Janet duly arrived at the house of Mr. Robert Greg Tennant at the hour named in the invitation. She had had a great struggle with herself, but pride had ultimately triumphed. Her fellow-servants had given her no peace. She had, indeed, to dress in her black alpaca. But, sure enough, her hair had been done in the latest fashion by her only friend, the girl with whom the cook had seen her walking, who was an assistant in a hair-dresser's shop. It was so twisted and tortured that Janet felt "as if she had slept on it the wrong way," as she expressed it to herself. She passed and re-passed the end of the Avenue half-a-dozen times, but her courage would not let her ring the bell of the corner house. For there were lights in nearly every window, and a cab had just driven away from the door.
Poor Janet's heart leapt within her, and she had half a mind to turn homeward and confess that she had been romancing. But another cab stopped before the gate, and through the open door she saw a glimpse of lights and flowers that looked to her like Paradise—as she imagined it from the hymn-singing at the Salvation Army meetings.
So as the last cabman came slowly out of the Avenue, Janet called to him. The man was arranging his rugs [168]about him for a long drive back to his stand at the centre of the town.
"I'll give you a sixpence if you will turn about and drive me up to that door you have just been at," said Janet.
"Done," said the man; "and good money for the job."
So, without betraying the least surprise or curiosity, the man turned about his vehicle, and Janet tripped daintily inside. They drove up to the door with prodigious rattle and ceremony. The cabman jumped from his seat and rang the bell in form. When the door was opened, Janet Urquhart paid the man his easily-earned sixpence. He touched his hat, and she went leadenly up the steps.
A trim maid-servant was at the door, who evidently had received very definite orders, for only the faintest curl of the nostril betrayed her own opinion of the affair.
When Janet was shown into the cloak-room her troubles began. Should she take off her hat, or not? She looked about to see if the ladies had left their hats. None were to be seen. Yet she had never seen ladies in the evening, except bareheaded. After long consideration she resolved to keep her hat on. But when she was in the doorway to go up to the drawing-room she saw a lady coming through the outer door with a shawl of soft gauzy wool over her head.
Janet shrank back instantly and turned cold with the thought of her escape. With trembling hands she took off her hat and pinned her veil to it as she had once seen her mistress do. The lady came in, bustling a little like one who knows she is late.
"It is cold to-night," she said affably to the shy girl standing in the doorway, but without looking at her.
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"Yes, ma'am," said Janet, and the next moment she could have bitten her tongue out for the mistake.
"Oh, how I wish I had never come," she said a score of times to herself as she went up the stairs.
But it was too late to turn back.
"What name?" said the daintily-capped maiden, with the curl of her nostril a little more accentuated.
For a moment Janet was so taken aback that she could not even remember her own name.
"Janet," she stammered; "Janet—from Bailie Holden's."
The maid's face broadened into a smile, at sight of which poor Janet's lip quivered, and for a moment she thought that she must burst out crying. Scarcely was she able to keep back the welling tears. But the door was a little open, and she saw Miss Celie, whom she already knew and loved. The sight of that pleasant face, dimpling and flashing all over with bright kindness, reassured her.
"Say 'Janet Urquhart'!" she said, with a little faltering return of assurance in her voice.
And the trim maid-servant, with a strong protest in her tone, announced in accents of terrifying distinctness, "Miss Janet Urquhart."
Then she shut the door, and Janet was left standing aghast and speechless in the bright humming place.
"I would not have done it," soliloquised the indignant maid outside, "unless my place had depended on it."
But within Celie Tennant's drawing-room, poor silly little Janet of Inverness was being most pleasantly and charmingly entertained by her hostess. Celie had, in fact, asked only a few of her most intimate friends, whom she could trust with the momentous secret of the loves and sorrows of Cleaver's boy. The fascinating cousin [170]from the tented field was there, ready for love or war. But it was to Donald Iverach that the principal work of the evening had been allotted.
It was he who first asked Janet to dance with him. It was he who sat out with her after her desperate failure, for she had lacked the courage to say that she had never learned to dance. It was he who found her a handkerchief, when, with the bitterness of disappointment, the tears at last would not keep down, but welled piteously up from the underlips of Janet's blue and childish eyes. It was Mr. Donald Iverach who took her down to supper, where she suffered agonies over the use of fish-knives and the management of a plate upon her knees. It was he who finally took her aside, and so fervidly pursued his wooing that, had Janet Urquhart been mercenary, he might without doubt have had a suit for breach of promise of marriage successfully brought against him. So far did the wooing proceed, and so fervently persistent was this wicked Junior Partner, that, bewildered and dazzled, poor Janet found herself being pressed to name the happy day, and, what is more, in some danger of doing it, too. As for the Junior Partner, that young man was obviously excited, but seemed quite unconscious of the risks he was running. Had the Senior Partner heard him, he would undoubtedly have considered his son to be rapidly qualifying for a strait jacket. But the infatuated youth held on his way. Janet and he were sitting in a little alcove at the top of the stairs, cobwebbed with the latest artistic Japonaiseries of the period.
"And now," urged the reckless youth, when he had sealed in due form the silent acquiescence he had won, "let us go back and tell them all that we are going to be married."
Mr. Donald Iverach was certainly quite mad. But [171]Janet of Inverness was madder still, for instead of accepting the very eligible young man with modest reluctance, she burst out crying all at once without the least warning, and ran downstairs, leaving Donald Iverach standing spellbound looking after her. Down the stair and through the hall she ran. She opened the door and flew out into the night, crying "James! James! I want you, James!"
And the strangest part of the whole is that even as she opened the door two dark forms separated at the outer gate.
"There noo, look you after her," said Cleg Kelly to Cleaver's boy. And James Annan went as he was bidden. The girl's wild cry of "James! James!" hushed into quite another way of saying the same words, when she found herself clasped in the arms of Janet's boy—late Cleaver's. For James Annan not only had the root of the matter in him by nature, but, as we have seen, he was a lad of some little experience.
"What did I tell you, sir?" said Cleg to the Junior Partner, as they stood together on the step, and looked after the pair who had vanished into the darkness.
"It came out all right, I grant," said Mr. Donald Iverach, "but I want no more games with pretty kitchen-maids. I will tell you what—for three full minutes I thought she was going to take me!"
And the Junior Partner went down the street at the rate of five miles an hour.
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