“Who on earth is that?” asked Thorpe, wonderingly. The man was obviously of the lower class, yet there seemed something about him which invited recognition.
“Presumably it's the new head-gardener,” she replied with brevity.
Her accent recalled to Thorpe the fact that there had been something disagreeable in their conversation, and the thought of it was unpleasant to him. “Why, I didn't know you had a new man coming,” he said, turning to her with an overture of smiling interest.
“Yes,” she answered, and then, as if weighing the proffered propitiation and rejecting it, turned slowly and went into the house.
The trap apparently ended its course at some back entrance: he did not see it again. He strolled indoors, after a little, and told his man to pack a bag for London, and order the stanhope to take him to the train.
CHAPTER XXIII
IN the early morning, long before any of the hotel people had made themselves heard moving about, Thorpe got up.
It was a long time since he had liked himself and his surroundings so little. The bed seemed all right to the eye, and even to the touch, but he had slept very badly in it, none the less. The room was luxuriously furnished, as was the entire suite, but it was all strange and uncomfortable to his senses. The operation of shaving and dressing in solitude produced an oppression of loneliness. He regretted not having brought his man with him for this reason, and then, upon meditation, for other reasons. A person of his position ought always to have a servant with him. The hotel people must have been surprised at his travelling unattended—and the people at High Thorpe must also have thought it strange. It flashed across his mind that no doubt his wife had most of all thought it strange. How would she explain to herself his sudden, precipitate journey to London alone? Might she not quite naturally put an unpleasant construction upon it? It was bad enough to have to remember that they had parted in something like a tiff; he found it much worse to be fancying the suspicions with which she would be turning over his mysterious absence in her mind.
He went downstairs as speedily as possible and, discovering no overt signs of breakfast in the vicinity of the restaurant, passed out and made his way to the Embankment. This had been a favourite walk of his in the old days—but he considered it now with an unsympathetic eye. It seemed a dry and haggard and desolate-looking place by comparison with his former impressions of it. The morning was grey-skied, but full of a hard quality of light, which brought out to the uncompromising uttermost the dilapidated squalor of the Surrey side. The water was low, and from the mud and ooze of the ugly opposite shore, or perhaps from the discoloured stream itself, there proceeded a smell which offended his unaccustomed nostril. A fitful, gusty wind was blowing from the east, and ever and again it gathered dust in eddying swoops from the roadway, and flung it in his face.