“What do you want?” inquired Mr. Ponders.
Rosalie said, “If you please, Mr. Ponders, Miss Keggs is not feeling at all well and would you be so very kind as to give her some of her medicine, please?”
Mr. Ponders rose and regarded Rosalie from the hearthrug. “So it’s going to be you coming for the medicine now, is it?” he said. He looked rather a mean little man, standing there; not thrilling as when he appeared in the schoolrooms for there was an unpleasing familiarity in his air, but still decidedly mysterious, for though he smiled and looked snakily at Rosalie, he still glanced from side to side as though furtively looking for something and he still, before committing himself to an action, paused as though meditating a statement and then suddenly performed the action as though he had made up his mind not to speak—yet.
“You’re Rosalie, aren’t you?” inquired Ponders, putting his hands in his pockets and stretching out his stomach like one much at his ease. “Rosalie Aubyn. You come with your Auntie. What’s your Pa?”
“A clergyman, Mr. Ponders.”
“Oh, he’s a clergyman, is he?” Mr. Ponders’s eyes slid from side to side, rather as if he had somewhere in the room some confirmation or some refutation of Rosalie’s statement that he could produce if he could catch sight of it, and continued thus to slide with the same suggestion while he playfully put Rosalie through a further examination relative to her “Auntie,” her “Ma” and her brothers and sisters. He appeared then to be meditating a question of some other order but instead suddenly straightened himself, withdrew his hands from his pockets and said, “Well, you’d better be running along with the medicine.”
He took from Rosalie the bottle Miss Keggs had given her and from his pockets a bunch of keys. In the lock of one of his cupboards he fitted a key, paused a meditative moment, then with a decisive action opened the cupboard and from a tall black bottle very carefully and steadily filled the medicine bottle. The medicine was dark red. It first ran in a fine dark red cloud around the inner shoulders and sides of the bottle and then plunged in a steady stream direct from the larger receptacle to the smaller.
Rosalie, watching, was moved to say, “How well you pour it, Mr. Ponders.”
“I’ve poured a tidy drop in my time,” said Mr. Ponders, completing the operation and corking the medicine bottle. He held it towards Rosalie, paused in his mysteriously deliberative way, and then suddenly handed it to her. “And a tidy fair drop for Miss Keggs at that,” he added. He went to the door, again paused as though uncertain whether to open it, then opened it for Rosalie to pass out. “Good night,” said Mr. Ponders.
Lucky Mr. Ponders to have for his own a cosy room like that—men, always for some reason, with the best of everything again! Unpleasing Mr. Ponders to look at you like that and to speak to you like that—men, always horrible again! Rosalie, thus thinking, made a swift and unobserved climb to the attics. Miss Keggs must have heard her coming. The door was pulled sharply from Rosalie’s hand and there was Miss Keggs and the bottle almost snatched away from Rosalie. “How long you’ve been! But you’ve got it! And no one saw you?” Miss Keggs went very swiftly to the washstand and took up a small tumbler. Clear that she wanted her medicine very badly. She toppled in the contents of the bottle, its neck clinking against the glass, the dark red medicine splashing and some spilling, so differently from Mr. Ponders’s performance of a far more difficult operation, and with the bottle still in her hand held the glass to her lips and drank deeply.