“When, Braddle, do you think I shall be able to take a drive again?” he asked his nurse.
Braddle was not prepared to say upon her own responsibility, but the doctor would tell him when he came in that afternoon.
“I feel astonishingly well, considering the sharpness of the attack,” her patient said. “Our little talk has quite stimulated me. When I go out,”—there was a gleam in the eye he raised to hers,—“I am going to call at Temple Barholm.”
“I knew tha would,” she commented with maternal familiarity. “I dunnot believe tha could keep away.”
A few weeks later there were some warm days, and his grace chose to go out in his pony-carriage. If he was not in some way amused, he found himself whirling, with rheumatic gout and seventy years, among recollections of vivid pictures better hung in galleries with closed doors. It was always possible to stop the pony-chaise by roadsides where solitary men sat by piles of stone, which they broke at leisure with hammers as though they were cracking nuts. He had spent many an agreeable half-hour in talk with a road-mender who could be led into conversation and was left elated by an extra shilling. As in years long past he had sat under chestnut-trees in the Apennines and shared the black bread and sour wine of a peasant, so in these days he frequently would have been glad to sit under a hedge and eat bread and cheese with a good fellow who did not know him and whose summing up of the domestic habits and needs of “the workin’-mon” or the amiabilities or degeneracies of the gentry would be expressed, figuratively speaking, in thoughts and words of one syllable. He did not, it might be told, desire to enter into conversation with his humble fellow-man from altruistic motives. He did it because there was always a chance more or less that he would be amused. He might hear of little tragedies or comedies; he much preferred the comedies. Blest with a neatly cynical sense of humor, he knew he had always been an entirely selfish man and that he was entirely selfish still, and was not revoltingly fretful and domineering only because he was constitutionally unirritable.
He was, however, amiably obstinate, and was accustomed to getting his own way in most things. On this day of his outing he insisted on driving himself in the face of arguments to the contrary. He was so fixed in his intention that his daughters and Mrs. Braddle were obliged to admit themselves overpowered.
“Nonsense! Nonsense!” he protested when they besought him to allow himself to be driven by a groom. “The pony does not need driving. He doesn’t go when he is driven. He frequently lies down and puts his cheek on his hand and goes to sleep, and I am obliged to wait until he wakes up.”
“But, Papa dear,” Lady Edith said, “your poor hands are not very strong. And he might run away and kill you. Please do be reasonable!”
“My dear girl,” he answered, “if he runs, I shall run after him and kill him when I catch him. George,” he called to the groom holding the plump pony’s head, “tell her ladyship what this little beast’s name is.”
“The Indolent Apprentice, your Grace,” the groom answered, touching his hat and suppressing a grin.