WHERE IS SHE?
At mid-day! Where is she? What have they done with her? And who are "they"?
Is it an idiotic joke on the part of that noisy, irrepressible Lord Fourcastles? Is it for some bet that he has spirited the little heiress away? Is it perhaps some bit of absurd skylarking got up between himself and the Honourable Jim?
If there's a chance of this it mustn't go further. I shall have to keep my mouth shut.
I can't go applying to the police—and then having Miss Million turning up and looking more than foolish! Then scolding her maid for being such a fool!
That stops my telling anybody else about my fearful anxiety—the mess I'm in!
Oh! Won't I tell Million what I think of her and her friends—all of them, Fourcastles, the cobra-woman, "London's Love," the giggling theatrical girls, and that unscrupulous nouveau-pauvre pirate, the Honourable Jim—as soon as she does condescend to reappear!...
A tap at the door. I fly to open it....
Only one of those little chocolate-liveried London sparrows, the Cecil page-boys.
He has a large parcel for Miss Million. From Madame Ellen's. (Oh, yes, of course. The blush-rose pink that had to be let out.) Carriage forward.
"Please have it paid and charge it to Miss Million's account," says Miss Million's maid, with great outward composure and an inward tremor.
I've no money. Three-and-six, to be exact. Everything she has is locked up. What—what am I to do about the bills if she stays away like this?
She seems to have been away a century. Yet it's only half-past twelve now. In half an hour Mr. Brace will be calling on me for an answer to his proposal of marriage....
There's another complication!
Oh! Why is life like this? Long dull stretches of nothing at all happening for years and years. Then, quite suddenly, "a crowded hour" of—No! Not "glorious life" exactly. But one disturbing thing happening on the top of another, until——
"Ppppring!"
Ah, the telephone again. Perhaps this is some news. The cobra-lady may have heard where Miss Million went.... "Yes?"
It wasn't the cobra-lady.
It was the rich, untrustworthy accent of the Honourable James Burke.
Ah! At last! At last! Now, I thought, I should hear something; some hint of Miss Million's whereabouts.
"Yes?" I called eagerly.
"Yes! I know who that is," called the voice—how different, now that I heard it again, from that of the Mr. J. Burke I rang up earlier, by mistake. "That's the pearl of all ladies'-maids, isn't it? Good morning, Miss Lovelace-Smith!"
"Good morning, Mr. Burke," I called back grudgingly. Aggravating young man! How was I to find out what I wanted to know without possibly giving my mistress away?
Perhaps he had been sent to ring me up to bring Miss Million's things to—wherever the party of them were. I began: "Can I do anything for you—sir?"
"Certainly. Call me that again!"
"What?" snappishly.
"Call me 'sir' again, just like that," pleaded the Honourable and Exasperating Jim. "I never heard any pet name sound so pretty!"
I shook my head furiously at the receiver.
Teasing me like this, when I was deadly serious, and so anxious to get sense out of him for once! Tormenting me from "under cover" of a telephone that didn't allow me to see his face or to know where he was.
I said angrily: "Where are you speaking from?"
"I've paid—I mean I've had to get a trunk-call for these few minutes, so don't let them be spent in squabbling, child," said Mr. Burke sweetly. "I'm in Brighton."
"Brighton——"
Ah! They were all down there probably. That was it! He'd whisked them away on his coach—on Leo Rosencranz's coach—just as he'd said he would! At last I'd know——
"Brighton's looking fine this morning," took up the easy, teasing voice. "Let me take you down here for a glimpse of the waves and the downs on your next afternoon out, Miss Maid. Say you will? You've no engagement?"
I began, quite savagely: "Yes, I've——"
"Mr. Brace!" announced one of the chocolate-liveried page-boys at the door.
Quickly I turned. And in my silly flurry I was idiotic enough to hang up the receiver again!
Horrors!
That's done it! I've rung off before I've been able to ask that villain, the Honourable Jim, where I am to ring him up, or ring any of them up, in Brighton!
They may be anywhere there! I've missed my chance of getting them!
Yes; that's done it....
Meanwhile here's this young man who proposed to me on the top of the 'bus last night coming in for his answer!
In he came, looking rather tense and nervous.
But after all my adventures of this morning what a relief it was to me to see a friend; a man who wasn't a suspicious waiter or an attendant who stared, or a teasing incorrigible who exasperated me from the other side of a telephone!
I don't think I've ever been so glad to see anybody as I was to see Mr. Brace again!
I said "Good morning" most welcomingly. And then I was sorry.
For he caught me by both hands and looked down into my face, while his own lighted up into the most indescribable joy.
"Beatrice!" he exclaimed. "It's 'Yes,' then? Oh, my dar——"
"Oh, please don't, please don't!" I besought him, snatching my hands away in sudden horror. "I didn't mean that. It isn't 'Yes'——" He took a step back, and all the light went out of his face.
Very quietly he said: "It's 'No'?"
I hate being "rushed." It seems to me everybody tries to rush me. I hate having to give answers on the spur of the moment!
I said: "I don't know what it is! I haven't been thinking about what you said!"
That seemed rather an ungracious thing to say to a man who had just offered one the devotion of his whole life. So I added what was the honest truth: "I haven't had time to think about it!"
A scowl came over Mr. Brace's fair face. He said in tones of real indignation: "You're as pale as a little ghost this morning. You've been working too hard. You've been running yourself off your feet for that wretched little—for that mistress of yours!"
So true, in one way!
"It's got to stop," said Mr. Reginald Brace firmly. "I won't have you slaving like this. I'm going to take you away out of it all. I'm going to tell Miss Million so now."
"You can't," I said hastily.
"Why? Isn't she up?" (disgustedly).
"Y—yes, I think so. I mean yes, of course. Only just now she's out."
"When will she be in, Miss Lovelace?"
"I don't know in the very least," I said with perfect truth. "I haven't the slightest idea." But I realised that I had better keep any further details of my mistress's absence to myself.
"There you are, you see. She treats you abominably. A girl like you!" declared the young bank manager wrathfully. "Works you to death, and then goes off to enjoy herself, without even letting you know how long you may expect to have to yourself! Shameful! But, look here, Miss Lovelace, you must leave her. You must marry me. I tell you——"
And what he told me was just what he'd told me the night before, over and over again, about his adoration, his presumption, his leaving nothing in the world undone that could make me happy.... And so on, and so forth. All the things a girl loves to hear. Or would love—provided she weren't distracted, as I was, by having something else on her mind the whole time!
I am afraid my answers were fearfully "absent."
Thus:
"No! Of course, I don't find you 'distasteful.' Why should I?" Then to myself: "I wonder if Mr. Burke may ring me up again presently?"
And:
"No! Of course there isn't anybody else that I care for. I've never seen anybody else!" And again, aside: "How would it be if I rang up every hotel in Brighton, one after the other, until I came to one that knew something about Mr. Burke's party?"
I decided to do this.
Then I began to fume impatiently. If only this nice, kind, delightful young man would go and let me get to the telephone!
But there he stood, urging his suit, telling me that he was obliged to go off on business to Paris early that afternoon; begging me to let him have his answer before he had to leave me.
"How long shall you be in Paris?" I asked him.
"A week. Possibly longer. It's such a long, long time——"
"It isn't a long time to give any woman to make up her mind in," I told him desperately. I thought all the time: "Supposing Million took it into her head to stay wherever she is for a week without letting me know? Horrors!"
I went on: "I can't tell you now whether I want to marry you or not. Just at this moment I don't feel I shall ever want to marry anybody! If you take your answer now it'll have to be 'No'!"
So then, of course, he said that he would wait. He would wait until he came back from Paris, hard as it would be to bear. And then there were a lot more kind and flattering things said about "a girl like me" and "the one girl in the world," and all that kind of thing. And then, at last—at last he went, kissing my hand and saying that he would write and tell me directly he knew when he was coming to see me again.
He went, and I turned to the telephone. But before I had so much as unhooked the receiver the door of Miss Million's sitting-room opened after a brief tap, and there stood——
Who but that Power in a frock-coat, the manager of the hotel himself.
"Good morning, Miss," he said to me, with quite an affable nod.
But his eyes, I noticed, were glancing at every detail in the room, at the telephone book on the floor, at the new novels and magazines on the table, at the flowers and cushions, at the big carton from Madame Ellen's that I had not yet taken into the bedroom, at me and my tired face. "Your young lady, Miss Million, hasn't returned yet, I understand?"
"No," I said, as lightly as I could. "Miss Million is not yet back."
"Ah! Time off for you, then," said the manager still very pleasantly. But I could not help thinking that there was a look in his eye that reminded me of that suspicious waiter at the club.
"Easy life, you young ladies have, it seems to me," said the manager. "Comfortable quarters here, have you? That's right. How soon do you think that you may be expecting your young lady back, Miss?"
"Oh, I'm not sure," said I very lightly, but with a curious sinking at my heart. What was the meaning of the manager's visit? Was he only just looking in to pass the time of day with the maid of one of his patrons? Or—horrible thought!—did he imagine that there was something not quite usual about Miss Million?
Had he, too, wondered over our arriving at the hotel with those old clothes and those new trunks? And now was he keeping an eye on whatever Miss Million meant to do? For all his pleasant manner, he did look as if he thought something about her were distinctly "fishy"!
I said brightly: "She may stay away for a few days."
"A little change into the country, I expect? Do anybody good this stuffy weather," said the affable manager. "Going down to join her, I expect, aren't you?"
This was a poser, but I answered, I think, naturally enough. I said: "Well, I'm waiting to hear from her first if she wants me!"
And I nodded quite cheerily at the manager as he passed again down the corridor.
I trust he hadn't even a suspicion of the uneasy anxiety that he had left behind him in the heart of Miss Million's maid!
What a perfectly awful day this has been! Quite the most awful that I've ever lived through in all my twenty-three years of life!
I thought it was quite bad enough when all I had to bear was the gnawing anxiety over Million's disappearance, and the suspense of waiting, waiting, waiting for news of her! Living for the sound of the telephone bell ... sitting up here in her room, feeling as if three years had elapsed between each of my lonely hotel meals ... wondering, wondering over and over again what in the world became of her since I saw my young mistress at the Supper Club last night....
But now I've something worse to bear. Something far more appalling has happened!
I felt a presentiment that something horrible and unforeseen might occur, even before the first visit of the manager, with his suspicious glance, to Miss Million's room.
For I'd wandered downstairs, in my loneliness, to talk to the girl in the telephone exchange.
She's a bright-eyed, chatty creature who sits there all day under the big board with the lights that appear and disappear like glowworms twinkling on a lawn. She always seems to have a cup of tea and a plate of toast at her elbow.
She also seems always to have five minutes for a chat. And she's taken a sort of fancy to me; already she's confided to me countless bits of information about the staff and the people who are staying or who have stayed in the hotel.
"The things I've seen since I've been working here would fill a book," she told me blithely, when I drifted in to find companionship in her little room.
"Really, I think that if I'd only got time to sit down and write everything I'd come across in the way of the strange stories, and the experiences, and the different types of queer customers that one has come in one's way, well! I'd make my fortune. Hall Caine couldn't be in it. Excuse me a minute." (This was a telephone interlude.)
"The people you'd never think had anything odd about them," pursued the telephone girl, "and that turn out to be the Absolute Limit!" (I wondered, uneasily, if she thought that my absent mistress, Miss Million, belonged to this particular type.)
So I went back to the subject next time I passed the telephone office. (This was after the manager had looked into my room with his kind inquiries after Miss Million.)
"And, really," I said. I can't think what made me, Beatrice Lovelace, feel as guilty as if I were a pickpocket myself. Perhaps it was because I had something to hide. Namely, the fact that I was a maid whose mistress had left the hotel without a hint as to her destination or the date of her return!
"That's a Scotland Yard man that's passing in the hall now," she added, dropping her voice. "No; not the one you're looking at," as I turned to glance at a very broad, light-grey back. "That's another of our American cousins. Just come. A friend of Mr. Isaac Rattenheimer; have you seen Mrs. Rattenheimer when she's going out in the evening? My dear! The woman blazes with jewels like a Strand shooting-gallery with lights. You really ought to have a look at her.
"Come down into the lounge to-night; pretend you've got some note or something for your Miss Million. She'll be coming back to-night, I suppose?" she said.
"Oh, she may not. It all depends," I said vaguely, but with a desperate cheerfulness.
I left the telephone girl to decide for herself what this mysterious thing might be that I had said "depended," and I drifted out again into the vestibule.
Here I passed the young man my friend had called an American cousin. He looked very American. His shoulders, which were broad enough in all conscience, seemed padded at least two inches broader. And the cut of his light-grey tweeds, and the shape of his shoes, and the way he'd parted his sleek, thick, mouse-coloured hair, were all unmistakably un-English.
As I passed he stared; not rudely, but with a kind of boyish, naïve interest. I wondered what Miss Million would have thought of him.
She's accustomed to giving me her impressions of every fresh person she sees; talking over each detail of their appearance while I'm doing her hair.... I mean that's what she used to be accustomed to! If only I knew when I should do her hair again!
Well, I walked upstairs, and the first hint of coming discomfort met me on our landing. It took the shape of our sandy-haired chamber-maid. She was whisking down the corridor, looking flushed and highly indignant over something or other. As I passed her she pulled up for a moment and addressed me.
"Your turn next, Miss Smith, I suppose!" she sniffed, with the air of one who feels that (like Job) she does well to be angry. "You'd better be getting ready for it!"
"Getting ready for what?" I asked bewilderedly.
But the sandy-haired one, with another little snort, had passed on.
I think I heard her muttering something about "Never had such a thing happen before! The ideear!" as she disappeared down the corridor. I was puzzled as I went back into Miss Million's room, that seems to have been empty for so long. What did the chamber-maid mean? What "thing" had happened? What was I to prepare for? And it was my "turn" for what?
I was soon to know.