AN UNUSUAL SORT OF BEGGAR
"I guess it's not any different 'business' from what I have told you, coming along in the car, Miss Smith," said the young American simply. "Don't quit on my account."
"No, nor on mine neither," said Miss Million, turning quite anxiously to me. "You stop on and hear the end of this, so that me and you can talk it over like, later.
"Now, then," turning to her cousin again, "what's it all about?"
"To cut a long story short," said the young American, in that earnest way of his that is really rather lovable. "You see before you, Cousin Nellie, a man who is"—he paused impressively before he brought out half a dozen pregnant words—"very badly in want of money!"
"Gracious! I must say I should not have thought it," ejaculated Million, with a note of the native shrewdness which I had suspected her of having left behind in our Putney kitchen. "If you are poor"—here her bright grey eyes travelled up her cousin's appearance from his quite new-looking American shoes to his well-kept thick and glossy hair—"if you are poor, all I can say is your looks don't pity you!"
"I need not point out to you that looks are a very poor proposition to go by when you are starting in on summing up a person's status," said the young American easily. "I may not look it, but money is a thing that I am desperate for."
A sequence of emotions passed each other over Million's little face. As I watched there were disbelief, impatience, helplessness, and the first symptoms of yielding. She said: "Well, I don't know how it is that since I have come into uncle's money I have been meeting people one after the other who keep offering to show me what to do with it. You know, Smith," turning to me. "Haven't I had a fair bushel of begging letters from one person and another who is in need of cash? Some of them was real enough to draw tears from the eyes of a stone! Do you remember that one, Smith, about the poor woman with the two babies, and the operation, and I don't know what all? Well! She dried up quick since I suggested calling round to see the babies! A fine take-in that was, I expect"—this to me, with her eye on the well-set-up young man sitting before her. "Still"—this was where the yielding began to come in—"you are my cousin, when all is said. And so, I suppose, I have got to remember that blood is thicker than water, and——"
She turned to me.
"Did you bring my cheque-book down, Smith, in my dressing-bag?"
"Yes, Miss, I did," I said gravely enough, though I was laughing ruefully within myself.
"Well, just pop upstairs and get it for me," said Miss Million. Then, again turning to her cousin, she said: "I can't say that I myself would have cared particularly to start borrowing money off some one the first time I set eyes on them, cousin or no cousin! Unusual sort of begging I call it! Still, I daresay I could spare you" (here I saw her making a rapid mental calculation) "five pounds, if that is of any good to you."
Here, at the very door, I stopped. I had been checked by the hearty laugh of real boyish amusement that broke from Mr. Hiram P. Jessop at her last words.
"Five pounds!" he echoed in his crisp, un-English accent. "Five? Any good to me? My dear cousin Nellie, that's no more good to me than a tissue-paper sunshade would be under a waterspout. No, five pounds would be most emphatically not any good to me. Nor ten pounds. Nor twenty pounds. I am not asking for a day's carfare and luncheon ticket. I tell you, my dear little girl, it is money I want!"
Miss Million stared at him rather indignantly this time. I didn't dream of leaving her at this juncture.
I waited and I watched, without troubling to conceal my interest from these two young people. I felt I had to listen to what would happen next.
"Money?" repeated Miss Million, the heiress. "However much do you want, then?"
"Thousands of dollars," announced the young American in his grave, sober voice.
There came into the bright grey eyes of Miss Nellie Million an angry look that I had once seen there when an unwise milk-boy had tried to convince our thrifty little maid-of-all-work that he had given her sixpennyworth instead of the bare threepennyworth that filled the little cardboard vessel which she held in her hand! For I believe that at the bottom of her heart "little Million" is still as thrifty, still as careful, still as determined that she won't be "done"!
In the matter of clothes she has, of course, allowed herself for once to loose her firmly screwed-on little dark head.
But now that the trousseau of new clothes is bought the brief madness had left her. She is again the same Million who once said to me at home: "Extravagant! That is a thing I could never be!"
In a voice of the old Million she demanded sharply of the quite prosperous-looking, well-dressed and well-fed young man in front of her: "Whatever in the wide world would you do with all that money, supposing you had it?"
"Well, I should not waste it, I guess," retorted the young man. "In fact, it would be put to a considerably bigger purpose than what it would if you had kept it, to buy yourself candies and hair-ribbon and whatever you girls do with money when it gets into your little hands. I want that money," here his voice grew more serious than before, "for an Object!"
"I want that money for an object," repeated Miss Million's American cousin. And then he went on, at last, to tell us what "the object" was.
It took a long time. It was very complicated. It was full of technical terms that were absolute Greek to me, as well as to Million. There she sat in the big basket-chair, with the coloured cushions behind her dark head; her grey eyes wide open, and fixed, defensively, upon the face of this young man with a story to tell.
To cut it short, it was this. About a year ago Mr. Hiram P. Jessop had left off being manager of the pork factory belonging to the late Samuel Million because of his other work. He was, he said, "no factory boss by nature." He was an inventor. He had invented a machine—yes! This was where the technical terms began raining thick and fast upon our bewildered ears—a machine for dropping bombs from aeroplanes——
"Bombs? Good heavens alive!" interrupted Miss Million, with a look of real horror on her little face. "D'you mean them things that go off?"
"Why, I guess I hope they'd go off," returned the young man with the shrewd and courteous smile. "Certainly that would be the idea of them—to go off! Why, yes!"
"Then—are you," said Million, gazing reproachfully upon him, "one of these here anarchists?"
He shook his mouse-coloured head.
"Do I look like one, Cousin Nellie? Nothing further from my thoughts than anarchy. The last thing I'd stand for."
"Then whatever in the wide world d'you want to go dropping bombs for?" retorted my young mistress. "Dropping 'em on who, I should like to know?"
"On the enemy, I guess."
"Enemy?"
"Sure thing. I wouldn't want to be dropping them on our own folks now, would I?" said the young American in his pleasant, reasonable voice; while I, too, gazed at him in wonder at the unexpected things that came from his firm, clean-shaven lips.
He began again to explain.
"Now you see, Cousin Nellie and Miss Smith, I am taking the aeroplane as it will be. Absolutely one of the most important factors in modern warfare——"
"But who's talking about war?" asked the bewildered Million.
"I am," said the young American.
"War?" repeated his cousin. "But gracious alive! Where is there any, nowadays?"
The glimpse of English landscape outside the window seemed to echo her question.
There seemed to be no memory of such a terrible and strenuous thing as war among those gently sloping Sussex Downs, where the white chalk showed in patches through the close turf, and where the summer haze, dancing above that chalk, made all the distances deceptive.
From the top of those downs the country, I knew, must look flat as coloured maps. They lay spread out, those squares and oblongs of pearl-grey chalk, of green corn, of golden hay, with "the King's peace over all, dear boys, the King's peace over all," as Kipling said.
The whole country seemed as if the events that had come and gone since the reign, say, of King John had left no more impression upon it than the cloud shadows that had rolled and passed, rolled and passed. As it was in the beginning, so it was in the late June of Nineteen Fourteen. And so it looked as if it must ever remain.
Yet——Here was an extraordinarily unexpected young man bringing into the midst of all this sun-lit peace the talk of war! War as it had never yet been waged; war not only on the land and under the waves, but war that dropped death from the very clouds themselves!
"I think you're talking silly," said Miss Million severely. "No doubt there's always a certain amount of warring and fighting going on in India, where poor dad was. Out-of-the-way places like that, where there aren't any only black people to fight with, anyhow.... But any other sort of fighting came to an end with the Bo'r War, where dad was outed.
"And I don't see what it's got to do with you, or why you should think it so fearfully important to go inventing your bomb-droppers and what-nots for things what—what aren't going to happen!"
The young American smiled in a distant sort of way.
"So you're one of the people that think war isn't going to happen again? Well! I guess you aren't lonely. Plenty think as you do," he told his cousin. "Others think as I do. They calculate that sooner or later it's bound to come. And that if it comes fortune will favour those that have prepared for the idea of it. Aren't you a soldier's daughter, Cousin Nellie?"
The little dark head of Sergeant Million's orphan went up proudly.
"Rather!"
"Well, then, you'll take a real live interest," said her cousin, "in something that might make all the difference in the world to your country, supposing she did come to grips with another country. That's the difference that would be made by machines like mine. Not that there is another machine just like my own, I guess. Let me tell you about her——"
Again he went on talking about his new bomb-dropper in words that I don't pretend to understand.
I understood the tone, though.
That was unmistakable. It was the rapt and utterly serious tone which a person speaks in of something that fills his whole heart. I suppose a painter would speak thus of his beloved art, or a violinist of his music, or a mother of her adored and only baby boy. I saw the young American's face light up until it was even as something inspired.
This machine of his, for dropping bombs from the clouds upon the heads of some enemy that existed if only in his imagination was "his subject." This was his all. This he lived for. Yes, that was plain to both of us. I saw Miss Million give an understanding nod of her little dark head as she said: "Yes, you haven't half set your mind on this thing, have you?"
"I guess you've hit it," said the American. Then Miss Million asked: "And where does the money part of it come in?"
Then he explained to us that, having invented the thing (it was all a pure joy apparently), now began the hard work. He had to sell the machine! He had to get it "taken up," to have it experimented with. All this would run him into more money than he had got.
He concluded simply: "That's where the Million dollars would come in so useful! And, Cousin Nellie, I am simply bound to try and get them!"
I watched my mistress's face as he made this announcement. Miss Million, I saw, was so interested that for the moment she had forgotten her own obsession, her infatuation for the Honourable Jim Burke. As well as the interest, though, there was "fight" in the grey eyes of the soldier's orphan who used to wear a blue-print uniform frock and a black straw hat with a scarlet ribbon about it.
She said: "I see what you mean. Me give you my money to play with! And what if I don't hold with investing any of uncle's money in this harum-scarum idea of yours? I am none so sure that I do hold——"
"Maybe I might have to do a little of the holding myself, Cousin Nellie," broke in the quiet, firm voice of her American cousin. "See here! What if I were to put up a tussle to get all that money away from you, whether you wanted to give it up to me to play with it or not?"
And then he began quickly to explain to her what he had explained to me coming down in the car. He went over the possibilities of his contesting Mr. Samuel Million's will.
I don't think I shall ever forget that funny little scene in the bungalow-furnished room with all those theatrical photographs papering the walls, and with the windows opening on to the Sussex garden where the bees boomed in the roses, and the lazy sound mingled with the chirping of the starlings, and with the shriller chatter of two of the "Refuge" girls lying in deck-chairs in the shadow of the lilacs.
Inside, these two cousins, young American and young Englishwoman, who might be going to fight for a fortune, stared at each other with a measuring glance that was not at all unfriendly. In the eyes of both I read the same question.
"Now, what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it?"
After a pause Miss Million said: "Well, this'll mean a lot of worry and noosance, I suppose. Going to Lawr! Never thought I should come to that sort of thing. Courts, and lawyers, an' all that——"
She looked straight at the young American, who nodded.
"Yes, I guess that's what fighting this thing out will mean," he agreed.
Miss Million knit her brows.
"Lawr," she said reflectively, voicing the sentiment of our whole sex on this vexed subject. "Lawr always seems to be ser silly! It lets a whole lot o' things go on that you'd think ought to 'a' been stopped hundreds of years ago by Ack of Parliament. Then again, it drops on you like one o' them bombs of yours for something that doesn't make twopennyworth of difference to anybody, and there you are with forty shillings fine, at least. An' as for getting anything done with going to Lawr about it, well, it's like I used to say to the butcher's boy at Putney when he used to ask me to give him time to get that joint brought round: 'Time! It isn't time you want, it's Eternity!'
"Going to Lawr! What does it mean? Paying away pots o' money to a lot o' good-for-nothing people for talking to you till you're silly, and writing letters to you that you can't make head nor tail of, and then nothing settled until you're old and grey. If then!"
"That's quite an accurate description of my own feelings towards the business," said the other candidate for Miss Million's fortune. "I'm not breaking my neck or straining myself any to hand over to the lawyers any of the precious dollars that I want for the wedding-portion of my machine."
"Go to law——No, that's not a thing I want to do," repeated the present owner of the precious dollars. "Same time, I'm not going to lose any of the money that's mine by right if I can possibly keep hold on it—that's only sense, that is!"
And she turned to me, while again I felt as if I were a referee. "What do you say, Smith?"
I was deadly puzzled.
I ventured: "But if you've both made up your minds you must have the money, there doesn't seem anything for it but to go to law, does there?"
"Wait awhile," said the young American slowly. "There does appear to me to be an alternative. Now, see here——"
He leant towards Miss Million. He held out his hand, as if to point out the alternative. He said: "There is another way of fixing it, I guess. We needn't fight. I'd feel real mean, fighting a dear little girl like you——"
"You won't get round me," said Miss Million, quite as defensively as if she were addressing a tradesman's boy on a doorstep. "No getting round me with soft soap, young man!"
"I wasn't meaning it that way," he said, "The way I meant would let us share the money and yet let's both have the dollars and the glory of the invention and everything else!"
"I don't know how you mean," declared Miss Million.
I, sitting there in my corner, had seen what was coming.
But I really believe Miss Million herself received the surprise of her life when her cousin gave his quiet reply.
"Supposing," he said, "supposing we two were to get married?"
"Marry?" cried Miss Million in her shrillest Putney-kitchen voice. "Me? You?"
She flung up her little, dark head and let loose a shriek of laughter—half-indignant laughter at that.
Then, recovering herself, she turned upon the young man who had proposed to her in this quite unconventional fashion and began to—well! there's no expression for it but one of her own. She began to "go for him."
"I don't call it very funny," she declared sharply, "to go making a joke of a subject like that to a young lady you haven't known above a half an hour hardly."
"I wasn't thinking about the humourousness of the proposition, Cousin Nellie!" protested Mr. Hiram P. Jessop steadily. "I meant it perfectly seriously."
Miss Million gazed at him from the chair opposite.
Her cousin met that challenging, distrustful gaze unflinchingly. And in his own grey eyes I noticed a mixture of obstinacy and of quite respectful admiration. Certainly the little thing was looking very pretty and spirited.
Every woman has her "day." It's too bad that this generally happens at a time when nobody calls and there's not a soul about to admire her at her best. The next evening, when she's got to wear a low-cut frock and go out somewhere, the chances are a hundred to one that it will be her "day off," and that she will appear a perfect fright, all "salt-cellars" and rebellious wisps of hair.
But to proceed with Miss Million, who was walking off with one man's admiration by means of the added good looks she had acquired by being in love with another man. Such is life.
"You mean it seriously?" she repeated.
"I do," he said, nodding emphatically. "I certainly do."
Miss Million said: "You must be barmy!"
"Barmy?" echoed her American cousin. "You mean——"
"Off your onion. Up the pole. Wrong in your 'ead—head," explained Miss Million. "That's what you must be. Why, good gracious alive! The idea! Proposing to marry a girl the first time you ever set eyes on her. Smith, did you ever——"
"I never had to sit in the room before while another girl was being proposed to," I put in uncomfortably. "If you don't mind, Miss, I think I had better go now, and allow you and Mr. Jessop to talk this over between yourselves."
"Nothing of the kind, Miss Smith, nothing of the kind," put in the suitor, turning to me as I stood ready to flee to scenes less embarrassing. "You're a nice, well-balanced, intell'gent sort of a young lady yourself. I'd just like to have your point of view about this affair of my cousin arranging to marry me——"
"I'm not arranging no such thing," cried Miss Million, "and don't mean to!"
"See here; you'd far better," said Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, in his kindly, reasonable, shrewd, young voice. "Look at the worry and discomfort and argument and inconvenience about the money that she'd avoid"—again turning to Miss Million's maid—"if she agreed to do so."
"Then, again," he went on, "what a much more comfortable situation for a young lady of her age and appearance if she could go travelling around with a husky-looking sort of husband, with a head on his shoulders, rather than be trapesing about alone, with nothing but a young lady of a lady's-maid no older or fitter to cope with the battles of life than she is herself. A husband to keep away the sordid and disagreeable aspects of life——"
Here I remembered suddenly the visit of that detective who wanted to search Miss Million's boxes at the Cecil. I thought to myself: "Yes! if we only had a husband. I mean if she had! It would be a handy sort of thing to be able to call in next time we were suspected of having taken anybody's rubies!"
And then I remembered with a shock that I hadn't yet had time to break it to my mistress that we had been suspected—were probably still suspected—by that awful Rattenheimer person!
Meanwhile Miss Million's cousin and would-be husband was going on expatiating on the many advantages, to a young lady in her position, of having a real man to look after her interests——
"All very true. But I don't know as I'm exactly hard up for a husband," retorted Miss Million, with a little simper and a blush that I knew was called up by the memory of the blue, black-lashed eyes of a certain Irish scamp and scaramouch who ought to be put in the stocks at Charing Cross as an example to all nice girls of the kind of young man whom it is desirable to avoid and to snub. Miss Million added: "I don't know that I couldn't get married any time I wanted to."
"Sure thing," agreed her cousin gravely. "But the question is, how are you going to know which man's just hunting you for the sake of Uncle Sam's dollars? Making love to the girl, with his eyes on the pork factory?"
"Well, I must say I think that comes well from you!" exclaimed Miss Million. "You to talk about people wanting to marry me for my money, when you've just said yourself that you've set your heart on those dollars of Uncle Sam's for your old aeroplane machine! You're a nice one!"
"I'm sincere," said the young American, in a voice that no one could doubt. "I want the dollars. But I wouldn't have suggested marrying them—if I hadn't liked the little girl that went with them. I told you right away when I came into this room, Cousin Nellie, that I think you're a little peach. As I said, I like your pretty little frank face and the cunning way you fix yourself up. I like your honesty. No beating about the bush."
He paused a second or so, and then went on.
"'You must be barmy,' says you. It appeared that way to you, and you said it. That's my own point of view. If you mean a thing, say it out. You do. I like that. I revere that. And in a charming little girl it's rare," said the American simply. "I like your voice——"
Here I suppressed a gasp, just in time. He liked Million's voice! He liked that appalling Cockney accent that has sounded so much more ear-piercing and nerve-rasping since it has been associated with the clothes that—well, ought to have such a very much prettier sort of tone coming out of them!
He liked it. Oh, he must be in love at first sight—at first sound!
"Plenty of these young English girls talk as if it sprained them over each syllable. You're brisk and peart and alive," he told her earnestly. "I think you've a lovely way of talking."
Miss Million was taking it all in, as a girl does take in compliments, whether they are from the right man or from the wrong one. That is, she looked as if every word were cream to her. Only another woman could have seen which remark she tossed aside in her own mind as "just what he said," and which tribute she treasured.
I saw that what appealed to Miss Million was "the lovely way of talking" and "the cunning way she'd fixed herself up." In fact, the two compliments she deserved least.
Oh, how I wished she'd say "Yes, thank you," at once to a young man who would certainly be the solution of all my doubts and difficulties as far as my young mistress was concerned! He'd look after her. He'd spoil her, as these Americans do spoil their adored womenkind!
All her little ways would be so "noo," as he calls it, to him, that he wouldn't realise which of them were—were—were the kind of thing that would set the teeth on edge of, say, the Honourable Jim Burke.
He—Mr. Hiram P. Jessop—would make an idol and a possession of his little English wife. That conscienceless Celt would make a banking-account of her—nothing else.
Oh, yes! How I wished she'd take her cousin and be thankful——
But here was Miss Million shaking her little dusky head against the gay-coloured cushions.
"I'm sure it's very kind of you to say all this," she told him in a rather mollified tone of voice, "but I'm afraid we can't arrange things the way you'd like. A girl can't sort of make herself like people better than other people, just because it might 'appen to be convenient."
"Other people," repeated the young American quickly. "Am I to take it that there is some one else that you prefer, Cousin Nellie?"
His cousin Nellie's very vivid blush seemed to be enough answer for him.
He rose, saying slowly: "Why, that's a pity. That makes me feel real out of it. Still——" He shrugged the broad shoulders under the light-grey padded coat. "As you say, it can't be helped. I congratulate whoever it is that——"
"Ow, stop! Gracious alive, there isn't any one to be congratulated yet," broke in Miss Million. "Me and—the gentleman haven't gone and definitely made up our minds about anything, up to now; but—well. As you say, it's better to have anything 'out.'"
"If you haven't definitely made up your mind," said the young American, just as he took his leave, "I shan't definitely take 'No' for my own answer."
And he's gone off now to put up at an hotel in Lewes, so that he can come over to call at the "Refuge" each day of the week that Miss Million says we are going to stay here. He thinks, I know, that after all he will "get round her" to like him.
As if, poor fellow! he had any chance at all against a man like the Honourable Jim!
Well! He'll soon see, that's all!