Roy stood still pondering.
Suddenly his mind was made up, and he set off for the high road at a good swinging pace. At the gate he passed Jim. “If they want to know where I am,” he called, “say I’ve gone to Dormstaple, to the Miss Bannisters’ Brother.”
IV
Miss Sarah Bannister and Miss Selina Bannister had lived in Dormstaple as long almost as anyone could remember, although they were by no means old. They had the red house with white windows, the kind of house which one can see only in old English market-towns. There was a gravel drive before it, in the shape of a banana, the carriages going in at one end and out at the other, stopping at the front doorsteps in the middle. A china cockatoo hung in the window. The door knocker was of the brightest brass; it was a pleasure to knock it.
Behind the house was a very large garden, with a cedar in the midst, and a very soft lawn, on which the same birds settled every morning in winter for the breakfast that the Miss Bannisters provided. The cedar and the other trees had cigar-boxes nailed to them, for tits or wrens to build in, and half cocoa-nuts and lumps of fat were always hung just outside the windows. In September button mushrooms grew on the lawn—enough for breakfast every morning. At one side of the house was the stable and coach-house, on the other side a billiard-room, now used as a workshop. And this workshop brings us to the Miss Bannisters’ Brother.
The Miss Bannisters’ Brother was an invalid, and he was also what is called eccentric. “Eccentric, that’s what he is,” Mr. Stallabrass, who kept the King’s Arms, had said, and there could be no doubt of it after that. This meant that he wore rather shabby clothes, and took no interest in the town, and was rarely seen outside the house or the garden.
Rumour said, however, that he was very clever with his hands, and could make anything. What was the matter with the Miss Bannisters’ Brother no one seemed to know, but it gradually kept him more and more indoors.
No one ever spoke of him as Mr. Bannister; they always said the Miss Bannisters’ Brother. If you could see the Miss Bannisters, especially Miss Selina, you would understand this; but although they had deep, gruff voices, they were really very kind.
As time went on, and the Miss Bannisters’ Brother did not seem to grow any better, or to be likely to take up his gardening and his pigeons again, the Miss Bannisters had racked their brains to think of some employment for him other than reading, which is not good for anyone all day long. One evening, some years before this story, while the three were at tea, Miss Selina cried suddenly, “I have it!”—so suddenly, indeed, that Miss Sarah spilt her cup, and her brother took three lumps of sugar instead of two.
“Have what?” they both exclaimed.