Miss Million's Maid Part 64

"Where's your mistress? In the drawing-room? Then come into the library, child," said the Honourable Jim Burke, "for it's you I've come to call upon."

"I've only a minute to spare you," I said forbiddingly, as I showed him into the square, rather mouldy-smelling library, with its wall of unread books and its family-portraits of dead and gone Price-Vaughans. "And besides, I don't think a chauffeur ought to come to the front door and----"

"I shall not be a chauffeur a minute longer than it takes me to get out of this dashed kit," said the Honourable Jim. Then he told me about his enlisting for active service.

"It won't be much time I shall have before that regiment gets its orders," he said. "Time enough, though----"

He paused and looked hard at me. So hard that I felt myself colouring, and turned away.

He took a step after me. I felt him give a little pull at my ap.r.o.n-strings to make me look round.

"Time enough to get married, darling of my heart," said Jim Burke, laughing softly.

And he took me into his arms and kissed me; at first very gently, then eagerly, fiercely, as if to make up for time already lost and for all that time yet to come when we must be apart from each other.

This, if you please, was all the proposal that ever I had from the young man.

I know all his faults.

Unscrupulous; he doesn't care how many duller and stodgier people he uses to his own advantage. Insincere; except to his wife. To me he shows his heart!

Vain--well, with his attractions, hasn't he cause for it? Unstable as water, he shall not excel; except in the moment of stress and the tight corner where a hundred more trusted men might fail, as they did the day he won the Military Cross, when he took that German trench single-handed, and was found with the enemy, aghast, surrendering in heaps around him!

His dare-devil gaiety and recklessness are given value now by the conditions of this war. And I feel that he will come back to me unscratched at the end of the struggle, his career a.s.sured. It will be luck, his unfailing luck as usual--no merit of his!

Meanwhile I wait hopefully.

I feed my heart's hunger, as do so many other women, on pencilled sc.r.a.ps of letters scrawled across the envelope "on active service."

As for my living, I haven't gone back to Aunt Anastasia, nor have I yet solved the weighty problem of how a woman of my cla.s.s and requirements is to live on the separation allowance. Now that Miss Million has gone back to her old work Mrs. James Burke has taken another job; well paid, and to a kindly mistress.

Miss Vi Va.s.sity's "dresser" gave notice because she had been offered higher wages by a French dancer. And London's Love, who, she says, hates "to see any strange face putting the liquid white on her shoulders,"

offered the post to "little Smithie."

I accepted.

I live the queer, garish, artificially lighted life of the theatres now.

I dress the hair and change the Paris frocks, and lace the corsets, and mend the pink silk fles.h.i.+ngs of England's Premier Comedienne.

I am in her dressing-room now, busily folding and putting away her scattered, scented garments. Even from here I can catch the roar of applause that goes up from every part of the theatre as she comes on in that dainty, impertinent travesty of a Highlander's uniform to sing her latest recruiting song, "The London Skittish."

To the right of her making-up mirror there stands a ma.s.sively framed, full-length photograph of a slim lad's figure in black tights. It's the picture of that worthless trick cyclist, who was the love of Vi Va.s.sity's life.

Ah, Vi! Do you think he is the only man whose cropped dark hair has felt like velvet beneath a woman's lips? The only man whose laugh has pierced a woman's heart "straight as a pebble drops into a pool"?

The woman knows better. I know some one who----

Suddenly I saw his dark head, his laughing face in the mirror before me.

Jim!

I thought I must be dreaming.

I turned; I met his black-lashed blue gaze.

His broad-shouldered, khaki-clad form filled up the narrow doorway of Vi Va.s.sity's dressing-room.

"Child," he called in the inexpressibly soft Irish voice.

He held out his arms.

It was he--my husband.

I ran to him....

"Gently," he said, wincing ever so little. "Mind my shoulder, now. It's smashed--more or less completely."

I cried out, seeing now that the jacket hung like a dolman upon his shoulder. I faltered the thought that would come to any woman. Yes!

However brave she was, however glad to let her man go out to do "his bit," there is a limit to what she is willing to lose ... and there are still young and strong and able-bodied civilians in England, untouched even by a Zeppelin bomb!

I said: "You can't--you can't be sent out again?"

"Bad cess to it, no," frowned my husband. "Don't look so relieved now, or I'll have to feel ashamed of you, Lady Ballyneck----"

"What d'you call me?" I asked, not comprehending. It was some minutes before I did understand what he said about his dad and his brother Terence, both "outed" the same day at Neuve Chapelle.

"And ourselves saddled with the G.o.d-forsaken castle and the estate, save the mark," said my husband, Lord Ballyneck, ruefully. "What we'll do with it until we let it to Miss Million at a princely rental (as I mean to) the dear only knows! It's a fine match you've made for yourself, child, though, when all's said. A t.i.tle, at all events. Sure I might have done better for myself," he concluded, with his blue eyes, alive with mirth and tenderness, feasting on my face. "I might have done better for myself than Miss Million's maid!"

THE END

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