As if, poor fellow! he had any chance at all against a man like the Honourable Jim!
Well! He"ll soon see, that"s all!
CHAPTER XXVIII
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 Va.s.sity, 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 cl.u.s.ters 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 ta.s.sels! 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 cla.s.s. 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 p.r.i.c.ked-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-gla.s.s and stood, a defiant little st.u.r.dy 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 Va.s.sity 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 Va.s.sity"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, n.o.body 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, cla.s.s 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, "w.a.n.gled," 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.