CHAPTER XI.—TEA IN A PALACE.
The motor car bore them smoothly and swiftly along through several broad shady streets. They had glimpses of splendid big houses, the front windows of which were gay with boxes of pansies and red geraniums. Then they slowed down, turned under a stone arch and paused at the door of an immense gray house half covered with English ivy.
“Here we are,” said their new friend, “and I think I had better introduce myself. I am Beatrice Colchester, and this is my governess, Fräulein Bloch. May I ask your names, so that I may introduce you to my grandmother?”
Miss Campbell immediately went through the introductions.
“You will have a hard time remembering so many of us,” said Billie. “Perhaps you had better call us by our first names. They are much easier. You can remember to say Elinor and Mary and Nancy and Billie without much trouble.”
“And you must not forget to say ‘Beatrice,’” exclaimed the other girl who seemed to the Motor Maids to be the most enchanting and unaffected girl they had ever met.
Perhaps you would like to know what Beatrice Colchester looked like? She was tall, taller even than Billie, and very slender. Her eyes were large and deep blue in color; her hair was reddish gold and wavy, and her skin as pink and white as milk and roses. Her features were not regular, but because of the charm of her expression and her lovely coloring, her rather large mouth and unduly small nose were not even perceived at first by the people who met her. In a photograph the deficiencies of her face were very evident.
The doors of the mansion were opened before they had alighted from the motor car, by two footmen in blue and buff livery, who stood on each side of the entrance as stiff and rigid as statues. But the girls had no eyes for them. They were looking at the hall of the palace. For whoever Beatrice Colchester really was, she certainly lived in the finest house that they had ever seen. The great hall was paneled in oak quite black with age; portraits of ladies and gentlemen of the court in velvets and satins with wigs and high head dresses hung on either side; and ranged along the walls were old suits of armor. At one end was an immense stained glass window exactly like the window of a church, through which the afternoon sun cast a ruby light. It was a very lofty hall and the staircase which went up at one side seemed to be lost in the gloom above.
“Is Grandmamma in the drawing room, James?” demanded Beatrice Colchester of one of those superb individuals in blue and buff.
“She is, my lady,” he managed to reply, without so much as moving a muscle of his imperturbable countenance.
“Will you come up, please?” she continued, turning to Miss Campbell. “We shall have tea at once. I know you must be starving.”
Up they went in a silent procession, awed and subdued by the splendor of the wonderful old house. Suites of drawing rooms, they found later, were below on each side of the hall. The room they now entered was a big, beautiful apartment, which seemed to be furnished with numberless comfortable chairs and enormous sofas piled with cushions that were covered with old brocades. There were low tables about, filled with books and vases of flowers and photographs in silver frames. A grand piano was at one end and on the walls were fine old pictures, which no doubt were even more valuable than the portraits below. It was indeed a vast and beautiful room, but it was not so imposing as the great hall and it was light and bright and cheerful. Toasting her toes in a big arm chair by the fire sat a little old lady, and standing on a perch at her right hand was a poll-parrot which called out as they entered:
“Late to tea again! Naughty Bee. Come, come. Hurry, hurry, hurry!”
It was so funny that Nancy laughed out loud, a merry, musical laugh which made the parrot turn and stare and put his head on one side in a most human manner.
“Hoity-toity-toity-toity,” he said in a deep bass voice.
The old lady turned, too, and looked at the newcomers without surprise,—because English people are never surprised. The girls could see that in her prime she must have been quite like her granddaughter; her tall figure was shrunken small with age, but her nose looked larger because her face had shrunken, too. The eyes were the same deep blue, with a kindly, warm glow. She was dressed in a gray silk poplin with lace bertha and cuffs, and on her white hair she wore a little lace cap.
“Grannie, dear,” cried Beatrice, running up and kneeling beside her grandmother, “we’ve had, oh, such an exciting morning,—such adventures! I’ve brought some new American friends home to tea. We will tell you all about what happened when we have had food. Is tea coming?”
“Pray introduce your friends, child,” replied the old lady, endeavoring to rise from her chair with the aid of a mahogany stick.
“Miss Campbell,” said Beatrice gayly, “and these are Billie, Elinor, Mary and Nancy. This is my grandmother, the Duchess of Kilkenty.”
Miss Campbell turned quite pale for a moment. A duchess? Great heavens! She would never have consented to come if she had known she was to have tea with a duchess! She was quite ignorant about titled people. How was one to address a duchess? In the dim recesses of her mind it came to her that it was necessary to say “your grace.” But how absurd, to this simple little old lady with mild blue eyes! Therefore Miss Campbell merely said:
“It is very kind of you to take us in and treat us with so much hospitality. Your granddaughter insisted on bringing us back to tea. You see, one of my girls fainted in the Abbey and we lost her for a while——”
“Think of it, Grannie, locked all alone in the room with the wax effigies! Wasn’t she brave not to have been frightened?”
“Dear, dear,” exclaimed the Duchess of Kilkenty, “and which one of you had that experience?”
They indicated little Mary, who hung back, flushing crimson at this unusual notice.
“My child,” exclaimed the little old lady, sitting down in her chair again, “won’t you come and sit beside me? I should like very much to hear you tell the story yourself. You say you fainted and were locked in? Then, what did you do when you came back to consciousness?”
“I think I must have felt as Juliet did,” said Mary, “when she waked up in her tomb. For a moment I almost believed I had been laid away somewhere, and then I remembered.”
“And then what did you do?”
Mary blushed and hung her head.
“Then I—I prayed,” she whispered.
The Duchess of Kilkenty took her hand and pressed it gently.
“May your prayers always be answered so quickly, my child,” she said, and sighed.
The others had not heard the conversation between Mary and the Duchess. Their attention had been attracted by two footmen, whether the same or others, they could not say; they all looked exactly alike. These important personages, however, bore each a silver tray loaded with the tea things. A third footman followed and drew up two mahogany tables on which the trays were placed. And in the midst of this most welcome interruption, for they were almost faint with hunger, the parrot began to scream:
“Tea, tea, tea. I must have my tea. Polly wants her tea.”
“Will you be quiet, Polly?” exclaimed Beatrice. “I shall give you your tea in a moment.”
“Indeed,” said the wise old bird. “Dear me, I’m sorry I spake.”
There was a general laugh at this and suddenly the company began to feel very much at home. The Duchess, after all, was not a grand, forbidding person, as they had always imagined duchesses were. She was a sweet, simple little old lady not half so fine as her servants, and she seemed most interested in these American visitors. She insisted on hearing all about their motor trips and asked the girls a hundred questions, while they sipped tea and consumed sandwiches and strawberries with clotted cream and cookies, very different from American cookies because they were not sweet.
“Does one carry firearms in America?” she asked Miss Campbell.
“Oh, no,” replied Miss Campbell suppressing a smile, “we are not such a wild country as you think. It is unlawful to carry concealed weapons, and of course one would never think of carrying a pistol in one’s belt.”
In the meantime, Billie was saying to Beatrice:
“Aren’t you afraid to invite strangers into your house like this? How do you know we are not—well, say a band of thieves? Cousin Helen chief pirate and all of us assistant pirates?”
Beatrice laughed.
“What a droll idea,” she exclaimed. “Of course you are not in the least like adventuresses; but then I had another very good reason, because, you see, I had heard all about you.”
“Heard about us?” they cried, astounded.
“Oh, yes, and I recognized you at once, because Uncle Dodo had only described you to me this morning and I knew quite well I could not be mistaken,—a small blue-eyed lady with white hair and four young girls,—and you are to visit Uncle’s place in Ireland with Madame Cortinas, the singer, and maybe I shall be there, too. Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Is Lord Glenarm really your uncle?” they asked.
“Yes, he is Granny’s second son. We think he’s wonderful. He does lots of good. Granny says he has made a stir even if he is so poor.”
“Poor” seemed hardly the word to use in connection with the handsome nobleman they had met at the opera, and the young girls exchanged a covert smile.
Mary had drawn her chair into the circle and was listening silently to the conversation. It was all very interesting, very remarkable, like a scene in a play: tea in a beautiful drawing-room with a real duchess!
But Mary’s mind was an inquiring one and she liked to get at the bottom of all puzzling things. Why was it that Beatrice Colchester talked so much about one uncle and never mentioned his brother?
In a pause in the conversation she asked:
“But where is the Duke of Kilkenty?”
Beatrice looked hastily across at her grandmother, who was talking with Miss Campbell. Then she pressed her finger to her lips and shook her head.
“Never ask that question here,” she said in a low voice.
Mary hung her head in great embarrassment. It was quite natural to have inquired about the Duke of Kilkenty. But she had always heard that some English families had mysterious secrets hidden away! It was a relief presently when Miss Campbell rose and gave the signal to depart. It was growing late and somehow a gloom seemed to have settled over the place. The bright room was filled with shadows and the girls had grown remarkably quiet.
How glad they would be to return to their own home-like, pretty lodgings again, where they could slip into dressing-gowns and the neat little maid would bring their dinner up to their sitting-room!
Having paid their respects to the old noblewoman and invited Beatrice to come to see them, they presently left the gray house and turned their faces toward Westminster Chambers and their own cheerful rooms.