Contraband; Or, A Losing Hazard

by G. J. Whyte-Melville

"We'll pull through, well enough, bar lepping!" answered the other, a touch of the brogue rising under excitement with mellow fluency to his lips. "Ye done it now, by the vestment!" he added, while half-sister to Termagant, cannoning from the broad wheel of an early vegetable waggon, against which she cut her shoulder to the bone, lost her foothold, and fell with a crash on the slippery pavement, bursting every strap and buckle of her harness, smashing into fragments lamps, shafts, and splash-board, to bring the whole carriage, with its contents, atop of her in headlong confusion. "Hurt, Kil?" demanded Frank, rising from the footway, on which he had gone a shooter through the swinging door, over the entire person of his friend.

"Landed on my head!" answered Kilgarron, as esteeming the fact a sufficient assurance of safety. "Where's Tom?"

"Here, my lord," replied that invincible functionary, with a cut on his pate that, to use his master's expression, would have "bothered an Irishman." "I've got your lordship a cab." Tom having indeed hailed one of these peripatetic vehicles while in the act of regaining his feet to secure the mare from destructive struggles by kneeling on her head.

In such a thoroughfare as Piccadilly, assistance is to be found even at two in the morning. Ere long the mare was again on her legs, at least on three of them. The brougham was being towed, like a dismasted wreck, into port; and the two passengers, having obtained clean water and the use of a clothes-brush in a chemist's shop, alighted from their cab at the door of Battledore House, "not a ha'porth the worse," as Kilgarron said, "an' fit to take the floor with the best of them!"

This young nobleman was proud of his dancing, pluming himself especially on a strict attention to time, which he called "humouring the tune."

But these untoward incidents befalling guests who were too late at any rate, brought their arrival to a period when most others were departing, and the ball seemed nearly over. Passing hastily through the crowd that always clusters about an awning, and hurrying up the cloth-covered steps with unseemly precipitancy, Frank became aware of his ill-luck when he heard the fatal announcement, "Lady Sycamore's carriage stops the way! Lady Sycamore coming out!"

Lady Sycamore was Helen's aunt and occasional chaperon. The Miss Planes, her ladyship's daughters, without pretension to beauty, were large, healthy, fresh-looking girls, of the dairy-maid style. Their mamma, wisely resolving that, whatever charms they did possess should be deteriorated as little as possible by bad air and want of sleep, invariably withdrew her charges from ball, drum, or concert at the earliest hour she could gather them under her wing.

Frank, entering the cloak-room to leave his paletot, found himself face to face with Helen coming into the hall.

For the first hour or two that night, Miss Hallaton had reaped a very fair harvest of admiration. Those who arrived later, and to whom she was pointed out as a beauty of the season, opined she was too pale, wanted freshness, brightness, and wore a very saddened expression for so young a girl. Lord Jericho, who danced his first quadrille with her, thought Miss Hallaton, without exception, the pleasantest company he ever came across, and held forth next day at luncheon in praise of her beauty, wit, manners, originality, and good nature, till his sisters, the ladies Ruth and Rebecca Jordan, hated the very sound of her name. Whereas, Vere Vacuous (of the Foreign Office, with an inordinate opinion of the last-named individual), who took her to tea, considered Miss Hallaton "classical, perhaps—statuesque rather. All very well as long as she don't open her mouth; but dull, he should say; probably quite uneducated. Provincial; yes, that described her, he thought. Great want of animation, and much too pale!"

This last accusation he must have retracted could he have seen the blush that reddened Helen's cheek, when, coming suddenly out of the cloak-room on the person she had been expecting the whole evening, she almost butted her head into the tie of his neckcloth ere she could start back and take him calmly by the hand.