CHAPTER XI.—AN UNEXPECTED MEETING.
The De Vere Arms at Pebworth, fourth-rate hotel though it necessarily was in a place where any hotel of the first or even of the second magnitude would have been as an oak in a flower-pot, was well and neatly kept. There was the commercial connection, and there was the county connection, both dear to the landlord, but on grounds wholly dissimilar. Biggles had been butler to the present, under-butler and knife-boy to the late Earl of Wolverhampton; and had he but had his own way, the De Vere Arms would have been strictly the family hotel which its address-cards proclaimed it, and the obnoxious word ‘commercial’ would have found no place there.
Mr Biggles, however, was in the position of one of those unfortunate managers of English country theatres who tell their friends, perhaps truly, that they would play nothing, save the legitimate drama, if they could help it. They cannot help it, and scared by the dismal spectre of Insolvency, they shelve Shakspeare in favour of newer idols of the public. So did Biggles and worthy Mrs B. to boot lay themselves out in practice to secure the lucrative custom of the ready-money, constantly moving, commercial gentlemen, while in theory devoting all their loyalty to those of their patrons who came in their own carriages, with armorial bearings on their panels and liveried servants on the driving-seat.
To this hostelry was borne, in Sir Gruntley Pigbury’s carriage, the insensible form of Jasper Denzil, supported by the sturdy arm of Captain Prodgers, while little Dr Aulfus, on the opposite seat, kept the patient’s nerveless wrist between his own thin fingers all the way from the race-course to the inn. Then Jasper, amidst spasmodic gaspings from the landlady and sympathetic exclamations from the chambermaids, was carried into the De Vere Arms and established in one of the best rooms, whence were summarily dislodged the effects of some well-to-do customer who had had a horse in the race, but who was unlikely under the circumstances to resent the invasion of his apartment. Jack Prodgers and the doctor seemed to have taken joint possession of the invalid; the former as prochain ami (and it is to the credit of such ne’er-do-wells as Captain Prodgers that the very wildest of them never do leave a friend untended in a scrape), and the other professionally.
Other friends came not. Lord Harrogate did indeed tap at the door, and so did four or five officers of the Lancer regiment, but contented themselves with an assurance that Jasper was in no immediate danger. And when Blanche Denzil’s tearful entreaties induced the Earl to solicit admittance to the sick-room for her at least, the surgeon went out and politely deprecated her entrance. Anything which might excite the patient should, he truly said, be as far as possible avoided. It was not exactly possible just yet to ascertain the amount of damage done; but he, the doctor, anticipated no serious consequences. And with this assurance the poor sister was compelled to be content. They say that every educated man of fifty is a fool or a physician. Jack Prodgers had seen the light some half-century since, and his worst enemies—the men whose cash he pouched at play—would not have taxed him with folly.
‘Now, doctor,’ he said quietly, ‘don’t you think the best we can do for the poor fellow is to get his left shoulder into the socket again before the muscles stiffen?’
The surgeon winced. He knew by the cursory examination he had made that no bones—unless it might be the collar-bone, an injury to which is not always promptly ascertained—were broken; but here, annoying circumstance! was a dislocation which he had left to be discovered by an outsider to the profession.
‘Bless my soul!’ he exclaimed, adjusting his spectacles, ‘so it is. We have no time to lose.’
As it was, time enough had been lost to bring about a contraction of the muscles, that rendered it necessary to call in the aid of James the waiter and Joe the boots, before the hurt shoulder could be reinstated in its normal position.
The pain of the operation roused Jasper from his stupor. He moaned several times and stirred feebly to and fro, and when the wrench was over, opened his eyes and gazed with a bewildered stare about him. Very pale and ghastly he looked, lying thus, with the blood slowly oozing from a cut on his right temple, and his hair stained and matted. They sprinkled water on his face and put brandy to his lips; but he merely groaned again, and his eyes closed.
‘That’s a very ugly knock on the temple; I hope there’s no more mischief,’ said the doctor in a whisper, but speaking more openly than medicine-men, beside a patient’s bed, often speak to the laity.
Jack Prodgers shook his head. He was a man of experience, and had in his time seen some prompt and easy recoveries, and other cases in which there was no recovery at all. It was with some remorse that he looked down at the bruised and helpless form lying on the bed. His heart had been case-hardened by the rubs of a worldly career, but there was a soft spot in it after all, and it was with sincere joy that he saw at length the sick man’s eyes open with a glance of evident recognition, while a wan smile played about his lips.
‘I say, Jack,’ said Jasper feebly, ‘we’re in a hole, old man, after all’—— Then he fainted.
‘Nothing the matter with his reason, thank goodness! It was the shock to the brain I feared the most for him,’ said the doctor, as again brandy was administered.
The regular clock-work routine of social machinery must go on in despite of accidents, and accordingly the down-train reached Pebworth at 3.40 (or, to tell the truth, a few minutes behind time) with its usual punctuality. There was no omnibus, whether from the De Vere Arms or from the opposition or White Hart hotel, in waiting at the station, wherefore the few arrivals had to consign their bales and bags and boxes of samples to the wheelbarrows of porters, for conveyance to whichever house of entertainment they designed to patronise. Amongst these was a thickset middle-aged man, with trim whiskers, a dust-coloured overcoat, a slim umbrella, and a plump black bag, which he preferred to carry as he trudged from the station to the hotel.
There was nothing very noteworthy about the new-comer, who was neatly dressed in black, and wore a hat that was just old enough to have lost its first tell-tale gloss, except that he had evidently striven to look some years younger than the parish register would have proclaimed him. Thus the purplish tint of his thick whiskers and thinned hair, heedfully brushed and parted so as to make the most of it, savoured of art rather than nature. His cravat too, instead of being black, was what haberdashers call a scarf of blue silk, of a dark shade certainly, but still blue, and was secured by a massive golden horse-shoe. Glittering trinkets rattled at his watch-chain, and his boots were tighter and brighter than the boots of men of business usually are. There is or ought to be a sort of fitness between clothes and their wearer, but in the case of this traveller, obviously bound for the De Vere Arms, no such fitness existed. That cold gray eye, those deeply marked crow’s-feet, the coarse mouth, and mottled complexion, consorted ill with the pretensions to dandyism indicated by a portion of their owner’s attire. Altogether, the man might have been set down as a corn-doctor, a quack, a projector of bubble companies, or possibly an auctioneer whose hammer seldom fell to a purely legitimate bid in a fair market.
As the stranger drew near to the hotel, having inquired his way once or twice from such of the natives as the great attraction of the day had not allured to the race-course, a carriage dashed past him at a very fast pace indeed, and drew up with a jerk in front of the De Vere Arms. The gentleman who alighted from it, tall, and of a goodly presence, lingered for an instant in the doorway to give some order to his servants. As he did so, his eyes encountered those of the traveller freshly arrived by the train, and who by this time was beneath the pillars of the porch. Sir Sykes Denzil, for it was he whose carriage had just brought him in hot haste to the place where his son lay ill, started perceptibly and hesitated, then turned abruptly on his heel and disappeared within the hotel, greeted by the obsequious Mr and Mrs Biggles.
Recognition, as we can all avouch, is in the immense majority of cases simultaneous, one memory seeming as it were to take fire at the spark of recollection kindled in the other. In this instance such was not exactly what occurred. Yet the traveller with the bag was perfectly certain that he had seen before the tall gentleman who had started at the sight of him, and that a diligent searching of the mental archives would elicit the answer to the riddle.
‘Have I written or telegraphed to order rooms here?’ repeated the new arrival testily, after the flippant waiter who came, flourishing his napkin, to see what the stranger wanted. ‘No, I have not. And to judge by the size of your town, my friend, and the general look of affairs, I should say that on any other day of the year but this such a precaution would be wholly superfluous.’
The waiter, who had been slightly puffed up by the ephemeral vogue of Pebworth and its chief hotel, took the rebuke meekly. ‘Would you step into the coffee-room, sir?’ he said. ‘I’ll ask Mrs Biggles about accommodation likely to be vacant. Any name I could mention, sir?’
‘Name—yes, Wilkins,’ returned the traveller, pushing open the door of the coffee-room, in which, at various tables, some dozen of sporting-men were making a scrambling meal. One or two of these looking up from their plates, nodded a greeting, with a ‘How d’ ye do, Wilkins?’ or ‘How goes it, old fellow?’ salutations which the recipient of them returned in kind. Then the waiter bustled in to say, more respectfully than before, that so soon as No. 28 should be vacated by a gentleman leaving by the 6.25 train, it would be at the disposal of Mr Wilkins. Further, here was a note for Mr Wilkins; into whose hand he proceeded to thrust a half-sheet of letter-paper, roughly folded in four, and containing but some two or three lines of blotted handwriting. ‘If you will so far oblige me’—thus ran the words, shaky and blurred as to their caligraphy, but tolerably legible—‘I shall be glad of a few moments’ interview with you, at once if not inconvenient, in No. 11. I will not detain you.’
There was no signature, but no reasonable doubt could exist in the mind of Mr Wilkins as to the note having been penned by the owner of the carriage that had so lately driven up to the door of the De Vere Arms.
‘Why, this is taking the bull by the horns,’ said Mr Wilkins, as he rose to obey the summons.