“You don’t know me,” she whispered, and for a moment her hand lay warm in his; “trust me! I’m your friend in spite of all you’ve said—or done!”
Dr. Baumgartner might have been ten minutes getting rid of the intruder; before that he had been first amazed and then relieved to hear the piano in the drawing-room; and that was all his anxious ear had heard of either boy or girl during his absence. Yet the boy was not standing over the piano, as he might have been, for Phillida was trying to recall one of the concert songs he said his sister sang. Pocket, however, was staring out into the garden with a troubled face, which he turned abruptly, aggressively, and yet apprehensively to meet the doctor’s.
But the doctor no longer looked suspiciously from him to Phillida, but stood beaming on them both, and rubbing his hands as though he had done something very clever indeed.
CHAPTER XIV.
BEFORE THE STORM
Sunday in London has got itself a bad name among those who occasionally spend one at their hotel, and miss the band, their letters, and the theatre at night; but at Dr. Baumgartner’s there was little to distinguish the seventh day from the other six. The passover of the postman, that boon to residents and grievance of the traveller, was a normal condition in the dingy house of no address. More motor-horns were heard in the distance, and less heavy traffic; the sound of church bells came as well through the open windows; then the street-door shut, and there was a long period without Phillida, until it opened and shut again, and in she peeped with her parasol and Prayer-book, as though they were all quite ordinary people without a guilty secret among them!
Such was the Sunday morning. It was fine and warm. Dr. Baumgartner pottered about his untidy little garden, a sun-trap again as Pocket had seen it first; the Turk’s head perspired from internal and external heat, but its rich yellow, shading into richer auburn, clashed rather with a red geranium which the doctor wore jauntily in the button-hole of his black alpaca jacket.
It was Phillida who had given him the flower at breakfast. She grew what she could in the neglected garden; the plants in the miniature conservatory were also hers, though the doctor took a perfunctory interest in them, obviously on her account. It was obvious at least to Pocket Upton. He saw all these things, and what they meant. He was not without his little gifts of observation and deduction. He noticed the difference in Baumgartner’s voice when he addressed his niece, the humane kindling of the inexorable eyes, and to-day he thought he saw a reciprocal softening on the part of Phillida. There had been none to see yesterday or the day before. It was her uncle whom the girl had seemed unable to forgive for the unseemly scuffle of Friday morning. But now it was as though memory and common fairness had set years of kindness against these days of unendurable mystery, and bidden her endure them with a better grace. If she felt she had been disloyal to him, she could not have made sweeter amends than she did by many an unobtrusive little office. And she exchanged no more confidences with poor Pocket.
Yet these two were together most of the day; all three were; and it was a strangely peaceful day, a day of natural hush, and the cessation of life’s hostilities, such as is sometimes almost pointedly bestowed before or after a time of strain. It was a day on which Pocket certainly drew his spiritual breath more freely than on any other since the dire catastrophe. There were few fresh clouds; perhaps the only one before evening was the removal of the book on hallucinations in which Pocket had become interested on the Saturday afternoon. It was no longer lying about the room as he had left it. There was a gap in its place in the shelf. The book had been taken away from him; it made him feel as though he were back again at his very first dame’s school.
And the church bells sent him back to the school he was at now! They were more mellow and sedate then the chapel bells there, that rang you down the hill at the double if you were late and not too asthmatical; and Pocket saw and heard himself puffing up the opposite hill to take his place for chapel call-over in the school quad. The fellows would be forming in squads there now, all in their Sunday tails or Eton jackets as the case might be; of course Pocket was in tails, though still rather proud of them. The masters, in their silk hoods or their rabbit-skins were prominent in his mind’s eye. Then came the cool and spacious chapel, with its marble pulpit and its brazen candelabra, and rows of chastened chapel faces, that he knew better than his own, giving a swing to chants which ran in his head at the very thought. How real it all was to him, and how unreal this Sunday morning, in the sunny room with the battle engravings over the book-cases, and the walnut chairs in front of them, and Dr. Baumgartner in and out in his alpaca coat! After chapel he would have gone for a walk with Blundell minor, most probably, or else written his letter home and got it over. And that chapter would have ended with cold boiled beef and apple-pie with cloves in it at Spearman’s.
The Italian restaurant which sent in Dr. Baumgartner’s meals certainly provided richer fare than that. There was a top-floor of soup in the portable contrivance, and before the meat a risotto, which the doctor praised without a single patriotic reservation.