IN WHICH MISS PAMELA POUNCE IS ORDERED TO PACK
Pamela Pounce sat with a bunch of cowslips in one hand and the lid of
the ribbon box in the other; she had fallen into a profound muse.
It was the cowslips, though they were but artifice, which had set her
active brain thus suddenly and idly day-dreaming. They had brought her
back with a rush to the old farm where she had been born and brought
up. The whole surroundings of her exile had vanished. She was no
longer in the big, bare, stuffy, untidy workroom at the back of Madame
Eglantine’s celebrated Paris hat shop: in the centre of snippets and
straws, feathers, fringes, flowers and other fashionable fripperies;
under the glare of the skylight; with the patter and gabble of French
voices, the click of scissors, the long-drawn sighs or quick pants of
energetic stitching, the rustle of crumpled silks, in her ears, and in
her nostrils the indescribable atmosphere of the _atélier_, as it was
called. An apartment hermetically sealed to the outer airs, save what
might penetrate of them through the opening of its doors; redolent
of the gums of artificial flowers, of last year’s and this morning’s
succulent cookery--Monsieur Ildefonse, the husband of Madame Eglantine,
liked a point of garlic in most dishes--and of the faint sickly scents
of hair powder and fine lady’s perfumes which hung about the whole
establishment. There were other odours in the workroom besides, of
which the less said the better. It was little wonder that Pamela
Pounce should now and again feel her splendid vitality slacken; that
she should have considerably fined down from a country buxomness since
she had joined Madame Eglantine’s staff.
But the bunch of cowslips had brought her away--far away from it all
for a blissful moment.
She was back again at home. The exquisite freshness of an early summer
morning on the Kentish downs encompassed her. Her young bosom lifted
with ecstasy. Oh! the breath of England: pungent of the sea, sweet of
the moorland herbs, free from the hills and whispering of the woods,
was there ever anything like it? There was a fragrance of breadmaking
too from mother’s oven, and a lovely reek of burning weeds where father
was busy over the potato fields!
Pamela started. A voice, sharp as a pen-knife, had recalled her to
reality.
“Ah, Meess”--she went by no other name in this French servitude, either
from her employer or her sister workers. It was an unconscious tribute
to a certain fine apartness of character, as well as to her British
independence. “Ah, Meess,” cried Madame Eglantine, “is this how I find
you? Asleep with your eyes open! My faith, is this how you conduct
yourself in the thick of the business hours? And the Marquise who
expects that hat by noon!”
Pamela opened her day-dreaming eyes full upon the speaker, gave an
inaudible sigh and a small ironic smile. She did not start or blush or
show any sign either of flurry or vexation at the acrid accent of the
rebuke, she was too completely mistress of herself for that. Her hand
hovered over the ribbon box; then with a decisive movement she nipped a
shimmering purple roll and began to draw out its darkly radiant lengths.
“Purple!” ejaculated Madame Eglantine, surprised into a quite amiable
tone; “purple for that blonde Marquise who is not yet twenty! And she
means to wear all white muslins with lace in floods. Did I not tell
you so? That ribbon I bought for _Madame la Gouvernante_--it is for
dowagers----”
She broke off and stared.
Pamela had twisted and snipped and pinched and the hat was trimmed in
what her famous _patronne_ herself would have described as “_un tour
de main_.” She now held it up on her balled hand, and turned it slowly
from side to side.
“But it is a stroke of genius!” exclaimed the little Frenchwoman. She
hated Pamela, but she was above all an artist. “No, no, do not touch
it again, no one must touch it! You have a thousand times reason. Blue
or green or pink--anyone with the ordinary mind would have blended me
the banal pretty-pretty with those cowslips. The Marquise would have
been but one of a score of shepherdesses, no more distinguished than a
dragée box for a baptism! But now----”
She paused and waved her hands before the delight of the mental
picture. A small, dusky woman with very bright eyes and extraordinarily
swift movements, she was like some quick furry animal of the mouse
tribe; a greater contrast to the fair, large, composed English girl
could hardly be imagined; yet on one point these two were singularly
akin. Both were geniuses in the same restricted yet fascinating realm
of art.
If there were a creature on earth capable of stepping straight off into
the shoes of Madame Eglantine, first milliner in the world of Fashion,
it was Pamela Pounce, the British yeoman’s daughter!
Perhaps it was this consciousness of her rival’s merits which made the
Frenchwoman, while too acute of intellect not to recognise them, regard
her clever apprentice with feelings which approached detestation. Yet
she was soon to find another cause.
“I’d better put in the stitches myself, I suppose, M’dame?” said Pamela
tranquilly. She spoke French fluently by this time, with a pronounced
if not unpleasing British accentuation. “The young ladies are so fond
of sewing things to death. It’s like a hand on pastry,” she went on
meditatively, as she bit her thread, and flung a cool, tantalising
glance at the irate ring of countenances about her. “You have, or you
haven’t got it, and no one to blame.”
“That will do, Meess. There is too much conversation here, Mademoiselle
Panache!” Madame hopped spitefully from Pamela upon the directress,
who, sitting large, square and sallow at the centre table, dispensing
materials, had permitted herself a gratified smile over the snubbing
of the English girl. For a moment or two there was silence in the
over-lighted, under-ventilated apartment. The season was early July;
a blazing white sunshine was pouring down through the casements which
their muffed glass but feebly mitigated.
Then the little angry, sharp-toothed mouse that was the bland, coaxing,
fluent Eglantine of the showroom found a fresh grievance.
“My God, Mademoiselle Anatoline, are you making a bouquet or tying
bristles on a broomstick? And Heaven pardon me, Mademoiselle Eulalie,
but if those hands of yours have been washed since--since---- What have
you been doing with those hands, _ma fille_? Blacking the boots or
scratching your head?”
Anatoline, who was large and fat and fair, became an apoplectic purple;
and Eulalie, who was the colour of a lemon with hair like a raven’s
wing, turned a shade more livid than nature had made her.
There was a titter, beginning sycophantically upon the lips of
Mademoiselle Panache. But Pamela’s smooth face, white where it was
not delicately carnation, might have been that of a handsomely tinted
statue. She cut her thread, tweaked one of the shimmering purple loops,
and once again putting the hat on her clenched hand, gave it a little
shake. The creation was complete!
Madame’s swift beady eye rolled in her direction.
“Give yourself the trouble to bring that upstairs to the showroom,
Meess,” she ordered. “Madame D’Aimargues said she would call, herself,
before midday, to try it on before it was sent. I will join you
presently and you had better remain, in case there were required an
alteration.”
“_Bien, M’dame_,” Pamela responded with some alacrity. She might get a
whiff of good open air as she went up the stairs. There might even be a
window ajar in the showroom. Such a miracle had been known to occur on
a very hot day.
Monsieur Ildefonse, Eglantine’s husband, was sitting in the little
glass cage off the back showroom, pompously referred to as the
_Bureau_. This individual had once been a very noted personality;
no other, actually, than the French Queen’s appointed coiffeur; in
consequence sought after to frenzy by every woman with the smallest
pretension to Fashion. Fine ladies had had their heads dressed at
six o’clock in the morning, nay, even three days before some special
assembly at Court.
To be able to say, with a toss of flying vaporous curls, exquisitely
redolent of _Poudre à la Maréchale_: “In effect, my dear one,
Ildefonse’s last idea, what do you think of it? It is succeeded.
_Hein?_” To be responded to, perchance, with a cry of envy and
despair: “Ildefonse! You managed to get Ildefonse!” And to know your
interlocutor, younger than you perhaps, and prettier, yet altogether at
a disadvantage, “a positive frump, my dear,” under less skilful hands,
that had been to reach, in verity, the very needle-peak of feminine
triumph, a few years ago.
But star succeeds to star; one Monsieur Charles was Court twiddler,
curler, crimper, frizzer, and general head artist. For Monsieur
Ildefonse had come into a heritage and retired. Not a fallen star,
therefore; merely astronomically removed to another hemisphere! He
shone now, though, it may be added, with a doubtful radiance, in a
restricted connubial circle; in other words, he sat at home and totted
up accounts for his clever, money-making spouse; made bargains for
her with flower manufacturers and mercers, and bullied the stewards of
great houses when Madame la Duchesse or Madame la Connétable forgot to
remember such insignificances as the settlement of bills.
Unanimously the workgirls adored him, with the single exception of
Pamela; and the relations between Madame Eglantine and her consort,
characterised in public by the most touching demonstrativeness, were
regarded as the very romance of matrimony. But Pamela, who had come
under the glance, more often than she cared, of Monsieur Ildefonse’s
slyly roving eye, had her private opinion.
She shuddered from him as she had shuddered from the fat, sleek, brown
slugs that came out after rain on the garden walls at home.
As a little girl she would explain: “’Tain’t that I’m afraid, you see,
but it makes me creep.”
She could have found no better words in which to describe the effect
upon her of the fascinating Monsieur Ildefonse.
There was a midday lull, this scorching day, even in Madame Eglantine’s
thriving establishment. It was late season, too, and save for orders
like that of the little Marquise D’Aimargues, for such as were
privileged to join in the pastimes of Royal haymaking and churning,
or a stray wedding order, business was slack, and the great little
milliner herself was preparing for that round of the most noted
watering places, with “just a few models” in her baggage, which was her
thrifty fashion of spending the holidays.
Pamela cast, in passing, a hasty glance between the green curtains
of the _Bureau_, to assure herself that her pet aversion was safely
employed.
He had removed his wig on account of the heat, and she turned her
eyes quickly away from the revolting spectacle of his close-cropped
bristling black head and the roll of olive fat at the back of his neck
above the embroidered collar of his blue cloth coat.
The pink, be-padded, be-wreathed, be-gilded, be-mirrored, be-draped
salons of Madame Eglantine were empty. Pamela walked slowly into the
middle of the front room and hesitated. Her own charming shape was
reflected from every possible angle. Down below, the whole _Place_
seemed asleep; a buzz of flies within and without, a lazy footfall on
the shady side and a distant rumble emphasised the universal drowsiness.
When Madame la Marquise’s coach came along there would be a prodigious
clatter to wake them all up. Pamela knew that she was quite safe. It’s
all very well to trim a hat. You never know what it’s like till you’ve
tried it on.
Very deliberately she divested her glossy chestnut hair of its discreet
cap, loosened the swelling waves a trifle more on either side of the
firm rose-tinted ivory of her face.
“If a dash of powder was for poor girls like me, I wouldn’t be too
bad-looking. I’d say that for myself,” she thought, and firmly set the
hat of the Marquise at the right angle over her radiant brow.
Well, it was a complete success. Like every true artist she was doubly
critical of herself, but Pamela had to admit that she could find no
flaw in her own taste and that the wide-brimmed curving Italian straw
with its bold sweep of purple ribbon, and its hanging bunches of
cowslips was a remarkably fine set-off for the glory of her amber hair
and the audacious brilliance of her complexion. Without a tinge of envy
or discontent she surveyed herself thoughtfully.
“Upon my word, Pamela Pounce, my girl!”--she was fond of addressing
herself mentally; as it were her strong reasonable mind to her
agreeable body. “You would have held your own with the best of them if
it had been the fancy of Providence to set you in the aristocracy. Ugh!”
With a piercing scream she started out of her complacent reflection.
A horrible olive-hued, leering face appeared over her shoulder in the
mirror; a blue-clothed arm stole round her waist.
Pamela swung herself free, whisked the hat off her head ready to use it
as a weapon should Monsieur Ildefonse pursue his advances.
In the dead pause the quick rustle of Madame Eglantine’s light summer
flounces were heard on the stairs.
Instantly the ex-hairdresser’s countenance lost its satyr smiles, and
became composed into its usual mask of smooth propriety.
“Is that you, _mon Agneau rose_?” he cooed.
“Yes, yes, it is I, _petit rat de mon cœur_,” she replied.
These endearments having perfunctorily passed between them, Madame
halted on the threshold and sent the glitter of her swift glance from
her spouse to her apprentice.
“I took the liberty of trying on the hat what I’ve just trimmed,
M’dame,” said Pamela then in her brazen way.
She wasn’t going to put it into Monsieur Ildefonse’s power to tell on
her behind her back, or worse still, to pretend to be shielding her.
She knew his slimy ways.
“You do well to call it a liberty,” said Madame Ildefonse, showing
all her small pointed teeth as if she wanted to bite Pamela. She was
panting a little, and there was a sort of whiteness about her nostrils
that pointed to considerable if repressed emotion. “But let it pass.
You were giving your opinion, I presume, my cabbage-stalk?”
“Meess very naturally wished me to admire your exquisite taste, _ma
tendre biche_,” he responded. “‘No one,’ says she to me, ‘but Madame
Eglantine could have made this inimitable, this absolutely original and
distinguished combination, all the while retaining the stamp of the
most high tone.’”
Monsieur Ildefonse was very glib of tongue.
“A-ah!” said Madame, smiling horribly. “You and Meess flatter me in
your private conversations.”
“My charmer, how can I console myself in your absence, except by----”
he broke off, for at that moment, with sounds of pomp, a thunder of
hoofs, a crash and a clatter, the street woke up indeed, as Miss Pounce
had prognosticated. And Madame D’Aimargues drove up in her four-horsed
coach.
Madame Eglantine cast off her rage, as one may divest oneself of a
garment, to be re-assumed at the chosen moment; Monsieur Ildefonse,
with a relieved shrug of his huge shoulders, began to retire,
cat-footed, to his den.
“Remain as you are, Meess,” commanded the milliner, now entirely
concentrated on the exigencies of her business.
She shook out her flounces and summoning the bland business smile to
her features cast a swift glance at the nearest mirror before taking
two steps to greet her valuable patroness.
It was that glance at the mirror which precipitated the catastrophe.
By some counter-reflection, Madame Eglantine’s jealous eyes caught a
vision of Ildefonse, her husband, her cabbage, the little rat of her
heart, pausing in his turn to cast a final ogle upon the abandoned, the
sly, the seductive, the shameless Meess!
Eglantine beheld that ogle. She swallowed her emotion. She was above
all _femme d’affaires_. Everything must give way before the profit of
the moment. She could wait.
The little Marquise, blonde and slim and rouged, ethereal yet vivid,
fluttered in, fanning herself, tried on her hat, chattered, laughed,
approved, exclaimed upon the heat, and, still fanning herself,
departed, leaving on Pamela’s mind the impression of a glittering
butterfly, as lovely, as useless, and as impalpable. You could crush
her, thought the girl, between finger and thumb.
Her serious lambent gaze had hardly followed the radiant apparition to
the door, when the explosion burst forth.
It was all the more devastating for having been withheld.
Wanton! Hussy! Baggage! Designing intriguing slut! _Meess de Malheur!_
What was Pamela, after all, but a stray apprentice, and an English one
at that, flung upon her, Madame Eglantine’s, benevolence for the sake
of old friendship, living on charity, a _beggar_! _Cette Lydie_, how
she had haggled! But if such wickedness had been paid for in all the
gold of false Albion, Madame Eglantine would not have kept her, to the
destruction of her domestic happiness!
“Meess, you pack this day.”
She further added a flood of vituperation, to which Pamela, all her
pretty carnations dead on her white cheeks, listened in a fixed silence.
When the Frenchwoman had run herself out of breath on a high scream,
Pamela answered her in English, which the whilom Bath milliner spoke
brokenly, but understood perfectly. “That’ll do, M’dame. I’m as pleased
to get out of this place as ever you can be to see the back of me. As
for that fat husband of yours, I wouldn’t touch him with a pair of
tongs. And as for yourself, I’d not remain a moment longer than I can
help with one as doesn’t know the meaning of truth, and would take an
honest girl’s character away out of pure spite and malice. And don’t
you dare,” pursued Pamela, with a swelling voice, “say anything against
my character, or as sure as there is justice in Heaven, I’ll bring your
business about your ears. I’ll tell that old cat, my Aunt Lydia, what’s
happened, that you caught your horrid old Ildefonse ogling me in the
glass, and that you haven’t that trust in him--and sure, I’m with you
there, for he ain’t fit to be trusted the length of your apron, and
so I tell you fair--you haven’t that trust in him that you could have
another moment of peace with me under your roof. God help you; I don’t
blame you! Give me the price of my ticket home, and I’ll see Aunt don’t
get at you over the indenture.”
* * * * *
For all her courage, for all the longing which the thought of England
brought her, the heart of Pamela Pounce was heavy as lead. She knew
that, at the Kentish farm, things were going badly with the yeoman; she
knew that she dared not add the burden of her penniless self to that
which rested on his shoulders. She knew that odious as it would be,
that abominably as her relative would abuse of the situation, there
would be nothing for it, but to throw herself again on her Aunt Lydia’s
family feeling, as soon as the Dover coach landed her in London town.
Her aunt was now with her mistress in Hertford Street, back from the
Wells, according to the latest reports, and that was one bit of luck;
another was, that judging by the tone of the letter just received by
Madame Eglantine with an order for hats, my Lady Kilcroney’s maid was
in the highest exultation over her mistress’s royal promotion.