“My father is a non-smoker, as well as a teetotaler, miss,” replied Phoebe.
“Dear me!” murmured Miss Lindon. “It's going to be a great puzzle.”
CHAPTER VII
IT was a puzzle to John as much as to the palpitating lady, and in the maze of his puzzledom the gleam of humour that visited him during their interview lost its way. Walter Herold's eyes, however, twinkled maliciously when he heard John's account at once rueful and pig-headed. Then he grew serious.
“It will be comic opera all the time. It can't be done.”
“It 's going to be done,” said John, obstinately. “There's nothing else to do. If I were a rich man, I could work wonders with a scratch in my cheque-book. I could hire an unexceptionable colonel's or clergyman's widow to do the business. But I'm not. How I'm going to get the house together, as it is, I don't know. Besides,” he added, turning with some savageness on his friend, “if you think it a comic-opera idea, kindly remember it was you who started it.”
Though Herold was silenced for the moment, to the back of his mind still clung the first suggestion he had made. It was the common-sense idea that, given a knowledge of John's relations with the Southcliff household, would have occurred to anybody. John had it in his power to befriend the unhappy child without trying the rash experiment of raising her social status. Wherein lay the advantage of bringing her up as a lady? A pampered maid in a luxurious home does not drag out the existence of a downtrodden slave. Such have been known to smile and sing, even to bless their stars, and finally to marry a prince in grocer's disguise, and to live happy ever afterwards. With John's description of the girl's dog-like eyes in his memory, Herold pictured her as a devoted handmaiden to Stellamaris, a romantic, mediaeval appanage of the sea-chamber. What more amazingly exquisite destiny could await not only one bred in the gutter, but any damsel far more highly born? Her silence as to the past could be insured under ghastly penalties which would have no need of imagination for their appeal. That of course would be an ultimate measure. He felt certain that a couple of months' probation in the atmosphere of the Channel House would compel any human being not a devil incarnate to unthinking obedience to the Unwritten Law. By following this scheme, Unity would achieve salvation, Stellamaris acquire a new interest in life, and John himself be saved not only from financial worries, but from grotesquely figuring in comic opera. As for Miss Lindon, he felt certain that she would fall down on her knees and offer up thanksgivings to the God of her grandmothers.
But of this scheme John would hear no word. He bellowed his disapproval like an angry bull, rushed out, as it were, with lowered head, into the thick of house-agents, and before Herold could catch him in a milder humour he had signed the lease of a little house in Kilburn, overlooking the Paddington Recreation Ground. By the time it was put in order and decorated, he declared, Unity would be in a fit condition to take up her abode there with Miss Lindon and himself.