The doctor was touched oddly by this sordid little romance of the kitchen and backstairs. Perhaps certain long, long dead and buried hopes, dreams, disappointments of his own stirred, faintly responsive beneath their graves; oh, that grim, arid little cemetery walled off in some corner of every heart! Ghosts walk about it, and we call them Regrets.
"What have you been doing since?" the old man asked gently.
"Nothing much, sir—hodd jobs, waitin' in heating-'ouses, and such-like," Huddesley answered openly. "'Tain't what Hi've been used to, but Hi can turn my 'and to most anything. Hi saw the paper, and Hi thought Hi'd like to get with a gentleman again; there was hanother hadvertisement in from the big 'ous hup there with the pillars, that Hi hinquired habout—but Hi found they don't 'ave nobody but coloured."
Mrs. Pallinder recalled this circumstance afterwards, with some regret. "He was here quite a while," she said. "The cook told me making inquiries in the kitchen—but I didn't see him. Such a pity—the coloured servants wouldn't have minded, but you can't expect a white man to sit down with them, you know. Well," she would conclude with her charming smile, "if I couldn't have him, I don't know of anybody I'd rather see him with than Doctor Vardaman." The doctor put a few more questions for form's sake, and ended by engaging Huddesley on the spot. "As to his references," he said, "I never troubled to look them up. A man like that is his own reference. Lord What's-his-Name of Berkeley Square, London, and What's-his-Name's Hall, Yorks, was a trifle too far off for me to bombard him with letters about a servant whom he had probably entirely forgotten. I'll risk Huddesley."
The event justified him; never had the doctor lived in such comfort—never, that is, since the death of his spinster sister, some years before. His boots and broadcloth showed the ex-valet's ministrations; the old gentleman gave choice little dinners; it was his turn to send dainties about amongst his friends. The only fault he ever found in Huddesley was a certain sour aversion to society for which, as Doctor Vardaman remarked, the man could hardly be blamed. "He never takes a day out, and won't look at a woman," said the doctor. "Most men of his class, after such an experience, take for a while at least to drink, or other reprehensible courses. And indeed I suspect that Huddesley didn't put in all of that dismal two years in the chaste occupations of waiting in heating-'ouses, and hother hodd jobs. But I don't want to push the inquiry. After all, he's had a pretty hard time for a young man—he's not over thirty, I think—what would you have? We're none of us saints."
FOOTNOTE:
[4] This was a negro settlement, a survival of old "Underground Railroad" days, full of bad characters, about half a mile off, towards the river. It has been improved away of late years.—M. S. W.