“I didn’t know you’d care about it,” said his son in mild surprise. “You see, it was this way. The fellow had wooden shoes on, and when the music began slow he began a shuffle, and gradually put on the pace till you couldn’t tell one foot from the other.”
Here Miss Rosalind broke into a derisive laugh.
“Really, Tom,” said she, “you are too clever. However did you guess that we were all dying to hear how a break-down is danced?”
“I didn’t till father said so.”
Here Roger and the two young ladies laughed again; whereat Tom, concluding he had said something good unawares, laughed too, and thought to himself how jolly it is to be clever and keep the table at a roar.
In private Captain Oliphant pursued the subject of Gustav and his relations (apart from their mutual connexion with the break-down) with the Maxfield tutor.
He received very little satisfaction from his inquiry. Tom was so full of his main topic that the other events of that memorable evening in town occupied but a secondary place in his memory.
He recollected Gustav as a good-natured foreigner whom Armstrong called by his Christian name, and who talked French in return. He could not remember where he lived, except that it was ten minutes’ walk from Christy’s Minstrels; nor had he the slightest idea what the two men talked about, except that Armstrong had promised to hold somebody’s hand, and that Gustav had tried to kiss him by way of recompense.
Captain Oliphant chose to take a very serious view of this disclosure. It fitted in exactly with his theory that the tutor was an adventurer of “shady antecedents,” and, as such, an undesirable companion for the late “dear one’s” orphan-boy.
“I should not feel I was doing my duty,” said he to Mr Pottinger that afternoon, “if I were not to follow this up. We don’t know whom we have to deal with; and the fact of Mr Ingleton having confided in him really, you know, weighs very little with me; old men of enfeebled intellect, my dear Pottinger, are so easily hoodwinked.”