"Ted--I--I--" and stopped.
He did not help her, and she said no more.
Presently the cab came to a standstill, and he helped her out. They
went in, past the tempting sweets, on to warmth and lightness. The rush
for tea was over, and there were not many people left now. They secured
a little table and sat down.
"What'll you have?" he said curtly.
"Oh--anything."
He ordered tea and tea-cake. The band struck up with a selection from a
popular musical play. She looked round quickly.
"Oh, how lovely!"
She poured out tea; he accepted his cup with a brief "thanks." She bent
across the table to him.
"Would you mind listening? I'm sure I'm purring all over."
There was a tentative smile in her eyes.
"Tea-cake?" he said.
She took a piece with a sigh. Suddenly her laugh rang out, deliciously
gay and glad. Coaxingly she bent towards him.
"Don't be cross, Ted! I'm so happy!"
He frowned.
"It was ridiculous of you," he began.
"I know it was!" with gay insouciance. "But this isn't the way to
punish me, is it?" Her voice sank softly; she was radiant in the joy of
the reaction. "You wouldn't be spoiling it all, Teddie?" she coaxed.
Unwillingly, his mouth relaxed into a smile; he caught it back with a
quick, bad-tempered indrawing of his lips.
"You'd better know--first--I followed you! Now bite my head off!"
Her eyes opened wide.
"All--the--way?" she said slowly.
He nodded.
"Why, Ted, how awfully _sweet_ of you!" in a soft and very unexpected
rush. "Fancy taking all that trouble! Bite your head off? Why, I think
it was just lovely of you!"
His glum face cleared.
"And my head's gone! gone! gone!" she laughed.
He glanced at it inquiringly.
"Oh, well, the ache thereof."
Presently she sighed loudly and with suggestive reproach.
"To think that all the time nice, cross, comfy you were there behind me!
I wish I'd known!"
He compressed his lips humorously.
"Don't be mean!" she laughed. "More tea?" As she handed him his cup:--
"Ted, you're not to be feeling superior just because I got into a muddle
and you pulled me out! If it had been a bog now, it would have been the
other way about! But yellow fog, and--" she gave a little shudder--"the
newspaper boys! But I ask you, how was a sane person, in other words,
an Irish person, to guess that omnibuses would refuse to allow dogs in
them? All the same," softly, "I'm feeling just now that man is a noble
animal, and woman a mere headless and rudderless cipher. But I warn you
it won't last."
"Wish it would," he said, giving K.K. a piece of cake.
"Ah, then, you are feeling superior! Ted, what would you have done if I
had had hysterics when I caught sight of you? Oh, I'm so happy!"
"Eat something," he urged.
She looked round the room, then out at the fog, and smiled on him.
He looked at her with sudden seriousness.
"Nell, remember another time if you're in a hole--"
"The hole doesn't exist that'll ever get a chance of seeing me again!"
She dismissed it airily.
"Well, anyhow, when that frame of mind's worn off--"
"You mean when I'm in a howling temper again," she interpolated, pursing
her mouth.
"Perhaps. Well, remember, _take a hansom_!"
"But I couldn't. I'd only sixpence with me."
"Doesn't matter. You pay up the other end. You could get it when you
arrived."
"Oh, do you? I didn't know. You don't in omnibuses."
"No, you don't in omnibuses."
She rested her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands.
"Shall I try to thank you, Ted?"
He flushed in horror.
"Good Lord, no! I say, have another cake."
She laughed softly.
"I don't want any more, thanks. I--"
"Do have some more tea."
She shook her head.
"If you'll let me speak--"
"You might give me some more, will you?"
She poured it out.
"I'm only trying to assure you I won't thank you!" she managed to say.
"I won't, really. You've been too nice. I'll do just whatever you
wish."
"Um!" he grunted.
She settled her elbows on the table again. She looked out straight
before her, and her face grew thoughtful. There was a little silence.
Then she looked at him and smiled; it was an odd little smile,
half-humorous, half sad.
"I'm getting like that," she said, "all bad-tempered and horrid and
cross! I was horrid to you, and to Denis,--to everyone. I--I used not
to be grumpy and nasty. I'm just growing that way. In books they don't.
When there's trouble and things all go wrong, they get sweeter and
sweeter. I don't. I feel sometimes all shuddery with snappishness. I
never used to feel like that--" Her voice died away in a plaintive
little murmur.
"Books are all rot!" he declared vigorously.
"Oh, Ted, all of them?"
She was laughing again, but the shadow of wistfulness still clouded her
eyes.
"All those with goody-goody heroines hanging around like dying ducks in
a thunder-storm!" he asserted.
"You don't mind if I'm horrid and grumpy, then?"
"Not a bit," he declared cheerfully.
She rose.
"You know you ought to have said that I never am horrid or grumpy. But
no matter!"
"I've got a conscience to think of, you know," he suggested.
Outside, they found that the fog had cleared away, leaving a wet, cold
world behind it.
"We'll choose our horse now," he said.
"Oh, how lovely! Here comes a hansom! Poor thing, his knees are rather
awful. There's a better one--that big bay, Ted!"
"Got a fare already."
"Oh, I didn't think of that."
"We'll walk along. You wouldn't sooner have a crock from the rank,
would you?"
"Don't insult me, Ted! Look--that grey! Oh, he's a beauty!"
"Put on the pace," Ted said to the man, and presently Nell was sighing
with joy.
"I'd love to spend a whole day in hansoms! Ted, the moral's all wrong!
I'm enjoying myself much too much. And never so much as one
'I-told-you-so' glance from you! It's hopelessly wrong!"
As they turned into Henley Road, she held out her hand.
"Shake," she said, "and--I'm not going to thank you, but--oh, Teddie,
you _are_ a brick!"
*CHAPTER XXVIII*
Towards morning on March 17 Miss Kezia dreamed. She was not often
troubled with dreams, but on this occasion her dream was long and
peculiarly vivid. She dreamed that she was passing through a narrow
roadway, on either side of which great rocks rose high and precipitous.
On these rocks men were at work, cutting, chiselling, hammering, and
every sound they made rolled and rumbled and echoed amongst the rocks,
till, in her dream, Miss Kezia's ears sang and buzzed in agony. As they
worked the men sang and talked, and the rocks took up their voices, and
flung them from one to another, till the noise was deafening. On she
hurried, striving to get through the roadway, but it had the
interminableness of dream roads, and Miss Kezia struggled in vain.
At seven o'clock she woke, because seven o'clock was the hour at which
she invariably rose. On the 17th of March she rose four minutes later
than usual, taking that time to ponder her dream and feel her pulse.
She looked anxiously at herself in the peculiarly unflattering mirror on
the toilet-table, but it showed her the same long Scotch face as usual,
and the green tinge imparted by the glass was no greener than it always
was. Miss Kezia considered dreams a weakness due to illness or a
diseased imagination, but halfway through her toilet a voice broke
out:--
"'Oh! Paddy dear, and did you hear the news that's going round?
The shamrock is forbid by law to grow on Irish ground;
Saint Patrick's day no more we'll keep, his colour can't be
seen.
For there's a cruel law agin' the wearin' of the green....'"
Miss Kezia stood, the cold water trickling down her face, and
experienced a queer sort of sensation. Where had she heard that
tune--sad even to her tough senses--quite lately? Why did her dream
suddenly descend upon her, the sense of it gripping her most
unaccountably?
A scream of woe in Molly's most material voice, "Oh, I've hammered my
thumb into the middle of next month!" and the heavy fall of a hammer
roused her suddenly, sharply, to full realisation and understanding of
her dream. To the accompaniment of a steady hammering she finished her
ablutions with a grim and wrathful haste. She faced the unflattering
mirror with a gleam in her eye, and pulled and screwed her hair into its
accustomed tight knot. She finished her toilet, and then she left her
room.
Green met her eye; whichever way she turned she encountered green. The
balusters were draped with green muslin. The austere photograph of a
long-faced ancestor hanging, a perpetual prim disdainer of the follies
of youth, on the wall opposite her door, looked out now disapprovingly
from beneath a coquettish green satin bow hanging over his very brows.
Sheila Pat came marching down the stairs, holding aloft the Irish flag.
"Are you all mad?" Miss Kezia queried wrathfully.
The Atom turned an eye alight with a far-away scorn upon her.
"It's St. Patrick's Day!" she said curtly, and marched on down the
stairs.
Miss Kezia put up with a good deal that day. She sat at the
breakfast-table and faced, with strong but silent disapproval, a
green-draped window. She said no word even when Sarah wriggled shyly
in, her diminutive cap adorned with a great green bow. But her eye
followed the hot and abashed little hand-maiden with dire meaning. When
next Sarah appeared the bow had vanished.
She watched, from beneath raised brows, Kate Kearney tumbling over her
own head in pursuit of the ribbon tied about her neck, but she did not
say anything. After breakfast a box came by parcel's post addressed to
Nell. It was a large box, and it was filled with shamrock. Miss Kezia
studied it amiably.
"I suppose it is a pretty little weed," she said with affability.
She went farther. She asked Sheila Pat for information anent St.
Patrick.
Unfortunately Sheila Pat started with the little item of his having swum
across the Shannon with his head in his mouth. Miss Kezia remonstrated.
She pointed out the impossibility of his performing such a feat.
Sheila Pat waxed indignant. She explained scornfully that anything was
possible to St. Patrick, and that, moreover, his being in Ireland at the
time had a great deal to do with his wonderful cleverness.
Miss Kezia argued that it would have been nothing more or less than a
miracle.
Sheila Pat retorted, "And why not?" Miss Kezia was shocked. A long and
hot discussion followed, of which the Atom had the last word. She
said:--
"Why, you can't know _any*thing! You don't even know what Ireland's
*like_! You're just a hignoramus!"
Miss Kezia was angry. She was also genuinely worried. It was not the
first time that her young relatives by marriage had worried her active
conscience from a religious point of view. Their stories of fairies and
legends and miracles seemed, to her stern narrowness, profane. In the
course of her argument with Sheila Pat, the Atom had observed that she
thought it must be very nice for God to have St. Patrick for a
companion. The remark had left Miss Kezia gasping.
Left alone with the rude epithet of hignoramus hovering scornfully in
the air, Miss Kezia sought to arrange the chaos in her mind. She was
still forming sound arguments to be used with effect on a future
occasion, when she heard the O'Briens going out. She went to the window
and received several further shocks. In the first place Denis was with
the others, when he should have been at the bank. In the second, third,
and fourth places, their costumes were most unseemly. To Miss Kezia
they appeared to be composed chiefly of shamrock and green ribbon. In
the fifth place Kate Kearney, all unchidden, was dividing her energies
in a vain attempt to rid herself of her bow, between the mud heap at the
side of the road and Miss Kezia's spotless door-steps.