Her little young ladyship

Chapter I

“OEVEN o’clock, sir!” said the correct and kU punctual James, entering his master’s room. “Seven o’clock, if you please, my lord.”

Lord Gresham turned and looked at his faithful servitor. Experience had taught him to detect the presence of information in James. He detected it now and lay back with a smile.

“Go on,” said he. “What is it?”

“We can’t stay ’ere long, sir,” James burst out. “You remember your dinner last night?” His lordship nodded. “Well, your breakfast bids fair to be worse. The proprietor as acts always as barmaid is actin’ now as cook. I saw queer things done with food by the blacks in Virginia, but never did I see or hope to see anything like what that man Kenny is doing with the ’am and the porridge — disgustin’, I calls it. And in a country they ’as the impudence to call New England.

The occupant of the best bedroom of the only hotel in Edgecombe, Connecticut, laughed reassuringly. “It can’t be worse than dinner was,” he 3 pointed out. “Nothing could, you know. Was he responsible for that?’^

“No, m’ lord. Dinner was done by the cook, but after dinner words passed between ’er and the proprietor. They was on the subject of more flies than currants in the rice pudding, as your lordship knowed at the time. Mr. Kenny’s words was moderate in the circumstances, but she was in an unreasonable state of mind through ’im having earlier in the day smacked her face with a leg of mutton. Your lordship remembers the leg of mutton ?”

“I do,” answered Gresham. “It was an atrocious leg of mutton.”

“Well,” James continued, “she has went; and the question now remains, what is your lordship going to eat, and how am I gbing to get it ?”

“You know perfectly well,” laughed his master; “there’s no question about it. I shall live on the fat of the land, and you will get it for me as you always do somehow. We can’t leave this place immediately, but I can promise that we sha’n’t stay long. Get the hot water, and while you are down-stairs ask a question or two about a gentleman called Forbes — John Forbes — he grows tobacco about here. He’s the man I’ve come to Edgecombe to see.”

James vanished obediently, but in the hall, which was pervaded by the atmosphere of dead chops and long-ago dough-nuts, he allowed himself the mutinous hope that John Forbes was dead or away or otherwise invisible.

James was, in fact, rather bored by the whole journey. He was much older than his present master, and in former services he had embarked upon travels as various as they were hazardous. He had travelled across continents in search of a lion or a lady, a beetle, a book, or even buried treasure, and these incentives he had come to understand. He had even been enthusiastic in the quest of the lady and the beetle. The lions and the buried treasure had not appealed to his matter-of-fact imagination. But this quest of young Lord Gresham’s was even less to his taste. Why should a young man of wealth, position and large property abandon the comfort and the pleasure of his domain to travel incognito from one uninteresting place to another; spend his days with uncouth overseers; endure discomforts of mosquitoes, privations and malarial fever, simply to verify or to obtain at first hand knowledge which was to be found in books. Knowledge of tobacco! James utterly despised tobacco except in its proper places. These he considered to be 5 smoking-rooms, tobacco-shops, pipes, cigars and cigarettes. He took no interest in its preliminary stages. Also he took no interest in the impoverished tenantry on his master’s estate. He regarded them with an impatient disgust, and felt debased by the knowledge that it was for their sake, to supply them with employment, that he and Lord Gresham had spent months in unhealthy towns in the southern states of America, investigating, listening, taking notes. He had comforted himself through weeks of slow boiling discomfort by the anticipation of this visit to New England, and now, on the morning after their arrival in this bourn, he was forced to admit that the change was not for the better.

But the incognito which Lord Gresham chose to assume was what rankled most sorely in his British rank -and -title -loving mind. He was treated as the common servant of an ordinary man, and he did not enjoy the experience. It hurt his pride. He was the valet of a peer of the British realm, and the state and formality which the master relinquished so easily was dear and almost essential to the man. In public he obeyed orders and dropped his master’s title, but in private he still affected forgetfulness, and revelled in ‘‘my lord.”

He hated democracy, and in the democratic economy of Mr. Kenny’s establishment all the guests, male and female, servant and master, dined, supped or breakfasted in one hungry assembly and in one fly-infested dining-room. James met this intolerable situation by choosing a table diametrically opposite to that at which his master sat. He was close to the opening in the wall through which the food made its appearance, and he rigidly inspected every dish before allowing the haughty young woman who served as waitress to lay it before his master. Even this oversight sometimes failed to satisfy his care, and he would thread the inconvenient maze of chairs and oil-clothed tables to impart grave doubts as to the youth of the eggs and grave warnings against the stewed prunes.

“They keeps them from week to week, m’ lord,” he whispered. “What isn’t eaten one day they puts back into the stew-pan and ladles out the next. They put the tea in cold water and then brought it to a boil, cooking the eggs at the same time and in the same receptacle. I wouldn’t have much to do with them, sir, if you was to ask my advice. The bread ain’t so bad, it came down from the city on an early train, and the milk was fresh this morning. I saw them milking the 7

COW. So if you was to ask me what you’d better breakfast on, I should answer * Bread and milk.’ ”

Upon these frugal elements Lord Gresham was concentrating his energies when James, having finished his own repast, reported for orders.

“It seems to be the general opinion, sir,” said he, “that this ’ere Mr. Forbes is the most important man any place about ’ere. I mentioned it to Mr. Kenny as ’ow you had a letter to ’im, and he said as that he guessed as much, and then he guessed the letter would about end us here. He showed me Mr. Forbes’s house — you can see it plainly from the door. High on the hill it is, very large and very white.”

“I noticed it,” his lordship answered. will stroll up there some time this morning. Did you understand what this man Kenny meant by saying the letter would finish us here ?”

“I did not, my lord,” James made reply. “I don’t always understand what these ’ere natives are saying.”

“ I wonder what he meant,” pondered Gresham.

“Couldn’t undertake to say, my lord, I am sure; but this I did understand, they all expect a very hot day, sir. They haven’t had a drop of rain since the last of May, and here it’s the nineteenth of 8

June: an awful climate, sir, but I should say, quite good enough for them that lives in it/’

An hour later when Lord Gresham, disregarding the warnings of his host and the remonstrances of his servant, fared forth into the glare of Edgecombe’s main street, he sympathised sincerely with James’s desire to shake its dust from his feet. But the Edgecombe dust, after nearly three weeks of drought, was not to be shaken off. It rose in clouds about any moving thing. Not even a dog could cross the road without raising it in dense volumes, and when an automobile full of shrouded figures tore its way past Gresham, he swore fluently as he choked and strangled on the footpath. Fortunately, the distance to the white house on the hill was not great, and it was with a sigh of relief that he turned in at its gate and left the road behind him. A few steps brought him to an arch in the hedge which screened an elaborate garden.

Chapter II

A BURNING sun high in a cloudless heaven was doing its best to ruin everything in the garden. It is a way such suns have in the “hot spells’’ which frequently disfigure the last week of May in the New England climate. But only the keen eyes of a gardener — and a disgruntled one — could have detected that ruin was hovering near the beds and bushes over which Reuben Sands shook so depairing a head.

To the hot young Gresham the garden was a lovely spot. Its winding paths shaded by lilac and syringa, by fresh-leaved maple and by solemn evergreen, afforded a most welcome relief from the heat and glare of the road. Between the garden and this road lay a stretch of lawn; between the garden and the house the grass appeared again; so that none of the soil and turmoil of the highway could reach the vine-hung porches. All this expanse of green and flower sloped somewhat steeply upward — hence the winding of the paths — to a large rather ungainly house. To have held Queen Anne’s architects responsible for the eccentricity of bay-window, chimney, dormer, turret, porte-

lO cochere and balcony which it presented to the blazing sun, and the dusty road, would be to add an undeserved enormity to a not too brilliant reign.

Lord Gresham discerned the bent back of Reuben Sands, who was arranging a piece of canvas tent-wise over a bed of newly transplanted pansies, and fared determinedly toward it.

‘‘Is this Mr. Forbes’s place?” the stranger asked, and Reuben stood suddenly erect, so suddenly indeed that the tent collapsed and the pansies’ parasol had like to be their winding-sheet, for though Reuben hated and dreaded droughts, he hated and despised “dudes,” and the voice which fell upon his ear was certainly, according to his category, that of a dude. So he dropped the canvas and turned slowly. His eye corroborated the verdict of his ears. Never had he seen a more perfect specimen.

It was a tall dude, and, to unprejudiced eyes perhaps, not ill to look upon, though it was clothed in garments which would have been trying to Apollo. These were in colour a cross between a mustard and a linseed poultice; in texture they were warm and fuzzy; in shape baggy; and in their owner’s calm conceit they were absolutely the correct thing with which to impress the eyes of benighted America.

“Oh, I say now, that’s too bad, you know,” the voice went on, when its owner saw the havoc his arrival had wrought. “We must have that up. Here, I’ll give you a hand.”

He gave not only the promised hand but his whole attention and dexterity, and Reuben was somewhat mollified. The stranger’s next question, however, reawakened all his contempt.

“Is Mr. Forbes in, do you know.^^”

“In?” repeated Reuben. “Is Mr. Forbes in? Say, do you know what time of day it is ?”

“ Eleven,” answered the stranger, looking at his watch.

“Eleven,” corroborated Reuben, looking at the sun. “And do you know what day it is ?”

“Thursday,” said the stranger promptly.

'‘Well,” answered Reuben, expectorating heartily, “when you find Forbes home at eleven o’clock on Thursday morning or any other week-day, you’ll find a dead man, that’s all. Do you suppose he’s a loafer?” and his eyes, as they strayed over the young man beside him, seemed to mark the inspiration of his last words.

“But if you want to see him,” he continued, “you’d better go right on up to the house, they can tell you more about him there. Mis’ Forbes is in, and I guess Dot is too. She was out here a minute ago gathering flowers, and she ain’t had time to go out since.”

Acting upon this advice the stranger mounted the wide steps and noted with approval the coolness produced by the creepers and by the recent sprinkling of the porch. There was no sign of life, but he noticed a table piled high with freshly cut flowers, those to which Reuben had alluded, he surmised. The door was open, and, as he rang the bell, he was struck by the beauty and good taste of the cool-looking empty hall. He was just beginning to wonder whether his effort with the bell had produced any effect, when a swinging-door at the far end of the hall burst open, and a girl entered with the peculiar twisting motion which swinging-doors impose upon those carrying, as she did, a large tray. Flower-jars and vases of all sizes were set out upon it, and the stranger realised in the act of taking off his hat that this was a lady, a beauty, and probably ‘^Miss Forbes.” As she came toward him with a little smile of interrogation he put this last surmise to the test.

‘‘Miss Forbes ?” said he, and the “dude” voice which had enraged Reuben seemed soft and pretty to her unprejudiced ear.

“Yes,” she answered as she set her burden beside the flowers. “And you,” she went on, 13

Stretching a cordial hand to him, “you are Captain Gresham. We have been expecting you. Your friend and ours, Mr. Elliott, wrote to dad and told him you’d be here some time this month or last; so you see we have been looking for you quite a long time.”

“And I should have been here long ago,” the gallant captain responded, “if I had known — what I know now.”

She caught the implication instantly and laughed at it with an amazing frankness. “My father will be here presently. You had much better wait here for him than try to find him at the mills. It is so noisy and dusty down there, and so heavenly quiet up here.”

“Heavenly, indeed,” Gresham answered.

Mr. Forbes did not return for nearly an hour, and during that time Dot discovered that Gresham had seen three years’ service, hated London, had been to Madame Tussaud’s, loved the country, owned some land and intended to devote himself for the next few years to the improvement of his estate and his tenants.

“That’s the reason I’m here, don’t you know ?” he explained. “When I talked to Elliott about it — nice old chap, Elliott, don’t you think ?”

“An old darling,” Dot agreed warmly.

*‘That is what I think. Well, Elliott advised that I should try tobacco. It grows, he says, on any soil, and employs any amount of unskilled labour — sounded just the thing for my chaps — they are unskilled enough for anything. So I came over here to see how the stuff is raised and all that sort of thing. Been to Virginia. Spent a month there and Fve almost decided to give the thing a trial; but Elliott strongly advised my seeing Mr. Forbes, since the climate here is more like ours at home. Elliott says he can put me up to no end of dodges if he likes.”

“Oh, he will, don’t you worry,” she laughed. “There is nothing he loves so much as teaching people about tobacco — ^why, he even taught me.”

“About tobacco ?”

“Yes, about tobacco. You see, I am with him quite a good deal, and so he talks things over with me. It makes it easier for him to have me understand. I can help him with the planters who come up from the South to look into his methods. Sometimes the mill keeps dad here in town, but he is just crazy about the fields. I guess it is because he has always worked in the mill, but this tobacco business is new. It is only about ten years since he got stuck on a deal and had to take a lot of waste land in payment. But you can’t

Stick dad. No, sir, not for long! Dad started tobacco on that land, and now it is just about as profitable as city lots.’’

While Dot had been culling information about her new acquaintance she had not been secretive about her own history. She told him her age, eighteen and a half, that her name was really Dorothy, and that she was an only child; that she belonged to the dearest dad in the world and the sweetest mother, and that all her nineteen years had been spent in the little town of Edgecombe, which lay outstretched before them in the valley. There he could see all the complicated buildings of her father’s mill and the rows and rows of neat little cottages in which the operatives lived. There, well to the right, was the high-school which she had attended. Right in front of them was the church. Beyond that again was the big public school — ‘‘ It wasn’t so big when I went there, but dad donated a wing the day I graduated. I was valedictorian,” she told him, with a pride which made his achievement of First at Oxford seem insignificant.

“Were you, indeed ?” he cried.

“I was,” she answered solemnly, “and when I read my paper mother cried and dad was so tickled he could hardly see.”

“What tickled him asked Gresham, with some natural amazement.

“Oh, nothing. He was just tickled, that was all. Glad, you know,” she explained as he still looked puzzled. “He is just the dearest dad, and oh!” she broke ofF as a dust-covered buggy turned in at the gate, “here he comes now. My! won’t he be glad to see you.”

Chapter III

D orothy ran along the porch and out upon the landing stage in the middle of the portecochere. She waved vehemently to the occupant of the approaching vehicle, and he waved as vehemently at her. He was not yet near enough to allow of Gresham seeing him clearly, but Dorothy required no closer identification.

‘‘You are going to meet the dearest old dad in the world,” said she. “Do you feel worthy ?”

“I don’t,” said Gresham, “but I’ll dissemble.” A little negro boy who crouched in the corner of the seat beside Mr. Forbes drove the horse round out of sight behind the house, while Forbes looked out from his daughter’s embrace at the mustard-coloured stranger behind her. Gresham looked at him with no less interest and found him to be a shrewd and genial American of middle life and middle class. His costume consisted of frockcoat, gray trousers, white waistcoat and widebrimmed straw hat. He greeted Gresham warmly when Dot had performed the introduction, and insisted that he should stay to lunch, a repast which

i8 was even then, as Gresham could hear, making its appearance in the dining-room. He took Gresham’s acceptance for granted and broke in upon his demurs with, “What will you drink, or has Dot attended to that?”

“Dad, dear,” said Dot penitently, “I didn’t. Honestly, I forgot all about it.”

“Well, you’re a nice hostess,” chided her father, “a boiling hot, dusty day, and not to offer a man a drink. I am surprised at you; but never mind, we’ll have time for one before lunch. Go and get the things. Dot.”

Dot reappeared almost immediately with the ingredients of what Mr. Forbes described as a Scotch high-ball. And presently Mrs. Forbes came out to join them and to apologise for her tardy appearance.

“Now, mother, tell the truth,” Forbes said to her, “what were you doing ?”

“Oh, John,” she pleaded, “how can you?”

“Why can’t I ?” Forbes laughed as he put his arm around her. “This is Captain Gresham, a friend of Elliott’s. Do you remember Elliott, he stayed with us last year. Well! this is his friend, and, for all you know, Elliott may have told him about your little ways.”

“Oh, John,” she remonstrated again and blushed warmly. She was not so tall as her daughter and not, Gresham decided, as pretty, but she had the same soft dark hair, the same brown eyes without Dot’s shrewd frankness, and the same rounded chin without Dot’s determination. She was most beautifully and perfectly dressed, and it was only in relation to her perfection that Gresham noticed and appraised the costly simplicity of Dot’s gown.

“Well, mother, go on, we’re waiting,” said Forbes. “’Fess up, what were you doing?”

“I was only up in the linen-room, dear,” Mrs. Forbes explained. “Captain Gresham will understand that there is a great deal to be done in keeping a big house like this running smoothly, and he won’t think it’s a bit kind of you to tease me about it.”

“Well, I won’t,” said her husband, “but Captain Gresham ought to know, if he is going to stay to lunch, that you are the most inveterate housekeeper in the United States.”

“My dear sir,” he went on, addressing his guest, “her heart is so bound up in this house that she occasionally farms out her husband and daughter on her neighbours so that she can have it all to herself.”

“Spring cleaning,” explained Mrs. Forbes to Gresham. “They take it very badly.”

“And it’s over now,” cried Dot. “We’re quite, quite safe for another year.”

Chapter IV

G resham thought as he took his place at the beautifully appointed table in the handsome shutter-shaded dining-room that Mrs. Forbes’s housekeeping preoccupation seemed a most satisfactory one. It was difficult, surrounded by all the familiar paraphernalia of mealtime at home, to realise that he was in an alien land, and that these people with whom he found himself so quickly on terms of ease and intimacy had been blank strangers to him three hours before.

The manner of ease and frankness which had so attracted and surprised him in the daughter was evidently the manner of the household. Even the maid who served the meal shared it, and urged dishes upon them as one having knowledge of their true constituents.

‘‘You had better have some cream potatoes, Mr. Forbes; Mary cooked them special for you; they are the first new ones this year.”

“Oh, very well,” said Forbes; “that was very good of Mary.”

As the meal progressed Gresham was more and more amazed at the scope and number of the topics discussed by these three. One of them, Dot, had never crossed the mountain which enclosed the valley; Mrs. Forbes had been once or twice to New York and often to Hartford; and Forbes himself had travelled no farther than the ordinary prosecution of his business demanded. Yet here they sat discussing affairs of international interest, and Forbes’s knowledge and memory of the South- African campaigns astounded his visitor. Usually the most reticent of heroes, Gresham, encouraged by their intelligent interest, found himself describing his part in various engagements, and discussing British tactics and commanders as technically, but not perhaps as frankly, as though his audience were composed of fellow-officers. They were still, conversationally, in Africa, when the meal ended and they drifted back to the veranda.

Presently Forbes’s buggy reappeared, and Gresham rose to make his adieus and apologies for the unconscionable time he had stayed. A whole code of signals were exchanged between Mr. and Mrs. Forbes, and then the latter asked him, with a pretty insistence, to make his home with them for as long as he stayed at Edgecombe.

‘‘Oh, I couldn’t think of it, really,” he remonstrated. “It is awfully good of you to take me in like this, but I am quite comfortable at the hotel/’

Dot turned to him suddenly. “Where do you expect to go to when you die,” she demanded, “if you tell whoppers like that.^ No one was ever comfortable at the Edgecombe Hotel. And it is only because people leave it so quickly that it has not earned the highest death-rate of the State. You comfortable there,” she laughed. “I can just see you fishing the flies out of the soup.”

“Dorothy,” her mother remonstrated.

“Well, I can,” said Dot. “I can imagine it. I have seen so many people do it. Really, Captain Gresham, you would be more comfortable here; people generally do drift here when they have had a meal or two at the hotel.”

“Well, we will call it fixed,” Forbes broke out. “You stay here with the ladies this afternoon; it is too hot and too late to go out to the fields, and ril send up for your duds as I pass the hotel. Elliott told me to take care of you, and I propose to do it. There is nothing mother enjoys so much as some one to take care of, and Dot and I are in such good shape that she can’t exercise her talents on us. Are your things in your trunk or are they scattered around the room so that you would have to go down and pack them yourself?”

“You’re awfully kind,” said Gresham again, and really he was rather overwhelmed by this hospitality. “My things are scattered about a bit, but my man is there and he’ll pack them for me. Shall he be in your way here ? he can quite as well stay down there, you know.”

But here Mrs. Forbes’s eagerness grew, if possible, more keen. Entertaining was her hobby; one wing of the house was devoted to guestrooms, and in it a suite had been set apart on the architect’s plans for “guest with own maid or valet.” Thus far it had not been used in its designated capacity; the Forbes’s friends had not contracted the maid or valet habit.

Mother with daughter, father with son, had often occupied the suite, but never before in the history of Edgecombe had a valet invaded the town. Mrs. Forbes determined to secure the valet and to put him in his allotted place. She felt all the triumph of the puzzle-player who, after long effort, finds a missing piece and slips it into its waiting place.

Chapter V

P ASSING through the village Forbes stopped at the untidy white-porticoed hotel with its long line of rickety chairs and cuspidors. The habitual number of loungers were gathered there discussing politics and the weather, and they greeted Forbes with as much respect as their democratic spirit allowed them to show. But he had no leisure nor inclination to listen to their surmises on thunder-storms or elections, and he went quickly through the screen door which led to the bar. There he found the proprietor whiling away the empty hours with yesterday’s paper and a thick cigar.

“Thought you’d be down,” was his greeting. “Thought so just as soon as he began asking where you lived and said he had letters of introduction to you. Queer fellow, ain’t he?”

“Oh, I guess he’s all right,” Forbes answered. “Sure he’s all right,” Jimmy Kenny replied. “But he’ll go high, John, higher than most you’ve had from me.”

“What room did he have?”

“He had three on the next floor. There was one for him, there was one he was going to have for a setting-room; we had to take the bed down — I don’t know why he couldn’t set in a room with a bed in it — and there was one for his hired man. Be you going to take the hired man, too?”

“Yes.”

“Then there was the board for the two of them and the bar charges.”

“Heavy drinker?” queried Forbes.

“No, not him; just whiskey and soda. But say, gee whiz, you ought to see that hired man.”

“Well, I want to see him,” said Forbes. “I want to tell him about bringing the duds up to the house.”

“You’ll find him round on the side porch,” said Jimmy. “But say, I might as well tell ye he located the ingredients of mint-julep this morning, and he found the necessities of a gin ricky pretty nigh about the same time. He has been enjoying himself considerable since he made them two discoveries. Now, if you want to make it right about his bar charges ”

“No, Jimmy, I guess not,” Forbes answered. “I guess he can keep on coming here for his juleps and rickies. I’ll just make it right with you about the rooms and the board.” And before 26 he sought out the faithful James upon the side porch, Forbes drew up a cheque of considerable magnitude to pay for one week’s pleasure for his wife. It was his custom so to deflect visitors of any importance or promise of entertainment whose interests brought them into the orbit of Mr. Kenny. It was also his habit and intention to pay for what he got and to stand under obligation to no man.

The arrangement worked admirably. Mrs. Forbes gained her heart’s desire; Mr. Kenny lost nothing but the trouble of entertaining the travelling public. The arrangement was of course a secret between the two men, but Forbes felt no compunction as to the kindly deceit it involved. Mother wanted company; well, he proposed to get it for her. It was well worth the price to see her so happy and so busy. Other men had untidy, uncomfortable homes and wives. The House was always a pleasure, always a credit, and his womenkind were always suitably and carefully dressed.

Forbes did not disguise from himself the fact that he, too, enjoyed entertaining the strangers who so often developed into friends. A great deal of the universality of information which had so impressed Gresham was due to the number and variety of the guests shanghaied from Mr. Kenny.