By judicious pumping I discovered it was Harold Forsyth who had blown upon me and “queered my pitch,” as showmen say, having come over from Colchester to play golf, and been seized upon by the watchful Thatcher, who of course had noticed my unremitting attentions to his daughter. Upon which Harold, either because he fancied it his duty (old friends are often very inconsiderate) or from sheer stupidity, had let slip the disastrous news of my engagement to another lady; though, as a matter of fact, at the very moment of their conversation it was off and I was free.
Old Mrs. Thatcher took the situation in at a glance, and, either from a natural desire to see her granddaughter properly settled or from pure friendship for me, who had always been attentive to her, and once took a bee out of her hair (that animal being almost the only living thing she really feared), immediately suggested I should go off at once to the Ladbroke Grove Road, provided with a letter to the aunt from Mr. Thatcher, in which everything was explained, and I was given authority to interview and settle matters with my dear sweetheart. So, next morning early, off I drove to Nesshaven Station in the milk cart, gay as a lark—that chorister of the poor and the cheerful well-to-do—and by twelve o’clock was rattling in a cab down the Ladbroke Grove Road.
CHAPTER V
ANGLESEY LODGE—MY INTERVIEW WITH LUCY IN KENSINGTON GARDENS—NOT SO SATISFACTORY AS I COULD DESIRE
There was a piano-organ playing in front of Anglesey Lodge as I drove up; it was playing the old “Les Roses” waltz, and quite dramatic and affecting the music sounded as I impatiently waited in the drawing-room, hung with Doré’s works to impress parents, and with a model of the Taj under glass, done in soapstone, and sent by some girl-pupil, I imagine, who had married and gone out to India.
The aunt soon joined me, smiling, with Mr. Thatcher’s open letter in her hand, and a very handsome woman she must have been—indeed, still was—with traces, on a florid scale, of Lucy’s simple and yet delicate beauty.
She was so friendly, and made herself so fascinating, it was fully half an hour before I could get away. She told me Lucy was out with some of the pupils, and that, if I went to Kensington Gardens and walked down the Broad Walk, I should be sure to see them. Further, if we made it up (as we surely should, she graciously added), she begged me to come back to lunch at half-past one; though she must ask me not to walk home with the young ladies through the streets for fear of adverse neighborly comments, and upsetting them for the afternoon studies.
I was soon at the entrance to the gardens in the Bayswater Road, where the keeper’s lodge is, with its glass bottles of sweets and half-penny rock-buns; and, true enough, there was dear Lucy, sitting on one of the seats facing the walk, reading to one of the little girls, while the other bigger ones, perhaps half a dozen of them, were playing rounders in French, among the trees and the dead leaves.
“Combien de rounders avez-vous?” cried one of them as I came up; and “Courrez, Maud, courrez!” cried another, clapping her hands, as the tennis-ball in its torn cover whizzed close by me, whacked by a young person with a racquet, who was soon off on her round in a short frock but with uncommonly long legs.
I came quite close behind Lucy, taking care not to make the leaves rustle. She was reading Bonnechose’s History of France aloud, something about the wars of the Fronde and Cardinal Richelieu.