Читать книгу Miss Million's Maid - Berta Ruck - Страница 16

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I have been putting on all my outdoor things.

For I feel desperate.

And I must take advantage of this feeling. If I wait until to-morrow, when my rage and indignation and violent dissatisfaction with things-as-they-are have died down, and I'm normal again, well, then I shall get nothing done. I shall think: "Perhaps life here with Aunt Anastasia at No. 45 Laburnum Grove, isn't so bad after all, even if I do never have any parties or young friends or pretty frocks or anything that other happier, less-aristocratically connected girls look upon as a matter of course. Anyhow, there's nothing for it but to go on in the same humdrum fashion that I've been doing——"

Ah, no! I mustn't let myself go back to thinking like that again.

The secret of success is to get something done while you're in the mood for it!

In our hall with the unmended umbrella stand and the trophy of Afghan knives I was stopped by Aunt Anastasia.

"At least I insist upon knowing," she said, "where you are going now?"

I said, quite gently and amiably: "I am going to see Million."

"Million? The little object who was the servant here? Your taste in associates becomes more and more deplorable, Beatrice. You should not forget that even if she has happened to come into money"—my aunt spoke the very word as who should say "Dross!"—and concluded: "She is scarcely a person of whom you can make a friend."

"Million has always been a very staunch little friend of mine ever since she came here," I said, not without heat. "But I am going to this hostel of hers to ask her about something that has nothing to do with 'friendship.' You have her address. You know that it's a deadly respectable place. I expect I shall stay the night there, Aunt Anastasia. Good-bye." And off I went.

I was full of my new plan—a plan that seemed to have flashed full-blown into my brain while I was putting on my boots.

It had made me almost breathless with excitement and anticipation by the time I had rung the bell of the massive, maroon-painted door of the Kensington address and had said to the bored-looking man-servant who opened it: "May I see Miss Million, please?"

Such a plan it was as I had to unfold to her!

There was something odd and unfamiliar about the appearance of Million when she ran in to greet me in her new setting—the very Early Victorian, plushy, marble-mantelpieced, glass-cased drawing-room of the Ladies' Hostelry in Kensington.

What was the unfamiliar note? She wore her Sunday blouse of white Jap silk; her brown cloth skirt that dipped a little at the back. But what was it that made her look so strange? Ah! I knew. It was so funny to see our late maid-of-all-work in the house without a cap on!

This incongruous thought dashed through my mind as quickly as Million herself dashed over the crimson carpet towards me.

"Miss Beatrice! Lor'! Doesn't it seem ages since I seen you, and yet it's only this very morning since I left your aunt's. Well, this is a treat," she cried, holding out both of her little work-roughened hands. "It is nice, seein' some one you know, after the lot of old cats, and sketches, and freaks, and frosty-faces that live in this establishment!"

And the new heiress gave herself a little shake as she glanced round the spacious, gloomy apartment that we had for the moment to ourselves. Evidently Million found the Kensington "haven" recommended by her lawyer no change for the better from our Putney villa. Under the circumstances, and because of my plan, I felt rather glad of this.

I said: "Don't you like the place, then, Million? What are the people like?"

"Only one word to describe 'em, Miss Beatrice. Chronic. Fair give you ther hump. None of 'em married, except one, who's a colonel's widow, and thinks she's everybody, and all of 'em about eighty-in-the-shade. And spiteful! And nosey!" enlarged Million, as we sat down together on one of the massive red-plush covered sofas, under a large steel engraving of "Lord Byron and the Maid of Athens." She went on: "They wanted to know all about me, o' course. Watchin' me every bite I put into my mouth at table, and me so nervous that no wonder I helped myself to peas into me glass of water! Lookin' down their noses at me and mumbling to each other about me—not what I call very polite manners—and chance the ducks! I——"

Here the drawing-room door opened to admit one of the ladies, I suppose, of whom Million had been complaining. She wore a grey woolly shoulder-shawl and myrtle-green hair—I suppose something had gone wrong with the brown hair-restorer. And this lady gave one piercing glance at me and another at Million as she sidled towards a writing-table at the further end of the drawing-room and sat down with her back towards us. I'm sorry to say that Million twisted her small face into a perfectly horrible grimace and stuck out her tongue at the back. Then she, Million, lowered her voice as she chattered on about her new surroundings.

"Cry myself to sleep every night, I should, if I was to try to stay on here," she said. "Couldn't feel happy here, not if it was ever so! Oh, I'd rather go back to the Orphanage. Something of me own 'age' there, anyhow! Don't care if it is very tony and high-class and recommended. It's not my style.... I don't know where I'm going after, but, Miss Beatrice, I'm going to get out of this! I can't stay in a place that makes me feel as if I was in prison, so I'm going to hop it."

"That's just how I felt, Million. That's what I made up my mind to do," I told her. The new heiress gazed at me with all her bright grey eyes.

"What? You, Miss Beatrice? You don't mean——"

"That I'm not going on living at No. 45 Laburnum Grove!"

"What?" Million raised her voice incautiously, and the myrtle-green-haired lady glanced around. "Miss Nosey Parker," muttered Million, and then "Straight? You mean you've had a bust-up with your Aunt Nasturtium?"

"Rather," I nodded.

"About that young gentleman, I lay?" said Million. "Him from next door."

"How did you guess it was that? It was," I admitted. "He came to return this brooch of yours that you dropped on the 'bus—here it is—and my aunt chose to—to—to——"

"Oh, I know the way Miss Lovelace would 'choose'," said Million, with gusto. "So you left her, Miss Beatrice! So you done a flit at last, like I always been saying you did ought to do! You done it! Cheers! And now what are you thinking to do? Coming to me, are you?"

I smiled into the little affectionate rosy face that I was so accustomed to seeing under a white frilly cap with a black bow.

I said: "Yes, Million. I'm coming to you if you'll have me."

"Ow! That's the style, Miss——"

"If I come, you won't have to call me 'Miss' any more," I said firmly. "That'll be part of it."

"Part of what?" asked Million, bewildered.

"Part of the arrangement I want to make with you," I said. And then, looking up, I beheld curiosity written in every line of the back of that woman at the writing-table. I said: "Million, I can't talk to you here. Get your hat on and come out. We'll discuss this in the Park."

And in the Park, sitting side by side on two green wooden chairs, I unfolded to Million my suddenly conceived plan.

"Now, listen," I began. "You're a rich girl—a young woman with a big fortune of her own——"

"Oh, Miss, I don't seem to realise it one bit, yet——"

"You'll have to realise it. You'll have to begin and adapt yourself to it all, quite soon. And the sooner you begin the sooner you'll feel at home in it all."

"I don't feel as if I'd got a home, now," said Million, with the forlorn look coming over her face. "I don't feel as if I should ever make anything out of it—of this here being an heiress, I mean."

"Million, you'll have to 'make something of it'. Other people do. People who haven't been brought up to riches. It may not 'come natural' to them, at first. But they learn. They learn to live as if they'd always been accustomed to beautiful clothes, and to having houses, and cars, and all that sort of thing, galore. Million, these are the things you've got to acquire now you're rich," I said quite threateningly. "Even your dear old lawyer knew that this Kensington place was only 'pro tem'. You'll have to have an establishment, to settle where you'll live, and what you want to do with yourself."

"I don't want to do nothing, Miss Beatrice," said little Million helplessly.

"Don't talk nonsense. You know you told me yourself quite lately," I reminded her, "that you had one great wish."

Million's troubled little face lifted for a moment into a smile, but she shook her head (in that awful crimsony straw hat that she will wear "for best").

"You do remember that wish," I said. "You told me that you would so like to marry a gentleman. Well, now, here you will have every chance of meeting and marrying one!"

"Oh, Miss! But I'm reely—reely not the kind of girl that——"

"So you'll have to set to and make yourself into the kind of girl that the kind of 'gentleman' you'd like would be wild to marry. You'll have to——Well, to begin with," I said impressively, "you'll have to get a very good maid."

"Do you mean a girl to do the work about the house, Miss?"

"No, I don't. You'll have a whole staff of people to do that for you," I explained patiently. "I mean a personal maid, a lady's-maid. A person to do your hair and to marcel-wave, and to manicure, and to massage you! A person to take care of your beautiful clo——"

"Haven't got any beautiful clothes, Miss."

"You will have. Your maid will take care of that," I assured her. "She'll go with you to all the best shops and tell you what to buy. She'll see that you choose the right colours," I said, with a baleful glance at the crimson floppy hat disfiguring Million's little dark head. "She'll tell you how your things are to be made. She'll take care that you look like any other young lady with a good deal of money to spend, and some taste to spend it with. You don't want to look odd, Million, do you, or to make ridiculous mistakes when you go about to places where you'd meet——"

"Oh, Miss," said Million, blenching, "you know that if there is one thing I can't stick it's havin' to think people may be making game of me!"

"Well, the good maid would save you from that."

"I'd be afraid of her, then," protested Million.

I said: "No, you wouldn't. You've never been afraid of me."

"Ah," said Million, "but that's different. You aren't a lady's-maid——"

I said firmly a thing that made Million's jaw drop and her eyes nearly pop out of her head. I said: "I want to be a lady's-maid. I want to come to you as your maid—Miss Million's maid."

"Miss Bee—atrice! You're laughing."

"I'm perfectly serious," I said. "Here I am; I've left home, and I want to earn my own living. This is the only way I can do it. I can pack. I can mend. I can do hair. I have got 'The Sense of Clothes'—that is, I should have," I amended, glancing down at my own perfectly awful serge skirt, "if I had the chance of associating with anything worthy of the name of 'clothes.' And I know enough about people to help you in other ways. Million, I should be well worth the fifty or sixty pounds a year you'd pay me as wages."

"Me pay you wages?" little Million almost shrieked. "D'you mean it, Miss Beatrice?"

"I do."

"You mean for you, a young lady that's belonged to the highest gentry, with titles and what not, to come and work as lady's-maid to me, what's been maid-of-all-work at twenty-two pounds a year in your aunt's house?"

"Why not?"

"But, Miss—— It's so—so—Skew-wiff; too topsy-turvy, somehow, I mean," protested Million, the soldier's orphan, in tones of outrage.

I said: "Life's topsy-turvy. One class goes up in the world (that's your millionaire uncle and you, my dear), while another goes down (that's me and my aunts and uncles who used to have Lovelace Court). Won't you even give me a helping hand, Million? Won't you let me take this 'situation' that would be such a good way out of things for both of us? Aren't you going to engage me as your maid, Miss Million?"

And I waited really anxiously for her decision.