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Read Ebook: Miss Million's Maid: A Romance of Love and Fortune by Ruck Berta
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Ebook has 2629 lines and 103638 words, and 53 pages
I THE YOUNG MAN NEXT DOOR . . . . . . 1
II TWO GIRLS IN A KITCHEN . . . . . . 10
V MILLION LEAVES HER PLACE . . . . . . 31
VI ANOTHER RUMPUS! . . . . . . . . 36
X AN ORGY OF SHOPPING! . . . . . . . 67
XX WHERE IS SHE? . . . . . . . . . 168
XXX OUT ON BAIL . . . . . . . . . 319
THE YOUNG MAN NEXT DOOR
MY story begins with an incident that is bound to happen some time in any household that boasts--or perhaps deplores--a high-spirited girl of twenty-three in it.
It begins with "a row" about a young man.
My story begins, too, where the first woman's story began--in a garden.
It was the back garden of our red-roofed villa in that suburban street, Laburnum Grove, Putney, S.W.
Now all those eighty-five neat gardens up and down the leafy road are one exactly like the other, with the same green strip of lawn just not big enough for tennis, the same side borders gay with golden calceolaria, scarlet geranium, blue lobelia, and all the bright easy-to-grow London flowers. All the villas belonging to the gardens seem alike, too, with their green front doors, their white steps, their brightly polished door-knockers and their well-kept curtains.
From the look of these typically English, cheerful, middle-class, not-too-well-off little homes you'd know just the sort of people who live in them. The plump, house-keeping mother, the season-ticket father, the tennis-playing sons, the girls in dainty blouses, who put their little newly whitened shoes to dry on the bathroom window-sill, and who call laughing remarks to each other out of the window.
"I say, Gladys! don't forget it's the theatre to-night!"
"Oh, rather not! See you up at the Tennis Club presently?"
"No; I'm meeting Vera to shop and have lunch in Oxford Street."
Yes! From what I see of them, they do get heaps of fun out of their lives, these young people who make up such a large slice of the population of our great London. There's laughter and good-fellowship and enjoyment going on all up and down our road.
I simply long for somebody fresh of my own age to talk to. And I see so many of them about here!
"It's like starving in the midst of plenty," I said to myself this evening as I was watering the pinks in the side borders. The girls at No. 46, to the right of our garden, were shrieking with laughter together on their lawn over some family joke or other--I listened enviously to their merriment.
"Good evening!" said a pleasant, man's voice into the midst of my reverie.
Startled, I glanced up.
The voice came over the palings between our garden and that of No. 44. Through the green trellis that my aunt had had set up over the palings I beheld a gleam of white flannel-clad shoulders and of smooth, fair hair.
It was the young man who's lately come to live next door.
I've always thought he looked rather nice, and rather as if he would like to say good morning or something whenever I've met him going by.
I suppose I ought not to have noticed even that? And, of course, according to my upbringing, I ought certainly not to have noticed him now. I ought to have fixed a silent, Medusa-like glare upon the trellis. I ought then to have taken my battered little green watering-can to fill it for the fourteenth time at the scullery-tap. Then I ought to have begun watering the Shirley poppies on the other side of the garden.
But how often the way one's been brought up contradicts what one feels like doing! And alas! How very often the second factor wins the day!
It won the evening, that time.
I said: "Good evening."
And I thought that would be the end of it, but no.
The frank and boyish voice took up quite quickly and eagerly: "Er--I say, isn't it rather a long job watering the garden that way?"
It was, of course. But we couldn't afford a hose. Why, they cost about thirty shillings.
He said: "Do have the 'lend' of our hose to do the rest of them, won't you?" And thereupon he stretched out a long, white-sleeved arm over the railings and put the end of the hose straight into my hand.
"Oh, thank you; but I will not trouble you. Good evening."
Of course, that would have been the thing to say, icily, before I walked off.
"It's quite all right, thanks," he said. "Most refreshing!"
Here I realised that I was still giving him a shower-bath all the time.
Then we both laughed heartily together. It was the first good laugh I'd had for months! And then I trained the hose off him at last and on to our border, while the young man, watching me from over the palings, said quickly:
Well, I suppose I shall never know now, what he wanted to ask. For that was the moment when there broke upon the peaceful evening air the sound of a voice from the back window of our drawing-room, calling in outraged accents:
"Beatrice! Bee--atrice!"
Immediately all the laughter went out of me.
"Y--yes, Aunt Anastasia," I called back. In my agitation I dropped the end of the hose on to the ground, where it began irrigating the turf and my four-and-elevenpenny shoes at the same time.
"Beatrice, come in here instantly," called my aunt in a voice there was no gainsaying.
So, leaving the hose where it lay, and without another glance at the trellis, in I dashed through the French window into our drawing-room.
A queer mixture of a room it is. So like us; so typical of our circumstances! A threadbare carpet and the cheapest bamboo easy-chairs live cheek-by-jowl with a priceless Chippendale cabinet from Lovelace Court, holding a few pieces of china that represent the light of other days. Upon the faded cheap wallpaper there hangs the pride of our home, the Gainsborough portrait of one chestnut-haired, slim-throated ancestress, Lady Anastasia Lovelace, in white muslin and a blue sash, painted on the terrace steps at Lovelace Court.
This was the background to the figure of my Aunt Anastasia, who stood, holding herself as stiff as a poker in her three-year-old grey alpaca gown with the little eightpence-three-farthings white collar fastened by her pearl brooch with granny's hair in it.
Her face told me what to expect. A heated flush, and no lips. One of Auntie's worst tempers!
"Beatrice!" she exclaimed in a low, agitated tone. "I am ashamed of you. I am ashamed of you." She could not have said it more fervently if I'd been found forging cheques. "After all my care! To see you hobnobbing like a housemaid with these people!"
Aunt Anastasia always mentions the people here as who should say "the worms in the flower-beds" or "the blight upon the rambler-roses."
"The thinnest of excuses," put in my aunt, curling what was left visible of her lips. "You need not have taken the hose."
"He put it right into my hand."
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