Charley Melton went homeward, turned, and walked right up to the Euston Road, where he made for Park Crescent, and then walked straight down Portland Placc, so as to try and catch a glimpse of his inamorata.
He was blessed and yet annoyed, for Maude was at one of the windows with a book in her hand, apparently reading, but really looking down at Luigi, the Italian, who was turning the handle of his baize-covered chest in the most diligent manner, producing sweet sounds according to taste, and smiling and bowing to the lady.
“Lucky brute!” muttered Charley, as he went by without venturing to salute. For as he passed he saw a white packet drop from the window and fall upon the pavement, where it burst like a shell, scattering bronze discs in all directions, so that the organ-grinder had hard work to collect them laden as he was, while the tune he played was broken up into bits.
“Lucky brute!” sighed Charley Melton again, “allowed to stand upon the edge of the pavement to gaze up at her, and then paid for so doing. Ah, I’d better give it up. She won’t bolt with me. I seem as if I can get no help from Tom, and I cannot go there. Hang it all, I shall do something desperate before I’ve done. She was yielding, but the game’s up now.”
Poor Joby in the days which followed was far from happy, for his master was a great deal away from home, and the dog was shut out often enough from his rooms as well as from his confidence.
People said that Charley Melton, being crossed in love, was going to the bad—taking to drink and gambling, and steadily gliding down the slide up which there is no return; and certainly his habits seemed to indicate this to be the case, so much so that Joby thought a good deal in his dense, thick-brained fashion upon the problem that puzzled his head as well as several wiser ones—a problem that he was to solve though for himself when the due time came, for Joby could not make out his master.
Time glided on, and Charley Melton’s case seemed to grow more and more hopeless, while Maude appeared to be going melancholy mad, and passed a great portion of her time gazing dreamily down at the purveyor of tunes set afloat upon the air by the mechanical working of a large set of bellows, and the opening and shutting by a toothed barrel of the mouths of so many graduated pipes.
Everybody was miserable, so it appeared, saving Sir Grantley Wilters, whose joy approached the weird in the peculiarity of its developments. He took medicine by the bucketful, so his valet told Mr Robbins in confidence, “and the way he talks about your young lady is wonderful.”
It was wonderful, for in his amatory madness he chuckled and chattered and praised the lady’s charms, and he even went so far at times as to sing snatches of love songs in a voice that suggested the performances of a mad—or cracked—clarionet in a hilarious fit, during which it was suffering from a dry reed.
Love ruled the day at Portland Place, and Sir Grantley came and made it in the drawing-room as often as he liked, while when she could escape to the balcony, Maude stood and listened to the strains of Trovatore, and, “poor dear, seemed to get wuss and wuss.”