“Call it three weeks,” said Dick. “I know the limit to the governor's patience. He never let a matter remain unsettled for one month in his life.” He filled his pipe deliberately, standing with his legs wide apart and his broad back to the fire, while an expression of amused satisfaction gathered upon his good-looking countenance.
“I say,” he remarked, abruptly, “don't think I'm ungrateful. You did the trick, monsieur, and I won't forget it in a hurry.”
As he said this he turned his back to me and took a match-box from the mantel-shelf, as though he had merely made a casual remark about the weather, but by this time I knew the value of such undemonstrative British thanks.
Another condition that Sir Philip had made was that his son should not return to London until the Christmas vacation was over, and, though this was a matter of merely two or three weeks, Dick found it harder than a six months' postponement of his marriage. But to me, I fear, it did not seem so unreasonable, for, as he could not have his sweetheart's company, he insisted on retaining mine; so, after a polite protest, which Lady Shafthead declared to be unnecessary and Daisy to be absurd, I settled down to spend my Christmas at Helmscote.
At that time there was no one else staying in the house, so that when I sat down at dinner that night, one of a friendly company of five, I felt almost as though I was a member of the family. And the Shaftheads, on their part, seemed bent on increasing this illusion. Once I cheerfully alluded to my exile—cheerfully, because at that moment the thought had no sting.
“An exile?” said Lady Shafthead, smiling at me as a good mother might smile. “Not here, surely. You must not feel yourself an exile here.”
And, indeed, I did not. For the first time since I landed in this country, I felt no trace of strangeness, but almost as though I had begun to take root in the soil. Circumstances had not enabled me to enjoy any family life since I was a boy, and had I been given at that moment a free pardon and a ticket to Paris, I should have said, “Wait, please, for a few months, till I discover to which nation I really do belong. Here I am at home. Perhaps, if I return, I should now be lonely.”
The very look of my room when I retired to bed impressed me further with this feeling. The fire was so bright, the curtains so warm, every little circumstance so soothing. I drew up the blind and looked out of a latticed casement-window into a garden bathed in moonlight, and my heart was filled with gratitude. Last thing before I went to sleep, I remember seeing the firelight playing on the walls and mingling with a long ray from the moon, and the fantastic designs seemed to form themselves into letters making a message of welcome. And this message was signed “Daisy Shafthead.”
At what hour I woke I cannot say; but I felt as though I had not been long asleep, and that something must have roused me. The fire had burned low, but the long beam of moonlight still fell across my bed and made a patch of light on the opposite wall. Suddenly it was obscured, and at the same moment I most distinctly heard a noise—a noise at the window. I turned on my pillow with that curious sensation in my breast that by the metaphysical may easily be distinguished from exhilaration. I had left the curtains a little apart with an oblong of blind showing light between them. Now there was a dark body moving stealthily either before or behind this.
For a moment I lay still, then, with a spring so violent as almost to suggest that I had exercised some compulsion upon my movements, I leaped out of bed.