"Why not?"

"Because she would be such a _very_ great humbug, don't you see, chick?"

"Why shouldn't she? Somebody must, or there'd be no such thing."

"Why should there be any such thing?"

"Because of the word. Somebody must, or there'd be no one to hook it to.... Have they stopped, I wonder, or are they going to begin again?"

This referred to the Ethiopian banjos afar. "I do declare they're going to sing Pesky Jane, and it's nearly twelve o'clock!"

"Never mind _them_! How came _you_ to know all the vulgar n.i.g.g.e.r-songs?... I was going to say. It's very difficult to believe it's quite all humbug when one hears her talk about her son and his welfare, and his prospects and...."

"I know what she talked about. When her dear son marries, she's going to devote herself to him and her dear daughter that will be. Wasn't that it?"

"Yes; but then she couldn't say more than that all she had would be theirs, and she would take her to her bosom, etcetera. Could she?"

"She'll have to pull a long way!" The vulgar child's mind has flown straight to the Goody's outline in profile. She is quite incorrigible.

"But wasn't that what old Mr. Turveydrop said, or very nearly? Of course, one has to consider the parties and make allowance."

"Sallykin, what a madcap you are! You don't care _what_ you say."

"We-e-ell! there's nothing in that.... But look here, mammy darling.

Did that good woman in all she said to-night--all the time she was jawing--did she once lose sight of her meritorious att.i.tude?"

"It may only be a _facon de parler_--a sort of habit."

"But it isn't. Jeremiah says so. We've talked it over, us two. He says he wouldn't like his daughter--meaning me--to marry poor Prosy, because of the Goody."

"Are you sure he meant you? Did you ask him?"

"No, because I wasn't going to twit Jeremiah with being only step.

We kept it dark who was what. But, of course, he meant me. Like a submarine telegraph." Sally stopped a moment in gravity. Then she said: "Mother dear!"

"What, kitten?"

"What a pity it is Jeremiah is only step! Just think how nice if he'd been real. Now, if you'd only met twenty years sooner...."

A nettle to grasp presented itself--a bad one. Rosalind seized it bodily. "I shouldn't have had my kitten," she said.

"I see. I should have been somebody else. But that wouldn't have mattered to me."

"It would have--to me!" But this is the most she can do in the way of nettle-grasping. She is glad when St. Sennan, from his tower with the undoubted piece of Norman, begins to count twelve, and gives her an excuse for a recall to duty. "Do think how we're keeping poor Mrs.

Lobjoit up, you unfeeling child!" is her appeal on behalf of their own fisherman's wife. Sally is just taking note of a finale of the Ethiop choir. "They've done Pesky Jane, and they're going away to bed," she says. "How the black must come off on the sheets!" And then they hurried home to sleep sound.

But there was little sleep for the doctor that night, perhaps because he had got so young all of a sudden. So it didn't matter much that his mother countermanded his proposal that bed should be gone to, on the ground that it was so late now that she wouldn't be able to sleep a wink. If she _could_ have gone an hour ago it would have been different. Now it was too late. An aggressive submissiveness was utilized by the good lady to the end of his discomfort and that of Mrs. Iggulden, who--perhaps from some memories of the Norman Conquest hanging about the neighbourhood--would never go to bed as long as a light was burning in the house.

"It is very strange and most unusual, I know," she continued saying after she had scarified a place to scratch on. "Your great-uncle Everett Gayler did not scruple to call it phenomenal, and that when I was the merest child. After eleven no sleep!" She continued her knitting with tenacity to ill.u.s.trate her wakefulness. "But I am glad, dear Conrad, that you forgot about me. You were in pleasanter society than your old mother's. No one shall have any excuse for saying I am a burden on my son. No, my dear boy, my wish is that you shall feel _free_." She laid aside the knitting needles, and folding her hands across the outline Sally was to be dragged up, or along, dropped her eyelids over a meek glare, and sat with a fixed, submissive undersmile slightly turned towards her son.

"But I thought, mother, as Mrs. Fenwick was here...." Slow, slight, acquiescent nods stopped him; they were enough to derail any speech except the multiplication-table or the House-that-Jack-built! But she waited with exemplary patience for certainty that the train had stopped. Then spoke as one that gives a commission to speech, and observes its execution at a distance. Her expression remained immutable. "She is a well-meaning person," said she.

"I didn't know how late it was." Poor Dr. Conrad gives up self-defence--climbs down. "The time ran away." It _had_ done so, there was no doubt about that.

"And you forgot your mother. But Mrs. Fenwick is a well-meaning person. We will say no more about it."

Whereupon her son, feeling that silence is golden, said nothing. But he went and kissed her for all that. She said inscrutably: "You might have kissed me." But whether she was or wasn't referring to the fact that she had succeeded in negotiating his kiss on the rim of her spectacles, Conrad couldn't tell. Probably she meant he might have kissed her before.

There was no doubt, however, about her intention of knitting till past one in the morning. She did it enlarging on the medical status of her ill.u.s.trious uncle, Dr. Everett Gayler, who had just crept into the conversation. Her son wasn't so sorry for this as Mrs. Iggulden, who dozed and waked with starts, on principle, outside in the pa.s.sage unseen. _He_ could stand at the wide-open window, and hear the little waves plash "Sally" in the moonlight, and the counter-music of the down-drawn shingle echo "Sally" back. Sometimes the pebbles and the water gave place for a moment to the tread of two persistent walkers up and down--men who smoked cigars, and became a little audible and died again at every time of pa.s.sing.

One time the doctor caught a rise of voice--though they did not pa.s.s so very near--that said: "My idea is to stay here till...."

Then at the next turn the same voice grew from inaudibility to ...

"So I arranged with the parson here for to-morrow, and we shall get...." and died again. At this moment Dr. Everett Gayler was at the climax of his fame, having just performed tracheotomy on the Grand Duke of Hesse-Junkerstadt, and been created Knight-Commander of some Order whose name Mrs. Vereker wasn't sure about.

Next time the men returned, the same voice that seemed to do all the talking said: "... Expensive, of course, but she hates the idea of a registry-office." They paused, and the listener heard that the other voice had said something to which the first replied: "No, not Grundy.

But she had some friends cooked at one, and they said it was stuffy, and they would sooner have endured twenty short homilies...."

A wax vesta scratched, blazed, lighted another cigar, and the second voice said, "Oh--ah!" and both grew inaudible again.

Dr. Everett Gayler had just p.r.o.nounced the Grand d.u.c.h.ess's disease--they were an afflicted family--a disease his narrator couldn't p.r.o.nounce at all. Most of her bones, in a state of necrosis, had been skilfully removed by the time the smokers had pa.s.sed back.

But so much more was Dr. Conrad listening to what the waves said to the shingle and the shingle answered back, than to either the Grand d.u.c.h.ess or the registry-office, that it never crossed his mind whose the voice was who lit the vesta. He heard it say good-night--its owner would get back to the hotel--and the other make due response. And then nothing was left but the coastguard.

But the Grand Duke's family were not quite done with. It had to be recorded how many of his distinguished ancestors had suffered from _Plica polonica_. Still, the end did come at last, and the worthy lady thought perhaps if she could lie down now she might drop off. So Mrs.

Iggulden got her release and slept.

Dr. Conrad didn't, not a wink. The whole place was full of Sally. The flashlight at intervals, in couplets, seemed to say "Sally" twice when it came, and then to leave a blank for him to think about her in. The great slow steamer far out to sea showed a green eye of jealousy or a red one of anger because it could not come ash.o.r.e where Sally was, but had perforce to go on wherever it was navigated. The millions of black sea-elves--did you ever discriminate them?--that the slight observer fancies are the interstices of the moonlight on the water, were all busy about Sally, though it was hard to follow their movements. And every time St. Sennan said what o'clock it was, he added, "One hour nearer to Sally to-morrow!"

Poor Prosy!

CHAPTER XXIX

OF A MARRIAGE BY SPECIAL LICENCE. ROSALIND'S COMPARISONS. OF THE THREE BRIDESMAIDS, AND HOW THE BRIDE WAS A GOOD SAILOR

But it never occurred to Dr. Vereker that the voice of the smoking gentleman, whose "_she_" knew a couple that had been cooked at a registry office, was a voice quite familiar to him. The only effect it had on his Sally-dazed mind was to make him wonder four hours after what it was that kept putting Julius Bradshaw into his head. If a brain-molecule could have been found not preoccupied with Sally he might have been able to give her next day a suggestive hint about a possibility ahead. But never a word said he to Sally; and when, on her return from bathing the following morning, Mrs. Lobjoit, the fisherman's wife, surprised her with the news that "the young lady"

had come and had left her luggage, but would be back in half-an-hour, she was first taken aback, and thought it was a mistake next. But no--no chance of that! The young lady had asked for Mrs. Algernon Fenwick, or, in default, for Miss Sally, quite distinctly. She hadn't said any name, but there was a gentleman with her. Mrs. Lobjoit seemed to imply that had there been no gentleman she might have been nameless. Padlock's omnibus they came in.

So Sally went on being taken aback where she had left off, and was still pondering over the phenomenon when her mother followed her through the little yard paved with round flints bedded in mortar--all except the flower-beds, which were in this case marigold-beds and fuschia-beds and tamarisk-shakedowns--and the street door which always stood open, and it was very little use ringing, the bell being broken.

But you could pa.s.s through, and there would always be old Mr. Lobjoit in the kitchen, even if Mrs. Lobjoit was not there herself.

"Why not look on the boxes, you stupid kitten? There's a name on them, or ought to be." Thus Rosalind, after facts told.

"What a thing it is to have a practical maternal parent!" Thus Sally.

And Mrs. Lobjoit put on record with an amiable smile that that is what she kept saying to Miss Nightingale, "Why not look?" Whereas the fact is Mrs. Lobjoit never said anything of the sort.

"Here's a go!" says Sally, who gets at the label-side of the trunk first. "If it isn't Tishy!" And the mother and daughter look at each other's faces, each watching the other's theory forming of what this sudden apparition means.