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.