Leaving his father to execute his sublime purpose, Will went off on his own mission under protection of the big Mott umbrella. In returning it, he learnt that even its great ribbed dome had not saved Mr. Mott from a wetting, in consequence of which and his delicate health he was now imbibing stiff glasses of grog in his bedroom, hovered over by the anxious Mother Gander. It was pathetically out of the question, Will gathered, for Brother Mott to attend chapel again that day. Will’s “urgent business” lay, however, with Mr. Anthony Flippance: the soul to be saved being Jinny’s, now menaced with still further soilure from the gross contacts of horse-copers, cadgers, kidders, butchers, drovers, shepherds, swineherds, touts, tramps, and all the tricksters and pickpockets of the cattle-market.
The mission did not loom unpleasant, for although he resented the fiction about the Crystal Palace and the stuffed elephant, the tall talk was harmless enough—he had heard taller in America—and he was not indisposed for ungodly society after the reek of the chapel. That the genial Showman would instantly see the matter from his point of view he did not doubt.
But Tony Flip was not in the dining-room even in dishabille, and the waiter was still so occupied with late or leisurely diners as apparently to be unable to conjure him up. “I’ve just taken him up his breakfast,” he said, with an envious sigh. “No. 42. You’ll find him.”
But to intrude thus on the Showman’s privacy seemed indelicate: he waylaid a chambermaid in the corridor and asked her to tell Mr. Flippance a gentleman would be glad to see him when he had finished his meal. She brought back a mysterious answer as from Miss Flippance that he never saw clean-shaven gents.
Will fired up as at an insult. Evidently the rogue was not going to be so malleable: that daughter of his, too, he remembered, had no proper respect for Jinny. “Tell ’em I’ll wait here till my beard grows!” he commanded.
The chambermaid hung back, giggling. He felt in his pocket for a sixpence—again encountering only lining. “If you don’t take my message, I’ll kiss you,” he menaced. It was a jest that never failed him, and it did not fail now, though the fleeing “tucker-in” giggled more than ever. He watched her enter the lion’s den, but hardly had she done so, when the noble animal himself padded forth, grinning like a Cheshire cat, his fork protruded like a claw, and just-spluttered coffee dripping from his great jaws over the breast of his flamboyant hundred-stained hide.
“Where is he?” he roared genially to the dark corridor. “Come in! Come in!”
Will advanced defiantly.
“So it’s you! I was wondering what wit heaven had dropped with the thunder! Yankee yumour—I ought to ha’ guessed it.” And he nearly spitted Will on his fork in his enthusiastic effort to shake hands. “ ‘I’ll wait till my beard grows’—ha, ha, ha! That goes in this very night—no, there’s no show to-night, hang it! Don’t go, Polly,” he called, as he pulled Will into the room over a barrier of Bluchers and Wellingtons and even Hessian boots with silken tassels, “we must get that into Hamlet. When I say to Ophelia, ‘Get thee to a nunnery; go, farewell’— I’ll wind up ‘Until thy beard grows.’ That’ll be your new cue, Polly.”
“But that’ll spoil the scene,” Miss Flippance protested, poised in a morning wrapper in the open doorway between the two rooms. She was mysteriously mantled in aromatic clouds, like the spirit in The Mistletoe Bough, yet her father did not seem to be smoking.