Even the most valuable and expensive pet may become a vexation if it is continually showing ill-temper and fractiousness. Mrs. Monnerie merely puckered her lips or shrugged her shoulders at my outbursts of vanity and insolence. But drops of water will wear away a stone. From being Court Favourite I gradually sank to being Court Fool. In sheer ennui and desperation I waggled my bells and brandished my bladder. A cat may look at a Queen, but it should, I am sure, make faces only at her Ladies-in-waiting.
Fanny inherited yet another sinecure; and it was not envy on my side that helped her to shine in it, though I had my fits of jealousy. She was determined to please; and when Fanny made up her mind, circumstances seemed just to fawn at her feet. Life became a continuous game of chess, the moves of which at times kept me awake and brooding in a far from wholesome fashion in my bed. Pawn of pawns, and one at the point of being sacrificed, I could only squint at the board. Indeed, I deliberately shut my eyes to my own insignificance, strutted about, sulked, sharpened my tongue like a serpent, and became a perfect pest to myself when alone. Yet I knew in my heart that those whom I hoped to wound merely laughed at me behind my back, that I was once more proving to the world that the smaller one is the greater is one’s vanity.
In the midst of this nightmare, by a curious coincidence rose like a jack-in-the-box from out of my past the queerest of phantoms—and proved himself real.
I was sullenly stewing in my thoughts in the library one morning over a book which to this day I never weary of reading; Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne. It was the nearest I could get to the country. The whim took me to try and become a little better acquainted with “William Markwick, Esq., F.L.S.,” who had himself seen the Sphinx stellatarum inserting its proboscis into the nectary of a flower while “keeping constantly on the wing.” There seemed to be something in common, just then, between myself and the Sphinx.
I pressed my wainscot bell. After an unusual delay in a drastically regulated household, the door behind me gently opened. I began simpering directions over my shoulder in the Percy way with servants—and presently realized that all was not quite as it should be. I turned to look, and saw thrust in at the doorway an apparently bodiless, protuberant head, with black, buttony eyes on either side a long, long nose. Then the remainder of this figure squeezed reluctantly in. It was Adam Waggett.
Guy Fawkes himself, caught lantern in hand among his powder barrels, must have looked like Adam Waggett at this moment. For a while I could only return his stare from the midst of a vortex of memories. When at last I found my tongue and inquired peremptorily how he came there, and what he was doing in the house, he broke into a long, gurgling, strangulated guffaw of laughter. I was already in a sour temper—in spite of the sweetness of Selborne. As a boy he had been my acute aversion; and here he was a grown man and as doltish and ludicrous as when he had roared at me in the moonlight from outside the kitchen window at Stonecote. His stupidity and disrespect made me almost inarticulate with rage.
Maybe the foolish creature, feeling as strange as a cat in a new house, was only expressing his joy and affection at sight of a familiar face. But I had no time to consider motives. In a fever of apprehension that his noise might be overheard, my one thought now was to bring him to his senses. I shook my fists at him! and stamped my foot on the Turkey carpet—as if in snow. He watched me in a stupefaction of admiration, but at length his face solemnified, and he realized that my angry gestures were not intended for his amusement.
His mouth stood open, he shook his head, and, unless my eyes deceived me, set back his immense ears.
“Beg pardon, miss, I’m sure,” he stuttered, “it was the sc-hock, and you inside the book there, and the old times like; and even though they was telling me that there was such a—such a young lady in the house. … But I won’t utter a word, miss, not me. Only,” he stared round at the closed door and lowered his voice to an even huskier whisper, “except to tell you that Pollie’s doing very nicely, and whenever I sees her—well, miss, that thunderstorm and the old cow!”
At this his features gathered together for another outburst, which I succeeded in stifling only by warning him that so long as he remained at Mrs. Monnerie’s he must completely forget the old cow and the thunderstorm, and never address me in company, or even glance in my direction if we happened to be together in the same room.
“Mrs. Monnerie would be extremely angry, Adam, to hear you laughing in the library; and I am anxious that you should be a credit to Lyndsey in your new situation.”
“But you rang, miss—at least the library did,” he replied, now thoroughly contrite, “and Mr. Marvell said, ‘You go along, there, Waggett, second door right, first staircase,’ so I come.”
“Yes,” I said, “but it was a mistake. A mistake, you understand. Now go away; and
