"Oh, Mr. Lancelot, I'm so sorry." And her eyes filled again with tears.
"Oh, don't be sorry for me. I'm a man. I dare say I shall pull through. Just put me out of your mind, dear. Let all that happened at Baker's Terrace be only a bad dream-a very bad dream, I am afraid I must call it. Forget me, Mary Ann. Everything will help you to forget me, thank Heaven, it'll be the best thing for you. Promise me now."
"Yessir ... if you will promise me."
"Promise you what?"
"To do me a favour."
"Certainly, dear, if I can."
"You have the money, Mr. Lancelot, instead of me-I don't want it, and then you could-"
"Now, now, Mary Ann," he interrupted, laughing nervously, "you're getting foolish again, after talking so sensibly."
"Oh, but why not?" she said plaintively.
"It is impossible," he said curtly.
"Why is it impossible?" she persisted.
"Because-," he began, and then he realised with a start that they had come back again to that same old mechanical series of questions-if only in form.
"Because there is only one thing I could ever bring myself to ask you for in this world," he said slowly.
"Yes; what is that?" she said flutteringly.
He laid his hand tenderly on her hair.
"Merely Mary Ann."
She leapt up: "Oh, Mr. Lancelot, take me, take me! You do love me! You do love me!"
He bit his lip. "I am a fool," he said roughly. "Forget me. I ought not to have said anything. I spoke only of what might be-in the dim future-if the-chances and changes of life bring us together again-as they never do. No! You were right, Mary Ann. It is best we should not meet again. Remember your resolution last night."
"Yessir." Her submissive formula had a smack of sullenness, but she regained her calm, swallowing the lump in her throat that made her breathing difficult.
"Good-by, then, Mary Ann," he said, taking her hard red hands in his.
"Good-by, Mr. Lancelot." The tears she would not shed were in her voice. "Please, sir-could you-couldn't you do me a favour?-Nothing about money, sir."
"Well, if I can," he said kindly.
"Couldn't you just play Good-night and Good-by, for the last time? You needn't sing it-only play it."
"Why, what an odd girl you are!" he said with a strange, spasmodic laugh. "Why, certainly! I'll do both, if it will give you any pleasure."
And, releasing her hands, he sat down to the piano, and played the introduction softly. He felt a nervous thrill going down his spine as he plunged into the mawkish words. And when he came to the refrain, he had an uneasy sense that Mary Ann was crying-he dared not look at her. He sang on bravely:-
"Kiss me, good-night, dear love,
Dream of the old delight;
My spirit is summoned above,
Kiss me, dear love, good-night."
He couldn't go through another verse-he felt himself all a-quiver, every nerve shattered. He jumped up. Yes, his conjecture had been right. Mary Ann was crying. He laughed spasmodically again. The thought had occurred to him how vain Peter would be if he could know the effect of his commonplace ballad.
"There, I'll kiss you too, dear!" he said huskily, still smiling. "That'll be for the last time."
Their lips met, and then Mary Ann seemed to fade out of the room in a blur of mist.
An instant after there was a knock at the door.
"Forgot her parcels after a last good-by," thought Lancelot, and continued to smile at the comicality of the new episode.
He cleared his throat.
"Come in," he cried, and then he saw that the parcels were gone, too, and it must be Rosie.
But it was merely Mary Ann.
"I forgot to tell you, Mr. Lancelot," she said-her accents were almost cheerful-"that I'm going to church to-morrow morning."
"To church!" he echoed.
"Yes, I haven't been since I left the village, but missus says I ought to go in case the vicar asks me what church I've been going to."
"I see," he said, smiling on.
She was closing the door when it opened again, just revealing Mary Ann's face.
"Well?" he said, amused.
"But I'll do your boots all the same, Mr. Lancelot." And the door closed with a bang.
They did not meet again. On the Monday afternoon the vicar duly came and took Mary Ann away. All Baker's Terrace was on the watch, for her story had now had time to spread. The weather remained bright. It was cold but the sky was blue. Mary Ann had borne up wonderfully, but she burst into tears as she got into the cab.
"Sweet, sensitive little thing!" said Baker's Terrace.
"What a good woman you must be, Mrs. Leadbatter," said the vicar, wiping his spectacles.
As part of Baker's Terrace, Lancelot witnessed the departure from his window, for he had not left after all.
Beethoven was barking his short snappy bark the whole time at the unwonted noises and the unfamiliar footsteps; he almost extinguished the canary, though that was clamorous enough.
"Shut up, you noisy little devils!" growled Lancelot. And taking the comic opera he threw it on the dull fire. The thick sheets grew slowly blacker and blacker, as if with rage; while Lancelot thrust the five five-pound notes into an envelope addressed to the popular composer, and scribbled a tiny note:-
"Dear Peter,-If you have not torn up that cheque I shall be glad of it
by return. Yours,
"LANCELOT.
"P.S.-I send by this post a Reverie, called Marianne, which is the
best thing I have done, and should be glad if you could induce Brahmson
to look at it."
A big, sudden blaze, like a jubilant bonfire, shot up in the grate and startled Beethoven into silence.
But the canary took it for an extra flood of sunshine, and trilled and demi-semi-quavered like mad.
"Sw-eet! Sweet!"
"By Jove!" said Lancelot, starting up, "Mary Ann's left her canary behind!"
Then the old whimsical look came over his face.
"I must keep it for her," he murmured. "What a responsibility! I suppose I oughtn't to let Rosie look after it any more. Let me see, what did Peter say? Canary seed, biscuits ... yes, I must be careful not to give it butter.... Curious I didn't think of her canary when I sent back all those gloves ... but I doubt if I could have squeezed it in-my boots are only sevens after all-to say nothing of the cage."
THE SERIO-COMIC GOVERNESS
I.
Nelly O'Neill had her day in those earlier and quieter reaches of the Victorian era when the privilege of microscopic biography was reserved for the great and the criminal classes, and when the Bohemian celebrity (who is perhaps a cross between the two) was permitted to pass-like a magic-lantern slide-from obscurity to oblivion through an illuminated moment.
Thus even her real name has not hitherto leaked out, and to this day the O'Keeffes are unaware of their relative's reputation and believe their one connection with the stage to be a dubious and undesirable consanguinity with O'Keeffe, the actor and fertile farce-writer whose Wild Oats made a sensation at Covent Garden at the end of the eighteenth century. To her many brothers and sisters, Eileen was just the baby, and always remained so, even in the eyes of the eminent civil engineer who was only her senior by a year. Among the peasantry-subtly prescient of her freakish destinies-she was dubbed "a fairy child": which was by no means a compliment. A bad uncanny creature for all the colleen's winsome looks. The later London whispers of a royal origin had a travestied germ of truth in her father's legendary descent from Brian Boru. He himself seemed scarcely less legendary, this highly coloured squire of the old Irish school, surviving into the Victorian era, like a Georgian caricature; still inhabiting a turreted castle romantically out of repair, infested with ragged parasites: still believing in high living and deep drinking: still receiving the reverence if not the rent of a feudal tenantry, and the affection of a horsey and bibulous countryside. When in liquor there was nothing the O'Keeffe might not do except pay off his mortgages. "He looked like an elephant when he put his trousers on wrong-you know elephants have their knees the wrong way," Eileen once told the public in a patter-song. She did not tell the public it was her father, but like a true artist she learned in suffering what she taught in song. One of her childish memories was to be stood in a row of brothers and sisters against a background of antlers, fishing-rods, and racing prints, and solemnly sworn at for innumerability by a ruddy-faced giant in a slovenly surtout. "Bad luck to ye, ye gomerals, make up your minds whether ye're nine or eleven," he would say. "A man ought to know the size of his family: Mother in heaven, I never thought mine was half so large!" These attempts to take a census of his children generally occurred after a peasant had brought him up the drive-"hat in one hand, and Squire in the other," as the patter-song had it. At the moment of assisted entry his paternal dignity was always at its stateliest, and it was not till he had gravely hung his cocked hat upon an imaginary door-peg in the middle of the hall and seen it flop floorward that he lost his calm. "Blood and 'ouns, ye've the door taken away again."