“Mary!” she cried.... “I have been blind! My boy—my infatuated boy! That woman has a positively fiendish power over men.... She will enslave—ensnare Cis as she has done your father and dozens of others. Oh! my dear, there are stories.... She is relentless. The Sowersea’s second son, De la Zouch Sowersea, is now driving a cab in Melbourne, and the Countess attributes everything to her. At Berlin—where her husband had a diplomatic appointment, and she learned to offer refined English-women rum in their tea—there were worse scandals—agitations, duels! Now my son is in peril. Save him, Mary! Do something before it is too late!”
“I can hardly drop in at The Sabines—say I have called for my property, and take Cis and Papa away,” said Polly, her short upper lip quivering with pain and anger. “But I will think over what is best to be done. In the meantime do not worry Cis. Leave him to go his way. We need not be too nervous. He and Papa will keep an eye upon each other,” she ended.
“You know more of this than you have told me,” poor Lady Smithgill gasped. “There are scandals in the air—people are talking—about my boy and that woman! Why did she ever come here?” the unhappy lady murmured. “I said from the first that she would be no acquisition to the county!”
Polly’s cob, Kiss-me-Quick, came round, and Polly took leave. She had warm young blood in her veins, and an imperious temper of her own, and to be asked to “do something” to add a fresh access of caloric to the obviously cooling temperature of one’s betrothed is not flattering. Yes, she had suspected before; yes, she had known more than she had told the proprietress of the agitated double chin and the agitated maternal feelings. Sir Giles had betrayed Cis as unconsciously as he had betrayed himself. “Really, Poll, I think you ought to keep the young man better to heel,” he had said. “He means no harm, but Mrs. Osborne is a dangerously fascinating woman, and a woman of that type possesses advantages over a girl. And, of course, I don’t suggest anything in the nature of disloyalty to yourself—Cis is the soul of honor and all that. But to see an engaged young fellow sitting on footstools, and lying on the grass at the feet of a pretty woman—who doesn’t happen to be the right one—turning up his eyes at her like a dying duck in a thunderstorm—by George!—irritates me. He is always in Mrs. Osborne’s pocket, and one never can get a word with her alone—I mean, nobody is allowed to usurp her attention for an instant. And here is the key to the Crackle-Room, since you are asking for it.”
And Sir Giles handed his daughter the key in question, a slim, rusty implement belonging to the showroom of Overshott, an octagonal boudoir, periodically dusted and swept by the housekeeper’s reverent hands, but otherwise untouched, since Lady Barbara Overshott, the friend and correspondent of Pope and Addison, was found by her distracted husband sitting stone dead at her spinet before the newly-copied score of the “Ode on Saint Cecilia’s Day,” which had been sent her with the united compliments of the author and the composer. The furniture of the boudoir was of the reign of William and Mary, the walls panelled with pink lacquer beaded with ormolu, the shelves, brackets and cabinets laden with priceless specimens of crackle ware—the joy of the connoisseur and the envy of the collector.
“Thank you,” said Polly, taking the key. “I was anxious to see for myself how many of Lady Bab’s vases and bowls are left to us.” She looked very tall and very fair, and rather terrifying as she confronted Sir Giles. They were in the hall of Overshott, the doors of which stood wide open to the faint September breeze and the hot September sunshine, and Sir Giles, who was going to luncheon at The Sabines, was putting on a thin dust-coat in preparation for the drive. He jumped at the reference to the crackle.
“I suppose Mrs. Brownlow has told you that I have removed a piece or two,” he said, bungling with the sleeves of his dust-coat, for lack of the daughterly hitch at the back of the collar which would have induced the refractory garment to go on.
“Mrs. Brownlow has told me that a baker’s dozen of bowls and vases and plaques and teapots—the cream of the collection, in fact,” said Polly, “are adorning Mrs. Osborne’s drawing-room.”
“Confound it!” said Sir Giles, as he struggled with his garment. “The crockery isn’t entailed; and if I desire to give a teapot to a friend I suppose I can do as I like with my own! And—I can’t keep the cart waiting. Fanchon won’t stand.”
“Undoubtedly,” said Polly, becoming cool as Sir Giles grew warm. “Only—if you are going on giving teapots to friends, and there is a hamper of china at this moment under the seat of the cart—I think it would be advisable to change the name of the Crackle-Room. One might call it the ‘Plundered Apartment,’ or something equally appropriate.”