I think I have mentioned how, soon after we had got our house straight and ready to be an hotel, I sent a nice, respectful letter to those of my old masters and mistresses that I thought I should like to know where I was, so that we might perhaps have their patronage.
Of course I did not expect them all to pack up at once, and leave their homes and come and stay with us, but I thought at some time or other one or two of them might want to go somewhere, say, from Saturday to Monday, and they might say, “Oh, let us go down and see how Mary Jane is getting on!”
But the one I was most anxious to get down was Mr. Saxon—the author I told you such a lot about in my “Memoirs”—because I knew he wrote in the papers about the places he visited, and I thought if we made him comfortable, and the place suited him, and the air did his liver good, he might write about our hotel, and give it what Harry calls “a leg up,” though, of course, it isn’t right, because an hotel doesn’t have legs.
Mr. Saxon wrote a line of congratulation to us. I think it was to say he was glad we were settled so comfortably, and he’d come and see us one day, but we only guessed it was that, after reading over the letter for about two hours, because he wrote so dreadfully that you had to get as near what he meant as a word that was readable here and there would let you.
After the letter we heard no more, and as months went by we’d quite given up expecting him, when one morning we had a telegram from him, and that not being in his handwriting (thank goodness!), we could read it. It was this: “Keep me sitting-room and bedroom. Arrive this evening.—Saxon.”
“Oh, I’m so glad!” I said. “I hope he’ll like the place. We must make him comfortable and humour him, and he’ll give us a nice advertisement.”
“I hope he will,” said Harry; “but, I say, my dear, you don’t think he’ll go on like he does in your ‘Memoirs,’ do you?”
“Oh, he’s a little odd, and he’s sure to be a bit fidgety, but you’ll soon get used to him,” I said; and then I went upstairs and got the best rooms ready, and put the furniture just how I knew he liked it. Two tables in the sitting-room—one for him to eat on, and the other for him to write on—and I put a great big linen-basket in the room for a waste-paper basket, and I put the big inkstand on the table, and I sent out for a dozen pens and a new blotting-pad; and I put an easy-chair for him to sit in, because I remembered how particular he was about his chairs, always declaring that he never could get one that was fit to sit in, and I made the place look so nice and comfortable that I said to Harry, “There now, I don’t believe even he can grumble at it.”
We wished he had said whether he was coming to dinner or not, because we could have had the table all laid ready for him; but as he only said “this evening,” we made up our minds he would arrive by the train which got in at 8.15; and that was the one he did come by.
When the fly drove up we went outside to welcome him, and we saw there was another gentleman with him—a big gentleman, with a large round face and a fair moustache and blue eyes, who looked like a German, but we found out afterwards he wasn’t—through Mr. Saxon, who, when we asked what nation the gentleman was, said, “Oh, I don’t think he knows himself, but his father was a Russian and his mother was a German, and so I suppose he’s a Swede.”