“He’s ill—some sort of fever—poor chap—been ill three days, and they never told me or sent for me—just like their grit—meant to fight it out alone. I’m going out there at once.”
From day to day I had reports from Mr. Butt of the progress of Jones’s illness.
“I sit with him every day,” he said. “Poor chap,—he was very bad yesterday for a while,—mind wandered—quite delirious—I could hear him from the next room—seemed to think some one was hunting him—‘Is that damn old fool gone,’ I heard him say.
“I went in and soothed him. ‘There is no one here, my dear boy,’ I said, ‘no one, only Butt.’ He turned over and groaned. Mrs. Jones begged me to leave him. ‘You look quite used up,’ she said. ‘Go out into the open air.’ ‘My dear Mrs. Jones,’ I said, ‘what DOES it matter about me?’”
Eventually, thanks no doubt to Mr. Butt’s assiduous care, Everleigh-Jones got well.
“Yes,” said Mr. Butt to me a few weeks later, “Jones is all right again now, but his illness has been a long hard pull. I haven’t had an evening to myself since it began. But I’m paid, sir, now, more than paid for anything I’ve done,—the gratitude of those two people—it’s unbelievable —you ought to see it. Why do you know that dear little woman is so worried for fear that my strength has been overtaxed that she wants me to take a complete rest and go on a long trip somewhere—suggested first that I should go south. ‘My dear Mrs. Jones,’ I said laughing, ‘that’s the ONE place I will not go. Heat is the one thing I CAN’T stand.’ She wasn’t nonplussed for a moment. ‘Then go north,’ she said. ‘Go up to Canada, or better still go to Labrador,’—and in a minute that kind little woman was hunting up railway maps to see how far north I could get by rail. ‘After that,’ she said, ‘you can go on snowshoes.’ She’s found that there’s a steamer to Ungava every spring and she wants me to run up there on one steamer and come back on the next.”
“It must be very gratifying,” I said.
“Oh, it is, it is,” said Mr. Butt warmly. “It’s well worth anything I do. It more than repays me. I’m alone in the world and my friends are all I have. I can’t tell you how it goes to my heart when I think of all my friends, here in the club and in the town, always glad to see me, always protesting against my little kindnesses and yet never quite satisfied about anything unless they can get my advice and hear what I have to say.
“Take Jones for instance,” he continued—“do you know, really now as a fact,—the hall porter assures me of it,—every time Everleigh-Jones enters the club here the first thing he does is to sing out, ‘Is Mr. Butt in the club?’ It warms me to think of it.” Mr. Butt paused, one would have said there were tears in his eyes. But if so the kindly beam of his spectacles shone through them like the sun through April rain. He left me and passed into the cloak room.
He had just left the hall when a stranger entered, a narrow, meek man with a hunted face. He came in with a furtive step and looked about him apprehensively.