“She must not know,” exclaimed Jack.
“Of course not. Women are children of a larger growth, and must be treated as such. The pills we give them must be coated with sugar, the powders concealed in raspberry jam. I will make myself so agreeable to Madame Chicot that she will be delighted to accept my escort to and from the theatre: but I will keep her anonymous admirer at a distance as thoroughly as the fiercest dragon that ever kept watch over beauty.”
“A thousand thanks, Desrolles. You won’t find me ungrateful. Goodbye.”
“Are you going across the Channel?”
Mr. Chicot did not say where he was going, and Desrolles was too discreet to push the question. He was a man who boasted sometimes, when drink had made him maudlin, that, whatever had become of his morals, he had never lost his manners.
Jack Chicot left a brief pencilled note for his wife:—
“Dear Zaïre—
“Since we get on so badly together, a few days’ separation will be good for both of us. I am off to the country for a breath of fresh air. I sicken in the odour of gas and stale brandy. Take care of yourself for your own sake, if not for mine.—
VII
“A Little While Such Lips as Thine to Kiss”
It was midwinter when Jasper Treverton died. Spring had come in all her glory—her balmy airs and sultry noontides, stolen from summer; her variety and wealth of wood and meadow blossoms; her snowy orchard bloom, tinted with carnation; her sweetness and freshness of beauty—a season to be welcomed and enjoyed like no other season in the changing year; a little glimpse of Paradise on earth between the destroying gales of March and the fatal thunderstorms of July. Spring had filled all the lanes and glades round Hazlehurst with perfume and colour when John Treverton reappeared in the village, as unexpectedly as if he had dropped from the skies.
Eliza Sampson was destroying the aphids on a favourite rose tree, handling them daintily with the tips of her gloved fingers, as if she loved them, when Mr. Treverton appeared at the little iron gate carrying his own portmanteau. He, the heir of all the ages, and of what signified much more in Miss Sampson’s estimation, an estate worth fourteen thousand a year.
“Oh,” She cried, “Mr. Treverton, how could you? We would have sent the boy to the station.”
“How could I do what?” he asked, laughing at her horrified look.
“Carry your own portmanteau. Tom will be so vexed.”
“Tom need know nothing about it, if it will vex him. The portmanteau is light enough, and I have only brought it from the George, where the bus dropped me. You see I have taken your brother at his word, Miss Sampson, and have come to quarter myself upon you for a few days.”
“Tom will be delighted,” said Eliza.
She was meditating how the dinner she had arranged for Tom and herself could be made to do for the heir of Hazlehurst Manor. It was one of those dinners in which the economical housekeeper delights, a dinner that clears up every scrap in the larder, and leaves not so much as a knuckle bone for the predatory “follower,” male or female, the cook’s hungry niece, or the housemaid’s young man. A little soup, squeezed, as by hydraulic pressure, out of cleanly picked bones and odd remnants of gristle; a dish of hashed mutton, a very small hash, fenced round with a machicolated parapet of toasted bread; a beefsteak pudding with a kidney in it, boiled in a basin the size of a breakfast-cup. This latter savoury mess was intended to gratify Tom, who was prejudiced against hashed mutton, and always pretended that it disagreed with him. For entrentets sucrés there were a dish of stewed rhubarb, and a mould of boiled rice, wholesome, simple, and inexpensive. It was a little dinner which did honour to Miss Sampson’s head and heart; but she felt that it was not good enough for the future lord of Hazlehurst, a gentleman out of whom her brother hoped to make plenty of money by-and-bye.
“I’ll go and see about your room while you have a chat with Tom in the office,” she said, tripping lightly away, and leaving John Treverton on the lawn in front of the drawing-room windows, a closely shorn piece of grass, about fifty feet by twenty-five.
“Pray don’t give yourself any trouble,” he called after her, “I’m used to roughing it.”
Eliza was in the kitchen before he had finished his sentence, she was deep in consultation with the cook, who would have resented the unannounced arrival of any ordinary guest, but who felt that Mr. Treverton was a person for whom people must be expected to put themselves about. He had given liberal vails, too, after his last visit, and that was much in his favour.
“We must have some fish, Mary,” said Eliza, “and poultry. It’s dreadfully dear at this time of year, and Trimpson does impose so, but we must have it.”
Trimpson was the only fishmonger and poulterer of Hazlehurst, a trader whose stock sometimes consisted of a pound and a half of salmon, and a single fowl, long-necked and skinny, hanging in solitary glory above the slate slab, where the salmon steak lay frizzling in the afternoon sun, which shone full upon Trimpson’s shop.
“Well, miss, if I was you, I’d have a pair of soles and a duck to follow, with the beefsteak pudding for a bottom dish,” suggested cook, “but, lawks, what’s the good of talking? we must have what we can get. But I saw two ducks in Trimpson’s window this morning when I went
