"It is now eight o'clock," said the elderly gentleman, "if this young
lady has no objection, I will eat a light supper in this apartment; and
if you, ma'am, have no objection, I will retire to my bedchamber
immediately after the meal. I do not require a heavy supper," he added
as Mrs. Tabrum's jolly face began to pucker with the impatience of a
good housewife to enumerate the plentiful dainties of a well-stocked
larder.
The latter perceiving that Phyllida was recovered of her alarm, and
anxious to prove to the elderly gentleman that his appetite was in the
wrong by producing a flock of savoury dishes as speedily as possible,
hereupon curtseyed, and was soon audible in shrill pursuit of little
Polly Patch.
The Travellers' Room of the _Basket of Roses_ was plunged into rosy
quiet. The Dutch clock swung a languid pendulum to and fro with gentle
tick; the fire whispered and crackled faintly; the lattices occasionally
shook before a more unruly blast; a mouse stood up in a dark corner and
squeaked; the huge oak dresser occasionally tapped; two unknown birds,
screened till morning by chintz foliage, sometimes stirred on their
perches; the elderly gentleman sometimes rapped his mother-o'-pearl
snuff-box; Phyllida sometimes smoothed her forget-me-not flowered
skirts; and away in the taproom was a tinkle and murmur of taproom
sounds muffled by several intervening doors. Yet, however fair the
surroundings, it is impossible for two people, unacquainted, to maintain
a graceful silence for long. The elderly gentleman began to tap his
snuff-box more frequently, while Phyllida would smooth her skirts more
persistently and from time to time cast a sidelong glance in the
direction of the elderly gentleman. The latter felt the undercurrent of
strong emotion so keenly that he was worried by this steady inaction
into a curiosity quite alien to his character, and plunged into a
conversation consisting principally of a large number of direct
questions on his side and a small number of indirect replies on the part
of Phyllida. At last, after a tiresome quarter of an hour in which the
only solid piece of information given and offered was the fact that he
was going to, she departing from the salubrious town of Curtain Wells,
the elderly gentleman produced from the upper left-hand pocket of his
waistcoat an oval case of worn Morocco leather. Phyllida observed that
he rapped this in just the same decided way as he rapped his snuff-box
and felt a certain incongruity in his manner, as he took from it the
miniature of a young girl and offered the portrait for her inspection,
asking whether she detected a likeness.
The girl, depicted with the meticulous art of the worker on a small
scale, recalled at once the features of Mr. Charles Lovely. Phyllida
hesitated for a moment before assigning the likeness to such a man.
"You observe, Madam, the resemblance to yourself?" said the elderly
gentleman.
"To myself?" replied Miss Courteen taken aback.
"For what other reason should I show it to you?"
"To say truth, sir, it reminds me more of a gentleman----"
"Eh! what's that," he interrupted. "Not young Charles Lovely?"
"Indeed, sir--'twas he occurred to my mind."
"You know him?"
"I have stepped a minuet with him," replied Phyllida, now more than ever
on her guard against the steel-grey eyes of the elderly gentleman.
"This was my sister, his mother."
If you had asked the stranger what prompted him to confide so suddenly
in Miss Courteen, I doubt he would have been unable to tell you. If his
clerks could have seen Sir George Repington, head of the great banking
house of Repington, at this moment they would have been indescribably
shocked to hear him announce this piece of personal information. The
clerks in busy Throgmorton Street firmly believed that the great Sir
George Repington lived a desolate and severe life surrounded by
calculating machines of enormous complication; they would have gasped to
imagine his bleak financial solitudes disturbed by a young woman in an
inn-parlour. The chief cashier, indeed, might have emitted one of his
dry hacking little laughs; but then the chief cashier had grown old in
the service of the Repingtons and, having known Sir George as a young
man, enjoyed a privileged cynicism. Moreover, the chief cashier when he
was junior clerk had carried half a score sealed notes to Thistlegrove
Cottage--a diminutive paradise five or six miles along the Hounslow
Road. There, amid the chirping of many linnets, young Master Repington
would swear eternal fidelity while the sun-dyed sleepy air coloured his
dear one's lips as deep as rubies and enchanted with gold her soft brown
hair. No doubt the present scene of this small history would have
awakened a delightful memory from the dusty recesses of the chief
cashier's brain, for all that the end of Thistlegrove Cottage was a
businesslike affair on a level with many other successful monetary
transactions of the great house of Repington and Son.
Phyllida was somewhat embarrassed by the sudden announcement of his
relationship to that dreadful Mr. Lovely, who had lampooned the whole of
the fashionable world. She wondered if the elderly gentleman was aware
of his nephew's late indiscretion, whether she ought to break the news
of his odium, and finally with a maid's inconsequence fell to wishing
she had never eloped since the step had involved her in so awkward an
adventure.
Sir George, noticing her embarrassment, introduced himself,
"My name is Repington, ma'am--Sir George Repington." As he said this he
received the miniature from Phyllida, and having, as it were, fondled
the oval for a second, replaced it in the upper left-hand pocket of his
waistcoat.
The introduction put Phyllida deeper than ever into a quandary. She felt
the genteel movement to be a low curtsey coupled with the graceful
revelation of her name, but this was just the act she could not bring
herself to perform. What a vast number of polite difficulties attached
themselves to an elopement, and how she wished with all her heart she
had never been so foolish as to brave them unaccompanied.
"The resemblance is certainly very remarkable," said Sir George
Repington.
Phyllida clutched this conversational straw.
"I doubt, sir, 'twould ill become me to allow the compliment."
The stilted reply did not seem to offend the elderly gentleman, for he
bowed very gallantly and tapped the lid of his snuff-box with an air.
"And my nephew, ma'am, what does Curtain Wells think of my nephew?"
Luckily for Phyllida who was racking her brains to devize a polite
method of informing Sir George Repington that his nephew had offended
the whole world, that is to say the whole world known to the residents
and visitors of Curtain Wells, Mrs. Tabrum came back to say that a pair
of fowls were on their way.
"A morsel of cheese is all that I require, thank'ee," said Sir George to
this information. "A morsel of cheese, well-aired sheets and----"
"A bit off the breast," murmured Mrs. Tabrum coaxingly.
"Well-aired sheets and----"
"A grilled drumstick," insinuated the landlady.
"Well-aired sheets and----"
"The liver wing."
Sir George Repington capitulated and sat down to supper with Phyllida
opposite and a great bowl of daffadillies between them.
Nobody ever found out what exactly was the elderly gentleman's unspoken
requirement.
Sir George was enjoying himself--a very unusual occupation for that grim
and solid man of business.
Phyllida, on the contrary, was becoming more deeply embarrassed every
moment. She could not help picturing to herself the awkwardness of
greeting her dear Amor in the presence of such a man. Moreover, she
could not understand why the latter preserved such a lack of curiosity.
She, a heroine to herself, was unable to appreciate the point of view
that took her and her adventure for granted. She almost resented Sir
George's acceptation of her as part of the furniture of a wayside inn.
As a matter of fact, the banker was abroad to enjoy himself, and the
discovery of a maid sitting solitary in the firelight of an inn parlour
only struck him as whimsical in so far as she resembled his dead sister.
Having, after a lapse of many grey years, put on once more the mantle of
youth, he was very ready to welcome a face that consorted so perfectly
with his mood.
But as supper went on, and the elderly gentleman inquired no farther
into the well-being of Mr. Charles Lovely, while Mr. Amor did not
arrive, and the drunken postillions remained in the tap-room, and the
Dutch clock ticked on quite unperturbed by the raging of the storm
without, Phyllida began to regain her equanimity, and even to converse
so trippingly with the elderly gentleman that elopements and Gretna
Green marriages floated away while she chattered of her dearest Morton,
betrayed the latter's partiality for young Mr. Chalkley, compared her
boldness with the more modest behaviour of a certain Miss Jenny West,
who was the third daughter of a parson who lived four--no five miles
from where they lived in Hampshire, jumped from the tale of Miss West to
the tale of Miss West's brother who scandalized the country by stepping
eight consecutive gavottes with his cousin from Hertfordshire; and
ultimately confided to Sir George her profound contempt for Mr. Moon and
her immense distrust of Major Tarry. Yet, at the very moment when she
was telling Sir George of a ludicrous chase of the Major's wig one windy
March morning in the preceding year the furious gale was blowing his
sodden pigtail to and fro without a curse from the little soldier in
whom stern death had begotten a divine and everlasting indifference to
the minor amenities of polite appearance. Sir George Repington was near
to the capture of his fled youth that fire-lit evening. He was back in
the old South Gallery at Repington Hall sitting in the wide window seat
at the West End, and opposite to him with flushed exquisite face sat his
sister Joan, rippling joyfully through the fair meadows of life like a
glittering brook. The musick of Phyllida's conversation revived for the
elderly gentleman many a crimson dusk. He thought with a sigh of the
South Gallery now, with its hollow echoes, its dust and long line of
contemptuous ancestors, and of himself as, with severe tread, he ran the
batteries of many immutable eyes.
Old Tabrum would quaver in from time to time to survey the comfort of
his guests, regaling them with some particularly choice floral anecdote.
His wife too would peep to inquire whether the roasted fowls fulfilled
her expectations, and once little Polly Patch put her cap round the door
and asked if his honour would like the warming-pan left in his bed or
merely whisked three or four times over his already well-aired sheets.
* * * * *
Phyllida made a careless remark about her mother, and Sir George
Repington hoped that Mrs. Courteen (Phyllida had some time ago divulged
her name) would not be alarmed by the strife of the elements. Phyllida
made a very careless reply to this, by reassuring Sir George about her
mother, who, as she pointed out, would be not at all likely to observe
the wildness of the night in her anxiety to secure her hand against the
prying glances of my lady Bunbutter.
"Is that Sir Moffyn Bunbutter's lady?" said Sir George.
"Yes, indeed, sir."
"Sure to be, sure to be," Sir George commented. "Who'd have thought of
seeing poor old Sir Moffyn's lady here of all places?"
"But she's not here, sir. She is at Curtain Wells."
"But your mother?"
Phyllida saw her mistake, but, being unused to falsehoods, made no
attempt to extricate herself from the situation provoked by her own
carelessness. As a happy compromise, she blushed and made queer little
excavations in the salt-cellar.
"You've no brother and your father is dead?" went on Sir George, fixing
the abashed young woman with his sharp eyes. "Then you are alone in this
inn?"
The statement, put so baldly, sounded very dreadful to Miss Courteen.
Moreover, she had an uneasy idea that the elderly gentleman was
beginning to feel himself compromised by her company, so she made
patterns in the salt-cellar more fantastick than ever, blushed till the
shells of her ears seemed veritably to crack in the furnace of outraged
sensibility, and looked very guilty.
"Alone?" the elderly gentleman repeated.
Phyllida's whispered 'yes' was only just audible above the languid
ticking of the Dutch clock.
The antique landlord broke the tension by putting his head round the
door and demanding from Sir George whether he preferred to sleep in the
Dorick Summerhouse with a view of the surrounding country, or in the
Green Vista with a more comfortable bed, if not so wide a view.
Antiquity was followed by his wife, who hustled him fairly into the
candlelight and explained that all their bedchambers were named to suit
the flowery eccentricity of her husband.
"Thus we have the Parterre," said old Simon in support of his wife's
explanation, "the Pleached Alley (though that is more truly a passage).
The Sun Dial (a warm attick), the Quincunx, the Bosquet, the Arbour, the
Green Gallery, the Cascade (or stairway) and for my dear hollyhock and
myself, the Columbary."
"God bless you, sirrah," said Sir George rather testily, "I'm no Dutch
garden-maker that I should fret about such vagaries of taste. Oons!
plant me where you will, I wager I shall not open till daybreak."
This quip pleased the old landlord enormously, and he retired upon a
chuckle prolonged sufficiently to convey him to the farthest ends of the
house, whither he was followed by his anxious wife.
Left alone once more, Phyllida and Sir George looked at each other over
the remains of that genial supper.
Neither broke the silence for a while. The elderly gentleman was the
first to speak.
"Don't you think it is somewhat unwise to travel alone, especially as
your postillions do not seem a very trusty pair?"
"I am not really alone," said Phyllida,
"I'm--I'm--expecting--a--a--companion."
Sir George Repington raised his eyebrows and seemed about to make a
severe comment upon this halting explanation, but, leaning his elbow on
the table and his cheek on his hand, he changed his mind and in cold
deliberate accents, so cold and so deliberate that you would have sworn
a weight of emotion was sunk beneath them, began a tale. Since this tale
must either be told by me or by Sir George himself, inasmuch as it
concerns one or two of our characters, I will let the original author
give it to you in his own words, nay I will give the story the
distinction of a chapter to itself.
_Chapter the Thirty-first_