“Well,” he said, “if this ain't the limit! You may search ME!”
A respectable person in a white apron4 came to him from the other side of the room. It was Buttle's wife, who had been hastily called in.
“Sh—sh,” she said soothingly5. “Don't you worry. Nobody ain't goin' to search you. Nobody ain't. There! Sh, sh, sh,” rather as if he were a baby. Beginning to be conscious of a curious sense of weakness, Selden lay and stared at her in a helplessness which might have been considered pathetic. Perhaps he had got “bats in his belfry,” and there was no use in talking.
At that moment, however, the door opened and a young lady entered. She was “a looker,” G. Selden's weakness did not interfere6 with his perceiving. “A looker, by gee7!” She was dressed, as if for going out, in softly tinted8, exquisite9 things, and a large, strange hydrangea blue flower under the brim of her hat rested on soft and full black hair. The black hair gave him a clue. It was hair like that he had seen as Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughter rode by when he stood at the park gates at Mount Dunstan. “Bats in his belfry,” of course.
“How is he?” she said to the nurse.
“He's been seeming comfortable all day, miss,” the woman answered, “but he's light-headed yet. He opened his eyes quite sensible looking a bit ago, but he spoke10 queer. He said something was the limit, and that we might search him.”
Betty approached the bedside to look at him, and meeting the disturbed inquiry11 in his uplifted eyes, laughed, because, seeing that he was not delirious12, she thought she understood. She had not lived in New York without hearing its argot13, and she realised that the exclamation14 which had appeared delirium15 to Mrs. Buttle had probably indicated that the unexplainableness of the situation in which G. Selden found himself struck him as reaching the limit of probability, and that the most extended search of his person would fail to reveal any clue to satisfactory explanation.
She bent16 over him, with her laugh still shining in her eyes.
“I hope you feel better. Can you tell me?” she said.
His voice was not strong, but his answer was that of a young man who knew what he was saying.
“If I'm not off my head, ma'am, I'm quite comfortable, thank you,” he replied.
“I am glad to hear that,” said Betty. “Don't be disturbed. Your mind is quite clear.”
“All I want,” said G. Selden impartially17, “is just to know where I'm at, and how I blew in here. It would help me to rest better.”
“You met with an accident,” the “looker” explained, still smiling with both lips and eyes. “Your bicycle chain broke and you were thrown and hurt yourself. It happened in the avenue in the park. We found you and brought you in. You are at Stornham Court, which belongs to Sir Nigel Anstruthers. Lady Anstruthers is my sister. I am Miss Vanderpoel.”
“Hully gee!” ejaculated G. Selden inevitably18. “Hully GEE!” The splendour of the moment was such that his brain whirled. As it was not yet in the physical condition to whirl with any comfort, he found himself closing his eyes weakly.
“That's right,” Miss Vanderpoel said. “Keep them closed. I must not talk to you until you are stronger. Lie still and try not to think. The doctor says you are getting on very well. I will come and see you again.”
As the soft sweep of her dress reached the door he managed to open his eyes.
“Thank you, Miss Vanderpoel,” he said. “Thank you, ma'am.” And as his eyelids19 closed again he murmured in luxurious20 peace: “Well, if that's her—she can have ME—and welcome!”
She came to see him again each day—sometimes in a linen21 frock and garden hat, sometimes in her soft tints22 and lace and flowers before or after her drive in the afternoon, and two or three times in the evening, with lovely shoulders and wonderfully trailing draperies—looking like the women he had caught far-off glimpses of on the rare occasion of his having indulged himself in the highest and most remotely placed seat in the gallery at the opera, which inconvenience he had borne not through any ardent24 desire to hear the music, but because he wanted to see the show and get “a look-in” at the Four Hundred. He believed very implicitly25 in his Four Hundred, and privately—though perhaps almost unconsciously—cherished the distinction his share of them conferred upon him, as fondly as the English young man of his rudimentary type cherishes his dukes and duchesses. The English young man may revel26 in his coroneted beauties in photograph shops, the young American dwells fondly on flattering, or very unflattering, reproductions of his multi-millionaires' wives and daughters in the voluminous illustrated27 sheets of his Sunday paper, without which life would be a wretched and savourless thing.
Selden had never seen Miss Vanderpoel in his Sunday paper, and here he was lying in a room in the same house with her. And she coming in to see him and talk to him as if he was one of the Four Hundred himself! The comfort and luxury with which he found himself surrounded sank into insignificance28 when compared with such unearthly luck as this. Lady Anstruthers came in to see him also, and she several times brought with her a queer little lame29 fellow, who was spoken of as “Master Ughtred.” “Master” was supposed by G. Selden to be a sort of title conferred upon the small sons of baronets and the like. The children he knew in New York and elsewhere answered to the names of Bob, or Jimmy, or Bill. No parallel to “Master” had been in vogue30 among them.
Lady Anstruthers was not like her sister. She was a little thing, and both she and Master Ughtred seemed fond of talking of New York. She had not been home for years, and the youngster had never seen it at all. He had some queer ideas about America, and seemed never to have seen anything but Stornham and the village. G. Selden liked him, and was vaguely31 sorry for a little chap to whom a description of the festivities attendant upon the Fourth of July and a Presidential election seemed like stories from the Arabian Nights.
“Tell me about the Tammany Tiger, if you please,” he said once. “I want to know what kind of an animal it is.”
From a point of view somewhat different from that of Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance, Betty Vanderpoel found talk with him interesting. To her he did not wear the aspect of a foreign product. She had not met and conversed32 with young men like him, but she knew of them. Stringent33 precautions were taken to protect her father from their ingenuous34 enterprises. They were not permitted to enter his offices; they were even discouraged from hovering35 about their neighbourhood when seen and suspected. The atmosphere, it was understood, was to be, if possible, disinfected of agents. This one, lying softly in the four-post bed, cheerfully grateful for the kindness shown him, and plainly filled with delight in his adventure, despite the physical discomforts36 attending it, gave her, as he began to recover, new views of the life he lived in common with his kind. It was like reading scenes from a realistic novel of New York life to listen to his frank, slangy conversation. To her, as well as to Mr. Penzance, sidelights were thrown upon existence in the “hall bedroom” and upon previously37 unknown phases of business life in Broadway and roaring “downtown” streets.
His determination, his sharp readiness, his control of temper under rebuff and superfluous38 harshness, his odd, impersonal39 summing up of men and things, and good-natured patience with the world in general, were, she knew, business assets. She was even moved—no less—by the remote connection of such a life with that of the first Reuben Vanderpoel who had laid the huge, solid foundations of their modern fortune. The first Reuben Vanderpoel must have seen and known the faces of men as G. Selden saw and knew them. Fighting his way step by step, knocking pertinaciously40 at every gateway41 which might give ingress to some passage leading to even the smallest gain, meeting with rebuff and indifference42 only to be overcome by steady and continued assault—if G. Selden was a nuisance, the first Vanderpoel had without doubt worn that aspect upon innumerable occasions. No one desires the presence of the man who while having nothing to give must persist in keeping himself in evidence, even if by strategy or force. From stories she was familiar with, she had gathered that the first Reuben Vanderpoel had certainly lacked a certain youth of soul she felt in this modern struggler for life. He had been the cleverer man of the two; G. Selden she secretly liked the better.
The curiosity of Mrs. Buttle, who was the nurse, had been awakened43 by a singular feature of her patient's feverish44 wanderings.
“He keeps muttering, miss, things I can't make out about Lord Mount Dunstan, and Mr. Penzance, and some child he calls Little Willie. He talks to them the same as if he knew them—same as if he was with them and they were talking to him quite friendly.”
One morning Betty, coming to make her visit of inquiry found the patient looking thoughtful, and when she commented upon his air of pondering, his reply cast light upon the mystery.
“Well, Miss Vanderpoel,” he explained, “I was lying here thinking of Lord Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance, and how well they treated me—I haven't told you about that, have I?
“That explains what Mrs. Buttle said,” she answered. “When you were delirious you talked frequently to Lord Mount Dunstan and Mr. Penzance. We both wondered why.”
Then he told her the whole story. Beginning with his sitting on the
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