Part 9 (1/2)

'Miss Lucy's lost,' said the cook heavily, 'that's what's happened. So now you know. You run along and play, like a good little boy, and don't make extry trouble for us in the trouble we're in.'

'Lost?' repeated Philip.

'Yes, lost. I expect you're glad,' said the nurse, 'the way you treated her. You hold your tongue and don't let me so much as hear you breathe the next twenty-four hours. I'll go and write that telegram.'

Philip thought it best not to let any one hear him breathe. By this means he heard the telegram when nurse read it aloud to the cook.

'Peter Graham, Esq., Hotel Wagram, Brussels.

Miss Lucy lost. Please come home immediately.

PHILKINS.

That's all right, isn't it?'

'I don't see why you sign it Philkins. You're only the nurse--I'm the head of the house when the family's away, and my name's Bobson,' the cook said.

There was a sound of torn paper.

'There--the paper's tore. I'd just as soon your name went to it,' said the nurse. 'I don't want to be the one to tell such news.'

'Oh, my good gracious, what a thing to happen,' sighed the cook. 'Poor little darling!'

Then somebody wrote the telegram again, and the nurse took it out to the stable-yard, where Peppermint was already saddled.

'I thought,' said Philip, bold in the nurse's absence, 'I thought Lucy was with her aunt.'

'She came back yesterday,' said the cook. 'Yes, after you'd gone to bed.

And this morning that nurse went into the night nursery and she wasn't there. Her bed all empty and cold, and her clothes gone. Though how the gipsies could have got in without waking that nurse is a mystery to me and ever will be. She must sleep like a pig.'

'Or the seven sleepers,' said the coachman.

'But what would gipsies want her _for_?' Philip asked.

'What do they ever want anybody for?' retorted the cook. 'Look at the heirs that's been stolen. I don't suppose there's a t.i.tled family in England but what's had its heir stolen, one time and another.'

'I suppose you've looked all over the house,' said Philip.

'I suppose we ain't deaf and dumb and blind and silly,' said the cook.

'Here's that nurse. You be off, Mr. Philip, without you want a flea in your ear.'

And Philip, at the word, _was_ off. He went into the long drawing-room, and shut the door. Then he got the ivory chessmen out of the Buhl cabinet, and set them out on that delightful chess-table whose chequers are of mother-of-pearl and ivory, and tried to play a game, right hand against left. But right hand, who was white, and so moved first, always won. He gave up after awhile, and put the chessmen away in their proper places. Then he got out the big book of photographs of pictures, but they did not seem interesting, so he tried the ivory spellicans. But his hand shook, and you know spellicans is a game you can't play when your hand shakes. And all the time, behind the chess and the pictures and the spellicans, he was trying not to think about his dream, about how he had climbed that ladder stair, which was really the yard-stick, and gone into the cities that he had built on the tables. Somehow he did not want to remember it. The very idea of remembering made him feel guilty and wretched.

He went and looked out of the window, and as he stood there his wish not to remember the dream made his boots restless, and in their shuffling his right boot kicked against something hard that lay in the folds of the blue brocade curtain.

He looked down, stooped, and picked up little Mr. Noah. The nurse must have dropt it there when she cleared away the city.

And as he looked upon those wooden features it suddenly became impossible not to think of the dream. He let the remembrance of it come, and it came in a flood. And with it the remembrance of what he had done.

He had promised to be Lucy's n.o.ble friend, and they had run together to escape from the galloping soldiers. And he had run faster than she. And at the top of the ladder--the ladder of safety--_he had not waited for her_.