He pondered a little, sombrely.
“Did she know you were coming here, to see me?” he asked presently.
“Yes, I told her. Perhaps you would like to know what she remarked upon it.”
“Shouldn’t I!”
“She said, ‘I’m sure, for my sake, Richard, he’ll take care of you.’”
“Did she say that, Dick—did she?”
“Her very words, old fellow.”
“By George! tell her I’ll never let you out of my sight until it’s to give you back to her.”
He got up in some emotion, and walked to the window. If in all that hurrying panorama beneath his eyes, that endless procession of shapes and shadows all set on overtaking and outstripping one another in the race for wealth, there was moving onward one only other soul as disinterestedly intent as he on a brother’s welfare, the old dark city, I am sure, might yet boast of the seed of promise in its veins.
I dined at the flat that evening. I was not introduced to Johnny’s mamma until, having entered the banqueting-hall, my attention was called to an extraordinary old lady seated already at the head of the table in a wheel-chair in the nature of a portable throne. She was enormously squat and fat, like a loaf, and her head, I fear, bore no more testimony to the efficacy of “Grafto” than had the late lamented analyst’s. The pile on it, nominally golden, but of a hue that never was on sea or land, was so glaringly, even so loosely adjusted, that, if she had turned a great bird’s nest upside down on her head, the deception could not have been more flagrant. It’s size and precariousness so engrossed my attention, that once, when a blundering footman knocked it crooked with a plate, and she said placidly, “You nearly upset my hair, Richard!” I felt as if the rebuke were personal to myself, and blushed over the involuntary movement I had made to catch it before it fell into the soup. The man put it straight like a dish cover, without his mistress, or himself, or anybody else exhibiting the least disturbance; and then I comprehended upon what purely undissembling terms the article stood, and felt that one could no more quarrel with it on the score of mendacity than with a bonnet.