“Hoighty, Toighty,” said Miss Pounce, and stood looking down at the page with one hand on her hip, eyelids drooping, a quizzical smile, and a tilted chin.
“And how’d it be if I can’t give up my Duchesses and Marchionesses to whom I’ve been engaged for goodness gracious knows how long? There, trot along, and tell my Lady I’ll do my best, seeing she’s so pressing! Yes, yes. I’ll come. And shut your mouth, little boy, in the name of Heaven, or you’ll be picked up for a frog and brought to the Royal Aquarium.”
Number 6a, Queen Street was a small narrow house wedged in between two larger residences; one of those domiciles that seem made for the impecunious fashionable. Miss Pounce serenely preceded Madame Mirabel’s liveried porter who negotiated an alarming array of bandboxes, not without some bumpings, up the narrow stairs, in the wake of the country footman. On the second floor landing she ordered the important chattels to be deposited, and bidding the porter have a hackney in half an hour, stood a monument of composure while the country footman knocked at the panels of the door.
There was a clamour within, voices, among which Lady Amelia’s didactic tones could easily be distinguished, objurgations, lamentations, sobs. The footman invited Miss Pounce by a leer to share the joke, knocked louder, and at an exasperated “Come in,” flung open the door. As Pamela entered the long, dingy bedroom a silence fell.
The beauty was sitting in an arm-chair by the empty fire-place, her face buried in her hands, evidently in tears; the elder sister was bending over her with a countenance of concern, while in the background stood a frightened-looking elderly maid, her finger to her lip.
“Come in, come in!” repeated Lady Amelia, bursting into speech. “Shut the door. I’m sorry to have troubled you, I’m sure. No. I don’t want the bandboxes. Miss Jane Vibart cannot possibly go out to-night. She has most successfully contrived to make such a spectacle of herself that I doubt if she will be able to show again for the rest of the season.”
“Oh, Mamma!” exclaimed the elder daughter in reproachful accents. “’Tisn’t Jenny’s fault!”
“You’ll not say it’s mine, I trust?” retorted a deeply annoyed parent, and, as the beauty lifted her face, Pamela saw that it was indeed disfigured almost out of recognition by that distressing if not alarming complaint, the toothache. The poor girl’s left cheek was swollen to comicality.
Jane Vibart, with a loud boo-hoo, buried her head in her handkerchief again, and Sally, with a championship which Pamela thought the younger ill deserved, protested: “But Mamma, Mr. Tugwell hurt her so dreadfully last time, that poor Jenny was terrified——”
“Foh! I’ve no patience with her,” stormed the lady. “She’ll have to have it out now, and ’twill hurt her a vast deal more. Provoking creature, and it is so important, so particularly important that she should go to-night. Well, Miss, if you lose your chance of the match of the year, you’ve none but yourself to blame, and let that be a comfort to you. Pray, young woman, did you not hear me say I should not require your goods? O! I could shed tears of vexation, and it all so neatly planned! The Duchess herself would have seen that you took the floor with Mr. W., and says she to me: ‘The child has but to unmask at supper, and I think we may say ’tis as good as done.’ Mr. W., his uncle’s heir, and such a personable, worthy young man, by all accounts, and looking to be settled. Well, well! Meeking, take Miss Jane to her apartment, and tell Mrs. Martha to apply the leeches. ’Tis time for me to be dressing.”