Some one who must have heard the news somehow or other of Teddy’s return home had decorated the front of the old waiting-room with evergreens and sunflowers; and a sort of triumphal arch also being erected on the arrival platform of the same floral pattern.
Who could have done it?
Why, no less a person than Jupp, whose black beard seemed all the blacker, surrounding his good-humoured face, as he came out of the office with Mary on his arm, and a young Master Jupp and another little Mary toddling behind them—the whilom porter no longer dressed in grimy velveteens, but in a smart black frock-coat, his Sunday best, while his wife was equally spruce.
“I know it’s ag’in the rules, miss,” he explained to Conny; “but I see the telegram as said Master Teddy’d be here this arternoon, God bless him, and I’m thankful, that I am, he’s restored safe and sound from the bottom of the sea and Davy Jones’s Locker, as we all on us thought. So says I to Grigson, my old mate as was, who’s in charge here now, and we detarmined as how we’d make a kind of show like to welcome of him home.”
“You’re a right-down brick, Jupp!” said Doctor Jolly, shaking him by the hand, while Mary kissed her former nurse children all round; and, while they were all exchanging congratulations, up came the train rumbling and whistling and panting and puffing into the station, the engine bearing a Union Jack tied to the funnel, for Jupp’s interest in two of the special passengers being brought to Endleigh was well-known on the line.
Hardly had the train come to a standstill than out jumped Teddy, a trifle taller and broader across the shoulders as might have been expected from his two years of absence, but the same open-faced boy with the curly brown hair and blue eyes that all remembered so well.
What a meeting it was, to be sure, and how he hugged his sisters and Dr Jolly and Jupp and Mary all round—Uncle Jack almost being unnoticed for the moment, although he did not appear to mind it, looking on with a sympathetic grin of delight at the general joy expressed in every countenance present!
The doctor’s “shanderadan” had a full cargo back to the vicarage, everybody talking to everybody all at once and none being able to finish a complete sentence—little Cissy keeping tight hold of Teddy’s arm the while as if fearful of losing him again and thinking it might be all a dream.
When they got to the house Teddy was through the gate and across the lawn in two bounds, tapping at the door of the study before his father knew that he had come.
Like another father, the vicar was overcome with glad emotion, clasping him in his arms and embracing him, weeping as he cried in a broken voice: