“Dear father,” she said, drawing herself away, and smiling all aglow, while tears proclaimed a joy too deep for any surface smile to speak, “this is our dear friend, my preserver, Mr. Wade.”
Mr. Clitheroe studied me with a bewildered look, as I have seen an old hulk of a mariner peer anxiously into a driving sea-fog from the shore, while he talked of shipmates shaken from the yard, or of brave ships that sunk in unknown seas. Then the mist slowly cleared away from the old gentleman’s dim eyes, and he saw me in the scenery of my acting with him.
“Ah yes!” he said, in a mild, dreamy voice, “I see it all. Sizzum’s train, Fort Bridger, the Ball, the man with a bloody blanket on his head, you and your friend galloping off over the prairie,—I see it all.”
He paused, and seemed to review all that wild error of his into the wilderness.
“Yes, I see it all,” he continued. “My dear Mr. Wade, I remember you with unspeakable gratitude. You and your friend saved me this dearest daughter. I have suffered wearing distress since then, and you must pardon me for forgetting you one instant. Excuse my left hand! Dwarf George is a capital machinist, but he says he cannot put new springs into my right. That is nothing, my dear Mr. Wade, that is nothing. God has given me peace of mind at last, my dear daughter has forgiven me all my old follies, and my stanch old mate will never let me want a roof over my head, or a crust of his bread and a sup of his can.”
There is a Hansom cab-horse, now or late of London, who must remember me with asperity.
But then there is a cabman who is my friend for life, if a giant fare can win a cabman’s heart.
By the side of the remembrance of my gallop down Luggernel Alley, I have a picture in my mind of myself, in a cab, cutting furiously through the cañons of London in chase of a lover. The wolves and cayotes of the by-streets—there are no antelopes in London—did not attempt to follow our headlong speed. We rattled across Westminster Bridge, up Whitehall, and so into May Fair to Lady Biddulph’s door.
The footman—why did he grin when he saw me?—recognized me as the family friend of yesterday, and ushered me without ceremony into the breakfast-room, where the family were all assembled.