So he prepared to disappear. From his bedroom window he could see, as he dressed, the pale head of Mr. Samuel Rust on a far fir-crowned slope, looking away over the green land towards London, waiting, side by side with the divine.
The gardener took three slices of dry bread from the breakfast which waited expectantly on a table in the hall, and went out. But under a gorse bush amongst the heather, he found some tiny scarlet flowers. He picked two or three, and returning put them on the breakfast plate of Mr. Samuel Rust. He put a halfpenny there too.
“Very vagabondish—tra-la-la ...” he murmured tunefully, and studied the infinitesimal effect with his head on one side.
Then he disappeared. He did it straightforwardly along the open road, as the best vagabonds do, and he was pleased with his fidelity to the part.
Presently he recalled for the first time Mr. Samuel Rust’s promise of a happy suggestion for that morning. For a moment he wondered, for a second he regretted, but he posed as being devoid of curiosity. This is a good pose, for in time it comes true. It eventually withers the little silly tentacles which at first it merely ignores. Curiosity needs food as much as any of us, and dies soon if denied it. And I am glad, for it seems to me that curiosity and spite are very closely akin, and that spite is very near to the bottom of the pit.
The memory of Mr. Rust’s remark, however, kept the gardener for some moments busy being incurious. He was not altogether successful in his pose, for when the pallid owner of the Red Place stepped out of a thicket in front of him, he thought with a secret quiver, “Now I shall know what it was....”
“Taking a morning walk—what?” remarked Mr. Rust, achieving his ambition, the commonplace, for once in perfection.
“No,” replied the gardener (one who never told a lie unless he was posing as a liar), “I was leaving you. I have left a smile of thanks and a halfpenny on your plate. You know I’m a rover, an incurable vagabond, and my fraternity never disappears in an ordinary way in the station fly.”
It is rather tiresome to have to explain one’s poses. It is far worse than having to explain one’s witticisms, and that is bad enough.
“Come back to breakfast,” said Samuel. “I can let you into a much more paying concern than vagabondage.”