Pollyooly E-Book

Edgar Jepson

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Edgar Alfred Jepson was an English writer, principally of mainstream adventure and detective fiction, but also of some supernatural and fantasy stories that are better remembered. The story „Pollyooly. A Romance of Long Felt Wants and the Red Haired Girl Who Filled Them” (1912) takes place prior to World War I. Pollyooly, whose given name is Mary Bride, is the 12-year-old housekeeper of John Ruffin, a London barrister. Pollyooly and her younger brother, Roger are orphans. Raised by their aunt in a village, they come to London when her aunt is swindled out of her life’s savings and forced to find work as Ruffin’s cook and housekeeper. When their aunt is killed by a motorist, Pollyooly tries to fill in for her aunt in order to keep both her and her brother out of the workhouse.

Leseprobe

Contents

I. POLLYOLLY CHANGES HER ADDRESS

II. THE SEIGE

III. POLLYOLLY VINDICATES HER PERSONAL HUMAN DIGNITY

IV. THE SQUARING OF ERMYNTRUDE

V. LOVE’S MESSENGER

VI. THE IDEA OF THE DUCHESS

VII. POLLYOLLY PLAYS THE CHANGELING

VIII. POLLYOLLY FINDS A CAREER

IX. THE DUKE’S MISTAKE

CHAPTER I

POLLYOOLY CHANGES HER ADDRESS

“The Lump shan’t go into the workhouse–ever,” said the angel child, with the red hair, firmly. Then after a pause she added even more firmly, “I won’t let him.”

Mrs. Brown shook her shapely head: she was the wife of a policeman. The gloom on her so round and usually so cheerful face deepened; and she said despondently, “I don’t know how you’ll manage–you bein’ so young, an’ work that ’ard to git.”

“Aunt Hannah told me never to let the Lump go into the workhouse the last afternoon I saw her at the hospital; and I promised her he never should; and he shan’t,” said the angel child in the same tone of cold resolution. “I’ve got twenty-two shillings as it is.”

“An’ that won’t last long, Pollyooly, my dear,” said Mrs. Brown gloomily.

“But on Saturday there’ll be another ten shillings–five shillings from Mr. Ruffin and five shillings from Mr. Gedge-Tomkins; and perhaps I’ll go on doing their work for quite a long time,” said Pollyooly, still undismayed.

“That’s too much to ’ope,” said Mrs. Brown, her words and tone once more belying her naturally cheerful face.

“They don’t know that Aunt Hannah’s dead,” said Pollyooly.

“They’ll ’ear,” said Mrs. Brown conscientiously, in the same comforting vein.

“They won’t hear from me,” said Pollyooly curtly.

“But if they know how bad she was, they’ll ’ave bin expectin’ ’er to die,” said Mrs. Brown.

“They only know that she’s ill. I didn’t tell them that it was an accident, and how bad it was. And I’m not going to tell them she’s dead. I’m going to go on doing her work just as long as I can,” said Pollyooly in the same tone of cold resolution.

“Lord, Pollyooly, what lies you’ll have to tell! An’ whatever would your Aunt Hannah have said to that? An’ she so strict with you,” said Mrs. Brown, raising her plump hands.

“It isn’t for me–it’s for the Lump. And it’s all there is to do,” said Pollyooly with a touch of distress in her resolute voice. “And I shan’t tell any lies, Mrs. Brown; I shan’t really. If they ask me straight out if Aunt Hannah is dead, I shall tell them the truth.”

“What a row there’ll be, when they do find out,” said Mrs. Brown.

“I can’t help that–there’s the Lump,” said Pollyooly. “Besides, I cook their breakfasts for them and clean their rooms quite well–ever so much better than that dirty old Mrs. Meeken does the floor below.”

“I must say that your aunt did bring you up to do things proper. And I expect you to do them two sets of chambers quite well. What’s two sets of chambers, after all? And gentlemen too who never know whether a room’s clean, or whether it isn’t. I do ’ope as you’ll keep the jobs a good long time. I don’t see who’s to tell the gentlemen that your Aunt Hannah’s dead. But things do out so,” said Mrs. Brown; and she surveyed the two children gloomily.

Yet they were not of an appearance to cast a gloom on the faces of those who beheld them. Pollyooly was, to the eye, the genuine angel child. Her eyes were a deep blue; her mouth was shaped like Cupid’s bow; the hue of wild roses stained faintly her pale cheeks; and her white skin was translucent like mother-of-pearl. Her chin was perhaps a little squarer than the chin of the conventional angel; and her red hair was further at variance with the Christmas-card tradition and ideal. But to the eye of persons of taste she was the genuine angel child.

Even so was her little brother Roger, whose magnificent placidity had earned for him the name of “The Lump,” the genuine cherub, with the round, chubby face, little curls, and Cupid’s bow mouth of all the cherubs that the painters have limned, the sculptors carved. But in him also there was no slavish adherence to tradition: his curls, like Pollyooly’s silken hair, were red.

Pollyooly’s black frock and the Lump’s black tunic threw their clear complexions and delicate coloring into vivid relief. They had just returned from the funeral of their great-aunt, Hannah Bride. Five days earlier an enthusiastic motorist, engaged in a spirited effort to beat the speed-limit along the Thames Embankment, had knocked her down, and she had died of her injuries in St. Thomas’ hospital.

The motorist, one of the wealthy aliens who help so hard to make England what she should not be, on observing that he had knocked down a woman, beat the speed-limit to a frazzle in his passionate effort to escape the payment of a doctor’s bill, and since it chanced that no one saw, or at any rate remembered, the number of his car, he made good that escape.

Hannah Bride died none the more peacefully for the thought that she left a grand-niece of twelve and a grand-nephew of two to face the world with about a pound in money and some indifferent furniture. Yet she did not die in utter dismay, for she believed that Heaven would temper the wind to these two lambs shorn of their great-aunt; and she had great confidence in Pollyooly as the protector of the Lump.

Mrs. Brown had helped Pollyooly draw her aunt’s burial money from the insurance company, and had arranged the funeral. Now, on their return from it, she was giving the children the lavish tea the sorrowful occasion demanded.

She and her husband, a rising young policeman, were the children’s only friends in London, or indeed in the world. Mrs. Brown was a native of Muttle-Deeping, and had been in service at Deeping Hall when Hannah Bride was its housekeeper, in the days of Lady Constantia Deeping. Three years before Hannah Bride had retired to private life in a cottage at Muttle-Deeping, on her savings and a pension from Lady Constantia, in order that she might devote herself to the rearing of the Lump, whose mother had died in bringing him into the world.

A year later misfortunes befell her. Lady Constantia Deeping died; and her heir, the Duke of Osterley, had marked his disapproval of the Old Age Pensions Act by stopping all the pensions of the old servants who had for so many years served his father and uncles and aunts. It had proved a great saving to him: in the case of Hannah Bride alone he saved thirty pounds a year.

Then Hannah Bride had lost the savings of her forty-seven years’ service with Lady Constantia Deeping in an imaginary gold-mine, the offspring of the fertile fancy of three gentlemen who spent their laborious days in the City of London, and the instrument with which they extracted money from simple old men and women whose country experience had gifted them with an insufficient distrust of the Oriental imagination.

Thus it came about that, thanks to the Duke of Osterley and these three gentlemen, Hannah Bride came to London to begin the world afresh at the age of sixty-seven.

Mrs. Brown had been her mainstay. She had found for her lodging an attic at the top of the house in which she herself lived, and it was from her that Hannah Bride had learned that the post of laundress to two sets of rooms in the Inner Temple was vacant, had applied for them, and had been so lucky as to obtain them.

After the manner of her class, Mrs. Brown reckoned a funeral an occasion for feasting, and she was giving the children buttered toast with jam on it. They both enjoyed it; the Lump with the natural freedom from care of his two and a half years, Pollyooly in spite of her anxiety about the future, and her grief at her aunt’s death. During the rest of the meal she discussed with Mrs. Brown the prospects of getting work, when she should have lost her Temple posts. Mrs. Brown assured her with confident conviction that, as soon as Mr. Ruffin and Mr. Gedge-Tomkins learned of her aunt’s death, they would insist on having a laundress–those who clean and cook in chambers in the Temple have from times immemorial borne the title of ‘Laundress’–staider and of more trustworthy years; and Pollyooly sadly believed her.

After tea she took the Lump up to their attic and washed him. Then they sallied forth into their street, that little slum, much of it seventeenth century, on which the back windows of the middle block of the King’s Bench Walk look down, and which is all that is left of the Alsatia of the Stuarts. It is not unlikely that in the very room in which they had eaten the funeral feast of buttered toast and jam, the great hero of the restoration, Colonel Blood, caroused, drinking the English sun to sleep, and lighting lamps that would have outburned the Eddystone had it chanced to have been built at the time.

It is to be feared that Pollyooly, in spite of her mourning, walked down that immemorial slum with a truculent swagger which went ill with her angelic air. She was at variance with certain young Alsatians who had taken shrill exception to the redness of her hair, and she prosecuted a relentless feud against them with a vigor, the result of a childhood spent in the healthy air of Muttle-Deeping, which they feared and envied. The two children came down the street without encounter, and went to the gardens on the Embankment. There, while the Lump disported himself, in his sedate way, on the dry turf with an unmaned wooden horse, Pollyooly sat and considered the dark future. In her black frock, with her desolate, delicate air, she looked but a frail creature to face the world, a frail provider of the needs of the carefree cherub.

Next morning, however, when she betook herself in her oft-washed blue print frock, for she was keeping the black frock, which had been purchased out of the burial-money, as best, to No. 75 in the King’s Bench Walk, she wore the serene and cheerful air proper to a dauntless spirit; and as she swept and dusted the rooms in her care, she sang softly the songs of the country child.

It was half-past eight; she was cooking the breakfast of the Honorable John Ruffin, when there came a knock at his oak, as the outer door of a set of chambers is inexplicably called, seeing that it is so often made of pitch-pine. She peered cautiously through the slit of the letter-box, as she had been carefully instructed to do lest she should open the oak to the seedy dun. She saw, standing without, a stout gentleman of a rich Assyrian air, wearing a very shiny silk hat: a well-to-do figure, reassuring to her childish mind; and she opened the oak.

“I want to see Mr. Ruffin,” said the stout gentleman sharply.

There was a touch of hostility in his tone, and Pollyooly’s quick ear caught it: “You can’t see him. He’s not had breakfast; it’s no use bothering him before breakfast,” she said quickly.

“Rats,” said the stout gentleman shortly; and he pushed rudely past her, went along the passage to the sitting-room, and, without knocking, entered it.

The sitting-room was empty of human occupant, but bestrewn with human wearing apparel; and then the Honorable John Ruffin came into it from his bedroom.

“What the deuce do you mean by forcing your way unannounced, Fitzgerald?” he said sharply.

“I’ve come for my money–the rest of my money,” said Mr. Montague Fitzgerald in a tone of fierce bluster.

The tone seemed to soothe the Honorable John Ruffin; the slight frown cleared from his excellent brow; and he smiled an amiable, though mocking smile.

“Didn’t you get my letter?” he said in a gentle, rather drawling voice.

“Yes; I got it all right. And I’ve come to find out what it means,” said Mr. Montague Fitzgerald yet more blusterously.

“It means what it says. You’ve come to the end of fleecing me. I’ve paid off your loan and twenty per cent. interest on it; and I’m not going to pay a farthing more,” said the Honorable John Ruffin in the sweetest tone of his well-modulated voice.

Mr. Montague Fitzgerald gasped; then he thundered, “My money! I’m going to ’ave it!”

“Not from me,” said the Honorable John Ruffin with unabated sweetness.

“I will have it! I’ll show you what’s what, if you try to come any of these swindling games over me! I will have it!” roared Mr. Montague Fitzgerald.

“You can get it from the devil–or the High Court,” said the Honorable John Ruffin with cloying sweetness.

Mr. Montague Fitzgerald burst into a warm perspiration. The Honorable John Ruffin’s first suggestion was absurd–there was no money there. His second suggestion was little better–the High Court was the last place to which Mr. Montague Fitzgerald wished to go for several months. On a recent visit to it, to obtain a little matter of sixty per cent. from another unfortunate client, the judge had taken occasion to remark on his methods of dealing with inexperienced youth with a crude frankness which had considerably contracted the sphere of his lucrative usefulness to the community; he wished it contracted no further.

He hesitated a moment; then in a very different, indeed a honeyed, tone, he said, “Now, Mr. Ruffin, you’re a man of honor–”

“Am I?” said the Honorable John Ruffin sharply.

“You are,” said Mr. Montague Fitzgerald warmly.

“In that case you ought not to be in my rooms for a moment; and if you don’t clear out this very instant, I’ll kick you out,” said the Honorable John Ruffin; and he made a step forward with such a stern light of resolution shining in his eyes that Mr. Montague Fitzgerald reached the door in a single bound and vanished through it.

“Ruffin by name and Ruffin by nature,” he said as he came down the passage; and he pushed back his hat to wipe his warm and beaded brow with a large silk handkerchief of garish hue.

“I told you not to go and bother Mr. Ruffin before breakfast,” said Pollyooly with unsympathetic severity.

The money-lender scowled at her, and said ferociously, “I’ll make him pay for it as sure as my name’s Montague Fitzgerald!”

“I shouldn’t think you will. Mr. Ruffin doesn’t pay anything unless he wants to,” said Pollyooly with an air of superior knowledge; and she laughed gleefully as she turned to the bacon she was grilling, for she had heard heart to heart talks before between the Honorable John Ruffin and other creditors.

Mr. Montague Fitzgerald flung across the threshold and slammed the inner door violently behind him. It can not have seemed to him that he had signalized his departure with sufficient emphasis, for on the instant he slammed to the oak as well.

Pollyooly smoothed the joyous smile from her face, carried the bacon into the sitting-room, and set it on the table.

The Honorable John Ruffin was reading the Morning Post with an entirely unruffled serenity. He rose briskly and said, “Ah, ha! Breakfast. I fear the vulgar taste for altercation is growing on me, Pollyooly. It improves my appetite.”

“Yes, sir,” said Pollyooly.

He began his breakfast, and she went round the room tidying it up. She had done that already that morning; but in the few minutes which the Honorable John Ruffin had spent in it, he had unconsciously, but thoroughly, effaced the traces of her earlier work. On one chair lay the jacket of his pajamas, on the other his bath-towel, on another his sponge. He had apparently had some difficulty in making up his mind what clothes he would wear that day, for three pairs of trousers, a coat, and two waistcoats had been thrown on the sofa; and the drawer in which he kept his ties stood on the floor by the window in a good light.

Now and again Pollyooly glanced at him with approval. He was not a handsome man. No fabricator of waxworks would ever offer him a salary to sit as a model for busts of the Apollos which adorn the windows of the hairdressers. But he had an uncommon air of breeding and distinction. His well-shaped, firm lips, square chin, and steadfast gray eyes showed him a young man of a resolute spirit; and about the corners of those firm lips and steadfast, but kindly, eyes lurked a spirit of humor, mocking and elusive. What though his nose was too large for his somewhat lean face? The ancients have for ever decided that it is better to have a nose too large than too small.

For his part, as he ate his bacon with slow approval, he watched Pollyooly with the pleased eye of a lover of beauty; and presently he said, in a tone of gentle apology, “I’m afraid you find me rather trying, Pollyooly. The fact is I was born to enjoy the services of a valet; and every morning the effort of deciding what to wear brings home to me afresh the unkindness of fortune in robbing me of my birthright.”

“Yes, sir,” said Pollyooly politely. She liked the conversation of the Honorable John Ruffin, though she rarely put the strain of trying to understand it on her tender mind.

“How is your aunt this morning?” he said.

Pollyooly flushed faintly and said quickly, “She’s no better, sir, thank you.”

“Well, I hope she’ll soon be well enough to begin work again.”

“Don’t I do it right, sir?” said Pollyooly anxiously.

“Quite–quite. You keep the place quite as clean, and you have a way with bacon your aunt could never hope to rival. I can only ascribe it to the possession of genius–genius, Pollyooly; and when Fortune relents, I shall attach you to my person, at a large salary, for the sole purpose of grilling my breakfast bacon for me. I have decided that when I start on my tour round the world I shall take with me a valet, you, and six well-fed pigs, to be killed and cured at such intervals as the occasion demands.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Pollyooly gravely. “But I couldn’t leave the Lump–my brother Roger, sir.”

“We will take brother Roger with us. I must have my bacon; and traveling will expand his mind,” said the Honorable John Ruffin with a lordly air.

“Thank you, sir,” said Pollyooly; and she carried the drawer, the garments, the bath-towel, and the sponge into the bedroom. Then she went to the kitchen, boiled two eggs, and brought them to her employer.

“Perfectly done–an angel of genius,” he said, after opening the first of them. “Has it ever occurred to you, Pollyooly, how extraordinarily like an angel you look?”

“Angels don’t have red hair, sir,” said Pollyooly quickly.

“Yes; your red hair is against the best British traditions, but not against the Italian. I must assure you that in spite of your red hair you are, to the cultivated eye, the authentic angel child,” said the Honorable John Ruffin firmly.

“Yes, sir,” said Pollyooly doubtfully.

The gray eyes of the Honorable John Ruffin twinkled, and he said, “Surely your neighbors have pointed this out to you?”

For the first time the respectful seriousness of Pollyooly’s face was broken by a frown; and her eyes flashed. “The big boys call me ‘Ginger,’ sir,” she said.

“The big boy is an insensate creature,” said the Honorable John Ruffin with the sententious assurance of an expert anthropologist. “And what do little boys call you?”

“They don’t call me anything. I’ve taught them not to,” said Pollyooly with a sudden, unangelic truculence.

The Honorable John Ruffin chuckled. “I might have known it–red hair will out,” he said in the pleased tone of one who chances on yet another proof of a cherished theory.

“Yes, sir,” said Pollyooly.

Reluctantly she left him to finish his breakfast and betook herself to the set of chambers on the other side of the landing to prepare the breakfast of Mr. Gedge-Tomkins. Mr. Gedge-Tomkins felt no need of converse with his fellow-creatures at breakfast time; and if he had, it could not have been gratified by converse with a little girl. He was a strong, silent man, with a soul above girls, little or big. All his powerful mind was seriously bent on a brilliant career at the Bar and in politics; and he refrained sternly from frittering away his intelligence on lighter things. It is an odd, but pregnant, fact that though his face was longer and broader than the face of the Honorable John Ruffin, neither his nose nor his eyes were as big as those of the younger and less earnest man.

Pollyooly rarely had a word from him beyond his instructions about procuring the food he desired for his breakfast next morning, though she often heard him snort like a war-horse as he browsed sternly on his morning paper. It is to be feared that she did not lavish on his bacon the thoughtful care she lavished on that of the Honorable John Ruffin; but the appeal of the really sterling qualities of God’s Englishman to a child of twelve is seldom strong.

Till noon she was busy with the rest of the work of the two sets of chambers, washing up the crockery, dusting the bedrooms, and making the beds. Then, having finished her work, she shut the two oaks with a deep sigh of relief that she had earned her wages for yet another day before her employers learned of her aunt’s death.

As she came down the stairs, Mrs. Meeken, the extremely decayed lady who acted as laundress to the tenants of the two sets of chambers on the floor below, contrived to be on the landing to greet her.

“And how’s your poor aunt to-day?” she said with a carneying smile.

“She’s not any better, thank you,” said Pollyooly quickly.

“Ah, at ’er hage, poor dear, we knows what hillness his. I shouldn’t wonder as she hisn’t long for this world,” said Mrs. Meeken, with an air she believed to be pious, but which was merely cunning.

“Oh, she’s not any worse,” said Pollyooly coldly; and she went on briskly down the stairs.

But Mrs. Meeken’s inquiry had banished her peace of mind; and she walked down the King’s Bench Walk on lagging feet, her brow puckered by an anxious frown.

None the less, in spite of her carking care, as she turned into Alsatia she assumed a truculent air, which sat but curiously on her slender form, and swaggered up to the door of the house in which she lived. As she came to it, a careless, but active little boy of her own size came running out of it. With the spring of a panther Pollyooly was upon him, her fingers clenched in his abundant hair.

“I’ll teach you to call me ‘Ginger,’ Henry Wiggins,” she said, and she smacked him with striking vigor.

Henry yelled and scratched and kicked, but not till she had lavished on him his due meed of smacks did Pollyooly loosen her grip. Henry bolted, howling, down the street, and Pollyooly went up the stairs smiling the serene smile of one who had done her duty and done it well.

For the next twenty days Pollyooly retained her two posts of laundress undisturbed. Five or six times the Honorable John Ruffin and Mr. Gedge-Tomkins inquired how her aunt was; and she replied that she was no better. Mrs. Meeken was more frequent in her inquiries, and she received the same answer.

But Pollyooly was not happy; always the fear of the inevitable discovery hung upon her spirit, sometimes depressing it for as long as ten minutes at a time. She was on the way to develop a cleft between her eyebrows from her frequent anxious frowns. Most children would have taken a fortnight’s security as a guarantee that her secret would remain for ever undiscovered; but Pollyooly had too active an imagination; and the dreadful fear of finding herself and the Lump adrift on the world was always with her.

In the meantime she was doing everything in her power to provide against the evil day of discovery, but her power was not great. The rent of their attic was three shillings a week, the Lump’s milk cost another shilling and two-pence, since her aunt had held a pint of milk a day to be a necessity for a child of two; and Pollyooly adhered firmly to the practice. The stale bread, the bacon-fat, which the Honorable John Ruffin spurned, and Mr. Gedge-Tomkins got no chance of spurning, and an occasional uneaten egg, made the chief part of their food; and there was sometimes a red-letter day when too many brandies and sodas on the top of too much champagne made even his beloved bacon abhorrent to the Honorable John Ruffin, and Pollyooly brought home six slices of untouched bacon and two boiled, but uneaten eggs.

But in spite of these heavy demands on her slender purse, Pollyooly had contrived to raise the twenty-two shillings bequeathed by her aunt to thirty-four shillings and sixpence; and she reckoned that, even if the evil day of discharge came upon her at once, she could support the pair of them for another month, or even five weeks, while she sought work in the place of the posts she had lost.

On the afternoon of the twenty-first day she brought the toddling Lump out of the house to escort him to gardens on the Thames Embankment in which he was wont to take the fresh air which kept him chubby, and passed Mrs. Meeken a few steps from their door. The sight of Mrs. Meeken in Alsatia was disquieting enough; but the look of cunning triumph which that good lady bestowed on her, as she passed, was more disquieting still, and stirred in Pollyooly a strong qualm of uneasiness. The sun was shining too brightly for the uneasiness to last; but if she had known how Mrs. Meeken had been spending her time, no sunshine would have eased her mind.

Mrs. Meeken was one of the genuine, old-fashioned Temple laundresses, who apparently earned that title by washing nothing, not even themselves. She was slovenly, dirty, dishonest, and gin-sodden. Indeed, from her aroma she might have been a perambulating juniper tree. She had resented bitterly the intrusion of Hannah Bride into No. 75 in the King’s Bench Walk, because she had expected on the death of her no less gin-sodden crony, Hannah Bride’s predecessor, to obtain herself the post of laundress to the Honorable John Ruffin and Mr. Gedge-Tomkins. She could not, indeed, have done the work of four sets of chambers, but that would not have distressed her at all, as long as she was drawing the money, and enjoying double the quantity of gin. Her original bitterness had been increased by a distinct lack of sociability on the part of Hannah Bride, who had not only failed to treat her to gin, but had refused to come and be treated, with a contemptuous asperity exceedingly galling to a highly spirituous woman. Her rival’s prolonged absence from her work had awakened in Mrs. Meeken the strong hope that she was too ill to return, and that the coveted posts would at last fall to her lot.

Mrs. Meeken was not an active woman, naturally, since gin in excess does not tend to conserve the energy even of the sprightly; and sprightly, even in her bright, unwashed youth, Mrs. Meeken had never been. But her passionate desire for gin had urged her to a splendid effort. She had torn herself for a whole hour from the public bar of the Prince of Wales’ Head, an old-time tavern, grown flamboyant with the years, which she and several of her friends used as a club in which to spend their thirsty afternoons, and had betaken herself to Alsatia in search of information about her sick supplanter.

Her effort had been gloriously rewarded. She had learned to her infinite amazement and delight that Hannah Bride had been dead for more than three weeks. She argued, very justly, that Pollyooly would not have withheld this fact from her unless she were also withholding it from her employers, that she was keeping her aunt’s posts under false pretenses. With infinite joy she saw her way to take a vicarious vengeance on her detested supplanter. Glorious visions of unlimited gin floated before the rheumy vision of what she had of a mind.

Mrs. Meeken has since, with some alcoholic suddenness, been taken to her mothers. The good sociologist can not regard the world as much the worse for her loss.

It was about six o’clock that evening, what time Pollyooly, unconscious of her doom, was peacefully washing the sleepy Lump before putting him to bed, that the Honorable John Ruffin became aware, chiefly through the medium of his olfactory nerve, of the presence of Mrs. Meeken waiting at his door, and gave a curt, but grudging, assent to her request for an interview. He led the way into his sitting-room, lighted the gas, and surveyed his visitor with an expression of considerable disfavor.

“If you please, sir, it’s about that little gel what does your work, sir, that I’ve been wyting to speak to you, sir. It bein’ only my plyne dooty, sir,” said Mrs. Meeken.

“Your duty would be plain,” said the Honorable John Ruffin, looking critically at Mrs. Mecken’s ill-favored face.

“Yes, sir; it were; an’ what I’ve come to tell yer, sir, is as that there little gel ’as bin deceivin’ you, sir, most shameful–the hartful little ’uzzy, she is,” said Mrs. Meeken, with an admirable display of virtuous indignation.

“How rarely do we find beauty and virtue conjoined,” said the Honorable John Ruffin sadly, but in a guarded tone.

“You mye well say so, sir,” said Mrs. Meeken piously. “An’ when I ’eard this very afternoon as ever was as ’ow that little ’uzzy’s aunt was dead, an’ ’ad been dead this three weeks, an’ you knowin’ nothink about it, Hi sez to myself, ‘Not a single wink of sleep will you get this night, Maria Meeken, knowin’ as ’ow those two poor gentlemen are bein’ hartfully deceived, hunless you hups an’ houts wiv it.”

“In matter of morals one should never wait,” said the Honorable John Ruffin sententiously. “I congratulate you, Mrs. Meeken, on the speed with which you have performed this painful duty. Good evening.”

Mrs. Meeken’s face fell; and she looked at him with a sudden, uneasy surprise. Then she said, “You’ll be wantin’ a laundress, sir.”

“You are wrong, Mrs. Meeken–what I shall be wanting–what I am wanting is a valet,” said the Honorable John Ruffin, in a very firm voice.

“And well did I know it,” said Mrs. Meeken, cheering up. “An’ offen an’ offen ’ave I said to myself, ‘If Mr. Ruffin would let me walet them there rooms of ’is, ’e wouldn’t know ’isself, or them.”

Another whiff of Mrs. Meeken struck on the sensitive nostrils of the Honorable John Ruffin, and he shuddered. “I can well believe it,” he said coldly. “But I am afraid that the proprieties would not permit of my being valeted by a married woman.”

“But Hi’m a widder, sir–a lone widder,” said Mrs. Meeken.

“Thrice fortunate Mr. Meeken,” said the Honorable John Ruffin. “But there would be even less propriety in a widowed valet than a married one.”

“But you’ll be wantin’ some one to attend to you, sir. That there little ’uzzy can’t do rooms like these properly. She can’t keep them clean–not what I calls clean,” cried Mrs. Meeken, persisting in her effort to realize her golden vision of gin.

“I should think that very likely indeed,” said the Honorable John Ruffin. “But it is wiser to endure the evils we have than to fly to those we smell. Good evening, Mrs. Meeken. You will find the front door open. I left it open.”