wanted to act. What do I do?"
"If you're Lord Herbert, which is the part they wanted a man for,
you talk to me most of the time."
Jimmy decided that the piece had been well cast.
The dressing-gong sounded just as they entered the hall. From a
door on the left, there emerged two men, a big man and a little one,
in friendly conversation. The big man's back struck Jimmy as
familiar.
"Oh, father," Molly called. And Jimmy knew where he had seen the
back before.
The two men stopped.
"Sir Thomas," said Molly, "this is Mr. Pitt."
The little man gave Jimmy a rapid glance, possibly with the object
of detecting his more immediately obvious criminal points; then, as
if satisfied as to his honesty, became genial.
"I am very glad to meet you, Mr. Pitt, very glad," he said. "We have
been expecting you for some time."
Jimmy explained that he had lost his way.
"Exactly. It was ridiculous that you should be compelled to walk,
perfectly ridiculous. It was grossly careless of my nephew not to
let us know that you were coming. My wife told him so in the car."
"I bet she did," said Jimmy to himself. "Really," he said aloud, by
way of lending a helping hand to a friend in trouble, "I preferred
to walk. I have not been on a country road since I landed in
England." He turned to the big man, and held out his hand. "I don't
suppose you remember me, Mr. McEachern? We met in New York."
"You remember the night Mr. Pitt scared away our burglar, father,"
said Molly.
Mr. McEachern was momentarily silent. On his native asphalt, there
are few situations capable of throwing the New York policeman off
his balance. In that favored clime, savoir faire is represented by a
shrewd blow of the fist, and a masterful stroke with the truncheon
amounts to a satisfactory repartee. Thus shall you never take the
policeman of Manhattan without his answer. In other surroundings,
Mr. McEachern would have known how to deal with the young man whom
with such good reason he believed to be an expert criminal. But
another plan of action was needed here. First and foremost, of all
the hints on etiquette that he had imbibed since he entered this
more reposeful life, came the maxim: "Never make a scene." Scenes,
he had gathered, were of all things what polite society most
resolutely abhorred. The natural man in him must be bound in chains.
The sturdy blow must give way to the honeyed word. A cold, "Really!"
was the most vigorous retort that the best circles would
countenance. It had cost Mr. McEachern some pains to learn this
lesson, but he had done it. He shook hands, and gruffly acknowledged
the acquaintanceship.
"Really, really!" chirped Sir Thomas, amiably. "So, you find
yourself among old friends, Mr. Pitt."
"Old friends," echoed Jimmy, painfully conscious of the ex-
policeman's eyes, which were boring holes in him.
"Excellent, excellent! Let me take you to your room. It is just
opposite my own. This way."
In his younger days, Sir Thomas had been a floor-walker of no mean
caliber. A touch of the professional still lingered in his brisk
movements. He preceded Jimmy upstairs with the restrained suavity
that can be learned in no other school.
They parted from Mr. McEachern on the first landing, but Jimmy could
still feel those eyes. The policeman's stare had been of the sort
that turns corners, goes upstairs, and pierces walls.
CHAPTER XIII
SPIKE'S VIEWS
Nevertheless, it was in an exalted frame of mind that Jimmy dressed
for dinner. It seemed to him that he had awakened from a sort of
stupor. Life, so gray yesterday, now appeared full of color and
possibilities. Most men who either from choice or necessity have
knocked about the world for any length of time are more or less
fatalists. Jimmy was an optimistic fatalist. He had always looked on
Fate, not as a blind dispenser at random of gifts good and bad, but
rather as a benevolent being with a pleasing bias in his own favor.
He had almost a Napoleonic faith in his star. At various periods of
his life (notably at the time when, as he had told Lord Dreever, he
had breakfasted on bird-seed), he had been in uncommonly tight
corners, but his luck had always extricated him. It struck him that
it would be an unthinkable piece of bad sportsmanship on Fate's part
to see him through so much, and then to abandon him just as he had
arrived in sight of what was by far the biggest thing of his life.
Of course, his view of what constituted the biggest thing in life
had changed with the years. Every ridge of the Hill of Supreme
Moments in turn had been mistaken by him for the summit; but this
last, he felt instinctively, was genuine. For good or bad, Molly was
woven into the texture of his life. In the stormy period of the
early twenties, he had thought the same of other girls, who were now
mere memories as dim as those of figures in a half-forgotten play.
In their case, his convalescence had been temporarily painful, but
brief. Force of will and an active life had worked the cure. He had
merely braced himself, and firmly ejected them from his mind. A week
or two of aching emptiness, and his heart had been once more in
readiness, all nicely swept and garnished, for the next lodger.
But, in the case of Molly, it was different. He had passed the age
of instantaneous susceptibility. Like a landlord who has been
cheated by previous tenants, he had become wary. He mistrusted his
powers of recuperation in case of disaster. The will in these
matters, just like the mundane "bouncer," gets past its work. For
some years now, Jimmy had had a feeling that the next arrival would
come to stay; and he had adopted in consequence a gently defensive
attitude toward the other sex. Molly had broken through this, and he
saw that his estimate of his will-power had been just. Methods that
had proved excellent in the past were useless now. There was no
trace here of the dimly consoling feeling of earlier years, that
there were other girls in the world. He did not try to deceive
himself. He knew that he had passed the age when a man can fall in
love with any one of a number of types.
This was the finish, one way or the other. There would be no second
throw. She had him. However it might end, he belonged to her.
There are few moments in a man's day when his brain is more
contemplative than during that brief space when he is lathering his
face, preparatory to shaving. Plying the brush, Jimmy reviewed the
situation. He was, perhaps, a little too optimistic. Not
unnaturally, he was inclined to look upon his luck as a sort of
special train which would convey him without effort to Paradise.
Fate had behaved so exceedingly handsomely up till now! By a series
of the most workmanlike miracles, it had brought him to the point of
being Molly's fellow-guest at a country-house. This, as reason
coldly pointed out a few moments later, was merely the beginning,
but to Jimmy, thoughtfully lathering, it seemed the end. It was only
when he had finished shaving, and was tying his cravat, that he
began to perceive obstacles in his way, and sufficiently big
obstacles, at that.
In the first place, Molly did not love him. And, he was bound to
admit, there was no earthly reason why she ever should. A man in
love is seldom vain about his personal attractions. Also, her father
firmly believed him to be a master-burglar.
"Otherwise," said Jimmy, scowling at his reflection in the glass,
"everything's splendid." He brushed his hair sadly.