Thorpe swung on his heel, and moved briskly toward the further door, which he could see opened upon the lawn. He was conscious of annoyance with this moon-faced, dawdling Gafferson, who had been afforded such a splendid chance of profiting by an old acquaintanceship—it might even be called, as things went in Honduras, a friendship—and who had so clumsily failed to rise to the situation. The bitter thought of going back and giving him a half-crown rose in Thorpe's inventive mind, and he paused for an instant, his hand on the door-knob, to think it over. The gratuity would certainly put Gafferson in his place, but then the spirit in which it was offered would be wholly lost on his dull brain. And moreover, was it so certain that he would take it? He had not said “sir” once, and he had talked about medals with the pride of a scientist. The rules were overwhelmingly against a gardener rejecting a tip, of course, but if there was no more than one chance in twenty of it, Thorpe decided that he could not afford the risk.
He quitted the greenhouse with resolution, and directed his steps toward the front of the mansion. As he entered the hall, a remarkably tuneful and resonant chime filled his ears with novel music. He looked and saw that a white-capped, neatly-clad domestic, standing with her back to him beside the newel-post of the stairs, was beating out the tune with two padded sticks upon some strips of metal ranged on a stand of Indian workmanship. The sound was delightful, but even more so was the implication that it betokened breakfast.
With inspiration, he drew forth the half-crown which he had been fingering in his pocket, and gave it to the girl as she turned. “That's the kind of concert I like,” he declared, bestowing the patronage of a jovial smile upon her pleased and comely face. “Show me the way to this breakfast that you've been serenading about.”
Out in the greenhouse, meanwhile, Gafferson continued to regard blankly the shrivelled, fatty leaves of the plant he had taken up. “Thorpe,” he said aloud, as if addressing the tabid gloxinia—“Thorpe—yes—I remember his initials—J. S. Thorpe. Now, who's the man that told me about him? and what was it he told me?”
CHAPTER VII
THE experiences of the breakfast room were very agreeable indeed. Thorpe found himself the only man present, and, after the first few minutes of embarrassment at this discovery, it filled him with surprised delight to note how perfectly he was at his ease. He could never have imagined himself seated with four ladies at a table—three of them, moreover, ladies of title—and doing it all so well.
For one thing, the ladies themselves had a morning manner, so to speak, which differed widely from the impressions he had had of their deportment the previous evening. They seemed now to be as simple and fresh and natural as the unadorned frocks they wore. They listened with an air of good-fellowship to him when he spoke; they smiled at the right places; they acted as if they liked him, and were glad of his company.
The satisfied conviction that he was talking well, and behaving well, accompanied him in his progress through the meal. His confession at the outset of his great hunger, and of the sinister apprehensions which had assailed him in his loitering walk about the place, proved a most fortuitous beginning; after that, they were ready to regard everything he said as amusing.
“Oh, when we're by ourselves,” the kindly little old hostess explained to him, “my daughter and I breakfast always at nine. That was our hour yesterday morning, for example. But when my son is here, then it's farewell to regularity. We put breakfast back till ten, then, as a kind of compromise between our own early habits and his lack of any sort of habits. Why we do it I couldn't say—because he never comes down in any event. He sleeps so well at Hadlow—and you know in town he sleeps very ill indeed—and so we don't dream of complaining. We're only too glad—for his sake.”