I felt a chill of despair creeping over my heart.
What did she mean by saying that "so many of them" kept coming and going in this place?
This, combined with the comments of those post-office girls at Lewes, awoke in my mind one terrifying conclusion. This place with the peaceful garden and the pretty name----! There was something uncanny about it....
This place was a lunatic asylum!
Yes, I did not see what else on earth it could possibly be! And then this woman with the vacuous face and the wild hair, and still wilder kind of attire, she, without doubt, was one of the patients!
What in the world was my poor little Million doing in this galley, provided she was here at all?
And who brought her here? And what was the Honourable Jim"s car doing out there? Could he have been so disgraceful as to have got her brought here for the purpose of rescuing her himself, and of earning her undying grat.i.tude as well as the riches of her uncle? Oh, what a horrible trick....
Rather than that I felt that I would gladly see the money all go over to Miss Million"s cousin! That big young man stood there looking as puzzled as I did, glancing doubtfully, almost apprehensively, at the woman with the wild attire.
I attacked her again, with more firmness this time.
"I think Miss Million must be here," I said. "She sent me a telegram, and they told me at the post-office place that it was----"
"Oh! her that sent the telegram, was it? That"s the young lady you want?
I know, I took the telegram myself," said the woman with the autumn-foliage hair. "It was a girl who turned up here with nothing but an evening gown and a light coat the day before yesterday; a dark girl, short."
"That would be the one," I cried with the utmost eagerness. "Is she----Oh, is she still here?"
"She"s here, all right," said the woman with the hair. "My word! She wasn"t half in a paddy, I can tell you, because she could not get her maid or whoever it was to send down her things from London. Nothing but what she stood up in, and having to borrow, and no one with a thing to fit her! She is here, all right!" Relieved, but not completely relieved until I should have heard more of Million"s adventures, I said: "I am her maid. I have brought down her things. Would you be so kind as to tell me where I should find Miss Million?"
"She will be in the house, having her dinner now," said the poor red-haired lunatic quite kindly. "You will excuse me coming in with you myself, dear, won"t you? There is a strange gentleman in there come in that other car, and I have not had time to go and get myself dressed yet. I made sure I should have all the morning to myself to get my hair done. Such a time it does take me," she added, shaking it out with an air of vanity, and, indeed, she had something to be vain of. "It isn"t everybody I like to see me like this. I am never one to be careless about my appearance when there are gentlemen about. They never think any more of a girl" (poor creature, she was at least forty) "for things of that kind. I am sure I had no more idea that there was another gentleman coming in, and me with my hair like this! Of course, as I always say, well! it"s my own hair! Not like some girls that have to have a haystack on their heads before they"re fit to look at, as well as a switch all round...."
It really seemed as if she was going on with this "mildly mental"
chatter for as long as we chose to listen.
So I gave one glance at Miss Million"s cousin, meaning, "Shall we go?"
He nodded gravely back at me. Then, leaving the red-haired lunatic on the path, shaking her tresses in the sun, we went on between the lilac bushes with their undergrowth of lilies and stocks and pinks until we came to the house.
The house was a regular Suss.e.x farm sort of looking place that had evidently been turned into a more modern dwelling-house place. There were bright red curtains at all the white-sashed windows, which were wide open. There were window-boxes with lobelia and canary-creeper and geraniums. As I say, all the windows were flung wide open, and from out of them I heard issuing such a babble of mixed noises as I don"t think I had ever heard since I was last in the parrot-house at the Zoo. There were shrill voices talking; there was clattering of knives and forks against crockery. These sounds alternated with such bursts of unrestrained laughter that now I was perfectly certain that my suspicion outside in the garden had been a correct one. Yes! This place could be nothing but some inst.i.tution for the mentally afflicted.
And this--and this was where Million had been spirited off to!
Setting my teeth, and without another glance at the increasingly grave face of my companion, I ran up the two shallow stone steps to the big open front door, and rang the bell. The tinkling of it was quite drowned by the bursts of hysterical merriment that was issuing from the door on the left of us.
"They can"t hear us through that Bedlam," was Mr. Jessop"s very appropriate comment. "See here, Miss Smith, as it appears to be mostly ladies I shan"t be wanted, I guess. Supposing you go easy into the porch and knock on that door while I wait out here on the steps?"
This I did.
I knocked hard in my desperation. No answer but fresh bursts of laughter, fresh volumes of high-pitched talk. Suddenly I seemed to catch through it a deep-voiced masculine murmur with an intonation that I knew--the caressing Irish inflection of Mr. James Burke.
"What divilment is he up to now, I wonder?" I thought exasperatedly, and my annoyance at the very thought of that man nerved me to knock really peremptorily on the st.u.r.dy panels of the door.
Then at last I got an answer.
"Don"t stand knocking there like an idiot, come in," shrieked the highest-pitched of all the parrot voices. Giving myself a mental shake, in I went.
I found myself in a big brown distempered room, with a long white table running down the centre of it. The place seemed full to overflowing with two elements--one, the overpowering smell of dinner, i. e., pork and greens and boiled potatoes, and stout; two, a crowd of girls and women who looked to me absolutely numberless. They were all more or less pretty, these girlish faces. And they were all turned to me with wide-open eyes and parted lips. Out of this sea of faces there appeared to be just two that I recognised as I gazed round. One was the laughing, devil-may-care face of the Honourable Jim, who sat with a long peg gla.s.s in front of him, at the bottom of the table.
CHAPTER XXV
FOUND!
THE other----
Ah, yes! At last, at last! After all my anxiety and worry and fretting and search! There she was! I could have kissed the small, animated grey-eyed face of the girl who was sitting next to the Honourable Jim at the table. However she"d come there, I had at least found her.
My long-lost mistress; Miss Million herself!
"Oh, it"s her!" cried Miss Million"s shrill c.o.c.kney voice in a sudden cessation of the parrot-like shrieks of talk and laughter as I ran round the table. "Oh, it"s my Miss--it"s my Miss Smith!"
She clapped her hands with impatience, jumping up in her chair.
"Have you brought them, Smith?" she demanded eagerly. "Have you got my clothes----"
"Oh, "ark at her!" shrieked some one on the right of the table. "It"s all her clothes! Hasn"t thought of anything else since she came down----"
"Better late than never----" The babble went on all around me, while I strove to make myself heard.
"Now we shall see a bit o" style----"
"Don"t see anything wrong with the blouse the girl"s got on, myself----"
"Fits where it touches, doesn"t it----"
Indeed, the garment in which my young mistress"s small form was enfolded appeared to be the sort of wrap which a hairdresser"s a.s.sistant tucks about one when one is going to have a shampoo!
"Looks like a purser"s jacket on a marling-spike!" sang out some one else; and then more laughter.
Well, if they were lunatics, they were at least the cheerful variety!
I went up to Miss Million"s chair, ignoring the blue glance of the man beside her, and said in my "professional," respectful murmur: "I have brought your dressing-bag and a suit-case, Miss----"
"Why ever didn"t you bring them down yesterday?" demanded Million, all eyes and shrill c.o.c.kney accent.
"I didn"t know, Miss, where I was to bring them," I replied, feeling the amused gaze of the Honourable Jim upon me as I said it.
"But, bless me! I gave the full address," vociferated Miss Million, "in that telegram!"
All the lunatics (or whatever they were) were also listening with manifest enjoyment.