NOTHING SEEMED TO PUT THE MAN DOWN.
Yet nothing that I could say seemed to put the man down. In spite of rebuffs, he was assiduous in running down the companion-ladder for my parasol or my smelling-bottle; he fetched me chairs; he stayed me with cushions; he offered to lend me books; he pestered me to drink his wine; and he kept Elsie in champagne, which she annoyed me by accepting. Poor dear Elsie clearly failed to understand the creature. 'He's so kind and polite, Brownie, isn't he?' she would observe in her simple fashion. 'Do you know, I think he's taken quite a fancy to you! And he'll be an earl by-and-by. I call it romantic. How lovely it would seem, dear, to see you a countess.'
'Elsie,' I said severely, with one hand on her arm, 'you are a dear little soul, and I am very fond of you; but if you think I could sell myself for a coronet to a pasty-faced young man with a pea-green complexion and glassy blue eyes—I can only say, my child, you have misread my character. He isn't a man: he's a lump of putty!'
I think Elsie was quite shocked that I should apply these terms to a courtesy lord, the eldest son of a peer. Nature had endowed her with the profound British belief that peers should be spoken of in choice and peculiar language. 'If a peer's a fool,' Lady Georgina said once to me, 'people think you should say his temperament does not fit him for the conduct of affairs: if he's a roué or a drunkard, they think you should say he has unfortunate weaknesses.'
What most of all convinced me, however, that the wishy-washy young man with the pea-green complexion must be playing some stealthy game, was the demeanour and mental attitude of Mr. Higginson, his courier. After the first day, Higginson appeared to be politeness and deference itself to us. He behaved to us both, almost as if we belonged to the titled classes. He treated us with the second best of his twenty-seven graduated manners. He fetched and carried for us with a courtly grace which recalled that distinguished diplomat, the Comte de Laroche-sur-Loiret, at the station at Malines with Lady Georgina. It is true, at his politest moments, I often caught the undercurrent of a wicked twinkle in his eye, and felt sure he was doing it all with some profound motive. But his external demeanour was everything that one could desire from a well-trained man-servant; I could hardly believe it was the same man who had growled to me at Florence, 'I shall be even with you yet,' as he left our office.
'Do you know, Brownie,' Elsie mused once, 'I really begin to think we must have misjudged Higginson. He's so extremely polite. Perhaps, after all, he is really a count, who has been exiled and impoverished for his political opinions.'
I smiled and held my tongue. Silence costs nothing. But Mr. Higginson's political opinions, I felt sure, were of that simple communistic sort which the law in its blunt way calls fraudulent. They consisted in a belief that all was his which he could lay his hands on.
'Higginson's a splendid fellah for his place, yah know, Miss Cayley,' Lord Southminster said to me one evening as we were approaching Aden. 'What I like about him is, he's so doosid intelligent.'