Miss Million's Maid Part 63

Another little buzz of comment greeted the name of the lady whom I had always called "the cobra-woman."

And then Mr. Jessop turned from this surprising theme to something that seemed nearer still to his heart. "Well, and, Cousin Nellie, here's a bit of good news. I guess that bomb-dropper of mine is a cinch. Your authorities over here are taking it up all right. They're going to use it all right!"

"Oh, are they, Hiram?" said my young mistress in the indulgent tone of a grown-up person discussing its toys with some child. She always adopts this tone towards her cousin's invention. "And what do they think they're goin' to use it for, eh?"

The young American looked round the table at each of the faces turned towards him.

Then, in a detached tone, he made the announcement of that which was to make all the difference in the world to all of us.

"I guess they'll use it--in this coming war!"

Well, of course we'd seen "rumours of wars" in the day-old papers that had reached us in our wet Welsh valley. But a houseful of women recks little of newspaper news--or did reck little. It all seemed as far away, as little to do with us as, say, the report of some railway accident in Northern China!

Now the young inventor's simple words brought it home to us!

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

THE FORTUNES OF WAR

WAR--European war was at our very doors, and it seemed more than likely that England was going to join in, Mr. Jessop said.

He went on, quite quietly, to inform us that it would find him ready, he guessed. He'd sent in his application early to the Royal Flying Corps, and he guessed that next time we saw him he'd be an Army aviator all right, in training for using his own bomb-dropper----

Here his young cousin dropped her soup-spoon with a clatter.

"What?" cried Miss Million sharply. "You? If there is any war, shall you start fighting the Germans?"

"I should say so!" smiled Mr. Hiram P. Jessop. "Why, yes!"

"But you're American! Why ever on earth should you fight?" demanded Miss Million rather shrilly. "Nothing to do with you! You aren't English; you aren't Belgium! You belong to a--what's it?--a neutral nation!"

"I guess I'm not going to let that stand in my way any," said Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, "if there's a chance of getting in at those hounds!"

And I saw a curious change come over my mistress's small, bonny face as she regarded this man who--under no obligation to fight--felt he could not merely look on at a struggle between Right and Might.

It was not the sentimental, girlish adoration that she had turned upon her first fancy, the Honourable Jim.

It was the look of a real woman upon the man who pleases her.

This was not the only quick change which the war made.

For instance, who would have thought that those German Jews, the Rattenheimers, would ever have had to be interned in a camp in the middle of England, away from all their friends and all their jewel-collecting pursuits?

And who would have thought that Mr. Hiram P. Jessop--I beg his pardon! I mean Flight-Lieutenant H. P. Jessop, of the Royal Flying Corps, was responsible for the prompt and uncompromising manner in which that alien couple were "dropped upon" by the authorities. Well! I should like to hope that their imprisonment was at least half as uncomfortable as that night which my mistress and I pa.s.sed--thanks to them--at Vine Street police-station! But no, I suppose that's too much to expect.

Then there's the change that has been brought about by the war in my young mistress herself.

At a time when all uniform is glorious, she herself has gone back to uniform, to her old, cast-aside livery of the print frock, the small white cap, the ap.r.o.n of domestic service!

I gasped when I first heard what she intended to take up, namely, the position of "ward-maid" in a big London house that has been turned into a hospital for wounded officers.

"I must do something for them," she told me. "I feel I must!"

"Well, but why this particular thing?" I demurred. "If you wanted to you could take up nursing----"

"Nursin', nothing!" she retorted, in an idiom which she had borrowed from the Flight-Lieutenant. "To begin with, I've no gift that way. I know I haven't; a girl can feel that in her bones. Secondly, I ain't no training for it. I'm not one of these that imagine because it goes to their heart to see a pore fellow with a bandage round his head, well, they're a born nurse!"

"With your money," I told her, "you could provide that hospital with any number of indoor maids to do the work!"

"Yes. And how'd they do it? Not as I should," maintained the Soldier's-Orphanage-trained girl very proudly. "I know the ways o' some o' these townified maids; haven't I watched 'em all down Laburnum Grove?

I'm going to make my 'bit' another way!"

From morn until dewy eve the girl who was once Miss Million, the heiress, works harder than ever she worked when she was my Aunt Anastasia's maid-of-all-work. Thursday is her afternoon off; Thursday sees her motoring in the Park, exquisitely got up in a frock and furs that were bought during the "shopping orgy" of the first week of her wealth. And----

She has thought it over once again, and she has promised to marry her aviator on his very first leave.

"Seemed to make all the difference, him being a soldier; seems to make anybody just twice the man they was before. And him just three times, seeing he'd no real call to go and fight, only he wanted to!" she admitted to me, when we were all packing up to come away from the house in Wales, where we had left the ventriloquist's wife in charge.

So that, if all's well, I shall yet have the task of attiring Miss Nellie Million in her shimmering bridal-gown and her filmy veil for that wedding of hers on which I had set my heart from the beginning.

Only--her bridesmaids will have to be Marmora, the Breathing Statue Girl, and the lively little Boy-Impersonator.

Vi Va.s.sity and I will be debarred from that function, because we're both married women.

Yes! I am married, too!

But not to Mr. Reginald Brace.

For when he persisted, "Why are you so sure you could never care?"

I said frankly, "I hate to hurt you. But--Reginald, I don't like the way your hair grows."

He looked at me in utter bewilderment through the darkness-made-visible of those Welsh lamps.

He said: "But a man can't help the way his hair grows!"

"No. And a woman can't help the way she feels about it," I told him sadly but resolutely.

He saw at last that I meant I wasn't going to take him. He went--after saying all those things about remembering me as the sweetest girl he'd ever met, and if ever I wanted a friend, et cetera--all the pathetic, well-meant, useless things that I suppose a rejected man finds some comfort in.

He went back to a whirl of business at his bank, and he has stayed there ever since, "carrying on" his usual everyday job (the only sort of "carrying on" he knows, as Vi Va.s.sity would say). In his way he is "on active service" too; doing his duty by his country. There is something the matter with his heart--besides his crossed-in-love affair, I mean--something that prevents him from enlisting. Very hard lines on him, to be quite young and otherwise fit, but doomed to remain a civilian. Of course there have to be some people as civilians still. We couldn't get on without any civilians at all, could we?

My lover joined as a trooper the day before war was officially declared.

And he came over to Miss Million's house in Wales to tell us of his plans the morning after Mr. Brace had gone off to town. He--the other man--was still in the laurel-green chauffeur's kit that he was so soon going to change for his Majesty's drab-coloured but glorious livery. And I was in my maid's black, with cap and ap.r.o.n, when I opened the door to him.