“Dullness I could overlook,” said the aunt of Clovis; “what I cannot forgive is his making love to my maid.”
“My dear Mrs. Troyle,” gasped the hostess, “what an extraordinary idea! I assure you Mr. Brope would not dream of doing such a thing.”
“His dreams are a matter of indifference to me; for all I care his slumbers may be one long indiscretion of unsuitable erotic advances, in which the entire servants’ hall may be involved. But in his waking hours he shall not make love to my maid. It’s no use arguing about it, I’m firm on the point.”
“But you must be mistaken,” persisted Mrs. Riversedge; “Mr. Brope would be the last person to do such a thing.”
“He is the first person to do such a thing, as far as my information goes, and if I have any voice in the matter he certainly shall be the last. Of course, I am not referring to respectably-intentioned lovers.”
“I simply cannot think that a man who writes so charmingly and informingly about transepts and Byzantine influences would behave in such an unprincipled manner,” said Mrs. Riversedge; “what evidence have you that he’s doing anything of the sort? I don’t want to doubt your word, of course, but we mustn’t be too ready to condemn him unheard, must we?”
“Whether we condemn him or not, he has certainly not been unheard. He has the room next to my dressing-room, and on two occasions, when I dare say he thought I was absent, I have plainly heard him announcing through the wall, ‘I love you, Florrie.’ Those partition walls upstairs are very thin; one can almost hear a watch ticking in the next room.”
“Is your maid called Florence?”
“Her name is Florinda.”
“What an extraordinary name to give a maid!”
“I did not give it to her; she arrived in my service already christened.”
“What I mean is,” said Mrs. Riversedge, “that when I get maids with unsuitable names I call them Jane; they soon get used to it.”
“An excellent plan,” said the aunt of Clovis coldly; “unfortunately I have got used to being called Jane myself. It happens to be my name.”
She cut short Mrs. Riversedge’s flood of apologies by abruptly remarking:
“The question is not whether I’m to call my maid Florinda, but whether Mr. Brope is to be permitted to call her Florrie. I am strongly of opinion than he shall not.”
“He may have been repeating the words of some song,” said Mrs. Riversedge hopefully; “there are lots of those sorts of silly refrains with girls’ names,” she continued, turning to Clovis as a possible authority on the subject. “‘You mustn’t call me Mary —’”
“I shouldn’t think of doing so,” Clovis assured her; “in the first place, I’ve always understood that your name was Henrietta; and then I hardly know you well enough to take such a liberty.”
“I mean there’s a SONG with that refrain,” hurriedly explained Mrs. Riversedge, “and there’s ‘Rhoda, Rhoda kept a pagoda,’ and ‘Maisie is a daisy,’ and heaps of others. Certainly it doesn’t sound like Mr. Brope to be singing such songs, but I think we ought to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
“I had already done so,” said Mrs. Troyle, “until further evidence came my way.”
She shut her lips with the resolute finality of one who enjoys the blessed certainty of being implored to open them again.
“Further evidence!” exclaimed her hostess; “do tell me!”
“As I was coming upstairs after breakfast Mr. Brope was just passing my room. In the most natural way in the world a piece of paper dropped out of a packet that he held in his hand and fluttered to the ground just at my door. I was going to call out to him ‘You’ve dropped something,’ and then for some reason I held back and didn’t show myself till he was safely in his room. You see it occurred to me that I was very seldom in my room just at that hour, and that Florinda was almost always there tidying up things about that time. So I picked up that innocent-looking piece of paper.”
Mrs. Troyle paused again, with the self-applauding air of one who has detected an asp lurking in an apple-charlotte.
Mrs. Riversedge snipped vigorously at the nearest rose bush, incidentally decapitating a Viscountess Folkestone that was just coming into bloom.
“What was on the paper?” she asked.
“Just the words in pencil, ‘I love you, Florrie,’ and then underneath, crossed out with a faint line, but perfectly plain to read, ‘Meet me in the garden by the yew.’”
“There IS a yew tree at the bottom of the garden,” admitted Mrs. Riversedge.
“At any rate he appears to be truthful,” commented Clovis.
“To think that a scandal of this sort should be going on under my roof!” said Mrs. Riversedge indignantly.
“I wonder why it is that scandal seems so much worse under a roof,” observed Clovis; “I’ve always regarded it as a proof of the superior delicacy of the cat tribe that it conducts most of its scandals above the slates.”
“Now I come to think of it,” resumed Mrs. Riversedge, “there are things about Mr. Brope that I’ve never been able to account for. His income, for instance: he only gets two hundred a year as editor of the CATHEDRAL MONTHLY, and I know that his people are quite poor, and he hasn’t any private means. Yet he manages to afford a flat somewhere in Westminster, and he goes abroad to Bruges and those sorts of places every year, and always dresses well, and gives quite nice luncheon-parties in the season. You can’t do all that on two hundred a year, can you?”
“Does he write for any other papers?” queried Mrs. Troyle.
“No, you see he specializes so entirely on liturgy and ecclesiastical architecture that his field is rather restricted. He once tried the SPORTING AND DRAMATIC with an article on church edifices in famous fox-hunting centres, but it wasn’t considered of sufficient general interest to be accepted. No, I don’t see how he can support himself in his present style merely by what he writes.”
“Perhaps he sells spurious transepts to American enthusiasts,” suggested Clovis.
“How could you sell a transept?” said Mrs. Riversedge; “such a thing would be impossible.”
“Whatever he may do to eke out his income,” interrupted Mrs. Troyle, “he is certainly not going to fill in his leisure moments by making love to my maid.”
“Of course not,” agreed her hostess; “that must be put a stop to at once. But I don’t quite know what we ought to do.”
“You might put a barbed wire entanglement round the yew tree as a precautionary measure,” said Clovis.
“I don’t think that the disagreeable situation that has arisen is improved by flippancy,” said Mrs. Riversedge; “a good maid is a treasure —”
“I am sure I don’t know what I should do without Florinda,” admitted Mrs. Troyle; “she understands my hair. I’ve long ago given up trying to do anything with it myself. I regard one’s hair as I regard husbands: as long as one is seen together in public one’s private divergences don’t matter. Surely that was the luncheon gong.”
Septimus Brope and Clovis had the smoking-room to themselves after lunch. The former seemed restless and preoccupied, the latter quietly observant.
“What is a lorry?” asked Septimus suddenly; “I don’t mean the thing on wheels, of course I know what that is, but isn’t there a bird with a name like that, the larger form of a lorikeet?”
“I fancy it’s a lory, with one ‘r,’” said Clovis lazily, “in which case it’s no good to you.”
Septimus