Part 40 (1/2)

”I am afraid there is no such thing left for me,” he said with an elaborate dreariness. ”Still, if your aunt will invite me, I will come.

Of course you will accompany me, I must have a chaperon.”

”Of course.”

”Ah!” Claude said, as a footman came softly into the room, ”here is our absinthe. Now, Jimmy, please do forget your horrible football, and I will teach you to be decadent.”

”As my aunt will teach you to be young--you old boy.”

II

”Mr Haddon has left, sir,” said the footman, standing by Claude's bedside in the detached manner of the well-bred domestic. ”Here is a note for you, sir; I was to give it you the first thing.”

And he handed it on a salver.

Claude stretched out his thin white arm and took it, without manifesting any of the surprise that he felt. When the footman had gone, he poured out a cup of tea from the silver teapot that stood on a small table at his elbow, sipped it, and quietly opened the square envelope. The Northamptons.h.i.+re sun was pouring in with a countrified ardour through the bedroom window. Outside the birds twittered in Miss Haddon's cherished garden. For Claude had come down at that contented spinster's invitation to spend a week with her, bringing Jimmy as chaperon, and this was the very first morning of his visit. Now he learnt that his chaperon had already ”left,” possibly to be a ”half-back,” or something equally ridiculous, at a local football match in a neighbouring village. Claude spread the note out and read it, while the birds chirped to the very manifest spring.

”DEAR BOY,--Good-bye, and good luck to you. I know you are never angry, so it is scarcely worth while to tell you not to be. I am off. Back in a week. You will learn your lesson better alone with Aunt Kitty. There is no absinthe in her cellar, but she knows good champagne from bad. You will be all right. Study hard.--Yours ever,

JIM.”

Claude drank two cups of tea instead of his usual one, and read the note four times. Then he lay back, wrapping his dressing-gown--a fine specimen of Cairene embroidery--closely round him, shut his eyes, and seemed to go to sleep. All he said to himself was:--

”Jimmy writes a very dull letter.”

At half-past nine, Miss Haddon's house reverberated in a hollow manner with the barbarous music of a gong, the dressing-gong. Claude heard it very unsympathetically, and felt rather inclined merely to take off his dressing-gown, as an act of mute defiance, and go deliberately to sleep, instead of getting up and putting things on. But he remembered his manners wearily, and slid out of bed and into a carefully-warmed bath that was prepared in the neighbouring dressing-room. Having completed an intricate toilette, and tied a marvellously subtle tie, shot with rigorously subdued, but voluptuous colours, he sauntered downstairs in time to be thoroughly immersed in the full clamour of the second--or breakfast--gong, which he encountered in the hall.

”Why will people wake the dead merely because they are going to eat a boiled egg and a bit of toast?” he asked himself as he entered the breakfast-room.

Miss Haddon was standing by the window, reading letters in the proper English manner. The sun lay on her grey hair, which she wore dressed high, and void of cap.

”You are very punctual,” she said with a smile. ”I was going to send up to know whether you would prefer to breakfast in your room. My nephew told me you might like to. I shall be glad to have your company. Jimmy has run away and left us together, I find.”

”Yes, Jimmy has run away,” Claude answered, beginning slowly to feel the full force of Jimmy's perfidy. He looked at Miss Haddon's cheerful, rosy face, and bright brown eyes, and wondered whether she had been in the plot.

”I hope you will not be bored,” Miss Haddon went on, as they sat down together, the intonation of her melodious elderly voice seeming to dismiss the supposition, even while she suggested it. ”But, indeed, I think it is almost impossible to be bored in the country.”

Claude, who was always either in London or Paris, looked frankly astonished. In handing him his cup of tea, Miss Haddon noticed it.

”You don't agree with me?” she asked.

”I cannot disagree, at least,” he said; ”because, to tell the truth, I am always in towns.”

”Probably you are happy there then,” she rejoined, with a briskness that was agreeable, because it was not a hideous a.s.sumption, like the geniality that often prevails, fitfully, at Christmas time.

But Claude could not permit his hostess to remain comfortable in this utterly erroneous belief.

”Oh, please--” he said, with gentle rebuke, ”I am not happy anywhere.”

Miss Haddon glanced at him with a gay and whimsical, but decidedly acute, scrutiny.

”Perhaps you are too young to be happy,” she said; ”you have not suffered enough.”