And now Edmund had been naughty on the Sabbath, and Mr. Wycherly knew what to expect.
Bread, watered by his tears, for Edmund. Bread, seasoned only by sorrowful reflection, for Miss Esperance.
Banishment for hungry Edmund if he cried aloud, and there were ducks for dinner, large fat ducks sent by Lady Alicia. Mr. Wycherly could smell the stuffing even now. Who would believe that the smell of sage and onions could bear so mournful a message?
The Greek characters of the Philebus he held in his hand danced before his eyes. He could not give his mind to the philosophy of beauty or the theory of pleasure. The doctrine of æsthetical, moral, and intellectual harmonies, pleasing as it was to him on ordinary occasions, failed to hold him just then, when all his mental vision was concentrated on a chubby, tearful figure whose misdeeds would debar him from duck for dinner.
Mr. Wycherly laid down his "Plato" and began to pace the room restlessly, finally taking up his stand at the window looking out on the garden. Where was that boy? Where had the monkey hidden himself? He was not with Mause, for Mr. Wycherly could see the old dog lying in a patch of sunshine on the little plot of grass.
He went back to his bookshelf for comfort: he wanted something human, something warm and faulty and sympathetic, and his eye lighted on "Tristram Shandy." "Tristram Shandy" was tight in the shelf—squeezed in between the "Phædo" and Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity"—Mr. Wycherly was nervous and agitated, and he must have pulled it out clumsily, for it fell to the ground with a thump.
As he stooped to recover it he caught sight of a plump brown leg protruding from beneath his sofa. He went down on his knees to look more closely, and there, cuddled up under the sofa, his curly head pillowed on his arm, lay Edmund, fast asleep. Edmund possessed a Wellingtonian capacity for falling asleep whenever he kept still. He had hidden under the sofa in Mr. Wycherly's room just before that gentleman took refuge there from the grieved annoyance of Miss Esperance at her grand-nephew's defection. Mr. Wycherly had shut his door, and no one dreamt of disturbing him to look there for the missing one.
Here was a pretty kettle of fish!
Although Mr. Wycherly knew that Miss Esperance would exonerate him from any actual participation in Edmund's truancy, he was assuredly accessory after the fact, and what was to be done?
"I hope he won't hit his head when he wakes up," Mr. Wycherly thought concernedly. "What a beautiful child he is!" and he knelt on where he was gazing admiringly at the slumbering cupid.