“I shall not go out,” replied my lord; “but I thank you for the offer of the girl. I dare say the place might be cleaner.”
“She is a girl, sir,” replied Mrs. Dunquerque, “who will not disturb you by any idle chatter. Phœbe!” Here she stepped out upon the stairs. “Phœbe! Come downstairs this minute, and bring a duster.”
When Phœbe came, she was a girl whose hair was pulled over her eyes, and she had the corner of her apron in her mouth; she wore a brown stuff frock, not down to her ankles; her hands where whiter than is generally found in a servant; her apron was of the kind which servant-maids use to protect their frocks, and she wore a great cap tied under the chin and awry, as happens to maids in the course of their work; in one respect, beside her hands, Phœbe was different from the ordinary run of maidservants—her shoes and stockings were so fine that she feared his lordship would notice them.
But he noticed her not at all—neither shoes, nor hands, nor cap, nor apron, which, though it was foolish, made this servant-girl feel a little pained.
“Phœbe,” said Mrs. Dunquerque, “you will wait upon this gentleman, and fetch him what he wants. And now do but look at the dust everywhere. Saw one ever such untidiness? Quick, girl, with the duster, and make things clean. Dear me! to think of this poor gentleman sitting up to his eyes, as one may say, in a peck of dust!”
She stood in the room, with her work in her hand, rattling on about the furniture and the fineness of the day, and the brightness of the room, which had two windows, and the noise of the market, which, she said, the young gentleman would mind, more than nothing at all, after a while. As for the dreadful language of the porters and fishwives, that, she said, was not pleasant at first, but after a little one got, so to say, used to it, and you no more expected that one of these wretches should speak without breaking the third commandment and shocking ears used to words of purity and piety, than you would expect his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury himself to use the language of the market. She advised the young gentleman, further, for his own good, not to sit alone and mope, but to go abroad and ruffle it with the rest, to keep a stout heart, to remember that Fortune frowns one day and smiles the next, being a deity quite capricious and untrustworthy; therefore that it behoved a young man to have hope; and she exhorted him in this end to seek out cheerful company, such as that of the great Doctor Shovel, the only Chaplain of the Fleet, as learned as a bishop and as merry as a monk: or even to repair to the prison and play tennis and racquets with the gentlemen therein confined: but, above all, not to sit alone and brood. Why, had he never a sweetheart to whom he could write, and send sweet words of love, whereby the heart of the poor thing would be lightened, and her affections fixed?
So she rattled on, while I, nothing loth, plied duster, and cleaned up furniture with a zeal surpassing that of any housemaid. Yet, because men never observe what is under their eyes, he observed nothing of all this activity. If I had crawled as slowly as possible over the work, it would have been all one to him.
Presently I came to the table at which he was sitting. This, too, was covered with dust. (It had been our table formerly, and had grown old in the service of the Pimpernel ladies.) I brushed away the dust with great care, and in so doing, I saw that he had a letter before him, just begun. It commenced with these enchanting words—
“Love of my soul! My goddess Kitty——”
Oh that I could have fallen at his feet, then and there, and told him all! But I could not; I was afraid.