over-respectful and out of fashion. He called her I Madam' once.
He seemed a person of means and
leisure, but he knew nothing of
recent concerts, theatres, or books. How did he spend his time?
He was certainly
chivalrous, and a
trifle simpleminded. She
fancied (so much is there in a change of costume) that she had
never met with such a man before. What COULD he be?
"Mr. Benson," she said, breaking a silence
devoted to landscape.
He rolled over and regarded her, chin on knuckles.
"At your service."
"Do you paint? Are you an artist?"
"Well." Judicious pause. "I should hardly call myself a Nartist."
you know. I DO paint a little. And
sketch, you know--skitty kind
of things."
He plucked and began to
nibble a blade of grass. It was really
not so much lying as his quick
imagination that prompted him to
add, "In Papers, you know, and all that."
"I see," said Jessie, looking at him
thoughtfully. Artists were a
very heterogeneous class certainly, and geniuses had a trick of
being a little odd. He avoided her eye and bit his grass. "I
don't do MUCH, you know."
"It's not your
profession?
"Oh, no," said Hoopdriver,
anxious now to hedge. "I don't make a
regular thing of it, you know. jest now and then something comes
into my head and down it goes. No--I'm not a regular artist."
"Then you don't
practise any regular
profession? Mr. Hoopdriver
looked into her eyes and saw their quiet unsuspicious regard. He
had vague ideas of resuming the
detective role. "It's like this,"
he said, to gain time. "I have a sort of
profession. Only there's
a kind of reason--nothing much, you know "
"I beg your
pardon for cross-examining you."
"No trouble," said Mr. Hoopdriver. "Only I can't very well--I
leave it to you, you know. I don't want to make any
mystery of
it, so far as that goes." Should he
plungeboldly and be a
barrister? That anyhow was something pretty good. But she might
know about barristry.
"I think I could guess what you are."
"Well--guess," said Mr. Hoopdriver.
"You come from one of the colonies?"
"Dear me!" said Mr. Hoopdriver, veering round to the new wind.
"How did you find out THAT?" (the man was born in a London
suburb, dear Reader.)
"I guessed," she said.
He lifted his eyebrows as one astonished, and clutched a new
piece of grass.
"You were educated up country."
"Good again," said Hoopdriver, rolling over again into her elbow.
"You're a CLAIRVOY ant." He bit at the grass, smiling. "Which
colony was it?"
"That I don't know."
"You must guess," said Hoopdriver.
"South Africa," she said. "I
stronglyincline to South Africa."
"South Africa's quite a large place," he said.
"But South Africa is right?"
"You're warm," said Hoopdriver, "anyhow," and the while his
imagination was
eagerly exploring this new province.
"South Africa IS right?" she insisted.
He turned over again and nodded, smiling reassuringly into her
eyes.
"What made me think of South Africa was that novel of Olive
Schreiner's, you know--The Story of an African Farm.' Gregory
Rose is so like you."
"I never read 'The Story of an African Farm,'" said Hoopdriver.
"I must. What's he like?"
"You must read the book. But it's a wonderful place, with its
mixture of races, and its brand-new civilisation jostling the old
savagery. Were you near Khama?"
"He was a long way off from our place," said Mr. Hoopdriver. "We
had a little
ostrich farm, you know--Just a few hundred of 'em,
out Johannesburg way."
"On the Karroo--was it called?"
"That's the term. Some of it was freehold though. Luckily. We got
along very well in the old days.--But there's no
ostriches on
that farm now." He had a diamond mine in his head, just at the
moment, but he stopped and left a little to the girl's
imagination. Besides which it had occurred to him with a kind of
shock that he was lying.
"What became of the
ostriches?"
"We sold 'em off, when we parted with the farm. Do you mind if I
have another cigarette? That was when I was quite a little chap,
you know, that we had this
ostrich farm."
"Did you have Blacks and Boers about you?"
"Lots," said Mr. Hoopdriver,
striking a match on his instep and
beginning to feel hot at the new
responsibility he had brought
upon himself.
"How interesting! Do you know, I've never been out of England
except to Paris and Mentone and Switzerland."
"One gets tired of travelling (puff) after a bit, of course."
"You must tell me about your farm in South Africa. It always
stimulates my
imagination to think of these places. I can fancy
all the tall
ostriches being
driven out by a black herd--to
graze, I suppose. How do
ostriches feed?"
"Well," said Hoopdriver. "That's rather various. They have their
fancies, you know. There's fruit, of course, and that kind of
thing. And chicken food, and so forth. You have to use judgment."
"Did you ever see a lion?" "They weren't very common in our
district," said Hoopdriver, quite
modestly. "But I've seen them,
of course. Once or twice."
"Fancy
seeing a lion! Weren't you frightened?"
Mr. Hoopdriver was now
thoroughly sorry he had accepted that
offer of South Africa. He puffed his cigarette and regarded the
Solent languidly as he settled the fate on that lion in his mind.
"I scarcely had time," he said. "It all happened in a minute."
"Go on," she said.
"I was going across the inner paddock where the fatted
ostriches
were."
"Did you EAT
ostriches, then? I did not know--"
"Eat them!--often. Very nice they ARE too,
properly stuffed.
Well, we--I, rather--was going across this paddock, and I saw
something
standing up in the
moonlight and looking at me." Mr.
Hoopdriver was in a hot perspiration now. His
invention seemed to
have gone limp. "Luckily I had my father's gun with me. I was
scared, though, I can tell you. (Puff.) I just aimed at the end
that I thought was the head. And let fly. (Puff.) And over it
went, you know."
"Dead?"
"AS dead. It was one of the luckiest shots I ever fired. And I
wasn't much over nine at the time, neither."
"_I_ should have screamed and run away."
"There's some things you can't run away from," said Mr.
Hoopdriver. "To run would have been Death."
"I don't think I ever met a lion-killer before," she remarked,
evidently with a heightened opinion of him.
There was a pause. She seemed meditating further questions. Mr.
Hoopdriver drew his watch
hastily. "I say," said Mr. Hoopdriver,
showing it to her, "don't you think we ought to be getting on?"
His face was flushed, his ears bright red. She ascribed his
confusion to
modesty. He rose with a lion added to the burthens
of his
conscience, and held out his hand to
assist her. They
walked down into Cosham again, resumed their machines, and went
on at a
leisurely pace along the northern shore of the big
harbour. But Mr. Hoopdriver was no longer happy. This horrible,
this fulsome lie, stuck in his memory. Why HAD he done it? She
did not ask for any more South African stories, happily--at least
until Porchester was reached--but talked instead of Living One's
Own Life, and how custom hung on people like chains. She talked
wonderfully, and set Hoopdriver's mind fermenting. By the Castle,
Mr. Hoopdriver caught several crabs in little shore pools. At
Fareham they stopped for a second tea, and left the place towards
the hour of
sunset, under such invigorating circumstances as you
shall in due course hear.
THE RESCUE EXPEDITION
XXX
And now to tell of those
energetic chevaliers, Widgery, Dangle,
and Phipps, and of that distressed beauty, 'Thomas Plantagenet,'
well known in society, so the paragraphs said, as Mrs. Milton. We
left them at Midhurst station, if I remember
rightly,
waiting, in
a state of fine
emotion, for the Chichester train. It was clearly
understood by the entire Rescue Party that Mrs. Milton was
bearing up
bravely against almost
overwhelming grief. The three
gentlemen outdid one another in
sympathetic expedients; they
watched her
gravely almost
tenderly. The
substantial Widgery
tugged at his moustache, and looked his
unspeakable feelings at
her with those dog-like, brown eyes of his; the
slender Dangle
tugged at HIS moustache, and did what he could with un
sympatheticgrey ones. Phipps, unhappily, had no moustache to run any risks
with, so he folded his arms and talked in a brave, indifferent,
bearing-up tone about the London, Brighton, and South Coast
Railway, just to cheer the poor woman up a little. And even Mrs.
Milton really felt that exalted
melancholy to the very bottom of
her heart, and tried to show it in a dozen little, delicate,
feminine ways.
"There is nothing to do until we get to Chichester," said Dangle.
"Nothing."
"Nothing," said Widgery, and aside in her ear: "You really ate
scarcely anything, you know."
"Their trains are always late," said Phipps, with his fingers
along the edge of his
collar. Dangle, you must understand, was a
sub-editor and reviewer, and his pride was to be Thomas
Plantagenet's
intellectualcompanion. Widgery, the big man, was
manager of a bank and a
mighty golfer, and his
conception of his
relations to her never came into his mind without those charming
oldlines, "Douglas, Douglas, tender and true," falling hard upon
its heels. His name was Douglas-Douglas Widgery. And Phipps,
Phipps was a
medical student still, and he felt that he laid his
heart at her feet, the heart of a man of the world. She was kind
to them all in her way, and insisted on their being friends
together, in spite of a
disposition to reciprocal
criticism they
displayed. Dangle thought Widgery a Philistine, appreciating but
coarsely the merits of "A Soul Untrammelled," and Widgery thought
Dangle lacked, humanity--would talk insincerely to say a clever
thing. Both Dangle and Widgery thought Phipps a bit of a cub, and
Phipps thought both Dangle and Widgery a couple of Thundering
Bounders.
"They would have got to Chichester in time for lunch," said
Dangle, in the train. "After, perhaps. And there's no sufficient
place in the road. So soon as we get there, Phipps must inquire
at the chief hotels to see if any one answering to her
description has lunched there."
"Oh, I'LL inquire," said Phipps. "Willingly. I suppose you and
Widgery will just hang about--"
He saw an expression of pain on Mrs. Milton's gentle face, and
stopped abruptly.
"No," said Dangle, "we shan't HANG ABOUT, as you put it. There
are two places in Chichester where tourists might go--the
cathedral and a
remarkably fine museum. I shall go to the
cathedral and make an
inquiry or so, while Widgery--"
"The museum. Very well. And after that there's a little thing or
two I've thought of myself," said Widgery.
To begin with they took Mrs. Milton in a kind of
procession to
the Red Hotel and established her there with some tea. "You are
so kind to me," she said. "All of you." They signified that it