"If mad--if your ladyship wishes."
(Thank heaven for a sense of humour! My one wild desire was to laugh.
Without that blessing, I should have yearned to slap her.)
"What references have you got from your last situation?"
"I have never been in service before--my lady."
"My word! That"s bad. However, you"re on the spot, and Lady Kilmarny recommends you. The poor Princess was going to try you, it seems. I should think she wouldn"t have given much for a maid without any experience."
"I was to have had two thousand francs a year as the Princess"s com--if the Princess was satisfied."
"Preposterous! I don"t believe a word of it. Why, what can you _do_? Can you dress hair? Can you make a blouse?"
"I did my mother"s hair, and sometimes my cousin"s."
"_Your_ mother! _Your_ cousin! I"m talking of a lidy."
My sense of humour _did_ almost fail me just then. But I caught hold of it by the tail just as it was darting out of the window, spitting and scratching like a cross cat.
It was remembering Monsieur Charretier that brought me to my bearings.
"I think your ladyship would be satisfied," I said. "And I make all my own dresses."
"That one you"ve got on?--which is _most_ unsuitable for a maid, I may tell you, and I should never permit it."
"This one I have on, also."
"I thought maybe it had been a present. Well, it"s _something_ that you speak both English and French pa.s.sably well. I"ll try you on Lady Kilmarny"s recommendation, if you want to come to me for fifty francs a month. I won"t give more to an _amateur_."
I thought hard for a minute. Lady Kilmarny had said it would not be many weeks before the Turnours went to England. There, if Miss Paget (who seemed extremely nice by contrast and in retrospect) were still of the same mind, I might find a good home. If not, she was as kind as she was queer, and would help me look further. So I replied that I would accept the fifty francs, and would do my best to please her ladyship.
She did not express herself as gratified. "You can begin work this evening," she said. "I was obliged to send away my last maid yesterday, and I"m _lost_ without one." (This was delightful from a "lidy" who had kept lodgers for years, with the aid perhaps of one smudgy-nosed "general"!) "But have you no more suitable clothes? I can"t let a maid of mine go flaunting about, like a Mary-Jane-on-Sunday."
I mentioned a couple of plain black dresses in my wardrobe, which might be made to answer if I were allowed a few hours" time to work upon them, and didn"t add that they remained from my mourning for one dearly loved.
"You can have till six o"clock free," said Lady Turnour. "Then you must come back to lay out my things for dinner, and dress me. What about your room? Had the Princess taken something for you in the hotel?"
I evaded a direct answer by saying that I had a room; and was inwardly thankful that, evidently, the Turnours had not noticed me in the restaurant at luncheon, otherwise things might have been awkward.
"Very well, you can keep the same one, then," went on her ladyship, "and let the hotel people know it"s Sir Samuel who pays for it. To-morrow morning we leave, in our sixty-horse-power motor car. We are making a tour before going back to England. Sir Samuel"s stepson joins us in Paris or perhaps before and travels on with us. He is staying now with some French people of very high t.i.tle, who live in a chateau. You will sit on the front seat with the chauffeur."
This was a blow! I hadn"t thought of the chauffeur. "But," thought I, "chauffeur or no chauffeur, it"s too late now for retreat."
Talk of Prometheus with his vulture, the Spartan boy with his decently concealed wolf! What of Lys d"Angely with an English chauffeur in her pocket?
CHAPTER V
When I was dismissed from the Presence, I ran to Lady Kilmarny with my story, and she agreed with me that the thing to dread most in the whole situation was the chauffeur.
"Of course he"ll naturally consider himself on an equality with you,"
she said, "and you"ll have to eat with him at hotels, and all that.
Once, when my husband and I were touring in France, and used to break down near little inns, we were obliged to have a chauffeur at the same table with us, because there was only one long one (table, I mean, not chauffeur) and we couldn"t spare time to let him wait till we"d finished. My dear, it was ghastly! You would never believe if you hadn"t seen it, how the creature swallowed his knife when he ate, and did conjuring tricks with his fork and spoon. I simply _dared_ not look at him gnawing his bread, but used to shut my eyes. I hate to distress you, poor child, but I tell you these things as a warning. _Are_ you able to bear it?"
I said that I, too, could shut my eyes.
"You can"t make a habit of doing so. And he may want to put his arm round your waist, or chuck you under the chin. I used to have complaints from my maid, who was comparatively plain, while you--but I don"t want to frighten you. He _may_ be different from our man. Some, they say, are most respectable. I love common people when they"re nice, and give up quite pleasantly to being common; and of course Irish ones are too delightful. But you can"t hope for an Irish chauffeur. I hear they don"t exist. They"re all French or German or English. Let us hope this one may be the father of a family."
It was well enough to be told to hope; and Lady Kilmarny meant to be kind, but what she said made me "creep" whenever I thought of the chauffeur.
She advised me not to take my meals with the maids and valets at the Majestic Palace, because a change, so sudden and Cinderella-like, after lunching in the restaurant, would cause disagreeable talk in the hotel.
As my living in future would be at the charge of the Turnours, I might afford myself a few indulgences to begin with, she argued; and deciding that she was right, I made up my mind to have my remaining meals served in my own room.
I hastily stripped a black frock of its tr.i.m.m.i.n.g, dressed my hair more simply even than usual, parted down the middle, and altogether strove to achieve the air of a _femme de chambre_ born, not made. But I"m bound to chronicle the fact for my own future reference (when some day I shall laugh at this adventure) that the effect, though restful to the eye, suggested the stage _femme de chambre_ rather than the sober reality one sees in every-day life. However, I was conscious of having done my best, a state of mind which always produces a cool, strawberries-and-cream feeling in the soul; and thus supported I tripped (yes, I _did_ trip!) downstairs to adorn Lady Turnour for dinner.
The door was open between her bedroom and the sitting-room. Waiting in the former I could hear voices in the latter. Lady Turnour and her husband were talking about the arrival of the stepson whose name, I soon gleaned from their conversation, is Herbert. Naturally, it _would_ be.
People like that are always named Herbert, and are familiarly known to those whom they may concern as "Bertie."
Presently, her ladyship came into the bedroom, and said, as a queen might say to her tirewoman, "Put me into my dressing-gown." If there were a feminine word for "sirrah," I think she would have liked to call me it.
My eye, roving distractedly, pounced upon a gold-embroidered, purple silk kimono, perhaps more appropriate to Pooh-Bah than to a stout English lady of the lower middle cla.s.s. I released it from its hook on the door, and would that her ladyship had been as easy to release from her bodice!
She had not one hook, but many; and they were all so incredibly tight that, to put her into the dressing-gown as ordered, I feared it would be necessary to melt and pour her out of the gown she had on.
While I wrestled, silent and red faced, with a bodice as snug as the head of a drum, the lord of all it contained appeared in the doorway, and stopped, looking at me in surprise.
He is common, too, this Sir Samuel, millionaire maker of pills; but he is common in a good, almost pathetic way, quite different from his wife"s way--or Monsieur Charretier"s. He has stick-up gray hair curling all over his round head, blue eyes, twinkling with a mild, yet shrewd expression (which might be merry if encouraged by her ladyship), and a large, slouching body with stooped shoulders.
"What young lady have we here?" he inquired.
"Not a young lady at all," explained his wife sharply. "My new French maid."
"I beg your pardon, I"m sure," said Sir Samuel, though it wasn"t quite clear whether it was my forgiveness or that of his spouse he craved, for his mistake in supposing me to be a "young lady."
"What"s her name?" he wanted to know, evidently approving of me, if not as a maid, at least as a human being.
"Something ridiculous in French that sounds like "Liz,"" sniffed her ladyship. "But I shall call her Elise. Also I shall expect her to stop dyeing her hair."
"But, madame, I do not dye it!" I exclaimed.
"Don"t tell me. I know dyed hair when I see it."
(She ought to, having experience enough with her own!)
"Nature is the dyer, then," I ventured to persist, piqued to self-defence by the certainty that her object was to strip me of my wicked mask before her husband.