“It may all end sooner than you expect,” he answered enigmatically, and with that he left me and ran up-stairs.
How was I to get through the day, I wondered. Sleep, smoke, write letters, slink about the garden, avoiding Ethel so that she should not learn of my ever-increasing doubts about the doctor! But there were twelve weary hours to while away. I would have gone into the garden and adopted Kipling’s cure for the hump, “Dig till you gently perspire,” but I was doing that already. My thoughts traveled with longing to the tingling crystal air of the Yorkshire moors—that was where I would like to be on such a day as this—off for a twenty-mile tramp with my pipe for company. But that was not to be, and, with a sigh of distaste, I collected writing materials and proceeded to the shade of the cedar to write some letters. Presently Ethel joined me; her face was still swollen—the bruise beginning to blacken. She looked tired too, and I imagined had been crying, but her eyes lit up with something of her old smile, as she came toward me, a letter in her hand.
“Do listen to this,” she cried. “Isn’t it just like mother? She’s sending us a visitor. A visitor now of all times, and some one we’ve never seen before at that!”
Mrs. Hanson’s incoherent hospitality was a family joke. Visitors she must have. She had no discrimination in the matter of individuals and occasions and the way they might jar or mix. She would think nothing of bringing home a perfect stranger, august or otherwise, and feeding him on kindliness and cold mutton. And I will give hes credit for this—the visitor, august or ordinary, the cold mutton, the kindliness and the occasion would generally mix to a pleasantly affable blend. My own friendship with the Hansons dated from one of these haphazard invitations, so I smiled at Ethel reminiscently as she stood by my side with the letter in her hand.
“A good thing too, perhaps,” I said, “we shall have to sit up, mind our manners, and behave. Tell me more about it. What is it to be—rich man, poor man, beggar man or thief?”
Ethel began to read me bits of the letter.
“You remember we were expecting to see my cousin, Bill Kenley, when he got home from Rhodesia—we were to look out for him next week on the Channel boat—well, rather to our surprise he arrived this week, yesterday in fact. And he surprised us still more by bringing with him a wife; they’re on their honeymoon—such a jolly girl—we both of us like her immensely. But poor things, while we were having lunch, a cable arrived for Bill ordering his immediate return—some native unrest that they fear may develop into serious trouble, and he must be on the spot. So he sails back again to-morrow. Meanwhile, what is his wife to do? She has no relatives here. I should have liked her to stay on here with us, but dad takes all my time and he doesn’t want to be bothered with any one else. So it occurred to me: why not send her down to you? You need a chaperon, you know. It’s all very well while the whole lot of you are there together, but after the tournament, you can’t go on keeping house for The Tundish without the Merchester pussies getting their claws into you. So you may expect Janet—that is her name—soon after this letter. You’ll be nice to her, I know—my family are really very good to me about backing up my wild invitations! But she is really very nice and you will enjoy having her on her own account. Dad is steadily getting more like his old self. He tells me to say how sorry he is to miss Francis. I hope you are having a good——”
“Oh well, that is all that matters,” Ethel finished, sitting down and fanning herself with the letter. “How am I to explain the situation to her, Francis, when she arrives? Just imagine coming to a strange house and finding yourself in the thick of all this!”
It certainly was rather a facer for Ethel, but I could not help seeing that the situation had its points. “She sounds better than your Aunt Emmeline anyhow, and that is what you would have had to come to. As your mother says, you can’t go on indefinitely without some older woman, and your aunt is the obvious elder.”
Now the said Aunt Emmeline was a sister of Hanson, ten years his senior, a spinster devoted to good works, and most uncomfortably and obtrusively High Church. When Aunt Emmeline fasted, the recording angel and the cook were not the only ones to know it, and she managed to cast a gloom like a London fog over even the cheerful Dalehouse family. In short she was one of those good women whose men-folk make friends with the devil.