“Beg pardon, sir, but the master wants you.”
Raffles, the page-boy, who happened to be the messenger, was obliged to deliver his summons three times—the last time with the accompaniment of a tap on the tutor’s shoulder—before that virtuoso swung round on his stool and demanded—
“What is it, Raffles?”
“Please, sir, the master wants you hinstanter.”
Mr Armstrong was inclined to compliment Raffles on his Latin, but on second thoughts (the tutor’s second thoughts murdered a great number of his good sayings) he considered that neither the page nor himself would be much better for the jest, and spared himself.
He nodded to the messenger to go, and closing the piano, screwed his eye-glass in his eye, ready to depart.
“Please, sir,” said Raffles at the door, “the governor he’s dicky to-day. You’d best have your heye on ’im.”
“Thank you, Raffles; I will,” said the tutor, going out.
He paced the long passage which led from his quarters to the oak hall, whistling sotto voce a bar or two of the Schumann as he went; then his manner became sombre as he crossed the polished boards and entered the passage beyond which led to his employer’s library.
Old Roger Ingleton was sitting in the almost dark room, staring fixedly into the fire. There was little light except that of the flickering embers in his dim, worn face. Though not yet seventy, his spare form was bent into the body of an old, old man, and the hands, which feebly tapped the arms of the chair on which they rested, were the worn-out members of a man long past his work. He saw little and heard less; nor was he ever to be met outside the confines of his library, or, in summer weather, the sunny balcony on to which it opened. Only when he talked were you able to realise that this worn-out body did not belong to a Tithonus, but to a man whose inward faculties were still alert and vigorous, whatever might be said of his outward failure. Could he but have been accommodated with the physical frame of a man of fifty, he had spirit enough to fill it, and become once more what he was twenty years ago, a complete man.