"It was a staircase window, as stretched all down one side of that
wing," Mrs. Dew said solemnly, "and the bannisters was up against it,
and Jane-Anne she leant over cranin’ ’er ’ead to see them soldiers, and
she lost ’er balance and swung back and drove ’er foot right through and
cut ’er leg so it bled dreadful."
"Poor child," said Mr. Wycherly, "that’s one thing she is quite safe
from here. There will be no temptation for her to put her feet through
any windows. Has she lost both her parents, Mrs. Dew?"
"That’s another thing," said Mrs. Dew, dropping her voice mysteriously,
"as I feel you ought to know, and that is, Jane-Anne’s father was a
Grecian."
"Really," Mr. Wycherly remarked, evidently quite unmoved by what Mrs.
Dew considered a most damaging fact. "A Greek; how interesting! What
was his name?"
"Staff rides," Mrs. Dew answered promptly. "At least that’s what I call
it, but he called it something longer. I’ve tried to English it as much
as possible to match her really respectable Christian name."
"Do you happen to remember how it was spelt?" Mr. Wycherly asked.
"Yes, sir, S-T-A-V-R-I-D-E-S."
"Ah," Mr. Wycherly exclaimed; "now I’ve got it. Stavrides. Quite a
common Greek name. What part of Greece did he come from?"
"Athens, sir, an’ it was there he met my sister, who was lady’s maid to
Mrs. Methuen’s cousin. She’d been schoolroom-maid first of all, then
when the young ladies grew up, they had her taught dressmaking and
hairdressin’ and took her everywhere with them. And when Lady Lettice
married she took my sister Jane with her, and they travelled a lot, an’
in Athens there was a carriage accident and my sister was thrown out and
stunned, and this young man was passing and he picked her up, and it
seems he fell in love with her there and then, for all her eye was swole
up with the bump she got—she was a very-good-looking girl was
Jane—anyway, ’e never rested till ’e’d married ’er. He was, I suppose,
in a rather better position than she was, though, from bein’ with the
young ladies so constant, my sister seemed to have caught their pretty
ways, and spoke exactly like them. She wasn’t a bit like me," said Mrs.
Dew simply, "you’d never ’ave thought we was sisters."
"What was Stavrides?" Mr. Wycherly asked.
"A sort of writer, sir, for newspapers. When they got married he came to
London, and he was correspondent for some paper, some Grecian paper. It
isn’t a trade I thinks much on, but he earned good money and he insured
his life heavy. And then, just like him it was, he forgot to pay the
premium, fell ill and died all of a hurry when Jane-Anne was but
four-year-old, and my sister was left without anything at all but some
forty pounds they ’ad in the bank."
"Poor thing," said Mr. Wycherly. "What did she do?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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