‘Well?’ said Dwala: ‘what’s your decision, Mr. Hartopp?’
‘Go to h——!’ said the blind man, hobbling resolutely away. The Prince and Prosser, after standing a little longer, turned and went sadly home again.
XXIII
As Dwala and Huxtable were sitting at breakfast one morning, a week later, the butler leaned down in his gentle fatherly way over the Prince’s shoulder, and told him that a man had been asking for him.
‘A blind man, sir, with a little girl with him; very respectable. They came about half-past seven.’
‘Where are they?’
‘They went away again, sir.’
‘Did they say if they were coming back?’
‘Not a word, sir; they just turned round and went into the Park when they heard you wasn’t up.’
Dwala then propounded at length to Huxtable all his ideas about Hartopp and Joey. Huxtable listened quietly, with an occasional colourless: ‘Quite so, quite so.’ He retired to his room after breakfast, and walked up and down a great deal. His ideas cleared after some hours of perambulation. He arrived at the same conclusion as Prosser. Prince Dwala was an eccentric. He thought over the cases of a number of peers and millionaires he knew about who had been eccentric, and suddenly realised that eccentricity was more than respectable; it was chic: it belonged to the grandest school of behaviour. It was not what he had expected in coming to Prince Dwala; his own part would be difficult and call for care. It was like the Boer War; that had been eccentric too; but for that very reason it had been the making of his cousin Jim, who was now in command of a brigade. When he came down to luncheon he looked at Dwala with an interest almost tender.