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About forty-eight hours later Godfrey arrived duly at the little Essex
station three miles from Monk’s Acre. There was nobody to meet him,
which was not strange, as the hour of his coming was unknown. Still,
unreasonable as it might be, the contrast between the warmth and
affection that had distinguished his departure, and the cold vacuum
that greeted his arrival, chilled him. He said a few words to the
grumpy old porter who was the sole occupant of the platform, but that
worthy, although he knew him well enough, did not seem to realise that
he had ever been away. During the year in which so many things had
happened to Godfrey nothing at all had happened to the porter, and
therefore he did not appreciate the lapse of time.
Leaving his baggage to be brought by the carrier’s cart, Godfrey took
the alpenstock that, in a moment of enthusiasm, the guide had given him
as a souvenir of his great adventure, and started for home. It was a
very famous alpenstock, which this guide and his father before him had
used all their lives, one that had been planted in the topmost snows of
every peak in Switzerland. Indeed the names of the most unclimbable of
these, together with the dates of their conquest by its owners,
sometimes followed by crosses to show that on such or such an
expedition life had been lost, were burnt into the tough wood with a
hot iron. As the first of these dates was as far back as 1831, Godfrey
valued this staff highly, and did not like to leave it to the chances
of the carrier’s cart.
His road through the fields ran past Hawk’s Hall, of which he observed
with a thrill of dismay, that the blinds were drawn as though in it
someone lay dead. There was no reason why he should have been dismayed,
since he had heard that Isobel had gone away to somewhere in
“Ameriky,” as Mrs. Parsons had expressed it in a brief and illspelt
letter, and that Sir John was living in town. Yet the sight depressed
him still further with its suggestion of death, or of separation, which
is almost as bad, for, be it remembered, he was at an age when such
impressions come home.
After leaving the Hall with its blinded and shuttered windows, his
quickest road to the Abbey House ran through the churchyard. Here the
first thing that confronted him was a gigantic monument, of which the
new marble glittered in the afternoon sun. It was a confused affair,
and all he made out of it, without close examination, was a life-sized
angel with an early-Victorian countenance, leaning against the broken
stump of an oak tree and scattering from a basket, of the kind that is
used to collect nuts or windfall apples, on to a sarcophagus beneath a
profusion of marble roses, some of which seemed to have been arrested
and frozen in mid-air. He glanced at the inscription in gold letters.
It was “To the beloved memory of Lady Jane Blake, wife of Sir John
Blake, Bart., J.P., and daughter of the Right Hon. The Earl of Lynfield,
whose bereaved husband erected this monument—’Her husband ...
praiseth her.’”
Godfrey looked, and remembering the gentle little woman whose crumbling
flesh lay beneath, shivered at the awful and crushing erection above.
In life, as he knew, she had been unhappy, but what had she done to
deserve such a memorial in death? Still, she was dead, of that there
was no doubt, and oh! the sadness of it all.
He went on to the Abbey, resisting a queer temptation to enter the
church and look at the tomb of the Plantagenet lady and her unknown
knight, who slept there so quietly from year to year, through spring,
summer, autumn and winter, for ever and for ever. The front door was
locked, so he rang the bell. It was answered by a new servant, rather a
forbidding, middle-aged woman with a limp, who informed him that Mr.
Knight was out, and notwithstanding his explanations, declined to admit
him into the house. Doubtless she thought that a young man, wearing a
foreign-looking hat and carrying such a strange long stick, must be a
thief, or worse. The end of it was that she slammed the door in his face
and shot the old-fashioned bolts.
Then Godfrey bethought him of the other door, that which led into the
ancient refectory, which was now used as a schoolroom. This was open,
so he went in and, being tired after his long journey, sat himself down
in the chair at the end of the old oak table, that same chair in which
Isobel had kissed him when he was a little boy. He looked about him
vaguely; the place, of course, was much the same as it had been for the
last five hundred years, but, as he could see from the names on the
copybooks that lay about, the pupils who inhabited it had changed. Of
the whole six not one was the same.
Then, perhaps for the first time, he began to understand how variable is
the world, a mere passing show in which nothing remains the same,
except the houses and the trees. Even these depart, for a cottage with
which he had been familiar from his earliest infancy, as he could see
through the open door, was pulled down to make room for
“improvements,” and the great old elm, where the rooks used to
build, had been torn up in a gale. Only its ugly stump and projecting
roots were left.
So he sat musing there, very depressed at heart, till at length Mrs.
Parsons came and discovered him in a half-doze. She, too, was somewhat
changed, for of a sudden age had begun to take a hold of her. Her hair
was white now, and her plump, round face had withered like a spring
apple. Still, she greeted him with the old affection, for which he felt
grateful, seeing that it was the first touch of kindness he had known
since he set foot on English ground.
“Dear me, Master Godfrey!” she said, “hadn’t I heard
that you were coming, I could never have been sure that it was you. Why,
you’ve grown into a regular young gentleman in those foreign parts,
and handsome, too, though I sez it. Who could have guessed that you are
your father’s son? Why, you’d make two of him. But there, they say
that your mother was a good-looking lady and large built, though, as I
never set eyes on her, I can’t say for sure. Well, you must be tired
after all this travelling in steamships and trains, so come into the
dining-room and have some tea, for I have got the key to the
sideboard.”
He went, and, passing through the hall, left his alpenstock in the
umbrella-stand. In due course the tea was produced, though for it he
seemed to have little appetite. While he made pretence to eat the thick
bread and butter, Mrs. Parsons told him the news, such as it was. Sir
John was living in town and “flinging the money about, so it was
said, not but what he had got lots to fling and plenty to catch it,”
she added meaningly. His poor, dear lady was dead, and “happy for her
on the whole.” Miss Isobel had “gone foreign,” having, it was
told, quarrelled with her father, and nothing had been heard of her
since she went. She, too, had grown into a fine young lady.
That was all he gathered before Mrs. Parsons was obliged to depart to
see to her business—except that she was exceedingly glad to see him.
Godfrey went up to his bedroom, which he found unprepared, for somebody
else seemed to be sleeping there. While he was surveying it and
wondering who this occupant might be, he heard his father in the hall
asking the parlour-maid which of the young gentlemen had left that
“ridiculous stick” in the stand. She replied that she did not know,
whereupon the hard voice of his parent told her to take it away.
Afterwards Godfrey found it thrown into the wood-house to be chopped up
for firewood, though luckily before this happened.
By this time a kind of anger had seized him. It was true that he had not
said by what train he was coming, for the reason that until he reached
London he could not tell, but he had written that he was to arrive that
afternoon, and surely some note might have been taken of the fact.
He went downstairs and confronted his father, who alone amid so much
change seemed to be exactly the same. Mr. Knight shook him by the hand
without any particular cordiality, and at once attacked him for not
having intimated the hour of his arrival, saying that it was too late
to advise the carrier to call at the station for his baggage and that a
trap would have to be sent, which cost money.
“Very well, Father, I will pay for it myself,” answered Godfrey.
“Oh, yes, I forgot!” exclaimed Mr. Knight, with a sneer, “you
have come into money somehow, have you not, and doubtless consider
yourself independent?”
“Yes, and I am glad of it, Father, as now I hope I shall not be any
more expense to you.”
“As you have begun to talk business, Godfrey,” replied his father
in an acid manner, “we may as well go into things and get it over. You
have, I presume, made up your mind to go into the Church in accordance
with my wish?”
“No, Father; I do not intend to become a clergyman.”
“Indeed. You seem to me to have fallen under very bad influences in
Switzerland. However, it does not much matter, as I intend that you
shall.”
“I am sorry, but I cannot, Father.”
Then, within such limits as his piety permitted, which were sufficiently
wide, Mr. Knight lost his temper very badly indeed. He attacked his
son, suggesting that he had been leading an evil life in Lucerne, as he
had learned “from outside sources,” and declared that either he
should obey him or be cast off. Godfrey, whose temper by this time was
also rising, intimated that he preferred the latter alternative.
“What, then, do you intend to do, young man?” asked Mr. Knight.
“I do not know yet, Father.” Then an inspiration came to him, and
he added, “I shall go to London to-morrow to consult my trustees under
Miss Ogilvy’s will.”
“Really,” said Mr. Knight in a rage. “You are after that
ill-gotten money, are you? Well, as we seem to agree so badly, why not
go to-night instead of to-morrow; there is a late train? Perhaps it
would be pleasanter for both of us, and then I need not send for your
luggage. Also it would save my shifting the new boy from your room.”
“Do you really mean that, Father?”
“I am not in the habit of saying what I do not mean. Only please
understand that if you reject my plans for your career, which have been
formed after much thought, and, I may add, prayer, I wash my hands of
you who are now too old to be argued with in any other way.”
Godfrey looked at his father and considered the iron mouth cut straight
like a slit across the face, the hard, insignificant countenance and
the small, cold, grey eyes. He realised the intensity of the petty
anger based, for the most part, on jealousy because he was now
independent and could not be ordered about and bullied like the rest of
the little boys, and knew that behind it there was not affection, but
dislike. Summing up all this in his quick mind, he became aware that
father or not, he regarded this man with great aversion. Their natures,
their outlook, all about them were antagonistic, and, in fact, had been
so from the beginning. The less that they saw of each other the better
it would be for both. Although still so young, he had ripened early,
and was now almost a man who knew that these things were so without
possibility of doubt.
“Very well, Father,” he said, “I will go. It is better than
stopping here to quarrel.”
“I thought you would, now that your friend, Isobel, who did you so
much harm with her bad influence, has departed to Mexico, where, I have
no doubt, she has forgotten all about you. You won’t be able to run
after her money as you did after Miss Ogilvy’s,” replied Mr. Knight
with another sneer.
“You insult me,” said Godfrey. “It is a lie that I ran after
Miss Ogilvy’s money, and I will never forgive you for saying such a
thing of me in connection with Isobel,” and turning he left the room.
So did his father, for Godfrey heard him go to his study and lock the
door, doubtless as a sign and a token.
Then Godfrey sought out Mrs. Parsons and told her everything. The old
woman was much disturbed, and wept.
“I have been thinking of late, Master Godfrey,” she said,
“that your father’s heart is made of that kind of stone which Hell
is paved with, only with the good intentions left out—it’s that
hard. Here you are come back as fine a young man as a body can wish to
see, of whom his begetter might well be proud, though, for the matter
of that, there is precious little of him in you—and he shuts the door
in your face just because you won’t be a parson and have come into
fortune—that’s what rankles. I say that your mother, if she was a
fool when she married him, was a wise woman when she died. Parson or
not, he will never go where she is. Well, it’s sad, but you’ll be
well out of this cold house, where there’s so much praying but not a
spark of love.”
“I think so,” said Godfrey with a sigh.
“I think so, too, for myself, I mean. But, look here, my boy, I only
stopped on looking after this dratted pack of young gentlemen because
you were coming home again. But, as you ain’t, I’m out of it; yes,
when the door shuts on you I give my month’s notice, which perhaps
will mean that I leave to-morrow, for he won’t be able to abide the
sight of me after that.”
“But how will you live, Nurse, till I can help you?”
“Lord bless you, dear, that’s all right. I’ve been a careful
woman all my life, and have hard on £500 put away in the Savings Bank,
to say nothing of a bit of Stock. Also, my old brother, who was a
builder, died last year and left me with a nice little house down in
Hampstead, which he built to live in himself, but never did, poor man,
bit by bit when he was short of business, very comfortable and in a
good neighbourhood, with first-rate furniture and real silver plate, to
say nothing of some more Stock, yes, for £1,000 or more. I let it
furnished by the month, but the tenant is going away, so I shall just
move into it myself, and perhaps take in a lodger or two to keep me
from being idle.”
“That’s capital!” said Godfrey, delighted.
“Yes, and I tell you what would be capitaller. Mayhap you will have to
live in London for a bit, and, if so, you are just the kind of lodger I
should like, and I don’t think we should quarrel about terms. I’ll
write you down the address of that house, the Grove as it is called,
though why, I don’t know, seeing there isn’t a tree within half a
mile, which I don’t mind, as there are too many about here, making so
much damp. And you’ll write and let me know what you are going to do,
won’t you?”
“Of course I will.”
“And now, look here. Likely you will want a little money till you
square up things with your trustee people that the master hates so
much.”
“Well, I had forgotten it, but, as a matter of fact, I have only ten
shillings left, and that isn’t much when one is going to London,”
confessed Godfrey.
“I thought so; you never were one to think much of such things, and so
it’s probable that you’ll get plenty of them, for it’s what
we care about we are starved in, just to make it hot for us poor humans.
Take your father, for instance; he loves power, he does; he’d like to
be a bishop of the old Roman sort what could torture people who
didn’t agree with them. And what is he? The parson of a potty parish
of a couple of hundred people, counting the babies and the softies, and
half of them Dissenters or Salvation Army. Moreover, they can’t be
bullied, because if they were they’d just walk into the next chapel
door. Of course, there’s the young gentlemen, and he takes it out of
them, but, Lord bless us! that’s like kicking a wool sack, of which
any man of spirit soon gets tired. So, you see, he is sick-hearted, and
will be more so now that you have stood up to him; and, in this way or
that, it’s the same with everyone, none of us gets what we want,
while of what we don’t want there’s always plenty.”
While the old lady held forth thus in her little room which, although
she did not know it, had once been the penitential cell of the Abbey,
wherein for hundreds of years many unhappy ones had reflected in a very
similar vein, she was engaged in trying key after key upon a stout oak
chest. It was part of the ancient furniture of the place, that indeed
in former days had served as the receptacle for hair shirts, scourges
and other physical inducements to repentance and piety.
Now it had a different purpose and held Mrs. Parsons’ best dresses,
also, in a bandbox, an ornament preserved from her wedding-cake, for
once in the far past she was married to a sailor, a very great
black-guard, who came to his end by tumbling from a gangway when he was
drunk. Among these articles was a tin tea-canister which, when opened,
proved to be full of money; gold, silver and even humble copper, to say
nothing of several banknotes.
“Now, there you are, my dear, take what you like,” she said,
“and pay it back if you wish, but if you don’t, it might have been
worse spent.” And she pushed the receptacle, labelled “Imperial
Pekoe,” towards him across the table, adding, “Drat those moths!
There’s another on my best silk.”
Godfrey burst out laughing and enjoyed that laugh, for it was his first
happy moment since his return to England.
“Give me what you like,” he said.
So she extracted from the tea-tin a five-pound note, four sovereigns and
a pound’s worth of silver and copper.
“There,” she said, “that will do to begin with, for too much
money in the pocket is a temptation in a wicked place like London, where
there’s always someone waiting to share it. If it’s wanted
there’s more where that came from, and you’ve only to write and say
so. And now you have got the address and you’ve got the cash, and if
you want to catch that last train it’s time you were off. If I took
the same to-morrow night, why, it wouldn’t surprise me, especially as
I want to hear all you’ve been a-doing in those foreign parts,
tumbling over precipices and the rest. So good-bye, my dear, and God
bless you. Lord! it seems only the other day that I was giving you your
bottle.”
Then they kissed each other and, having retrieved his alpenstock from
the stick-house, Godfrey trudged back to the station, where he picked
up his luggage and departed for London. Arriving at Liverpool Street
rather late, he went to the Great Eastern Hotel, and after a good meal,
which he needed, slept like a top. His reception in England had been
bitter, but the young soon shake off their troubles, from which,
indeed, the loving kindness of his dear old nurse already had extracted
the sting.
On the following morning, while breakfasting at a little table by one of
the pillars of the big dining-room, he began to wonder what he should
do next. In his pocket he had a notebook, in which, at the suggestion
of the Pasteur, he had set down the address of the lawyers who had
written to him about his legacy. It was in a place called the Poultry,
which, on inquiry from the hall-porter, he discovered was quite close
by the Mansion House.
So a while later, for the porter told him that it was no use to go to
see lawyers too early, he sallied forth, and after much search
discovered the queer spot called the Poultry, also the offices of
Messrs. Ranson, Richards and Son. Here he gave his name to a clerk, who
thrust a very oily head out of a kind of mahogany box, and was told
that Mr. Ranson was engaged, but that, if he cared to wait, perhaps he
would see him later on. He said he would wait, and was shown into a
stuffy little room, furnished with ancient deed-boxes and a very large,
old leather-covered sofa that took up half the place. Here he sat for a
while, staring at a square of dirty glass which gave what light was
available, and reflecting upon things in general.
While he was thus engaged he heard a kind of tumult outside, in which he
recognised the treble of the oily-headed clerk coming in a bad second to
a deep, bass voice. Then the door opened and a big, burly man, with a
red face and a jovial, rolling eye, appeared with startling suddenness
and ejaculated:
“Damn Ranson, damn Richards, or damn them both, with the Son thrown
in! I ask you, young man”—here he addressed Godfrey seated on the
corner of the sofa—“what is the use of a firm of lawyers whom you
can never see? You pay the brutes, but three times out of four they are
not visible, or, as I suspect, pretend not to be, in order to enhance
their own importance. And I sent them a telegram, too, having a train
to catch. What do you think?”
“I don’t know, Sir,” Godfrey answered. “I never came to
a lawyer’s office before, and I hope I shan’t again if this is the
kind of room they put one into.”
“Room!” ejaculated the irate gentleman, “call it a dog
kennel, call it a cesspool, for, by heaven, it smells like one, but in
the interests of truth, young man, don’t call it a room.”
“Now that you mention it, there is a queer odour. Perhaps a dead rat
under the floor,” suggested Godfrey.
“Twenty dead rats, probably, since I imagine that this hole has not
been cleaned since the time of George II. We are martyrs in this world,
Sir. I come here to attend to the affairs of some whippersnapper whom I
never saw and never want to see, just because Helen Ogilvy, who was my
first cousin, chooses to make me a trustee of her confounded will, in
which she leaves money to the confounded whippersnapper, God knows why.
This whippersnapper has a father, a parson, who can write the most
offensive letters imaginable. I received one of them this morning,
accusing the whippersnapper of all sorts of vague things, and me and my
fellow trustee, who is at present enjoying himself travelling, of
abetting him. I repeat, damn Ranson, Richards and Son; damn the parson,
damn Helen—no, I won’t say that, for she is dead—and especially
damn the whippersnapper. Don’t you agree with me?”
“Not quite, Sir,” said Godfrey. “I don’t mind about
Ranson, Richards and Son, or anybody else, but I don’t quite see why
you should damn me, who, I am sure, never wished to give you any
trouble.”
“You! And who the Hades may you be?”
“I am Godfrey Knight, and I suppose that you are my trustee, or one of
them.”
“Godfrey Knight, the young man whose father gives us so much trouble,
all at our own expense, I may remark. Well, after hearing so much of
you on paper, I’m deuced glad to meet you in the flesh. Come into the
light, if you can call it light, and let me have a look at you.”
Godfrey stepped beneath the dirty pane and was contemplated through an
eyeglass by this breezy old gentleman, who exclaimed presently:
“You’re all right, I think; a fine figure of a young man, not bad
looking, either, but you want drilling. Why the devil don’t you go
into the army?”
“I don’t know,” answered Godfrey, “never thought of it.
Are you in the army, Sir?”
“No, not now, though I was. Commanded my regiment for five years, and
then kicked out with the courtesy title of Major-General. Cubitte is my
name, spelt with two ‘t’s’ and an ‘e,’ please, and
don’t you forget that, since that ‘e’ has been a point of
honour with our family for a hundred years, the Lord knows why. Well,
there we are. Do you smoke?”
“Only a pipe,” said Godfrey.
“That’s right; I hate those accursed cigarettes, still they are
better than nothing. Now sit down and tell me all about yourself.”
Godfrey obeyed, and somehow feeling at ease with this choleric old
General, in the course of the next twenty minutes explained many things
to him, including the cause of his appearance in that office.
“So you don’t want to be a parson,” said the General,
“and with your father’s example before your eyes, I am sure I
don’t wonder. However, you are independent of him more or less, and
had better cut out a line for yourself. We will back you. What do you
say to the army?”
“I think I should rather like that,” answered Godfrey. “Only,
only, I want to get out of England as soon as possible.”
“And quite right, too—accursed hole, full of fog and politicians.
But that’s not difficult with India waiting for you. I’m an Indian
cavalry officer myself, and could put you up to the ropes and give you a
hand afterwards, perhaps, if you show yourself of the right stuff, as I
think you will. But, of course, you will have to go to Sandhurst, pass
an entrance examination, and so forth. Can you manage that?”
“Yes, Sir, I think so, with a little preparation. I know a good deal
of one sort or another, including French.”
“All right, three months’ cramming at Scoones’ or
Wren’s, will do the trick. And now I suppose you want some money?”
Godfrey explained that he did, having only £10 which he had borrowed
from his old nurse.
Just then the oily-headed clerk announced that Mr. Ranson was at
liberty. So they both went in to see him, and the rest may be imagined.
The trustees undertook to pay his expenses, even if they had to stretch
a point to do so, and gave him £20 to go on with, also a letter of
introduction to Scoones, whom he was instructed to see and arrange to
join their classes. Then General Cubitte hustled off, telling him to
come to dine at an address in Kensington two nights later and “report
himself.”
So within less than an hour Godfrey’s future career was settled. He
came out of the office feeling rather dazed but happier than when he
went in, and inquired his way to Garrick Street, where he was informed
that Mr. Scoones had his establishment. He found the place and, by good
luck, found Mr. Scoones also, a kindly, keen, white-haired man, who
read the letter, made a few inquiries and put him through a brief
examination.
“Your information is varied and peculiar,” he said, “and not
of the sort that generally appeals to Her Majesty’s examiners. Still,
I see that you have intelligence and, of course, the French is an
asset; also the literature to some extent, and the Latin, though these
would have counted more had you been going up for the Indian Civil. I
think we can get you through in three months if you will work; it all
depends on that. You will find a lot of young men here of whom quite
seventy per cent. do nothing, except see life. Very nice fellows in
their way, but if you want to get into Sandhurst, keep clear of them.
Now, my term opens next Monday. I will write to General Cubitte and
tell him what I think of you, also that the fees are payable in advance.
Good-bye, glad you happened to catch me, which you would not have done
half an hour later, as I am going out of town. At ten o’clock next
Monday, please.”
After this, not knowing what to do, Godfrey returned to the Great
Eastern Hotel and wrote a letter to his father, in which, baldly
enough, he explained what had happened.
Having posted it in the box in the hall, he bethought him that he must
find some place to live in, as the hotel was too expensive for a
permanence, and was making inquiries of the porter as to how he should
set about the matter when a telegram was handed to him. It ran: “All
up as I expected. Meet me Liverpool Street 4.30.—Nurse.”
So Godfrey postponed his search for lodgings, and at the appointed hour
kept the assignation on the platform. The train arrived, and out of it,
looking much more like her old self than she had on the previous day,
emerged Mrs. Parsons with the most extraordinary collection of bundles,
he counted nine of them, to say nothing of a jackdaw in a cage. She
embraced him with enthusiasm, dropping the heaviest of the parcels,
which seemed to contain bricks, upon his toe, and in a flood of
language told him of the peculiar awfulness of the row between his
father and herself which had ensued upon his departure.
“Yes,” she ended, “he flung my money at my head and I flung
it back at his, though afterwards I picked it up again, for it is no use
wasting good gold and silver. And so here I am, beginning life again,
like you, and feeling thirty years younger for it. Now, tell me what
you are going to do?”
Then they went and had tea in the refreshment room, leaving the jackdaw
and the other impediments in charge of a porter, and he told her.
“That’s first-rate,” she said. “I always hated the idea
of seeing you with a black coat on your back. The Queen’s uniform
looks much better, and I want you to be a man. Now you help me into a
cab and by dinner time to-morrow I’ll be ready for you at my house at
Hampstead, if I have to work all night to do it. Terms—drat the
terms. Well, if you must have them, Master Godfrey, ten shillings a
week will be more than you will cost me, and I ought to give you five
back for your company. Now I’ll make a start, for there will be a lot
to do before the place is fit for a young gentleman. I’ve never seen
it but twice, you know.”
So she departed, packed into a four-wheeled cab, with the jackdaw on her
lap, and Godfrey went to Madame Tussaud’s, where he studied the
guillotine and the Chamber of Horrors.
On the following morning, having further improved his mind at the Tower,
he took a cab also, and in due course arrived at Hampstead with his
belongings. The place took some finding, for it was on the top of a
hill in an old-fashioned, out of the way part of the suburb, but when
found proved to be delightful. It was a little square house, built of
stone, on which the old builder had lavished all his skill and care, so
that in it everything was perfect, with a garden both in front and
behind. The floors were laid in oak, the little hall was oak-panelled,
there were hot and cold water in every room, and so forth. Moreover, an
odd man was waiting to carry in his things, and in one of the front
sitting-rooms, which was excellently furnished, sat Mrs. Parsons
knitting as though she had been there for years.
“Here you are,” she said, “just as I was beginning to get
tired of having nothing to do. Lord! what a fuss we make about things
before we face ’em. After all they ain’t nothing but bubbles. Blow
them and they burst. Look here, Master Godfrey,” and she waved her
hand about the sitting-room. “Pretty neat, ain’t it? Well, I
thought it would be all of a hugger-mugger. But what did I find? That
those tenants had been jewels and left everything like a new pin, to
say nothing of improvements, such as an Eagle range. Moreover, the
caretaker is a policeman’s wife and a very nice woman always ready to
help for a trifle, and that man that brought in your boxes is a
relative of hers who does gardening jobs and such-like. Now, come and
see your rooms,” and she led him with pride into a capital back
apartment with a large window, in fact an old Tudor one which the
builder had produced somewhere, together with the panelling on the
walls.
“That’s your study,” she said, “bookshelves and all
complete. Now, follow me,” and she took him upstairs to a really
charming bedroom.
“But,” said Godfrey, surveying these splendours, “this must
be the best room in the house. Where do you sleep?”
“Oh! at the back there, my dear. You see, I am accustomed to a small
chamber and shouldn’t be happy in this big one. Besides, you are going
to pay me rent and must be accommodated. And now come down to your
dinner.”
A very good dinner it was, cooked by the policeman’s wife, which Mrs.
Parsons insisted on serving, as she would not sit at the table with him.
In short, Godfrey found himself in clover, a circumstance that filled
him with some sadness. Why, he wondered, should he always be made so
miserable at home and so happy when he was away? Then he remembered
that famous line about the man who throughout life ever found his
warmest welcome at an inn, and perceived that it hid much philosophy.
Frequently enough homes are not what fond fancy paints them, while in
the bosom of strangers there is much kindliness.