“Well, not altogether,” he replied, “at least, not in a worldly sense. He left his affairs in a very complicated state, and his eldest son went straight up to London to consult me about them, and, not finding me there, and time being important, went to Kebble. I was rather disappointed when I got back and heard about it.”
“Umph!” I said; “she’s not a smart spirit, anyway.”
“No,” he answered, “perhaps not. But, you see, something did really happen.”
After that his affection for “Maria” increased tenfold, while her attachment to himself became a burden to his friends. She grew too big for her table, and, dispensing with all mechanical intermediaries, talked to him direct. She followed him everywhere. Mary’s lamb couldn’t have been a bigger nuisance. She would even go with him into the bedroom, and carry on long conversations with him in the middle of the night. His wife objected; she said it seemed hardly decent, but there was no keeping her out.
She turned up with him at picnics and Christmas parties. Nobody heard her speak to him, but it seemed necessary for him to reply to her aloud, and to see him suddenly get up from his chair and slip away to talk earnestly to nothing in a corner disturbed the festivities.
“I should really be glad,” he once confessed to me, “to get a little time to myself. She means kindly, but it is a strain. And then the others don’t like it. It makes them nervous. I can see it does.”
One evening she caused quite a scene at the club. Whibley had been playing whist, with the Major for a partner. At the end of the game the Major, leaning across the table toward him, asked, in a tone of deadly calm, “May I inquire, sir, whether there was any earthly reason” (he emphasised “earthly”) “for your following my lead of spades with your only trump?”
“I—I—am very sorry, Major,” replied Whibley apologetically. “I—I—somehow felt I—I ought to play that queen.”
“Entirely your own inspiration, or suggested?” persisted the Major, who had, of course, heard of “Maria.”
Whibley admitted the play had been suggested to him. The Major rose from the table.