She rose from the table with a determination that struck awe to the hearts of the powdered underlings, and, drawing herself up to her full height, exclaimed:
"Send Mrs. Forbes at once to my study, if you please--at once, do you understand?"
In a moment Mrs. Forbes, who was the great novelist"s maid, appeared on the threshold of the oracle"s lair. She was a sober-looking, black-silk personage, who always wore a pork-pie cap in the house, and a Mother Hubbard bonnet out of it. Having been in service with Mrs. Greyne ever since the latter penned her last minor poetry--Mrs. Greyne had been a minor poet for three years soon after she put her hair up--Mrs. Forbes had acquired a certain literary expression of countenance and a manner that was decidedly prosy. She read a good deal after her supper of an evening, and was wont to be the arbiter when any literary matter was discussed in the servants" hall.
"Madam?" she said, respectfully entering the room, and bending the pork-pie cap forward in an attentive att.i.tude.
Mrs. Greyne was silent for a moment. She appeared to be thinking deeply.
Mrs. Forbes gently closed the door, and sighed. It was nearly her supper-time, and she felt pensive.
"Madam?" she said again.
Mrs. Greyne looked up. A strange fire burned in her large eyes.
"Mrs. Forbes," she said at length, with weighty deliberation, "the mission of woman in the world is a great one."
"Very true, madam. My own words to Butler Phillips no longer ago than dinner this midday."
"It is the protecting of man--neither more nor less."
"My own statement, madam, to Second Footman Archibald this self-same day at the tea-board."
"Man needs guidance, and looks for it to us--or rather to me."
At the last word Mrs. Forbes pinched her lips together, and appeared older than her years and sourer than her normal temper.
"At this moment, Mrs. Forbes," continued Mrs. Greyne, with rising fervour, "he looks for it to me from Africa. From that dark continent he stretches forth his hands to me in humble supplication."
"Mr. Greyne has not been taken with another of his bilious attacks, I hope, madam?" said Mrs. Forbes.
Mrs. Greyne smiled. The ignorance of the humbly born entertained her. It was so simple, so transparent.
"You fail to understand me," she answered. "But never mind; others have done the same."
She thought of her reviewers. Mrs. Forbes smiled. She also could be entertained.
"Madam?" she inquired once more after a pause.
"I shall leave for Africa to-morrow morning," said Mrs. Greyne. "You will accompany me."
There was a dead silence.
"You will accompany me. Do you understand? Obtain a.s.sistance from the housemaids in the packing. Select my quietest gowns, my least conspicuous bonnets. I have my reasons for wishing, while journeying to Africa and remaining there, to pa.s.s, if possible, unnoticed."
Again there was a pause. Mrs. Greyne looked up at Mrs. Forbes, and observed a dogged expression upon her countenance.
"What is the matter?" she asked the maid.
"Do we go by Paris, madam?" said Mrs. Forbes.
"Certainly."
"Then, madam, I"m very sorry, but I couldn"t risk it, not if it was ever so----"
"Why not? Why this fear of Lutetia?"
"Madam, I"m not afraid of any Lutetia as ever wore ap.r.o.n, but to go to Paris to be drugged with absint, and put away in a third-cla.s.s waiting-room like a package--I couldn"t madam, not even if I have to leave your service."
Mrs. Greyne recognised that the episode of the valet had struck home to the lady"s maid.
"But you will not leave my side."
"They will absint you, madam."
"But you will travel first in a sleeping-car."
Mrs. Forbes put up her hand to her pork-pie cap, as if considering.
"Very well, madam, to oblige you I will undergo it," she said at length.
"But I would not do the like for another living lady."
"I will raise your wages. You are a faithful creature."
"Does master expect us, madam?" asked Mrs. Forbes as she prepared to retire.
A bright and tender look stole into Mrs. Greyne"s intellectual face.
"No," she replied.
She turned her large and beaming eyes full upon the maid.
"Mrs. Forbes," she said, with an amount of emotion that was very rare in her, "I am going to tell you a great truth."
"Madam?" said Mrs. Forbes respectfully.
"The sweetest moments of life, those which lift man nearest heaven, and make him thankful for the great gift of existence, are sometimes those which are unforeseen."
She was thinking of Mr. Greyne"s ecstasy when, upon the inhospitable African sh.o.r.e where he was now enduring such tragic misfortunes, he perceived the majestic form of his loved one--his loved one whom he believed to be in Belgrave Square--coming towards him to soothe, to comfort, to direct. She brushed away a tear.
"Go, Mrs. Forbes," she said.
And Mrs. Forbes retired, smiling.
An epic might well be written on the great novelist"s journey to Africa, upon her departure from Charing Cross, shrouded in a black gauze veil, her silent thought as the good ship _Empress_ rode cork-like upon the Channel waves, her ascetic lunch--a captain"s biscuit and a gla.s.s of water--at the buffet at Calais, her arrival in Paris when the shades of night had fallen. An epic might well be written. Perhaps some day it will be, by herself.
In Paris she suffered a good deal on account of Mrs. Forbes, who, in her fear of "ab-sint," became hysterical, and caused not a little annoyance by accusing various inoffensive French travellers of nefarious designs upon her property and person. In the Gulf of Lyons she suffered even more, and as, unluckily, the wind was contrary and the sea prodigious during the whole of the pa.s.sage across the Mediterranean, both she and Mrs. Forbes arrived at Algiers four hours late, in a condition which may be more easily imagined than properly described.
Genius in thrall to the body, and absolutely dependent upon green chartreuse for its flickering existence, is no subject for even a sympathetic pen. Sufficient to say that, when the ship came in under the lights of Algiers, the crowd of shouting Arabs was struck to silence by the spectacle of Mrs. Greyne and Mrs. Forbes endeavouring to disembark, in bonnets that were placed seaward upon the head instead of landward, unb.u.t.toned boots, and gowns soaked with the attentions of the waves.