The Irishman took the glass, held it up against the light, made a curious Kaffir-like click with his tongue and threw back his head. "I guess that went down fine," said he. "One dollar and ten cents from you, Miss, and I'll make no charge for extras." He held out a great horny hand.
Nellie Pope opened her imitation gold bag. "Bin out o' luck lately," she said. "Don't know whether I've got—No, I 'aven't. Oh, I know!" With a little laugh she bent over Peter again and hunted him over for some money. Finding a small leather case she opened it. It contained a wad of bills. With a rather comical air of haughty unconcern she handed the chauffeur two dollars. "Keep the change," she said.
He laughed, pocketed the money, handed back the glass and went off, shutting the door behind him.
Miss Pope, who had a tidy mind as well as an economical nature, took the glass into the kitchen and finished the bottle herself. And then, without removing her hat and gloves she sat down and counted the money that was contained in the case. "One hundred and twenty-five dollars," she said. "Some little hevening!"
She put the case into her bag, where it lay among a handkerchief, steeped in a too-pungent scent, a small, round box of powder, a stick of lip salve, and a few promiscuous dimes. Then she took off her hat—a curious net-like thing round which was wound two bright feathers—her coat and her gloves. The latter she blew out tenderly, almost with deference. They were white kid. All these she put very carefully on a scrupulously clean dresser. Singing a little song she arranged a meal for herself on the table,—having first laid a cloth. Bread, butter and sardines made their appearance, with the remains of a chocolate cake which had been greatly to the taste of her last night's customer, who had not been, however, a very generous person. Extremely hungry, she sat down and, with the knowledge that her purse was full, laid on the butter with a more careless hand than usual. While she ate she enjoyed the bright dialogue of Robert Chambers in a magazine which, having first broken its back in order to keep it open, she propped up against a bowl. Half way through the meal, she jumped up suddenly. "'Ere!" she said. "You can't leave that poor boy like that, you careless cat, and 'im lying with a fever!" She went swiftly into the bedroom, and once more stood looking down at the inert form of poor old Peter. Then she laughed at the difficulty of taking off his clothes, and with a shrug of her shoulders started pluckily at his boots. She hung the coat and waistcoat over the back of one of the chairs,—there were only two,—and having folded the trousers with great care, returned to her supper. It was after two o'clock when finally she crept quietly into bed.
XI
A little over twenty-four years before, Nellie Pope had been born to two honest, hard-working country folk. They lived in a village of about two dozen cottages a stone's throw from the great cross cut by the Romans on the chalky side of Chiltern Hills, in England. Her parents' quiver had already been a full one and there was indeed very little room in it for the new arrival. Eight other boys and girls had preceded her with a rapidity which must have surprised nature herself, bounteous as she is. The father, a deep-chested, brown-bearded, very ignorant, but good-natured man, worked all the year round on a farm. His wages were fourteen shillings a week. The wife, who had been a domestic servant, added to the family pot by taking in washing and, if able, helping at the big house when guests were there. Neither of them had ever been farther away from their native village than the town which lay in the saucer of the valley, the steeple of whose church could be seen glinting in the sun away below.
Little Nellai, as she was called, was thrown on her own resources from the moment that she could crawl out of the narrow kitchen door into the patch of garden where potatoes grew and eager chickens played the scavenger for odd morsels of food. Her eldest sister was her real mother, and it was she who daily led her little brood of dirty-faced children out into the beech forest which stood in strange silence behind the cottage. The monotonous years slipped by one after another, enlivened only by a death or a birth or a fight, or a very occasional jaunt to the town in one of the farm wagons, perched up on a load of hay or wedged in between sacks of potatoes. Little Nellai's pretty face and fair hair very soon made her a pet of the lady at the big house, and it was from this kind, but mistaken person, from whom she obtained the seeds of discontent which at the early age of sixteen sent her into the town as a "help" in the kitchen of a man who kept a garage. It was from this place, on the main road to London, that Nellie Pope saw life for the first time and became aware of the fact that the world was a larger place than the little village perched up so near the sky, and caught the fever of discovery from the white dust that was left behind by the cars which sped to London one way, and to Oxford the other.
During this first year among shops and country louts, Nellie became aware of the fact that her pretty face and fair hair were very valuable assets. They procured her candies and many other little presents. They enabled her to make a choice among the young men with whom to walk out. They won smiles and pleasant words not only from the chauffeurs of the cars which came into her master's garage to be attended to, but also from their owners. Eventually it was one of these—more unscrupulous than most—who, staying for a few days at the "Red Lion," carried Nellie away with him to London, after several surreptitious meetings in the shady lane at the back of the churchyard. There it was that she saw life with very naked eyes, passed quickly from one so-called protector to another, was taken to the United States by one of a troupe of gymnasts, and then deserted. For two years she had been numbered among the night birds who flit out after dark—a member of the oldest profession in the world. There were, however, no moments in her life—hard, terrible and sordid as it was—when she looked back with anything like regret at those heavily thatched cottages which stood among their little gardens on the side of the hills. She could put up with the fatigue, brutality and uncertainty, the gross actuality of her present life, with courage, cheerfulness and even optimism, but the mere thought of the deadly monotony of that peaceful village, where summer followed winter with inexorable routine, made her shudder. The first pretty frock which had been given her by the lady of the big house had begun the work. The candies and the little presents from the country louts had completed it; and here she was, still very young, with a heart still kind and with a nature not yet warped and brutalized,—a danger to any community in which she lived, the deliberate spreader of something so frightful that science and civilization stood abashed in her presence.