‘Shall I bathe your poor suffering foot again?’ asked the cook, casting languishing eyes at the warder.
‘By-and-by, when the liquor is exhausted,’ answered the warder.
‘Would you like a little more hot water to the spirit?’ said Patience, who was setting—as it is termed in dance phraseology—at the youngest of the constables.
‘No, miss, but I’d trouble you for a little more spirit,’ he answered, ‘to qualify the hot water.’
Then the scullery-maid, who had also found her way in, blocked the other constable in the corner, and offered to sugar his rum. He was a married man, middle-aged, and with a huge disfiguring mole on his nose; but there was no one else for the damsel to ogle and address, so she fixed upon him.
All at once, whilst this by-play was going on, under cover of the music, the door from the staircase opened, and in sprang Eve, with her tambourine, dressed in the red-and-yellow costume she had found in the garret, and wearing her burnished necklace of bezants. Barbara withdrew her hands from the piano in dismay, and flushed with shame.
‘Eve!’ she exclaimed, ‘go back! How can you!’ But the boy from the table beckoned again to her, pointing to the piano, and her fingers; Eve skipped up to her and whispered, ‘Let me alone, for Jasper’s sake,’ then bounded into the middle of the hall, and rattled her tambourine and clinked its jingles.
The men applauded, and tossed off their rum-and-water; then, having finished the rum, mixed themselves eagerly hot jorums of brandy.
The face was at the window, with the nose flat and white against the glass, like a dab of putty.