Читать книгу A Sovereign Remedy - Flora Annie Webster Steel - Страница 9

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Would anything stop those waves except a Cornish coast? thought Helen Tressilian, as she watched the green-blue, solid water slip over a half-sunk rock, and with unabated strength, send up against a higher shelving mass a forty-foot column of reckless spray.

And the sky was so blue, the sun so hot, bringing out all the aromatic odours of the cliff herbs. How sweet they were! It would almost be worth while to be a humble bee to work so busily among the purple thyme. She let some heads of it she had picked fall on her lap with a little listless gesture. Yes! to work instead of droning out the days. To work as Herbert, the dead young husband of her dreams, had meant to work. It was seven years since she had lost him in Italy, whither they had gone on their honeymoon for his health. So he lay there dead through the breaking of a blood vessel; dead without a good-bye; dead under the blue sky amid the orange blossoms, while she, after her mother's death, kept house for her father, Sir Geoffrey Pentreath. And still on her roughest serge suits she wore the conventional muslin of widowhood round her throat and wrists.

And in her heart? In her heart she had set up such a fetich of bereavement that the idea of a second marriage was unthinkable. Yet it would have been advisable. The death of her only brother in South Africa sent the few farms, which was all that remained of the great Pentreath estates, to a distant cousin, and for long years past Sir Geoffrey had had no ready money. Poor father! It was the thought of her which made him----

She glanced to the left, over a great scaur of tumbled rocks like some giant's house in ruins, gave a little shiver and buried her face in her hands.

Poor father! Yet how could he? And how could he be mixed up with all those fateful, hateful people with money, who brought their chauffeurs to the old serving-hall at the Keep? Those chauffeurs were the bane of her life; for what should she give them to eat!

Some one from behind clasped her wrists close, and held her hands still on her eyes.

"Guess!" said a sepulchrally gruff voice.

"My dear Ned! Where have you come from?" she answered gaily.

"How did you find out?" asked Ned Blackborough, seating himself on the thyme beside her.

"As if any one but Ned Cruttenden--I can't help the name, my dear--was ever quite so hoarse!"

"By George, Nell," he said, looking seawards, "it is good to be here. That's what one always says, isn't it, when the visible Body of the Lord is transfigured before one's eyes as it is now."

"You know, Ned, I do not agree with your Buddhistic notions," she said, a trifle severely.

"Beg pardon! They're not Buddhistic; but I'm always forgetting you don't like--though you will some day! Meanwhile I want to ask you a question: and as the butler told me you would be on the coast somewhere ... you've a most superior set of London servants just now, Nell----"

"To keep the chauffeurs company," she interrupted, shrugging her shoulders. "One must--but don't let's talk of it--it's sickening---- And so you came to the old place?"

"To the old place, Nell," he repeated, looking at her with criticising eyes of kind affection, and thinking she looked as though she stood in need of physical and moral backing; "I always think of you here, looking out to sea, just under Betty Cam's chair----" he nodded his head backwards to the scaur of tumbled rocks. "If you get looking so long, Nell, you will be seeing ghostly things--like she did. She was your ancestress, you know, and it isn't safe----"

He spoke tentatively, but she evaded him. "You said you had a question," she asked; "what is it?"

"Only if you have room at the Keep?"

She laid her hand on his in swift reproof--"Was there ever a time when there was not room?"

He smiled. "True; but unfortunately I've--I've a second self now."

"Ned!" She stared at him. "Oh Ned! How could you--without a word! Who is she?"

"It is a he, my dear. We collided together and found out our respective names were the same. But of that anon. And there is a Scotch doctor too--a rattling good fellow, one Peter Ramsay, whom we picked up--but of that also anon. Meanwhile these are at the 'Crooked Ewe' regaling themselves, and--well! I can't leave them, you see, for they're my guests, but--but we could dine with the chauffeurs, you know."

"Don't be silly, Ned! Of course you must come. There's still room in the ruins for the family--and you won't mind----"

She broke off suddenly, and looked out to sea.

"Tired, Nell?" he asked quietly. "How you fuss, my dear cousin!"

"Who could help fussing?" she said without looking at him. "We could live so comfortably, father and I, on what we have got, if it were not for this craze of his to make money for me. Ah, Ned! I wish you had never lent him that fifteen thousand."

It was nearer twenty-five thousand, but that fact lay lightly on Ned Blackborough's mind.

"I believe it to be an excellent investment," he remarked coolly, "though I own I didn't know what he wanted it for at the time."

"And you don't know now?" she broke in passionately. "There it stands--despicable utterly--facing the sea--that sea." She pointed to it appealingly.

Ned looked out to the clear horizon, so definite yet so undefined, where a liner, after taking its bearings from the lighthouse far away to the west, was steering straight up Channel. It seemed to glide evenly between sea and sky, and yet here the thunder of each wave filled the air with sound. Ay! a sea not to be safely faced by anything despicable.

"You are letting this beast of an hotel get on your mind, Nell," he said, after a pause. "After all, half the white and coloured cliffs of Old England are so desecrated----"

"Don't excuse it," she interrupted almost fiercely; "it's inexcusable. When I think what Jeff would have said--Jeff who loved every stone--dear old Jeff----" She broke off and hid her face in her hands.

"Curse South Africa!" said Ned under his breath.

She looked up after a while. "You see," she began more composedly, "what stings is that it is all done for me; and I--fifty pounds a year would keep me going as a hospital nurse; and I shall never be anything else, Ned, never! I lost everything for myself seven years ago, and what I have belongs to others. And there is so much in the past for which atonement should be made. You don't belong to the Pentreaths, you see; but they were a wild race--Betty Cam, as you reminded me! Think of her! Why, Ned, when I see at night that hateful place all lit up with electric light and shining far, far out to sea, I feel as if we were doing it all over again! Luring ships to the rocks!"

"My dear Nell, what an imagination you've got!" expostulated her cousin.

She pulled herself up. "Have I? But it is so useless. And it seems to get worse and worse since Mr. Hirsch came in. He is at the Keep now, arranging for a light railway. And oh, Ned! the place where we used to picnic as children--you remember, of course--is all placarded as 'eligible building-sites.'"

Ned whistled, and looked out to sea. As he had said, the white cliffs of Marine England were so disfigured everywhere; but that did not bring much consolation for the destruction of absolute beauty.

"Well," he said, "I only hope some one may think them so, and that the hotel is crowded up to the garrets. It's got to be; for the farmers and the little shopkeepers at Haverton, who put their piles into it--because my uncle did--will expect a dividend!"

"And the others too," she added bitterly. "You know Mr. Hirsch has floated it. It's quoted on the Stock Exchange now, and they are going to run up select jerry-built villas with the money they get on the new shares, as they ran up the jerry-built hotel----"

"With mine," laughed Ned, a trifle uneasily. "Well, my dear child, I hadn't any intention of building it--but it's there--and let us come and look at it. It can't help, can it, being in a lovely spot?"

"Can't it?" she said coldly; "but I try to forget its existence--it gets on my nerves."

"Apparently," he said quietly.

"And so it would on yours," she retorted, "if you lived within hail of it, and nothing else was talked about day and night. But there--let's leave it alone! You can see it on your way to the 'Crooked Ewe.' We shall expect you to lunch, of course."

"Thanks," he replied; "and--and I think you'll like the Scotch doctor--he is so awfully keen. So full too of his work at Blackborough. He is house-surgeon, I think, to some hospital there."

Her face, a moment before, almost sullen in its obstinate objection, lit up at once. "Not St. Peter's!" she cried. "How interesting---- Why! it is the best, they say, in the kingdom; and I mean to have my training in the children's ward there."

"You look rather as if you ought to go there as a patient, Nell," he replied, shaking his head; "and you are a perfect child still. I wonder if you will ever learn----"

"What?" she asked quickly.

"Yourself," he laughed, as he started up the scaur.

Betty Cam's chair lay at the top; a huge slab of gneiss with another forming the back, bearing no particular resemblance to a chair at all. Still there it was that Betty Cam, the witch, used to sit, and, after lighting her false fire, fling her arms about and mutter incantations till deadly storms arose.

Many are such stories, current on the wild west coast, and still firmly believed of the people; none perhaps better authenticated than this, that on the nights of fierce sou'westers a glow of light could still be seen at Betty Cam's chair, and that more than once the ghost of the ghostly Indiaman which, with all sails set, had sailed one awful winter's night straight up the bay, straight over the cliff, nipped up Betty Cam, and sailed away with her right over far Darty-moor to Hell, had been seen pursuing the same extraordinary course.

Ned felt as if he could have put other folk aboard for that trip, as, cresting the hill-top, he came full in sight of the Sea-view Hotel.

He sat down promptly on the chair, and gave a low whistle of dismay.

Cam's point, as he had known it, that gorse-covered promontory sheer down in purpling cliff to the blue-green sea, was gone. In its place was an ineffectual attempt at a--at a tea-garden! Winding walks here, winding walks there, meandering toward aimless summer-houses, kiosks, bandstands, which were recklessly scattered about the bare soil. For it was bare. Gorse would grow there, or scented purple thyme, or any of the innumerable small aromatic herbs which the south-west wind loves, but grass and most garden flowers were helpless before the constant breeze, which, instant in season and out of season, swept over the point laden with salt, and even in this flat, calm, June weather making the steel guy-ropes of the flag-staff hum like a hive of swarming bees.

As for the Sea--view--ye gods! the pestilential obviousness of that name!--Hotel, if it also were not guyed by ropes it looked as if it would be the better of it. What was it, standing on the very edge of the cliff--Italian--Greek--Gothic--or a Swiss chalet? There were reminiscences of all in its medley of inconsequent towers, gables, battlements, balconies. A lunatic asylum built by the patients! Utterly irrational, utterly out of touch with its surroundings of earth, and sea, and sky. Yes! quite antagonistic to the little fishing village in the bay below, to the supreme fairness of the coast trending away westward in headland after headland. Above all, absolutely unfit to face that wide waste of water, so smooth, so silent on the far horizon, so restless, so clamorous in its assault on the near cliffs. You could hear the angry roar of the waves on the rocks, see the weather--stains on those thin walls.

And as he watched a strange thing came about. In every wide window of the huge façade a blaze of light showed, and round the arches hung with lamps in the tea-garden, a multi-coloured flash shone for a second, and then went out again.

They must be trying the electric light. Then he laughed suddenly. It tickled his fancy--apt to be vagrant--to think how this gigantic modern sham, full of false civilisation, full of lifts, lounges, bars, winter-gardens, a real up-to-date, twentieth-century substitute for a home, engineered on the latest American lines, must look to any home-bound ship passing up channel. A beacon distinctly; but a beacon warning the world against what?

"Trinity House and Betty Cam had better settle it between them," he muttered to himself, as, turning at right angles, he set off over the moorland to the "Crooked Ewe," where Peter Ramsay and Ted Cruttenden were awaiting him.

He had picked up the former crossing over from Cardiff to Ilfracombe, and finding he had a few days to spare before taking up his new appointment, Ned had asked him to come on with him and see the prettiest part of Cornwall, and perhaps stop a night with his uncle Sir Geoffrey Pentreath--if there was room.

He wondered rather how Helen had found this room, as he looked round the long lunch table; but, as his uncle confided to him, half of the guests belonged to the hotel. There had been a committee of ways and means, and several people--notably Mr. Robert Jenkin, who was sitting next Helen--were over from Wellhampton for the day. Yes! that was Mr. Hirsch at her other side, a most able man, but rather too near his bête noire, Mr. Jenkin, to show to advantage.

As a matter of fact, Mr. Hirsch was making himself extremely disagreeable to his enemy by insisting on keeping the conversation at a much higher level of culture than any to which Mr. Jenkin could aspire, for he had begun and gone on with life for a considerable time as a local ironmonger. Then fortune had favoured him, and he became the local millionaire, remaining still, however, so Mr. Hirsch declared, "the petty tradesman."

The latter was a very clever, very dapper little German Jew, with nothing to show his ancestry and his age, except a slight foreign lisp, and a still more slight tendency to size below the last button of his waistcoat, a tendency which gave him more concern than it need have done, since it really only showed in profile. For the rest, he was inscrutably good-natured. Money stuck to him, and his many kindnesses never interfered with his keen eye for business--or beauty.

It was Helen's handsome, melancholy face which had been the secret of his interest in Sir Geoffrey's venture; on the principle of opposites, it is to be supposed, since he was a frank pagan, a bon viveur born.

So he talked lightly of Rome, and a few of the crowned heads of Europe with whom he had a bowing acquaintance; but finding this rather too interesting to Mr. Jenkin, he settled down on Bayreuth, and gossiped Parsifal, becoming after a time really engrossed, and saying almost with tears in his eyes, "Ah! my dear lady, how I should love to show you it."

He felt seriously sentimental; in truth, the remark was as near a proposal as he had gone for quite a number of years.

"We intend, Mrs. Tressilian," put in Mr. Jenkin, not to be outdone, "to get the Yaller Peking band down from the Halls durin' our season--July-August. It'll play durin' meals, an' after dinner in the Pirates' Pavilion. An' I'm sure, Mrs. Tressilian, the conductor--he ain't really a Chinaman, ma'am, the pig-tail bein' only a thing to catch on--ha! ha! ha! that ain't a bad joke, is it, Hirsch? Pig-tails a thing to catch on to--ha! ha! ha!"

Mr. Hirsch surveyed him with distasteful wonder.

"You don't wear one, do you, Mr. Jenkin?" he asked suavely, his foreign accent coming out, as it always did, when he was annoyed.

"No, sir, I don't," snapped his adversary; "but as I was sayin', ma'am, I'm sure if you had a hankerin' after any particular tune, he'd play it. I don't know about Percival, but his repertoire of Cake Walk is the first, I'm told, in Europe."

Meanwhile Ned Blackborough was taking stock of the rest of the company. On the whole--queer! The Wrexhams he knew, of course. She went in for spiritualism and he for spirits; both good enough sorts even at that; but the bulk smelt distinctly of money.

And his uncle?

Ned had not seen him for over a year, and he was frankly taken aback by the change in him. His face, weakly handsome as ever, hale still in its thin ruddiness, had lost the cheery look which had survived even the death of his only son, who had "died as a Pentreath should." This and such vague comfortings regarding "rest," and being "with his mother," and of the youthful company whom "the gods love,"--comfortings with which humanity has always met bereavement, had not only been on his lips, but in his heart. He had always been an optimist--and now? Anxiety sat on every feature. The man was haggard. And what was this grievance against Helen which made such sentences as "Mrs. Tressilian will have her own opinion, no doubt," or "You must ask my daughter; I cannot answer for her," quite noticeably frequent in his conversation.

As he sat listening while his next-door neighbour, a very talkative and a very deaf lady, assured him that her motor, which she had bought in Paris, was the only one of its kind in England, and that it was absolutely, entirely, shakeless and noiseless, Lord Blackborough had time for cogitation.

They were very smart people, and it was a very smart luncheon: champagne, pâte-de-foie en aspic, liquers, and cigarettes on the lawn. A new régime certainly for the kindly old Keep, where, as a boy, he had spent his holidays with his aunt, his mother's sister. Yes! a new régime, especially if the chauffeurs were being similarly regaled downstairs!

And what a fine old place it was! set so deep out of the way of the wind in a hollow of old pines and oaks, and yet so close to the sea that even now the hollow boom of the Atlantic waves sounded against the shrill voices of those smart women as a bassoon sounds against a violin. Ay! and in the winter sou'-westers, the rush and hush of the sea blent with the rush and hush of the leaves. He could imagine Betty Cam--h'm, that was Helen's fault for being so tragic! He looked round for her, and saw her talking to Dr. Ramsay. Ted also was well employed, hanging on Mr. Hirsch's lips as he spoke airily of bulls and bears. Ted, if he didn't take care, would become a zoologist also!

So thought Ned Blackborough as he wandered away from the lawns that were still kept smooth and green, towards the wilderness of garden beyond. And the thought of money bringing the thought of Aura, he smiled, lit a cigar, and went still further afield to find a certain peach tree that used to have peaches on it.

The others were happy, why should he not have his share of enjoyment?

As a matter of fact, however, Helen and Dr. Ramsay were not enjoying themselves; at least she was not, for he had met her assertion that the one wish of her life ("since my husband's death seven years ago," being interpolated with the usual note of resigned reverence in her voice) had been to be a hospital nurse, with a dubious shake of the head.

"I wouldn't if I were you," he said slowly. "I rather doubt your being fit for it. One requires a lot of stamina."

She stared at him almost haughtily. "But I am very strong, I assure you," she replied, with a smile of great tolerance, "I daresay I look pale--for the Cornish coast; but, oh! I am very strong!"

"Physically, perhaps." His Scotch accent gave the qualification great precision.

"Then, mentally----" she almost gasped.

"Mentally, no," he replied quite calmly.

"Excuse me," she remarked, "but I really do not think you know me well enough."

"Do I not?" he remarked, his brown eyes smiling into hers; "you forget that I am a doctor, and, Mrs. Tressilian, your nervous system is at the present moment--mind you, it's no blame--in absolutely unstable equilibrium."

"Unstable equilibrium! Really, Dr. Ramsay"

"My dear lady," he said, "I have been thinking all lunchtime that if you would only allow yourself to be hypnotised, you would be clairvoyant. I shouldn't wonder if you would be able to project yourself! and think what that might mean! Why, you might give us a clue----" he paused quite excited.

"And what has that to do with nursing?" she asked coldly.

"It makes for a temperament that is too--what shall I call it?--unpractical. You have a gift--a great gift--but it is not for nursing; you are too sentimental."

"And how do you arrive at that conclusion?" she asked, interested in spite of herself.

"Excuse me!" He touched the muslin cuff she wore with a hand she could not help admiring: it was so shapely, so strong, so skilful-looking, albeit so small for a man of his height.

Yet her eyes flashed a quick challenge at him. "You mean that it is sentimental and unpractical to mourn those one loves. I do not agree with you."

The sunlight glinting through his eyes turned them almost to amber. There was a world of gentle raillery in them at which, however, it was impossible to be angry.

"To wear your heart on your sleeve?--yes," he replied. "Ah, Mrs. Tressilian, believe me, you are lost to the world! What a wife you would have made with your ardent imagination to some grovelling slave tied down, as I am, by the nose, to the body of things! But that is another story, and so is clairvoyance, though in your present state I'm convinced you could see. The point at issue remains that----" he paused.

"Well!" she asked almost eagerly.

He laughed. "My patients say I prescribe Paradise, when I beg them not to fash themselves. But there is one thing I have found out. I can't tell you why, but worry stops the working of the vital machine. It gets into the cogs somehow and clogs the wheels. Then you fall back on reserve-force, and having exhausted that, feel exhausted. We doctors nowadays are helpless before the feeling of hustle. We prescribe rest-cures, but you can worry as much, perhaps more, on the flat of the back! The remedy lies with the patient. And you have so much imagination, Mrs. Tressilian. Used cheerfully, it is the most valuable therapeutic agent we have. Ah! here comes your father. Some of the hotel people want to take us all back to tea, and I expect he is coming to ask you about it."

She looked at him steadily, but he showed no consciousness, and she turned to meet Sir Geoffrey feeling baffled. She had known about and had meant to avoid this tea; but something in the very directness of Dr. Ramsay's unsought diagnosis roused her to show him its incorrectness.

Anyhow she found herself rather to her disgust not only going to the hotel, but going in the front seat of Mr. Hirsch's motor.

And once in the wide, south-western verandah--which was built so close to the perpendicular cliff that leaning over the balustrade you could see nothing but the sea--while the salt wind clung to her cheek like the fierce kiss of a lover, bringing with it an unwonted flush of colour, she was forced to admit that the place had its charms; that it was not all vulgarised. There was laughter and music, of course (both of them loud), about the tea-tables, but at the further end comparative peace reigned around the couch of an invalid lady, whose little girl was apparently a great friend of Sir Geoffrey's. He was always so good to children, she remembered with a pang, picturing herself as she was at little Maidie's age.

The child's mother, Amy Massingham, was very dark--dark, with those large lustrous eyes, and very white teeth, which suggest Indian blood; and she must have been beautiful before languor and pallor had come instead of rich colour and vivacity. Still, even at her best she could never have touched the exceeding brightness and beauty of her little daughter Maidie. She was incomparable. A little vivid tropical bird flitting about Sir Geoffrey, chattering, her small round face glowing with brilliant tints, sparkling, dimpling, her teeth showing in a flash of smiles that seemed to irradiate her body and soul, while her cloud of dark hair, still golden bronze at its curly tips, floated about with her.

She was like a ripe pomegranate, yellow and red-brown in her dainty little yellow silk frock.

Perched now on Sir Geoffrey's long lap, she was stroking his soft moleskin knees, and swinging herself backwards and forwards rhythmically.

"And when daddie comes from India," she insisted, "we won't go 'way and leave 'oo, Sir Geoffley, will we, mumsie? We'em goin' to stop at Seaview always, an' always, an' always. Ain't we, mums?"

Amy Massingham smiled gently: she did everything so very gently that she failed, as it were, to do anything at all. Her impact was not strong enough to move any fixed object.

"Well, my precious! It would be delightful, and dear Sir Geoffrey is so kind, isn't he? but I'm afraid dadda can't manage it. You see, Mrs. Tressilian, darling old Dick is only home on short leave--really only to see me--but his people will want to have him first thing."

"Oh, mumsie! We'se goin' to have him the firstest thing of all," protested Maidie, who was now on the floor, fondling the big curly retriever who was always Sir Geoffrey's shadow, "for his ship'll pass over there--right over there, don't you see, Mrs. T'sllian."

She was by this time leaning over the balustrade beside Helen and looked up at her--such a sparkling, brilliant little maid!--with fearless eye. Something in the childless woman's heart went out to her, and beyond her again to the grave far away under the orange-trees of the man who was dying when she married him. If she could have had such a child!--it had been better, perhaps.

"Supposing we were to put up a signal here, saying, 'Mumsie and Maidie waiting for you,' wouldn't it be fun?" she said, smiling.

"Will you do it?" said the child quickly.

She shook her head. "It was only supposing, Maidie," she replied.

The little brilliant creature's face fell. "Oh! I wis' you would--make 'em stop right here, just this corner. I want him to stop, an' then I'd go on the ship too, an' sail, an' sail, an' sail." She had forgotten her disappointment in the new idea. That is what the world does generally, thought Helen; and yet----

"I suppose you love your father, don't you, Maidie?" she asked suddenly.

The child looked at her gravely. "'Normous much," she replied, repeating her stock phrase. "An' I love Sir Geoffley 'normous much too. We 're goin' to live together, an' I'm to be his darlin' for ever an' ever an' nay! Ain't we? Ain't we?"

And she flung herself into his arms as he approached them, an unreserved joyous bundle of curls, smiles, and dimples. His face relaxed from the hard look of pressing anxiety it had worn all day. He caught the child up, tossing her like a feather above his long length, then cuddling her close to kiss.

"For ever, and ever, and aye!" he echoed; "Never fear, Maidie, I'm yours to command."

Then he set her down and turned to his daughter. "Helen!" he said, "I've some business here which may keep me awhile. You'll drive back with Hirsch, of course."

She did not meet his eyes, but kept hers far out at sea.

"I think not, father," she said gently, "I want to walk home with Ned. I have something to say to him."

Sir Geoffrey looked at her resentfully. "Ned has found a sick Indian friend upstairs and won't be available--you'd better go."

She turned round then. "No, father, I can't. It isn't fair--on him. Even coming here----" She broke off, and turned to the sea again.

He came closer, hesitated. "Nell," he said almost pitifully, "can't you--to please me? He really is a good fellow at bottom. I wouldn't ask it otherwise. It would free me--from you don't know what. And, my God! in London half the pretty women one meets are married to such awful bounders."

"It is because Mr. Hirsch isn't a bounder--because he really is in some ways a good fellow," she said, "that I will not--I can walk back with the others."

He stood looking at her with anger and affection in his eye for a moment, then strode off to say good-bye to Mrs. Massingham.

"I suppose your husband may drop in any moment," he said cheerfully.

"Any moment," she echoed, "we are so excited, Maidie and I. This morning we saw such a big vessel passing, right away on the horizon. The manager thought it might be a transport."

Maidie looked up and nodded her cloud of curls. "But it wasn't, you see," she said; "for she's--(here she nodded again at Helen)--goin' to signal 'Stop here!'"

"That was only supposing, Maidie!"

"Supposing an' supposing an' supposin'. 'Free times 'free is 'free," quoted Maidie slyly, "Just you wait an' see."

"Yes! wait and see," laughed Sir Geoffrey; "Goodbye, little one! Next time, I suppose, daddy will have put my nose out of joint, and you won't have anything to say to me--eh?"

She grew crimson to her ear-tips. "Never! never! never!" she cried, stamping her foot wilfully; "we's goin' to live together for everan'everan'--aye!"

The bystanders laughed at her sudden passion, and Sir Geoffrey's thin, ruddy face actually flushed a still deeper red.

"All right, little lady," he said half-sheepishly. "Never you fear! I'll keep my promise for ever an' never an'-naye!"