Happy Pollyooly Part 12

"Let's go into a waiting-room and talk it over quietly. We don't want to make any silly mistakes," said Mr. Wilkinson yet more faintly.

"I should think you didn't! You've made enough already," said the Honourable John Ruffin frankly. "But you'd better come along to my chambers. I've got Mary Bride's little brother there and a woman who has known her all her life. If you can't take my word for it, she'll convince you all right."

Mr. Wilkinson was very limp in the taxicab: he perceived that he had allowed his enthusiasm to carry him away with the result that he had been hopelessly duped. It was indeed mortifying, the more mortifying that he could not blame any one but himself--himself and nature. The more carefully he examined Pollyooly the more impressed he was by her likeness to Lady Marion Ricksborough. The detective was gloomy; he had lost a night's rest for nothing, as well as his hope of forthwith receiving the reward for the capture of the missing child, for it was he who had tracked her to the house in Devon. Now he might be months recovering her trail.

The Honourable John Ruffin on the other hand was in excellent spirits.

He had no desire to embroil himself with his cousin, by definitely taking the side of the d.u.c.h.ess in their quarrel; and he began to see plainly that the matter would never come to the duke's ears. Neither the lawyer nor the detective would talk about it; they both cut too ridiculous a figure.

At 75 the King's Bench Walk, they found Mrs. Brown and the Lump. Mr.

Wilkinson needed no more evidence than the warmth with which Pollyooly kissed and hugged her little brother; but none the less he received Mrs. Brown's convincing a.s.surances that she was Mary Bride.

When that worthy woman had been dismissed to the kitchen, he said heavily:

"This has been an unfortunate mistake--very unfortunate."

"Not so unfortunate as it would have been if Pollyooly had been ten years older. It would have cost you hundreds. As it is, I shouldn't wonder if she would be content with a fiver as compensation," said the Honourable John Ruffin with a soothing smile.

Mr. Wilkinson groaned; then he said:

"Well, I've made a mistake, and I suppose I must pay for it."

Slowly and sadly he drew a five-pound note from his notebook and handed it to Pollyooly.

"Thank you, sir," said Pollyooly; and dropped a curtsey, like the well-mannered child she was.

"Your housekeeper? To think that she should have roused the whole hotel to get that bath!" said Mr. Wilkinson bitterly.

"She was for the time being the daughter of a duke--by your appointment," said the Honourable John Ruffin suavely.

Mr. Wilkinson waved the detective out of the room, and followed him.

At the door he paused to say very heavily:

"I shall never trust my eyes again."

"No: I shouldn't," said the Honourable John Ruffin gently. "I think another time, if I were you, I should try gla.s.ses."

CHAPTER VII

POLLYOOLY PLAYS THE GOOD SAMARITAN

Mr. Wilkinson had departed, a sadder but very little wiser man, and taken his detective with him; Mrs. Brown had been thanked, paid, and dismissed; and Pollyooly, having sufficiently fondled and kissed the irresponsive but unresisting Lump, went into the kitchen and set about getting ready the Honourable John Ruffin's tea.

She had lighted the gas under the kettle and taken the bread and b.u.t.ter from the cupboard, when he came into the kitchen, wearing an air of the most earnest purpose, and said impressively:

"Genius, Pollyooly--genius is the art of taking infinite pains."

"Yes, sir," said Pollyooly politely.

"That is why you are unsurpa.s.sed in the art of grilling bacon; you take infinite pains with it," he went on with the same earnestness.

"Yes, sir," said Pollyooly with more understanding.

"And now I am going to instruct you in the art of making tea," he said proudly. "I only learned yesterday that it was an art. Till then I believed that you merely poured boiling water on tea, and there you were. I have learned that it is not so. Also I have learned that that vegetable which comes from India and Ceylon, and is called tea by those who sell it, is not really tea at all. Tea only comes from China; and I have bought some."

"Yes, sir," said Pollyooly with the air of one receiving information gratefully.

"And now I will teach you the art of making it exactly as it was taught to me," he said with a very schoolmasterly air.

Thereupon, under his instructions, Pollyooly warmed the tea-pot and stood by the tea-caddy ready to put in two teaspoonfuls of tea (one for him, one for the pot) the moment the kettle boiled. The moment it did boil, following his instructions, she put the tea into the pot, and then, tilting the kettle without taking it from the stove, she poured the still boiling water on to it. Then she inverted the little gla.s.s egg-boiler and stood ready to bring the infusing tea into his sitting-room as soon as the upper half of it was nearly empty of sand.

Then he said in raised and sonorous tones of profound satisfaction:

"That is the art of making tea. Now that you have once learnt it, I know,--I am sure that very soon you will be not only the finest griller of bacon in England, but also the finest maker of tea."

"I'll try, sir," said Pollyooly cheerfully. "It doesn't seem very difficult."

"To genius nothing is _very_ difficult," said the Honourable John Ruffin impressively. "The difficulty is to stick to it--to go on getting the thing right every time. But you can do it with bacon: why not with tea?"

When the sand had nearly all run out of the upper part of the gla.s.s, she took the tray into the sitting-room; he poured out a cup of tea, and declared that it was tea fit for the G.o.ds.

Pollyooly smiled at his satisfaction, and then said:

"Please, sir: I should like a note to Madame Correlli to say that I couldn't go to my dancing yesterday because I had to go into the country. She is so particular."

"Certainly; I will write it after tea," said the Honourable John Ruffin amiably.

After he had finished his tea he wrote the note and gave it to her.

Then she paid a proud visit to the Post Office Savings Bank and added to her fattening account the sum of twelve pounds. Undoubtedly the Osterley family were valuable acquaintances.

Fortified by the exculpatory note from the Honourable John Ruffin, Pollyooly went next morning to her dancing cla.s.s with an easy mind.

It had been clear to her friends that the career of housekeeper, admirably as she discharged its duties, was far inferior to her abilities; it did not give them nearly full scope. Those friends were young, and they were alive, keenly alive, to the fact that there is a steady demand for angels in that sphere of British and German industry curiously known as musical comedy. They could not conceive that, since she had to work for a living, Pollyooly's natural grace and the agility she had acquired in her earlier childhood, at the village of Muttle Deeping, and still retained, could be put to more agreeable and profitable use than that of helping to supply this demand for angels, and so help to raise the British ideal of womanly beauty.

For three mornings in the week therefore, Pollyooly, taking the Lump with her, went to Madame Correlli's dancing cla.s.s in Soho; and thanks to her active early life at Muttle Deeping, was esteemed by that accomplished lady one of her most promising pupils. It is no wonder that Pollyooly and her young friend and fiance Lord Ronald Ricksborough, the heir of the Duke of Osterley, looked forward with confidence to the day when she should be a s.h.i.+ning light of musical comedy and the proper wife for a British n.o.bleman.

Madame Correlli read the Honourable John Ruffin's note with indulgence, accepted the excuse, and set Pollyooly to work.

Pollyooly was disinclined to make friends, close friends, of the other little girls in her cla.s.s. She was indeed very civil to them, like the well-mannered child she was; but they did not greatly attract her.

Belonging to hard-working, dancing families, they talked a great deal in their high-pitched, tw.a.n.ging voices about their friends and relations who danced at the Varolium, Panjandrum, and other music halls, friends of whom, since she herself aspired to higher things, Pollyooly had but a poor opinion. Moreover, many of them powdered their little faces, penciled their eyebrows, and deepened the roses in their cheeks with rose-carmine or rouge; and to Pollyooly, a daughter of Muttle Deeping, these practices were repugnant.

But she had formed one friends.h.i.+p among them, a friends.h.i.+p born of her protective instinct, with Millicent Saunders, a frail, pale wisp of a child, whose black eyes looked very big indeed in her thin face, framed in a ma.s.s of black hair. The other pupils were apt to look down on Millicent, because, though few of them ran to finery, Millicent was shabby indeed. Pollyooly was quite unaffected by this, for in the days when she had lived in the dreadful fear that she and the Lump might be driven by necessity into the workhouse, she had gone shabby herself.

She knew that Millicent's mother, who had once been a dancer, was now a charwoman, often out of work, and in feeble health. It was Millicent's perpetual complaint that she herself was so slow growing up to the age at which she would be earning money and supporting her ailing mother.

Down the vista of the future she saw a splendid vision in which her mother should always have a bloater with her tea. To Pollyooly Millicent always looked hungry.

It was Millicent's great pleasure to sit with the Lump on her knee in the intervals of their work, mothering him as long as he would suffer it; and it was her privilege to take his left hand as Pollyooly led him from Soho, across the dangerous crossings to the safe stretch of the embankment from Charing-Cross to the Temple. As they went Pollyooly and Millicent talked of the price of provisions and the trials of housekeeping.