I went hot and cold, and didn’t know which way to look.
“It’s all right, Bob,” said Mr. Saxon; “don’t blame Mrs. Beckett. It’s my fault. I told her you were only let out of a lunatic asylum yesterday, and she and her husband have been seeing that you don’t get into mischief.”
I made for the door, and got downstairs quick. But I could hear the gentleman going on, and saying it was too bad, and that it was a shameful thing to have made out that he was a lunatic. But he was all right at dinner-time, and he laughed about it, and said Mr. Saxon was an awful man, and always up to some idiotic trick or other.
And so he was. But it was a long time before I felt quite comfortable with the gentleman we’d treated as a lunatic, and given a blunt knife to, and made to go to bed in the dark, and watched about wherever he went.
It was too bad of Mr. Saxon to play such a trick on us; for the gentleman was as sane as he was, and, if it came to that, a good deal saner. For sometimes Mr. Saxon does things, and says things, that are only fit for a lunatic asylum; and I’ve heard his friends say to him, “Why, if anybody who didn’t know you were to hear you, they’d take you for a lunatic.”
Mr. Saxon and the gentleman who wrote burlesques went away together. Mr. Saxon was really much better when he left, and he said so. He’s promised to send us his portrait with his autograph under it to put up in our little private room, and before he left I got his permission to allow me to dedicate my next book to——
* * * * *
What! The billiard balls gone. Nonsense! You’ve looked everywhere for them, John, and they’re not there? You don’t mean to say they’re stolen? Well, I declare, what next! I suppose somebody has been in and found the place empty and walked off with them. I knew something would come of that separate entrance. It’s your own fault, for not locking the room up when you go to dinner. Your master will be in a fine way when he hears of it. I expect he’ll make you pay for them, and it will serve you right.
CHAPTER XXI.
THE VILLAGE WITCH.
People who have lived all their lives in London, when they come to live in a country place generally find the inhabitants what is called “behind the world,” and the village that our hotel is in is no exception to the rule. Even the railway, which has done a lot to take stupid ideas out of country people, hasn’t made our village folks quite as sharp as they should be. The old people—those who were born before School Boards and all the new-fangled ideas—have some awfully funny notions, and nothing you can say will shake their belief in them.