"Good Lard, my dear—excuse—old chap, you know!—why, good Lard, what a fool I am! Why, I knoo your father in India."
But he stops suddenly, to Sally inexplicably. She does not see that General Pellew has laid a finger of admonition on his lips.
"I never saw my father," she says. It is a kind of formula of hers which covers all contingencies with most people. This time she does not want it to deadlock the conversation, which is what it usually serves for, so she adds: "You really knew him?"
"Hardly knoo," is the reply. "Put it I met him two or three times, and you'll about toe the line for a start. Goin' off at that, we soon come up to my knowin' the Colonel's not your grandfather." Major Roper does not get through the whole of the last word—asthma forbids it—but his meaning is clear. Only, Sally is a direct Turk, as we have seen, and likes clearing up things.
"You know my friend Lætitia Wilson's mother, Major Roper?" The Major expresses not only that he does, but that his respectful homage is due to her as a fine woman—even a queenly one—by kissing his finger-tips and raising his eyes to heaven. "Well, Lætitia (Tishy, I call her) says you told her mother you knew my father in India, and went out tiger-hunting with him, and he shot a tiger two hundred yards off and gave you the skin." Sally lays
stress on the two hundred yards as a means of identification of the case. No doubt the Major owned many skins, but shot at all sorts of distances.
It is embarrassing for the old boy, because he cannot ignore General Pellew's intimations over Sally's head, which she does not see. He is to hold his tongue—that is their meaning. Yes, but when you have made a mistake, it may be difficult to begin holding it in the middle. Perhaps it would have been safer to lose sight of the subject in the desert of asthma, instead of reviving it the moment he got to an oasis.
"Some misunderstanding'," said he, when he could speak. "I've got a tiger-skin the man who shot it gave me out near Nagpore, but he wasn't your father." How true that was!
"Do you remember his name?" Sally wants him to say it was Palliser again, to prove it all nonsense, but a warning finger of the old General makes him desperate, and he selects, as partially true, the supposed alias which—do you remember all this?—he had ascribed to the tiger-shooter in his subsequent life in Australia.
"Perfectly well. His name was Harrisson. A fine shot. He went away to Australia after that."