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 st.u.r.dy 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 pa.s.sed 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 Va.s.sity 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----