“Indeed, yes,” I replied, and settled down into my fireside armchair to listen attentively and to make notes.
“Well,” pursued my Uncle Quintus, “that night when he was to rescue two lives from — death, maybe, Aubrey Smith, as was his way on Wednesdays, spent the evening with his sweetheart, Hylda, at Rose Villa, her home in Clapham. Rut from the moment when she opened the door to Aubrey that evening, Hylda had a feeling that this Wednesday was in some way special and different from the rest.
“ ‘Quite a beauty,’ she said of the bouquet which Aubrey handed her, but with a touch of reproach she said it, since Aubrey could ill afford such displays. Every Wednesday, it was true, he brought a bouquet, but this was a mass that must have cost ten shillings.
“She wondered why, and he knew that she wondered, there was such a sympathy between their natures, yet he offered no explanation; and she wondered why he was in black, with a black tie...
“Captain Hood himself — Hylda’s father — noticed it, as they sat to dinner, and made the remark, ‘Why, Aubrey, you look as if you were in mourning tonight.’
“ ‘But you know, sir,’ said Aubrey, ‘that I am the last of the crew — I haven’t a relative now to mourn for.’
“But he said it with shy eyelids, and Hylda, to whose ken his soul was an open book, understood that this evening Aubrey, for some reason, was concealing something or other from her.
“That startled her heart! There was the big bouquet, the black garb... What, then, was in the wind? Her eyes, when he was looking at his plate, kept silently inquiring it of his face.
“Once when Captain Hood had limped his lamed leg to his ingle-nook to muse there over his cheroot as usual, Aubrey looked as if disposed to tell something; Hylda by this time had withdrawn her pampered Lupot fiddle from its silk covering, and had it at her chin, Aubrey was accompanying her on the piano, and all down Rosehill Road faces were looking out from the rows of oriels, as was usual on Wednesday evenings, to hear the music — for Hylda, the hope of the Royal College, could make her fiddle discourse strange sorrows. She and Aubrey had done the Sonata in F, and were about to give a Lied, when, in the interval, their hands met as they turned the leaves of the second book, their hands and their eyes, and Hylda smiled, and he smiled; and he began then to say, ‘Hylda, perhaps I had better tell you—’ when Captain Hood from his nook called out, ‘Aubrey, let me hear that last melody of the Wallenstein that I like’; and Aubrey called back: ‘Quite so, sir,’ and started to render it.
“After which for hours they wearied out the ear with sweetness, and through it all Hylda waited to hear, but Aubrey said nothing.
“ ‘Dear heart,’ she whispered to him at the door near eleven when he was going, gazing up a moment on his breast into those girl-beguiling eyes of Aubrey, ‘God keep you.’
“He stooped to kiss her — a steepish stoop, he was so high up compared with her — saying, ‘We’ll meet for luncheon tomorrow at the Circus,’ and he went, she gazing after him, he in the falling snow waving his hat back at her — the most picturesque old hat on this planet, in such an egregious tone of green, turned down over the nose, with Art Student and Latin Quarter written all over it — and he was gone from her.
“He took train at Clapham Junction for Victoria, and from Victoria was off afoot (to save ’bus fare!) to his little flatlet in Maida Vale.
“It was during this tramp that he rescued the two lives.
“In an alley behind the Edgware Road it was. At that very spot, earlier in the night, a hungry man, who had desired to go to prison, had broken a street lamp; and just there, as Aubrey passed, stood a cab and a barrow, blocking the way; at the same moment a motor-car came round a corner, and, its driver not apparently sighting the barrow under the cab’s shadow, dashed on. Out of Aubrey’s mouth a shout of warning broke; in the rashness of the moment he even ran out from the pavement, so that, although the driver at once had his brakes on, Aubrey was knocked staggering, as the car bumped softly upon the barrow.
“In a moment there stood with him an old man and a young lady from the car, the old man saying: ‘My dear sir! are you hurt?’
“ ‘Not a bit!’ Aubrey cried.
“ ‘Papa, this is you in the rôle of chauffeur,’ the young lady remarked — in a queer species of whisper, husky, rapid, which, however (though the noise of the engine, running free, was in the ear), Aubrey could still hear.
“ ‘Now, Laura!’ — the old man turned upon her to insist that he was an accomplished chauffeur, then requested that Aubrey must go home with him for a glass of whisky, rather confirming Aubrey’s surmise that he was talking to an Irishman.
“ ‘But, sir, really—’ he began to say.
“ ‘Yes, come,’ Laura said to him in that same whispered way, and he gathered that her voice, owing to some affection of the vocal chords, was gone.
“ ‘Yes, come.’ There she stood, almost as tall as her tall father, draped in a pony-skin coat, its opening framing her face. ‘Yes, come.’ And now he went.
“ ‘An adventure!’ he said, as the three passed into a house in Brook Street: ‘on my birthday, too’ — this fact not having been mentioned to his sweetheart, Hylda Hood; and although he and Hylda had been engaged since they were thirteen, Hylda still remained ignorant what day his birthday was.
“ ‘Your birthday?’ from the old man, whose name had now turned out to be Sir Phipps O’Dowdy O’Donague: ‘now, that’s singular. I’ll give you some whisky for it — come on!’
“Aubrey was brought into an apartment with silken walls and two brawling fires; and here, pointing to a picture, he said at once, ‘Why, I saw that in last year’s Academy.’
“ ‘Ego pinxi,’ Laura said with a curtsey.
“ ‘Awfully well done,’ he breathed under it.
“ ‘Praise from Raphael.’ She curt-seyed again.
“ ‘Who told you that I am an artist?’ he asked.
“ ‘I may be dumb,’ she said, ‘but I’m not blind.’
“ ‘You dumb?’ he cried: ‘not quite, I think!’
“Her tongue flew as she sat stooped forward before him, her chin on her fists, flew in that breathy throat-whisper that went on as busily as a threshing-machine, or paddle-boxes threshing the sea; and he, listening with one ear to her and with the other to her father — for they fought against each other, speaking together in a race — thought that he had never lighted upon a pair of such live and brilliant beings. Father and daughter tossed rains of repartee at each other, jeered at each other, despaired of each other, yet were evidently chums. Neither could sit still six minutes. Sir Phipps jumped up to show the latest novel by Bourget, Laura jumped up, humming, to dash her hand over the piano keys, to show a Welsh crowth, or a miniature of Coquelin. Before twenty minutes Aubrey was at home with them; and once — the whisky had then come, and Laura had run out for a moment — Sir Phipps furtively took from out of his breast pocket a photograph, and furtively gave Aubrey a glimpse of it — the photograph of a lady.
“ ‘Well, the old sinner!’ was Aubrey’s first thought; his second was: ‘How perfect a beauty!’
“ ‘La Rosa,’ whispered the old man, thinking apparently that Aubrey would know the name; but Aubrey had no notion who La Rosa was.
“He wanted to take the photograph to feast his eyes on it; but now they could hear Laura’s steps, and Sir Phipps hurriedly hid it.