Derek’s heavy eyebrows closed together in an offended frown, and seemed to darken his whole face. This unsolicited offer of assistance hurt his dignity. He showed a touch of the petulance which came now and then when he was annoyed, to suggest that he might not possess so strong a character as his exterior indicated.
“It’s very kind of you,” he began stiffly.
Freddie nodded. He was acutely conscious of this himself.
“Some fellows,” he observed, “would say ‘Not at all!’ I suppose. But not the Last of the Rookes! For, honestly, old man, between ourselves, I don’t mind admitting that this is the bravest deed of the year, and I’m dashed if I would do it for anyone else.”
“It’s very good of you, Freddie —”
“That’s all right. I’m a Boy Scout, and this is my act of kindness for today.”
Derek got up from the table.
“Of course you mustn’t come,” he said. “We can’t form a sort of debating society to discuss Jill on the platform at Charing Cross.”
“Oh, I would just hang around in the offing, shoving in an occasional tactful word.”
“Nonsense!”
“The wheeze would simply be to —”
“It’s impossible.”
“Oh, very well,” said Freddie, damped. “Just as you say, of course. But there’s nothing like a gang, old man, nothing like a gang!”
2.
Derek Underhill threw down the stump of his cigar, and grunted irritably. Inside Charing Cross Station business was proceeding as usual. Porters wheeling baggage-trucks moved to and fro like Juggernauts. Belated trains clanked in, glad to get home, while others, less fortunate, crept reluctantly out through the blackness and disappeared into an inferno of detonating fog-signals. For outside the fog still held. The air was cold and raw and tasted coppery. In the street traffic moved at a funeral pace, to the accompaniment of hoarse cries and occasional crashes. Once the sun had worked its way through the murk and had hung in the sky like a great red orange, but now all was darkness and discomfort again, blended with that odd suggestion of mystery and romance which is a London fog’s only redeeming quality.
It seemed to Derek that he had been patrolling the platform for a life-time, but he resumed his sentinel duty. The fact that the boat-train, being already forty-five minutes overdue, might arrive at any moment made it imperative that he remain where he was instead of sitting, as he would much have preferred to sit, in one of the waiting-rooms. It would be a disaster if his mother should get out of the train and not find him there to meet her. That was just the sort of thing which would infuriate her; and her mood, after a Channel crossing and a dreary journey by rail, would be sufficiently dangerous as it was.
The fog and the waiting had had their effect upon Derek. The resolute front he had exhibited to Freddie at the breakfast-table had melted since his arrival at the station, and he was feeling nervous at the prospect of the meeting that lay before him. Calm as he had appeared to the eye of Freddie and bravely as he had spoken, Derek, in the recesses of his heart, was afraid of his mother. There are men—and Derek Underhill was one of them—who never wholly emerge from the nursery. They may put away childish things and rise in the world to affluence and success, but the hand that rocked their cradle still rules their lives. As a boy, Derek had always been firmly controlled by his mother, and the sway of her aggressive personality had endured through manhood. Lady Underhill was a born ruler, dominating most of the people with whom life brought her in contact. Distant cousins quaked at her name, while among the male portion of her nearer relatives she was generally alluded to as The Family Curse.
Now that his meeting with her might occur at any moment, Derek shrank from it. It was not likely to be a pleasant one. The mere fact that Lady Underhill was coming to London at all made that improbable. When a man writes to inform his mother, who is wintering on the Riviera, that he has become engaged to be married, the natural course for her to pursue, if she approves of the step, is to wire her congratulations and good wishes. When for these she substitutes a curt announcement that she is returning immediately, a certain lack of complaisance seems to be indicated.