Miss Million's Maid Part 37

"Let's have a look at that wire, dear, will you?" she said to the parcels girl. "I think I remember Miss Carfax taking this in. Yes.

That's right. 'Why ever don't you send my clothes, Miss Million?' I remember us pa.s.sing the remark afterwards what an uncommon name 'Million' was."

"Oh, do you! How splendid!" I said, all eagerness at once. "Then you remember the young lady who telegraphed?"

"Yes----"

"A small, rather stumpy young lady," I pursued. "Nice-looking, with bright grey eyes and black hair? She was dressed in a cerise evening frock with a----"

The post-office girl shook her head behind the wire screen.

"No; that wasn't the one."

"How stupid of me; no, of course, she wouldn't be still wearing the evening frock," I amended hastily. "But she was dark-haired, and short----"

Again the post-office girl shook her head.

"Shouldn't call her short," she said. "Taller than me."

"Dark, though," I insisted. "Black hair."

"Oh, no," said the post-office girl decidedly. "That wasn't her. Red hair. Distinctly red."

"Are you sure," I said, in dismay, "that you haven't made a mistake?"

"Oh, no," said the post-office girl, still more decidedly. "I've seen her about, often. I know the colour of her hair. You know, Daisy,"

turning to another of the girls, "that one from the 'Refuge.'"

"There's so many from the 'Refuge' come in here," said the maddening girl she had called Daisy.

"Yes, but you know the one. Rather strikingly dressed always. Lots of scent, makes herself up. Her with the hair. The one we call 'Autumn Tints.'"

"'Autumn Tints'--oh, yes, I know her----"

"Yes, we know her," chorused the other girls, while I fidgeted, crumpling Million's baffling wire in my hand. "That's the lady who sent off the telegram. I couldn't be mistaken."

Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, at my side, interposed.

"Well, now, will you young ladies be so kind as to tell us where she resides? The 'Refuge'--what'll that be?"

We had, it seemed, still some distance to go. We must take the road that went so, then turn to the right, then to the left again. Then about a mile further down we'd see a red brick house in a clump of trees, with a big garden and green palings on to the road. It had "The Refuge" painted up on a board nailed to a big oak tree in the garden. We shouldn't be able to mistake it, said the girls.

"Certainly you won't mistake it if you see any of the 'Refugees' in the garden when you come up," hazarded the most talkative of the post-office girls.

"It's a case of 'Once seen, never to be forgotten,' there!"

As we went out of the office I found myself wondering more and more anxiously what all this might mean. What sort of a place had Million got herself into the middle of?

"What do you think it all means?" I turned again appealingly to the young man who was driving me.

He shook his grey-hatted head. His face was rather graver than before.

Mercy! What were we going to find? What did he think? Evidently he wasn't going to tell me.

Only when we got clear of the straggling outskirts of Lewes he crammed on speed. Up the gradual hills we flew between the bare shoulders of the downs where the men and horses working in the fields afar off looked as small as mechanical toys. The whole country was gaunt and gigantic, and a little frightening, to me. Perhaps this was because my nerves were already utterly overstrained and anxious. I could see no beauty in the wideswept Suss.e.x landscape, with the little obsolete-looking villages set down here and there, like a child's building of bricks, in the midst of a huge carpet.

There seemed to me something uncanny and ominous in the tinkling of the sheep-bells that the fresh breeze allowed to drift to our ears.

On we whizzed, and by what miracle we escaped police-traps I do not know.... We took the turns of our directions, and at last I heard a short, relieved sort of exclamation from Mr. Hiram P. Jessop.

"Here we are. This'll be it, I guess." For here were the dark-green towers of elms set back from the road. A red roof and old-fashioned chimney-stacks showed among them. There was a garden in front, with tall Mary-lilies and pink-and-white phlox and roses and carnations and thrift that grew down to the palings.

And close up beside those palings there was drawn a pale-blue car that I knew well--too well!

It was the car with the silver-winged Victory as mascot! The car in which we'd been followed and shadowed for so much of our journey by the Honourable Jim Burke.

He was here, then! He was before us!

What had he to do with the "Refuge"?

Sounds of singing greeted us as we left the car, pushed open the green-palinged gate, and walked up the pebbled path between the flower-beds of the garden. Some one behind the lilac bushes was singing, in a very clear, touching voice, a s.n.a.t.c.h of the ballad: "Oh, ye'll tak'

the high road and I'll tak' the low road, and I'll be in Scotland before ye...."

A turn in the garden path brought us full upon the singer. A wonderful apparition indeed she was! As tall as any woman I had seen (excepting the long-limbed cobra-lady), and the June sun shone on a head of hair that was as bright as a bed of marigolds--red hair, but not all the same kind of red. It was long and loose in the breeze, and it fell to the singer's waist in a shower of red-gold, covering her face and hiding most of her bodice, which appeared to be a sort of flimsy muslin dressing-jacket. Her skirt was very makeshift and of brown holland. The stockings she wore were white thread, and her shoes were just navy-blue felt bedroom slippers, with jaeger turn-overs to them. In fact, her whole appearance was negligee in the extreme. Who--what could she be?

She looked a cross between a mermaid and a scarecrow. She was holding one hank of red-gold out against her arm, as a shop a.s.sistant measures silk, and she crunched along the garden path, still singing in that delicious voice: "But I and my true love will never meet again, on the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond!" Blinded by her hair and the stream of sunlight, she nearly walked straight into us before she discovered that there was any one there on the path at all.

"I beg your pardon," began Mr. Hiram P. Jessop with his usual politeness. "Could you inform us----"

The singing mermaid gave a little "ow" of consternation, and tossed back some of the hair from her face.

It was a disappointing sight, rather, for what we saw was a round, full-mooney, rather foolish face, with a large pink mouth, but no other definite features. The eyes were pale blue, the cheeks were paler pink, and the eyebrows and eyelashes looked as if they had been washed away in a shower of rain.

Altogether, a thoroughly weird apparition it was who stared at us, and giggled, and said, in a very c.o.c.kney accent: "Oh, good Gollywog! another man! There's no getting away from them in this place this morning. And there was I thinking I had found a quiet spot to dry my hair in!"

"I am very sorry to intrude," said Mr. Hiram P. Jessop in his most courteous voice. "Could you inform me, Madam, if this is the house they call The Refuge?"

"That's right," said the woman with the hair. And I found myself suddenly wondering if she were the lady that those post-office girls had nicknamed "Autumn Tints."

It was most appropriate, with those reds and golds and bronzes of the hair that must have been sufficiently striking had it not been "treated"

with henna, as it had.

So I said eagerly, and without further preamble: "Oh, then, could you tell me if Miss Million is here?"

"I couldn't, dear, really," said the woman, who looked all washed-out excepting her hair. "There is such a lot of them that keep coming and going here! Like a blessed beehive, isn't it? Bothered if I can keep track of all their names!"

She paused a moment before she went on.

"Miss Million--now which would she be?"