelace," said the Hon. Jim gravely,
with a curious twitch at the corners of his firmly cut mouth. "Tell me,
now. Do you consider it a fair dispensation of Providence that all the
domestic virtues should be of less avail to a girl in a sea-breeze than
the natural kink in the chestnut hair of her?"
It is ridiculous, the way this young man always starts a conversation
with some silly question to which there is absolutely no answer!
The only thing to be done was to ignore it! So I rose to my feet as
primly as I could, and said: "Good afternoon! They will all be sorry
that you came too late for the picnic. I believe Miss Vi Vassity has
gone down there, to the left"--here I pointed towards the grey-blue
sweep of distance cut by the mast of a wireless station somewhere near.
"And Miss Million is with her."
The Hon. Jim said gently: "I was not really asking which way they had
gone. What I really wanted to know is----"
Here he looked hard at me----"What has happened to--" here his voice
changed again--"to the gentleman from the new, young, and magnificent
country, where the girls are all peaches, and their lovers are real,
virile, red-blooded, clean-limbed, splendid specimens of what the
Almighty intended the young man to be, I guess?"
Try as I would, I could not keep my lips from quivering with laughter at
the perfect imitation which Mr. Burke gave of the young man who was
certainly worth ten of him in every way, even if he does not speak with
the accent of those who have "come down" (and a good long way, too) from
the Kings of Ireland.
"If you mean Mr. Jessop," I said distantly, "I think he went off with
Miss Vassity and his cousin."
"Ah!" said the Hon. Jim, on a long-drawn note. "Oh! the cousin of the
little Million, is he? Is that it? Does that account for it?"
"Account for what?" I said rather snappishly; and then, feeling rather
afraid that he might answer with something that had nothing to do with
the matter in hand, I went on hastily: "I don't think they can have gone
more than about ten minutes. They will be so glad to see you! You will
easily catch them up if you hurry, Mr. Burke----"
Mr. Burke allowed all the noble reproach of a hunger-striking suffragist
to appear in those blue eyes of his as he looked down at me.
"Child, have you the heart of a stone?" he asked seriously. "'Hurry,'
says she! Hurry! To a starving man who has walked from the Refuge here
on his flat feet, without so much as a crumb of lunch or the memory of a
drink to fortify him! Hurry? Is that all you can think of?"
Well, then, of course----
One can't let a man starve, can one? So----
I was simply forced to do what I could for this undeserving late-comer
in the way of feeding him after his tramp across the downs.
I gave him a seat on the rug. I foraged in the re-packed luncheon
baskets, and got him a clean plate, knives, forks, glass.... I brought
out all that was left by the "Refuge" party of the hunter's beef, the
cold chicken, the ham, the steak-and-kidney pie, and the jam pasty that
had been made by the Serio-girl, who is in her "off" moments a
particularly good cook.
The Honourable Jim did appreciate the meal!
Also he seems to enjoy having a woman to wait hand and foot upon him.
In fact he "made errands" for me among the devastated luncheon baskets
in the shadow of the car.
He demanded pepper (which had been forgotten).
He wanted more claret (when all had been finished).
Finally he demanded whole-meal bread instead of the ordinary kind.
"There isn't any," I said.
"Why not?" he demanded, aggrieved.
I laughed at him across the big table-napkin that I had spread as a
cloth, pinning it down with four of the irregular, sun-heated flints
that lay loose on the turf all about us. I said: "I suppose you're
accustomed to have everything 'there' that you happen to want?"
"I am not," said the Honourable Jim. "But I'm accustomed to getting it
'there' one way or another."
"I see. Is there anything else that I ought to do for you that I've
forgotten?"
"There is. You haven't called me 'Sir,'" said the Honourable Jim. "I
like you to call me 'Sir.'"
Immediately I made up my mind that the word should never pass my lips to
him again.
But he went on eating heartily, chattering away between the
mouthfuls.... I scarcely know what the man said! But I suppose all kinds
of worthless people have that gift of making themselves "at home" in any
company they like, and of carrying on that flow of talk that they
contrive to make sound amusing, although it looks perfectly silly
written down....
One can't imagine anybody really sterling (like my Mr. Brace, for
example) exploiting a characteristic of this sort. The Honourable Jim is
"at" it the whole time. Just to keep his hand in, of course!
(I never cease to see through him.)
At last he finished lunching. He pulled out a very pretty platinum
cigarette-case.
(I wondered who he had "wangled" that out of.)
"Miss Lovelace, you don't smoke?"
"No, thank you. I don't."
"Ah! That's another pleasing thing about you, is it?"
This made me sorry I hadn't taken one of his horrid fat cigarettes.
I said: "I suppose you would think it unwomanly of me if I smoked?"
He laughed. "Child," he said, "you have the prettiest obsolete
vocabulary to be got anywhere outside Fielding. 'Unwomanly,' is it, to
smoke? I don't know; I only know that nine out of ten women do it so
badly I want to take the cigarette out of their fingers and pitch it
into the grate for them! Clouds of smoke they puff out straight into
your face till you'd think 'twas a fiery-breathing dragon in the room!
And staining their fingers to the knuckle as if they'd dipped them in
egg. And smothering themselves with the smell of it in a way no man
manages to do--why, by the scent you'd scarcely tell if it was hair
they'd got on their heads or the stuffing out of the smoking-room
cushions! I can't ever understand how they get any man to want to----"
Here he went off at a tangent.
"Don't let your young mistress learn the cigarette habit, will you? By
the way, you've contrived to improve the little Million in several ways
since last I saw you."
Oh!
So possibly he really had been paying serious court to the heiress. Yes;
again I had the foreboding shudder. Complications ahead; what with the
Honourable Jim and the Determined Jessop, and the Enamoured Million--to
say nothing of the bomb-dropping machine and the fortune that may be
lost!
"You look thoughtful, Miss Lovelace," said the fortune-hunter who
doesn't know there may be no fortune in it. "Mayn't I congratulate
you----"
"What?" I said, quickly looking up from the luncheon basket that I was
repacking. I wondered where he might have heard anything about my Mr.
Brace. "Congratulate me?"
"Why, on your achievements as a lady's-maid."
"Oh! Oh, yes. Very kind of you to say I had effected 'improvements,'" I
said as bitingly as I could. "I suppose you mean Miss Million's hands
that you were so severe about?"
Here my glance fell upon Mr. Burke's own hands, generally gloved.
They gave me a shock.
They were so surprisingly out of keeping with the rest of his otherwise
well-groomed and expensive appearance, for the nails were rough and
worn; the fingers stumpy and battered and hard, the palms horny as those
of a navvy.
The Honourable Jim saw my look.
"Yes! You think my own hands are no such beauties. Faith, you're right,
child," he said, carelessly flicking the ash from his cigarette off
against a flint. "I never could get my hands fit to be seen again after
that time I came across as a stoker."
"A stoker?" I repeated, staring at the young man. "What on earth were
you doing as a stoker?"
"Working my passage across home from Canada one time," he told me. "You
know I was sent out to Canada by the old man with about five bob a week
to keep up the old family traditions and found a new family fortune. Oh,
quite so."
"What did you do?" I asked. One couldn't help being a little interested
in the gyrations of this rolling stone that has acquired polish and
nothing else.
"Do? Nothing. A bit of everything. Labourer, farm hand. On a ranch,
finally," he said, "where they wouldn't give me anything to eat until
I'd 'made good.' Yes, they were harder than you are, little black
pigeon-girl that I thought had the heart of a stone under the soft
black plumage of her. And by 'making good' they meant taking a horse--a
chestnut, same coloured coat as your hair, child--that nobody else could
ride. I had to stick on her for three hours, and I stuck on. I told
myself I'd rather die than come off. And I didn't come off, nor yet did
I die, as you may perceive," laughed the Honourable Jim, tossing the end
of the cigarette over the cliff, above which the gulls were wheeling and
calling in voices as shrill as those of the "Refuge" girls. "But they
had to carry us both home--the horse and myself."
"Why carry you?"
"The pair of us were done," he said. "But it was a grand afternoon we
had, Miss Lovelace, I can tell you. I wish you'd been there, child,
looking on."
It was very odd that he should say this.
For at that very instant I had found myself wishing that I could have
seen him mastering the vicious chestnut.
I should have loved to have watched that elemental struggle between man
and brute with the setting of the prairie and the wide sky. However much
of "a bad hat" and a "waster" he is, he has at least lived a man's life,
doing the things a man should do before he drifted to that attic in
Jermyn Street and those more expensive town haunts where anybody else
pays. Impulsively I looked up at the big, expensively dressed young
loiterer with the hands that bear those ineradicable marks of strenuous
toil. And, impulsively, I said:
"Why didn't you stay where you were? Oh, what a pity you ever came
back!"
There was a pause before he laughed. And then we had what was very like
a squabble! He said, in a not-very-pleased voice: "You'd scorn to say
flattering things, perhaps?"
"Well," I said, "I'm not a Celt----"
"You mean that," he said sharply, "to stand for everything that's rather
contemptible. I know! You think I'm utterly mercenary----"
"Well! You practically told me that you were that!"
"And you believe some of the things I tell you, and not others. You pick
out as gospel the ones that are least to my credit," the Honourable Jim
accused me. "How like your sex!"
How is it that these four words never fail to annoy our sex?
I said coldly: "I don't see any sense or use in our standing here
quarrelling like this, all about nothing, on such a lovely afternoon,
and all. Hadn't you better find your hostess?"
"Perhaps I had," said Mr. Burke, without moving.
I was determined he should move!
I said: "I will come a little of the way with you."
"And what about the rugs and things here?"
"I shan't lose sight of them."
"Oh."
In silence we moved off over the turf. And, ridiculous as it was, each
of us kept up that resentful silence until, far off on the green downs,
we saw moving towards us three specks of colour: a light grey speck
between a pink and a blue speck.
"There they are," I told him. "Miss Vassity and my mistress and her
cousin."
"Give me your moral support, then; don't run away till I've said good
afternoon to them," Mr. Burke said, as if in an agony of shyness. And
then the blue imps came back to sweep the resentment out of his eyes. He
looked down at me and said: "Child! Think me all that's bad, if you want
to. Enlarge upon the affecting 'pity' of it that I didn't stay out
day-labouring in Canada, instead of wangling my keep out of fools at
home, to whom I'm well worth all the cash I cost 'em! Go on despising
me. But listen. Give me credit for one really high-principled action,
Miss Lovelace!"
"What is it?" I demanded rather scornfully. "When have you shown me any
kind of high principledness?"
"This afternoon," he retorted. "Just now. Just when I came upon the
Sleeping Beauty on the cliffs!"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that it's not every man who would have woke her up with just a
snatch of song. And I that am so--so hard up for a pair of decent new
gloves!" he concluded, laughing.
And then he caught my eyes with his own, his insolent, devil-may-care
blue ones. He looked down, straight down into them for a long moment.
I felt myself crimsoning under his regard. I felt--yes, I don't know how
it happened, but I did feel exactly as if he had done what he had,
after all, had the decency to leave undone.
There's very little difference, apparently, between a look like
that--and a tangible caress....
And yet I couldn't say a word!
I couldn't accuse him--of anything!
Maddening young scamp!
I stood as straight as the wireless mast on the downs. I glared out
towards the steely glitter of the English Channel.
"Ah, now, why should you be angry?" protested that ineffably gentle
Irish voice beside me. "Sure I'm only just pointing out how differently
an unscrupulous fellow might have behaved. I never kissed you, child."
I couldn't think of a crushing retort. All I could find to say was, of
course, the very last thing I really meant.
"I shall never forgive you!"
"What?" took up the Honourable Jim swiftly and merrily. "Never forgive
me for what?" To this I didn't have to reply, for the other three people
had come quickly up to us.
Miss Million came up first, holding out both hands to the Honourable
Jim.
"At last! Well, you are a stranger, and no mistake!" she declared,
panting a little with the haste she had made. "I have been looking out
for you all the morning----"
Surely this is an attitude that Mr. Burke ought to approve of in "our
sex"!
"And I did hope," said Miss Million quite touchingly, "I did hope you
was going to come over to see me!"
I'm not quite sure whether I'm glad or sorry that I happened to be
present at that meeting on the sun-lit, wind-swept downs between my
mistress and the young Irishman, to whom she presently introduced her
cousin, Mr. Hiram P. Jessop.
Really it was a most embarrassing moment. I think nine out of ten women
would have found it so! For none of us really enjoy seeing a man "caught
out" before our eyes. And this was practically what happened to the
Honourable James Burke.
It served him right! It certainly was no more than he deserved! And
yet--and yet I couldn't help feeling, as I say, sorry for him!
It happened thus.
Miss Million, flushed and sparkling with the delight of seeing her hero,
Mr. Jim Burke, again after three days of separation, put on a pretty
little air of hostess-ship and began: "Oh, here's some one I want you to
know, Mr. Burke. A relative of mine. My cousin, Mr. Jessop----"
"I have already had the pleasure of making Mr. Burke's acquaintance,"
said the young American, with that bow of his, to which Miss Million,
standing there between the two young men, exclaimed: "There now! To
think of that! I thought you hadn't had a word together, that day at
lunch----"
"It was before then, I think," began the Honourable Jim, with his most
charming smile. Whereupon Miss Million interrupted once more.
"Oh, I see! Yes, of course. That must have been in America, mustn't it?
How small the world is, as my poor Dad used to say. I s'pose you two met
while you was both attending to poor uncle, did you?"
Miss Million's cousin gave one of those quick, shrewd glances of his at
the other young man.
"Why, no, Cousin Nellie," he said slowly. "I hadn't the pleasure of
seeing Mr. Burke in the States. And I wasn't aware that he was
acquainted with our uncle."
This was where Miss Million rushed in where any other woman might have
guessed it was better not to tread.
"Oh, Lor', yes!" she exclaimed gleefully. "Mr. Burke was a great friend
of our Uncle Sam's. He told me so the first time we met; in fac', that's
how I come to know him, wasn't it, Mr. Burke?"
She ran on, without waiting for any answer: "Uncle used to call him
'Jim,' and to say he looked forward to his coming every day that time
when he had to lay up for two months with that sprained ankle of
his----"
"When was that, Cousin Nellie, if I may ask?" put in the young American
quietly.
"Why, that was just a twelvemonth ago, Mr. Burke told me; didn't you,
Mr. Burke?" ran on the unsuspecting Miss Million, while I, standing
still in the background as a well-trained lady's-maid should do,
permitted myself one glance at the face of that young pretender.
It was blank as a stone mask. I looked at Mr. Jessop. His grave,
penetrating eyes were fixed upon that mask.
As for Miss Vi Vassity, to whom I also turned, I saw her common, clever,
vivacious face lighted up with a variety of expressions: amusement,
curiosity, irony. She knew, as well as I did, what was happening. She
was keener than I to see what would happen next.
In far less time than it takes to tell all this Miss Million had rattled
on: "Oh, yes; Mr. Burke was with uncle in Chicago pretty near every day
all the last year of his life, wasn't you, Mr. Burke? Shows how well he
used to know him, doesn't it? And then when he heard my name at the
Hotel Sizzle!
"Soon as he heard that I was related to Mr. Samuel Million, his old
friend, he came round and chummed up at once. It is funny, isn't it,"
concluded Miss Million, "the queer way you get to know people that
you've never dreamt about?"
"Yes, it's real funny, I guess, that I haven't happened to have gotten
to know Mr. Burke while he was on the other side," broke in the voice of
the American, speaking quietly but very distinctly as it "gave away" the
pretensions of the Honourable Jim in two simple sentences.
"I guess there wasn't a day in the last two years that I wasn't visiting
the old man. And I never heard anything about a sprained ankle, nor yet
about his having had any Mr. Burke to come around and see him."
After this revelation there was a pause that seemed to last for ever.
But I suppose it couldn't have been as long as that. For I, turning my
eyes from the quartette on the turf, was watching a big white seagull
wheeling and swooping above the cliff.
Its long wings had only flapped, slowly, twice, before the hearty voice
of Miss Vi Vassity broke the silence that I felt to be quite
nerve-racking.
"Well! Are these biographical notes going to keep us busy for the whole
afternoon, or are we going to get on to the spirit-kettle and the cakes?
"I'm fair dying for a drop to drink, I can tell you. Talkin' does it.
And I never can bear those flasks. Don't trust 'em. Some careless hussy
forgets to give 'em a proper clean-out once in a way, and the next time
you take your cup o' tea out of the thing where are you? Poisoned and a
week in a nursing-home. Miss Vi Vassity, 'London's Love,' has been
sufferin' from a severe attack of insideitis, with cruel remarks from
_Snappy Bits_ on the subject. Give me hot water out of the kettle.
"Come on, Jim, you shall get it going; you're a handy man with your
feet--fingers, I mean; come on, Miss Smith. The other girls seem to have
lost themselves somewhere; always do when there's a bit of housework and
women's sphere going on, I notice. We'll spread the festive board.
Nellie'll bring on the cousin--I can see they've got secrets to talk.
S'long!"
She kept up this babble during the whole of tea in the lee of that motor
on the downs where Mr. Burke had come upon me as I drowsed after lunch.
The tea was even noisier and gayer than the lunch had been. We had this
flow of comment-on-nothing from London's Love, and a couple of songs
from our Serio, and American tour reminiscences from our Lady Acrobat.
Also a loud and giggling squabble between that lady and the
Boy-Impersonator about which of them looked her real age.
Also an exhibition of the blandishments of our Twentieth-Century Hebe,
who sat on the turf next to the Honourable Jim. She was doing her utmost
to flirt with him; putting her lazy blonde head on one side to cast
languishing glances at him, invoking his pity for a midge-bite that she
said she had discovered on her upper arm.
"Look," she murmured, holding out the sculptured limb. "Does it show?"
That softly curved, white-skinned, blue-veined and bare arm could have
been his to hold for a nearer inspection of that imperceptible wound if
he had chosen. I made sure he'd catch hold of it ... it would have been
just like him to laugh and suggest kissing it to make it well. I'm sure
that's what the "Breathing Statue Girl" meant him to do. They're just a
pair of silly flirtatious Bohemians----
Rather to my surprise the Irishman merely gave a matter-of-fact little
nod and returned in a practical tone of voice: "Yes; you've certainly
got glorious arms of your own, Miss Marmora; pity to let 'em get
sunburnt and midge-bitten. It'll show on the stage if you aren't
careful. I'd keep my sleeves down if I were you----"
"'And that's _that_!'" the Boy-Impersonator wound up with George Robey's
tag. And in the midst of all the laughter and chatter no one seemed to
notice that two of the party were absolutely silent and almost too
absent-minded to drink their tea--namely, the American cousin and Miss
Nellie Million, the heiress.
I hardly dared to look at her. I thought I was in for a terrible flood
of tears and misery as soon as we got home to the "Refuge."
For evidently Mr. Hiram P. Jessop had been getting in quite a long talk
with his cousin before tea, and I am sure he had explained to her just
the sort of gay deceiver that her admired and Honourable Jim was!
Oh, the disillusionment of that!
To find out that he had made that dead set at knowing her from the
beginning only because of her uncle's money! And that, so far from there
having been any of that family friendship of which she was so proud, he
had never set eyes on old Mr. Million!
I was afraid she would be utterly heart-broken, shaken with sobs over
the perfidy of that handsome impostor whom she must always love....
How little I knew her kind!
I was undeceived on the way home to the "Refuge." Miss Million clutched
me by the arm, holding me back until every other member of the party,
those who walked, those who rode on donkeys, and those who motored, had
got well ahead.
"I'm walking back alone with you, Smith," she announced firmly. "Let all
of them get on, Hiram and Vi and all. I want to speak to you. I'm fair
bursting to have a talk about all this."
I pressed the sturdy short arm in my own with as much sympathy as I
could show.
"My dear! My dear Miss Million," I murmured, "I am so dreadfully sorry
about it all----"
"Sorry? How d'you mean sorry, Smith?" My unexpected little mistress
turned sharply upon me. "Y'orter to be glad, I should think!"
"Glad?"
"Yes! About me being 'put wise,' as Hiram calls it, to something that I
might have been going on and on getting taken in about," went on Miss
Million as we started off to find the road over the downs.
"If it hadn't ha' bin for my cousin and him meeting face to face, and
him not able to deny what he'd said, I might ha' been to the end of the
chapter believing every word I was told by that Mr. Burke. Did you ever
know anything like him and the lies he's been stuffing me up with?"
I stared at the real and righteous and dry-eyed anger that was incarnate
in Million's little face as we walked along.
I positively gasped over the--well, there's nothing for it but to call
it the distaste and dislike of the one in which she pronounced those
three words: "That Mr. Burke."
"Whatcher looking so surprised at?" she asked.
"You," I said. "Why--only yesterday you told me that you were so
much--that you liked Mr. Burke so much!"
"Yesterday. O' course," said Million. "Yesterday I hadn't been put wise
to the sort of games he was up to!"
"But----You liked him enough to say you--you were ready to marry him!"
"Yes! And there'd have been a nice thing," retorted the indignant
Million. "Fancy if I had a married him. A man like that, who stuffed me
up with all those fairy tales! A nice sort of husband for anybody! I
can't be grateful enough to Hiram for telling me."
I was too puzzled to say anything. I could only give little gasps at
intervals.
"Isn't it a mercy," said Miss Million with real fervour, "that I found
him out in time? Why ever d'you look at me like that? It is a mercy,
isn't it?"
"Yes. Yes, of course. Only I'm so surprised at your thinking so," I
hesitated. "You see, as you really liked Mr. Burke----"
"Well, but I couldn't go on likin' him after I found him out. How could
I?" demanded Million briskly. "Would any girl?"
I said: "I should have thought so. I can imagine a girl who, if she
really cared for a man, would go on caring----"
"After she found out the sort he was?"
"Yes. She might be very unhappy to find out. But it wouldn't make any
other difference----"
"What?" cried Million, looking almost scandalised. "I don't believe you
can mean what you say!"
"I do mean what I say," I persisted, as we walked along. "I think that
if one really cared for a man, the 'caring' would go on, whatever one
found him out in. He might be a murderer. Or a forger. Or he might be in
the habit of making love to every pretty woman he saw. Or--or anything
bad that one can think of. And one might want to give up being fond of
him. But one wouldn't be able to. I shouldn't."
"Ah, well, there's just the difference between you and I," said Miss
Million, in such a brisk, practical, matter-of-fact voice that one could
hardly realise that it belonged to the girl whose eyes had grown so
dreamy as she had spoken, only yesterday, of the Honourable Jim.
"Now, I'm like this. If I like a person, I like 'em. I'd stick to
anybody through thick and thin. Do anything for 'em; work my fingers to
the bone! But there's one thing they've got to do," said Miss Million
impressively. "They've got to be straight with me. I've got to feel I
can trust 'em, Smith. Once they've deceived me--it's all over. See?"
"Yes, I see," I said, feeling more puzzled than ever over the difference
between one person's outlook and another's. As far as I was concerned, I
felt that "trusting" and "liking" could be miles apart from each other.
I shouldn't change my whole opinion of a man because he had deceived me
about knowing my uncle, and because he had spun me a lot of "yarns"
about that friendship. Men were deceivers ever.
I, in Miss Million's place, should have shrugged my shoulders over the
unmasking of this particular deceiver, and I should have said: "What can
one expect of a man with that voice and those eyes?"
Evidently in this thing Million, whom I've tried to train in so many of
the little ways that they consider "the mark of a lady," is more
naturally fastidious than I am myself.
She said: "I don't mind telling you I thought a lot o' that Mr. Burke. I
thought the world of him. But that's----"
She gave a sort of little scattering gesture with her hands.
"Why, I can't begin to tell you the yards of stuff he's been telling me
about uncle and the friends they was! And now here it's all a make-up
from the beginning. He hadn't a word to say for himself. 'Jer notice
that, Smith?" said Miss Million.
"I expect he was ashamed to look any one in the face, after the way he'd
bin going on. Pretty silly I expect he felt, having us know at last that
it was all a put-up job." I had to bite my lips to keep back a smile.
For as Miss Million and I swung along the road that, widening, led away
from the downs and between hedges and sloping fields, I remembered
something. I remembered that tea at Charbonnels with the Honourable Jim.
It was there that he admitted to me, quite shamelessly, that he had
never, in the whole of his chequered career, set eyes upon the late
Samuel Million. It was then that he calmly remarked to me: "You'll never
tell tales." So that it's quite a time that I've known the whole
discreditable story....
Yes; I confess that in some ways Miss Million must have been born
much more scrupulous and fastidious than Lady Anastasia's
great-granddaughter!
"No self-respecting girl would want to look at him again, I shouldn't
think," concluded my young mistress firmly, as we passed the first
thatched cottages of a village.
I ought to feel inexpressibly relieved. For now all my fears regarding
the Honourable Jim are at rest for evermore. He won't marry her for her
fortune, for the simple reason that she won't have him! And she won't
break her heart and make herself wretched over this perfidy of his,
because a perfidious man ceases to have any attraction for her honest
heart. That sort of girl doesn't, "while she hates the sin, love the
poor sinner."
What a merciful dispensation!
It's too utterly ridiculous to feel annoyed with Million for turning her
coat like this. It's inconsistent. I mustn't be inconsistent. I must
trample down this feeling of being a little sorry for the blue-eyed
pirate who has been forced to strike his flag and to flee before the
gale of Miss Nellie Million's wrath.
I ought, if anything, to be still feeling angry with Mr. James Burke on
my own account: teasing me about ... pairs of gloves and all that
nonsense!
Anyhow, there's one danger removed from the path. And now I think I see
clearly enough what must come. Miss Million, having found that she's
been deceived in smooth talk and charming flattery and Celtic
love-making, will turn to the sincerity of that bomb-dropping American
cousin of hers.
They'll marry--oh, yes; they'll marry without another hitch in the
course of the affair. And I----Yes, of course, I shall marry, too. I
shall marry that other honest and sincere young man--the English
one--Mr. Reginald Brace.
But I must see Million--Miss Million--married first. I must dress her
for her wedding. I must arrange the veil over her glossy little dark
head; I must order her bouquet of white heather and lilies; I must be
her bridesmaid, or one of them, even if she does have a dozen other
girls from the "Refuge" as well!
And who'll give her away? Mr. Chesterton, the old lawyer, will, I
suppose, take the part of the bride's father.
Miss Vi Vassity is sure to make some joke about being the
bride's mother. She is sure to be the life and soul of that
wedding-party--wherever it is. It's sure to be a delightfully
gay affair, the wedding of Nellie Million to her cousin, Hiram
P. Jessop! I'm looking forward to it most awfully----
These were the thoughts with which I was harmlessly and unsuspectingly
amusing myself as Miss Million and I walked along down the white Sussex
highroad in the golden evening light.
And in the middle of this maiden meditation, in the middle of the
peaceful evening and the drowsy landscape of rose-wreathed cottages and
distant downs, there dropped, as if from one of Mr. Jessop's machines, a
positive bomb!
The unexpected happened once more. The unexpected took the form, this
time, of an unobtrusive-looking man on a bicycle.
When we met him, slipping along on the road coming from the direction
of Miss Vi Vassity's "Refuge," I really hardly noticed that we had
passed a cyclist.
Miss Million, apparently, had noticed; she straightened her back with a
funny little jerky gesture that she has when she means to be very
dignified. She turned to me and said: "Well! He'll know us next time he
sees us, that's one thing! He didn't half give us a look!"
"Did he?" I said absently.
Then we turned up the road to the "Refuge." Neither of us realised that
the man on the bicycle had turned his machine, and had noiselessly
followed us down the road again.
We reached the white gate of the "Refuge," under its dark green cliffs
of elm. I had my hand on the latch when I heard the quiet voice of the
cyclist almost in my ear.
"Miss Smith----"
I turned with a little jump. I gave a quick look up at the man's face.
It was the sort of quiet, neutral-tinted, clean-shaven, self-contained
ordinary face that one would not easily remember, as a rule.
Yet I remembered it. I'd seen quite enough of it already. It was burnt
in on my memory with too unpleasant an association for me to have
forgotten it.
I heard myself give a little gasp of dismay as, through the gathering
dusk, I recognised the face of the man who had wanted to search my
trunks at the Hotel Cecil; the man who had afterwards shadowed me down
the Strand and into the Embankment Garden; the man from Scotland Yard.
Mercy! What could he want?
"Miss Million----" he said.
And Miss Million, too, stared at him, and said: "Whatever on earth is
the meaning of this?"
There was a horrified little quaver in her voice as she said it, for
she'd guessed what was afoot.
I had already told her of the manager's visit to her rooms the day
before I came down from London, and she had been really appalled at the
event until Miss Vi Vassity had come in to cheer her with the
announcement that she was sure this was the last that would ever be
heard by us of anything to do with having our belongings looked at.
And now, after three or four days only, this!...
Here we stood on the dusty road under the elms, with the man's bicycle
leaning up against the white palings. We were a curious trio! The young
mistress in a pink linen frock, the young lady's-maid in black, and the
"plain-clothes man" giving a quick glance from one to the other as he
announced in his clear but quiet and expressionless voice: "I have to
arrest you ladies----"
"Arrest!" gasped Miss Million, turning white. I grasped her hand.
"Don't be silly, my dear," I said as reassuringly as I could, though my
voice sounded very odd in my own ears. Million looked the picture of
guilt found out, and I felt that there was a fatal quiver in my own
tone. I said: "It's quite all right!"
"I have to arrest you ladies," repeated the man with the bicycle, in his
wooden tone, "on the charge of stealing Mr. Julius Rattenheimer's ruby
pendant from the Hotel Cecil----"
"Oh, I never! I never done it!" from Million, in anguished protest. "You
can ask anybody at the Orphanage what sort of a----"
"I have to warn you that anything you say now will be used in evidence
against you," concluded the man from Scotland Yard, "and my orders are
to take you back with me to London at once."