PAMELA POUNCE

WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE INCOMPARABLE BELLAIRS
JOHN SENESCHAL’S MARGARET
THE PRIDE OF JENNICO, Etc.

HODDER AND STOUGHTON LIMITED

PAMELA POUNCE

A TALE OF
TEMPESTUOUS PETTICOATS

BY
AGNES & EGERTON CASTLE

HODDER AND STOUGHTON LTD.
TORONTO LONDON NEW YORK
ST. PAUL’S HOUSE WARWICK SQUARE E.C.4

CONTENTS

PREFACE

There can be no doubt that shedding her petticoats a woman has shed much, if not all, of her femininity, till she is now merely a person of an opposite sex. She is a female; for nothing will ever make her a man, but Woman (with a capital W), Woman with her charm, her elusiveness, her mystery, her reserves, her virginal withdrawals, her exquisite yieldings; she is that no longer.

How much of her queenship has she not given up with her petticoats?

At no time was Woman more thoroughly feminine, more absolutely mistress of her own fascinations and of the hearts of men, than in the eighteenth century; preferably the latter half.

That was a time when it may be said that no woman could look ugly; that beauty became irresistible. Take the period consecrated by the art of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and of Romney; take the picture of the Parson’s Daughter, by the latter artist; that little face, so piquante, innocent, fresh, sly, mischievous, is nothing at all without its cloud of powdered curls but a very ordinary visage; almost common indeed! With its distinctive coiffure, framing, softening, etherealising, giving depth to the eyes and allurement to the smile; how irresistibly delicious! How irresistibly delicious, too, is the mode which exposes the young throat so modestly between the soft folds of the muslin kerchief.

Youth then, even without much beauty, is served to perfection by the taste of the period. What of beauty itself? Look at the portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire, by Sir Joshua Reynolds, the famous one with the big hat, where she is holding the dancing baby. There is an answer more eloquent than any words can give.

And, rarest thing in a fashion! it became age as completely. Even elderliness emerged triumphant. I vow that Mrs. Hardcastle, Mrs. Malaprop, Mrs. Primrose are delightful figures of buxomness on any stage. Their double chins assume a pleasant sort of dignity, overshadowed by the curls and loops of their tremendous coiffures. The dress with its panniers, its apron, its general amplitude is peculiarly advantageous to the too, too solid flesh of the matron.

The mode of the moment has a singular effect on the morals of the moment. Our emotions are more moulded and coloured by our clothes than we are aware.

It is quite certain that when a young lady went panniered and patched, fichued and ruffled, powdered and rouged, tripping on high heels, ready for the minuet, her feelings went delicately with her, metaphorically garbed in daintiness to match.

And, when a gentleman of fashion was a Beau; when his fine leg showed to its utmost in a silk stocking; when his pampered hand was as elegant of gesture with a pinch of snuff between falling ruffles as it was in whipping out a small sword, he retained his masculine virility none the less; but like the blade of that same small sword, was cutting, polished, deadly, vicious even, all within the measure of courtesy and refinement.

The world has mightily changed since the days when hearts beat under the folds of the fichu or against the exquisite embroideries of the waistcoat. Sad divagations then, as now, were taken out of the path of rectitude, but they were taken with a rustle of protesting petticoats, to the gallant accompaniment of buckled shoes or, more romantic still, dashing top-boots.

A tale of 1788 is necessarily a tale of petticoats.

“A winning wave, deserving note

Of a tempestuous petticoat,”

cries the poet of an earlier age. Femininity must needs rustle and whisper, and curtsy and flounce through every chapter.

The collaborator whose name appears for the last time on this title page, turned to the century of The Bath Comedy and the subsequent and connected chronicles as a kind of relaxation of the mind from what he most hated: the ugliness of modern life. The realism which sets itself to describe the material, the grosser aspect of any emotion, the brutality that miscalls itself strength, that forcing of the note of horror—which is no more power than the beating of a tin can or the shrieking of a syren is music—were abhorrent to him. He liked the pretty period in spite of its artificialities; he liked the whole glamour of the time; he liked its reticence and its gaiety, its politeness, its wit, and its naughtiness and its quaintness, because, as in an artistic bout of fencing, it was all bounded by a certain measure of grace and rule.

The laughter he gave to these conceptions came, as true laughter must, from a most innocent and wholesome heart. It is this laughter which is his last legacy to a sad, tangled, and rather ugly world.

Agnes Egerton Castle.

PROLOGUE

“No man is hero to his valet”; so runs the cynical adage. But you can reverse the saying with reference to the other sex. Every woman is a heroine to her lady’s maid; it may not be true in all cases, but ’tis true enough for any proverb.

The romance of a lady’s own woman is centred in her mistress. She will clothe her in finery with a greater joy than if she were draping herself; rather than see her go shabby she would wear sackcloth; she will hang over the banisters, on a dinner-party night, to observe the sit of her train as she sweeps downstairs on the arm of some notable personage; she will lean out of the window to watch her step into her sedan, and if there are Beaux hovering and my Lady tosses her plumes and whisks her panniers to proper advantage it is Abigail’s heart that beats high with pride.

Even Miss Lydia Pounce, own woman to my Lady Kilcroney, a damsel remarkable from her earliest youth for her tart and contradictious ways, who was verging on elderliness now with the acidity and leanness peculiar to the “born old maid,” would have laid down her life to ensure that my Lady’s court gown should fit her trim waist without a wrinkle, or that the pink silk stocking that clothed her pretty leg was drawn to its proper skin-tight limit.

(Both the Incomparable Kitty and her Lydia were exceedingly particular that these same stockings should never be worn with the gross slovenliness that permitted a sag. Not indeed that anything but the merest glimpse of slender, arched feet, like the “little mice” of an earlier poet’s fancy, peeping in and out from under the flutter and foam of lace and silken flounce, was ever displayed to the vulgar eye; but to know these niceties complete in the smallest and most delicate detail was necessary to the comfort of any self-respecting Woman. And on this point Lydia was in thorough sympathy with her mistress, as upon all others connected with the elegance and bon ton of the most modish of Mayfair belles; of that leader of Fashion, Feeling and Style which the Lady Kilcroney undoubtedly was.)

If Woman be a heroine to her lady’s maid, in what light does she appear to her Milliner?

Here we come upon debatable ground. At first sight it would seem that the milliner, being dependent upon her customers for her very existence, it must follow that whatever her private opinion may be with regard to their appearance and taste, she can have but one burning desire: to please her patronesses. There is nevertheless another side to the question.

What Woman of intelligence but does not realise that a Mode may make or mar her? How much may hang on the droop of a feather; the tilt of a hat-brim; the glow of a rose in cunning juxtaposition with the soft carmine of a blushing cheek? Blue eyes may flash into sudden significance under a knot of azure ribbon, that had before languished their tenderest in vain. Saucy innocence may triumph beneath a shepherdess wreath; or tired charms kindle into new brilliancy stimulated by the consciousness of the perfect inspiration. In fine, all that life holds best is at the mercy of the mantua maker where the Lady of Fashion is concerned. Let but a clever business woman grasp this great and awful truth; and she who combines the brain that can devise, the taste that never fails, the acumen that knows no hesitation, the finger that is at once light and firm, unerring and ethereal, becomes to her employers a treasure beyond the mines of Golconda!

Such a treasure did Miss Pamela Pounce, with whom these pages are concerned, prove herself to the noted Madame Mirabel of Bond Street. And such an influence, far-reaching and subtle, did she exercise on the lives of the Elégantes who consulted her, with the eager submission and reverence of the believing Greek for his Oracles, though with far other and comfortably practical results!

Miss Pamela Pounce, Goddess of Modes, was ipso facto Goddess of the Machine of Life, deciding, with a lucky toss of ribbons or hitherto undreamt of combination of fallals, the fate of her fair customers, and incidentally that of their Beaux, their lovers and their husbands; my Lady Kilcroney and her lazy, jolly life-loving Lord; dark-browed Susan Verney, who would fain have bent the whole world to her sway as she did her weary Baron; Lady Anne, her sister, still fondly, foolishly in love with her stalwart, countrified Squire, Philip Day; their young sister, the last of the fair Vereker Ladies and the naughtiest, with her tangled love-stories; Mr. Stafford, the once famous Beau, proud of the startling beauty of his excellent, dull, childish wife, and anxious that she should flaunt it à la mode with the best of them; Sir Jasper Standish, the sporting Baronet, who, bereaved of his exquisite, clinging Julia, found himself entangled beyond belief with Miss Pamela Pounce’s ribbons; the noted young actress, Miss Falcon, known as “Fair Fatality,” whose brief life drama was more tragic than any she had enacted for the benefit of the public; the plain Miss Vibart, who found beauty and love and happiness all in a Pounce bandbox; Mistress Molly Lafone, own sister—who would believe it?—to the pearl of ingenuous womanhood, Prue Stafford, Molly Lafone that minx, whom the members of my Lady Kilcroney’s coterie were so unanimously leagued to suppress and exclude, and who, in spite of their efforts contrived to insinuate herself disastrously into all their combinations (was it not under a wreath twisted by Pamela’s long clever fingers that this elegant little adventuress came to her most deserved catastrophe?)—there was not one of them but came under her wand!

But at the same time the arbiter of the fate of others, in the shape of a very human young woman, guided the shuttle of her own destiny, and wove a remarkably pretty design for herself.

Milliners, unlike Oracles and Sybils, have each their personal human span with its joys and fears, pleasures, pains and triumphs. Pamela’s romance ran like a cherry-coloured thread through the warp and woof of those other existences, so far above her, in which her profession had involved her. To show the whole pattern, light and dark, sparkling and deep-hued, flowered, dotted, arabesqued, of this brocade of earthly life, the poor Modiste must assume as important a place as that of her clientele.

CHAPTER I

How my Lady Kilcroney entered into Royal
Service under the Shadow of the Italian Hat
trimmed by Miss Pamela Pounce

While Miss Pamela Pounce was serving her third year as apprentice to the great art of Hat Confectionery, under the ægis of no less a personage than the world-famous Madame Eglantine of Paris—once “the little French Milliner” of Bath—her aunt and benefactress, who had placed her in these favourable circumstances, had begun to taste the proudest triumph of her life.

Miss Lydia Pounce was about to become own woman to a Court lady! My Lady Kilcroney—to whom she had so faithfully and ruthlessly devoted herself—from the days when, as the Widow Bellairs, she first scintillated in the world of fashion, to her present position of Viscountess—was chosen by Her Majesty, Queen Charlotte, to fill the post of Lady-in-Waiting to her own Sacred Person.

To enter Court circles had been the dream of Lydia’s angular and ambitious breast. Her mistress’s gratified vanity was a trifling emotion compared to the bursting satisfaction which this upward step on the social ladder afforded the maid. It is not too much to say that she regarded herself in the light of a Prime Minister who has successfully brought about some great political event, and who is a far more important person than the Sovereign whom he serves.

It came to pass in this wise.

His Most Gracious Majesty, King George III, had been ordered to Cheltenham Spa for the waters by his physicians; his state of health was causing anxiety, the extent of which was as yet quite unknown to the bulk of his loyal subjects. Queen Charlotte, the most devoted of spouses, of course determined to accompany him; and the Royal party duly proceeded to the Spa.

It happened to be Lady Flora Dare-Stamer’s term of attendance on Her Majesty, and that stout estimable Lady-in-Waiting happened to be Lady Kilcroney’s very close and dear friend. There was nothing remarkable, perhaps, in the conjunction of these two happenings; but it was indeed singular that Kitty Kilcroney should happen to discover a delicacy in her son and heir which necessitated an instant visit to the celebrated health resort now so vastly honoured.

These events having succeeded each other, nothing more natural than that my Lady Kilcroney should invite her “poor dear Flo” to a dish of tea and a chat at her lodgings, to rest her of the fatigue consequent upon her eminent but exhausting office.

Though Lady Flora had made no secret to her intimates of her intention to rid herself of her honours as soon as might be, who so surprised as her dearest Kitty to learn that she now believed her emancipation at hand?

“To tell you the truth, my dear,” said Lady Flo, chewing a macaroon, “it’s not a job that suits me in the least. ’Twould fit you vastly better.”

“O, Lady Flo!” cried Kitty in accents of amazement. “What a strange thought! I vow and declare such an idea never crossed my mind. And, in truth, ’tis rank impossible. There are a hundred reasons, a thousand reasons, why I am the last person likely to be selected by Her Majesty. I am too young.”

“Upon my word,” said her companion bluntly. “I doubt if there’s so much between us, my dear, were it not that I have run to fat. These macaroons are excellent. ’Tis like your genius to be so well served in lodgings. You’ve brought the best of your staff with you, I make no doubt.”

“And, O, my love! the difficulty of housing them! There’s scarce a tradesman in the town that hath not a servant of mine.”

Kitty spoke with the careless self-importance of the wealthy woman. And Lady Florence approved.

“How right of you, my love, to insist on Comfort!” Comfort was the first and last of her aspirations. “Aye, I will have a little more cream. This whipped stuff—I dare swear ’tis your idea to have it so lavishly flavoured with the vanilla; vastly delicate. Your chocolate is as incomparable as your agreeable self! But yours are not the years of giddiness. I speak in all friendship, I beg you to believe.”

Kitty murmured in an absent voice, that she had married her first—worthy Bellairs—a mere child, practically out of the nursery.

“Anyhow, my sweet Kilcroney, no woman who has had two husbands can deny a certain amount of experience, and upon rep,” with a rolling laugh, “I don’t care who knows that I’m on the wrong side of thirty! You must be pretty well advanced on the right side of it?”

“If you can call twenty-eight——”

“Admit to twenty-eight, by all means!—nevertheless, ’tis an age of discretion. And Her Majesty——”

“I understand——” said Kitty, balancing her teaspoon on the rim of her handleless cup with a musing air—she wondered in her soul if the excellent Lady Flo could really be taken in by this pretence; if it were possible she did not guess that she, Kitty Kilcroney, was longing, grilling to step into her Court shoes—as if she cared who knew that she was over thirty her last birthday, and warming but to riper beauty as the months slipped by!

“’Tis not,” she said aloud, with a pout, “that I would decline a post about our gracious Queen, if ’twere offered me, God forbid! I am too loyal a subject. But I understand the German woman, that frumpish creature, the Keeper of the Robes—what’s her barbarous name?—hath the royal ear, and will not suffer anything young or comely, if she can help it, about Her Majesty—(And there’s one for you, my Lady Flo, with your right and your wrong side of thirty!) ’Tis a vast of pity you will not continue to occupy a position so honourable and so becoming to you.”

“To tell you the truth,” said Lady Flora unmoved, helping herself to another macaroon, “’tis the standing that undoes your poor friend! Conceive it, my love, full fourteen stone, and on my feet hours every day. Hours did I say? Centuries. Look hither!” She thrust out a large sandalled foot, which certainly had a plethoric appearance. “’Tis swollen beyond belief. I acknowledge my stoutness. I made but little count of it, for I’ve been a prodigious comfortable woman along of it. ’Tis a cushioned life. It pads the mind as it were. I assure you, I believe myself to have been, only some three months ago, the most good-tempered woman in England. And now! ’Pon rep, I am growing peevish! Fie upon it—stout and peevish! Was there ever such a combination?”

As if to contradict her own statement she again gave way to her jolly laugh. Kitty, watching her through long eyelashes, sighed.

“But what can induce you to think of me, my Lady Flo? Poor little retiring me?”

“Pray my dear, do not play the Molly Lafone with me!”

Molly Lafone! Such a comparison was too comic! Kitty laughed, and dropped her not very successful mask.

“Upon my word, then, I believe it would suit me! But how can it be accomplished? I am not one to push myself forward. My Lord Kilcroney is an Irishman and no courtier, and their Majesties have their own favourites; and indeed to begin with, I doubt whether you will find it so easy to resign.”

“Resign, Kitty! Resign? No, dear Kilcroney, I am on the point of being graciously dismissed. It took some management, but I was desperate. Another month of this, I said, and Mr. Stamer will be able to look out for a new wife—which he would do, my dear love, across my very coffin—’twas yesterday sennight then, I made up my mind. I took my best rose-point flounce—by the mercy of heaven it was just returned from the lace-menders, neatly packed in tissue tied with ribbon and a scent bag within, as elegant a parcel as you could wish to see!—and I sought Mrs. Schwellenberg—aye, that same!—and says I, ‘For mercy’s sake, give me a chair. My poor feet will scarce support me?’ At which she looks as sour as a crab, and quoth she: ‘We all have veet, Lady Florence’ (you know her vile accent), ‘but we forget dem in our great honour and brivilege,’ ‘Would God I could forget mine,’ thinks I. But she glances at the parcel in my hand: ‘Take a zeat,’ she says with a roll of her old eye. ‘Ah, my good Frau,’ says I to myself, ‘you may look, but you shan’t clutch yet a bit!’”

Lady Florence laughed reminiscently, and Kitty screamed:

“Never tell me you gave the old Dutch villain your rose-point flounce!”

“And what would be the good of a rose-point flounce to me, when I should be dropped dead in the Queen’s apartment, like any hackney jade? My love, I showed that ancient toad my two feet—and I vow toad is a good name for her, for she hath the countenance and the croak of her own pet frogs—I showed her my feet, and I lamented my stones of weight. ’Pon rep! I gave myself sixteen, I did indeed, and what with the swelling, I looked ’em! ‘Let me confide in you,’ I cries, ‘if ever I saw a truly noble soul writ on a human brow, ’tis on yours! My frame,’ I cries, ‘is not equal to my devotion. My ankles will not support the loyalty of my heart! ’tis not that I should grudge passing away in such service,’ I cries, turning up my eyes—You could not have done it better, Kitty!—‘but were I to faint in those sacred precincts, were I to pass away in that august Presence, Her Majesty would be justly annoyed. Dr. Jebb has warned me. Alas! look at me. Am I not fat?’ ‘Vat you are,’ says she, ‘but so am I.’ Well, then, my love, I gave her a peep of the lace, and she began to dribble at the corners of her mouth, and I knew the trick was done! ‘If I speak to Her Majesty,’ says she, and she fingering my rose-point, ‘I vonder vot substitute I could suggest. Her Majesty she does not like the changes, and——’ And then, I thought of you, Kitty.”

“I wonder why, in the name of Heaven!” cried this lady tartly.

“Your feet won’t swell, my love.”

“I need not accept,” quoth Kitty, pinching her lips.

“Kitty, if you play your cards well, the post will be offered to you while their Majesties are here at Cheltenham. ’Tis all settled with the Schwellenberg. Do you not know,” said Lady Florence, pushing the dish with a single remaining macaroon upon it, virtuously from her, “that Susan Verney is making all the interest in the world for the honour? But she was rude to the Schwellenberg one day—you know poor Susan’s way!—when they met in my drawing-room at Queen’s Lodge, and the Schwellenberg will have none of her!”

“Say no more!” cried Kitty, and fires shot from her eyes.

“My love, I believe I have served you,” said Lady Florence, replying to the eloquence of that glance. “‘My royals are not bartial to the Irish,’ said Schwellenberg. ‘Ah, but Madam,’ I says. ‘My Lady Kilcroney is not Irish. She is true-born English, and has vast wealth—widow of an Indian Nabob—vast wealth and a generous heart!—And you admire the lace, Madam?’ says I, ‘in the very truth I was hoping I might venture to offer it to you, for ’tis lace that should be worn at court, Madam, and in no other place—and as I mentioned to you, my Lady Kilcroney and her Lord have practically severed all ties with Ireland. If you would accept the flounce, Madam, on my retirement (I think there is a narrow edging of rose-point to match).’ ‘I will tink of what you say about my Lady Kilcroney,’ croaks she. Am I not a good friend, Kitty?”

She looked at Kitty with such beaming kindness that all this latter’s caprices vanished; she cast herself affectionately on Lady Florence’s huge bosom and voted that she was indeed the best and dearest!

It was agreed between them before the large and jovial lady left the pleasant apartments overlooking the meadows, that she would call early next morning, and report the result of Mrs. Schwellenberg’s “tinking,” since she had been given to understand that Her Majesty would deliver her gracious dismissal that evening, during the process of the Royal disrobing.

“You must hold yourself ready, my sweet child, to be at any point considered suitable along Her Majesty’s path during the next few days. By the looks Her Majesty casts on me I am convinced Schwellenberg has kept her word, and prepared the ground ’ere we left Queen’s Lodge. Well, she knew she would not get the rose-point otherwise.”

Kitty stood reflecting in the bow-window long after Lady Florence’s chairmen had reeled away with their burden towards Lord Fauconberg’s small house on the hill, which had been placed at their Majesties’ disposal. It could not be said that she had quite so altogether consuming a desire for the post of Lady-in-Waiting since hearing Lady Florence’s talk and gazing on those swollen feet, but, rather than that Susan Verney—dark, overbearing Susan!—should have the advantage, Kitty would have stood on burning ploughshares. She had, thank Heaven, as good health as any lady in the kingdom, a back that was never tired, and a fund of humour and good humour that made her equal to most trials. Moreover she had a fighting spirit, and, she flattered herself, a charm of her own. If she did not get the better of Schwellenberg on the one hand, and ingratiate herself with Royalty on the other, then she was no longer Incomparable Bellairs!

Her agreeable reflections were broken in upon by the entrance of my Lord Kilcroney.

Now, hot-blooded, red-headed Irishman as he was, it was the rarest thing in the world for this nobleman to be seriously out of temper with anyone, let alone with the wife of his bosom; but, as he flung himself into Kitty’s hired parlour, he was in as irate a mood as he had ever indulged in, and that with his Lady.

“Here’s a pretty business!” quoth he, and cast his hat on the table in the middle of the room, very nearly dislodging the glass dome which protected a gold filigree basket containing the most purple plums, the reddest strawberries, the bluest grapes that ever artist in wax produced. “Here’s a pretty to-do!” cried Denis Kilcroney.

“There seems indeed to be a to-do!” retorted Kitty. She wheeled round from the window. “But you will condescend to explain the cause perhaps, my Lord?”

“So I hear you’ve got a place about the court, me darling,” said Denis, plunging into sarcasm, with a flushed countenance. “’Pon me soul, ’tis the grand lady you’re going to be entirely! ’Tis the back seat your husband will have to be taking. Glory be to God, what’s a husband? And an Irish one into the bargain!”

“Pray, my Lord,” cried Kitty, all eagerness. “Where have you heard the news? For, as I’m a living woman, ’tis news to me.”

“Ah! go on out of that.” My Lord was certainly very angry, and more than usually Hibernian. “Didn’t that fat baggage come straight out of these doors? Didn’t she put that full moon face of hers out of the sedan window and bawl to her men to stop, and them with the sweat dripping off them, God help them! And ‘oh,’ she calls, ‘My Lord Kilcroney,’ she cries, ‘’tis quite settled,’ she says. ‘And your Kitty to take my post about Her Majesty.’ Why, all Cheltenham could have heard her.”

“Tush!” Kitty’s peach-tinted countenance, agog with delight, fell. “Is that all? Why——” she was about to expound to Denis with some firmness the folly of giving way to passion over an event that was still in the uncertain future, at the same time conveying to him her clear intention to leave no stone unturned towards its accomplishment, when her little black page appeared at the open door, grinning at the sounds of dispute, and announced: “Mistress Lafone.” And if the sight of dusky innocence amused was exasperating to my Lady, what can be said of the feelings aroused by the smile of minxish artfulness?

“Good heavens,” cried Kitty. “And what brings you to Cheltenham, if one may ask?”

“Good-morrow, my sweet Kilcroney.”

This familiarity!

“Good-morrow, Madam.” Kitty swept a curtsy to mark her distance, the while my Lord kissed the creature’s hand, positively as if he liked doing so, and him but out of such a tantrum as never was.

“And what should bring me to Cheltenham—(no, my Lord, pray. I prefer the little stool. I do indeed)—why should not poor little me be here with the rest?”

“Why, indeed?” growled Kilcroney.

“And what has brought you, my Lady, if one may inquire?”

“She thought little Denis looked pale!” cried my Lord, and gave a great guffaw.

“You may laugh, Madam,” said Kitty, as Mrs. Lafone tinkled delicately. “There are feelings which only a mother can understand.”

Mistress Lafone was childless.

“One excuse will serve as well as another.” My Lord let himself fall into a chair that creaked threateningly beneath his weight.

“Oh, I seek for no excuse,” quoth Molly Lafone. Crouching on the low stool, she had a singular air of astuteness, in spite of her fostered childishness. “I never can understand why people should not tell the truth.” She raised arch eyes towards my Lord, while Kitty sat with the majesty of an Eastern idol, and had not as much as the quiver of an eyelash.

“I’m here to curry favour with royalty,” she laughed again sweetly, “like the rest of us!”

The brazenness of it! My Lord guffawed again. He certainly was in a most unpleasant mood.

“Huthen. I hope you’ll be as successful as my Lady there!”

“Oh! My Lady Kilcroney!...”

“Sure, isn’t it the surprise of her life.” Kilcroney once again waded heavily in sarcasm. “She hadn’t as much as the faintest notion such a thing could happen to her—had you, me Lady? She hadn’t as much as opened her mouth for the plum”—it was perhaps the purple artifice on the table that suggested the simile—“but didn’t it drop into it? It’s going to be Lady-in-Waiting she is, in place of my Lady Flo——”

“Oh! my Lord, say you so? Says he right, my dearest Lady Kilcroney? ’Tis the most splendid, the most monstrous delightful news I’ve heard this long time. Oh!” cried Mrs. Lafone, clasping and wringing her hands in an ecstasy. “May not your little Molly rejoice with you?”

“You are vastly disinterested,” said Kitty.

Mrs. Lafone gave her tinkling laugh.

“Ah, my Lady—indeed, my Lord, I have said that I am frank. Dearest Lady Kilcroney, I will be frank—If I could obtain some little post—the teeniest, weeniest little post at court——”

But Kitty interrupted, bouncing out of her stateliness.

“Pray, Mrs. Lafone, for what post should you consider yourself qualified about the august person of our gracious Queen?”

“Oh! My Lady Kilcroney, the least little post in all the world! Hath not the Queen appointed a plain Miss Burney reader? I believe I could very well be reader. Mr. Lafone says I have a silver tone in my voice, and our curate at home once told me——”

“Tush, the celebrated Miss Burney hath qualifications, child, which you in your foolishness fail to appreciate.”

“Yet she is but a music teacher’s daughter, Madam,” said Molly with a mighty sigh. She dropped her white eyelids and turned a green glint on my Lord, and sighed again. “Or if not actually about her Majesty—who am I, indeed, to aspire to that Presence?—some office about yourself, dear Lady Kilcroney. I would be your secretary, your Lady-in-waiting, your devoted attendant!”

“This is folly,” cried Kitty. “I am by no means appointed to my Lady Flo’s post, and if I were—well, to be frank with you, Lafone, since you like frankness so much—you are the last person in the world I should ever be instrumental in bringing to court. Heavens!” cried Kitty, gazing upwards at the low ceiling, as if she saw through it into the celestial regions. “What discretion, what faultless propriety of conduct, what a delicate sense of responsibility, what a blameless record should be demanded of one who would enter that sacred circle!...”

(It was the glint of her visitor’s green eye at my Lord which gave this stern decision to Kitty’s tones.)

Here, quite unexpectedly, and with admirable effectiveness, large tears rose in Mrs. Lafone’s eyes and rolled down her cheeks, without in the least disturbing the prettiness of her pointed visage. My Lord cast a glance from one to the other; it was lit with a tender sympathy as it fell on this touching impersonation of grief, and kindled with reproach as it shot to Kitty.

Mrs. Lafone gave a small sob.

“Your sweet lady,” she said, now audaciously addressing her male champion, “has ever been a friend in need. ’Tis for that, that I have ventured, my Lord, that I have ventured to come to her to-day, hearing—yes! I will own it, I already knew that she was like to be next in the Queen’s choice. I made the journey hither in the hopes—’tis for no reason of petty vanity, no mere envious ambition——” (Thus the minx) ... “oh! my Lord, I scarce know why, I have ever been sadly persecuted. I am the victim of evil tongues!... My reputation has been assailed....”

“Ha!” said Kitty. The ejaculation leaped from her.

Molly Lafone produced another silver sob. “Quite unfoundedly, I do assure you! My conscience is spotless, my Lady Kilcroney, spotless!”—she caught Kitty’s eye, and went on in a humble voice—“in this instance! Indeed, my Lady—but Mr. Lafone—I am sadly maligned, he is suspicious, he——” Here the unfortunate young woman became quite incoherent in her demonstrations of distress. She wrung her white hands with extra pathos. Another large tear flowed, and a volley of little sobbing, disjointed phrases accompanied it, “domestic happiness—ignorance of the world—poor little me, country-bred and guileless—salvation or despair!”

In the midst, Kitty rose, returning to majesty.

“I must put a stop to a scene so useless and so painful. How is it possible, Madam, you do not see that every word you utter but marks the impossibility of your request? Pray, my Lord, see Mistress Lafone to her chair.”

“Kitty!” cried Kilcroney, springing to his feet. He had not thought it of her, to requite these open-hearted confidences with insult; to turn so trusting and touching a creature into the street; a lady—an old friend! “Pray Mistress Lafone, let us be offering you a dish of tea,” cried he.

There are days when everything goes askew. Kitty’s great footman marched into the room and presented his mistress with a letter which, he said, had just been brought by a riding messenger. Kitty took it from the salver with all the air of one glad of the diversion, but no sooner had she perused it than she exclaimed, in tones of such consternation, that my Lord leant forward and took it out of her hand. He exclaimed in his turn, but in accents of pleasure.

“Why, what is this? Sure, Alanna, there is naught here to upset you, ’tis the best of good fortune on the contrary! Here’s your sweet friend, my Lady Mandeville, actually at Malvern and proposing to drive over and spend the day with you to-morrow, bringing her little rogue to play with ours.”

“Oh, this is intolerable,” cried Kitty, “this is past bearing! Bid the messenger wait. Good heavens, do I not hear him riding away?—Call him back, my Lord, call him back! On no account must my Lady Mandeville be permitted to visit me to-morrow.”

My Lord stood rooted to the spot, and the veins on his forehead swelled. Kitty rushed to the window and hailed vigorously; the rhythmic footfalls of a horse receding at slow pace along the cobble stones was, on a sudden, altered to the clatter of a returning trot.

“Damnation!” cried my Lord. “This passes all!”

Mistress Lafone had stopped the wringing of hands and the production of tears, and was all malicious interest.

Kilcroney had entered into a towering passion. He protested that it was the most monstrous low thing, that he forbade my Lady to behave so base to her friend.

“Tare an’ ’ounds!” cried he, “if it wasn’t ashamed you were, and that, not a minute ago, to be enjoying the finest hospitality in the world, the kindest, the most open-hearted, ’tis not ashamed you should be to return a thrifle of it! Shame!” ejaculated Denis. “Shame! ’tis on the other leg. Gad, ’tis the shameful bit of meanness you’d be practising and ’tis ashamed I am of you meself (that I should live to say it). Your best friend! And all for what? For what if ye please? For the favour of them that never as much as acknowledged your existence. ’Pon me soul, rather than wound the feelings of that angel upon earth, that fair, fond, gentle, noble creature——” My Lord’s voice cracked. “I’d see the whole of Windsor, and Kew to boot, tumble into the Liffey.”

Kitty, white under her delicate smears of rouge, sat down at her writing-table with the most sublime air of offended virtue, but the hand that dipped the pen into the ink shook, and there were tears in the voice which presently declared that if ever there was woman here maligned by her own husband, it was my Lady Kilcroney: she who had not liked to disturb her Lord, but who had nevertheless noticed a red spot behind their darling little Denis’s ear that very morning; which spot, as every one who was a mother knew, might very well betoken no less a malady than the measles, which malady, being highly infectious to young children, she, as a mother, now felt it her duty to put off her cherished Lady Mandeville and the adored little Impington to a more auspicious day.

“Spot!” interrupted my Lord, with a roar between derision and wrath, and

“Spot?” cooed Mistress Lafone, now letting herself go openly to insolence. “My dearest Lady Kilcroney, you are too droll!”

There was contempt written on the countenances of the pair so odiously conjoined against Kitty; neither of them being subtle enough to see that my Lady was content with any excuse, so long as it flung a veil of elegance over her set purpose.

This incomparable woman recovered herself, rose, summoned Pompey, and sent him forth with her letter to my Lord Mandeville’s groom. She watched its delivery, through the window, and having beheld the man start off again, returned to the centre of the room, made in silence a profound curtsy, which included her Lord and her visitor, and sailed forth, closing the door carefully behind her.

My Lord let himself fall again into the arm-chair, and once more this article of furniture protested with ominous creaks and cracks.

“There’s not a stick in the place, bejabers, that isn’t as rotten as pears. ’Pon my word,” grumbled Denis Kilcroney, “I wish the plaguey waters had never been discovered, I do indeed; ’tis a poor thing when a man’s own son and heir is made a weapon against him, and him but turned of three. ‘Little Denis is pale, and we must to Cheltenham. And we’ll lie at Lady Mandeville’s, which is on our way, my love’ (and it thirty miles out, taking the back and the forth of it). ‘And our little Denis will have a playfellow, ’twill be so vastly good for him. Little Impington and he will be comrades.’ And scarce are we settled at Impington Court with as good entertainment—aye—and as generous (’tis the cellar of the world my Lord Mandeville has, and ’tis as free with it he is—troth, as I’d be meself if my Lady’d let me, and I can give him no finer character!) No sooner are we settled, and scarce a cork drawn ye may say, but ’tis ‘Little Impington is too rough for our darling Denis. He will teach him ill ways, he will do him a hurt. And Impington Court is a thought too low for the child’s health. And we must move on to Cheltenham, my love, or there will not be a lodging to be had.’ And you should have seen the farewells, the clingings, the embracings, and the tears, and heard the promises. ‘We shall meet again soon, my dearest, dearest Rachel. I vow I’ll not be parted from the most cherished of my friends!’ And now ’tis: ‘Keep away—little Denis hath a spot!’ To be sure, our dearest Rachel must not cast a blight over my Lady’s Court prospects.”

“But why, pray you, why, my Lord Kilcroney, should my Lady Mandeville cast a blight? Is she not in the Court favour?”

Mistress Molly’s tones were as insinuating as the fillet of sweetness that issues from a flute; nevertheless, Denis, starting from his black mood, gave her a sudden odd look.

“Prithee, why, my Lord?”

Kitty was in the right of it. The little jade was as false as loaded dice! As if every one did not know poor Rachel’s story; how she had been a Quaker and an actress, and my Lord Mandeville’s mistress before she had been his wife; and how, save for that one stain, which, indeed, had been the fall of a pure woman piteously and devotedly in love, she had ever shone in a wicked world, the noblest example to her sex.

Mistress Lafone caught my Lord’s look upon her and deemed it time to depart. Without waiting, therefore, for his reply to her question, she feigned horror at the lateness of the hour, and bustled away from the Kilcroney lodgings, malcontent with her visit, the more so that my Lord Kilcroney brought a wooden countenance and a dry manner to the very hall door.

She went forth down the single street and across the meadows; for her rooms were in an out-of-the-way cottage, far from the fashionable quarter patronised by the well-to-do. Mrs. Lafone’s fortunes were indeed at a low ebb. Her elderly, niggardly husband had vowed some time ago that he would pay no more debts for her, and he was keeping his vow. In her efforts at self-extrication, Mistress Molly, not having a scrupulous delicacy of conduct, had become further considerably entangled. A scandal threatened which might be the undoing of her. And there was my Lady Kilcroney not only declining to help her, but as good as turning her out of the house!

Molly Lafone was sharp of scent as a weasel. It was unpleasantly clear to her that the irate great lady was determined to seize the first opportunity of cutting her altogether; and when my Lady Kilcroney, leader of society as she was, cast her off, she would be lost indeed! She had no thought in her breast, as she walked along the road between the flat fields, but the longing to pay Kitty out.

The way was deserted. Evening shadows were lengthening across the mellowness of the sun-steeped plain. Molly Lafone slackened her pace. Why, indeed, should she hurry back to the stuffy little room where she could afford herself no better supper than bread and milk?

Truly, if there are angels who reward the virtuous, there must be little demons who provide dainties for those who serve the ways of evil! There, just at her feet, shining quite golden in the rays of the setting sun, lay a letter.

It lay so that its superscription was visible, and Molly could hardly believe her eyes when she read in Kitty’s writing the words: “For the hand of my Lady, the Countess Mandeville.”

“The careless fellow,” said she, “he’s dropped it from his belt as he jogged along. Pshaw, how I hate a clumsy fool!”

Then she laughed shrilly. “My Lady Mandeville will never get her Kitty’s affectionate answer, nor hear how little Denis hath a spot, and she will come driving in to-morrow to hang herself and her tarnished name round Kitty’s neck for all Cheltenham to see, under the nose of the virtuous Queen Charlotte. That is very well done!” cried Molly. “That is a very fit punishment for such base intentions. I am very glad.”

And lest anyone should be busybody enough to pick up the dropped letter and forward it to its destination, which would be a sad interference with the just action of Providence, Mistress Lafone picked it up herself and minced it into small pieces as she walked along towards her cottage lodging. She had quite a good appetite for her bread and milk that night.

It had been my Lady Kilcroney’s intention to keep her cherished little Denis in his cot, for the space of at least a day, for indeed there was more than one red mark on the satin of his small, plump body, and Kitty vowed it was of a piece with the rest of my Lord’s brutality to declare that those who leave their own homes for the discomforts of lodgings must expect the occasional flea. But on receipt of a letter sent round by my Lady Flora’s woman, she promptly altered her plans, and ordered the protesting cherub to be arrayed in his best robe-coat covered with fine muslin, and his white satin hat with feathers.

My Lord, as soon as his infant’s roars had been soothed by candies, picked up the letter which Kitty had dropped on the floor in her hurried exit to her bed-chamber; and, while his Lady was alternately pealing at her bell and shouting for Lydia, without compunction read it.

“My Dearest Lady Kilcroney: ’Tis all arranged. I consider my freedom well purchased at the price of the rose-point flounce, and the service to a friend, no less, by the trimmings to match. Her Majesty received me in her closet last evening, and the matter was settled quick. I must confess, dearest Kitty, with all the veneration and love (these words were heavily underlined) that I cherish for her August Person, I did feel it hard to find that my poor feet were represented as the dropsy. Dropsy, my love. And I but turned of thirty! ‘You should have warned me,’ said Her Majesty, ‘that you were suffering from a disease.’ ‘Ma’am,’ said I, ‘if disease there is’—(I was afraid to deny it, dear Kitty, lest the fetters should not be struck off my aching ankles)—‘’twas contracted in Your Majesty’s service.’ And now if my Kilcroney has a taste for gilded slavery (though there’s less gilding than you would believe), let her be at the entrance of the pump room, to receive Her Majesty at the head of the other lady visitors, on her first visit thither this very morning at eleven o’clock. The Gentlemen-in-Waiting are informing the other notabilities of the town, and Her Majesty is prepared for the little ceremony which she desires shall have the appearance of an Impromptu, it being her wish to avoid state during the Royal Visit and not to be incommoded by the crowd. If your little Denis were to offer a bunch of roses, it would, I think, please the Queen, who likes to see ladies occupied of their children and is interested in any who are about the age of the Princess Amelia. From what Mrs. Schwellenberg—oh! Kitty, to think of that toad festooned about with my lace—hath wrote to me (thank God we have left the frog-fancier behind at Windsor) I understand you can consider the appointment as good as made——”

The letter dropped from Kilcroney’s hand. His good-natured face (for in spite of tantrums he was to the core a man of good nature), clouded with genuine dismay. It looked as if the plaguey business, which he had regarded in the light of a mere game, was like to turn to earnest.

Why, in the name of Heaven, a woman with all the world could give her, and a devoted husband besides, should break up her family life for the pleasures of an annual three months’ slavery—Lady Florence had well named it—passed his comprehension.

“Nay, Lydia,” Kitty’s voice was uplifted in the other room, “take back the tabby; aye, and the satin cloak from Madame Mirabel’s. I have thought better of it, child. Put away the Eglantine new hat with the feathers. I will wear muslin and a plain straw. I wish to Heaven,” cried Kitty pettishly, “that there was a milliner in the Kingdom who could run up a hat to suit a lady’s eyelashes or the tilt of her nose outside Paris.”

“There’s the Italian straw we bought last time we was staying over there at Madame the Duchess’s,” said Lydia tentatively; “the same your ladyship ordered for yourself to wear at the Feet at Trianon to which the French Queen asked us—and a sweet elegant creature Her Majesty is, with all her fancies for dairies and such—and the thunderstorm coming on it was the disappointment of the world, and one that I am not like to forget in a hurry! Sure your ladyship ain’t forgotten it? A plain rice straw, with a ribbon round, but with a set to it! Aye, and trimmed by my blood-niece, as is apprenticed to Madame Eglantine out of my own poor savings; me being always one to stand by my family, cost what it do.”

“The Italian straw,” my Lady reflected; “’twas monstrous thoughtful of you, child, to pack it—la, Lydia, ’tis the very thing—trimmed by your niece did you say? Nay, only the genius of Eglantine could twist a bow like that. Put it on my head. Why, ’tis perfect—aye, I will wear it. Her Majesty desires simplicity.”

“Simplicity, is it?” Kilcroney groaned. “God help us all!”

As Kitty sallied forth, all in vapoury white, fresh and sweet as a privet blossom, her face delicately pink under the artful shepherdess hat, Pompey following with the great rose-bunch in a bandbox, and little Denis trotting alongside scarlet-cheeked from a triumphant battle royal over the wearing of gloves, my Lord looked after them with some melancholy.

“I’ll stroll along presently and keep in the background. I’d not like to be blighting Kitty’s prospects after the fashion of yonder poor Rachel. By all accounts Her gracious Majesty Queen Charlotte is no more like to fancy an Irishman than the unhappy girl that has a mistake to her name.”

Kitty had determined to walk to the pump room. ’Twas scarce a hundred yards away, and “squeeze those crisp flounces into a chair before they had served their purpose—never!” She had taken but a few steps along the street when who should cross her but Mrs. Lafone. Molly, all in the modesty of lilac dimity, with pensiveness, something even approaching penitence, on her pert face. Kitty was in a fair humour, and as her little enemy flung her a deprecating glance of green eyes, actually paused and smiled.

“Whither away, Lafone?”

“Alas, my Lady Kilcroney, stepping into the pump room anon to drink my glass of the waters, I heard as how Her Majesty was expected, and how you and the other ladies of note are to receive her on this, her first appearance.... My Lady Kilcroney, knowing myself so unfit, feeling myself so out of spirits, I deemed it more becoming to retire till all was over.”

Now Kitty, riding on the top of the wave, was a trifle intoxicated. It was in a tone of almost Royal patronage that she exclaimed:

“Why should you miss the sight, child? You could very well find a little place where you could see and not be seen. Retrace your steps with me.”

“Oh! My Lady Kilcroney,” cries Molly, with her dramatic clasp of the hands, “was there ever anyone so truly benevolent as you are!”

Hanging her head, the little minx started off, a humble step behind her patroness, and, looking over his shoulder at her, Denis the younger was fascinated by the wicked mockery on her face, and nearly fell into a puddle for staring.

There was no excitement in the town, for Her Majesty’s intention was known but to the favoured few. The Royal Family, it was bruited, were still reposing from the fatigues of their journey. There was, however, a small group of gentlemen about the pump room doors, in elegant morning attire, and two or three barouches and as many chairs were in the very act of depositing their fair burdens as Lady Kilcroney sailed up. She was just in time, indeed, to see Lady Verney—black-browed Susan, panting, flushed, incredibly plumed—hurl herself out of her hired sedan. At sight of Kitty this personage halted in her rush forward into the pump room.

“You here, dear Kilcroney?” her voice shook. There was fury in her eye.

“Even so, dear Verney. Pray, my Lord Courtown, shall I take my stand on this spot? Hither with the flowers, Pompey. My little son is to offer these to Her Majesty, Colonel Digby; certainly ’twould be a mercy if you would have the kindness to hold them till the right moment comes. Such tender years are scarcely to be trusted!—Nay, Denis, lambkin, no more sugar plums till we get home again, or little pandies would be so sticky, Denis couldn’t give the nosegay to the beautiful Queen—What a pity, my dearest Susan, you should have made yourself so fine. By Her Majesty’s most express wish, all is to have the appearance of the simplest impromptu! Still, my skirts are fairly wide. If you place yourself behind me——”

Place herself behind Kitty! Had her beloved friend run mad, she that was always so flighty? My Lady Verney to place herself in the rear, be hidden by another’s flounces, she who had posted day and night, all the way from Hertfordshire, upon the news of a probable vacancy about the Queen’s person! Was it possible that Kitty, with her Irish husband, labelled with such a name, could fancy that she was like to meet with the Queen’s favour? Susan was sorry for her poor friend. She tossed her head with a snort. My Lady Verney had something of the appearance of a handsome horse.

But stupefaction succeeded indignation when Lord Courtown, very civilly addressing her, begged her to take her place with the other ladies in the rear of my Lady Kilcroney, for the royal party might be expected any moment.

“Mrs. Tracy, ma’am, as one conversant in these matters, will you stand at my Lady’s elbow?—My Lady Kilcroney, Mrs. Tracy—Her Majesty’s Senior Bedchamber Woman, who is at the waters on her own account.”

My Lady Verney, biting her lip, stamped heavily on her neighbour’s foot as she shifted her position. Turning at the low cry, her fierce black eyes met the plaintive green ones of Mrs. Lafone, who in spite of her discreet protestations, had taken as forward a place in the group as well she could. As a rule Molly was in no better favour with Susan Verney than with the rest of the coterie, but at that moment they shared a sentiment which made them suddenly and momentarily sympathetic.

“Oh, my Lady Verney,” whispered Molly, “did you ever see anyone so sadly cocked up as our poor Kitty? It frightens me for her, it does indeed. I fear such pride must have a fall.”

Although Susan could see no sign of this prognostication being fulfilled, it comforted her nevertheless; and she was able to bear, with a better equanimity than any who knew her would have thought possible, the painful spectacle of my Lady Kilcroney’s success with the Queen. Success it indubitably was, though Her Majesty was a dry woman and not given to displays of affability. It was evident that she had come prepared to be pleased with Kitty Kilcroney and that pleased she found herself. And truly, Kitty in her snowy flounces, so charmingly blushing under her wide-brimmed hat—which was indeed trimmed by Lydia’s niece, Miss Pamela Pounce—Kitty so daintily maternal with the sturdy little boy clutching his roses, was as pretty a picture as any would wish to gaze upon.

The two blooming Princesses exclaimed upon the darling child, and good-natured Lady Flo was one broad beam behind “her Royals’” back. And if Kitty blushed she had nevertheless the most elegant ease. Her curtsy was a model; the dignified modesty with which she advanced and then retreated within the due measure of etiquette was perfect of its kind. And when the incident took place, which might indeed have proved awkward, of Master Denis declining to part with his posy, his mother saved the situation. “Denis,” quoth she, bending but not whispering; all with a modest assurance that could not have been bettered by one who had been years at Court. “Lambkin, do you not remember what I bid you? To whom were you to offer these flowers?”

“To the beautiful Queen,” said the child, his great brown eyes roaming about as if he were seeking—as well he might, poor innocent!—whom the description might fit. The Queen, with a flattered smile, herself took the offering from his chubby fingers.

“Pretty rogue!” said Princess Augusta.

When the other introductions had been gone through it seemed to be nobody’s business to present Mistress Lafone; and though the equerries looked tentatively at her and then at my Lady Kilcroney, nothing could be less responsive than that usually alert being. So Molly made an artless curtsy as became her simplicity, and thought, in her disloyal heart, how frumpish and dowdy Her Majesty looked; and wondered if ’twas Miss Burney who appeared so shortsighted and awkward and timid, with no more air than nothing at all. And save for the gentlemen, who were very personable and had bright looks about them as if they might be enjoyable company to a woman of spirit, there was really naught in this vision of the Court which would make her, little Molly, yearn for it—a vast stiffness and dullness indeed! If it had not been that needs must when the devil drives she would have snapped her slender fingers and ‘thank you,’ but as matters stood—the drowning do not pause to contemplate the quality of the spar flung to them.

Mrs. Lafone looked vindictively at Kitty and then turned a watchful glance at the door. She wondered how soon and in what circumstances Kitty’s dearest friend, who was not received at Court, might make her appearance? However Kitty might strive to hide the visit, Mrs. Lafone would take care that it should be known of; she had but to whisper the fact to my Lady Verney and she did not doubt that the Royal occupants of Fauconberg Hall would promptly be in possession of the damning fact. Other people could put spokes in wheels besides my Lady Kilcroney; and the more swiftly they were rolling to favour, the greater might be the upset!

Her Majesty, talking very affably to Kitty, had advanced towards the counter where the waters were distributed. Here divers magnates of the town were awaiting her, whom the Comptroller of the Household, my Lord Courtown, named to her, one after the other. Kitty and her group of ladies were left thus for the moment outside the Royal circle of attention. The hall by this time contained a certain amount of curious spectators, very respectfully aligned against the walls, for the public of Cheltenham, genteel quiet folk, would have died rather than presume on Her Majesty’s condescending informality.

“Pray,” said the Queen, to Mr. Clark, the town doctor, “let me have a taste of the water, sir, to drink which the King has been sent hither. I ought at least to know,” she added archly, “to what penance he hath been condemned.”

She sipped and declared she had expected worse; Princess Royal and Princess Augustus also sipped, but they cried out and protested that they were sorry for dear papa. And while the Royal pleasantries were producing the most exquisite if refined mirth throughout the whole assembly, Mrs. Lafone, who had been conscious that she was the object of considerable interest to one of the equerries (indeed, he was lifting his quizzing glass to mark his notice), perceived his glance wander from herself and become fixed. He dropped his quizzing glass, the better to see; a warmth of wondering admiration, prodigiously different from the familiar ogle she had herself evoked, wrote itself on his countenance. But for the presence of Royalty, she thought he might have exclaimed out loud. Molly’s glance promptly followed his. She could hardly believe her eyes. Here was fate playing her game with a vengeance. Her enemy was delivered into her hands. Everyone knew the face of Rachel Peace!

My Lady Mandeville advanced, clad, like Kitty herself, in white, but with a flutter of grey ribbons here and there to mark her Quaker preference. Her delicate pale face was faintly flushed, under the wide brim of her simple hat. She was not less fair than the pearls at her throat, not less shining in delicate beauty. She held by the hand a noble boy, slightly older than little Denis, who marched as if the place belonged to him and gazed about under frowning brows as though he wondered who dared occupy it without his permission.

If Kitty made a charming picture with her little son, Rachel, with the heir of Mandeville, graceful and gracious, with a lovely tenderness emanating from her, was the very embodiment of sweet motherhood.

She came across the wide hall with swift step, looking from right to left, a smile hovering on her lips, her seeking eyes already lit with fond pleasure. Where was her dear Kitty? Suddenly she stopped—the smile faded, the light of the expectant gaze went out, shadow fell upon her radiance, a flutter as of fear shook her; yet she had but encountered the gaze of my Lady Verney. Susan Verney, who was very well acquainted with Rachel Mandeville, who had indeed also tasted of her hospitality, both in town and in the country, now withered her with a blasting stare of denegration, a stare which said: “My Lady Mandeville, I am pure virtue to-day, I do not know you.”

The room was all eyes to look at Rachel, and though so decorous it was all whispers.

The next moment the poor thing saw the Queen and the Princesses, and Kitty Kilcroney white as death and good Lady Flora scarlet in the face; she saw and understood. Motionless she strove to rally her courage. She wanted strength of heart and clearness of mind to do just what would be right; Quaker Rachel who had never done wrong but once! And for that breathless moment, unknown to herself, her eyes hung on Kitty’s face; and Kitty’s eyelids were cast down.

The little Viscount Impington tugged at her hand. His was an impatient spirit.

“Come on, Mamma,” cried he, in loud authority; and at the same moment little Denis O’Hara raised a piping cry: “Imp, Imp, Imp!” and tearing himself from the maternal clasp, galloped across the room to hurl himself upon his baby comrade.

The Queen looked at Kitty with an air of profound surprise and disapproval, and Kitty looked back at the Queen. And her heart rose within her; for, with all her foibles and fancies, she had a heart.

It led her then to do the noblest act of her whole existence.

Holding herself very erect and moving with a beautiful dignity, she slowly backed the length of the room that divided her from Rachel Mandeville; and, keeping her eyes on the Royal face the while, she took her friend by the hand. Then she stood very upright and waited. Rachel could do naught else but wait too.

In the dead silence the Queen prepared to take her departure.

Little Mr. O’Hara and my Lord Impington were beginning to show signs of following up their affectionate greeting with a rough-and-tumble fight and each mother had to take possession of her child and keep him firmly held; but they kept tighter hold of each other still.

The Royal group advanced; the kindly young Princesses with awed looks, as if they felt how ill things were going without understanding. When she reached my Lady Kilcroney and her friend, Queen Charlotte paused and seemed to hesitate. She cast a strange troubled glance at the two young women, and Kitty and Rachel fell, still clasping hands, into a great curtsy. And the question was, which of the two made it with a nobler grace.

The last of the equerries to follow looked back at the door, and saw my Ladies Mandeville and Kilcroney embracing and kissing and he thought they were both in tears.

My Lord Kilcroney had been among those who unobtrusively joined the lookers-on in the pump room during the Royal visitation, and, beholding the scene, his own eyes filled. In the effort to regain his self-control he turned his dimmed gaze away from the two who enfolded each other in such affecting and unaffected friendship and it fell upon Mistress Lafone. As awhile ago his son and heir, he was fascinated by the expression on the small pale visage. Molly caught his riveted glance, wilted beneath it, and somehow vanished. Not my Lord Kilcroney nor anyone could ever as much as guess at her share in the morning’s business; yet so does conscience make cowards of us all, as Mr. Shakespeare has it.

My Lord kissed his wife’s hand before most respectfully saluting that of my Lady Mandeville. At sight of him, Kitty mingled laughter with her tears.

“Is it not delightful, Denis,” cried she, “that our sweet Rachel should have had this happy thought? But, oh, my dear love, our little rascals are at fisticuffs again!”

“My dear Kitty,” wrote Lady Florence that evening, in a letter brought round from Fauconberg Hall by one of the pages in waiting, “I thought you were dished, I did indeed. And of all the odd tiresome contretemps, my love!... Well, I have not time to say even a word of what I felt: Her Majesty is not fond of audacities and you did, dearest Kitty, the most audacious deed.... Well, never mind again!

“’Twas your hat did the trick to begin with, my love; you was always so clever about clothes, Kitty. Sure, it was the finest inspiration to wear that modest country straw with its plain ribbon. It caught Her Majesty’s eye from the first moment, and that you know means so much. So modest, sensible and quiet you showed beside poor Susan! Susan, with that tow-row of feathers on her head! ’Tis she who is dished after all: ‘A loud young woman,’ says the Queen to me. ‘I do not approve of Lady Verney’s style.’ And what must she do on the top of it but present herself in my parlour at Fauconberg Hall this very afternoon?—a vast piece of presumption, since the Queen hath forbidden visitors to all and sundry!—And wants an interview of Her Majesty, to apologise—prithee, Kitty, think of it!—for Her Majesty’s having been exposed to such a meeting. She, to apologise for the town! She, to cast her stone at poor Rachel! I have never known my Royal so angry! ‘Are you then not acquainted with my Lady Mandeville?’ She asks our Verney. You should have seen Susan’s face under her red plumes. (I had taken good care Her Majesty should know we all were.) To be brief, Kitty, Verney went forth with her comb considerably cut, and Her Majesty took a twist in the other direction and spoke very kind to me; though regretting the incident, she said she could not find too grave a fault with a display of loyalty. ‘Tell my Lady Kilcroney,’ she says, ‘that about My Person I appreciate loyalty!’”

Denis Kilcroney heard the contents of this missive with a grave countenance. Then, looking at his wife’s charming face, all irradiated between the joys of her good conscience and its unexpected reward, he exclaimed generously that it was a proud day for the House of O’Hara. “Though,” he added, “the proudest moment of it all was when I saw you stand by your friend, me darling girl!”

CHAPTER II

In Which Miss Pamela Pounce is ordered
to Pack

Pamela Pounce sat with a bunch of cowslips in one hand and the lid of the ribbon box in the other; she had fallen into a profound muse.

It was the cowslips, though they were but artifice, which had set her active brain thus suddenly and idly day-dreaming. They had brought her back with a rush to the old farm where she had been born and brought up. The whole surroundings of her exile had vanished. She was no longer in the big, bare, stuffy, untidy workroom at the back of Madame Eglantine’s celebrated Paris hat shop: in the centre of snippets and straws, feathers, fringes, flowers and other fashionable fripperies; under the glare of the skylight; with the patter and gabble of French voices, the click of scissors, the long-drawn sighs or quick pants of energetic stitching, the rustle of crumpled silks, in her ears, and in her nostrils the indescribable atmosphere of the atélier, as it was called. An apartment hermetically sealed to the outer airs, save what might penetrate of them through the opening of its doors; redolent of the gums of artificial flowers, of last year’s and this morning’s succulent cookery—Monsieur Ildefonse, the husband of Madame Eglantine, liked a point of garlic in most dishes—and of the faint sickly scents of hair powder and fine lady’s perfumes which hung about the whole establishment. There were other odours in the workroom besides, of which the less said the better. It was little wonder that Pamela Pounce should now and again feel her splendid vitality slacken; that she should have considerably fined down from a country buxomness since she had joined Madame Eglantine’s staff.

But the bunch of cowslips had brought her away—far away from it all for a blissful moment.

She was back again at home. The exquisite freshness of an early summer morning on the Kentish downs encompassed her. Her young bosom lifted with ecstasy. Oh! the breath of England: pungent of the sea, sweet of the moorland herbs, free from the hills and whispering of the woods, was there ever anything like it? There was a fragrance of breadmaking too from mother’s oven, and a lovely reek of burning weeds where father was busy over the potato fields!

Pamela started. A voice, sharp as a pen-knife, had recalled her to reality.

“Ah, Meess”—she went by no other name in this French servitude, either from her employer or her sister workers. It was an unconscious tribute to a certain fine apartness of character, as well as to her British independence. “Ah, Meess,” cried Madame Eglantine, “is this how I find you? Asleep with your eyes open! My faith, is this how you conduct yourself in the thick of the business hours? And the Marquise who expects that hat by noon!”

Pamela opened her day-dreaming eyes full upon the speaker, gave an inaudible sigh and a small ironic smile. She did not start or blush or show any sign either of flurry or vexation at the acrid accent of the rebuke, she was too completely mistress of herself for that. Her hand hovered over the ribbon box; then with a decisive movement she nipped a shimmering purple roll and began to draw out its darkly radiant lengths.

“Purple!” ejaculated Madame Eglantine, surprised into a quite amiable tone; “purple for that blonde Marquise who is not yet twenty! And she means to wear all white muslins with lace in floods. Did I not tell you so? That ribbon I bought for Madame la Gouvernante—it is for dowagers——”

She broke off and stared.

Pamela had twisted and snipped and pinched and the hat was trimmed in what her famous patronne herself would have described as “un tour de main.” She now held it up on her balled hand, and turned it slowly from side to side.

“But it is a stroke of genius!” exclaimed the little Frenchwoman. She hated Pamela, but she was above all an artist. “No, no, do not touch it again, no one must touch it! You have a thousand times reason. Blue or green or pink—anyone with the ordinary mind would have blended me the banal pretty-pretty with those cowslips. The Marquise would have been but one of a score of shepherdesses, no more distinguished than a dragée box for a baptism! But now——”

She paused and waved her hands before the delight of the mental picture. A small, dusky woman with very bright eyes and extraordinarily swift movements, she was like some quick furry animal of the mouse tribe; a greater contrast to the fair, large, composed English girl could hardly be imagined; yet on one point these two were singularly akin. Both were geniuses in the same restricted yet fascinating realm of art.

If there were a creature on earth capable of stepping straight off into the shoes of Madame Eglantine, first milliner in the world of Fashion, it was Pamela Pounce, the British yeoman’s daughter!

Perhaps it was this consciousness of her rival’s merits which made the Frenchwoman, while too acute of intellect not to recognise them, regard her clever apprentice with feelings which approached detestation. Yet she was soon to find another cause.

“I’d better put in the stitches myself, I suppose, M’dame?” said Pamela tranquilly. She spoke French fluently by this time, with a pronounced if not unpleasing British accentuation. “The young ladies are so fond of sewing things to death. It’s like a hand on pastry,” she went on meditatively, as she bit her thread, and flung a cool, tantalising glance at the irate ring of countenances about her. “You have, or you haven’t got it, and no one to blame.”

“That will do, Meess. There is too much conversation here, Mademoiselle Panache!” Madame hopped spitefully from Pamela upon the directress, who, sitting large, square and sallow at the centre table, dispensing materials, had permitted herself a gratified smile over the snubbing of the English girl. For a moment or two there was silence in the over-lighted, under-ventilated apartment. The season was early July; a blazing white sunshine was pouring down through the casements which their muffed glass but feebly mitigated.

Then the little angry, sharp-toothed mouse that was the bland, coaxing, fluent Eglantine of the showroom found a fresh grievance.

“My God, Mademoiselle Anatoline, are you making a bouquet or tying bristles on a broomstick? And Heaven pardon me, Mademoiselle Eulalie, but if those hands of yours have been washed since—since—— What have you been doing with those hands, ma fille? Blacking the boots or scratching your head?”

Anatoline, who was large and fat and fair, became an apoplectic purple; and Eulalie, who was the colour of a lemon with hair like a raven’s wing, turned a shade more livid than nature had made her.

There was a titter, beginning sycophantically upon the lips of Mademoiselle Panache. But Pamela’s smooth face, white where it was not delicately carnation, might have been that of a handsomely tinted statue. She cut her thread, tweaked one of the shimmering purple loops, and once again putting the hat on her clenched hand, gave it a little shake. The creation was complete!

Madame’s swift beady eye rolled in her direction.

“Give yourself the trouble to bring that upstairs to the showroom, Meess,” she ordered. “Madame D’Aimargues said she would call, herself, before midday, to try it on before it was sent. I will join you presently and you had better remain, in case there were required an alteration.”

“Bien, M’dame,” Pamela responded with some alacrity. She might get a whiff of good open air as she went up the stairs. There might even be a window ajar in the showroom. Such a miracle had been known to occur on a very hot day.

Monsieur Ildefonse, Eglantine’s husband, was sitting in the little glass cage off the back showroom, pompously referred to as the Bureau. This individual had once been a very noted personality; no other, actually, than the French Queen’s appointed coiffeur; in consequence sought after to frenzy by every woman with the smallest pretension to Fashion. Fine ladies had had their heads dressed at six o’clock in the morning, nay, even three days before some special assembly at Court.

To be able to say, with a toss of flying vaporous curls, exquisitely redolent of Poudre à la Maréchale: “In effect, my dear one, Ildefonse’s last idea, what do you think of it? It is succeeded. Hein?” To be responded to, perchance, with a cry of envy and despair: “Ildefonse! You managed to get Ildefonse!” And to know your interlocutor, younger than you perhaps, and prettier, yet altogether at a disadvantage, “a positive frump, my dear,” under less skilful hands, that had been to reach, in verity, the very needle-peak of feminine triumph, a few years ago.

But star succeeds to star; one Monsieur Charles was Court twiddler, curler, crimper, frizzer, and general head artist. For Monsieur Ildefonse had come into a heritage and retired. Not a fallen star, therefore; merely astronomically removed to another hemisphere! He shone now, though, it may be added, with a doubtful radiance, in a restricted connubial circle; in other words, he sat at home and totted up accounts for his clever, money-making spouse; made bargains for her with flower manufacturers and mercers, and bullied the stewards of great houses when Madame la Duchesse or Madame la Connétable forgot to remember such insignificances as the settlement of bills.

Unanimously the workgirls adored him, with the single exception of Pamela; and the relations between Madame Eglantine and her consort, characterised in public by the most touching demonstrativeness, were regarded as the very romance of matrimony. But Pamela, who had come under the glance, more often than she cared, of Monsieur Ildefonse’s slyly roving eye, had her private opinion.

She shuddered from him as she had shuddered from the fat, sleek, brown slugs that came out after rain on the garden walls at home.

As a little girl she would explain: “’Tain’t that I’m afraid, you see, but it makes me creep.”

She could have found no better words in which to describe the effect upon her of the fascinating Monsieur Ildefonse.

There was a midday lull, this scorching day, even in Madame Eglantine’s thriving establishment. It was late season, too, and save for orders like that of the little Marquise D’Aimargues, for such as were privileged to join in the pastimes of Royal haymaking and churning, or a stray wedding order, business was slack, and the great little milliner herself was preparing for that round of the most noted watering places, with “just a few models” in her baggage, which was her thrifty fashion of spending the holidays.

Pamela cast, in passing, a hasty glance between the green curtains of the Bureau, to assure herself that her pet aversion was safely employed.

He had removed his wig on account of the heat, and she turned her eyes quickly away from the revolting spectacle of his close-cropped bristling black head and the roll of olive fat at the back of his neck above the embroidered collar of his blue cloth coat.

The pink, be-padded, be-wreathed, be-gilded, be-mirrored, be-draped salons of Madame Eglantine were empty. Pamela walked slowly into the middle of the front room and hesitated. Her own charming shape was reflected from every possible angle. Down below, the whole Place seemed asleep; a buzz of flies within and without, a lazy footfall on the shady side and a distant rumble emphasised the universal drowsiness.

When Madame la Marquise’s coach came along there would be a prodigious clatter to wake them all up. Pamela knew that she was quite safe. It’s all very well to trim a hat. You never know what it’s like till you’ve tried it on.

Very deliberately she divested her glossy chestnut hair of its discreet cap, loosened the swelling waves a trifle more on either side of the firm rose-tinted ivory of her face.

“If a dash of powder was for poor girls like me, I wouldn’t be too bad-looking. I’d say that for myself,” she thought, and firmly set the hat of the Marquise at the right angle over her radiant brow.

Well, it was a complete success. Like every true artist she was doubly critical of herself, but Pamela had to admit that she could find no flaw in her own taste and that the wide-brimmed curving Italian straw with its bold sweep of purple ribbon, and its hanging bunches of cowslips was a remarkably fine set-off for the glory of her amber hair and the audacious brilliance of her complexion. Without a tinge of envy or discontent she surveyed herself thoughtfully.

“Upon my word, Pamela Pounce, my girl!”—she was fond of addressing herself mentally; as it were her strong reasonable mind to her agreeable body. “You would have held your own with the best of them if it had been the fancy of Providence to set you in the aristocracy. Ugh!”

With a piercing scream she started out of her complacent reflection.

A horrible olive-hued, leering face appeared over her shoulder in the mirror; a blue-clothed arm stole round her waist.

Pamela swung herself free, whisked the hat off her head ready to use it as a weapon should Monsieur Ildefonse pursue his advances.

In the dead pause the quick rustle of Madame Eglantine’s light summer flounces were heard on the stairs.

Instantly the ex-hairdresser’s countenance lost its satyr smiles, and became composed into its usual mask of smooth propriety.

“Is that you, mon Agneau rose?” he cooed.

“Yes, yes, it is I, petit rat de mon cœur,” she replied.

These endearments having perfunctorily passed between them, Madame halted on the threshold and sent the glitter of her swift glance from her spouse to her apprentice.

“I took the liberty of trying on the hat what I’ve just trimmed, M’dame,” said Pamela then in her brazen way.

She wasn’t going to put it into Monsieur Ildefonse’s power to tell on her behind her back, or worse still, to pretend to be shielding her. She knew his slimy ways.

“You do well to call it a liberty,” said Madame Ildefonse, showing all her small pointed teeth as if she wanted to bite Pamela. She was panting a little, and there was a sort of whiteness about her nostrils that pointed to considerable if repressed emotion. “But let it pass. You were giving your opinion, I presume, my cabbage-stalk?”

“Meess very naturally wished me to admire your exquisite taste, ma tendre biche,” he responded. “‘No one,’ says she to me, ‘but Madame Eglantine could have made this inimitable, this absolutely original and distinguished combination, all the while retaining the stamp of the most high tone.’”

Monsieur Ildefonse was very glib of tongue.

“A-ah!” said Madame, smiling horribly. “You and Meess flatter me in your private conversations.”

“My charmer, how can I console myself in your absence, except by——” he broke off, for at that moment, with sounds of pomp, a thunder of hoofs, a crash and a clatter, the street woke up indeed, as Miss Pounce had prognosticated. And Madame D’Aimargues drove up in her four-horsed coach.

Madame Eglantine cast off her rage, as one may divest oneself of a garment, to be re-assumed at the chosen moment; Monsieur Ildefonse, with a relieved shrug of his huge shoulders, began to retire, cat-footed, to his den.

“Remain as you are, Meess,” commanded the milliner, now entirely concentrated on the exigencies of her business.

She shook out her flounces and summoning the bland business smile to her features cast a swift glance at the nearest mirror before taking two steps to greet her valuable patroness.

It was that glance at the mirror which precipitated the catastrophe. By some counter-reflection, Madame Eglantine’s jealous eyes caught a vision of Ildefonse, her husband, her cabbage, the little rat of her heart, pausing in his turn to cast a final ogle upon the abandoned, the sly, the seductive, the shameless Meess!

Eglantine beheld that ogle. She swallowed her emotion. She was above all femme d’affaires. Everything must give way before the profit of the moment. She could wait.

The little Marquise, blonde and slim and rouged, ethereal yet vivid, fluttered in, fanning herself, tried on her hat, chattered, laughed, approved, exclaimed upon the heat, and, still fanning herself, departed, leaving on Pamela’s mind the impression of a glittering butterfly, as lovely, as useless, and as impalpable. You could crush her, thought the girl, between finger and thumb.

Her serious lambent gaze had hardly followed the radiant apparition to the door, when the explosion burst forth.

It was all the more devastating for having been withheld.

Wanton! Hussy! Baggage! Designing intriguing slut! Meess de Malheur! What was Pamela, after all, but a stray apprentice, and an English one at that, flung upon her, Madame Eglantine’s, benevolence for the sake of old friendship, living on charity, a beggar! Cette Lydie, how she had haggled! But if such wickedness had been paid for in all the gold of false Albion, Madame Eglantine would not have kept her, to the destruction of her domestic happiness!

“Meess, you pack this day.”

She further added a flood of vituperation, to which Pamela, all her pretty carnations dead on her white cheeks, listened in a fixed silence.

When the Frenchwoman had run herself out of breath on a high scream, Pamela answered her in English, which the whilom Bath milliner spoke brokenly, but understood perfectly. “That’ll do, M’dame. I’m as pleased to get out of this place as ever you can be to see the back of me. As for that fat husband of yours, I wouldn’t touch him with a pair of tongs. And as for yourself, I’d not remain a moment longer than I can help with one as doesn’t know the meaning of truth, and would take an honest girl’s character away out of pure spite and malice. And don’t you dare,” pursued Pamela, with a swelling voice, “say anything against my character, or as sure as there is justice in Heaven, I’ll bring your business about your ears. I’ll tell that old cat, my Aunt Lydia, what’s happened, that you caught your horrid old Ildefonse ogling me in the glass, and that you haven’t that trust in him—and sure, I’m with you there, for he ain’t fit to be trusted the length of your apron, and so I tell you fair—you haven’t that trust in him that you could have another moment of peace with me under your roof. God help you; I don’t blame you! Give me the price of my ticket home, and I’ll see Aunt don’t get at you over the indenture.”

For all her courage, for all the longing which the thought of England brought her, the heart of Pamela Pounce was heavy as lead. She knew that, at the Kentish farm, things were going badly with the yeoman; she knew that she dared not add the burden of her penniless self to that which rested on his shoulders. She knew that odious as it would be, that abominably as her relative would abuse of the situation, there would be nothing for it, but to throw herself again on her Aunt Lydia’s family feeling, as soon as the Dover coach landed her in London town.

Her aunt was now with her mistress in Hertford Street, back from the Wells, according to the latest reports, and that was one bit of luck; another was, that judging by the tone of the letter just received by Madame Eglantine with an order for hats, my Lady Kilcroney’s maid was in the highest exultation over her mistress’s royal promotion.

CHAPTER III

In which Miss Pamela Pounce, the Milliner’s Assistant,
becomes Arbiter of Life and Death in High
Society

“Pray Mrs. Tabbishaw,” wrote my Lady Kilcroney’s woman to the Mantua maker in Cheapside, “send Pamela along with those white feathers of her ladyship’s, which you has, this ever so long, to be died blew, yours obleeged,

“Lydia Pounce.”

Now the fact of Pamela being Lydia’s niece did not endear her to that maturing damsel, “which,” she was fond of remarking to any beholding them together, “do seem prodigious absurd, seeing as how there’s scarce a year or two betwixt us.”

But if Miss Lydia was not fond of displaying herself in public with a fine strapping young woman of twenty-three who had an inconsiderate way of dropping out “Aunt” at every second word (“which, reely, my dear, I vow she does a’ purpose”—and perhaps indeed she did), my Lady Kilcroney’s indispensable Abigail, as she never omitted informing all and sundry, had a remarkable sense of family feeling. She had placed the inconvenient niece with the matchless Eglantine. With such a start in life she considered the girl’s fortune made; and if Paris were to become the stable abode of so much bloom and bumptiousness, she, for one, would continue to bear the separation with fortitude.

When, after two or three years’ absence, however, Pamela reappeared on the scene, extraordinarily Frenchified, unconscionably beautified, and quite unpardonably wideawake, having quarrelled to the death with Madame Eglantine, and possessing, to boot, only the clothes on her back and the price of her ticket, Miss Lydia Pounce was very justly annoyed. It was quite impossible to send the girl home, since bankruptcy threatened the Kentish farm. Once again Lydia’s fine conception of family obligation came to the fore. There was Mrs. Tabbishaw, at whose second-rate establishment in Cheapside the elder Miss Pounce had been in the habit of having such odd jobs done for her ladyship as the dyeing and re-curling of feathers, the cleaning and mending of unimportant laces, the quilting of winter petticoats. Mrs. Tabbishaw owed her a good turn, and if she would now make room for Pamela, give her board and just enough wage for her clothes, Lydia would see to it that her mistress should go as far as to purchase an occasional hat.

Pamela had no choice but to fall in with her aunt’s arrangements, for had not Madame Eglantine sworn that she would give her no character? (As if, indeed, it had been her fault that that odious Monsieur Ildefonse should take to ogling her behind Madame’s back, and her staring into the mirror!) She knew very well, however, that she was sadly wasted at the poor, unmodish place; and, indeed, since Mrs. Tabbishaw was too stupid to realise the treasure that had come her way, the younger Miss Pounce was forthwith turned into a maid-of-all-work. Her long, clever fingers were set to scrub and to cook, to pink or to quilt, or to whatever odd job pressed the most. She was kept running to and fro with parcels, and up and downstairs on messages. She was sent galloping to shops and warehouses to match ribbons and velvets, and all the while the wives and daughters of the city went on purchasing the modes of the year before last, as interpreted by vulgar minds, while spirit, delicacy, art, dash, millinery genius in fine, was actually within their reach! Not that Pamela Pounce had any desire to adorn them. Her aspirations flew very high. Some day she meant to be as great in her line as Eglantine herself, to exercise her talents upon heads as worth while as my Lady Kilcroney’s own.

“You’re jealous of me, you cat!” It was thus she apostrophised the worthy Aunt Lydia in the solitude of her bare attic chamber. “You’re jealous of me. You know you’re an old maid and peevish, and I’m only twenty-three and better-looking than you ever were in your life, with twice your wits, though yours are as sharp as your elbows. You think I’d take the shine out of you, you lemon-faced thing! You know I’d toss up a bit of lace and feather for your ladyship’s boudoir cap, and that her ladyship would nigh faint with the ecstasy of it when she saw herself in the glass. And a sweet pretty creature she is—the one glimpse I ever had of her, and that through the door, you mean thing! Ah, give me a chance, and I swear the sedans and the carriages would be blocking the streets to get at me. But not if you can help it, old Miss Pounce! You’re to be the only important Miss Pounce in this world; that’s your little game! But ’tis not for nothing I’ve got it all in me!”

And hugging her knees as she sat on her bed—the chair being too rickety to bear her fine proportions—Miss Pounce the younger would map out her future in glorious processions of feathers and head-dresses, hats and bonnets, wreaths and négligés.

Through all the hardships, the dreary daily grind, the unkindness and the unremitting exertions, her star shone upon her with a light that never wavered. The first winter was a trying one, and Pamela found London, after Paris, a cruel, ugly place; a cruel cold one, and a cruel hard one. When the summer came, existence might be easier, but the hours were longer with the daylight, and there were nights when even Pamela’s high heart gave way, and she would drop on her pallet bed almost too exhausted to sleep. She had grown thin, and there was a certain fierceness in the fire of her bright grey eyes, as if they looked on all humanity as an enemy, by that July 16th, 1789, when my Lady Kilcroney’s woman wrote for the “blew feathers.”

“Oh, drat!” said Mrs. Tabbishaw.

She was just sitting down to her dinner at three o’clock in the afternoon of a torrid day. The reek of roast duck and sage and onions was succulently in the air, and there was a tankard of porter facing and winking amber bubbles beside her plate already.

“Drat!” Mrs. Tabbishaw took a gulp of the porter, and waddled to the door to scream: “Those blue feathers, where the deuce were they put? Pamela! Pamela! I say, where is that girl? My chest is wore out screeching for her. Where’s Pamela, Miss Trotter, dear?”

“Just a-setting down to bread-and-cheese in the scullery,” screamed a thin voice from the counting-house.

“Setting down! It’s like her impidence! Send for her this moment, Miss Trotter. Tell her she’s got to take my Lady Kilcroney’s blue feathers to Hertford Street this very minute. Tell her it’s pressing, Miss Trotter. And stay, look out my lady’s bill, which Miss Pounce promised me to have settled this while back, and it twelve pound odd. Tell the chit to ask her aunt for it. I’m none too fond of letting fine ladies’ bills run up, and it all for odds and ends that are scarce worth my doing. And, hark ye, tell her she’ll have to hurry back too, with that pinking to finish to-night for Mrs. Alderman Gruntle’s cradle, and her eleventh due any time.”

“For mercy’s sake, Aunt Lydia,” said Pamela Pounce, as much to that damsel’s surprise and annoyance she was ushered in upon her by Pompey, the black page. “Give me a bit of bread-and-butter, and a drink of Bohea, for I declare to Heaven I’m starving. And I’ve brought you the feathers. And they’re dyed a dreadful blue, I think; but once you give anything over to Mrs. Tabbishaw you get the mark of her paw upon it, and so I tell you.”

“’Twould be well if she put the mark of her paw upon you, miss, for your impidence. Bread-and-butter, quotha! And I’m sure ’tis a good thing if you are a trifle fined down from the gross size you was when you came back from Paris. ‘Dear me,’ says my lord’s new man to me, when he caught sight of you, ‘that’s a prize one! She’d make ten of you,’ he says; and him so genteel, I blushed to hear him.”

“Oh, that fellow!” Pounce the younger tossed her head; “waylaying me on the stairs to say I couldn’t be a Pounce, being so—well, so vastly different from you, Aunt Lydia. And begging to see me home; as if I’d let him—a valet, indeed!”

“Upon my word!” Lydia’s faded, sallow, pretty countenance went a trifle more sallow, and looked considerably less pretty. “Who’s to talk of impidence, I’d like to know, and what do you expect, miss?”

“Somebody considerably less like stripes and buttons. If I don’t get a gentleman one day, Aunt——”

“A gentleman? La, hear her!”

“I’ll go single, like yourself.”

Pamela’s full light grey eyes became abstracted. Anon, as she had turned in at the area railings, a young gentleman had dashed by her up the steps, and had set the knocker thundering against the panels of the hall door. As she had looked up he had looked down at her; and then he had smiled, and made a little gesture towards his hat, which if not the courtesy he would have paid to one of his own class, was nevertheless a genial, pleasant salute. She thought she had never seen so handsome a countenance; come under the gaze of such flashing dark eyes. There would be a lad for one who was lucky enough to be able to go in at the front door!

“And, indeed, miss——”

Lydia wheeled round, and perceiving Pompey lingering, all one grin, tweaked his wool.

“How dare you, you little blackamore! What are you doing here?”

“He’s waiting for orders to get me a cup of chocolate and a bit of cake, aren’t you, Pompey?” cried the quite audacious Pamela. “I’m sure my Lady’ll never miss it. And as soon as I’ve got it to give, I’ll give you a crown-piece, Pompey.”

She laughed on the little boy, and when Pamela Pounce laughed, she was something to look on; for her wide, fresh mouth curled so deliciously, and the corners of it went up so gaily, and she had such fine, white, even teeth, and as the dimples came and went, she gained such adorable little lines of fun about half-shut eyes, and the most engaging little crinkle in her cocked nose!

“La!” Mrs. Tabbishaw’s slavey cast herself into her aunt’s arm-chair, untied the ribbons of her wide straw hat, and flung it on the table. She ran her long fingers, surprisingly white in spite of their toil, through the roughened curls of her chestnut hair, stretched her long legs luxuriously, and contemplating the dust on her shabby shoes: “Thought I should have dropped, I did,” she cried, “when I come into Shepherd’s Market—three big feathers and two little ones, Aunt Lydia! And, la! the blue! ’Tis the peacockest vile colour, I ever—— And oh, here’s my Lady’s bill! And old Tabby must have it paid. She’s all swears and spits and fur-flying about it, as it is. ‘Get your aunt to pay,’ she says, ‘for her beggarly odds and ends that don’t bring an honest body a bit of worth while,’ and oh!” she yawned outrageously, “I’m to hurry back, no less, for Mrs. Alderman Gruntle’s eleventh is waiting on my pinking.”

“My lady’s account!” Lydia snatched the written sheet from her niece’s hand: “Of all the—there, that’s what comes o’ dealing with them second-class shops. Mrs. Tabbishaw thinks my Lady can be treated like one of her City bodies, I declare.”

“I’m not to go back without the money,” said Pamela.

“Dear, to be sure! And my Lady so put about as never! What with her new hat being such a failure, and her out of sorts too, over her gown for the Birthday, she about to take up her first turn as Lady-in-Waiting into the bargain—Court friends being that spiteful, and my Lord having the ill luck at Whites, and Bellairs’ young nephew, Mr. Jocelyn, an audacious, gaming, young rascal, if ever I see one, as set on the dice as my Lord, and him but a beggar, so to speak. And my Lady paying his passage back to India twice over, to my certain knowledge, and him losing it on the green cloth within the hour! Well, my Lady’s done with him, that’s one good thing. ’Tain’t the moment for Tabbishaw, and so I tell you!”

“Why, la!” Pamela had a graceful, lazy mockery in her eye and voice which, however ill-placed in one of her humble station, somehow became her. “My Lord must have been, indeed, uncommon out of luck, if my Lady Kilcroney, her as every one knows is a-rolling in old Bellairs’ money, can’t pay twelve sovereigns to a poor shop in the City. But give me back the bill, Aunt, and I’ll tell Mrs. Tabbishaw she’s got to wait till my Lord casts a better tot.”

Lady Kilcroney’s maid gazed at her audacious relative as if deprived of speech. Nevertheless, in all her wrath there was a certain grudging admiration.

“The girl’s as insolent as if she’d been born a lady!”

The thought flashed across her mind as she whisked through the door brandishing the account. On the threshold the power of language returned to her.

“As if twelve sovereigns wasn’t as many farthings to one of my Lady’s wealth!”

Here she nearly cannoned against Pompey with a tray, and bidding him wait to be dealt with till his hands were empty of chocolate, disappeared, objurgating, down the passage.

Pamela was half-way through her second cup of chocolate, vastly refreshed and comforted by it, and the agreeable little cakes which had accompanied it, when her relative returned, with a red spot on either cheek bone, her nostrils dilated over panting breaths. She had all the air of one who emerges from a wrestle. The light of battle, was still in her eye, but of battle victorious.

“Here, miss,” she cried, “thirteen sovereigns to settle your Tabbishaw, and milady says you can keep the change. Gave me all sorts, she did, being, as who should know better than I, from early morning, my dear, in as peevish a temper as ever was. And—and what she can do in that way,” said Lydia, turning up her eyes, “you’d never believe if you hadn’t seen, the world being made up of Diddumses. There wasn’t an item along here she didn’t have her scratch at, and in the end, she says: ‘For Heaven’s sake stop talking!’ (That’s how poor servants is treated).

“‘You’ll have me reeling in the head,’ she says. ‘Take thirteen sovereigns from my purse, and get out of my room and don’t let me hear another word of that there maddening bill!’ And so you can keep the change, my love. And, if you’d believe it, just out of cussedness, the young gentleman what’s annoyed her so prodigious has the boldness to come knocking at our hall door and demanding urgent, through Mr. Blandfoot, the butler, a few moments’ conversation with her ladyship. My Lady having given orders that he was not to be admitted, the scamp sends for the butler—well, that’s about dished him, I can tell you!

“‘Tell him, Blandfoot,’ says my lady, ‘that I don’t give alms at the door. Tell him,’ she says, ‘to go and earn his living. I don’t hold,’ she says, ‘with able-bodied beggars!’”

“Oh,” said Pamela, her thoughts flying back with compassion to the dashing young gentleman on the doorstep, “what a cruel thing to say. ’Tis insulting misfortune.”

“Insulting fiddlesticks! Here, hasten, you baggage, or you’ll lose your good place, and I’ve had enough of you for one day, I can tell you that.”

“And what a darling, sweet auntie you are!” said the second Miss Pounce, as she tied on her shepherdess hat with knowing little peeps at the mirror. “’Tain’t any wonder I love you. Ta-ta.”

She dropped the sovereigns into her worn reticule, kissed her hand from the door in sarcastic farewell, and departed.

With fourteen shillings and twopence to the good in her pocket, Pamela felt a singular sense of independence. Instead of hurrying back into the heat, crowd, and toil of Cheapside, she turned her steps towards Hyde Park, the green boughs of which seemed to beckon to her from the top of the street.

“I’ll go and sit under the trees,” thought the girl. “An idea for a hat has come into my mind, and I’ll work it out and let Mrs. Alderman Gruntle and her cradle and the pinking go to the deuce.”

She found a retired spot in the shade, and, the turf being dry and inviting, stretched herself luxuriously at full length to stare upwards at the odd little triangles and stars of blue sky visible through the interlacing leaves above her.

Composing her hat with the zest of a poet his verses, she lay at ease, in great content, when she was startled by the sound of rapid footsteps on the sward.

She sat up and beheld a young man, a very fine and modish-looking young gentleman indeed, who advanced with great strides, brought himself to a sudden halt within the shady little dell, and casting swift looks from side to side, as if to make sure he was not observed, flung his hat on the ground and stood staring.

Pamela, shielded from observation by a clump of bushes, watched with a sudden and inexplicable feeling of apprehension, which grew as she caught sight of a drawn countenance, deathly pale.

“For sure,” thought she, “the poor gentleman’s desperate!”

The next instant she sprang to her feet with a scream; he had drawn a pistol from his breast pocket and, with an odd jerk, almost as if forced by some malevolent power which he could not withstand, raised it to his temple.

Pamela was one of those rare beings in whom swift wits unite with swift action. She hurled herself upon the would-be suicide and wrenched the weapon from his hand. For a strange moment they stood facing each other, eye into eye. It seemed to her as if the whole world held nothing but those mad eyes of his, dilated, starting, haunted; the pupils were contracting and expanding in the violet irises as with some dreadful pulse of his heart. Suddenly his whole being relaxed; he smiled.

“Good heavens,” she cried, “’tis the young gentleman on the doorstep!”

“And you,” said he, “are the young lady in the area. If the next world’s as odd as this, ’twill be a vastly comic place.”

“Oh!” cried Pamela, who did not at all like this reference to Eternity. Still less did she like the manner in which he put out his hand towards the pistol.

“By your leave, my dear. My property, I believe?”

She strove to avoid his grasp; she fought to keep the weapon in her hand. “Why, what farce is this?” he exclaimed, laughing. “What do you imagine, my good girl? May not an actor practise his greatest scene without——? Why, what prodigious nonsense have you got into your pretty head? The things’s not even loaded!”

“Ah, but what did you say yourself just now?”

She was a vigorous creature, and terror lent her strength. She remained in possession of the dangerous implement.

“What did I say? I merely tried the effect of my most telling speech upon you—with fine result. If my public are as impressionable——”

Once more he stretched out his hand, but, leaping from him, the girl raised the pistol, aimed at the nearest bush, pulled the trigger, and fired.

As the reverberations died away she turned a face, drained of colour but triumphant, upon him.

“So much for your story, Mr. Actor!” cried she.

“Why, you’re too quick for me!” he answered, with a moody change, thrust his hands into his pockets, began to pace the dell backwards and forwards before her, kicking his hat each time he passed it.

She thought that he was no more than a boy, for all his manly growth, and her heart went out to him.

“Here, give me the pistol,” he said. “Tush, child, ’tis safe enough for the moment. We’ll be having the park-keeper upon us to see who’s been murdered. Let us look innocent.”

“Oh, oh,” she shuddered, “if I had not been there!”

“Nay, my dear, I’m in no mood to thank you, I protest. Yet ’tis something to have had a vision of a pretty face and a kind, womanly spirit at the last.”

“There you go again! Sir, sir!”

She surrendered the smoking pistol, and, as he slipped it into his pocket:

“Farewell, my dear,” said he.

“Ah, no!” She clutched his arm by both hands. “You shall not go till you have promised me—promised me on your honour as a gentleman to spare yourself.”

“I could do that, on my honour,” he answered her; “but that I will not quibble before such true eyes. Nevertheless it is to spare myself that I seek death. You bid me on my honour. ’Tis because I cannot live dishonoured that I hold this pistol to my temples. ’Tis not that I don’t love life as well as another man, or better. ’Fore Heaven, it is because I have loved life too well. Had I as much as a guinea in my pocket I would have defied Fate. When I stood on those steps and rapped that knocker a while ago, I swear I had as little thought of blowing my brains out as you had. When you and I smiled at each other I thought this world a very good place, I do assure you. That woman in her fine house yonder, rolling in luxury, with her lap dog and her chocolate and her black page, her jewels and her laces, her silks and her satins; all in her cushions; that woman, I say, who finds the Bellairs’ money of so vast a use to spend, might have given me a ten-pound note out of her store. When all’s said and done, I’m the only Bellairs left. And, if but a nephew by marriage, nevertheless the last kin of her old Nabob. Ten pounds I asked of her—that contemptible sum! And what did I receive? The vilest insult, through the most insulting medium. Odds my life, when I think of it——”

He clenched his hands.

Pamela stood, reflecting profoundly, one needle-marked finger to her lip, her white brow drawn together under the shade of her hat.

Ten pounds to save a man’s honour. It seemed indeed a strangely small sum! As if he read her thought, he broke forth:

“I dreamt last night, three times over, that I tossed a double six at tric-trac, and ’tis the sixteenth of July and I am twenty-six. My Lord Sanquhar promised to give me my revenge at the Six Bells at six of the clock. ’Twas such a conjunction of luck as could not fail. I would have won back my I.O.U.’s. I would have returned my Lady Kilcroney the passage money to India. She wants to ship me to India, my dear, the inconvenient poor relation. Ah, she need not fear. I shall beg from her no more. What a farce it has all been! ’Tis time to put an end to it. Bless you for your sweet looks, my pretty child. Think of me only as one who, after life’s fitful fever, sleeps well. Aha! I shall sleep better I dare say, than my Lady Kilcroney when she has read the letter I sent to her anon!”

“One moment, Mr. Bellairs, since that’s your name,” said Pamela Pounce, with her wide, lovely smile. She dived into her reticule, and began to gather the coins together with counting digits. “If you’ll condescend to borrow of a person who goes in by the area gates, here are thirteen sovereigns at your service. I’ve just had a long bill paid me. And, oh,” cried Pamela, suddenly and unexpectedly bursting into tears, “I wish they were three hundred!”

“Gracious heavens!” said the young gentleman.

“If you don’t take them I’ll never know another happy moment,” sobbed Pamela. “Oh, how could I? Oh, sir, don’t say ‘No,’ because I am just a poor girl.”

“Nay then. I won’t say ‘No.’ Upon my soul, I don’t care if you go in at the coal hole, you’ve the finest spirit and the prettiest face, ay, and the warmest heart I’ve ever met in woman.”

He held out his hand, and she put the money into it. He hesitated then, and looked at her; and perhaps because of some warning that flashed through her wet eyes, or perhaps because of some innate spring of good breeding in him, he only kissed the hand that had been strong to save him.

“Pray, what o’clock is it?” He struck his waistcoat, where a black ribbon made pretence for a missing watch. “My time piece has gone the way of most of my possessions.”

“’Tis past five,” she said, “by the shadows.”

The country girl had not forgotten her lore.

“Past five,” cried he, “and I due at the Six Bells! If you will move a step, my dear, I will pick up my hat.”

“Allow me, sir,” said she. “Hats are my business.”

She lifted the felt from the grass, dusted it with her arm, pushed out the dent where he had kicked it, and gave each corner a perfectly unnecessary twist.

“I’m in the millinery,” said she, as she handed it to him.

“I thought there was something remarkably elegant about your headgear,” he observed. “And pray oblige me with your address, that I may know where to return my loan, for the conviction grows in me that I am destined to win and to live.”

She knew that sense of victory; it was akin to the conviction of her own confident soul; but while she smiled she pondered. Then she said demurely:

“My name is Pamela Pounce, sir. If you will inquire for me, care of my aunt, Miss Lydia Pounce, own woman to my Lady Kilcroney, ’twill be the safest address.”

He gave her a quaint look, bowed profoundly, and hurried away.

“The safest address,” he murmured, as he went. “Ah, Pamela, you’re one of the wise virgins!”

Then he laughed.

“Farce did I call it? And I set for the blackest tragedy! Nay, ’tis a mighty delicate comedy, and we’re but at the first act of it.”

Pamela stood gazing after the retreating figure.

“Now,” said she to herself, “I have the choice of three roads. I must go—to Bridewell, to the river, or to Aunt Lydia. It had better be to Aunt Lydia.”

“Stripes and buttons,” who had not forgotten how the younger Miss Pounce had snubbed him on their first meeting, informed her that she might “hunt up the old girl for herself”; her ladyship having gone out her ladyship’s woman, if not in her own apartment, might be found in her ladyship’s chamber.

And here indeed, with a not altogether comfortably beating heart, Pamela confronted her aunt.

Lydia stared, as if beholding a ghost.

“La, whatever’s to do?”

“The money’s gone,” said Pamela with great firmness.

She had made up her mind from the first that nothing should induce her to betray either the unfortunate young gentleman or her own rash interference with his concerns.

“Gone? Gone, miss?”

Pamela opened her reticule and mutely took out from it a vinaigrette, three pennies, a sixpence, and a pocket handkerchief, and showed the remaining vacuum to Lydia’s horrified eyes.

“But how in the name of goodness could such a thing happen?”

“You lend me the money, aunt, and I’ll pay you back faithful, and I’ll trim you all your hats for three years for nothing into the bargain.”

But with an action of little bony hands which typified her patronymic, Miss Pounce seized the reticule from her niece. She shook it, and tested it; she held it up to the light, she pulled its lining out. Then she tried the clasp, which fastened with a snap as uncompromising as that which now closed her own tight jaws.

Still, without speaking, she looked volumes at the milliner’s assistant.

“I declare as I’m a living woman, aunt,” asseverated the sinner, “that I have no more notion what’s become of the gold than you have yourself. And all I can tell you is”—her courage rose with the sense of this perfect adherence to the truth—“that as I left this house it was jingling in that bag, and when last I looked there wasn’t one left. And if you don’t come to my aid—why, you know what Madame Tabbishaw is? She’ll always say I stole them. Come, you’ll lend me the money, I know you will, for father’s sake, and the name’s sake. We Pounces ain’t never been called thieves, aunt.”

Her voice shook, for suddenly the word stung her, unrepentant though she remained.

“Lend you!” Miss Lydia let herself fall into my lady’s own rosy-cushioned chair and broke into piercing remonstrance.

How in the name of goodness was she to find such a sum? Did Pamela think she was made of gold? Here was a return for all her kindness! A girl who was so wickedly careless—likely to keep her promises, indeed! She that ought to be racking her brains to pay back her dear auntie for all her sacrifices.

“Thirty pounds, miss, it cost me to send you to Paris, and you to be so unprincipled as to let Madame Eglantine’s husband take to ogling you. And it’s paying me back you ought to be, instead of having the brazenness to ask me for thirteen pounds. And indeed, miss, it’s not thirteen pounds I’ll give you; no, not a farthing more than the sum of the bill. You that might have had fourteen and tuppence!”

She suddenly broke off, sat up straight, and pointed a finger at her niece with a sharp throw.

“Where did you go to, miss, when you left this house? Straight, now! What? You went and sat under the trees in the park? Upon my word, I never! And how long might you have been a-sitting there? You don’t know. Better and better. You went to sleep, miss, with that there bag full of gold. Oh, you——”

Pamela drooped her head, receiving the indictment as with the humility of a guilty conscience, though she was considerably relieved by the solution which the older Miss Pounce had found for herself.

Suddenly Lydia bounced out of her seat.

“Mercy on us, here’s my Lady!” cried she. And then, with a scream: “Mercy on us!” she cried again. “What in the world has happened?”

Pamela stared. My Lady Kilcroney it was indeed, to judge by a fine feathered hat and a delicate flutter of muslins, but a vastly different Lady Kilcroney from the charming, happy little lady of Pamela’s remembrance. A small figure with a stricken face crawled into the room, and, as Lydia rushed forward, nearly swooned against her.

“My Lady, my Lady, what is it?” cried the maid in genuine concern, guiding her mistress’s form to the chair she had herself but just vacated.

“Oh, oh, oh!” moaned my Lady. “Oh, in the name of Heaven, send for my Lord? Oh, Lydia, the letter, the letter!”

Both women then saw that in a little gloved hand my Lady Kilcroney was clutching an open sheet. Lydia took it into her own grasp and glanced at it.

“Mercy on us!” then cried she for the third time. “That dratted young man you’ve been so good to! Well, if ever was anything so ungrateful! To go and put an end to himself, just to spite you! Never you take on, my Lady, he’s no great loss, I protest. A good riddance, say I.”

“Oh, oh, oh!” Kitty Kilcroney sat up and wrung her hands. “Was ever any woman so punished for a fit of temper? Oh, Lydia! Oh! I shall never smile again! ’Twas my Lord being so late in yestereven from White’s, mad-stupid with his losses. And, oh, the night I had, trying to show him the error of his ways and the vast folly of not letting bad be when the luck’s against him. And him going off in a huff, God knows where, before I’d as much as swallowed my chocolate! And Mrs. Mirabel’s hat coming on the top of it, and it is a sight to frighten the crows after all my trouble. And my gown for Her Majesty’s birthday the wrong yellow, and no time to get another! And for the wretched boy to come to me then, with his horrid tale of the dice and the cards, as bad as my Lord’s own, him without a farthing but my bounty! Oh, oh, ’twas true I insulted him! What’s that you say? Who are you, pray?”

She had dropped her cries of anguish to speak with the irritability of the afflicted.

“I am your woman Lydia’s niece.”

Pamela went down on her knees before the little distracted lady, and spoke very gently and deliberately as to a child; and the while she spoke Kitty’s eyes widened on her smiling countenance as if they beheld an angel’s.

“Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs has not committed suicide, my Lady Kilcroney, nor will he do so, because I took the pistol out of his grasp. Yes, my Lady, I, with these hands. And I gave him the thirteen pounds you sent me to pay Mrs. Tabbishaw’s bill. Thirteen pounds! And he went away to gamble with them at the ‘Six Bells,’ and he was quite sure that he was going to win all his money back from Lord Sanquhar with the help of them, and I am quite sure, too, for him. Says he ‘My luck is turned.’ And——”

She was interrupted.

“And that’s what happened to my Lady’s money. Oh, you deceitful wretch! Oh, you vile young thief!”

Lydia forgot everything but her indignation. Her gimlet tones might have disturbed the dead, but neither my Lady nor Pamela paid the smallest heed to her, for Kitty Kilcroney had flung herself upon the young milliner’s neck, and, shedding tears of joy, called her the most incomparable girl, the noblest creature, the nearest thing to a seraph that had ever walked a world of woe.

They were both as keen of wit one as the other, and it was wonderful how, with scarce a question and answer, the whole story came out.

“You turned into the park, you did not know why? Ah, but I know why! ’Twas Providence, child. A most merciful act of Providence! And you saw his desperate face? Oh, I can scarce bear it! You wrenched the pistol from his very hand? Oh, if I live to be a hundred, how can I be grateful enough to Heaven and to you? Rash and unfortunate young man! You gave him thirteen pounds? He only asked me for ten. Oh, where did you say he had gone to? I must send after him. Lydia, bid the carriage round again. I must go myself. And you shall go with me, child. Oh, you shall indeed!”

“Since her Ladyship’s in such a fine mood of generosity,” cried Lydia, who occasionally presumed on fourteen years’ service, “perhaps she’ll pay Mrs. Tabbishaw’s bill over again? Or else my niece will be getting into trouble, and she needn’t look to me to get her out of it, lying to my very face!”

Kitty was standing before her mirror, happily setting her flounces into trim, like a ruffled bird its feathers.

“And why did you never tell me you had such a niece, Lydia, I should like to know? And what do you mean by burying a fine young woman like that with a creature like Tabbishaw? Ugh!”

My Lady’s nerves were pardonably on edge. The shriek that escaped her as my Lord Kilcroney marched into the room was as piercing as Lydia’s own.

“Good heavens, my Lord, you’ll be the death of me! You should have married Susan Verney, you should indeed, or someone with a cast-iron constitution. Stay——”

Kitty’s frowns were never of long duration, and she was in no mood for frowning! “You’ve come in the very nick of time, my dearest love. Do I not hear your coach without? Hasten, hasten to the tavern of the ‘Six Bells.’ Pray, where is it, my dear? Oh, doubtless you know, dearest Denis. And you will ask for Jocelyn Bellairs. You know, Denis, poor young Bellairs?”

“Faith, then, I’ve been beforehand with you, me darling!” said my Lord.

He was running Pamela’s straight young figure up and down with the eye of the connoisseur as he stood there, a handsome, devil-may-care gentleman; one who patronised so superlative a tailor, wore such fine lawns and laces, and had withal so monstrous elegant a frame whereon to hang them that a trifle of a loop hanging here or a button loose there merely pointed to a genteel carelessness.

“Faith, I’ve been beforehand with you! Meeting my Lord Sanquhar anon, he took me to the ‘Six Bells,’ where he had a rendezvous with your poor young relative, Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs. And bejabers,” cried my Lord, with his favourite Irish oath, “if that young rascal hasn’t cleaned both me and my Lord Sanquhar as bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard.”

He paused; the investigating eye fixed itself with a guilty twinkle upon his Kitty’s countenance, where a mixture of strange emotions were struggling for expression. And suddenly Lydia clapped her hands and broke into eldritch laughter. Whereat my Lady also made her choice of emotions, and laughed too.

“And troth, mavourneen,” said my Lord, delighted to find the situation so unexpectedly agreeable, “I’m here to say ’twas you were in the right of it the live-long night. There’s not a ha’porth of good in trying to force fortune when the jade has made up her mind to flout ye. And I’ll take your advice, me darling, and go with you into the country the moment we get those devils of I O U’s settled, till it’s time for you to abandon me for that dashed damnation Court of yours!”

“Oh, I can’t scold you!” cried his wife. “But, oh, why did you abandon me all day? ’Twas cruel unkind of you, and I dare swear if you’d been here ’twould never have happened; for you’d not see a fellow dicer go wanting for a ten-pound note, my Lord, if I know you! Oh, read that letter, Denis, and you’ll understand. And if it had not been for Lydia’s niece here, admirable girl! who took the pistol out of his very hand in the park, and gave him her employer’s money—oh, if it were not for this noble, clever young woman, where should I be now?”

“You needn’t worry about the bill, aunt,” said Pamela, with the perfect composure that compelled that person’s disapproving admiration. “I gave your address to Mr. Bellairs, and, as he will certainly be punctual with repayment, her Ladyship will perhaps kindly allow me to remain until he calls with the money?”

There was nothing my Lady Kilcroney would have refused Miss Pounce the younger at that moment, and the milliner’s assistant proceeded to add to her obligations.

“If your Ladyship would trust me with the retrimming of Miss Mirabel’s hat meanwhile, I make bold to say I could alter it to your satisfaction——”

CHAPTER IV

Showing Storm Within and Without

There are some who seem to be destined always to keep on top as the wheel of life revolves; no matter how others may suffer from the law of its relentless motion.

My Lady Kilcroney (still in the minds of those who had first known her in her brilliant widowhood “Incomparable Bellairs!”) might be counted among the rare ones who are thus miraculously favoured.

Beauty, wit, charm, wealth, rank and the irresistible dash of the born leader she had already possessed; now she had attained to Court favour: she was Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Charlotte! It is scarcely necessary to add that she had become a power in the world; should she choose to exercise her influence on behalf of anyone clever and virtuous enough to profit of it, that person’s fortune might be regarded as safe.

So do great planets, following their allotted orbits, carry in their wake lesser stars that bask and shine in a reflected light!

In the instance of Miss Pamela Pounce the luminary thus lifted into prominence, possessed a very considerable power of shining on her own account; and, once her position in the hemisphere assured, she required no borrowed brilliancy.

In other words, my Lady Kilcroney’s recommendation obtained for Pamela Pounce a new start in life. Madame Mirabel, exceedingly dissatisfied with her head milliner, aware that Madame Eglantine of Paris was growing sleek on the very cream of her rightful British custom, and being moreover much struck with Pamela’s genteel appearance, her manner and her aptitude, was all readiness to oblige so distinguished a client as my Lady Kilcroney, and give the young woman a trial.

Before the autumn of her disastrous summer had waned, the younger Miss Pounce found herself firmly established in the very position which had been the object of her wildest dream. She was head of the millinery department of the great Bond Street mantua maker.

Like her unexpected patroness, it might seem that her cup of happiness was full. But there is no factor in the calculations of existence so easily forgotten as that most important item of all; the human heart.

Pamela, in making her courageous plan of life, had forgotten to reckon with her heart!

And this tiresome, irresponsible, uncontrollable organ began to trouble her exceedingly. In those hours of leisure when she was not concocting delightful schemes for the breaking of other people’s hearts—for every one knows what a killing hat will do—she found herself considerably inconvenienced by the peculiar conduct of her own.

Said Miss Polly Popple, of the millinery department, to Miss Clara Smithson, the book-keeper:

“You mark my words, my dear, there’s something up with that young woman Pounce! She’ll be getting herself into a regular scandal with that dashing young spark of hers! And if she ain’t got something on her conscience already ... I don’t know the signs!”

Miss Smithson leant forward, wheezing heavily.

“Providence ain’t always unjust, Polly,” she said, “and people do come by their rights, no matter how many viscountesses is against them!”

“Ah,” said Polly, swelling her fine bust, and looking at herself in the fly-blown glass which hung over the chimney in the little room at the back of the Bond Street shop where she was sitting, after hours, with her friend. “That was a bit of jobbery, that was! There isn’t one in the establishment, I do believe, that wasn’t struck all of a heap when they heard that a strange young female was put into old Mrs. Dodder’s place instead of me, which the next in rank is always, by law, you might say, entitled to. Lady Kilcroney being that prodigious in the fashion—not that I was ever one to admire her; give me breeding!—and Madame Mirabel being so set on cutting out Madame Eglantine—not that she ever will, and you mark my words, for London ain’t Paris, I say, and that I’ll maintain, and you may talk yourself blue in the face, Clara, and you won’t alter that! If it hadn’t been for that put-up job, ’tis I’d have been head of the millinery here this moment.”

Miss Polly Popple’s case was clear, but Miss Smithson’s reasons for disliking Pamela were perhaps more abstruse. She talked big of the claims of friendship, of her sympathy for Miss Popple, and also of a “rising within her,” which with her was an infallible sign of “something fishy” in somebody else. But the truth was that the new-comer’s radiant youth, her success, her spirit of enterprise, had started the base passion of envy in Miss Smithson’s withered breast; a passion the more prejudicial that it flourishes entirely outside the pale of reason! She listened very greedily, therefore, to Miss Popple’s rapid exposition of her suspicions. Between gossip, malice, and inventiveness, the new head milliner’s character seemed indeed in a parlous condition when Miss Popple concluded.

That wheezing breath of Miss Smithson’s was drawn with ever-increased intensity.

“Walking with the young gentleman late of an evening in the Green Park! Upon my word! If it had been you that had seen her last night, now, Miss Popple dear, instead of that poor foundling of a Mary Jane, which Madame Mirabel was saying only yesterday could scarce be trusted to match a skein of blue silk, I’d go to Madame Mirabel this minute with it, I would, being so to speak, a cousin——”

“Beware what you does, Miss Smithson, you’ll ruin all. Give her rope.”

“Rope, Miss Popple?”

“Rope to hang herself with,” said Miss Popple vindictively. “That’s in a manner of speaking. Plain, she’ll give herself away or he’ll give her away,” she had an ill-natured giggle, “so as we give them time. It’s his game to give her away, a devil-may-care hand, some young buck who only wants to have her at his mercy, just for his fun. Wasn’t he after her here—open—three afternoons out of last week?”

“After her here?” Miss Smithson again repeated her friend’s last words. She was exceedingly shocked.

“Why, mercy to goodness,” she went on in horrified tones: “Ain’t it the rule of the house? No male belongings is allowed after the young ladies here if they were grandfathers itself. And they churchwardens.”

“Oh, tush, Smithson,” interrupted Polly contemptuously. “Of course my sly young beau comes dangling in with some lady friend, to help her to choose a hat—by way of—” Polly winked. “Toosday, it was Mrs. Lafone as brought him, or, to be correct, he brought her, which, knowing the minx as I do—I refers here to Mrs. Lafone—’tis my intimate conviction ’tis he will pay for that there hat! But, as you knows, Miss Smithson, and none better, ladies’ morals ain’t our concern, thanks be, so long as we keeps our own respectable.”

Miss Smithson admitted this regrettable truth with a doleful sigh. Polly took another pull at the brew of hot spiced beer which they had concocted for their comfort this cold December night, and proceeded:

“Thursday, if Mr. Stafford doesn’t bring him along all innocent! He, with his handsome lady on his arm, up from Windsor for the day, to buy her a stylish head for a Christmas present. And, ‘What are you doing, looking in at a hat-shop window, Bellairs,’ says he, laughing and joking (’tis his way, my dear, a very agreeable gentleman!) ‘Gad,’ says he, ‘you’ve not got a wife to run you up bills! Your chinkers goes hopping out on hosses and dice and cards, and what not! Selfish fellows you bachelors are!’ And Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs, bowing to Mr. Stafford and declaring he only wished he had other people’s luck—and indeed, Miss Smithson, Mrs. Stafford is a real beauty!—but all the while, my dear, who is he looking at and ogling and taking occasion to whisper to—but Miss Pounce, if you please! And if I didn’t see the way her kerchief lace was quivering with the palpitation of her heart, and her hands shaking as she took down heads for Mrs. Stafford and held them up for her—well, my name’s not Popple.”

Miss Smithson leant over the sulky coal fire and lifted the saucepan from the hob to refill her glass. Her own hands shook. That Pamela was a disgrace and would bring discredit on the whole house of Mirabel! She felt it in her bones.

“You may say so, dear.” As her friend drank, Polly Popple tendered her own tumbler for replenishment, murmuring parenthetically, however: (“Not a drop more, love. I never did hold with stimulants, only you were so pressing and it is a foggy night, I won’t deny, and a drop of cordial, a mere medical precaution, so to speak)—you may say so,” the slighted young lady of the bonnet department took up her theme with fresh gusto. “And you’d say so a million times more if you had seen them to-day. For Mr. Jocelyn comes in with my Lady Kilcroney—and oh! the bold brazenness of it!—there he stands behind my Lady’s chair and Pounce—La! I declare I’d have been sorry for her if she wasn’t what she is, the baggage—red and white and not knowing where to put her eyes with him signalling to her. Yes, and if he did not thrust a letter into her hand as I went out, you may set me down a liar. And her stuffing it into her kerchief under my very nose!”

“Don’t, dear, don’t,” moaned Miss Smithson, beating the air with her bony hand. Then, after a long pause, during which she seemed to be painfully bringing her virginal mind to confront the awful pictures just presented to it, she went on acridly: “There’ll be a bust up. When a girl comes to that pint of disreputableness things is bound to happen. It can’t go on like this—you mark my words.”

Now, strangely enough, barring the inexactitude of the premise, such a conclusion had just formed itself in Pamela’s own mind.

It could not go on. Something was bound to happen. She had saved the life of Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs; and he had demonstrated his gratitude by promptly falling head over heels in love with her. So far, so good; or rather, so far, so bad, where a dashing young gentleman of expensive habits, small principle and remarkable fascination and a young person of the working classes are concerned. For the mischief of it was she had fallen in love with him. Poor Pamela, with her high spirit, her clear brain and her strong courage, to be betrayed by a heart as vulnerable as any silly girl’s of the lot! She was clear-sighted enough to know that, stripped of the golden glamour, the path of her romance led to a very ugly gulf. She despised herself for her weakness. She had no illusions on the quality of the attachment offered to her by Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs, but, as the short December days dropped away to Christmas, she found, growing within her, a dangerous new self; a reckless creature who cried: The Devil might take the consequences; a girl was young but once; you found your fate, and had to clasp him or lose him; the one man you could love, and him only, or go wanting to your grave!

“I know it’s death and destruction some time,” said Pamela to herself, sitting hugging her knees in the neat little chamber in Shepherd Street, where she lodged with a most respectable widow woman who had once seen better times, “but isn’t it death and destruction anyhow and at once if I have to give him up?”

She re-read the letter he had slipped into her hand—the audacious fellow—a few hours ago at Madame Mirabel’s.

“It must be yes or no, my darling lovely girl.”

My darling, lovely girl. That was what his eyes were always saying, and oh! it was sweet!

It must be yes or no! She told herself that if she couldn’t say yes, it was still more impossible to say no. Backwards and forwards she struggled with the insolvable problem, till her tallow candle expired with a great stench, and she was left in darkness and misery. Worn out with her long day she fell at last asleep, to be wakened by the call of a cock in Shepherd’s Market. Perhaps it was this farmyard cry which, weaving into her consciousness, had made her dream so strongly of the old place at home. When she woke she could hardly believe she was not in the billowing four-poster in the great attic, with pretty Sister Susie asleep beside her.

Again the cold, foggy, bleak London morning was rent by the crow of the cock. Then Pamela knew where she was, and she knew something else, too.

That other self which had got into her must not be listened to on any account. It must indeed be stamped out of existence with the utmost promptitude.

Now Pamela was considerably wiser than most young women in her position. She took a sensible resolution.

“I’ll go to Mrs. Mirabel this very morning,” she decided, “and ask for a Christmas holiday. She won’t refuse me, being the good-natured soul she is, and me so useful to her. And once I get home and feel mother’s arms about me—there! I know I’ll be all right. I needn’t be afraid of myself any more.”

Pamela Pounce took seat in the Dover coach. She was in a sedate flutter, an admirably dignified bustle. She knew to the fraction of an inch the amount of space to which she was entitled, and she possessed herself of it determinedly. She had, besides her own agreeable person, divers bandboxes and loose parcels to place, and this she did with an amiable assurance that put protest to the blush, and set other passengers’ pretensions in a gross light. When her arrangements were concluded she heaved a sigh, presented a vague smile, and lay back, her hands folded, to survey the other travellers at leisure. She was herself better worth looking at than any of the coach-load, which contained a foreign couple, one or two of the usual bagmen on the road to France, a Dover shopkeeper, a farmer’s wife, and an elderly gentleman of delicate and serious mien, who drew an old calf-bound volume from a shabby bag, and fixed large gold-mounted spectacles upon his high, transparent nose with all the air of one prepared with solace for the journey.

But as he sat exactly opposite Miss Pamela Pounce, his shrewd, cold eyes wandered ever and anon from the print to fix itself upon her, as though—which was indeed the fact—he were puzzled in what category to place her. It was obvious to Sir Edward Cheveral, who, though impoverished, was himself a gentleman of the first water, that the ambulent nymph in front of him was not of his class, perfect as was the fit of her grey riding coat, refined and reposeful as were the hands in their long grey gloves, tasteful in its coquettishness as was the grey riding toque, set on chestnut curls, and suitably as these curling tresses, unpowdered, were smoothed away to be tied with a wide black ribbon at the back of the long proud throat.

In the first instance, no young person of family with such claims to distinction as her elaborate travelling gear pointed to, would be voyaging in the public coach unattended; in the second, in her quiet ease, and the full yet not immodest assurance of her glance, the manners of one accustomed to fight the world for herself were very obvious; in the third, there was an indefinable lack of the never-to-be-mistaken stamp of breeding.

“For all your clever counterfeit, my good girl,” reflected Sir Everard, “you haven’t the ring of the guinea gold.”

Yet he reproached himself for the accusation. Here was, after all, no counterfeit; very good metal of its kind. “Fine yellow brass,” thought he with a chuckle. “All in a good sense, my dear.”

What was she? From whence and whither speeding? Not an actress. That fresh, close-textured skin had never known paint on its flower-like surface. The cheeks were not even rouged; indeed, after the flush of bustle, the colour of them was now settling back in a curious ivory pallor, which went well with the ardent hair. No fine lady’s young woman; every movement had betrayed conscious independence. A shop-girl? The wife of some small merchant? Nay, ’twas the impersonation of maiden liberty, and what shop-girl could encompass such a wealth and detail of modishness?

She caught his gaze upon her, leaned forward and smiled. He had already noticed that her smile was rather dazzling. He quite blinked to find it addressed to himself.

“I trust, sir,” said she, “my bandboxes do not incommode you?”

“By no means, madam,” answered he civilly; and moved his long, thin legs back a further fraction beneath the seat.

“I haven’t been home,” said she, “for four years, and luggage do grow when one has five young sisters at home, sir, and presents run to hats.”

“To hats?” he repeated, with that interested air that obviates the audacity of a question.

“Along, sir,” said Miss Pounce, and her smile broadened, “with me being in the millinery business.”

She drew herself up with a very pretty and, to his mind, becoming pride.

“A business,” he said, “which I take it, madam, is in a flourishing condition.”

“You may say so, sir.” Her pride increased. “Since Miss Pamela Pounce—that’s me!—has been made head of the department, Madame Mirabel can scarce execute the vast number of orders.”

“Upon my word!” He had removed his spectacles, and was smiling on her in his turn in a kindly, detached, faintly satiric way. “I trust Madame What’s-Her-Name recognises her debt to you?”

The head milliner gave her curls ever so slight a toss.

“Well, sir, she wouldn’t like to lose me. She knows I’m worth my weight in gold to her.”

His glance flickered over her comely proportions. Tall, generously made, he had called her a nymph. “Goddess would have been the better appellation,” murmured he.

“Well, ’tis a comfort to an old man like myself to meet one so youthful to whom work is proving both fruitful and blessed.”

Miss Pamela Pounce didn’t need any old gentleman to commend her. She knew the value of work, and who better? And if it was blessed to her, why she took good care that it should be. And, as to content with her lot—sure, if she hadn’t been, she wasn’t a fool, she’d have picked out another for herself.

“’Tis some old clergyman,” she thought, and laughed. “He’ll scarce know what a hat means. Clergyman’s wives and daughters in the country would give any woman of taste bad dreams for a fortnight. There was Mrs. Prue Stafford. Had she not still to learn that to wear pink and blue with such cheeks as she had was positive vulgar? And she married to the finest of fine gentlemen.”

Sir Everard folded his spectacles, put them carefully into his breast pocket, and closed his Virgil. Here was an opportunity of studying a—to him—hitherto quite unknown branch of humanity, after an unexpectedly pleasant fashion. The girl pleased him. He had called her brass and humoured the simile. A shining, solid composition of metal that took a handsome polish and showed itself boldly for what it was. He liked her for her spring of youth, her frank pride of her trade, for having no petty nonsense nor poor pretentiousness to pass for what she was not. He liked her brave independence. There was, he thought, a better modesty in her quiet certainty than any prudish airs and graces could have lent her.

“’Twould be a presuming fellow,” he mused, “that would dare to try his gallant ways with such an one, and if he did, I would back my young milliner to teach him a lesson.”

She told him how she had, so to speak, graduated in Paris, which accounted, thought he, for a taste that was scarcely indigenous. And her home was between Canterbury and Dover, and she, brought up till seventeen on the farm, the eldest of eleven. Then he knew whence she had drawn that sap of splendid vigour; a hardy flower of English soil. And the chief of his many prides being that he was an Englishman, he was still better content.

She would alight, she told him, at “The Rose” at Canterbury, where she would lie the night. And father would fetch her in the morning; for ’twas mortal cold across the downs on a winter’s evening, and ’twas a long drive for the mare even in good weather.

“Bravo,” said he. “I, too, halt at ‘The Rose,’ I am glad to know that I shall have such good company. May I sit beside you at supper in the eating-room, my dear young lady?”

“Oh, you’re vastly obliging, sir!” said Pamela Pounce, and a faint pink crept, like the colour of a shell, into her smooth, pale cheek, for she had a good eye for a gentleman, and she knew that she was honoured.

Her tongue ran on gaily, and he listened with a gentle air of courtesy and an interest which in truth was not assumed.

In spite of her sophisticated manner her chatter was very artless. It was a revelation of a character which had remained curiously untouched by the world. The busy mart in which she lived had cast none of its dust upon her soul.

Dear, to be sure, how prodigious joyful they would be at home to see her back!

“Four years, sir, think on it! I was but a child when I left them, and now I’m a woman!” ’Twas like, indeed, that none would recognise her again, should they just happen to meet, accidental like. She half wished she could have walked in upon them and taken them by surprise. But then: “Father, sir, would ha’ lost the pleasure of coming to fetch me,” and her mother might have been vexed. “Mother’s very house-proud, sir. She’d want to have things pretty for me, and bake cakes and that.”

And they’d all be looking out for her on the house step. Just to think of their dear faces fair turned her silly. She blinked away a tear and gave her bright smile. But as he smiled back it was with a certain melancholy. The farmer with his eleven children—poor, struggling fellow!—the hardworked mother, the good, industrious child, returning home with her hands full of gifts, blessed in her honest toil for them, were they not all about to taste joys from which he had deliberately cut himself off in his fastidious isolation? He had scarcely ever regretted his chosen solitariness. His beautiful old shabby home, set in the loneliness of the snowy park, the wood fire in the library in the company of a favourite book, the ministrations of a couple of well-drilled servants, an austere silence, a harmonious communion with the high spirits of the dead; that was the Christmas to which he himself had looked forward with complacency. Now he wondered; his heart contracted with a most unusual sense of pain; had he lost the best in life? If he had had a daughter by his shoulder with a white, pure forehead such as this girl had, and had seen her eyes fire with love, heard her voice tremble at the thought of meeting him, her old father, would not that have brought him a sweetness finer than the most exquisite page in Virgil?

The day, which had opened blue and gold, with a high wind and clear sunshine, began to gather threatening clouds by the time the posting station was reached; and the “Dover High-Flyer” plunged away again into a snow squall with all the speed of its fresh horses.

“We are like to have a seasonable Christmas,” quoth Sir Everard, and was pleased to note that, while the rest of the company grumbled and complained, the fine specimen of young womanhood opposite to him produced a warm shawl from a bundle, tucked it round her knees, and offered him the other end, declaring, with a smile, that she was as warm as a toast, and that she did love a white Christmas.

They all dined at Rochester, and had hot punch, of which Miss Pounce partook with enthusiasm, but in very discreet measure.

Conversation flagged on this, their last, stage. The snoring of the foreign pair who, having tied their heads up in terrible coloured handkerchiefs, leant against each other and gave themselves up to repose with much the same animal abandonment as that with which they had gobbled the beef-steak pie and gulped the hot rum of the “Bull Inn” at Rochester; the sighing fidgets of the farmer’s wife, and the grunts of her neighbour, the Dover tradesman, each time they jarred him from a fitful somnolence, alone broke the inner silence. Without, the multiple rhythm of the horses hoofs and the varying answer of the road to the wheels—now the scrunch of cobble stones, now the slushy whisper of the snow-filled rut, now the whirring ring of a well-metalled stretch—formed a monotonous whole which lulled to silence those who could not sleep.

Sir Everard saw, by the shifting flicker of the lamps, how pensiveness gathered on the bright face opposite him. Once or twice the girl raised a finger to the corner of her eyelid as if to press back a rising tear; sighs lifted her bosom.

“Ah!” thought the old philosopher, “the goddess of modes is not so fancy free as I had thought. Here, truly, are all the signs of a gentle love tale. Perhaps the young man in the counting-house, or some sprightly haberdasher, who sees Miss pass to her work, and would fain capture for his own counter a face so fair and charming.”

Sir Everard felt very old and stiff by the time Canterbury was reached, and half regretted his suggestion to his travelling companion, to continue their comradeship at supper. He thought it might have better become his years and aching bones to retire into a feather bed with a basin of gruel. Far indeed was he from guessing the singular emotions into which his old age was destined to be plunged that evening.

A fine room with a four-poster, no less indeed than the chamber which went by the name of “Great Queen Anne,” this was what the landlord proposed to allot to Sir Everard. A chimney you couldn’t beat in the kingdom for drawing, mine host averred, and a fire there this minute; agreeable to Sir Everard’s obliging communication. And what could he do for Miss?

Sir Everard was a little shocked to hear Miss Pounce enter upon a brisk bargain for an attic, and hesitatingly began a courteous offer of his own apartment, when she interrupted him with the valiant good sense which he had already had cause to admire in her.

“Not at all, sir! ’Tis what suits my station—so long as the sheets are clean and there’s a good bolt to the door; you’ll promise me that, Mr. Landlord? And if you can’t spare a warming pan, sure a hot brick will do vastly well. And now, sir, give me time to see my bandboxes in safety, and I’m for supper.”

Even as she spoke she started. Her eye became fixed, her lips fell open upon a gasp of amazement. The healthy white bloom of her countenance turned to deathly pallor, and then a tide of blood rushed crimsoning to her forehead. Beholding this evidence of strong emotion, it scarcely needed the sight that met Sir Everard’s glance as he followed the direction of her eyes to confirm his instant conclusion. The young man, of course! Stay, the young man is a gentleman—poor nymph! Here then were joy, and fear, confusion, the warning of conscience, and artless passion, all mixed together.

The young gentleman advanced; a fine buck, of the very kind, thought Sir Everard, who took an instantaneous dislike to him, to turn the head of any girl beneath him in station, whom he might honour with his conquering regard. There was a black and white handsomeness about his chiselled countenance; all the powder in the world could not disguise that those jet eyebrows were matched with a raven spring of hair. With a smile, a dilation of nostrils, a swagger of broad shoulders, a leisurely step of high-booted legs, he came forward out of the tap-room. No surprise on his side: my gentleman had planned the meeting.

“La, Mr. Bellairs!” Pamela Pounce exclaimed, and her voice trembled. Then she rallied, and strove to pursue with lightness, “who ever would have thought of seeing you here?”

He took her hand and lifted it to his lips with an exaggerated courtesy, as if he mocked himself for it the while.

“Why, did I not guess rightly, my dear, you would be spending a lonely evening here on your way home?”

“Oh, Mr. Bellairs!”

He kept her hand in his, to draw her apart. Sir Everard, gazing at them, his chin sunk in his muffler, with severe, sad eyes, saw how she swayed towards him, as she went into the window recess, as if her very soul floated on the music of his voice. He watched them whisper ardently together, and then she went by him like a tornado, picking up her bandboxes as she passed, quite oblivious of his presence, or of anything, apparently, save the young rascal, so Sir Everard apostrophised him, who stood gazing after her with the same insufferable smile; the smile of the easy conqueror.

Sir Everard never had had a high opinion of women. Life had given him no reason to indulge in illusions. But now all his condemnation was for the man. The strong, self-reliant creature who had faced him all those weary hours with such unalterable good humour, such a candid outlook, such a pleasant acceptance of her own position that it was the next thing to high breeding, what was this Captain Lothario planning to make of her? And how, since he had found her already so hard to win that he must travel to Canterbury for the purpose, did she now thus readily yield herself to his plucking hand? Ay, the villain had struck at some peril point in the life of her soul. The child was tired after her long journey; tired too, perhaps, by the mental conflict from which her integrity had hitherto emerged triumphant. A sudden assault had found the fortress unprepared. ’Twas the old story!

Sir Everard went wearily to his room. The thought of the feather bed and the gruel, of a selfish withdrawal from further association with what was like to end in sordid tragedy tempted him perhaps, but he did not yield to it. The girl’s smile haunted him. It had been so brightly innocent; and he was haunted, too, by the last memory of her face, stricken with astonishment, quivering with joy. However she might fall, it would not be through light-mindedness. The folly, the misery, was deep rooted in her poor heart.

He made a careful toilet, and went down the slippery oak stairs, leaning on his gold-headed cane, looking a very great personage indeed, delicately austere and nobly haughty.

Alas! Pamela never so much as lifted her radiant head when he came into the eating-room. She was seated beside her gallant at the end of the table in close conversation—that whispered, blushing, laughing, sighing conversation of lovers—and if the roof had fallen over them, Sir Everard thought, the two would scarce have noticed it, so absorbed were they in each other.

The young man had ordered champagne, and the girl’s glass was filled, but the bubbling wine had barely been touched. Another intoxication, more deadly and more sure, was working through her veins. The old philosopher, seeing her condition, resigned for the moment all thought of interference, and sat down to his bottle of claret and bowl of broth.

Hardly, however, had he broken his hot roll, than the room was invaded by fresh arrivals; a young woman, wrapped in furs, conducted by a gentleman who had not removed his travelling coat, and kept his hat pressed on his brows; a personage who entered with an intolerable arrogance as if the place belonged to him, who ordered champagne and supper for the lady, and fresh horses for his coach, in a voice which rang like the crack of a whip. He could not wait; the servers must bustle. A guinea each to the ostlers if they harnessed within ten minutes. “And, hark ye, sirrah, a bottle of your best Sillery, and——”

“Surely I know this autocratic fellow,” thought Sir Everard, and as the traveller drew his companion with an imperative sweep of his arm about her, to the end of the table opposite to that at which Mr. Bellairs and his Dulcinea were seated. “My Lord Sanquhar!” cried Sir Everard, “by all that’s outrageous! And who in the name of pity is his victim now?”

That the two were lovers, of a stage considerably more advanced than the poor milliner and her Beau, was obvious to the onlooker, and as my Lord Sanquhar now tore his hat from his head, to dash the snow that covered it into the fire, where it hissed and spluttered like a curse, the young woman who accompanied him let herself fall on to the settle and turned a look of darkling challenge, of brooding suspicion, into the room.

She was clad in the most sumptuous garments. There was a bloom of royal purple against the tawny clouds of her sables. There was a fire of ruby at her throat, caught up and repeated at each ear, as if deep gouts of a lover’s blood had taken to themselves flame for her adorning. But the countenance she turned upon the room was, Sir Everard thought, so striking, that all this splendour seemed its natural attribute; striking with a Spanish beauty, a richness and depth of colour, with flashing orbs, high nostrils, and scarlet lips.

“Good Heavens!” Sir Everard mused, “where has he picked the jade? Victim? Nay, ’tis the kind that keeps a knife in her stocking and will whip it out and under your rib, and make an end of you with less ado than another will shed a tear. My Lord Sanquhar will have to look out for himself. Illicit love is a dangerously charged atmosphere in which to handle live gunpowder.”

The “Dover High-Flyer” had only dropped two of its passengers at “The Rose,” and the landlord was free to attend to his imperious guest. He himself served my Lord Sanquhar’s champagne, and with bent back received his “pishs” and “pshaws” on the dearth of proper entertainment for the lady. She wanted fresh fruit, and there was none. She asked for chocolate, and pettishly refused to touch it. One sniff was enough. All her desires and denials she communicated in a guttural undertone to her companion, who translated them into oaths.

Sir Everard, who had had but a poor appetite, was now, his broth bowl pushed on one side, dipping bits of roll into his wine after a foreign fashion, and watching the while the two sets of lovers at the further end of the room. He noticed, not without some satisfaction, that constraint had fallen upon the ardent Bellairs and his fair milliner. The colour on the young man’s face fluctuated. He bit his lip and shot doubtful looks of question from the blatant couple to the downcast countenance of his companion, who had grown very pale, scarcely spoke, and seemed now and again as if she was struggling with tears.

A clatter of hoofs, the clang of a bell, and a shout from the door announced another guest, a solitary horseman, it seemed. The landlord, who was just entering the room with a plate of dried plums in the hope of tempting the appetite of the capricious lady—he had scented my Lord’s quality with unerring nose—here thrust the dish into the hands of a waiter and turned back to receive the newcomer. He had left the door open behind him and all could hear the passionate explosion of a hoarse voice in the hall.

The dark little lady on the settle by the fire sprang to her feet, and stood, tense. Her companion gave a swift frowning look of surprise. Sir Everard, gazing upon her also, drew a quick breath. “By the immortal gods,” said he to himself, “the drama is coming swifter than one could have imagined.” And, indeed, what the ancient quiet inn was destined to hold for the next ten minutes in the way of human passion, conflict, and tragedy, might happily be never as much as guessed at in the lifetime of most men.

The landlord, his wig awry, his features discomposed, puffing and blustering, was vainly endeavouring to prevent the ingress of a small thick-set man, who though wrapped in a cloak and carrying some considerable burden, which he kept hidden under its folds, contrived by a single violent thrust of his shoulder, to send him spinning out of the way. The intruder advanced then at a headlong run, brought himself up short, flung back his cloak, and with the same gesture his hat, and stood revealed, swarthy, grizzled, livid, panting through dilated nostrils, glaring upon the woman by the settle. There was a great flare of colour on his broad chest, where, wound in a scarlet shawl, a little child of about two, with a head of curls of that dark copper hue destined to turn black with years, lay placidly asleep; the curve of a plump apricot cheek was all that was visible of its face.

“Good heavens,” said Sir Everard, and at the sight of the sleeping innocence, something in his old heart began to lament.

There was a moment’s extraordinary silence, broken only by the breathing of the man with the child, which hissed through his set teeth like the strokes of a saw. Then my Lord Sanquhar laughed.

The man leaped as if he had been struck. A torrent of words broke from him—guttural, fierce, intolerably anguished. Sir Everard knew a little Spanish.

The unfortunate was pleading: “Come back, come back! I will forgive all. Come back, Dolores, you cannot leave us. You cannot leave the little one. Come back in the name of God, in the name of His Holy Mother. Madre di Dios, look at her! You cannot leave that! Ah! unhappy one, you want gold and jewels. Was not our love your treasure? Is not our child a pearl? Look at her!”

In singular contrast to the unrestrained violence of his outburst, the manner in which he held out the child was pure tender. The little one woke, stared about her with devouring black eyes of amazement, caught sight of the standing woman’s face and cried, joyfully beating the air with minute dusky hands, “Mamma, mamma!”

At this a sob burst from the unhappy father, so deep and tortured it was as if it rent him.

“Dolores, our little girl, she calls you ‘Mamma, mamma!’ Call again my angel! ‘Mamma, mamma!’”

He went down on his knees and held out the babe, and as he did so she wailed.

The mother, meanwhile, stood, insolent lids half closed, red lips thrust forward, tapping the floor with impatient foot, the embodiment of cruel disdain.

At her child’s cry she stuffed her fingers into her ears with savage gesture, stamped, and flung a raging glance at her lover as one who said, “How long am I to endure this?”

He answered it by the movement of a beckoning finger, which brought her to his side. Then he cast a gold piece on the table, clapped his hat on his head, and together they moved towards the door.

“Ah! By the blessed saints!”

The Spaniard in a bound was before them. He shook the screaming infant in their faces as if it had been a weapon.

“I swear this shall not be. I swear that I shall kill you and your paramour and the child and myself rather than that this shall be.”

It was here that Pamela caught the little one from him. He was perhaps too far gone in passion to notice the action; perhaps he was glad to have his hands free for his fierce purpose—anyhow, he relaxed his hold. And the girl, clasping the baby in her arms, hushing it and soothing it, ran with it to the further end of the room. Sir Everard had also risen and Bellairs had started forward. But it would have been as easy to baulk a wild cat of its leap as to arrest the betrayed husband in his spring upon his betrayer.

No one ever quite knew how it happened. There was the flash of a knife, an oath, and my Lord Sanquhar’s “Damn you, you would have it!” and the explosion of a pistol.

The Spaniard fell without a groan, right across the doorway. Sir Everard and Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs both knew that he was a dead man before he touched the ground.

“You are witness all,” said my Lord Sanquhar, “that this was in self-defence.”

The woman cast a backward glance into the room. Her rich bloom had faded. She was white, but with a palpitating whiteness as of fire at its intensest, and the gaze of her great eyes was as fire too. Almost red they shone, repeating the blood fires of the rubies. Then she gave herself to Lord Sanquhar’s embrace, and together they rushed out into the night.

“Odds my life!” said Mr. Bellairs, looking up at Sir Everard. He had flung himself on one knee beside the stricken man, and was going through the vain parade of seeking for a pulse which he knew no longer beat. “Did you see that, sir?”

“He lifted her across her husband’s very body! He lifted her right across the body?” said Sir Everard, in a hushed voice of disgust.

“Lifted her? Sir, she jumped!”

Pamela kept the child’s face turned against her breast with a loving hand, and as she rocked and soothed, she herself wept as if her heart would break.

Through the doors, cast open to the night, the roar of a new snow wind hurtled in upon them. There followed a sudden clamour of voices, as the host endeavoured to arrest my lord’s departure and was borne down, well-nigh annihilated, from his path; the crackling shout of my lord’s orders; the plunge and clatter of hoofs on the cobbles. It seemed as if the blood-guilty pair had gone on the wings of the storm, and that the very elements cried after them as they went.

Sir Everard, as the most responsible witness, assisted the landlord in the preliminary investigation of magistrate and constable. He took a certain grim pleasure in furnishing Lord Sanquhar’s name, and trusted the nobleman might be summoned to answer for his action. Even if acquittal were a foregone conclusion, to a reputation already tarnished this incident was not likely to add a lustre. By the quality of the murdered man’s clothes, the massive gold of his watch-chain, the signet ring on his dead hand, it was judged that he was a merchant of the better class, and that the unfortunate incident would probably make some stir among his compatriots.

The cold and stiffening body which had been so short a while before pulsing with agony and passion, was laid in the harness-room of the inn, covered with a white sheet. Scarce ten yards away the grey horse that had borne its rider on the wild race to death was placidly munching its corn, the sweat not yet dry on its flanks.

When Sir Everard returned to the eating-room he found Pamela still on the settle, the child asleep on her lap. On the board beside her a half-finished bowl of bread and milk showed that she had been occupied with the worse than motherless babe, while he had attended to the last concerns of its doomed father. On the other side of the hearth, one elbow propped on the high mantelshelf, stood Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs. The old man’s entrance had evidently interrupted a conversation between the two lovers, of an interest so vital that both the faces now turned upon him were stamped with fierce emotion.

Sir Everard removed a chair from before the table and sat down on it facing the fire, and for a space no one spoke.

Pamela had cast the scarlet shawl across one shoulder so as to shade the child’s head from the light. Her hand patted and her knees swayed, rocking the infant sleeper.

“Poor little creature!” said Sir Everard at last.

The girl gave him a quick glance.

“I’ll keep her to-night. I’ve told the landlord I would, and I’d keep her always if I could.”

“’Tis a generous thought,” said the old gentleman, with a faint smile for the magnanimous impractibilities of youth, and as he smiled he was aware that Mr. Bellairs snapped his fingers and jerked his foot on the edge of irritable outburst.

Suddenly Pamela began to sob quickly under her breath; turned her head aside so that her tears should not fall on the little placid face.

“I’ve been a wicked girl! A wicked girl!”

“Hush!” cried Mr. Bellairs, and flung out his hand.

“No, sir; I won’t be silent!”

“But, good God, my dear, need you drag this stranger into our intimate concerns?”

“He’s no stranger to me, Mr. Bellairs. We travelled down in the coach together, and he couldn’t have been more civil to me if I’d been a lady born; no, nor kinder if he’d been my father. Oh, sir, I don’t know your name, but I know by the pitying way you looked at me that you understood what dreadful danger I was in and how—” again she sobbed—“how ready I was to yield to it! He wanted me to go to Paris with him. He did, indeed! He wanted his love to be my all-in-all, and nothing else was to matter. I’ve been a wicked girl! I listened to him. I never would listen to him before—not when he spoke like that—but to-night I did. Heaven forgive me! What took me?”

“Confound!” said Mr. Bellairs.

He wheeled away from the sight of her weeping, clutched the mantelpiece with both hands, and dropped his head on them.

“Well, ’tis all over now.”

Sir Everard spoke uneasily. This openness upon a subject so delicate was painful to him, but Pamela had the yearning to relieve herself by confession.

“Oh, sir, how could I do it? I don’t know myself. I swear when I look back ’tis as if I had not been myself at all. Something came into me—so rash, so desperate! ’Twas as if nothing mattered but just his love, our love. And then—then—when those two came in I saw our sin as it was. Oh, heavens! Oh, Heaven forgive me! Murder and every evil was there. Would I not have been just as cruel, done just as horrid murder? When the truth came out, would my father and mother and my own dear loves at home, waiting for me so fond and so trusting, and so proud of their poor, silly Pam, ever have held up their heads again? Oh, base, base! I would have murdered them for my pleasure. And that love, what was it? The thing that those two looked at each other, something vile, something that brought contamination even just to see go between them. Did he and I look at each other like that? It turned me sick even to think on, even before—before that poor, poor man came in! Heaven forgive me! Heaven strike those two in their bad hearts! Oh, sir, did you look at her when she stared back upon us, that woman? I suppose there was beauty in her face; I suppose he who went with her thought her handsome airs worth the cruelty and the blood and the crime on his soul. But to me she was ugly, all ugly, with the ugliness of her sin——”

She broke off, bit her quivering lip, and stared fixedly before her; an expression of horror on her countenance as if she still beheld the ugliness of which she spoke.

Mr. Bellairs straightened himself and snapped his fingers again.

“Tall talk, my dear,” he began; and then broke off, dropped his eyes under Sir Everard’s stern gaze, and stood abashed. Then: “Perhaps you’re right,” he said in an altered, strangled voice; and dashed from the room as if driven.

Pamela started, glanced after him, and then wiped her wet cheeks with the end of the baby’s shawl.

“Let him go,” she said.

“You’re a brave girl.”

“Oh no, sir! Only so grateful, so wonderfully saved, so ashamed. Oh, this little creature against my breast—must I not feel it—think of it—if I had had my foolish way I should never have been worthy to hold such a lovely, lovely little dear in my arms again.”

Sir Everard insisted on lighting Pamela to her attic chamber. She went up before him with a step so elastic, in spite of the burden of the child in her arms, that she had to wait for him on every landing; which she did with a return of her bright amiability and even a flicker of its former radiance in her smile. Each time she halted she rocked the baby, swaying from foot to foot, murmuring under her breath a crooning song which the old man thought very sweet; so sweet indeed, that, with a swing of memory’s pendulum it brought him back to his own childhood’s days and the tender face of his mother, long dead—a mother who had never been old like him.

On the threshold of her poor room they parted. She spared him her right hand for a second from its motherly caressing and patting of the child which she bore with such ease on her left arm. He bowed over it as if it had been his queen’s.

When he went down to the flaming hearth which justified the landlord’s boast, he sat long by it.

He, who had hitherto lived apart in a world of books, found his mind obsessed by the thought of the frightful passions of humanity as they had this night played themselves out before him.

The whole scene reproduced itself in his tired brain with the colours of life; Lord Sanquhar’s sardonic, pale, haughty face, the rich vividness, the unblessed allurement, the cruel beauty of the unfaithful wife; the Spaniard’s agony; the irredeemable tragedy of that picture of the father with the child; then the dead face.

“Heaven strike their bad hearts!” had cried Pamela in her honest revulsion. Could God ever forgive those who had sent forth the soul of their victim so charged with fury and despair that even death could bring no peace to his brow?

And then he thought of Pamela’s face as he had last seen it—pale, tear-stained, but with the old luminous innocence. And, after all, he thought, there had come good out of the evil.

“The providence of God is over us all,” he thought with gratitude, as he rose stiffly to seek that feather bed, where there was small likelihood of sleep that night for him.

He heard the call of a coach horn beyond, in the night, and immediately afterwards the mighty clatter of the four sets of hoofs and the rush of the wheels in the streets. He went to his window, opened it, and looked out.

The up coach from Dover, pausing only to drop a single passenger. Stay, to take up a passenger, too. Sir Everard recognised the swing of the shoulders, the tall, alert frame, the indefinable swagger, even though muffled in the many-caped travelling coat.

Young Bellairs was not going to Paris with a fair companion!

“Thank Heaven!” said Sir Everard.

CHAPTER V

In which Miss Pamela Pounce Demonstrates the
Value of Virtue to her Family and her Friends

“And I’m sure, my dear,” said Mrs. Pounce, the tears welling in her eyes as she gazed lovingly at her eldest daughter, “’tis the golden girl you’ve been to us!”

“Ah, you wait, mother!” cried Pamela. “Just you wait! If I don’t finish paying off that there mortgage with the new spring fashions, call me Tabbishaw, that’s all I say.”

The force of condemnation for vulgar stupidity could go no further on Miss Pounce’s lips.

Farmer Pounce, seated before the kitchen fire, turned his big, grizzled head to cast a glance no less affectionate than his wife’s upon the good daughter.

“This time last year,” he said; then, in a ruminating voice, “ah, ’twas a black look-out! As much as I could do to squeeze the interest on the borrowed money and the expenses of the new loan. And Sir Jasper, with his eye on the farm this long while, turning the screw on me, he and lawyer Grinder between them. Cruel hard terms they made me, cruel hard, but there, ’twasn’t as if I didn’t know their little game. Aye, aye, they were but waiting, the both of them, to sell me up and get me out of it all; the land my father’s father’s father called his own.”

Mrs. Pounce wept at the mere recollection. Where would they have been, they and the little ones, but for the golden girl?

Pamela winked away a bright tear of sympathy. Everything about this girl was bright; the spring of her chestnut hair from her white forehead, which itself shone as with a kind of luminosity, the glance of her full, shrewd eyes, the smile that curved her lips. Oh, above all, it was Pamela’s smile that was bright with the gaiety and joy of life!

“Pish, you dears,” she said now, and covered up her emotion with just one of those flashing smiles. “Don’t be making too much of it. All those months I wasted at old Tabbishaw’s didn’t I know in my spirit it would all come right? Wasn’t I sure the whole time”—she played with her capable fingers in the air—“that there was a fortune in these hands once I could get them proper to work? And I tell you now, without vanity—oh, I ain’t got a mite of vanity about it, ’tis my gift, the way pigs is father’s gift—give me a yard of ribbon, a feather, and a bit of straw, and I’ll turn you out two guineas before you can say ‘knife.’”

“Dear, to be sure,” mused Mrs. Pounce, forgetting to knead her scones. “And think of the Christmas dinner we’ve had. A turkey fit for the Queen’s table, though I says it as shouldn’t. And me having to sell every one of my lovely birds last year and keep father on the salt beef, Christmas and all! And there’s Susie, such a picture in the bonnet you trimmed for her, at morning service, that I’d never be surprised if Farmer Fleet’s son were to come to the scratch to-night at Sir Jasper’s barn dance, I shouldn’t indeed.”

“I’ve got a white cambric, mother, and blue ribbons ready for her,” said Pamela, smacking her lips with gusto, “and a Shepherdess Dunstable. If that don’t settle him! ’Tis the very thing, so simple and fresh, a sort of daisy-gown, father and mother, that’ll start Master Tom thinking o’ dairies and the clean linen and the white flour in the bin; and, ‘What a modest, nice girl,’ he’ll say, ‘The very wife for a farmer. No nonsense of cheap finery. Only what a maid could buy for herself and stitch at home,’ he’ll think, poor innocent, and it’s the model for the French Queen at Trianon, where she plays at milkmaid, you’d never believe!”

“Mercy on us!” said Mrs. Pounce, with an uncomprehending stare. “Frenchies be queer people, to be sure.”

“And Jenny and Betty shall wear the sprigged muslin,” pursued Pamela. “And my little pet, Peg, the robe-coat I made her out of the odds and ends Madame Mirabel gave me from her ladies’ counter.”

“And what will you wear yourself, my dear?” asked the mother, cutting her rolled-out paste into neat rounds.

“Is it me, mother?” Pamela hesitated. Then: “I don’t mean to go,” says she.

“Not mean to go?” screamed the farmer’s wife, blank disappointment writing itself on her good-humoured countenance.

“Tut! tut!” cried the farmer, and wheeled himself round in his chair.

The London girl coloured, and a shadow came over her face.

“Some one’s got to stay at home and look after little Tom,” said she stoutly, “and him but ten months old, the poor fond lamb!”

She glanced at the wooden cradle to the left of the hearth, where, under a patchwork quilt, a chubby miniature reproduction of the farmer was lying, with fists clenched in a determined fashion, as if he defied anyone to rob him of his repose.

“Why, I never heard such nonsense!” Mrs. Pounce gathered the cuttings of paste together and dabbed them into a single lump with an irritable hand. “And who’s minded little Tom, do ye think, all the hours, miss, that I’ve got to be butter-making, plucking of geese, and cutting up pig for the salting? Who but old Nance, my love, who looked after yourself when you was no bigger than the little ’un there?”

“She’s getting very old,” said Pamela. “I caught her nodding yesterday with the Blessing on her lap, and he as near as anything into the cinders. Besides, my mind’s made up, and there’s no use your trying to unmake it. I’ve my reasons, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Why, Pam, why, lovey”—Mrs. Pounce had a grimace like an infant about to cry—“you fair break my heart. Why, ’twas all my thought, these days and days, how I’d let neighbours see what a beauty my dear, good London da’ter be, and as elegant as any lady!”

“If you’ve got a reason for disappointing your mother, out with it, girl, so it’s a good ’un,” said Farmer Pounce, with some sternness.

Pamela tossed her head. She was never one for making mysteries.

“Well, father and mother, if you must know so particular, wasn’t that Sir Jasper Standish as was driving the high curricle away from Pitfold Church this morning? The stout gentleman, with the kind of red eye, and it rolling?”

“Aye, aye,” grumbled the farmer, “the very man, my dear, and a hard gentleman he be. And queer tales there are about him. ’Tis a good thing he comes to Standish Hall but seldom. Aye, aye, ’twas him driving them bloods in the curricle. And a mort of fine ladies and gentlemen in the barouche. They’ll be staying Christmas, I reckon.”

“Aye,” corroborated Mrs. Pounce. “A twenty-pound jar of my best salt, and six turkeys, no less, not to speak of the geese—aye, and a ham, cured in that very chamber in the chimbley, child. But, dear, to be sure, was you set against meeting Sir Jasper just for the seeing of him step into his curricle?”

“You didn’t happen to note, mother, the gentleman who stepped in after him?”

Farmer Pounce and his wife exchanged a scared look, and then by common consent transferred it to their daughter. There was silence, broken only by the cheerful song of the kettle on its chain over the embers, and the stertorous breathing of the infant farmer in the cot.

Then, with a catch in her breath:

“Well, child?” ventured Mother Pounce.

Once more Pamela tossed her head. She was seated at a corner of the kitchen table, needle, scissors, and workbox at her elbow, and she turned and twisted the lilac satin rosette in her hand.

“Well,” she said at last, without looking up. “I don’t happen to want to meet him, that’s all.”

“How, my dear?” Mrs. Pounce shot a frightened glance at her husband’s grim face, and another at her daughter’s bright, bent head.

“Ain’t the young gentleman a friend of yours?” she asked faintly.

Pamela snapped her thread.

“You do want to know a lot, don’t you, mother dear? But there! There’s no reason why I shouldn’t tell you. I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of. That young gentleman has the good taste to admire me a mortal lot, but he ain’t got the good taste, in my opinion, to admire me the right way. He came after me to Canterbury, knowing I was due here for my Christmas holiday, and I sent him packing, and, thinks I, ’tis done now, once for all, and we’ll be the best of friends at a distance. And you could have knocked me down with a feather when I see his black eye roaming round the church this morning. Encourage him by going with you to-night? That would never do, Pamela, my girl! says I to myself, and——”

“What dost mean by the right way, daughter?” interrupted the farmer, who had been ruminating her words, and not found them to his liking. The veins of his forehead were swelled; the hand that gripped the wooden arm of his chair shook.

“I mean the wrong way. Now, father, don’t you be a-working yourself up. I can look after myself, and ain’t that just what I’m doing? Mother, I vow your cap will beat the one I made for the Duchess of Queensberry all to nothing. Now, won’t the children be pleased when they find those cakes all piping hot, mother? They ought to be in soon now—back from Rector’s. I’d like to try the little gown on my poppet ere you put her to rest to-night.”

It was the first party Sir Jasper had invited to Standish Hall since the death of his wife, and lavish as was his hospitality, the loss of that incomparable woman had never been more painfully felt. A widower-forlornness was over everything. Dusty, flowerless, unkempt the parlours; discomfort, an open negligence of refined detail, the lack of the controlling hand, in fine, was sensible to all his guests.

The Christmas dinner was over, and the ladies had retired. If you had cared to have examined the bottles in rows on the floor, or the cut-glass decanters on the table, you would have found that the company had drawn considerably on Sir Jasper’s generous cellar, and had not scrupled to mix very freely.

Sir Jasper and his youngest male guest, Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs, were at the height of an argument, egged on and applauded by good-natured Squire Upshott, and that saturnine rake, Sir James Devlin, while Lawyer Grinder, from Canterbury, leaned back, smiling grimly, his grey fingers round his glass, his grey eyes acute, his large ears pricked outside his scratch wig for any business advantage the holiday dissipation should lay open.

“Pshaw! My dear fellow, the girl’s been three years in Paris, I tell you! You’ll not have me believe she’s better than her neighbours. Why, don’t I know all about her? Isn’t her father squatting on a bit of land that juts into my ring fence—’pon honour, like a fly in a man’s honey—eh, Grinder? As handsome a slut as I ever laid eyes on, if that’s the bouncer I saw at church this morning. If you’re after her, lad, go in and win! If not, step aside, and make room for your elders!”

Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs took a draught from the beaker in front of him, then cast rather a wild glance at his host.

“You!” cried he. “You step in with Pamela Pounce! My dear Sir Jasper, I do not intend to be uncivil, but the idea is too droll!”

“How now? Is Miss so difficult? You know ’tis but a milliner?”

“Ay, I know more of her, I dare swear, than you do. Difficult? Well, Sir Jasper, you or anyone may try their chances so far as I am concerned—I would not give that for them”—snapping his fingers. “Pure waste! When I tell you that I have failed——”

The unconscious cockscombry was greeted with a shout of laughter.

“Hark to him!” cried old Upshott.

“Odds life!” jeered Sir Jasper. “You stimulate me! So fastidious?”

“Nay!” Young Bellairs flung a fine black eye about him. “So virtuous,” said he, his voice sinking quite an octave deeper than its usual gay note.

There was another laugh; and then a silence; and then Sir Jasper repeated drawling:

“So virtuous? It all depends what the virtue is—eh, gentlemen? There’s prudence, now—they tell me ’tis much practised of the French.”

“What am I to take out of that, sir?”

“Why lad, you may take it that Miss knows her value. With all due deference to your good looks, you might fail where one like myself might succeed.”

“Meaning, Sir Jasper——?”

“Meaning, Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs, that little milliners, especially if they’ve been in Paris, may have learnt to have an eye to the main chance.”

There was again much and loud merriment. The four other gentlemen looked at the one handsome youth of the party as if it were agreeable to see his comb cut.

“Gad, if there’s any betting going on it, I’ll back Jasper,” said Sir James Devlin, with that cold smile of his which seemed to blight where it rested. “But the mischief’s in it, who’d take up the wager at such odds? What? Sweet, penniless Romeo in the one scale, and rich Sir Paris in the other, and Juliet a French milliner, Pshaw!”

“Why then, Sir James,” cried Mr. Bellairs. “Romeo is none so penniless but that he can back his own word. I’m ready to wager Sir Jasper this moment as much as he cares to risk that Miss Pamela Pounce—who is not French, sir, but good Kentish stock—will send him to the right-about, as she has sent—aye, though ’tis I say it—a better man! That all his money-bags will not weigh this nutshell”—he crushed one under his clenched hand on the mahogany as he spoke—“against her virtue.”

Sir Jasper grew red in the face; his eyes protruded, his veins swelled.

“Why, done with you, you poor innocent——”

“Stay, stay,” intervened Sir James. “If there’s to be betting, let’s do it proper, a’ Heaven’s name! In primo, what is the wager to be?”

Sir Jasper and Bellairs spoke together:

“That pretty Pounce will pounce fast enough if it is made worth her while,” cried Sir Jasper, with a guffaw. And:

“That Sir Jasper has about as much chance of Miss Pamela Pounce’s favour as of the Princess Royal’s,” asserted Bellairs.

“Now, tut, tut!” Sir James Devlin shook his head and clacked his tongue. “If I’m to draw up your wager, gentlemen, you must, if you please, be a trifle less slipshod. You can’t bet on a pun, Sir Jasper, nor you on a high-falutin’ comparison to royal ladies, young man. You’ve got to bet on facts, my lads. Say, that a week from to-day we find the young person agreeably installed under the protection of our host here, in—better say London—eh, Jasper? Might be a bit awkward, too close to Miss’s family, what? Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs here to be given ocular proof that circumstances alter cases. Let your charmer ask him to tea in her new abode this day week.”

“Carry her off, carry her off, good old style. Tally-ho!” cried the tipsy squire.

“Capital idea!” Mr. Grinder shook with amusement. “Run away with her! Carry her off, and keep her from the hats and feathers, Sir Jasper, and I’ll see that you get Little Pitfold at long last. We’ll foreclose for the rest of the mortgage. Zounds, we will! Drat that girl! She’s been paying off at an uncommon quick rate. Took my breath away, she did. We had to give old Pounce a couple of years for the look of the thing, you remember—never dreaming—But there! Time will be up next Lady Day, and”—he broke into dry chuckling—“if you carry off the girl you’ll win your wager, and get your land into the bargain. Kill two birds with one stone.”

Jocelyn Bellairs lay back in his seat with arms folded, and a scornful smile on his countenance. He did not care what conditions were imposed, and the higher the stake the better for him. He was so sure of the result.

Sir James Devlin had drawn out his tablets.

“The wager’s plain enough now,” quoth he. “Sir Jasper Standish wagers Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs that the girl, Pamela Pounce, will give him a dish of tea this day week, at an address hereafter to be determined, the said Pamela Pounce being then established under the protection of the said Jasper Standish. What are the stakes?”

“Oh, make it worth while!” eagerly cried Bellairs.

Devlin gave him a keen side-glance.

“’Tis scarce usual to make the stakes higher than you can meet, Mr. Bellairs.”

The young man flushed darkly. But before he could reply:

“Odds my life,” exclaimed Sir Jasper. “Let’s make it worth while! What say you to a thousand guineas?”

“Done!” cried Jocelyn eagerly. Then he added: “I’d like to make a stipulation. If Sir James loses, let him remit the rest of that mortgage first, whatever it is. I’ll be content with the residue.”

“’Pon my word, sir, that’s a strange proposal,” said Sir Jasper, staring with an air which gave him an odd resemblance to an incensed bull.

“You can cry off the whole bet, if you’re afraid of it,” taunted his guest.

“Foh!” said Mr. Grinder. “’Tis but a matter of a hundred and eighty-nine pounds, when all is said and done. Never niggle at that, Sir Jasper. Go in, and win! ’Pon me soul!” cried the old sinner, rubbing his hands, “I’d sleep better in my grave if I thought the Standish estate had got Pitfold at last.”

“The stakes to be a thousand guineas,” murmured Devlin as he wrote, “out of which Sir Jasper remits the rest of Farmer Pounce’s mortgage, one hundred and eighty-nine pounds and hands the residue eight hundred and eleven, plus the shillings for the guineas, to Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs. Any backers? Fifty guineas on Jasper. Who’ll take me?”

Squire Upshott was too far gone, and Lawyer Grinder shook his head, so Sir James had to content himself with jotting down: “No backers.”

“Why, zounds!” exclaimed Sir Jasper, after he had ruminated a while. “It seems that more hangs on this betting to-night than the virtue of Miss, after all. What? The farm that we Standishes from grandfather down have vainly been trying to get hold of. That’s a fine idea of yours, Grinder, odds my life, it is! A thousand guineas besides, and as fine an armful—hark ye, Devlin, did ye notice her this morning in church, as neat as a chestnut filly? Foh! There’s blood in her, sir, there’s blood in her, or I’m no judge——”

He broke off. ’Twas a dashed superior smile on young puppy’s face. What made the fellow so cocksure, in the name of all that was sly? A sudden thought struck him.

“Look you here, Master Bellairs,” cried he, with a muffled roar. “No collusion! No putting your head and Miss Pounce’s together to do me out of a thousand guineas! Eh, Devlin? Eh, Grinder? No blanked tricks!”

Jocelyn’s nostrils quivered scornfully.

“I give you my word of honour, Sir Jasper,” said he, “to have no communication in private with the young lady till your week is out.”

“Come, come!” said Sir James. “Split me, Jasper, we’re all gentlemen here!”

The smile on the face of Mr. Bellairs became accentuated.

“I’m ready to give Sir Jasper any guarantee,” said he.

“Deuce take him! He’s like a fellow with a card up his sleeve!” thought Sir Jasper. “Word of honour, or no word of honour, I’ll make Devlin keep watch for me.”

When they went upstairs to the splendid, neglected drawing-room where Lady Barbara Flyte, her niece, Miss Lesbia Ogle, and Mrs. Colonel Dashwood were waiting to pour out tea for them, Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs showed himself in high spirits.

“Ah, Pamela, my girl!” cried he to himself, “that was an angry look you cast at me across your prayer-book this morning, a monstrous, unpeaceful kind of look to a man of good will; but if this day’s work has not wiped out old scores—A ‘filly,’ he called you. Aye, you’ll come over the fence as clean as a bird. I’ve no fear of you, my splendid girl, and you’ll be kinder to me, I dare swear, when next we meet; but that won’t be this day week, at any lodging paid for by Sir Jasper.”

“Why, la, Sir Jasper, what a merry tune!” And “Oh, Sir Jasper, what a strange, pretty place!” And, “Why, Sir Jasper, ’tis the most Christmas sight I’ve ever beheld!” And, “Pray, pray, Sir Jasper, don’t ask me to trip it with your country bumpkins, for I vow and protest I could never pick up those vulgar steps!” And, “Oh, Aunt Bab, do but look at the pink roses in Goody’s cap!” And, “Oh, Miss Ogle, you’re nowhere, I declare, beside Miss in feathers yonder, plucked from the old turkey before mother put it in the pot.” “You’re too droll, Mrs. Dashwood!” “Do you think, Sir Jasper, the buck in the top-boots would have me for his partner if I simpered ever so sweet upon him?”

Sir Jasper, moving in this fire of chatter, a lady on each arm and Miss Lesbia Ogle hanging on his coat-tails, appeared at the barn-door when he believed his guests to be assembled. The merry tune to which Lady Bab had alluded fell silent at his approach; there were curtseys and dips and bows on every side, while the three fiddlers mopped their streaming faces and, rising as one man from the wooden bench on which they had been seated in a row, duly ducked their shock heads to their patron.

Sir Jasper gave condescending smiles and short, indifferent nods right and left, the while his eyes roamed, seeking, this way and that. Here was old Mother Pounce, right enough, as large as one of her own feather beds, in a lace cap, if you please, mighty genteel, with lavender knots. And Farmer Pounce in his red waistcoat; confound the fellow, with his air of independence! Aye, was there not a sort of triumph about him? Don’t cry till you’re out of the wood, Mr. Yeoman! And split him, what a row of young Pounces—a fine healthy litter! And, ’pon honour, a monstrous pretty little chit in white muslin with a straw hat! Pshaw! He had no time to waste on silly seventeen. Where was their agreeable bone of contention; where was the handsome Pamela?

“How, now, yeoman, where is your elder daughter?”

“At home, Sir Jasper,” answered the father, with the brevity that declines discussion.

“Sure, Sir Jasper,” put in Mrs. Pounce, conciliatingly. “My daughter was vastly obleeged, but she was a trifle fatigued this evening.”

“She would stay and look after our Tom,” piped Susie.

“She preferred not to come, sir,” said Yeoman Pounce, frowning.

Sir Jasper’s brow had likewise gathered thunder-clouds. His eyes rolled inward. One excuse contradicted another; the farmer’s insolence voiced the truth. And Master Jocelyn Bellairs, who had not accompanied his host to the dance, because forsooth, it might be difficult for him to keep his honourable pledge—Master Jocelyn Bellairs, who had announced his intention of taking a pleasure stroll this freezing Christmas night—Master Jocelyn Bellairs, whose very presence at Standish Hall demanded explanation; who was practically a self-invited visitor, where was he? Pshaw, did they take him for a fool? Was he to be mocked in his own house and jockeyed by his own guest? Zounds! The whole plot was clear in a minute. A plot it was; no wonder Mr. Bellairs had that insufferable air of certainty. He and his lady-love would soon be laughing over the thought of how they had swindled him of a thousand guineas. And what a spending time they would have together!

If the revelation came swift as lightning to Sir Jasper, no less swiftly did he make up his mind for action.

It was a three-mile walk to Pitfold Farm. He would have out his curricle, and his bloods, and be beforehand with Bellairs.

Some ten minutes later he was bowling along the frozen road at the highest speed of his roughed horses, an astounded groom beside him. Purpose was setting in his mind as hard as the ice in the ditches. There was no time like the present. He had a slippery pair of young rascals to deal with. If he was to win his wager he must carry off the girl this very night.

He laid his plans with a wiliness which is not infrequently a characteristic of gross natures. Conscious in himself of a fine capacity for evil, such as he will be suspicious of every one and everything; look for treachery from his most trusted friend, and infidelity in the wife of his bosom.

He dismounted at the farmyard gate, and bade Job Stallion, the groom, drive in alone and announce that Sir Jasper Standish had sent the curricle for Miss Pounce, as it was her father and mother’s pleasure she should come to the dance.

The ruse succeeded with a facility beyond his expectations. Pamela had been finding the lonely evening disconsolate enough. Baby Tom slept, while old Nance displayed uncommon wakefulness. The time was heavy on Pamela’s hands, and to while it away she had had the happy thought of trying on the pretty garments which she had prepared before Mr. Bellairs’ appearance in church had made a call upon her prudence.

Now the reaction which so often follows self-sacrifice had set in. She was beginning to call herself a fool, and to regret her excessive discretion. Thus when old Nance laboured, panting, to the attic chamber, and supplemented Job’s message with: “You’d never think of saying nay now, Pam, my dear. Ain’t it Providence you should just have been fitting on? And, oh, to be sure, was there ever so pure lovely a gown? You’ll be the belle o’ the ball, my dearie, that you will, and easy!”

Pamela never hesitated at all. She caught her travelling-cloak off the peg, and lifted her best feathered hat from its bandbox—how could a milliner resist such an opportunity?—pinned it on her auburn curls, cast herself headlong down the stairs, out through the farm kitchen like a whirlwind, and laughing, swung herself up on the curricle beside the grinning Joe.

She was rather taken aback when this latter halted outside the farmyard gate, and a portly figure appeared from the shadow of the oak tree. Hat in hand, Sir Jasper pleasantly saluted her.

“Why, Miss Pounce, this is capital. Your father and mother vowed you’d never come, but I said I was sure so good a daughter would be obedient to her parents. Nevertheless”—he was climbing up beside her in the high seat, while Job shut the gates behind them—“I was ready, you see, to exercise a neighbour’s persuasion, should you persist in your cruel resolve. The ball would be nothing without you, ’pon honour. There are half a dozen fine young bucks with faces as long as my whip-handle already.”

By this time Job was up on the back seat, and his master started the chestnuts at a pace that only his own pride and temper would have urged upon them.

“Oh, la!” cried Miss Pounce, and made a clutch for her hat. She drew the pure keen air into her lungs, felt the wind of their passage blow with the most delicious invigoration against her face. “Oh, la! Was there ever anything so beautiful? ’Tis the first time I have driven by moonlight. ’Tis the first time I have ever driven in a curricle! Oh, ’tis like flying, Sir Jasper! Oh, what a night! I vow I feel like a bird!”

The moonlight flooded the road, hedges and trees sparkled and shimmered white as diamonds. The sky was one mighty sapphire, darkly, wonderfully blue. The stars, fainting in the moonlight, looked like the thousand facets of a jewel.

“Oh,” cried Pamela again, “I’ll make a head out of it for the opera, I will indeed! Sapphire blue ribbands and frosted silver feathers. ’Tis an inspiration.”

This gave Sir Jasper his opening.

“Why,” said he, “’tis a monstrous pity such a monstrous fine girl as you should have to work for her living. The moment I set eyes on you this morning, said I to myself——”

Pamela interrupted:

“Keep your pity and your compliments, sir. They’re wasted on me.”

“Why, how now, I like your spirit. I vow, my dear, ’tis you are wasted on such a life.”

“What if I like my work, sir?”

“You were born to wear ’em—the fine hats—not to make ’em. You were born to be a lady, that’s what I said to myself the moment I clapped eyes on you this morning.”

“Foh! I know ’tis gentlemen’s way to start this kind of silly talk whenever they get with a poor girl, but I assure you, sir, I’ve no relish for it. And as for my being a lady, I’ve seen too much of gentlefolk. I wouldn’t thank the Lord to ha’ made me one.”

She spoke with her head up and a straight back.

“’Tis but gentlemen’s way,” she repeated to herself; “but I’ll let him see he’ll have to respect me, lady or no lady.”

She gripped the rail of the curricle, not to give herself courage—for she had no thought there was anything to fear—but to brace herself the better against any further presumption. She was quite unprepared, therefore, when he turned his bloods away from the road leading to Standish Hall, and, with a flourish of the whip, sent them helter-skelter up the hill on the London causeway.

The cry she gave was one more of anger than of fear. A solitary pedestrian, coming at a swinging pace along the road which led from Sir Jasper’s residence, heard it, and beheld the curricle as it topped the hill, fantastically silhouetted in black against the moonlit sky. He gave an answering shout, and started running. But he had as much chance of overtaking the gig as if it had been a bird on the flight. He gave up, panting, after a yard or two, stamped his foot, shook his fist at the radiant sky, and started running again in the opposite direction.

“Where are you taking me to?”

Sir Jasper’s teeth and his eyeballs flashed horribly in the silver light as he smiled upon Pamela.

“You’ll be uncommon grateful to me one day, my pretty little milliner.”

“Good Heaven, what do you mean, sir?”

“I dare swear you ain’t so far from being grateful now. Oh, aye! ’Tis the regular thing to set up a hullaballoo, but I’m not to be taken in by any tushery, and so I tell you! You may scream till you’re blue, there ain’t a soul on the roads to hear you, and as for kicking, ’tain’t easy on a curricle, so, like a girl of sense let’s pretend you’ve had your vapours, and you and I will have a glorious time together. Why, who was talking of silver feathers? ’Tis golden chains I’ll give you, my splendid child; aye, and a pearl each for your pretty ears—I can’t see ’em under your hat, but I dare swear they’re pretty like the rest—and maybe a diamond brooch for your kerchief. And you shall have a house of your own and a pair of fine London maids to wait on you, and I’ll take you about, my dear, and you will have naught to do in the world but enjoy yourself.”

She listened in dead silence till he had finished, and then without condescending to reply to him, turned her head over her shoulder, and hailed the groom.

“Job Stallion, Job Stallion,” she said, “your father was reared on my father’s land. Will you see a Kentish girl carried away to perdition against her will, and not lift a finger to save her?”

“Job Stallion,” said Sir Jasper, snatching a pistol from the seat beside him, “if you unfold your arms you’re a dead man.”

Then Sir Jasper and the yeoman’s daughter stared into each other’s eyes, each drawing long, fierce breaths through dilated nostrils. Suddenly he laughed and dropped the pistol back into its holster. Again he sent his whip circling. The horses broke into a canter on the downward slope, the light-hung vehicle swaying and leaping behind them. The very intensity of their speed saved them from stumbling.

At length Pamela said in a low voice:

“At least I have a right to know where you are taking me.”

“Did I not tell you? To London.”

“You do not think I am so simple as to believe you can drive to London with these horses to-night?”

“Why, of course not. We’ll stop at Ashford, and get a chaise and four of the best posters money can hire. We’ll be in London to-night, never fear. Hark, there’s nine of the clock striking from Catterford Hill.”

He pointed with his whip. Pamela saw the square tower of the little church silver and black against the sky. A lump rose in her throat. For the first and only time that night a burst of hysterical weeping threatened to overwhelm her.

“I’m lost,” she said to herself, “if I don’t keep brave. If I don’t keep my head, I’m lost.”

No strong soul ever cries vainly on courage. The anguish passed, her spirit rose.

“Sir Jasper Standish,” said she, “why are you running away with me? Tell me that.”

“Won’t you believe I want to make a lady of you?”

“No.”

“Well, then, the mere sight of that handsome face of yours this morning has made me mad in love with you. Will you believe that?”

“Neither the one nor the other, sir. You see,” she went on, “I am not kicking nor screaming, I am in your power, and I can’t help myself. I think you’d find it better for yourself, sir, and better for me, if you’d tell me the truth.”

Her quiet tone, the perfect composure of her face, very pale and lovely in the moonlight as she turned it upon him, struck some faint spark of generosity.

“By Heaven!” said he admiringly. “You’re a well-plucked one. The truth you want. Split me, ’tis all true! But you’re right, there’s yet another reason. I want to win a wager, my little darling!”

“What wager, sir?”

“You.” He grinned at her. “That spark of yours—he is a spark of yours, ain’t he?—that fine young fellow, Jocelyn Bellairs, he wagered you were too virtuous for a man to have a chance with. But I wagered him you wasn’t. Come now, you’re a good-hearted piece. Help me to win my wager, and I’ll make it worth your while.”

Pamela reflected profoundly. Then she gave a little laugh.

“Why, Sir Jasper!” she exclaimed. “What sad, wild creatures you gentlemen are! It comes to this, then. I’ve got to make the best of a bad job.” Then she swallowed hard, and said, with a still more sprightly air, “You’ll give me a bit of supper at Ashford, I suppose, for I’m mortal hungry.”

He broke into hoarse laughter, and cried again that, by Heaven, she was a well-plucked one, and they’d get on first class; that she should have the finest supper the Bear Inn could afford. If she’d stand by him, by Jingo, he’d stand by her. There wasn’t a gentleman in England who’d be such a friend to the woman who trusted him as he would be to her.

When they arrived at Ashford, she demanded, with a sudden air of command, which became her, he thought, mightily, and tickled his already high good humour to positive hilarity, that she should be brought to a sitting-room and partake of the meal in privacy while the post-chaise was being got ready.

“And,” quoth she, “let it be champagne, Sir Jasper, since”—she gave him a wide, taunting smile—“’tis to be made worth my while.”

He flung an arm about her the moment the waiter had withdrawn; she freed herself with a vigorous thrust, but as she did so, she laughed.

“Nay, drink your sillery, sir. Aye, pour me a glass. Oh, aye, I’ll drink any toast you like. Have you not said it yourself? I’m the best-natured girl in the world—so long as you keep your place, sir. Why, ’tis the finest pigeon-pie I’ve tasted since Paris. You know I was in Paris, Sir Jasper?”

Sir Jasper chuckled, winking at her.

Her fingers clenched round her knife, the while her smile would not have misbefitted the lips of a Bacchante.

“And will you bring me to the opera, Sir Jasper? Oh, and to Ranelagh? Oh, to think of me going to Ranelagh on a gentleman’s arm, like a lady!”

He was enraptured. He tossed the remainder of his tumbler down, and filled himself a third, emptying the bottle. He had almost forgotten the wager in the intoxication of his personal triumph. Dash it! It had not taken him long to cut out young Bellairs. What a demnition handsome piece she was. There wasn’t one of those raffish ladies he had left behind him at Standish Hall could hold a candle to her. And odds his life! What a pair of eyes she had, and what teeth, and what a skin!

Suddenly she dropped her knife and fork.

“Sir Jasper,” said she, with an air of great gravity, “I’ll not go a step farther with you unless you do something for me.”

“Name it, my dear.”

“Why, sir, send Job back with a letter to my parents. And ’twill be the best for yourself, I can tell you, as matters stand. My father wouldn’t let the king rob him of his daughter without a fight.”

He stood staring at her doubtfully, his wide nostrils scenting mischief like an irritated bull; she went on very quickly, “I’ll not go a step farther with you unless you do. Give me your tablets—gentlemen always carry them, I know. You shall see for yourself what I write.

“Dear Father—don’t be alarmed, I’m going with Sir Jasper for a wager. ’Tis a mere joke. He’s too grand a gentleman to let harm come to me out of it.—Your loving daughter, Pam.”

She read it to him. He went over it himself, then once more tried to catch her to him, vowing she was as clever as she was handsome.

“Nay, nay, nay!” She was the most imperative, tantalising creature possible to imagine. “Now, Sir Jasper, run and give this to Job yourself. Stay, put a guinea with it, to make the lad eager. Tell him to ride, ride, ride, hell for leather! Isn’t that what you gentlemen say? Hell for leather,” she repeated, laughing, as she hustled him from the room. “Don’t come back to me till you’ve seen him start.”

He went. That third bumper of champagne on the head of so many potations earlier in the day, after the long, cold drive, had fairly stupefied him. He went, because her strong will drove him, without attempting to analyse her motive. For the moment his suspicious brain was lulled to a kind of imbecile complacence. He went pounding forth. As soon as the sound of his heavy steps died away on the wooden boards, Pamela was out of the room like a dart.

She had seen the dark pit of the back stairs gape on the passage as they had passed along to the sitting-room. She was down it now, as sure-footed as if it had been lit up. In another moment, past a pair of staring kitchen sluts and a tapman, she was out in the back yard and running along the village street.

She always declared afterwards that she had been as one guided. She did not pause to reconnoitre or hesitate at a turning. Fleet and light as a shadow, she raced through the alleys of the little town, deserted this Christmas night, till she came to a point on the main road which she knew Job Stallion must pass on his homeward way, and then she hid herself.

She had not very long to wait before the beat of horses’ hoofs resounded on the frozen ground. Hell for leather, indeed! ’Twas the most egregious jog-trot that ever took lazy groom and unwilling horse from warm quarters on a Christmas night!

Job Stallion let fly a terrified oath as Pamela rose out of the ditch and laid a hand upon his bridle. He was scarcely less alarmed when he discovered that he had to do with neither wraith nor highwaywoman, but with his master’s prize. She cut short his “darsents” and his whimpering expostulations very sternly.

“I am going to ride pillion behind you, Job Stallion, and you must whip up that fat brute of a post-horse to something of a canter, for you’ve got to carry me back home before Sir Jasper can overtake us. Thank your stars, my lad,” she went on, “that the Lord has given you a chance of redeeming the night’s work, for I tell you it would have gone hard with any who had a hand in it. Men have been hanged for less!”

She kept him busy with whip and spur till the old grey mare wheezed and bucketed along the road at a pace astonishing for her years and size.

It was somewhere midway between Ashford and Pitfold that they crossed Mr. Bellairs riding towards them on his own rakish chestnut as if for a race. If Pamela’s heart beat high at sight of him she did not avow her pride and pleasure even to herself; if her bright, clear heat of anger and triumphant determination gave place to tender, womanly emotions, she betrayed no sign of them. She postponed explanations, and issued instructions to Mr. Bellairs as to Job Stallion in the accents of one who means they shall be carried out.

“You will kindly ride a hundred paces behind me, Mr. Bellairs. I have no notion of having my name mixed up with yours or Sir Jasper’s this night. As for you, Job, hand me over that tablet. You can keep the guinea for yourself. And you will drop me, if you please, in the courtyard at Standish Hall, for ’tis not too late to join the dancers in the barn. And I mean there shall be no talk on this night’s work, if I can help it.

“If you breathe a word, Job Stallion, you’ll wish you never were born, or my father’s name not Jeremy Pounce! And as for you, Mr. Bellairs, sir, you’ve won your wager—yes, I know all about it—so you owe me a good turn, I think, and all I ask for is silence, silence! My father’s a violent man, and it does no woman’s name any good—no, not even a poor milliner’s—to be made such sport of as mine betwixt you two gentlemen to-night. As for Sir Jasper, I warrant he’ll hold his tongue. He don’t cut so fine a figure!”

And so it ended. Pamela went to the barn dance, after all, and danced in vast condescension with several agreeable young farmers. Jocelyn Bellairs got the rector to introduce him to Mrs. Pounce, and sitting beside that lady, made himself so agreeable that she was, as she expressed it, quite in a twitter. Mindful of his word passed to Sir Jasper, he did not again approach Pamela, but the gaze with which he followed her about the long room was eloquent enough.

When the little Pounces had nearly yawned themselves off the benches, and Pamela’s poppet, Peg, had gone to sleep outright, her curly head on her mother’s ample lap, it was the elegant young gentleman who conducted Mrs. Pounce to the waiting farm cart, with as much courtesy as if he were leading a duchess to her barouche. The moon was set. The courtyard was fitfully illumined by torches thrust into clamps in the wall, and by the shifting rays of the lanterns carried by the revellers.

As Pamela, standing by the cart, lifted Peg up to her mother’s extended arms, while Mr. Bellairs obligingly held the lantern, Sir Jasper’s curricle wheeled slowly into the yard drawn by a pair of fairly exhausted thoroughbreds. Without stirring from his high seat, the reins slipping from his hands, Sir Jasper stared at the picture painted on the night as at some spectral vision.

“Why, here’s Sir Jasper!” cried an obsequious voice. “Three cheers for Sir Jasper, lads!”

Perhaps because his appearance had been as unexpected as his disappearance, perhaps because the sight of his dreadful face of wrath, flamingly illumined by the red glare of a torch was enough to choke off any demonstration, perhaps because he was too unpopular a landlord even for so many glasses of negus and so many mince-pies to counterbalance—however it may have been, there was but a poor response; a faint cry, that rose and quavered away. It was almost more deadly in its effect than an execration. Sir Jasper rolled a bloodshot eye upon his tenants and neighbours.

“Blast you all!” he cried huskily, let himself drop from his seat, and reeled towards the house.

On New Year’s day Pamela returned to London, and, on the day after, a summons to Yeoman Pounce to attend at Mr. Grinder’s office in Canterbury caused some perturbation to the inmates of Little Pitfold. But when he returned he brought astounding intelligence.

“You’ll never believe it, wife!” he cried from the threshold, “but the mortgage is paid off! Buss me, mother, we’re free of our own again!”

“Oh, ’tis our Pam! ’Tis that best of children! Oh, the surprise, father! Oh, the slyness of it, never telling us a word! Oh, was there ever so good a girl?”

“Lawyer Grinder,” said the farmer, letting himself drop heavily in a chair, “kept a close mouth. He wasn’t at liberty, those were his words, to say who it was as had paid it off. ‘But paid off it is, and that’s enough for you, farmer,’ says he. ‘I reckon I know whom I’m beholden to,’ I says, ‘and I’ll tell you plain, lawyer,’ says I, ‘I’m not a man as ’ud be beholden without it was to one who, so to speak, be but paying back what’s due to a parent.’ At that he smiles on the wrong side of his mouth, after his fashion, wife, none best pleased, I can tell you. As for Sir Jasper—well, he won’t get hold o’ Little Pitfold nohow now!”

When Mrs. Pounce wrote to Pamela in London the letter was very full of blessings on a good daughter.

“And your father is so out of himself with joy, my dear, ’tis a new lease of life.”

And Pamela smiled as she read. Her lover, now very respectful, though by no means less ardent, had told her the story of the wager. Who was to say, after all, that she had not paid off the mortgage? As for the rest, she knew when to speak and when to be silent.

CHAPTER VI

In which my Lady Kilcroney Strikes a Match and
Miss Pounce Throws Cold Water on it

The late Lady Standish was one of my Lady Kilcroney’s earliest friends.

When Kitty first burst upon society in the select precincts of Bath—then the fabulously rich, unpardonably pretty, delightful, audacious, amazing little Widow Bellairs—Julia Standish was scarce a three weeks’ bride.

From the very beginning Kitty’s endeavour had been to insert some backbone into the lovely but invertebrate Julia, and once, in despair, she had summed up the situation by exclaiming: “That ’twas like trying to mould too soft a jelly: the moment you thought you had her into shape, she was deliquescent again.”

Therefore, though the connection was long and close; though Kitty, whether as Mistress Bellairs or my Lady Kilcroney, counted no party complete without her Julia; though, when in town together, scarce a day could pass upon which Julia, driven by the stress of some overwhelming emotional crisis, did not fling herself, weeping, upon Kitty’s breast, it could not be said that my Lady Kilcroney was very ardently attached to Lady Standish, or that her death, sad and premature as it was, plunged her in any depth of sorrow.

The truth was that Julia Standish, elegant and virtuous, fair to look on and fond of feeling, belonged to the class that wear out the affections by over-usage. The stuff of Kitty’s sturdy good comradeship had been worn so uncommonly thin, that at the time of Julia’s lamented death scarcely enough had been left between them to make a darn worth while.

Kitty liked life in a strong brew, and Lady Standish wept into her cup so persistently that there was nothing left but salt water.

Nevertheless, when the news of the irreparable event reached her, my Lady, being the best-hearted little woman in the world, wept herself for quite three minutes, and then, dispatching her Lord to see what service he could be to poor Sir Jasper, ordered her sedan and had herself deposited at Madame Mirabel’s in Bond Street, to order a black bonnet and mourning mantle for the funeral.

My Lord had set out on his melancholy errand with a dutiful concealment of its intense distastefulness.

He thought Jasper’s case the most confounded dreadful a man could be placed in, and shrank, with all his Irish softness, from the spectacle of a woe beyond his consolation.

He found matters even more tragic than he anticipated. The last word Sir Jasper’s incomparable Julia murmured to him, as, her hand in his, she left him for a better world, was to remind him of his promise never to replace her. This pledge had been exacted many times during the seven years of their existence together, but never more solemnly than in the hours that had preceded her demise.

From the moment of her seizure—spasms on the lungs—to that last breath, Sir Jasper had been in unremitting attendance. Every physician of note had been summoned to her bedside; but, in spite of all the resources of science, bloodings, blisters and cuppings, pills and potions, poor Julia Standish persisted in succumbing. He was the most afflicted of widowers! She had been the pearl of wives. No woman could ever compare with her in the whole world again. He was a blasted man. Console himself! he roared. That angel, that departed saint need have put him to no promise. She might sleep in peace; her Jasper was henceforth naught but a solitary mourner. What was left him, indeed, but to live for his little ones, those five pledges of their mutual affection; to rear them worthy of such a mother, and, his task accomplished, take his broken heart to lie beside her in the grave? “For I will be buried with my Julia,” he cried upon each fresh gush of tears.

“Faith,” said Lord Kilcroney to his Kitty, describing the scene to her when they met again, “she’s dropt her mantle upon him with a vengeance. Wasn’t it the watering-pot you used to call her, me darling? The poor lady. He caught me by the neck a while ago, and troth he soaked me to the skin. ‘She was the most elegant woman!’ cries he. ‘She was that, me lad,’ says I. ‘And the most virtuous!’ cries he, with another gulp. ‘Aye, that she was,’ cries I. And sure, Kitty, if ever a poor soul made virtue tedious and dismal——”

“Hush, hush!” my Lady Kilcroney interrupted. “Speak no ill of the dead, sir. Poor Julia, she was a fond, foolish creature, but she was an old friend, and, ’pon honour. Denis, I’m crying for her myself. ’Tis but fitting indeed, that Sir Jasper, who was a sad, bad husband, my love, and would have given any woman red eyes, should mourn her now.”

“’Tis the frantickest widower I ever met. Mourn, quotha! ‘How shall I survive?’ is all his cry, and to see him going on that way, you’d scarce give him a sennight.”

“Psha!” said Kitty. “Such frantick fits never last. I give him a sennight, my Lord, to—to dry his eyes and look about for number two.”

“’Pon me honour, Kitty, you’re out of it! Didn’t she extract a promise from him, the dying angel, that he’d never look at woman again, and as for marriage——”

“And if that isn’t Julia all over!” cried Kitty indignantly. “And he with five children! A man of Sir Jasper’s temperament! Tush! Pooh! And were I on my death-bed, Denis, ’twould be the last of my wishes to lay such a monstrous bit of nonsense on your spirits. Why, ’twould be but tempting you to perjury. Yes, you—or any other man. ‘Look out for a well-bred creature, pray,’ I would say, ‘and a healthy, that she be kind to our little Denis, and pick her sensible, for the Lord’s sake.’ Now, Sir Jasper, mark my words ... I give him a week to bellow, and, after that—observe me—he will be found at such common, low places as a cockfight, or a bruising match, with a kerchief high about his neck, and a hat down on his eyes. And he will, like as not, make expeditions to Bristol and Plymouth, where he is less known, and where a man may attend a bit of sport without his friends’ eyes upon him. Do I not know your masculine ways, my Lord? And by and by he will be found at the clubs, at the cards, and the betting; and however lugubrious he may show his countenance, and however sadly he may heave his sigh when he first appears, ’twill wear off marvellous! And oh, and oh,” cried Kitty, breaking into wrathful laughter, “then there will be never such a buck on the town, nor one with such an eye for petticoats, as your disconsolate widower!”

“’Tis a biting tongue ye have in your head, me darling,” said Kilcroney, half admiring, half displeased.

“Before the year is out,” concluded my Lady triumphantly, “’twill be the duty of all his friends, aye, and of poor dear Julia’s, who care for the welfare of her children, to see that he is safe wed. I shall look to it myself, I owe it to the memory of poor dear Julia!”

Kitty broke off. Her glance roamed. A frown corrugated her white forehead. Kilcroney saw that she was mentally seeking, among all her acquaintance, for a substitute with the desired qualifications.

About the time of Sir Jasper’s bereavement, that distinguished peer, my Lord Ongar, put off this mortal coil. The title and fortune passed to a nephew, and it was found that his widow, and the daughter who was yet too young to have left the parent nest, were singularly ill-provided for. My Lady Ongar, who was a Frenchwoman, was in poor health; and much sympathy was felt for her situation, as well as for that of the little Lady Selina, who, on the threshold of presentation to the world, found herself suddenly at so great a disadvantage. It was true that both her sisters had made good marriages; one to Lord Verney, who had a house in town as well as country property; the other to Squire Day, of Queen’s Compton. But then, as Kitty Kilcroney said, who, that had a heart in her breast, could suggest placing a high-spirited girl under the charge of Susan Verney? “For sure, my dear, somewhere back there must have been a slave-driver among her ancestors. And as for Nan Day, was she not lost in domestic bliss? and no one ought to expect pretty Selina to bury herself in haycocks and babies—other people’s babies!”

It was owing to the Viscountess Kilcroney’s influence that the young lady was offered a post about the Princess Augusta, the second of the bevy of beautiful Royal Princesses; for, since assuming her duties as Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Charlotte, Kitty had vastly pleased Her Majesty in that capacity.

Not indeed that my Lady Kilcroney, who now had her own personal experience to go by, approved of Court life as a career for any young unmarried female. ’Twas monstrous cramping, she declared to those who had her complete confidence; and the Royals, perfect beings as they were, and gratifying as it was to be chosen to serve them, had a fashion of very naturally considering themselves paramount, and their favour the chief benefit of existence.

“I’ll not have the child’s youth sucked out of her,” quoth my Lady, in the strict privacy of her chamber, to the grunting Denis, who himself disliked the Court and all its ways with a large intolerance, born of its demands on his Kitty. “But a year, my love, ’twill give her a certain stamp of elegance. We can scarce look for a very great marriage for our Selina, with never two farthings in her pocket, but there are a vast of pleasant gentlemen of the second rank who water at the mouth at the thought of anything favoured by Royalty.”

It was not till Lady Selina had been some nine months in her new post, and Sir Jasper Standish well-nigh a year a widower, that the great idea flashed into Kitty’s mind.

Sir Jasper was a personable man, and had not yet topped thirty-five; a very prime age for a bridegroom with the greenness of youth cast off, the tedium of maturity not yet as much as dawned. With your man of thirty-five it is a point of honour to be as ready with the generosity of youth as the lad of twenty, especially should his fancy turn to sweet seventeen. He will have gained, however, a vast experience, and, unless he be a fool, a seasoned judgment. Sir Jasper was no fool; and though he had so far justified my Lady Kilcroney’s prognostications as to be more conspicuous at any dashing sport-meeting than ever before, he kept chiefly in the company of his own sex, and never so much as noticed the passage of the most flouncing petticoat; and who was more likely to know than Kitty, since she was the only lady in the world whose society the widower now frequented?

At first the talk would be all of his Julia; but in a little while lamentations gave way to more cheerful discourse anent the young family.

It was in her capacity of godmother to little Kate Standish that, a due interval having elapsed since the loss of their ever-to-be-regretted Julia, Kitty Kilcroney first addressed Sir Jasper on the subject of a second marriage. She was, of course, quite prepared for the shocked refusal which met her.

Was it possible my Lady Kilcroney should not be aware of the solemn vow, by which he had pledged himself to his Dying Treasure, to remain ever faithful to her memory?

My Lady Kilcroney was very well aware of it. Heaven knew, she exclaimed, rolling her pansy eyes towards the ceiling of her drawing-room—she was for the while free of her Court duties, and was established in the Hertford Street mansion—Heaven knew, if ever there was anyone in the world who could appreciate what a second marriage meant to a true mourner it was she! When Bellairs went—“Ah, you never knew my first, Sir Jasper! The most excellent, the most estimable, the most generous and noble-minded of men. There was not a condition in his will, I do assure you! Everything, everything left to me! ‘My dearest wife, Kitty, in token of the perfect happiness she gave me.’ Those were his words, Sir Jasper. But a year’s happiness, alas! and he, poor seraph, scarce able to endure anyone in the room with him with the gout so cruel settled in his joints that, if you’ll believe me, his feet were like nothing so much as warming-pans, and his hands—my poor Bellairs’ hands, why, there were days when he could not have borne that a butterfly should settle on them! When my cherished martyr was released from his sufferings, did I not, like you, vow in my heart that I never, never would replace him?”

Here Kitty fixed her eyes upon Sir Jasper’s lugubrious countenance, and, positively, though her tone was filled with such pious melancholy, they twinkled.

“I fail to see the analogy, my Lady Kilcroney,” said he huffily. “My Julia was as young as she was fair, as elegant in form as she was virtuous in character.”

“True, true, Sir Jasper! Bellairs became, very shortly after our espousals, a wreck, an absolute wreck. But he retained the most admirable amiability of temper. ’Twas indeed that which first drew my heart to him. ‘My dear,’ he said to me, ‘when I heard that my poor old friend Ned had gone smash, and shot himself, and left a little daughter without a farthing to buy a ribbon with, I cast about in my mind what I should do to help her. And, faith, I can think of no better way, my dear, than to make a rich widow of you.’ And then he set to laughing in his droll, wheezing way. ‘I’m game for a year,’ says he, ‘if you can stand the old man for a year,’ says he. ‘I’ll put you in the way of getting the best the world can give you; honour and good repute, and wealth and a young husband in due time—better than if your poor father had kept out of indigo. If you’ll trust me, I’ll trust you,’ says he. And my dear Bellairs kept his word royally. He’d never so much as a suspicion of me; or aught but a smile for my pleasures.” Here a tear suddenly flashed. “I’m proud to say,” cried Kitty. “I deserved his confidence. Is there ever anything so beautiful in life as wedded trust?”

Sir Jasper went home thoughtful. His Julia had had every merit, but if she had had also just the tiniest part of Bellairs’ the Nabob’s generosity of mind, would he, could he have so often—as alas! he had! But there were times when he had been goaded, indubitably driven, to seek distraction. Angel as she had been, to what screaming vapours, what swoons had she not treated him? How often also—here he held his head higher, and made a knowing thrust at a door post with his gold-headed walking-stick as he went by—had she not suspected the vilest deeds when he had been as innocent as the lambs in the field?

“You cannot,” said Sir Jasper, sapiently to himself, as his marital crimes appeared before him suddenly transmogrified into peccadilloes. “You cannot be said to betray a trust that has never been reposed in you.”

Next time my Lady spoke of matrimony to the bereaved, it was in the tone of one who regrets a rash determination, but recognises its binding quality.

“What a pity, Sir Jasper, you should have been led into such fond folly! To take such a vow! Irrevocable of course. Who would have the dreadful courage to suggest the breaking of a pledge to one who is now among the saints. What if a father’s duty points one way? that death-bed obligation sternly points the other.”

She pitied Sir Jasper—she did indeed. How was a man, and he so young, to deal with five children, and they with all the difficulties of life before them; character, education and—heavens!—illnesses? Measles and mumps, hectics and whooping coughs, and all the rest of it! “Poor Julia, could she but see now to what her intemperate passion for you has led! If our Julia had a fault—dare I say it, Sir Jasper?—she was a little, leetle inclined to jealousy.”

When Kitty returned to Queen’s Lodge, to take up service with Her Majesty, Sir Jasper and she had come to discussing very freely the kind of person who might be regarded as worthy to fill their dearest Julia’s shoes.

Kitty was full of suggestions, but, one way or another, the paragons enumerated by the lady were never to the gentleman’s taste.

When Lady Selina joined the Court circle, she was, if truth be told, the very last young female whom Kitty could in conscience have selected as a fitting companion for a widower of Sir Jasper’s kidney, or the proper kind of stepmother to his peevish brats. Nevertheless when the idea came, it was with the brilliant conviction of a flash of lightning.

Selina Vereker was not dark and masterful like Susan Verney, nor was she soft and warm-hearted, all feminine impulse and charm, like Nan Day. She was a bold piece, Kitty had decided from the first, with a short nose and a short temper, and hair under her powder as blazing as Sir Jasper’s own, and a grey eye that possessed a certain cold, reflective audacity which made Kitty thoughtful. She was a judge of minxes. Withal the creature if not pretty, was mighty attractive; with a little head on a white throat, and a way of tossing it; slim, long limbs like a boy, and a freedom of movement inside her voluminous skirts that was almost unbecoming to her sex. And the tiresome child was in a hundred scrapes, and in Royalty’s black books before she had been a fortnight at her duties. This was unpleasant for Kitty, who had recommended her. And, as she had a kind heart, it filled her with apprehension for the future. For if anything so awful were to happen as that Selina should fall into serious disgrace and be dismissed from Court, what in the world would become of her? So poor, so naughty, and so innocent; with a pair of selfish sisters, and her mother retired to a convent! Why, with Royal displeasure upon her, never could she hope to ally herself to a genteel family!

Sir Jasper! Was not the man to her hand? He deserved a wife with some fire in her, after having so long endured the deliquescent Julia, and he deserved too, sad rake that he was, something with a temper of her own to keep him to attention and in his place.

“To heel, sir, or beware, there are other fine fellows in the world who are ready to appreciate what you have the bad taste to neglect.”

Her mind made up, Kitty set to work with a transparent artifice, to which only the blundering male would fall a prey.

“Pray come to tea, to-morrow, sir—or stay, perhaps better not, for I have Princess Augusta’s Maid-of-Honour, the little Selina Vereker, and, oh no, I would not for the world that you should meet!”

“And why, pray?”

“La, Sir Jasper, and you on the look-out for a new Lady Standish! You might fall in love with her, to be sure.”

“And what then, my Lady Kilcroney?”

“Oh, Sir Jasper, Sir Jasper, that would never do!”

“And why not, ma’am?”

“But eighteen, sir.”

“I see no objection there.”

“Fie, Sir Jasper, and you turned thirty-six!”

“But thirty-five my last birthday, ma’am, as I’m a sinner.”

“A sinner, indeed, Sir Jasper, and now you have it. What? Would you, sir, mate with innocence, guilelessness; lamb-like light-heartedness, and sprightliness; you with——?”

“Come, come, my Lady Kilcroney. I’ve not been a model husband, I dare say.”

“I dare say not, sir. Heavens, my poor Julia!”

“Your poor Julia, ma’am, would have driven a saint—Pshaw! She was too good for me!”

“Believe me, sir, you should wed a young lady of some experience, if not a widow; a staid female, sir.”

“Thank you, my Lady, I’m vastly obliged, I’m sure.”

“And you so jealous, Sir Jasper, who could scarce even trust virtue’s self, in the shape of Julia! La, to think of you with Selina—such beauty, Sir Jasper; such grace, such charm, so ready to take the pleasure of her years, so pure ignorant of the world’s ways.”

“Good heavens, my Lady Kilcroney, if I do not come to your tea-party to-morrow, ’twill be that I am a dead man.”

“Do not say you were not warned,” said my Lady, and had the laugh of scorn to herself to see with what conquering airs Sir Jasper glanced at himself in each mirror when, departing, he crossed the long length of her drawing-room at Queen’s Lodge.

The pretty Maid-of-Honour and the already foresworn widower duly met over Kitty’s bohea, next afternoon. Sir Jasper duly fell head over heels in love; and before the week was out, they were engaged to be married. Royalty approved, my Lady Ongar gave her consent with tears of joy; and both Susan Verney and Ann Day sent cool sisterly sanction.

Having secured her victim Kitty prepared herself to enjoy every moment of the delightful process of decking her for the sacrifice. What woman but does not feel that in the trousseau lies the true inward satisfaction of the bridal state? To a benevolent heart like my Lady Kilcroney’s the choice of Lady Selina’s garments, the proper expenditure of the funds entrusted to her for the purpose by the widowed mother offered a task in which duty went hand in hand with delight. Generous soul that she was, she promptly decided to supplement the Dowager’s exiguous allotment by a contribution of her own: secretly, so as not to hurt the poor child’s feelings, but to an extent which should in her estimation befit the wedding of a maid-of-honour under the protection of the Lady Kilcroney.

Needless to add that to bring Selina to Pamela Pounce was almost the first of her desires as self-elected Fairy Godmother. Who but Pamela indeed, could set out a Bride so that her appearance on the great morning should be an event in the world of Fashion? Pamela under Kitty’s instructions—there never was such a combination of intellect!

My Lady Kilcroney as she drove up through the bright sunshine from Windsor was filled with anticipations so agreeable and exciting that she had little thought to spare for the silence and irresponsiveness of the girl beside her.

Selina had a delicious little countenance, even though she was sulking heavily; so when her glance strayed reflectively upon her my Lady found nothing in the contemplation to disturb her equanimity.

It was the first time in its annals that the House of Mirabel beheld a carriage with the Royal liveries halt before its portals, and the flutter in its discreet walls was indescribable.

Madame Mirabel herself catching sight of the scarlet splendour, through the first floor window, was seized with the trembles, and had to send Miss Clara Smithson for a glass of ratafia out of the back parlour cupboard before she could control her limbs sufficiently to walk downstairs. It was true that her immense agitation was promptly allayed by Miss Polly Popple, who put her head in at the door to say:

“It’s only my Lady Kilcroney after all, what’s brought a pale Miss for a wedding hat. So don’t you put yourself about, Madame Mirabel, and Miss Pounce that cool it don’t look as if her opinions were what they ought to be, and gracious goodness where is the roll of silver ribbon came from Lyons? I laid it out of my hand, Clara, when I ran up a while ago about Mrs. Lafone’s bill, and him giving all sorts in the showroom. I wouldn’t be married to an elderly gentleman what’s miserly not for—where’s the silver ribbon for mercy’s sake? There’s the bell going after me like mad. Thank you, dear. Don’t put yourself about, Madame Mirabel—who ever told you it was the Queen! It’s only my Lady Kilcroney—drat it, there it goes again—I’m coming.”

Pamela Pounce had caught a glimpse of Kitty’s dainty profile behind the misleading scarlet as the Queen’s barouche halted; and it was with her usual graceful self-composure that she swam forward to curtsy to her patroness. Four steps and a nicely graduated obeisance, with just an undulation which included my Lady’s companion, Pamela had a perfect command of the correct attitude. Then she waved her hand.

“Chairs, Miss Popple. Pray be seated, ladies.”

Then, with a pretty spring of alacrity in manner and voice, a most respectful yet delightfully confidential approach to familiarity:

“And what can I show your Ladyship to-day?” cried she. “There’s the sweetest head, a twist of cherry tulle with a bunch of green grapes, just come from Paris—made for your Ladyship.”

Kitty waved the tempting suggestion on one side. “Nothing for me to-day, my dear creature. I’ve brought Lady Selina.”

Selina, who had entered, stood and sat down like an automaton with every reason to be dissatisfied with its surroundings, here gave her patroness a steely look of enmity, and then cast down her eyes so that their long eyelashes cast a shadow on her white cheek.

Pamela appraised the small set face and Kitty proceeded to expound; “The fact is, Miss Pounce, I am here with Lady Selina for a wedding order.”

“Indeed, my Lady.”

“Yes, indeed,” cried Kitty, warming to her subject, “the wedding hat, no less, child, and the going away! Oh! And a head for the dinner party I mean to give in honour of the engagement. Princess Augusta has promised to attend. And the wedding is to take place from my house in Hertford Street, Pamela, the very moment May is over. What with my Lady Verney having a feeling about the mourning, and my Lady Anne Day so set about with measles in her nursery, there isn’t anyone as near to this dear girl as myself, if it’s reckoned by old friendship.”

Here Kitty paused for breath and after duly waiting for Lady Selina to express some acknowledgments of these handsome sentiments, Pamela, in the young person’s persistent mutism, was fain to remark that there was no one like her Ladyship for kindness, that she knew. And though this was but a deferential murmur, there was conviction in it. Pamela had every reason for this testimony.

Kitty glanced askance at the bride’s most unbride-like countenance; she faintly shrugged her shoulders. None of the Verekers had good tempers and she was not going even to notice Selina’s moods.

“A wedding hat.”

Pamela pondered upon the bride, while her quick brains worked.

(“Dear to be sure, the poor young lady! One would think ’twas her funeral things they were getting together. Who are they going to marry her to? And why is my Lady Kilcroney managing it all, and that mortal tickled?) I wouldn’t recommend white satin for my Lady Selina,” she said out loud, “though I know it’s the usual thing, my Lady. And if I might venture, it wouldn’t do to be putting dead white next her face. No, my Lady Kilcroney, no, my Lady Selina, not if you was to rouge ever so and that would be a thousand pities; my Lady’s skin is a treat to look at. And it’s her cachet to be pale with those dark eyes—excuse me, my Lady, for dropping into French, it’s a way I got into in Paris. Now I’d like lace.” The milliner spoke slowly as if she were tasting one by one, the condiments of an exquisite dish. “A fine brim of real lace, my lady, with a tulle lining, three layers of tulle, and the middle one pale pink. Oh, pale, pale, pale.” Pamela twiddled her fingers in the air, mitigating the colour till it faded into nothingness. “The tint they’re calling in Paris, cuisse de nymphe émue. Excuse me, my Lady, I won’t be so bold as to translate it. Yes, your Ladyship, the French have droll minds! But your Ladyship has seized the idea; not pink, but just a warmth, a lightening of the white, ’twill be exquisite. A twist of silver ribbon to hold it together—Miss Popple, where’s that silver ribbon that came from Lyons? I have a model here,” went on Pamela, stooping to pull out one of the deep drawers of the cupboard which ran the length of the room, and in which the most special treasures in the millinery line were hidden away from the ordinary public, only to be brought out for the favoured. “I have a model here which is the very latest, out of Paris. It’ll never be seen at all, so to speak, till next month, and that on a Queen’s head.”

Queen Charlotte’s Lady-in-waiting sprang up and tripped across the carpet to stand by the milliner’s side.

“It must be worth while for a female of Fashion,” my Lady was thinking, “to have a post about Queen Marie Antoinette, always the first in the land in modes and in looks as in everything else.”

Now Lady Selina Vereker, hearing the two women whisper as they stood together, lifted her eyes and watched and hearkened very intently.

“The young lady’s just engaged I take it,” said Pamela, shaking the tissue paper from a cobweb vision of blue tulle and lace.

“’Twas only ratified by Lady Ongar last night, from her retreat at Wimbledon. (They say it’s a convent of nuns my dear, but ’tis not generally known.)”

“Dear, to be sure, the poor lady!”

Here Kitty lowered her voice, but Selina’s irately keen ears caught the murmur.

“Sadly ill-provided for. My Lord Ongar’s affairs in a desperate state. Hardly a brass farthing between the three poor girls! A most prodigious relief to have the third settled.”

Then Pamela’s clear compassionate undertone.

“I trust the young lady is happy in her choice, so young as she looks.”

The milliner’s eye wandered to the Bride-elect and met her darkling gaze.

“Why, that goes without saying,” exclaimed my Lady tartly, “since I made the match, Miss Pounce. Sir Jasper Standish is one of my Lord’s oldest friends.”

“Sir Jasper Standish! Good God!” Pamela started and wheeled round. She echoed the words in accents which left no doubt as to the consternation evoked by the name.

Her face was reflected in the glass in front of her, and Selina had a vision of its blasted expression of horror and disapproval.

The next moment Miss Pounce had resumed her usual bland self-control, and was bending over the French hat, feigning to be absorbed in twitching its knotted ribbons into place.

“Upon my word, Miss Pounce,” exclaimed Kitty, in high surprise and anger. “And what have you got against Sir Jasper Standish, may I ask, that you should couple his name with such impiety?”

“Oh, nothing, my Lady, nothing!”

Pamela’s hands trembled as she twitched the faint pink ribbons. “Nothing but a bit of a business trouble between my father and Sir Jasper, our place being all but next door to Standish Hall—I crave your Ladyship’s pardon, I’m sure, for letting my feelings go away with me,—but Sir Jasper was hard on father over a mortgage.”

“Oh! a mortgage! Pish, child!” Kitty was immensely relieved, though she could not conceal that she considered it a great liberty in a milliner thus to obtrude her family affairs upon the notice of distinguished clients. She had not so very high an opinion of Jasper herself, and Pamela was a prodigious handsome girl! She had been actually trembling over what might have come out!

My Lady’s manner for the rest of the séance comically varied between a dignified displeasure and the overwhelming fascination exercised by the milliner’s supreme talent.

Lady Selina submitted to all the trying-on and listened to the prolonged discussions with the same demeanour of angry martyrdom which she had brought into the shop.

“You’ve been insufferable, my dear!” cried Kitty, patience giving way at length, as the sleek royal horses started on their homeward way.

Selina turned her long, brilliant eyes upon her companion without speaking. There was a pert question and an underlying significance in them, which further exasperated the chaperone.

“’Pon honour!” exploded Kitty, “I marvel what’s to do with you. You, with everything the world can give you, and three as sweet hats chosen as ever I’ve seen in my whole life! Such a picture as you’ll look, a Bride, with your mother’s lace and all! and by the airs of you, you might have been trying on sackcloth to go to the stake.”

“You must remember, my Lady Kilcroney, that I am in mourning.”

“Psha!”

“And Sir Jasper a widower himself.”

“And what of that, child?”

“Oh, nothing,” said Selina. “Do you think it’s going to rain?”

Kitty looked at her long and earnestly. Was there ever such a little shut-up countenance, such obstinate close lips and such naughty secret eyes?

“I wish to Heaven,” she said, at last, “that you’d say what you’ve got in your heart, child.”

“Oh, I was just thinking about Miss Pamela Pounce!”

“And what of her?”

My Lady still uneasily remained cross.

“Oh, I only thought she looked honest!” said the girl. And not one other word to the purpose could my Lady Kilcroney extract from her.

They drove into Windsor in a strained silence and separated to their divers duties in no very cordial mood.

Kind-hearted people in positions of authority are apt to fall into the danger of doing good to their neighbours in spite of themselves. They see so clearly the value of the benefits they mean to confer, that fate having given them the power to enforce their acceptance, they do not hesitate to wield it. With the best intentions in the world they become tyrants. Kitty had a real desire to be of use to the orphan, and she was quite sure that the plans she had laid for her were entirely for her comfort and well-being. In any case matters had gone too far for Selina, even to dream of such a catastrophe as a withdrawal of her word.

The Maid-of-Honour had accepted Sir Jasper of her own free will. If she had secretly repented, if she chose to sulk and make a martyr of herself, Kitty knew better than to encourage her by seeming to notice it. And my Lady told herself that the moods of such a chit were of no account. She was too fresh out of the schoolroom to stand so much promotion all together—Maid-of-Honour, Bride-elect, the pet of royalty, all in a couple of months—a little spoilt cat, and if she scratched Jasper ’twould but do him a vast of good.

Nevertheless, my lady Kilcroney felt slightly uncomfortable until she next beheld the engaged couple together. Then, indeed—it was the next evening after their shopping drive to London, in my Lady’s own rooms—Selina appeared to have completely forgotten her gloomy fit. The child was in outrageous spirits, with quite scarlet cheeks, taunting and mocking her ardent lover, till he was beside himself.

Kitty forbore rebuke. In her relief she was full of indulgence towards behaviour which, at another time, she would have severely reprobated.

“My dear love,” she wrote to her husband that night. She was still in attendance at Windsor and Denis, very much injured, was alone at Hertford Street. “Everything is going as well as possible. Do not forget to call on Mr. Gunter’s about the wedding cake and on Mr. Bartolozzi about the tickets of invitation.”

Could she have known how Lady Selina had employed the afternoon of that very day, the poor Lady-in-Waiting would have issued very different instructions.

For Selina had obtained leave from her “Royal” to go to town about her trousseau. The Princess Augusta, all blandness and good nature, offered every facility, even to her own carriage.

How grateful was Lady Selina! But “Oh, no, Ma’am,” she pleaded, “it makes me feel so horrid shy! There we were yesterday, my Lady Kilcroney and I, in one of the Queen’s barouches and every one turning round and staring at us, and oh! so disappointed, Ma’am, not to see the Royal faces. My mother is sending her own maid for me, and we’ll take a chaise and Sister Verney will meet me in the town.”

Princess Augusta looked very kindly at the child. She liked her modest disclaimer and the little flattery it wrapped about, and it all sounded very proper and becoming. How could she guess that Selina was lying like a little devil, that the audacious creature would positively set out from the consecrated precincts of Queen’s Lodge alone, take the common coach to town and proceed on foot to Bond Street; in a kind of disguise indeed, a plain bonnet, borrowed off a Royal housemaid, which had a brown gauze veil to drop over her face, so that she might have passed her own mother in the street and not been known!

The cunning girl watched her opportunity and slipped into Miss Pounce’s showroom at a slack moment. As she flung back her veil Pamela’s colour changed; she saw who it was.

Selina walked quite close up to her and the two stood a moment staring at each other. The milliner was too acute not to feel the moment big with importance, and too shrewd not to guess at the cause.

“What did you mean,” said Selina then, “by saying yesterday like that: ‘Sir Jasper! good God!’?”

Pamela was not often taken-to, but she felt herself in a most disagreeable fix.

“La!” she faltered. “I could have bitten my tongue out. I can only ask your pardon.”

“I want you to answer my question. What did you mean?”

Pamela, who had been growing pale, grew paler.

“Father had trouble with him over a mortgage.”

“Oh, tush with your mortgage! That’s only a bit of trumpery. It wasn’t the mortgage. You know something of Sir Jasper.”

The milliner hesitated: then she tossed her head.

“And if I do, my Lady? There! There ain’t anything for you to suspect me about, I do assure you.”

“Oh, I don’t suspect you!” cried Selina wildly. “I see you hate him! I hate him myself! I haven’t anyone to help me. What do you know of him?”

“Nothing that would count as against a gentleman’s honour,” said Pamela bitterly, recalling, with an inward shudder, the vile trick that had been played upon her, and the narrowness of her escape.

Selina caught the working-woman’s two capable hands.

“I won’t get you into a scandal! I know you’ve got your bread to earn. I’ll never mention your name or let anyone guess! I promise! I promise! Look here, I’ll put it differently: if you were me, would you marry Sir Jasper Standish?”

Pamela drew a long breath and the truth leaped.

“I’d see myself dead rather!”

The absurdity of the phrase did not detract from its effectiveness.

“Ah!” cried Selina. “Thank you! That’s all I wanted to know.”

She wrung the hands she had caught, whisked her veil over her flushed countenance and turned to leave. On the threshold of the shop she paused and flung back a quick reassurance.

“Don’t be afraid. I’ll never betray you!” which Miss Polly Popple, overhearing, promptly carried to the awestruck ears of Miss Clara Smithson.

“There’s a low-class girl just been in the showroom blackmailing Miss Pounce and gone off Heaving knows with how much hushmoney! ‘I won’t betray you,’ says she. And Miss Pounce looking after her, that distraught; you’d think she’d seen a ghost.”

“Ah! my dear,” said Miss Smithson. “Retribution is gathering over that abandoned creature’s head.”

CHAPTER VII

In which is Manifest the Hand of the Sainted Julia.

“Oh, my Lady Kilcroney, I haven’t a moment! The most dreadful thing has happened!”

Selina Vereker stood before the astonished Kitty. She was robed for Court ceremonial and looked a very splendid young woman in brocaded whites and silver laces. Her hair was full dressed and spread mightily in wings and curls. In her hand she held a posy of pink roses. But against all this elegance, the small countenance looked troubled; it was, indeed, contorted like that of a child about to cry.

“I haven’t a moment,” she repeated. “The Princess Augusta expects me to attend her to the Duchess of Hampshire’s ball, and even now she will be waiting for me. But oh, my Lady, oh, my Lady, I thought I must run in to tell you—Sir Jasper has broken with me!”

“Never say so, child! And the marriage for next Monday as ever was!”

My Lady Kilcroney was in the long, narrow parlour which formed part of her set of rooms in St. James’s Palace. She, too, was in full fig; a marvel of glistening white, with the fashionable purple trimmings that proclaimed attachment to Royalty. The Bellairs diamonds shone on her throat and bodice, and diamonds shot from every angle of her piled and flying curls. At the Maid-of-Honour’s words she shook and sparkled and quivered in all her finery, looking like some magic tropical bird spreading out wings for battle.

“The Princess Augusta is waiting for me!” cried Selina, and sobbed.

“Let her wait,” quoth Kitty fiercely. She had enough familiarity with the Royals now to appreciate the fact that, after all, they were but human beings.

“What has happened? Sit there and tell me this moment. Sir Jasper break off his engagement! Some fantastick of jealousy, sure. The man’s mad! Why, ’tis but this morning you showed me that wonderful knot of brilliants he gave you, child, on your complaining you had no fancy for a dead woman’s jewels.”

Selina let herself fall into the chair indicated, and hid her face in her hands.

“Oh, the disgrace!” she moaned.

“It shall not be,” stormed her patroness. “You’ve dropped your roses, child.”

“What, the roses? How—did I still hold them? Oh, my Lady, the roses, ’tis they undid me!”

“Your roses undid you? Talk plain, in the name of common sense.”

“The roses undid me, Madam,” said Lady Selina, lifting up her head to grind her teeth at Kitty, as that lady said afterwards, for all the world like her little Denis at ten months old with the double ones coming. “How should I know that when the beautiful pink roses arrived they were not from Sir Jasper? and oh, my Lady, he came storming into my parlour, demanding to see me, and I scarce out of the hands of Monsieur Achille and going in to him in my wrapper, I do assure you, not knowing what prodigious important thing he had to say to me, and he, my Lady Kilcroney, scarce able to speak with the fierce rage. ‘The roses,’ he says, ‘where are the roses you was to wear to-night?’ And there they were, unpacked at his elbow before I had had time as much as to take them in my hand. As I’m a living woman, as I hope to be saved, my Lady, I, all innocence! ‘The roses?’ says I, and he falls upon them, and, oh, to think of it, in the very middle rose, hidden like a snake in the grass, was a billet. A billet, my Lady Kilcroney, I scarce know how to tell you—from——”

“Another gentleman?” screamed Kitty, jumping to the horrid truth.

“Some stranger.”

“And indeed I hope so, Miss. And what was wrote in it, pray?”

Selina dropped long white eyelids over those brilliant curious eyes of hers which never seemed to corroborate her lips, and, drawing an immense quivering sigh, the corners of the same pretty lips going down over a sob: “Oh, my Lady, the monstrous audacity of it,” she cried. “The creature wrote—God knows who he can be—

‘If you wear these roses to-night, Beauteous Selina, your adorer will know that; whatever happens, he may still hope.’”

“’Pon my word,” said Kitty.

“It seems Sir Jasper had had an anonymous letter——”