He went on, and at the door of the audience chamber was received by a couple of lackeys, who, throwing wide the oak, announced him in form—
“My lord Chesterfield, for Mrs. Davis!”
She had been peering into costly nooks and corners, and was taken by surprise. But that did not matter. The blush with which she whisked about from contemplating herself in a remote stand-glass became her mightily, and seemed offered to his lordship like a flower gathered from the mirror to propitiate him for the liberty she had been caught taking. He accepted and pinned it over his heart, so to speak. If this was rusticity, he was quite willing, it appeared to him, to become a country Strephon on the spot. The danger, he foresaw at once, was of falling in love with his own pretence.
And, indeed, Mrs. Davis, with her pert young face and forget-me-not eyes, made an alluring figure, and one seeming admirably efficient to the part she was dressed to play. As to that, Hamilton had advised with taste and discretion; so that, in her plain bodice and pannier, with her slim arms bared to the elbow and tied above with favours of ribbon, and the curls shaken over her bright cheeks from under a coquettish hat-brim, she might have passed for the very sweet moral of a provincial nymph, conceived in the happiest vein between homeliness and fashion. She curtsied, as she had been taught to curtsey on the stage—latterly, for her sex had only quite recently won its way to the footlights—and boldly, with a little musical laugh, accepted the situation.
“Sure,” she said, “if you hadn’t caught me at it, my cheeks ’ud betray me. I was looking in the glass—so there!”
It put him at his ease at once. With no rustic coyness to conquer, he was already half way to the end. It mattered little, he felt confident, what he might venture to say; and so he gave his tongue full rein.
“So there!” said he; “and faith, Mistress Davis, if I were you, I could look till my eyes went blind.”
“Could you?” she said. “Then you’d be a blind donkey for your pains.” She came up and stood before him, her chin raised, her hands clasped behind her back. “So you’re Lord Chesterfield,” she said. “How do you like it?”
“How do you?” he asked, grinning.
“H’m!” she said critically, bringing one hand forward to fondle her baby chin. “’Tis early days to say. But, on the face of you, you look very much like any other man. But perhaps you’re different underneath—made of gold, like the boys in the folk-tale.”