“A-cabinet-making he went as a boy, and cut his fingers cruel, and the Wraye Abbey housekeeper fainted dead away at the sight of the blood, they said!—and the head-house-maid gave notice at being asked for cobwebs, which she vowed and declared not one were to be found in the place, though answer for attics how can you? And he had my name pat, Miss Ada, so soon as I answered the door. ‘Halloa, Husnuggle!’ he says; ‘so you’ve come up from Peakshire to help nurse the sick governesses?’ And I says: ‘Yes, Master Robert, and it’s like the good old times come back, to see your handsome, smiling face again.’ And you’ll come to him in a few minutes?”
“The minutes have passed, Husnuggle, while you have been talking. I am going down to Mr. Bertham now.”
She found him in a little ground-floor parlor, sacred to accounts and the semi-private interviews accorded by the Lady Superintendent to shabby-genteel visitors with hungry faces (growing still more wan as the tale of penury was told) and smartish visitors with impudent faces, apt to flush uncomfortably under the keen scrutiny of those blue-gray eyes. It was plainly but comfortably furnished, and a red fire glowed in its grate of shining steel, and a plump and sleek and well-contented cat dozed happily upon its hearthrug.
You saw Bertham as a tall, lightly-built man of barely thirty, with a bright, spirited, handsome face and a frank, gay, cordial manner. No trace of the pompousness of the ex-Secretary of State either in his appearance, voice or handshake: a warm and cordial grip was to be had from Bertham; or, in default of this, a brusque nod that said: “You are objectionable, and I prefer to keep clean hands!”
He was striding lightly up and down the little parlor, with the loose ends of his black satin cravat—voluminous, according to the fashion of the time—floating behind him; and each time he covered the distance from the hearthrug to the muslin-blinded window he would stop, look impatiently at his watch, and recommence his walk.
She said, standing in the doorway, watching him do this:
“You are not in a genuine hurry, or you would not be here at all.”
“Ada!” He turned with a look of glad relief, and as she noiselessly closed the door and came to meet him, he took both the womanly cordial hands she held out to him, and pressed them in his own. “It does one good to see you. It does one good even to know you anchored here in Cavendish Street, and not flying from Berlin to Paris, from Paris to Rome, from Rome to Heaven-knows-where—comparing foreign systems of Hospital management and sanitation with our own, and finding ours everywhere to be hopelessly out of date, and inferior, and wrong....”
“As it is!” she said—“And is it not time we knew it? so that we can prove those mistaken who say, ‘To be insular is to be strong, perhaps, but at the same time it is to be narrow-minded.’”
“Ah! Ada, Ada!” he said, and his sweet and mellow voice had sadness in it. “If we all lived up to your standard, the Millennium would have come, and Governments would cease from troubling, and War Secretaries would be at rest.”