Miss Million's Maid: A Romance of Love and Fortune — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Miss Million's Maid: A Romance of Love and Fortune
John Stuart Mill · en
"I have to warn you that anything you say now will be used in evidence
against you," concluded the man from Scotland Yard, "and my orders are
to take you back with me to London at once."
CHAPTER XXIX
LOCKED UP!
WHO could ever have anticipated this?
Who would have dreamt, a night or two ago, of where Miss Million, the
American Sausage-King's heiress, and her aristocratically connected
lady's-maid would have had to spend last night?
I can hardly believe it myself, even yet.
I sit on this perfectly ghastly little bed, narrow and hard as any stone
tomb in a church. I gaze round at the stone walls, and at the tiny
square window high up; at the tin basin, chained as if they were afraid
it might take flight somehow; at the door with the sliding panel; the
ominous-looking door that is locked upon me!
And I say to myself, "Vine Street police-station!"
That's where I am. I, Beatrice Lovelace, poor father's only daughter,
and Lady Anastasia's great-granddaughter! I've been taken up, arrested!
I'm a prisoner. I've slept--that is, I've not been able to sleep--in a
cell! I've been put in prison like a pickpocket, or a man who's been
drunk and disorderly, or a window-smashing suffragette!
Only, of course, the suffragette does her best to get into prison. She
doesn't mind. It's a glory to her. She comes out and "swanks" about in a
peculiarly hideous brooch that's been specially designed to show that
she's been sentenced to "one month," or whatever it was.
She's proud of it. Oh, how can she be? Proud of having spent so much
time in a revolting place like this! "I think," gazing round hopelessly
once more--"oh, I don't believe I shall ever be able to get the
disgusting, bleak, sordid look of it out of my mind, or the equally
sordid, bleak, disgusting smell of it out of my skirts and my hair!"
And I clasp my hands in my lap and close my eyes to shut out the look of
those awful walls and that fearful door.
I go over again the scene yesterday down at the "Refuge," when we were
arrested by that Scotland Yard man, and when I had just enough presence
of mind to ask him to allow us, before we went off with him, to leave
word with our friends.
A group of our friends were already gathered on the gravel path outside
the house under the lilacs. And there came running out at my call Miss
Vi Vassity, half a dozen of her Refugette girls, Miss Million's American
cousin, and--though I thought he must have taken his departure!--the
disgraced Mr. Burke.