Lady Drake was a woman of the very strictest propriety. It seems necessary to state the fact at this juncture. She was a woman of the strictest propriety, and, indeed, was inclined to carry respectability to excess, but she was of a hungry disposition. The descendant of an ancient family of large feeders, she very naturally possessed their main characteristic. Her temperament required a good deal of food to be administered to it at frequent intervals, and even in the watches of the night she was by no means certain to be exempt from sudden accesses of what in a man might have been called voracity. To combat these effectually, she usually kept a large supply of biscuits, potted meats, and other necessaries by her bedside, and if she woke at any time, would apply herself to these, banish by their means the promptings of heredity, and then, turning over, fall quietly to sleep again, calmed, nourished, and altogether built up. In the hurry of her departure to Ribton Marches, however, she had omitted to provision herself as was her habit, and, being of a highly sensitive disposition, she did not care to disclose the emptiness of her nocturnal larder to those in charge of the commissariat of the palace. On the Monday night she had managed to secrete a dozen or so of chocolates at dessert, and this booty had secured her from actual starvation, although it had not prevented her from suffering severely during the dark hours. But on Tuesday, the chocolates having given out, and her position at dinner precluding the possibility of another successful raid, her case was sad indeed, and something very like starvation stared her in the face.
Under these circumstances Lady Drake became more acidulated than usual, and worried his Grace during the evening with even more than her normal pertinacity and success. And yet it was her victim who eventually heaped coals of fire upon her neat bandeaux, for it was the Duke who explained to her, in the very moment of her despair, those beautiful inventions placed by the Bun Emperor about his palace for the mechanical feeding of the hungry, and the solace of those who wandered abroad in search of luggage-labels and the reviving pill. Lady Drake went up to bed greatly comforted, and fully resolved that, when the palace was wrapped in slumber, she would fare forth, penny-wise, in search of that sustenance which she would most certainly be requiring long before the men dropped their cigar-ends and went up to their rooms. The men were late in going, and Lady Drake, after one or two furtive expeditions to the head of the stairs, rewarded by hideous visions of Mr. Bush resting beside a glass of whisky-and-water, in despair lay down, and, to her extreme surprise, fell fast asleep.
She woke soon after three, feeling heredity strong upon her. Accordingly she got up, wrapped herself in the Indian shawl dressing-gown that was her patent of courtly breeding, took a candlestick in one hand and three shillings and fourpence worth of coppers in the other, and set bravely forth upon her adventure. Down the mighty stairs she tripped, her heart beating high with pleasant anticipations, careless of the gloomy solitude in which the mighty hall was wrapped, intent only upon the satisfaction of an inherited appetite. She gained the bottom of the stairs. All was silent. But the friendly candle flickered upon the blessed machine in whose interior lay hid, as in a mine, such golden dainties—soft, succulent butter-scotch, the pale and rounded peppermint, the crunching bar of cocoanut-ice, and the insidious but rewarding brandy-ball. Her ladyship trembled with rapture as she surveyed it. For one brief instant she devoured it with her tiny eyes like pin-points. Then she placed her candle carefully down, grasped her forty coppers, and crept ravenously forward on slippered feet. She was about to enjoy a supper of some forty courses. The thought shook her to the very soul.
She gained the machine, and her glance ran passionately over its pretty knobs, its delicate buttons, the minute let-in labels which indicated the lairs of its various inhabitants. Which sweet should she treat like the wily badger and "draw" first? After a period of profound meditation, she resolved to open her banquet with a packet of "golden candy." She therefore advanced, placed a penny in the slot, and promptly received a parcel of luggage-labels with pink insertions full of twine. Lady Drake was staggered. Although a traveller, she had never accustomed herself to support life on addresses. But her ardour was only dashed for a moment. Reasoning that one mistake should only lift her on stepping-stones to higher things, and acutely surmising that if luggage-labels occupied the home of "golden candy," "golden candy" should fill the place of luggage-labels, she placed another penny in the slot, and grasping the drawer marked "luggage-labels," was the prompt recipient of yet another parcel of those useful articles. Her ladyship was now irritated. These delays increased her already sharp-set appetite. With a bitter exclamation she thrust a third copper into the slot, attacked a drawer marked "peppermints, extra strong," and was instantly the proud possessor of a neat black button-hook with a cork handle. Many persons of weak character would now have desisted from further perseverance, and have retired, depressed and supperless, to bed. But Lady Drake had not been married to a V.C. without catching the complaint of courage. She had now lost threepence, and was still famishing. Her situation seemed desperate, but she rose to the occasion. A dogged expression came into her tiny, peaked countenance. She seized a chair, placed it before the machine, and sat down with the fixed determination of pressing every button and pulling every knob before she left the battle-field. She meant to have it thoroughly out with the machine. She was resolved to fight to the death. A thousand button-hooks should not turn her from her purpose. In went another copper—another knob was pulled, but this time with a result so remarkable that Lady Drake almost screamed aloud. For all of a sudden an immense jet of pennies spouted forth into her lap and well-nigh submerged her. She was drenched in the coinage of departed generations of sugar-plum seekers, and was rendered breathless by their proved determination to be fed. She nearly succumbed under this wave of misfortune and coppers, but her grit saved her, and, beating aside the flood with her tiny hands as one that swims, she pressed button after button, attacked knob after knob, with all the frenzy of a passionate nature in arms, reckless of danger, heedless of death. Lady Drake "saw red," and had the judgment-day suddenly dawned behind the lattice-windows of the hall, she would still have fought on, still have pressed forward, headlong to glory—and food. A crash of cigars did not daunt her. A cloud of pills nearly blinded but could not deter her. Dutch dolls beset her, but she overcame them. Showers of cherry-blossom broke over her from collapsible squirts, stamps flew round her like falling leaves in autumn—she scarcely knew it. And at last she had her reward. The sweets began to come, heralded by the exquisite eruption of a sugar pig, with a string tail and pink eyebrows all complete. With a piping cry she greeted it and its lovely following, a crowd of all the wonders known to a greater than Fuller. They poured upon the tiny dauntless creature with a passionate ardour, filling her lap to the very brim, until the last knob was grasped, the last button had yielded to her frantic thumb. And just at this moment Mr. James Bush laid an enormous hand on Lady Drake's shoulder, and, with a scream of surprise, she turned round, slipped from her chair, and assumed that Eastern posture in which she was discovered by Mr. Harrison as he fled from the cursing telephone.
Now the Duke, who was a heavy man but a light sleeper, heard Lady Drake's scream in his dreams. It was followed by the bang of a door as Chloe, unobserved by the engrossed couple in the hall, gained her bedroom and flung herself in a fit of laughter upon her pillow. The bang decided the Duke to wake up. He carried out his decision with manly promptitude, and, bounding out upon the landing, protruded his head over the oaken balustrade and beheld Lady Drake seated upon the floor in a dressing-gown, apparently engaged in friendly intercourse with the man from Bungay. His Grace did not perceive Mr. Harrison, who had not yet emerged into the circle of light. Therefore, after a moment of careful contemplation, the Duke returned chuckling to his apartment, and, murmuring something vague about "not spoiling sport," and a mumbling conviction that he had always thought that fellow Bush was "a bit of a dog," lay down again to laugh.
Meanwhile, the courage which had supported Lady Drake during her fight with the machine was ebbing away under a stress of circumstances sufficient to appal the stoutest heart. Although her temper had given her a great victory over the Bun Emperor's patent, her respectability took serious umbrage at being discovered at four o'clock in the morning, immodestly draped in an Indian shawl, by an immense rustic of whom she knew nothing. Still, the little thing was grown so intrepid by association with the late deceased V.C. that she might have borne up against Mr. Bush. But the apparition of the groom of the chambers in full flight, the sound of his wailing cry, the sight of his disordered appearance and starting eyes, upset a mind and body naturally fatigued in the reaction that invariably succeeds a great crisis. Lady Drake remained upon the floor for about a couple of minutes, gazing fixedly at Mr. Bush and Mr. Harrison, and mechanically grasping in each hand two melting fragments of Turkish delight, vaguely thought of by her as defensive weapons against wicked men. Then, either forced to the conviction that such confections could hardly avail her much in a physical contest, or moved by some unreasonable fancy of the mind feminine, she got up very suddenly, and covering her retreat by a volley of edibles and miscellaneous articles of steel, wood and papier-mâché, she walked upstairs, having hysterics all the way, and vanished in a piping yell like the note of a toy terrier under the spell of music.
Mr. Bush and Mr. Harrison, their persons and hair decorated with a thousand sugar-plums, remained staring at each other aghast. Then Mr. Bush, extracting from his beard a surprise packet, two brandy balls and a penknife, solemnly turned and walked away to bed without deigning to speak to the groom of the chambers, who was left to make the best of his way to his apartment in a condition nearly bordering upon homicidal mania. Indeed, he knew not whether he waked or dreamed, whether he was in a nightmare, or whether he had merely become unexpectedly delirious. Only in the morning, when he woke to find his whiskers full of Everton toffee, did he realise that in very truth the Londoners had been holding their unhallowed revels in the sacred palace of the Emperor, and that it was incumbent upon him to get up if he was to be in time to be skinned by eight o'clock, according to the agreement made overnight with his imperial master.
The early beams of the bright and cheerful summer sun shone gaily over the Ribton Marches domain as the wretched Mr. Harrison, carrying in one hand the enormous volume containing his "Report of the Conduct of the Londoners on Tuesday, the — of June, 18—," set forth to the fishing-cottage to meet his doom. He walked very slowly, with that lingering gait peculiar to men in his dreadful circumstances, and occasionally rent the delicious morning atmosphere with lamentations which might have moved a heart of stone. But even the slowest walker arrives at the skinning post at last, and, as the clocks struck eight, Mr. Harrison's protruding eyes beheld the glittering sheet of water on whose verge stood the small pavilion where dwelt his banished master.
The Bun Emperor was up and already stationed in the embrasure examining the horizon through the telescope which had so alarmed Mr. Bush. His visage was empurpled. His hands, when not employed, clenched and unclenched themselves with threatening vivacity. Already, in fancy, they seemed to be at work on Mr. Harrison's outer integument. The groom of the chambers paused beside the pond and looked across its waters with an expression of wild entreaty. The Emperor dashed the window open.