There is a tide

by J. C. Snaith

This was vastly encouraging. But it was only a beginning and her nature was to leave nothing to chance. A little later that day she acquired a second-hand copy of Bell’s Standard Elocutionist from a bookshop in the Charing Cross Road. And then she arranged for Mr. Falkland Vavasour to hear her say a little piece every morning, when the drawing room was empty.

IX

MAME’S friendship with “the mystery man” continued to grow. That was a name his fellow guests had given him. His comings and goings were indeed mysterious. Nobody knew where he took his meals. Nobody knew what his circumstances were. All the time he had been at Fotheringay House, which was quite a number of years, his name had never been seen in a playbill. But there was a legend that he had once had an engagement with Bancroft at the old Prince of Wales.

He was always dressed immaculately, he was the soul of courtesy, his talk was urbane, and to Mame at any rate, it seemed highly informed. But there was no concealing from her keen eyes that the old boy was thin as a rail. In fact she would hardly have been surprised if some bright morning a wind from the east had blown him away altogether. As for his clothes, in spite of the wonderful air with which he wore them, and good as they had been, they were almost threadbare and literally shone with age.

Mame gathered from one of the tabbies, who in the process of time began to thaw a little, that Mr. Falkland Vavasour was a distant connection of the landlady’s. This fact was held to explain why he was allowed to live at Fotheringay House while invariably taking his meals at his club. At least it was generally understood that it was at his club that he took his meals. But wherever he may have taken them, even if the food was more delicate than at Fotheringay House, it could hardly have been more abundant. Week by week the old man grew thinner and thinner. His step on the drawing room carpet grew lighter and more feeble. Even his wonderful voice lost something of its timbre. Yet amid all these signs of decay, he retained that alert, sprightly man-of-the-worldliness which Mame found so curiously fascinating.

One morning, soon after breakfast, when she had been nearly five weeks at Fotheringay House, she sat in a corner of the dismal drawing room adding up her accounts and gloomily wondering whether the time had not come to look for “board and residence” that would cost less. Suddenly there came a rude shock. Mrs. Toogood entered in a state of agitation. Mr. Falkland Vavasour had just been found dead in his bed.

A doctor had already been sent for. But until he arrived the cause of Mr. Falkland Vavasour’s death must remain, like the old man himself, a mystery. The landlady as well as her p.g.’s were quite at a loss to account for the tragic occurrence. Miss Glendower, the most conversational of the tabbies, opined that it must be sheer old age. Dear Mr. Falkland Vavasour must certainly be very old.

Miss Du Rance agreed that he must be. For was he not playing the junior lead at the Liverpool Rotunda when the news came of President Lincoln’s assassination?

“What year was that?” asked Miss Glendower.

“’Sixty-five.” Mame gave that outstanding date in history with pride and with promptitude. Before starting east she had fortified a memory naturally good by a correspondence course; therefore she could trust it.