Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley Part 1

Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley.

by C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson.

CHAPTER I

If I didn't tell this, n.o.body else ever would; certainly not Diana, nor Major Vand.y.k.e--still less Eagle himself--I mean Captain Eagleston March; and they and I are the only ones who know, except a few such people as presidents and secretaries of war and generals, who never tell anything even under torture. Besides, there is the unofficial part. Without that, the drama would be like a play in three acts, with the first and third acts chopped off. The presidents and secretaries of war and generals know nothing about the unofficial part.

It's strange how the biggest things of life grow out of the tiniest ones. There _is_ the old simile of the acorn and the oak, for instance.

But oaks take a long time to grow, and everybody concerned in oak culture is calmly expecting them to do it. Imagine an acorn exploding to let out an oak huge enough to shadow the world!

If, two years ago, when I was sixteen, I hadn't wanted money to buy a white frock with roses on it, which I saw in Selfridge's window, a secret crisis between the United States and Mexico would have been avoided; and the career of a splendid soldier would not have been broken.

One month before I met the white dress, Diana and Father and I had come from home--that's Ballyconal--to see what good we could do with a season in London; good for Diana, I mean, and I put her before Father because he does so himself. Every one else he puts far, far behind, like the beasts following Noah into the Ark. Not that I'm sure, without looking them up, that they did follow Noah. But if it had been Father, he would have arranged it in that way, to escape seeing their ugly faces or smelling those who were not nice to smell.

I suppose I should have been left at Ballyconal, with nothing to do but study my beloved French and Spanish, my sole accomplishments; only Father had contrived to let the place, through the New York _Herald_, to an American family who, poor dears, snapped it up by cable from the description in the advertis.e.m.e.nt of "a wonderful XII Century Castle."

Besides, Diana couldn't afford a maid. And that's why I was taken to America afterward. I can do hair beautifully. So, when one thinks back, Fate had begun to weave a web long before the making of that white dress. None of those tremendous things would have happened to change heaven knows how many lives, if I hadn't been born with the knack of a hairdresser, inherited perhaps from some bourgeoise ancestress of mine on Mother's side.

When the American family found out what Ballyconal was really like, and the twelfth-century rats had crept out from the hinterland of the old wainscoting ("rich in ancient oak," the advertis.e.m.e.nt stated), to scamper over its faces by night, and door k.n.o.bs had come off in its hands by day, or torn carpets had tripped it up and sprained its ankles, it said bad words about deceitful, stoney-broke Irish earls, and fled at the end of a fortnight, having paid for two months in advance at the rate of thirty-five guineas a week. Father had been sadly sure that the Americans would do that very thing, so he had counted on getting only the advance money and no more. This meant cheap lodgings for us, which spoiled Diana's chances from the start, as she told Father the minute she saw the house. It was in a fairly good neighbourhood, and the address looked fas.h.i.+onable on paper; but man, and especially girl, may not live on neighbourhood and paper alone, even if the latter can be peppered with coronets.

I don't know what curse or mildew collects on poor Irish earls, but it simply goes nowhere to be one in London; and then there was the handicap of Father's two quaint marriages. Diana's mother was a music-hall "artiste" (isn't that the word?) without any money except what she earned, and also--I heard a woman say once, when she thought Little Pitcher's ears were engaged elsewhere--without any "h's" except in the wrong places.

My mother, the poor darling, must have been just as unsuitable in her way. She was a French chocolate heiress, whom Father married to mend the family fortunes, when Diana was five; but some one shortly after sprang on the market a better chocolate than her people made, so she was a failure, too, and not even beautiful like Diana's mother. Luckily for her, she died when I was born; but neither she nor the "artiste" can have helped Father much, with the smart friends of his young days when he was one of the best-looking bachelors in town.

Diana was considered beautiful, but "the image of her mother," by those inconvenient creatures who run around the world remembering other people's pasts; and though she and Father were invited to lots of big crushes, they weren't asked to any of the charming intimate things which Diana says are the right background for a debutante. This went to Di's heart and Father's liver, and made them both dreadfully hard to get on with. Cinderella wasn't in it with me, except that when they were beastly, I was beastly back again; a relief to which Cinderella probably didn't treat herself, being a fairy-story heroine, stuffed with virtues as a sultana cake is stuffed with plums.

The day I asked Father for the white frock with roses on it in Selfridge's window, he was so disagreeable that I went to my room and slammed the door and kicked a chair. It was true that I did not need the dress, because I never went anywhere and was only a flapper (it's almost more unpleasant to be called a flapper than a "mouth to feed"); still, the real pleasure of having a thing is when you don't need it, but just want it. The farther away from me that gown seemed to recede, the more I longed for it; and when Father told me not to nag or be a little idiot, I determined that somehow or other, by hook or crook, the frock should hang on my wall behind the chintz curtain which calls itself a wardrobe.

The morning of the refusal, Father and Di were starting off to be away all that day and night. They were asked to a ridiculous house party given by a rich, suburban Pickle family at Epsom for the Derby, and Di had been grumbling that it was exactly the sort of invitation they _would_ get: for one night and the Derby, instead of Ascot. However, it was the time of the month for a moon, and quite decent young men had been enticed; so Di wasn't so very sorry for herself after all. Her nickname at home in Ireland, "Diana the Huntress," had been already imported, free of duty, to England, by a discarded flirtee; but I don't think she minded, it sounded so das.h.i.+ng, even if it was only grasping.

She went off moderately happy; and I was left with twenty-four hours on my hands to decide by what hook, or what crook, I could possibly annex the dress which I felt had been born for me.

At last I thought of a way that might do. My poor little chocolate mother made a will the day before she died, when I was a week old, leaving everything she possessed to me. Of course her money was all gone, because she had been married for two years to Father, and Himself is a very expensive man. But he hadn't spent her jewels yet, nor her wedding veil, nor a few other pieces of lace. Since then he's wheedled most of the jewellery out of me, but the wedding veil I mean to keep always, and a Point d'Alencon scarf and some handkerchiefs he has probably forgotten. I had forgotten them, too, but when I was racking my brain how to get the Selfridge dress, the remembrance tumbled down off its dusty little shelf.

The legacies were at the bottom of my trunk, because it was simpler to bring them away from Ballyconal, than find a stowaway place that the American family wouldn't need for its belongings. The veil nothing would have induced me to part with; but the scarf was so old, I felt sure it must have come to my mother from a succession of chocolate or perhaps soap or sardine grandmammas, and I hadn't much sentiment about it. I had no precise idea what the lace ought to be worth, but I fancied Point d'Alencon must be valuable, and I thought I ought to get more than enough by selling it to buy the white dress, which cost seven guineas.

Taxying through Wardour Street with Di, I had often noticed an antique shop appropriately crusted with the grime of centuries, all but the polished window, where lace and china and bits of old silver were displayed. It seemed to me that a person intelligent enough to combine odds and ends with such fetching effect ought to be the man to appreciate my great--or great great-grandmother's scarf. I didn't run to taxis when alone, and would as soon have got into one of those appalling motor buses as leap on to the back of a mad elephant that had berserkered out of the Zoo. Consequently, I had to walk. It was an untidy, badly dusted day, with a hot wind; and I realized, when I caught sight of myself in a convex mirror in the curiosity-shop window, that I looked rather like a small female edition of Strumpelpeter.

There was a bell on the door which, like a shrill, disparaging _leit motif_, announced me, and made me suddenly self-conscious. It hadn't occurred to me before that there was anything to be ashamed of or frightened about in my errand. I'd vaguely pictured the shopman as a dear old d.i.c.kensy thing who would take a fussy interest in me and my scarf, and who would, with a fatherly manner, press upon me a handful of sovereigns or a banknote. But as the bell jangled, one of the most repulsive men I ever saw looked toward the door. There was another man in the place, talking to the first creature, and he looked up, too. Not even the blindest bat, however, could have mistaken him for a shopkeeper, and his being there put not only a different complexion on the business, but on me. I felt mine turning bright pink, instead of the usual cream that accompanies the chocolate-coloured hair and eyes with which I advertise the industry of my French ancestors.

The shopman stared at me with a sulky look exactly like that of Nebuchadnezzar, our boar pig from Yorks.h.i.+re, which took a prize for its nose or something. This person might have won a prize for his nose also, if an offer had been going for large ones. The rest of his face, olive green and fat, was in the perspective of this nose, just as the lesser proportions of his body, such as chest and legs, were in the perspective of his--waist. The shop was much smaller than I had expected from the window--a place you might have swung a cat in without giving it concussion of the brain, but not a lion; and the men--the fat proprietor and his long, lean customer, and two suits of deformed-looking armour, seemed almost to fill it. I've heard an actor talk about a theatre being so tiny he was "on the audience"; and these two were on theirs, the audience being me. I was so close to the fat one that I could see the crumbs on the folds of his waistcoat, like food stored on cupboard shelves. I took such a dislike to him that I felt inclined to bounce out as quickly as I had bounced in, but the door had banged mechanically behind me, as if to stop the bell at any cost. The shop smelt of moth powder, old leather, musty paper, and hair oil.

"Well, my little girl, what do you want?" inquired Nebuchadnezzar, with the kind of lisp that turns a rat into a yat.

Little girl, indeed! To be called a "little girl" by a thing like that, and asked what I wanted in that second-hand Hebrew tone, made me boil for half a second. Then, suddenly, I saw that it was funny, and I almost giggled as I imagined myself haughtily explaining that I had reached the age of sixteen, to say nothing of being the daughter of two or three hundred earls. I didn't care a tuppenny anything whether he mistook me for nine or ninety; but I did begin to feel that it wouldn't be pleasant unrolling my tissue-paper parcel and bargaining for money under the eyes and ears of the other man.

They were very nice eyes and ears. Already I'd had time to notice that; for even in these days, when men aren't supposed to be as indispensable to females as they were in Edwardian or Victorian and earlier ages, I don't think it's entirely obsolete for a girl to learn more about a man's looks in three seconds than she picks up about another woman's frock in two.

This man wasn't what most girls of sixteen would call young; but I am different from most girls because I've always had to be a sort of law unto myself, in order not to become a family footstool. I've had to make up my mind about everything or risk my brain degenerating into a bath sponge; and one of the things I made it up about early was that I didn't like boys or nuts. The customer in the curiosity shop, to whom the proprietor was showing perfect ducks of Chelsea lambs plastered against green Chelsea bushes, was, maybe, twenty-eight or thirty, a great age for a woman, but not so bad for a man; and I wished to goodness he would buy or not buy a lamb and go forth about other business. However, I couldn't indefinitely delay answering that question addressed to "little girl."

"I want to show you a point-lace scarf," I snapped. Nebuchadnezzar's understudy squeezed himself out from behind the counter, and lumbered a step or two nearer me, moving not straight ahead, but from side to side, as tables do for spiritualists.

"We don't mend lace here, if that's what you've come for, my child," he patronized me.

"It doesn't need to be mended," said I. "It's beautiful lace. It's to be sold."

"Oa--oh," he exploded with a c.o.c.kney drawl, and a rude look coming into his eyes which he'd kept out while there was hope that the dusty, blown-about little thing might turn into a customer. "Well! Let's see!

But I've got more old lace on hand now than I know what to do with."

As I unrolled layers of tissue paper which seemed to rustle loudly out of sheer spite, I was conscious that the customer had sauntered away as far as possible, and was gazing at some old prints on the wall which gave him an excuse to turn his back to us. I thought this sweetly tactful of him.

Nebuchadnezzar (over the shop he calls himself Franks, the sort of noncommittal name a Jacobs or Wolfstein likes to hide under) almost s.n.a.t.c.hed the lace from my hands as I opened the package, shook out its folds, held it close to his eyes, pawed it, and sniffed. "Humph!" he grunted ungraciously. "Same old thing as usual. If I've got one of 'em, I've got a dozen. What did you expect to ask for it?"

"Ten pounds," I announced, as bold as one of those lions that could not be swung in his shop.

"Ten pounds!" I don't know whether the sound he made was meant for a snort or a laugh. "Ten grandmothers!"

"Yes," said I, flaring up as if he'd struck a match on me. "That's just it! Ten of my grandmothers have worn this scarf since it was made, and I want a pound for each of them."

There was a small funny noise behind me, like a staunched giggle, and I glanced over my shoulder at the customer, but his back looked most calm and inoffensive.

"You'll have to take it out in wanting, I'm afraid, my girl," returned the shopkeeper. "I can offer you thirty bob, no more and no less. That's all the thing's worth to me."

I tried to pull the scarf out of his hands, but he didn't seem ready to give it up. "It's worth a great deal more to me," I said. "I'll carry it away somewhere else, where they _know_ about old lace."

"My word! You're a pert young piece for your size!" remarked the horrible man; and though I could have boxed his ears (which stood out exactly like the handles on an urn), I felt my own tingle, because it was _true_, what he said: I was a pert young piece. Holding my own at home, and lots of other things in life (for sixteen years of life seem fearfully long if they're all you've got behind you), had made me pert, and I didn't love myself for it, any more than a porcupine can be really fond of his own quills. I couldn't bear, somehow, that the man with the nice eyes should be hearing me called a "pert piece," and thinking me one. Quite a smart repartee came into my head, but a heavy feeling in my heart kept me from putting it into words; and Nebuchadnezzar went grunting on: "I know as much about old lace as any man in this street, if not in town. That's why I don't offer more."

"Give me back my scarf, please," was my only answer, in quite a small voice.

Still he held on to the lace. "Look here, miss," said he in a changed tone, "how did you come to get hold of this bit of property, anyhow?

Folks ain't in the habit of sending their children out to dispose o'

their valuables. How can I tell that you ain't nicked this off your mother or your aunt, or some other dame who doesn't know you're out? If I was doin' my dooty, I shouldn't wonder if I oughtn't to call in the police!"

"You horrid, horrid person," I flung at him. "You're trying to frighten me--to blackmail me--into selling you my lace for thirty s.h.i.+llings, when maybe it's worth twenty times that. But if any one calls the police, it will be me, to give you in charge for--for intimidation."

Almost before I had time to be proud of the word when I'd contrived to get it out, the customer had detached himself from the prints and intervened.

"I beg your pardon for interfering," he said (to me, not to Nebuchadnezzar), "but I can't help wondering"--and he smiled a perfectly disarming smile--"if you aren't rather young to be a business woman on your own account. Will you let me see the lace?"

Of course the shopkeeper gave it up to him instantly, shamefaced at realizing that his customer, instead of admiring his smart methods, was entering the lists against him.

While my champion (I felt sure somehow that he was my champion at heart) took the scarf in his hands, and began trying to look wise over it, I had about forty-nine seconds in which to look at him. Even at first glance I had thought him nice, but now I decided that he was the nicest man I had ever seen. Not the handsomest; I don't mean that, for our county in Ireland is celebrated for its handsome men, both high and low.

Also I'd seen several Dreams since we came to London: but--well, just the _nicest_.

Because it was the middle of the season and he was in tweeds, I fancied that he didn't go in for being "smart." I'd learned enough already about London ways to understand as much as that. But all the same I thought that he had the air of a soldier. And he had such a contradictory sort of face that it interested me immensely, wondering what the contradictions meant.

He had taken off his hat when I came into the shop (I'd noticed that, and had been pleased), and now I saw that the upper part of his forehead was very white and the rest of his face very tanned, as if his complexion had slipped down. He had almost straw-coloured hair, which seemed lighter than it was because of his sunburned skin; and his eyebrows and the eyelashes (lowered while he gazed at my lace) were two or three shades darker. They were long, arched brows that gave a look of dreamy romance to the upper part of his face, but the lower part was extremely determined, perhaps even obstinate. It jumped into my head that a woman--even a fascinator like Diana--would never be able to make him change his mind about things, or do things he didn't wish to do.

That was one of the contradictions, and the nose was another. It was rather a Roman sort of nose, and looked aggressive, as if it would be searching about for forlorn hopes to fight for; anyhow, as if it must fight at all costs. Then, contradicting the nose, was the mouth (for he was clean-shaven as all young men ought to be, and not leave too much to our imagination), a mouth somehow like a boy's, affectionate and kind and gay, though far from being weak. I didn't know what to make of him at all, and, of course, I liked him the better for that.