XVII
JUNE spent a worried and disconsolate night. She had very little sleep. Time and again she listened to the melancholy drip-drip of rain on the eaves just over her head. Never in her life had she felt so wretched. She was horribly lonely, without resources or friends. How she was to live through the endless years of servitude and dependence on the will of others that lay ahead she did not know.
To keep on telling oneself to bear up seemed of little use. She had had to do that each hour of each day since her mother’s death. The prospect of being cast upon the world was indeed dispiriting, yet in the end it might turn out better than to sacrifice one’s youth upon the altar of such a Moloch as Uncle Si.
As people who sleep ill are apt to do, she fell into a comfortable doze just about the time she ought to be getting up. Thus, to her dismay, she entered upon the trying institution known as Monday morning at a quarter past seven instead of half past six.
“Uncle Si will be growling for his breakfast in another quarter of an hour,” was the thought that urged her into her clothes with a frantic haste. One twist she gave and no more, without so much as a glance in the glass, at the mane of brown gold hair, and then she flew downstairs, buttoning the front of her dress.
A fire was burning in the kitchen grate, and upon it slices of bacon were sizzling in a frying-pan; the cloth was laid for breakfast; moreover, the parlour was already swept and dusted. In fact, at the precise moment of June’s belated appearance upon the scene, William, with a businesslike air, was returning from a visit to the dustbin.
When they met in the passage by the scullery she came within an ace of rebuking him. “Even if I oversleep myself you’ve no right to be so officious,” was the sharp phrase which rose to her lips. But a saving sense of justice, not always at the service of the female soul, held it back. After all, such kindness and devotion were worthy of respect; he had saved, besides, an unpleasant scene with Uncle Si.
“Oh, thank you, William, ever so much,” she had the grace to murmur, hoping as she hastily disposed of the last button of her dress, that he wouldn’t notice she had come down, “half undone.”
“Please don’t mention it, Miss June,” he said, with the politeness of a courtier, as he returned the empty dustpan to its home beneath the scullery sink. “As you didn’t seem quite yourself last night I was hoping you would not get up at all this morning. I was going to bring your breakfast up to you, and set it outside your door.”
“Oh, but you are much too kind.” A sudden fierce rush of colour made her cheeks burn horribly. He was a very nice fellow, even if he was not so bright in some things as he ought to be.
Uncle Si, by the grace of providence, was a few minutes late for his breakfast. This seldom happened for, as a rule, he was the soul of punctuality. However, he was going down to Newbury by the nine o’clock from Paddington to attend a sale; in consequence, he had bestowed far more pains upon his appearance than was usual at this early hour. He was in a fairly good humour. The fact that the charwoman’s return would enable him “to fire” his niece had cheered him so much that for once he had slept like a just man.
“Don’t expect me until supper time,” he said to June, as he put on his high felt hat and his macintosh, and grasped the knobbed stick, as ugly as himself, which invariably accompanied his travels. “And my advice to you, my girl, is to think over very carefully what I said to you last night.”
With an air of quiet satisfaction, S. Gedge Antiques stepped briskly forth into a soft autumn day where the sun as yet could not quite make up its mind to greet him.
It was to be a day of great events. And the first of these began to materialise shortly before eleven when June chanced to enter the shop. William, just at that moment, was fathoms deep in conversation with a customer. The customer was very tall, she was strikingly distinguished and, in the opinion of June, she was dressed exquisitely. Soft silk and faint blue Chinese embroidery clothed her with a dangerous beauty. But it was the coquetry of her hat, an artful straw wreathed wonderfully in flowers of many a subtle shade that gave the crowning touch.
The hat it was, no doubt, that completed William’s overthrow. There was a look of rapture in the eyes with which the vain fellow regarded its wearer, for which June could have found it in her heart to slay him on the spot.
That tell-tale look was really a little too much. June could not help lingering on the threshold to watch these two. So shamelessly was William engrossed with this vision of pure beauty that there was not a chance of his eyes straying to look at her. And she would not have cared if they had. Such an irrational surge of jealousy was now in her heart that she would have welcomed his seeing what she thought of his gazing like that, even upon the grandest young woman in the land.
“So nice of you to take so much trouble,” the fair customer said in a voice of such melody that June had to own that the celebrated Miss Banks, the daughter of Blackhampton’s chief physician, whose charm of manner had ever remained in her mind as the high-water mark of human amenity, would now have to take second place.
“Not at all, madam,” said William, in the William way. Even June had to admit that such fine courtesy, a little excessive, no doubt, was far removed from mere sycophancy. Had he not practised on her? For that reason she had a perfect right to feel furious; William’s homage was far too inclusive. At the same time, there was no gainsaying that in this case he had every excuse. Regarded as the mirror of fashion and the mould of form, Miss Banks of Blackhampton was now a back number.
“The friend I sent it to liked it very much indeed,” said the Super-girl. “It was so exactly what she wanted. And if by chance you are able to match it, I shall be most grateful.”
William, with that divine air of his, promised quite simply and sincerely to do his best.
“The price, too, was very moderate,” said the Super-girl with the geniality of one who owns a province. Then suddenly she half turned, and her merry glance, assisted by a Miss Banksian stick-eyeglass was trained full upon the Hoodoo. “What a delicious monster!” The voice had quite a Brahms trill in it, not that June had ever heard of Brahms. “It reminds one of Edgar Allan Poe or the Grand Guignol.”
Unabashed by culture, William stood to his full height. June could only marvel at his coolness.
“So Oriental. So grotesque. Makes one think of Ali Baba and the Cave of the Forty Robbers. Very valuable, of course?”
“No, I wouldn’t exactly call it valuable.” June hardly knew whether to admire or to deplore this candour. “And it takes up a lot of room, and absorbs a lot of light. Almost needs the British Museum, as you might say, to show it to advantage.”
Again the Brahms trill, as the eye of the Super-girl travelled from the Hoodoo to William. “Those fearful eyes and those grinning jaws studded with crocodile’s teeth make it look absolutely alive. And it’s so perfectly hideous that one feels sure there must be a curse on it.”
“Mr. Gedge declares there is.”
“Really?” The eyes, the blue eyes of the Super-girl grew round and merry. “I’d love to have a thing with a curse on it—if it’s a real one?”
“Mr. Gedge would part with it for a very reasonable sum I feel sure,” said William, with a judicious air that June admired the more for being hardly able to credit it in him.
With the casual air so becoming to riches, the young woman asked the price.
“Twenty pounds would buy it,” she was informed.
“Curse and all?”
“Curse and all, madam.” William had a nice sense of humour, which June had discovered before she had known him an hour, but in this big moment he did not relax a muscle.
For about a quarter of a minute the Super-girl looked again at the Hoodoo. And then with the air of one who takes a great decision, she gave the ugly chin a playful tap and said: “I believe the long gallery at Homefield is the very place for you, my friend. You may not be a thing of beauty, but at the far end I am sure you would be a joy for ever!” She made then such fine play with her stick-eyeglass, that Miss Banks was put off the map altogether. “And a real live curse given in, I think you said?”
William bowed a grave affirmative.
It was clear that Miss Blue Blood was intrigued. She folded, unfolded, refolded her stick-eyeglass; she looked the Hoodoo up, she looked the Hoodoo down, standing three paces back in order to do so. “Before I really decide”—addressing the monster in a voice of warm caresses—“I must get my father to come and look at you, my dear. He’s wiser than I in these matters. You might kill all the pictures in the long gallery.”
At this point William bowed again with exceeding deference. But here was not the end. The stick-eyeglass lit on the bowl of Lowestoft, which the Sawney who was turning out to be not quite such a sawney as he seemed, had picked up in his recent travels in Suffolk.
“I like that. What a charming piece!”
Mr. Half-Sawney held the charming piece to the light for Miss Stick-eyeglass to gaze upon.
“Yes—really quite charming!”
Their heads were so close while together they bent over its beauties, that June, without wishing real harm to either, could have found it in her heart to hope that the bowl might fall from the hands of William and break into a thousand pieces.
“What is the price?”
The bowl was turned on to its base while the young man glanced at the mystic code which had been traced by the hand of S. Gedge Antiques.
“Six guineas, madam,” she was most deferentially informed.
“I collect Lowestoft. A charming piece. It will go so well with my others. Will you kindly send it to 39b, Park Lane?”
“Certainly, Miss Babraham.”
The amazing Miss Babraham opened a vanity bag, took out a sheaf of notes, and chose six which, with the smile of a siren, she handed to William, who received them with one more bow from his full height, and proceeded to write out a receipt.
Somehow this transaction was altogether too much for June. Flashing one long last glance of immeasurable venom upon the stick-eyeglass who, all unconscious of the deadly passions it had aroused, had now returned to elegant and final contemplation of the Hoodoo, the niece of S. Gedge Antiques withdrew hurriedly to the scullery sink, filled a bucket of water, and proceeded with a kind of contained fury to scrub the floor of the larder.