Into her mind came some of the gossip of the servants’ sitting room, to
which as a rule she paid no attention. Ellen had given out that Simpkins
had said that he was to have time off from the following Friday to
Tuesday because Mr. Fallaray had made his plans to go down alone to
Chilton Park for a short holiday. To Chilton Park for a short holiday!
Ah! Here was a line to be followed up. Here was something which might
enable her to pick up the thread again.
She began to walk up and down her little room, in a nightgown which
certainly did not belong to a courtesan, repeating to herself again and
again “Chilton Park, Chilton Park,” worrying the thing out like a
schoolgirl with a difficult lesson. By some means, by hook or by crook,
she also must get to Chilton Park during that time; that was certain,
even if she had to ask Lady Feo to let her give up her position as
lady’s maid. But following this thought came another, instantly,—that
she would regret above all things to put her mistress to inconvenience,
because she was grateful for many kindnesses and maids were scarce. And
she was glad that the de Brézé could not hear her think and call out
“weakness, weakness.” How to get there? How to be somewhere in the
neighborhood so that she might be able to slip one night into the garden
to be seen by Fallaray, and then, for the first time, prove to herself
and to him that she was not any longer the Lola Breezy of Queen’s Road,
Bayswater, the little middle-class girl, timid and afraid, but the
reincarnation of her famous ancestress, as she had always supposed
herself to be, and had played at being so often, and had tried to be
during her brief escapes into life.
[Illustration: A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.]
How?—How?
She might, of course, ask Lady Feo for a week’s leave—a large order—go
to Whitecross and engage a room at the little inn that she had noticed
at the corner of the road at the top of the hill. But what would be the
use of that? How could she play Madame de Brézé in such a place, with
one evening frock and her own plain everyday dress with two
undistinguished hats and a piece of luggage that yelled of Queen’s Road,
Bayswater? It was absurd, impossible. Brick wall number one. And so she
tackled the task grimly, thinking hard, swinging from one possibility to
another, but with no better luck. Everything came back to the fact that
all her savings amounted to no more than ten pounds. How could she go
forward, unaided, on that? And then in a flash she saw herself at the
house in Kensington Gore with Chalfont and remembered the words of Lady
Cheyne, who, in asking her to come down to her little place in the
country, had said that the garden ran down to Chilton Park. It had been
pigeonholed in her brain and she had found it! And with a little cry of
delight she pounced upon it like a desert wanderer on water.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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