CHAPTER III.
“Tis the unlikely that always happens.”
My life seemed strangely quiet without Jerry for the next few days, and I longed all the more to console myself with Bobby and Teddy. But one gets used to the absence of anybody in time, and Lady Elizabeth’s arrangements were so promotive of the comfort and pleasure of all with whom she lived that it would have seemed ungrateful of me to suggest that I should be glad when the time came to go back to the Grange. Still, it was true that, apart from the loss of Jerry’s companionship, I had conceived a desire to leave Sunny Knowe. The Earl of Greatlands had become unpleasantly effusive to me. He was constantly paying me compliments, which were all the more galling as they were made with a perfectly grave mien. Had Belle been the recipient, there would have been nothing objectionable about them, as she could have received them in the full conviction that they were honestly meant. But for me, whose ugliness was proverbial, to be addressed as “pretty dear” and “dainty dove,” was very bitter indeed; for it was bad enough to be fully conscious of a total absence of all that was dainty and pretty, without being publicly satirized, and held up to the unfeeling laughter of Belle and her admirer, Lord Egreville.
One afternoon my temper, which of late had lain in abeyance, reasserted itself in a startling manner. We were all in the drawing-room, with several of the neighboring gentry, who had come over to confabulate about some tableaux vivants that there had been some talk of getting up. Several satisfactory groups had been decided upon; but, apparently by common consent, nobody had suggested that I should take a part in the performances, until the earl remarked: “Look here, there seems to be a strange want of judgment among you. You have left the flower of the flock out of your calculations, and I propose that she and I represent ‘Beauty and the Beast.’ I can soon dress up as the ‘Beast,’ and she can fill her part satisfactorily.”
“And pray who is the ‘flower of the flock’?” said Belle, who was to represent “Guinevere.”
“Who else, but winsome Dora?” retorted the earl, whereat there was an undisguised laugh on the part of Belle and a few more of her caliber, while the rest smiled in good-natured toleration of so palpable an absurdity. Just for one instant I turned sick with humiliation. Then I walked up to the earl, and, with my eyes flashing angrily, hissed rather than said: ‘You are an old man, my lord. I am but a young girl. You think that you may hold me up to ridicule and laughter with impunity. But I vow you shall do so no longer. Shall I tell you what I will do if you dare to insult me in that manner again?’
“Dora, how dare you!” exclaimed my father angrily. “If you have forgotten how to behave yourself, I must request you to go to your own room at once.—I told you how it would be,” he remarked to Lady Elizabeth.
“Tut, tut!” put in the earl. “Let the girl alone, Courtney. This little bit of an outburst is my especial prerogative, and I would like to hear the whole of it. What will you do if I repeat the kind of conversation which seems to rouse your ire? Why shouldn’t I call you a beauty?”
“Because I have a right to demand that you should cease to satirize my unfortunate appearance, and because I will no longer submit quietly to listen to compliments which become insults when applied to me.”
“But you have not yet told me how you will prevent me from saying just what I please.”