Part 18 (1/2)

”Master Buz, sir?” asked Fusby, quite unmoved by the intelligence; ”it's generally 'im.”

”Yes, Master Buz, and he asked me to give you this. . . . It's some things of his. I'll send for the suit-case--put it out of the way somewhere--he was dressed up . . . these are the clothes----”

”He will 'ave 'is frolic,” Fusby murmured indulgently; ”a very light-'earted young gentleman he is--step this way, please, sir.”

Fusby opened a door behind him, and announced in the voice of one issuing an edict, ”Mr Gallup.”

There seemed to Eloquent crowds of people in the hall, mostly gathered about a round table near the fire. He discerned Mrs Ffolliot in the very act of ”dispensing tea” and General Grantly standing on the hearthrug warming his coat tails. Mary, too, he saw give a cup of tea into her grandfather's hands, and he was conscious of the presence of Mrs Grantly seated on an oaken settle at the other side of the fire from Mrs Ffolliot. These four were clear to him as he came into the hall. There was a fire of logs in the open fireplace and a good many lights, and Eloquent, coming out of the soft darkness of that winter afternoon, felt dazzled and intolerably hot.

The four people he saw first suddenly seemed to recede to an immeasurable distance, and he became conscious of others whom he could not focus. His tongue clave to the roof of his mouth, and he was conscious that at his entrance dead silence had fallen upon the group by the fire. Then Mrs Ffolliot rose and held out a kind fair hand to him, and said something that he could not hear. Somehow he reached the succouring hand and clung to it like a drowning man, mumbling the while, ”Sorry to intrude upon you, but one of your sons”--again the name eluded him--”has broken his arm, and he's in my aunt's cottage.”

”Look at Ganpie's tea!” exclaimed a shrill clear voice, and the Kitten diverted attention from Eloquent to the General, who was calmly pouring the tea from his newly filled cup upon the bear-skin hearthrug, as he gazed fixedly at this bringer of ill-tidings.

Eloquent could never remember clearly what happened between the dual announcement of the accident and the spilling of the General's tea, till the moment when he found himself sitting on the settle beside Mrs Grantly with a cup of tea of his own, which Mary had poured out.

Everyone else seemed to have melted away, Mrs Ffolliot to telephone to the doctor, the General to order his motor, the Kitten and Ger to the nursery, and the rest of the party to the four winds.

But he, Mrs Grantly, and Mary were still sitting at the fire, and Mary had asked him if he took sugar.

”Two lumps,” he said.

”So do I,” said Mary, and it seemed a most wonderful coincidence of kindred tastes.

In thinking it over afterwards it struck him that the whole family took the accident very coolly. There was no fuss, very little exclamation; and to Eloquent, sitting as a guest in that old hall where, as a small boy, he had sometimes peeped wonderingly, there came a curious feeling that either he had dreamt of this moment or that it had all happened aeons of ages ago, and that if it was a dream then Mary was in a dream too, that he had always wanted her, been conscious of her, only then she was an immense way off; vaguely beautiful and desirable, but set in a luminous haze of impossibilities, remote, apart as a star.

Now she was friendly and approachable, only a few yards away, looking across at him with frank kind eyes and the firelight s.h.i.+ning on her bright hair.

The time seemed all too short till Mrs Ffolliot, dressed for driving, in a long fur coat, came back to tell them that the doctor was at a case five miles off, at a house where there was no telephone, and that she had arranged to take Buz into the Marlehouse Infirmary to have the arm set there, and, if necessary, he must stay there till he could be moved. . . .

”Could they drive Mr Gallup back?”

So there was nothing for it but to accompany the General and Mrs Ffolliot.

Mr Ffolliot did not appear at all.

General Grantly went outside with the chauffeur, and Eloquent again experienced the queer dream-like sense of doing again something he had done already as he followed Mrs Ffolliot into the motor. He had never lost his awestruck admiration for her, and it never occurred to him to sit down at her side. He was about to put down one of the little seats and sit on that, when she said, ”Oh, please, sit here, Mr Gallup,” and he sank into the seat beside her, confused and tremulous. Mary and Mrs Grantly had come into the porch with them, and stood there now calling out all sorts of messages and questions. The inner door stood open, and the hall shone bright behind them.

The motor purred and slid swiftly down the drive.

Mrs Ffolliot switched off the light behind her head, and Eloquent became conscious of a soft pervading scent of violets. The twenty years that lay between her first visit to his father's shop and this wonderful new nearness seemed to him but as one short link in a chain of inevitable circ.u.mstances. Like a picture thrown on a screen he saw the little boy standing at her knee, the giggling shop a.s.sistants, and his father flushed and triumphant. And he knew that through all the years he had always been sure that such a moment as this would come, when he would sit beside her as an equal and a friend. . . . And here he was, sitting with her in her father's motor, sharing the same fur rug. What was she saying?

Something kind about the trouble he had taken . . . and the motor stopped at his aunt's gate.

Uz was in the midst of a large bite of plum-cake when Eloquent announced his errand. Uz hastily took another bite, and just as the Kitten drew attention to her grandfather's tea he quietly opened the door of the hall, shut it after him softly, did the same by the front door, and hatless, coatless, and in his pumps--for his boots were exceedingly dirty, and Nana had caught him and turned him back to change before tea--he started down the drive at a good swinging run.

His wind was excellent, and he reached Miss Gallup's gate in about five minutes. Only once had he stopped, when the piece of cake he was carrying broke off short and dropped in the mud; he peered about for it during some four seconds, then gave it up and ran on.

The lamp was lit in Miss Gallup's sitting-room, but the blind was not pulled down. He looked in at the window and saw his brother lying on the sofa under the eiderdown, opened the front door--no one ever locks a door in Redmarley unless they go out, and then the key is always under the sc.r.a.per--and walked in.

”Hullo,” said Buz; ”isn't this rotten?”