Lady Barbarity: A Romance

by J. C. Snaith

“Then you will confess,” says I, “that Captain Grantley has the power to disconcert you?”

“Well—yes,” says she reluctantly, “because—well Captain Grantley is the devil.”

“He is the devil,” says I, triumphantly, “never a doubt about it. ’Tis the only phrase that fits him, and I’ve employed it several times myself. Prue, do you know that I hate—I detest—that man, and yet, and yet——”

“And yet,” says Prue, breathing hard, and her vermilion lips studded with two white teeth, “Bab, I quite agree with you that there is always a big ‘and yet’ sticking out of the Captain’s character.”

Further discourse was cut off by the unceremonious entry of two soldiers. The first was Corporal Flickers. His eye fell on three flaunting petticoats, and three faces of bold brilliancy surmounting them. Nothing to denote the thin and haggard fugitive in these. It would be uncharitable to blame the man for permitting himself to be so beautifully fooled, for the serene interest of Miss Prue and her innocent wonderment at the Corporal’s appearance would have defied the majority of his intellectual betters to unmask her. And Miss Prue was so radiantly calm in the presence of the Corporal that I am sure the pungent jest delighted her indeed.

Now I hope you will remember that this Mr. Flickers was that very red-haired wretch who had declaimed so powerfully against my Lady Barbara Gossiter and all her works, beneath the window of her ladyship at three o’clock that morning. A deadly feud was thus between us. At the same time, however, there was a sort of fascination about a man who was so terrible in opinion. There was defiance of all the things that were, crapulously shining in his beery orbs. In his nose, short and thick, and magnificently drunken, was writ the pugilist, and worse, alas! the pummeller of the classes. A mighty hatred of the aristocracy was indicated on his honest brow. His mien was so determinedly aggressive, and so purple in its tint, that it might have been washed in the bluest blood of dukes and earls. Thus at sight of him, I could scarce refrain from shivering, as we are said to do when someone walks across our graves.

To him the searching of my chamber was a pleasing duty. It involved iconoclasm and a tearing down of gilded luxury. And there was a sufficient unction in the rude methods he employed. He half tore the window curtain from the pole in shaking out its folds; he committed dreadful carnage with the bed, tearing sheets, and flinging counterpane and bolster to the ground. He wrenched one of the doors off my wardrobe, such was the vigour with which he opened it, and so ruthlessly mishandled one of my costliest robes that it was damaged beyond amendment. He was able to knock a china model of Apollo off the mantelpiece and shatter it into a hundred pieces on the hearth. He cracked one of my finest Knellers when he tapped upon the wall to assure himself it was not hollow. He contrived to tread upon my poodle and render it permanently lame as he examined the floor and wainscot. He cut the Turkey carpet in a dozen places by the way he used his heels; and when he paused to take a little breath, he calculated things so excellently well that by suddenly dropping fourteen stones of beer and democratic blackguardism on a frail settee, he smashed it in the middle, and in the fall he had in consequence had the good luck to put his elbow through the glass door of a cabinet. And he did all this with such a pleasant air that I almost wept for rage.

“Mr. Flickers,” says I, mildly, “my compliments to you. In five minutes you have managed to smash such an astonishing quantity of furniture that in future, with your kind permission, I shall amend the adage, and instead of speaking of a bull in a china-shop, shall phrase it a Corporal in a lady’s chamber.”

“Dooty, my lady,” says the Corporal, simply, but trying to crush a mirror into fragments by jamming his back against it, “dooty don’t wait fer duchesses. Dooty must be done.”

To show how completely he was the slave of it, he resumed his happy occupation at the word: stepped lightly to my clothes closet, and wreaked such a horrid havoc on my dresses that the tears appeared in poor Mrs. Polly Emblem’s eyes.