Lady Maude's Mania

She hid her face upon the withered old hand, and the burning blood crimsoned her soft white neck at this avowal.

“Well – well – well! He – he – he!” chuckled the old man. “I – I – I don’t see anything so very shocking in that, Maude. Charley Melton is a doosed fine fellow, and I like him very much indeed.”

“Oh, papa, papa,” cried Maude joyfully; and she turned, flung her arms round his neck, and hid her face in his bosom.

“Yes, Maude,” he continued. “He’s a gentleman, and a man of honour, though he’s poor like the rest of us.”

“Thank God – thank God!” murmured Maude, as the words made her heart throb with joy.

“His father was a gentleman too and a man of honour, though a bit wild. He was my junior at Eton. I like Charley Melton, and though I should hate the man who tried to rob me of my little pet here, I don’t think I should be very hard on him.”

“Yap – yap – yap!” came from the back drawing-room, and the old gentleman looked inquiringly at his child.

“It is a pet dog,” she said contemptuously, “that Sir Grantley Wilters has brought as a present for me.”

“Don’t have it, my dear,” said the old gentleman, eagerly. “I wouldn’t. He’s a miserable screw of a fellow, that Wilters. I don’t like him, and her ladyship’s always trying to bring him forward. She’ll be wanting to make him marry you next.”

“Didn’t you know, papa?” cried Maude.

“Know, my darling? Know what?”

“He has proposed to mamma for my hand.”

“Then – then – then,” cried the old man, indignantly, “he – he – he shan’t have it. If my Maude is to be nurse to any man, she shall be nurse to me. He – he don’t want a wife.”

The old man shook his head angrily, and then patted and caressed the fair young girl who clung to him for protection. What his protection was worth he showed when a carriage stopped at the door, and her ladyship’s trumpet tones were heard soon after on the stairs.

“Maude, my darling,” he said, “here’s her ladyship. I – I think I’ll slip off this way down to my study.”

He went out by one door, timing himself carefully, as her ladyship came in at the other, and began praising the “lovely” little pet dog which Sir Grantley had left, to which the little brute replied by snapping at her fiercely as she approached her hand.

All the same though it had to make friends with her ladyship, who adopted it from the next day, Maude stubbornly refusing to have anything to do with the black and tan specimen of the canine race wrought by the “fancy” in filigree.

Chapter Ten.

Love’s Messengers

“How a young lady as calls herself a young lady can bemean herself by making a pet of a low-bred, ill-looking dog like that, I can’t think,” said Mr Robbins, laying himself out for a speech in the servants’ hall. “That’s a nice enough little tarrier as Sir Grantley Wilters brought, and she won’t have none of it, but leaves it to her ladyship.”

“Yes,” said the footman, “and a nice mess is made, with sops and milk and cutlets all over the carpet.”

“Joseph,” said the butler with dignity, “it is not the place of a young man like you in livery to find fault with the acts of your superiors. Servants as do such things never rises to be out of livery.”

“Thanky, sir,” said Joseph, who, being a young man of a lively imagination and much whiskers, turned his head, squinted horribly at an under housemaid, and made her giggle.

“Such a dog as that ugly brute as comes brushing into the house every time the door is opened is only fit to go with a costermonger or a butcher.”

“Well, I’m sure, Mr Robbins,” said the cook, who for reasons of her own had a weakness for tradesmen in the latter line, “butchers are as good as butlers any day.”

“Perhaps they are, Mrs Downes – perhaps they are not,” said the butler with dignity; “but what I say is, Mr Melton ought to have known better than ever to have brought such a beast into a gentleman’s house.”

“That for your opinion, Mr Robbins,” said Mademoiselle Justine, colouring up and snapping her fingers. “I know what you think,” she said, speaking in a high-pitched, excited voice. “You think that a lady should admire scented men in fine tailor’s clothes and flowers, and wiz zere leetle wretched dogs. Bah! Tish! A woman loves the big and ugly and ster-r-r-rong. She can be weak and beautiful herself. Is it not so, my friends? Yes.”

Mademoiselle Justine shook her head, tightened her lips, and with sparkling eyes looked round the table, ending with heightened colour and patting her little bottine upon the floor.

“Well, that dog’s ugly enough anyhow,” said Robbins, smiling faintly, and making a second chin above his cravat. “As for that Mr Melton – ”

“Ah, bah! stop you there,” cried Mademoiselle Justine. “I do not say he is ugly, but he is big and sterong and has broad shouldaire. He is all a man —tout-à-fait all a – quite a man.”

There was another sharp burst of nods and jerks at this.

“You think, you, that my young lady will marry this Sir Wilters? That for him! He is a man for the Maison Dieu or the Invalides. He marry! ha, ha, ha! I could blow him out myself. Poof! He is gone.”

Mademoiselle Justine blew some imaginary bit of fluff from her fingers as she spoke, apparently shook her head into a kind of notch or catch in the spine, and then sat very upright and very rigid, while the butler said grace and the party broke up.

Lunch had been over in the dining-room some time, and her ladyship was going out for a drive. Maude had again declined, and her ladyship had smiled, knowing that Sir Grantley Wilters would probably call. Her ladyship was wonderfully made up, and looked her best, for Monsieur Hector Launay from Upper Gimp Street had had an interview with her that morning. There had been a consultation on freckles, and a large mole which troubled her ladyship’s chin had been condemned to death, executed with some peculiar acid, and its funeral performed and mourning arranged with a piece of black court plaster, which now looked like a beauty spot upon the lady’s chin.

Her gloves, of the sweetest pearl grey, fitted her plump hands to perfection, and she was quite ready to go out.

“Where is your papa, dear Maude,” said her ladyship, stopping to smell a bouquet. “Ah me, how sweet! How kind Sir Grantley is, and what taste he has in flowers.”

“Papa is in the library,” said Maude, quietly, and she glanced nervously towards the door.

“Come then, a sweet,” cried her ladyship; “and he shall go and have a nice ride in the carriage, he shall, and look down and bark at all the dirty dogs in the road.”

As she showed her second best teeth in a large smile, the little terrier took it to be a challenge of war, and displayed his own pigmy set; but after a due amount of coaxing, and the gift of a lump of sugar, he permitted himself to be caught and placed beneath her ladyship’s plump arm, presenting to a spectator who had a side view a little head cocking out in front, and a little tail cocking out behind – nothing more.

“I shall be back by five, I dare say, Maude. Where is Tryphie?”

“I am here, aunt, quite ready,” said a cheerful voice, and the bright little girl appeared at the door.

“You are not quite ready: you have only one glove on. Tryphie, you might pay some respect to those who find you a home and protection.”

The girl coloured slightly but made no answer, only exchanged glances with Maude, and kissed her hand to her.

“Dear me!” exclaimed her ladyship, “where did I put my flaçon? Oh, I remember.”

She marched in a stately manner with the roll of a female beadle, or an alderman in his gold chain of office, to an Indian cabinet, opened a drawer and inserted her hand.

“Why, what is this?” she exclaimed, drawing out something whitey brown and throwing it down with an ejaculation of annoyance. “Disgusting!”

The toy terrier uttered a sharp yelp of excitement, leaped from her ladyship’s arms on to a table, upsetting a china cup and saucer, bounded on to the floor and seized that which her ladyship had rejected – to wit, a savoury-looking chicken bone, and proceeded to denude it of its flesh.

“I declare your papa grows insufferable,” cried her ladyship. “His brain must be softening. I shall consult the doctor about him.”

Certainly it was very annoying, for her ladyship’s pearly grey Parisian glove had a broad brown smear of osmazome across it, and all due to Lord Barmouth’s magpie-like trick of hiding scraps of food away for future consumption, in Indian cabinets and china jars, and then forgetting the caché he had made.

Mademoiselle Justine was summoned, a fresh pair of gloves obtained and put on with the maid’s assistance, by which time the dog had polished the bone, and probably in his own tongue, being a well-bred animal, said a grace and blessed Lord Barmouth. Then he was once more taken up, his mouth and paws wiped by Justine on one of her ladyship’s clean handkerchiefs; Tryphie nodded a good-bye to her cousin, to whom she had hardly dared to speak, and then followed her ladyship downstairs.