It was time to end this unconsciousness.
'My dear,' said Lady Bligh, 'will you let me give you a little lecture?'
'Certainly,' said Gladys, opening her eyes rather wide, but won at once by the old lady's manner.
'Then, my dear, you should never interrogate people about their professional duties, least of all a judge. Sir James does not like it;
and even I never dream of doing it.'
'Goodness gracious!' cried the Bride. 'Have I been and put my foot in it, then?'
'You have said nothing that really matters,' [47] Lady Bligh replied hastily; and she determined to keep till another time some observations that were upon her mind on the heads of 'slang' and 'twang;' for the poor girl was blushing deeply, and seemed, at last, thoroughly uncomfortable; which was not what Lady Bligh wanted at all.
'Only, I must tell you,' Lady Bligh continued, 'it was an unfortunate choice to hit upon the death-sentence for a subject of conversation. All judges are sensitive about it; Sir James is particularly so. But there! there is nothing for you to look grieved about, my dear. No one will think anything more of such a trifle; and, of course, out in Australia everything must be quite different.'
Gladys bridled up at once; she would have no allowances made for herself at the expense of her country. It is a point on which
Australians are uncommonly sensitive, small blame to them.
'Don't you believe it!' she cried vigorously. 'You mustn't go blaming Australia, Lady Bligh; it's no fault of Australia's. It's my fault-- my ignorance--me that's to blame! Oh, please to remember: whenever I do or say anything wrong, you've not to excuse me because I'm an Australian! Australia's [48] got nothing to do with it; it's me that doesn't know what's what, and has got to learn!'
Her splendid eyes were full of trouble, but not of tears. With a quick, unconscious, supplicating gesture she turned and fled from the
room.
A few minutes later, when Lady Bligh followed her, she said, very briefly and independently, that she was fatigued, and would come down no more. And so her first evening in England passed over.
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[49] CHAPTER IV
A TASTE OF HER QUALITY
Mr Justice Bligh was an inveterate and even an irreclaimable early riser. In the pleasant months at Twickenham he became worse in this respect than ever, and it was no unusual thing for the slow summer dawns to find this eminent judge, in an old tweed suit, and with a silver frost upon his cheeks and chin, pottering about the stables, or the garden, or the river's brim.
The morning following the arrival of the happy pair, however, is scarcely a case in point, for it was fully six when Sir James sat down in his dressing-room to be shaved by his valet, the sober and vigilant Mr Dix. This operation, for obvious reasons, was commonly conducted in dead silence; nor was the [50] Judge ever very communicative with his servants; so that the interlude which occurred this morning was remarkable in itself, quite apart from what happened afterwards.
A series of loud reports of the nature of fog-signals had come suddenly through the open window, apparently from some part of
the premises. The Judge held up his finger to stop the shaving.
'What is that noise, Dix?'
'Please, Sir James, it sounds like some person a-cracking of a whip, Sir James.'
'A whip! I don't think so at all. It is more like pistol-shooting. Go to the window and see if you can see anything.'
'No, Sir James, I can't see nothing at all,' said Dix from the window; 'but it do seem to come from the stable-yard, please, Sir James.'
'I never heard a whip cracked like that,' said the Judge. 'Dear me, how it continues! Well, never mind; lather me afresh, Dix.'
So the shaving went on; but in the stable-yard a fantastic scene was in full play. Its origin was in the idle behaviour of the stable-boy, who had interrupted his proper business of swilling the yard to crack a carriage-whip, [51] by way of cheap and indolent variety. Now you cannot crack any kind of whip well without past practice and present pains; but this lad, who was of a mean moral calibre, had neither the character to practise nor the energy to take pains in anything. He cracked his whip as he did all things--execrably; and, when his wrist was suddenly and firmly seized from behind, the shock served the young ruffian right. His jaw dropped. 'The devil!' he gasped; but, turning round, it appeared that he had made a mistake--unless, indeed, the devil had taken the form of a dark and beautiful young lady, with bright contemptuous eyes that made the lad shrivel and hang his head.
'Anyway, you can't crack a whip!' said the Bride, scornfully--for of course it was no one else.
The lad kept a sulky silence. The young lady picked up the whip that had fallen from his unnerved fingers. She looked very fresh and buoyant in the fresh summer morning, and very lovely. She could not have felt real fatigue the night before, for there was not a lingering trace of it in her appearance now; and if she had been really tired, why be up and out so very early this morning? The [52] stable-boy began to glance at her furtively and to ask himself this last question, while Gladys handled and examined the whip in a manner indicating that she had handled a whip before.
'Show you how?' she asked suddenly; but the lad only dropped his eyes and shuffled his feet, and became a degree more sulky than before. Gladys stared at him in astonishment. She was new to England, and had yet to discover that there is a certain type of lout--a peculiarly English type--that infinitely prefers to be ground under heel by its betters to being treated with the least approach to freedom or geniality on their part. This order of being would resent the familiarity of an Archbishop much more bitterly than his Grace would resent the vilest abuse of the lout. It combines the touchiness of the sensitive-plant with the soul of the weed; and it was the Bride's first introduction to the variety--which, indeed, does not exist in Australia. She cracked the whip prettily, and with a light heart, and the boy glowered upon her. The exercise pleased her, and brought a dull red glow into her dusky cheeks, and heightened and set off her beauty, so that even the lout gaped at her [53] with a sullen sense of satisfaction. Then, suddenly, she threw down the whip at his feet.
'Take the beastly thing!' she cried. 'It isn't half a whip! But you just hold on, and I'll show you what a real whip is!'
She was out of the yard in a twinkling. The lout rubbed his eyes, scratched his head, and whistled. Then a brilliant idea struck him:
he fetched the coachman. They were just in time. The Bride was back in a moment.
12
'Ha! two of you, eh?' she exclaimed. 'Well, stand aside and I'll show you how we crack stock-whips in the Bush!'
A short, stout handle, tapering towards the lash, and no longer than fifteen inches, was in her hand. They could not see the lash at first, because she held it in front of her in her left hand, and it was of the same colour as her dark tailor-made dress; but the Bride jerked her right wrist gently, and then a thing like an attenuated brown snake, twelve feet long, lay stretched upon the wet cement of the yard as if by magic. Swiftly then she raised her arm, and the two spectators felt a fine line of water strike their faces as the lash came up from the wet cement; [54] looking up, they saw a long black streak undulating for an instant above the young lady's head, and then they heard a whiz, followed by an almost deafening report. The lash lay on the ground again, quivering. Coachman and stable-boy instinctively flattened their backs against the coach-house door.