“I mean, put his stick under his arm and his hat on.”
“Oh, gladly,” said Parker, “ever so gladly.”
“And escort him down the drive and open the front gate for him.”
Preceded by Parker, therefore, I left the room, and though it was perhaps unfortunate that there were two other servants in the hall, at Parker’s request one of them brought my hat, which Parker herself put on my head, while the other inserted my walking-stick, handle foremost, beneath my left arm-pit. Thanking them graciously, but without undue familiarity, and once again preceded by Parker, I then moved down the drive, of which this gentle domestic opened the front gate for me. Nor was that the last service that she was privileged to render me, for acting upon a suggestion that she had obligingly volunteered, I visited a tailor in Enfield High Street to whom, as I soon discovered, she hoped to be betrothed. An admirable young man, he had not as yet made up his mind as to whether it would be discreet to grant her request, but he was happy to provide me with two entirely new buttons and personally to affix them to the brink of my trousers.
Completely restored, then, in respect of my clothes, and physically recuperated with some excellent buns, I was enabled to assimilate the scenes of my return journey with an even keener appreciation, and to arrive at Paternoster Row in the full confidence of final success. Not having a visiting-card, I had made up my mind to announce myself as a messenger from Mrs. Chrysostom; and, as it proved, this was the means of securing me an almost immediate audience. A somewhat short and extremely stout man with a heavily-coloured face and a drooping grey moustache, Mr. Chrysostom Lorton, whom I recognized from his photograph, might rather have been a general than a man of commerce; and I cannot say that a first inspection of him gave me entire satisfaction. Undoubtedly well-dressed, with a serpentine gold ring encasing the lower portion of each third finger, I was rather disagreeably affected both by his bushy and protruding eyebrows as well as by his attitude towards a slight mischance associated with the inception of our interview. For in presenting the envelope, with which I had assured him Mrs. Chrysostom had entrusted me, I unfortunately in the first place handed him the one in which she had placed my posterior trouser-buttons. For a moment he stared at them with bulging eyeballs, and then I regret to say that he apparently forgot himself.
“Good God,” he said, “what the hell—crumph, crumph—what do you mean, sir?”
Equally surprised, I have always been glad to remember that I was the first to recover my equanimity. Laughing merrily, I handed him the second envelope—in point of bestowal, of course, the first.
“Although you must not assume,” I said, “that my natural mirth in any degree condones your involuntary blasphemy.”
“Condones my what?” he said. “Crumph, crumph. But how the devil did she get hold of them?”
Still clinging to the original envelope, whose texture he obviously recognized, his globular eyes continued to be focussed on the two buttons before him. Briefly I explained to him the circumstances of their detachment. But for a considerable time he kept referring to the subject.