“If she’s worth having, she’ll understand,” said the Captain, but he knew perfectly well she would not understand.
Mrs. Geedge noted this letter among the others, and afterwards she was much exercised by Madeleine’s behaviour. For suddenly that lady became extraordinarily gay and joyous in her bearing, singing snatches of song and bubbling over with suggestions for larks and picnics and wild excursions. She patted Mr. Geedge on the shoulder and ran her arm through the arm of Professor Bowles. Both gentlemen received these familiarities with a gawky coyness that Mrs. Geedge found contemptible. And moreover Madeleine drew several shy strangers into their circle. She invited the management to a happy participation.
Her great idea was a moonlight picnic. “We’ll have a great camp-fire and afterwards we’ll dance—this very night.”
“But wouldn’t it be better to-morrow?”
“To-night!”
“To-morrow perhaps Captain Douglas may be back again. And he’s so good at all these things.”
Mrs. Geedge knew better because she had seen the French stamp on the letter, but she meant to get to the bottom of this business, and thus it was she said this.
“I’ve sent him back to his soldiering,” said Madeleine serenely. “He has better things to do.”
§ 12
For some moments after the unceremonious departure of Captain Douglas from the presence of Lord Moggeridge, it did not occur to anyone, it did not occur even to Bealby, that the Captain had left his witness behind him. The general and the Lord Chancellor moved into the hall, and Bealby, under the sway of a swift compelling gesture from Candler, followed modestly. The same current swept them all out into the portico, and while the under-butler whistled up a hansom for the General, the Lord Chancellor, with a dignity that was at once polite and rapid, and Candler gravely protective and little reproving, departed. Bealby, slowly apprehending their desertion, regarded the world of London with perplexity and dismay. Candler had gone. The last of the gentlemen was going. The under-butler, Bealby felt, was no friend. Under-butlers never are.