In his late rambles about Belpher Castle in the company of Keggs and his followers, George had been privileged to inspect the library. It was an easily accessible room, opening off the main hail. He left Billie and her new friend deep in a discussion of slugs and plant-lice, and walked quickly back to the house. The library was unoccupied.

George was a thorough young man. He believed in leaving nothing to chance. The gardener had seemed a trustworthy soul, but you never knew. It was possible that he drank. He might forget or lose the precious note. So, with a wary eye on the door, George hastily scribbled it in duplicate. This took him but a few minutes. He went out into the garden again to find Billie Dore on the point of stepping into a blue automobile.

“Oh, there you are, George. I wondered where you had got to. Say, I made quite a hit with dadda. I’ve given him my address, and he’s promised to send me a whole lot of roses. By the way, shake hands with Mr. Forsyth. This is George Bevan, Freddie, who wrote the music of our show.”

The solemn youth at the wheel extended a hand.

“Topping show. Topping music. Topping all round.”

“Well, good-bye, George. See you soon, I suppose?”

“Oh, yes. Give my love to everybody.”

“All right. Let her rip, Freddie. Good-bye.” “Good-bye.”

The blue car gathered speed and vanished down the drive. George returned to the man in corduroys, who had bent himself double in pursuit of a slug.

“Just a minute,” said George hurriedly. He pulled out the first of the notes. “Give this to Lady Maud the first chance you get. It’s important. Here’s a sovereign for your trouble.”

He hastened away. He noticed that gratification had turned the other nearly purple in the face, and was anxious to leave him. He was a modest young man, and effusive thanks always embarrassed him.

There now remained the disposal of the duplicate note. It was hardly worth while, perhaps, taking such a precaution, but George knew that victories are won by those who take no chances. He had wandered perhaps a hundred yards from the rose-garden when he encountered a small boy in the many-buttoned uniform of a page. The boy had appeared from behind a big cedar, where, as a matter of fact, he had been smoking a stolen cigarette.

“Do you want to earn half a crown?” asked George.

The market value of messengers had slumped.

The stripling held his hand out.

“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.”

This translation of a favourite romance into terms of the servants’ hall chilled Maud like a cold shower. She recoiled from it.

“Wouldn’t you like to get a good education, Albert,” she said perseveringly, “and become a great poet and write wonderful poems?”

Albert considered the point, and shook his head.

“No, m’lady.”

It was discouraging. But Maud was a girl of pluck. You cannot leap into strange cabs in Piccadilly unless you have pluck. She picked up another book from the stone seat.

“Read me some of this,” she said, “and then tell me if it doesn’t make you feel you want to do big things.”

Albert took the book cautiously. He was getting a little fed up with all this sort of thing. True, ‘er ladyship gave him chocolates to eat during these sessions, but for all that it was too much like school for his taste. He regarded the open page with disfavour.

“Go on,” said Maud, closing her eyes. “It’s very beautiful.”

Albert began. He had a husky voice, due, it is to be feared, to precocious cigarette smoking, and his enunciation was not as good as it might have been.

“Wiv’ blekest morss the flower-ports Was-I mean were-crusted one and orl; Ther rusted niles fell from the knorts That ‘eld the pear to the garden-worll. Ther broken sheds looked sed and stringe; Unlifted was the clinking latch; Weeded and worn their ancient thatch Er-pon ther lownely moated gringe, She only said ‘Me life is dreary, ‘E cometh not,’ she said.”