Mistress Masham's Repose Read online

  Now in spite of the homicides or other torts which she might have committed as a pirate, who was partial to the Plank, Maria was not the kind of person who bore malice for injuries, and she was certainly not the kind of kidnaper who habitually stole babies from their heartbroken mothers, for the mere cynical pleasure of hearing them scream. She guessed immediately that this was the mother of the baby, and, instead of feeling angry about the harpoon, she began to feel guilty about the baby. She began to have an awful suspicion that she would have to give it back.

  Yet the temptation to keep it was severe. She would never drop on another find like this, she knew, not if she lived to be a thousand.

  Think to yourself, truly, whether you would have returned a live one-inch baby to its relatives, if caught fairly in the open field?

  But Maria did her best.

  She said: “I am sorry if this is your baby. Please, I have not done it any harm. Look, you can have it safe.

  “And really,” she added, almost tearfully, “it is a beauty.”

  She leaned forward to put the cradle at the mother’s feet.

  The fierce little woman was either too hysterical to listen, or else she did not understand English, for she slashed at the huge hand with her weapon as soon as it came within reach, and cut it across the thumb.

  “Oh, you would, would you?” cried Maria. “You little viper!”

  So, instead of giving up the baby, she wrapped it in her handkerchief, cradle and all, and put the bundle in the pocket of her skirt. Then she took a second handkerchief out of the other pocket, waved it in the face of the mother so that she fell on her back, dropped it over her head, flicked away the fallen harpoon, and gathered her as well. She so seldom had two handkerchiefs, or one for that matter, that she felt that the hand of the Lord must be upon her. Then, hearing a kind of hum in the pillar beside her, like the hum of a hive, she felt also that it would be wiser not to tempt the Lord’s hand further.

  Stuffing the larger bundle into the other pocket—it was kicking as hard as it could—she made for her passage through the brambles. When she got there, she turned round for a last look at the temple. She saw a group of three men struggling at the pillar door. Two of them were holding the third by the arms, to keep him back, and he was fighting them to follow her. He was a splendid fellow in a fur tunic, made of moleskin, and well over six inches high.

  CHAPTER III

  WHEN she had pushed off the punt and paddled to a safe distance, she laid down the scoop and took the larger package from her pocket. The woman had been kicking all the time, with fluttering skips and flops, so that it had felt like a small bird trying to get free. As soon as Maria had unwrapped and set her down on the slimy bottom of the boat, she stood panting, with a hand pressed to her heart. It was like a carving in ivory. Then she ran for the side, as if she were meaning to leap into the water, but checked herself, and stood glaring at her captor, the very picture of a wild thing fallen into human hands. Maria produced the other bundle and laid the baby, still in its cradle, not far from the mother’s feet. This brought her back from the side. She ran to the cradle, snatched the baby out of it, and began talking to it in a foreign language, examining it all over to see if it were hurt. It was clear that she was telling the baby that it was Mammy’s Wazzums Oodlums, and did a nasty female mountain try to steal it then, the precious pet?

  Maria licked her wounds, washed them in the cool water of the lake, dried them with the handkerchiefs, and kept a tight eye on the maternal scene.

  It was getting on for teatime, and she had a lot of things to fix. She was determined never to be separated from her treasures—or at least, not from the baby—but she knew perfectly well, on the other hand, that Miss Brown would refuse to let her have them. Either she would confiscate them, and keep them in a box with Maria’s penknife and sixpenny compass, or else she would take them for her own use, or she might even arrange to have them drowned, as she used to do with the favorite kittens. None of these things was going to happen, if Maria could help it.

  Where could she hide them? Miss Brown was constantly peeping about for faults, and there was not a private place in all the palace of Malplaquet which our heroine could call her own. There were no longer any toys in the toy cupboard, so that to keep them there would only call attention to it. Her bedroom was ransacked once a week.

  “I will put them,” she said, “in the little drawer of my dressing table for tonight at any rate, since Miss Brown’s headache will prevent her from interfering until tomorrow.”

  This time she made a bag from the wet and gory handkerchief, and, after cornering her captives, she put them both in this together, loose. She tied it round the top with string— for she was a handyman who generally carried string, having been told by her professor that efficient people always had a penknife, a shilling, and a bit of this useful article. She kept the cradle separate, thinking that it would be a bruising thing to be with, if one were bumping about in a bag with a baby. Then she made for the boathouse, put up the punt, and hurried home for tea.

  She looked in as she passed the kitchen, which had ovens, spits, and ranges suitable for serving a twelve-course dinner to one hundred and fifty persons—but now they cooked on a primus stove—and inquired about Miss Brown from Cook.

  “Lawks, Miss Maria, them stockings! And, glorious me, them rents all over the dress!”

  “Yes, I know. I was wondering if Miss Brown....”

  “You won’t see her tonight, my lamb, and for which we may thank our tender stars. You run up to your room now quiet-like, and bring me back them stockings when you have ’em changed. You’d best put on the dressing gown, until I mend the skirt.”

  “Is there anything for tea?”

  “Yes, Miss, there’s strawberries.

  “Seeing as She,” continued Cook, tossing her head, “was took bad-like, as we might say, I presumed the little liberty for to beg a pound on ’em from your professor, and this, with just a touch of condensated milk, which we was asaving of for Christmas, should make a dish, however humble, as might be savored by the Mistress of Malplaquet.”

  It is needless to explain that Cook was an Old Retainer, who bore with Miss Brown as well as she could. She lived her life in the gloomy kitchen, with nobody to love but Maria, except for a fat collie dog who had been left to her by her deceased husband, and whose name was Captain. He used to fetch the newspaper from the village every morning, in his mouth, and sometimes he went shopping with a basket.

  Maria said: “Cook, if you are ever captured by pirates, or surrounded by Indians, or if you should fall into the sea and be chased by a shark, I will see to it that this day’s work is not forgotten, if it costs me the last drop of my blood.”

  “Thank you, Miss Maria,” said Cook, “I’m sure.”

  She climbed the Grand Staircase and trotted down the Ducal Corridor, mounted the Second Best Staircase and passed the Corridor for Distinguished Strangers, plodded up the Privy Stairs in Ordinary and tiptoed down the Third Best Corridor Once Removed. At the end of this, where part of the main roof was still sound, there were the two small bedrooms in which she and Miss Brown were accustomed to sleep. It used to take Cook about three-quarters of an hour to get there from the kitchen, because she had Bad Legs, and Captain panted dreadfully as he padded up the stairs behind. But Miss Brown made them do the bed for her, all the same.

  She peeped in at the open door.

  There lay the tyrant on the bed, with her nauseous nose erect. She was reading a mauve book with a stuffed back, like a cushion, which was called The Daily Light. In her other hand she held a handkerchief soaked with eau de cologne, and with this she occasionally fanned The Daily Light, and occasionally patted her nose tip, which had grown pink and polished under these attentions.

  Miss Brown’s personality lay about her. There, beneath Maria’s fearful eye, stood the thirty pairs of pointed shoes, sharp as builder’s trowels, wrinkled at the toes, dressed in a neat line under the dressing table. There, on top
of the wardrobe, stood the gray toque hats with pins in them. On the bedside table stood the range of books which Miss Brown considered delightful: the Journal of George Fox, Holy Living by J. Taylor, and The Pilgrim’s Progress, about which Huckleberry Finn once remarked that “the statements were interesting, but tough.” In a corner of the room there was a cupboard, containing the fichus and frills with which Miss Brown adorned her bosom; the dressing table was covered with sharp things or hard things; and the whole place smelled of unused purses locked away in lavender or naphthalene.

  On the window sill there were some instruments for spying; the telescope with which she watched from the window, and the magnifying glass with which she looked for dirt.

  Her pupil went down on hands and knees. She crawled past the bed, below Miss Brown’s line of vision, and reached the window unobserved. She put the magnifying glass between her teeth, where pirates keep their cutlasses, except when drinking. She crawled back to the door, dropping a drawing pin, which she kept handy for such occasions, into one of the shoes while passing, and regained the corridor without mishap.

  Then she hurried to her room.

  In the bare room, where all the furniture was made of iron, she took the precious bundle out. She opened it upon the bed. The little woman lay like a suffocating frog, still clutching her baby, and Maria examined them at leisure, with the glass.

  The dress was poor. It was a simple garment, tied at the waist like a monk’s, and it seemed to have been knitted from silky wool. It was raveled in some places and worn, but serviceable. The woman’s face was red and healthy. The baby, as she had suspected, had blue eyes.

  Maria put them in the small drawer when she had finished, made a bunch of her own spoiled clothes, and tiptoed down to tea.

  CHAPTER IV

  BUT when the Mistress of Malplaquet got up next morning, she was not feeling happy. Not a scrap of the strawberry and cream had been touched, though she had left a saucer in the drawer, and she could get nothing from her prisoner but scowls. It was out of the question to play with her.

  “Cook,” she said at breakfast, “do you think Miss Brown’s headache will be better today?”

  “No, Miss Maria,” said Cook.

  “She has left me some mathematics to work out, before dinner—it seems to be about Algebra.”

  She twiddled her spoon nonchalantly, and looked from the corner of one eye.

  “I wanted to see the Professor.”

  “Run along and see him, luv. If Somebody wakes up, I’ll tell her as how you’m busy with them Algerians, whatsoeverashowsobe as which she might inquire.”

  “Cook ...” began Maria.

  “Yes, luv. You told un about the sharks.”

  The Professor was as poor as a church mouse, and he lived by himself in one of the Ridings, in what had once been a gamekeeper’s cottage.

  All round the ruined palace there were immense avenues, stretching in every direction, down which the departed dukes had been accustomed to drive in state when they had felt like an airing, or when the Comte de Paris and Queen Victoria had dropped in for the week end. These avenues had developed into Ridings which had once been thought the finest pheasant coverts in Europe, and in them King Edward had often popped away. Finally, when the carriage roads had vanished altogether, they had become green fields between the woods, long and thin, which were hired to grazing farmers by the solicitors who represented the Estate.

  Such was the Riding in which the Professor lived.

  He was a failure, but he did his best to hide it. One of his failings was that he could scarcely write, except in a twelfth-century hand, in Latin, with abbreviations. Another was that, although his cottage was crammed with books, he seldom had anything to eat. He could not tell from Adam, any more than Maria could, what the latest quotation of Imperial Chemicals was upon the Stock Exchange.

  In the daytime, he used to chop wood and cut some slices of bread and butter. In the evenings, having lighted the choppings, he would sit before the fire and quaff a glass of liquor, pondering the remarks of Isidore, Physiologus, Pliny, and similar people. His tipples were Cowslip, Dandelion, Elderberry, and sometimes Gooseberry Wine, which he brewed himself. Inflamed by these, in the kind glow of the green ash, he would dream of impossible successes: imagining that the Master of Trinity had referred to him by name in a lecture, or that Dr. Cook had offered to mention him in a footnote to Zeus, or even that one of the poorer colleges had given him a sort of supernumerary fellowship of the lowest class, carrying a stipend of about five pounds a year, so that he would no longer have to cut his bread and butter.

  On the second of June, the Professor had got up early to pick dandelions. He was wandering up and down the Ridings with a sack, nipping off the yellow heads with his fingers, and popping them inside. He did not notice Maria’s figure stumping up the avenue.

  “What ho!” she cried. “Avast! Belay!”

  “Go away,” said he promptly.

  “Do you know who you are talking to?”

  He straightened his aching old back, adjusted the spectacles, and examined her with care.

  “Yes, I believe I do. It is Black Maria, the Terror of the Tortugas.”

  “Then you had better keep a civil tongue, and know your station.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “Because what?”

  “Look here,” she said. “I can’t indulge in childish argument. I came on business.”

  “If you mean that you have come for breakfast, I fear that I have nothing left but half a pound of mustard.”

  She put her hand on the bottle-green sleeve and made him drop the bag. The reference to breakfast had touched her, for she knew he seldom had enough to eat. She put her arm, a little shyly, round the creaking waist.

  “I have found something.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “I can’t show it here. I have brought it, but it might escape in grass. I want to show you in the cottage.”

  He said: “Dear me, Maria, well, dear me. I must say I am glad to see you. Come in, come in. I hardly noticed it was you at first. Certainly you may come inside my cottage, although I ought to tell you that I have not done the washing up.”

  She put the five-inch woman on the kitchen table, in the bread crumbs. The only tea cup was full of ink. She told the story and explained her difficulties—how Miss Brown would be against it, how there was nowhere safe to hide the mannikins, how they would not eat, and the rest of the trouble.

  “H’m,” said he. “Let me see. It is one of these modern writers, I believe. Martin or Swallow or ... Yes, yes, dear me, it must have been our Dr. Swift. He was conscious of the similarity himself. Indeed, his nickname with Ld. Treasurer was Martin, if I have my facts. Yes, yes. Now Dr. Swift was at Malplaquet, as we know, in 1712. He came here straight from Twit-nam, with the poet Pope. But that was long before the Travels. H’m, h’m, h’m.”

  “I don’t ...”

  “Please hold your tongue, dear girl. It interrupts the flow. Now what more natural than this, that the immortal Dean should finish off the Travels here for Motte—could he have come again in ’25?—and what place could there be more suited to the toils of literature than the cool, quiet arbor on the Masham Isle? No doubt he left some Lilliputians there behind him, by mistake. We know that authors suffer from the absent mind.”

  “Gulliver’s Travels?”

  “Gulliver! The very name! This will be an addition to the annals of Malplaquet, to know that Gulliver was finished here, and that they left the people too. Excuse me while I look it up.”

  She dangled her legs on a soapbox, keeping a good lookout to see that the supposed Lilliputian did not run away, and the old gentleman brought down one first edition after another, with grunts and puffs of dust, but always with tender fingers. His findings were a disappointment.

  “It distinctly says that not one single citizen was carried off. Gulliver brought ‘six Cows and two Bulls alive, with as many Yews and Rams.’
One of the sheep was eaten on the voyage by a rat, and he gave one cow and one sheep to Captain John Biddel, who brought him home. H’m, h’m.

  “Wait a bit,” he added hastily. “It says that Gulliver left Blefuscu, in his rowing boat, on the twenty-fourth of September, 1701. He was picked up at sea by this Captain Biddel, on the twenty-sixth, in latitude thirty degrees south. Mark you, it was only two days later. He told his story to Biddel—he even gave the pair of animals to prove it—and, on their return to England, he was able to sell the remaining cattle for six hundred pound!

  “Believe me,” continued the Professor, taking off his spectacles and pointing them at her, “in those days, six hundred were six hundred. Why, Stella herself contrived to live in genteel comfort, with a capital of little more than twice that sum.

  “If you,” said he, “were a captain who had picked up such a castaway, within two days’ rowing of a known latitude, carrying a dozen cattle worth six hundred pound, old style, what would you do?”

  “I should go back to search the latitude.”

  “Then?”

  “I should bring back plenty more. My goodness, I should bring back men!”

  He shut the book with a bang, which he immediately regretted, wandered off to return it to its shelf, and began to think of something else.

  “All the same,” she said, “even if this creature—this, er, little lady—even if she did come originally from Lilliput or Blefuscu, I don’t see how it helps.”

  “No?”

  “She won’t eat.”

  “No?”

  “She won’t do anything.”

  He put his hands behind his back, shuffled on the floor, and scowled.

  “She isn’t any fun.”

  He stuffed his beard in his mouth, rolled his eyes, and glared. Then he unrolled them, liberated the whiskers, and looked haughtily upon his visitor.