Mrs. Buckmaster murmured under her breath: "What was I saying to Mr. Christopher?" and thereon Mr. Pelly felt in honour bound to testify to her truthfulness. "Yes—Mrs. Buckmaster thought so." Nobody was very definite.
"But did he come here with you, General?" asked Mr. Pelly, who was gradually toning down to sane inquiry-point. Mixed replies said that the Captain had not been long in the house. Lady Upwell was interviewing him—they were, in fact, audible in the distance. The General supplied further information.
"You see," he said, "Master Jack and I had just arranged it all beautifully. I was to come here to let it out gently and not frighten Miss Upwell, and also to find how the land lay. Because, you see after all, they were not engaged...."
"Oh no! They were not engaged." This was a kind of chorus; after which the General continued:
"Anyhow, Miss Upwell might have picked up with some other young fellow. However, she hasn't. Well!—I was to come here and take the soundings, and his ship was to follow on; he meanwhile going down to inflict a full dramatic surprise on his own family at Granchester Towers. He said their nerves were strong enough, and it would do them good. He was to come on as soon as he could, unless he heard to the contrary. And then, as he was riding through Sampford Pagnell on his way here, what must be come upon but a man of his own company, who had been invalided home after enteritis, who had been drinking and got into a row. He stopped to see him out of his difficulties—had to go bail for him—and then came on here. But it made him late. And I should have been here sooner myself, only something went wrong with the trains. It made me so late that I almost made up my mind, if Jack wasn't here, to go back to the inn at Grewceham, so as not to frighten you all out of your wits."
"There's my wife coming up. I wonder what they've settled." Thus the Baronet.
Then her Ladyship came in, and following her, in tiptoe silence, the young soldier himself. But alas!—it was all true about the arm. There was the loose right sleeve, looped up to his coat. But its survivor was still in evidence, and Mr. Pelly, as he took the hand that was left in his own, wondered if he was not still dreaming, so full was his mind of the story of that other hand, lost four hundred years ago. He could not dismiss the picture from his thoughts; and as he stood there talking with the young soldier, in whom he could see the saddening of his terrible experience through all the joy of his return, he was always conscious of its presence, conscious of its eyes fixed on all that passed before it—conscious of its comparison between the lot of its original, and Madeline's. And it made the old gentleman feel quite eerie and uncomfortable. So he resolved to say good-night, and did so as soon as a pause came in an earnest conversation aside between the Baronet and his Lady, who seemed to be enforcing a view by argument. Mr. Pelly heard the last words:
"I have told this dear, silly fellow Mad must speak for herself. I won't say anything.... No—not to-morrow; she had better be told and come down now." Here a subcolloquy. "Wouldn't she have gone to bed? Oh no, Eliza said not. Besides, she could slip something on." And then the mainstream again. "You must give me a little time to tell her, you know. One o'clock, isn't it? That doesn't matter. Just think if it was a party! You'll find I'm right, George." For when Lady Upwell is pleased and excited she calls her husband by his Christian name without the Sir.
When she had departed the General went back on a previous conversation. "But we can't make out yet, Jack, how we came not to get any wire about it—as soon as it was known you were alive. It ought to have been in the papers a month ago."
"Nobody knows out there yet, except Head Quarters. Don't you see? As soon as I was fit to get on a horse, I rode all night across the veldt, and reported myself in the early morning. I begged them to keep me dark for a bit, and old Pipeclay said he could manage it...."