“They were that, indeed,” said Sarah with a smile, as one who understood that sort of thing. “He, I’m sure, worshiped the ground she walked on, and she was just as bad. It came as a surprise to me that anything was wrong, though latterly she did use to have red eyes sometimes after he had been with her.”
“What name did she call him by?” asked David. “His name was Johann Strauss, wasn’t it?”
“He was a Mr. Strauss, sir, yes, but not the other name you say. At least, she always called him Harry.”
“Henry is sometimes the English for Johann, you see,” muttered David, with a random guess that Sarah was none the wiser. “Henry, too, was the name of the child, wasn’t it? How about the child? Don’t you know where it is?”
“I only know that she used to go every Tuesday and Thursday by the seventeen minutes past two train from Baker-St., and be back by six o’clock, so it couldn’t have been very far. ’Pon my word, sometimes she’d go half crazy over that child. There was a little box of clothes that she’s many a time made me waste half a day over, showing me the things, as if I’d never seen them afore, everything that was possible embroidered with violets, and she’d always be making—”
“Fond of violets, was she?” broke in David, ready enough to catch at the phrase.
“Oh, it was all violets with her,—violets in her hair, at her neck, at her waist, and all about the place. She had a sister called Violet, and I came to know the sister as well as I knew herself in a manner of speaking, she was always telling me about her. For often she had nobody to talk to, and then she’d make me sit down to hear about her mother and this Miss Vi and the child, and what she meant to do when her marriage could be made public, and that. She was a good, affectionate lady, was Miss Gwen, sir. You couldn’t help loving her, and it was a mortal hard thing what happened.”
It was just then that the mistress of the tavern looked in with an unsympathetic face; so David rose and slipped a gold coin into the hand of the staring Sarah. The talk had already lasted a long while, and the inn-door had to be opened to let him out.
He walked the two miles back to the station, and there learned that the last up-train for the night had just left. Even on the suburban lines there is a limit to late hours.
This carelessness on his own part caused him to growl. It was now a question either of knocking up some tavern, or of tramping to London—about twenty-one miles. However, twenty-one miles made no continent to him, and, after posting himself by questions as to the route, he set out.