“Give this note to Lady Maud.”
“Right ho!”
“See that it reaches her at once.”
George walked off with the consciousness of a good day’s work done. Albert the page, having bitten his half-crown, placed it in his pocket. Then he hurried away, a look of excitement and gratification in his deep blue eyes.
CHAPTER 9.
While George and Billie Dore wandered to the rose garden to interview the man in corduroys, Maud had been seated not a hundred yards away–in a very special haunt of her own, a cracked stucco temple set up in the days of the Regency on the shores of a little lily-covered pond. She was reading poetry to Albert the page.
Albert the page was a recent addition to Maud’s inner circle. She had interested herself in him some two months back in much the same spirit as the prisoner in his dungeon cell tames and pets the conventional mouse. To educate Albert, to raise him above his groove in life and develop his soul, appealed to her romantic nature as a worthy task, and as a good way of filling in the time. It is an exceedingly moot point–and one which his associates of the servants’ hall would have combated hotly–whether Albert possessed a soul. The most one could say for certain is that he looked as if he possessed one. To one who saw his deep blue eyes and their sweet, pensive expression as they searched the middle distance he seemed like a young angel. How was the watcher to know that the thought behind that far-off gaze was simply a speculation as to whether the bird on the cedar tree was or was not within range of his catapult? Certainly Maud had no such suspicion. She worked hopefully day by day to rouse Albert to an appreciation of the nobler things of life.
Not but what it was tough going. Even she admitted that. Albert’s soul did not soar readily. It refused to leap from the earth. His reception of the poem she was reading could scarcely have been called encouraging. Maud finished it in a hushed voice, and looked pensively across the dappled water of the pool. A gentle breeze stirred the water-lilies, so that they seemed to sigh.
“Isn’t that beautiful, Albert?” she said.
Albert’s blue eyes lit up. His lips parted eagerly,
“That’s the first hornet I seen this year,” he said pointing.
Maud felt a little damped.
“Haven’t you been listening, Albert?”
“Oh, yes, m’lady! Ain’t he a wopper, too?”
“Never mind the hornet, Albert.”
“Very good, m’lady.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say ‘Very good, m’lady’. It’s like–like–” She paused. She had been about to say that it was like a butler, but, she reflected regretfully, it was probably Albert’s dearest ambition to be like a butler. “It doesn’t sound right. Just say ‘Yes’.”
“Yes, m’lady.”
Maud was not enthusiastic about the ‘M’lady’, but she let it go. After all, she had not quite settled in her own mind what exactly she wished Albert’s attitude towards herself to be. Broadly speaking, she wanted him to be as like as he could to a medieval page, one of those silk-and-satined little treasures she had read about in the Ingoldsby Legends. And, of course, they presumably said ‘my lady’. And yet–she felt–not for the first time–that it is not easy, to revive the Middle Ages in these curious days. Pages like other things, seem to have changed since then.
“That poem was written by a very clever man who married one of my ancestresses. He ran away with her from this very castle in the seventeenth century.”
“Lor'”, said Albert as a concession, but he was still interested n the hornet.
“He was far below her in the eyes of the world, but she knew what a wonderful man he was, so she didn’t mind what people said about her marrying beneath her.”
“Like Susan when she married the pleeceman.”
“Who was Susan?”
“Red-‘eaded gel that used to be cook ‘ere. Mr. Keggs says to ‘er, ‘e says, ‘You’re marrying beneath you, Susan’, ‘e says. I ‘eard ‘im. I was listenin’ at the door. And she says to ‘im, she says, ‘Oh, go and boil your fat ‘ead’, she says.”