She followed us to the foot of the stairs with a lamp. The shadows of the
bannisters raced up the wall ahead of us, as she moved away. The Seraph
gripped the back of my blouse. We stopped at the door of Mrs.
Handsomebody's bedroom. Like Mrs. Handsomebody, it towered above us, pale
and forbidding.
"I dare you," said Angel, "to open it and stick your head in."
I was too drowsy to be timid. I turned the handle and opened the door far
enough to insert my round tow head.
The room was unutterably still. A pale bluish light filtered through the
long white curtains. The ghostly bed awaited its occupant. The door of a
tall wardrobe stood open--did something stir inside? I withdrew my head and
closed the door. Now I remembered that the room had smelled of black kid
gloves. I shuddered.
"You were afraid!" jeered Angel.
"Not I. It was nothing to do."
But when we were safe in bed and Mary Ellen had come and put out our light,
I lay a-thinking of the empty room. Strange, when people went away and left
you, how Something stayed behind! A shadowy, wistful something, that
smelled of kid gloves!
We slept till ten next morning. Mary Ellen superintended our baths. We were
in a state to behold, she said, and she was apprehensive lest Mrs.
Handsomebody should observe my swollen nose, for the big boy's fist had
somewhat enlarged that unobtrusive feature.
"Jist say ye've a bit of feverish cold if she remarks it," she cautioned,
"people often swells up wid colds."
We ate our bread and strawberry jam and milk from one end of the dining
table. We heaped the bread with sugar, and stirred the jam into our milk.
After breakfast, we played at knights and robbers in the schoolroom. It was
a raw morning, and a Scotch mist dimmed the window pane.
Angel and I were in the midst of a terrific fight over a princess whom he
was bearing off to his robber cave (The Seraph, draped in a chenille
table-cover, impersonating the princess) when we were interrupted by the
tinkle of the dinner bell.
How the morning had flown! Had she returned then? Was the funeral over? Had
she heard our shouts? We descended the stairs with some misgivings and
entered the dining-room in single file.
Yes, she was there, standing by the table, her black dress looking blacker
than ever! After a dry little kiss on each of our foreheads, she motioned
us to seat ourselves, and took her own accustomed place behind the tea
things. There was a solemn click of knives and forks. Mary Ellen waited on
us primly. It was not to be thought that this was the same room in which we
had feasted so uproariously on the night previous.
Yet I stared at Mrs. Handsomebody and marvelled that she should suspect
nothing. Did she get no whiff of the furry smell of Anita? Did no faint
echo of Tony's music disturb her thoughts? What were her thoughts? Deep
ones I was sure, for her brow was knit. Was she thinking of that brother on
whom the Scotch mist was falling so remorselessly?
The Seraph was speaking.
"It's a vewy bad fing to be dead," he was saying reminiscently--, "you
can't eat, you can't dwink, an' you jus' fly awound lookin' for somefing to
light on!"
I trembled for him, but Mrs. Handsomebody, lost in thought, gave no heed to
him.
At last she raised her eyes.
"I hope you behaved yourselves well, and made profitable use of your time
during my absence?"
We made incoherent murmurs of assent.
"Name the Channel Islands, John."
"Guernsey, Jersey, Alderney, Sark, and Herm," I replied glibly. So much had
I saved from the wreck of things ordained.
"Correct. Are you through your dinners then? You may pass out. Ah, your
nose, John; it looks quite red. What caused that?"
I said that I believed I had an inward burning fever. I had embellished
Mary Ellen's suggestion.
"I hope you are not going to be ill," she sighed.
It was not until Angel and I were back in the schoolroom, that we
discovered the absence of The Seraph. We turned surprised looks on each
other. Our junior seldom left our heels.
"I remember now," reflected Angel, "that, as he passed her, she stopped
him. I didn't think anything of it. What can she have found out? D'you
s'pose she's pumping the kid?"
We were left to our conjectures for fully a quarter of an hour. Then we
heard him plodding leisurely up the stairs. We greeted him impatiently.
"What's up? Did you blab? Whatever _did_ she say?" We hurled the questions
at him.
The Seraph maintained an air of calm superiority. He even hopped from one
floral wreath on the carpet to another, with his hands behind his back, as
was his custom when he wished to reflect undisturbed. He ignored our
importunities.
Angel, in exasperation, took him by the collar.
"You tell us why she kept you down there so long!"
Thus cornered, The Seraph raised his large eyes to our inquiring faces with
great solemnity.
"She kept me," he said, "to cuddle me, an' to give me this--" he showed a
white peppermint lozenge between his little teeth.
To _cuddle_ him. Was the world coming to an end?
"Yes," he persisted, "she kept me to cuddle me, an' she was cwyin'--so
there!"
Mrs. Handsomebody crying!
"It's about her dead brother, of course," said Angel. "That's why she
cried."
"No," said The Seraph, stoutly. "He was a _man_, an' she was cwyin' about a
little _wee_ boy like me, she used to cuddle long ago!"
_Chapter VI: D'ye Ken John Peel?_
I
Probably a little boy is never quite so happy as when he is worshipping and
imitating a young man. From this time on my hero was Harry, about whom so
fascinating an air of mystery hung that his lightest word was something to
be treasured. I pictured him, hungry and alone, perhaps brooding over the
Collect for next Sunday, or something of equal melancholy. I was always on
the watch for his tall, slender figure, when we took our walks, but when we
did meet again, it came as a surprise, and quite took me off my feet.
A month had passed since Mary Ellen's party. It was a windy, sunny day in
March, and great white clouds billowed in a clear sky--like clean clothes
in a tub of blueing, Mary Ellen had said. I was sitting alone on the steps
of the Cathedral. Angel was in the schoolroom writing his weekly letter to
father, and The Seraph was suffering a bath at the hands of Mary Ellen,
following an excursion into the remoter depths of the coal cellar.
So I sat on the Cathedral steps alone. It was a fine morning for flights of
the imagination. The soft thunder of the Cathedral organ became at my will
the booming of the surf on a distant coral reef. The pigeons wheeling
overhead became gulls, whimpering in the cordage. Little did the ancient
caretaker reck, as he swept the stretch of flagging before the carved door,
that he was washing off the deck of a frigate, whilst I, the rover of the
seas, kept a stern eye on him. Louder boomed the surf--then soft again. The
door behind me had opened and closed. The deck-washer touched his cap. Then
the Bishop stood above me, smiling, the sun glinting in his blue eyes and
on the buttons of his gaiters.
"Hal-_lo_, John," he said. "What's the game this morning. Seafaring as
usual?"
I nodded, "She's as saucy a frigate," I answered happily, "as ever sailed
the seas, and this here wild weather is just a frolic for her. But I don't
like the look of yon black craft to the windward." And I pointed to a
dustman's cart that had just hove into view.
"I entirely agree with you," replied the Bishop. "She looks as though she
were out on dirty business. I'd like nothing better than to stay and see
you make short work of her, but here it is Friday morning, and not a
blessed word of my sermon written, so I must be getting on." And with that
he strode down the street to his own house. I was alone again watching the
approaching vessel with suspicion. Then, above the thrashing of the spray,
I heard my name spoken by a voice I knew, and turning looked straight up
into Harry's face.
"John!" he repeated. "What luck. I have been watching for you for days, you
little hermit!"
"Watching for me, Harry?"
"Yes," he proceeded, "and the one time I saw you, that starched governess
of yours had you gripped by the hand--"
--"just like any old baby girl," I broke in.
Harry laughed and shook my hand enthusiastically. I saw that he was even
thinner than before. Was he, I wondered, "infernally hungry" at this very
minute?
"John," he said, looking into my eyes: "You can help me if you will. We're
friends, aren't we?"
I let him see that I was all on fire to help him, and it was then that he
made his wonderful suggestion.
"Would it be possible to evade your governess long enough to come and have
a bite with me?"
Dinner with Harry! In his own room! What an adventure to repeat to Angel
and The Seraph! Without further parley I set off down Henwood street at a
trot lest Mrs. Handsomebody should spy me from her bedroom window, in a
fateful way she had. Harry hurried after me, catching my arm and drawing me
close to him.
"What a plucky little shaver you are, John," he said. "I know she's a
corker, but I think you and I are a match for her, eh?"
I strode beside him breathless. I felt taller, stronger, than ever before.
By contrast with our masculinity Mrs. Handsomebody seemed a rather pitiful
old woman.
We spoke little, but hurried through many streets, till, at last, we came
to the narrow dingy one where I had first seen Harry. We turned down an
alley beside a green grocer's shop and entered a narrow doorway into the
strangest passage I had ever seen.
It was damp and chill. The floor was paved with dark red bricks and the
walls were stone. On our left I glimpsed a dim closet where a woman with
fat arms was dipping milk out of what looked like a zinc-covered box. On
our right rose the steepest, most winding staircase imaginable; and close
to the wall beside the stairs towered a giant grapevine whose stem was as
thick as a man's arm. After an eccentric curve or two, this amazing vine
disappeared through a convenient hole in the roof. I was lost in admiration
and should have liked to stop and examine it, but Harry urged me up the
stairs.
"How is that for steep?" he demanded, at the top. "Winded, eh? Now these
are my digs, John--" and he threw open a door with a flourish.
It was a shabby little room with a threadbare carpet, yet it wore an air of
adventure somehow. The lamp shade had a daring tilt to it; the blind had
been run up askew; and the red table cover had been pushed back to make
room for a mound of books. Harry's bed looked as though he had been having
a pillow fight. Surely not with the fat lady downstairs.
Harry was clearing the table by tossing the books into the middle of the
bed. "We're going to have tea directly," he explained. "Can't you hear her
puffing up the stairs? I expect a catastrophe every time she does it." He
set two chairs at the table and gazed eagerly at the doorway.
She appeared at last with heaving bosom carrying a large tray, and began to
lay the table. I observed with great interest that she was placing a whole
kidney for each of us, and that there were also potato chips and six jam
puffs. Harry bade me sit down with the air of one who entertains a guest of
importance; I swelled with pride as I attacked the kidney.
Harry, sitting opposite, eating with a gusto equal to my own, seemed to me
the most perfect and luckiest of mortals.
"Harry!" I got it out through my mouth full of potato chips, "Harry, I say!
Do you always have jolly things like these to eat?"
He gave a short laugh.
"Oh, no, my John! On the contrary there are many times when I do not eat at
all. However, I paid a visit to an uncle of mine yesterday, who gave me so
much money that I shall live well for some time to come, but--I shall never
know the time o'day."
"Oh, but that's fine--" I cried, "Not to know the time! I wish I didn't for
it's always time to go to bed, or do lessons, or take a tiresome walk with
Mrs. Handsomebody."
Harry stared hard at me. "What do you suppose," he asked, "she'll do to
you, for skipping dinner? Something pretty hot?"
"I dunno," I returned. "It's a new sort of badness. P'raps I'll have to do
without tea, or maybe she'll write to father--she's always threatening.
Don't let's talk about it."
"She appears to be a rather poisonous old party," commented Harry. "I see
that it behooves me to get to business and tell you just why I brought you
here." He pushed back his plate and took from his pocket a short thick pipe
and lighted it.
"Now John," he smiled, "just finish up those jam puffs. Don't leave one, or
my landlady will eat it, and she has double chins enough. I want to talk to
you as man to man."
Man to man! How I wished that Angel could see me, being made the confidant
of Harry! I helped myself to my third jam puff with an air of cool
deliberation.
"Now--" Harry leant across the table, his eyes on mine, "What sort of
looking man would you expect my father to be, John?"
I studied Harry and hazarded--"A brown face, and awfully thin, and greenish
eyes, and crinkly brown hair."
"Wrong!" cried Harry, smiting the table. "My father's got a full pink face,
the bluest of eyes and a fine head of white hair, which, I am afraid I
helped to whiten, worse luck!"
"He sounds nice," I commented.
"He is. Now what do you suppose my father _does_, John?"
"Not a _pirate_!" but I said it hopefully.
"Far from it. He's a bishop."
"Hurray!" I cried. "Our best friend is a bishop. He lives right next door
to us."
"The very man," said Harry. "He's my father."