The key had no sooner been turned upon the young East Indian, than the pride which had borne her up till then gave way in her solitude; and, now that nobody could see her, she sat down on the inverted clothes-basket, and indulged in a “good cry.” This, however, served but little to mollify the stubbornness of her spirit; for in a few minutes she started up again from her seat, and biting her lips, as if annoyed with herself for her weakness, said between her teeth, as she tossed her head till her ringlets shook again—“Beg her pardon, indeed!—no! not if she was to starve me to death up here, I wouldn’t!—and, what’s more, I wont be the first to make it up, I can tell her. I’ll let her see I can sulk as well as she can.” And then suddenly she burst out singing, ascending and descending the “chromatic scale” in as loud a voice as she possibly could, till the whole house seemed to echo again with the notes.
Presently she stopped abruptly, and said, as she laughed to herself, half in triumph, “There! that will just let the old thing know I’m not very miserable!” After this, she amused herself by thinking how nice and savage Wewitz would be to hear she was so happy—and how she would scold the maids.
The next moment, to pass the time, she pulled all her hair down, and began plaiting it in a series of tails, to see how she would look with it “crimped” in the morning; but, in a few minutes, the thought struck her that she would wear it like that affected old thing, Wewitz—just to tease her. “She would let her see,” she murmured, as she passed her comb through her long tresses, “that other people had got foreheads as well as herself.”
At last, by dint of pulling all her front hair nearly from the roots, and tying it back tight with the ribbon from her collar, she managed to make it keep as she wished. Whereupon she went to the window, and looked into one of the panes, to see how it became her.
“Ha!” she exclaimed, as she caught a faint sight of a reflection of her face, “it makes me look just like a cockatoo. I declare to goodness, too, it quite hurts me to shut my eyes, and my nostrils are both drawn up, for all the world as if I’d got under them a cup of that filthy senna and prunes that Miss Wewitz will force us to take once a month—to sweeten our blood, as she calls it, though it’s only to make us eat less. I’m sure!”
As there was no bearing the torture of what Miss Chutney termed the cockatoo-style of coiffure, she proceeded forthwith to arrange her locks in a series of those hairy black puddings, which are known by the name of sausage curls;—this done, she threw up the window, and looked out into the gravelly and deserted playground, her arms resting on the sill. In a few minutes she began singing, or rather humming to herself thoughtlessly, the finale to “La Cenerentola,” and immediately, to her great alarm, she saw the head of the Count de Sanschemise thrust from one of the lower windows, and his face turned up towards her. Miss Chutney stopped in the middle of one of her runs, and started back from where she was standing. “Well, if that isn’t the French gentleman! and he’ll be sure to fancy I did it on purpose,” she inwardly exclaimed. “Oh, what ever will he think of me! I’d have given anything rather than it should have occurred. It will be putting such silly notions in the man’s head; making him think, I dare say, that one’s quite taken with him, and that I’m sure I’m not. He’s got very fine expressive eyes of his own, certainly—but, oh dear! Frenchmen are so deceitful! His countenance is the very image of that love of a head that Miss Tatting did in crayons last ‘half.’ I wonder if he’s gone in yet.”
The latter remark Miss Chutney uttered in a half whisper, as if afraid to let herself hear it; and then she crept softly back towards the window, where she stood beside the shutters, stretching herself forward by degrees, and raising herself on tiptoe, so that she might look down without thrusting her head so far out as to be visible. Unfortunately, however, just as she had got to the point of seeing the tassel of the Count’s smoking cap, she lost her balance, and, tipping suddenly forward, was thrust, head and shoulders, half out of the window. In the fright of the moment she uttered a suppressed scream, and immediately disappeared. “Gracious! gracious! and it’s impossible to let him know I didn’t mean it,” she cried;—“it must have seemed to him for all the world like as if I was calling to him. Oh dear! oh dear! oh dear!? and, in the flurry of her emotions, she sat herself down on the top of the screw-press for the table-cloths, that stood in the extreme corner of the room, and hiding her face in her hands, beat a tattoo with her feet on the floor in vexation at what had happened.
In this position she remained, thinking over her past conduct with the Frenchman. Perhaps she had been too forward with him from the first. He must think her a very bold, rude girl,—oh, yes, that he must. She ought never to have been a party to his secreting himself in the music-room. Yes! yes! she had behaved very imprudently and wrong all through, though she would never acknowledge as much to Miss Wewitz;—no! not if she was to be torn to pieces by a thousand wild horses. Then the young lady only wished she could go over it all again; she’d be as cold and distant with him as ever that prosy old methodist preacher of a Mentor, in that horrid Telemachus, could have desired any young lady to be.
Suddenly, she was awakened from her reflections by a gentle tapping at the window. Had the noise been louder, Miss Chutney would have favoured the inmates of Parthenon House with one of her best shrieks; but as it was, the sound was so slight, that it was not until repeated several times that the young lady even noticed it. It was like the beak of a bird pecking against the glass, or the twig of an adjacent tree blown against the window,—and yet there was nothing to be seen.
Miss Chutney rose from her seat and moved a few steps towards the casement, when there suddenly appeared outside the top joint of a fishing-rod. Instinctively she drew back, and, still watching the mysterious implement, she saw it swing to and fro, while presently the line which dangled from the tip of it was jerked into the room, and deposited on the floor a three-cornered pink note, fastened to the hook. Without a thought, and almost mechanically, as it were, Miss Chutney ran forward and put her foot upon the letter, when, the line being detained, the top joint of the rod outside was seen to bend, until at last the hook tore its way through the paper, and being suddenly released sprung back again out of the window.