As he led away Blazer, with a new proprietary pride Tinker said firmly to Sir Tancred, "I shall go on considering him a bloodhound, sir."
CHAPTER SIX
THE RESCUE OF ELIZABETH KERNABY
Sir Tancred paused now and again in his leisurely breakfast to scowl across the dining room at Mr. Biggleswade, who, with his sour-looking wife and woebegone little girl, was breakfasting at an opposite table. The Royal Victoria Hotel was second-rate. The cooking was poor, the wine was bad, and Solesgate itself was dull. But these misfortunes Sir Tancred would have endured cheerfully because the place suited Hildebrand Anne, who had but lately recovered from an attack of scarlet fever at Farndon-Pryze, but he could not endure Mr. Biggleswade. It was not so much that he had reckoned up Mr. Biggleswade as a large, fat, greasy rogue, nor was it that no snub once and for all stopped Mr. Biggleswade from thrusting himself upon him with a snobbish obsequiousness; it was Mr. Biggleswade's noisy and haphazard methods of disposing of his food, which left small portions of each course nestling in his straggling beard, and filled the air with the sound of the feeding of pigs.
This Sir Tancred found unendurable, and the more unendurable that Mr. Biggleswade had made up his mind that he enjoyed his meals more in the presence of a baronet, and always waited for his coming.
Sir Tancred was eating his breakfast mournfully, therefore, reflecting on the unkindness of Fortune, who had afflicted Tinker with his fever at so inconvenient a time. For he had not been able to raise the money to take him to make his convalescence at one of the more expensive watering places, whither resort millionaires and the smart, whose fondness for games of chance and skill would have kept him in careless luxury. He had been driven to bring him to Solesgate, a town of six bathing-machines; and there the rest of his ready money dwindled to a few shillings. A sudden cessation of the sound of the feeding of pigs caught him from his mournful reflections. He looked up quickly, to see Mr. Biggleswade staring at his newspaper with a most striking expression of triumphant greed.
On the instant Sir Tancred filled with the liveliest interest; emotion, especially curious emotion, in his fellow creatures always aroused his interest, and not infrequently brought him profit, and Mr. Biggleswade's emotion seemed to him curiously violent to be excited by the perusal of a newspaper. He made half a movement to show it to his wife, caught Sir Tancred's eye, and setting it down, went on hastily with his breakfast. He had not been so quick but that Sir Tancred had seen that the paper was The Daily Telegraph, and the exciting paragraph on the first page.
Sir Tancred brightened to the rest of his breakfast; he had little doubt that he was on the track of some roguery or other, and he promised himself a hunt through the paper till he found it. When the Biggleswades, having finished their breakfast, went down to the beach, he lighted a cigar, took his folding-chair and his pile of newspapers, and settled down sixty yards away from them. As he had expected, their first act was to discuss the newspaper with great animation, handing it backwards and forwards to one another. And he took The Daily Telegraph from his pile, and set about seeking the source of their excitement. He passed over the first advertisement in the agony column, the offer of a reward for the recovery of the stolen child of Kernaby, the Marmalade Millionaire, merely noting that it had been raised to 4000 pounds, and came to the conclusion that the second advertisement was genuine, while the third, which set forth at great length the woes of a young woman parted from a young man, seemed to him to read like thieves communicating. He had begun to eliminate the superfluous words, when Tinker, with Blazer, his bull-terrier, came suddenly up to him from behind, and bade him good-morning.
Tinker had breakfasted some three hours earlier, probably in the hotel kitchen, for, as was his invariable custom, he was on the best of terms with the servants; and for all that he had spent the intervening hours on the uncovered slimy rocks, was in his usual state of spotless cleanliness. He is the one living boy to whom dirt does not cling.