“Your trip has done you good,” said Sir Mallaby approvingly, “The sea air has given you some sense. I’m glad of it. It makes it easier for me to say something else that I’ve had on my mind for a good while. Sam, it’s time you got married.”
Sam barked bitterly. His father looked at him with concern.
“Swallow some smoke the wrong way?”
“I was laughing,” explained Sam with dignity.
Sir Mallaby shook his head.
“I don’t want to discourage your high spirit, but I must ask you to approach this matter seriously. Marriage would do you a world of good, Sam. It would brace you up. You really ought to consider the idea. I was two years younger than you are when I married your poor mother, and it was the making of me. A wife might make something of you.”
“Impossible!”
“I don’t see why she shouldn’t. There’s lots of good in you, my boy, though you may not think so.”
“When I said it was impossible,” said Sam coldly, “I was referring to the impossibility of the possibility…. I mean, that it was impossible that I could possibly … in other words, father, I can never marry. My heart is dead.”
“Your what?”
“My heart.”
“Don’t be a fool. There’s nothing wrong with your heart. All our family have had hearts like steam-engines. Probably you have been feeling a sort of burning. Knock off cigars and that will soon stop.”
“You don’t understand me. I mean that a woman has treated me in a way that has finished her whole sex as far as I am concerned. For me, women do not exist.”
“You didn’t tell me about this,” said Sir Mallaby, interested. “When did this happen? Did she jilt you?”
“Yes.”
“In America was it?”
“On the boat.”
Sir Mallaby chuckled heartily.
“My dear boy, you don’t mean to tell me that you’re taking a shipboard flirtation seriously. Why, you’re expected to fall in love with a different girl every time you go on a voyage. You’ll get over this in a week. You’d have got over it now if you hadn’t gone and buried yourself in a depressing place like Bingley-on-the-Sea.”
The whistle of the speaking-tube blew. Sir Mallaby put the instrument to his ear.
“All right,” he turned to Sam. “I shall have to send you away now, Sam. Man waiting to see me. Goodbye.”
Miss Milliken intercepted Sam as he made for the door.
“Oh, Mr. Sam!”
“Yes?”
“Excuse me, but will you be seeing Sir Mallaby again to-day? If so, would you—I don’t like to disturb him now, when he is busy—would you mind telling him that I inadvertently omitted a stanza. It runs,” said Miss Milliken, closing her eyes, “‘Trust no future, howe’er pleasant. Let the dead past bury its dead! Act, act in the living Present, Heart within and God o’erhead!’ Thank you so much. Good afternoon.”
CHAPTER TEN
At about the time when Sam Marlowe was having the momentous interview with his father, described in the last chapter, Mr. Rufus Bennett woke from an after-luncheon nap in Mrs. Hignett’s delightful old-world mansion, Windles, in the county of Hampshire. He had gone to his room after lunch, because there seemed nothing else to do. It was still raining hard, so that a ramble in the picturesque garden was impossible, and the only alternative to sleep, the society of Mr. Henry Mortimer, had become peculiarly distasteful to Mr. Bennett.
Much has been written of great friendships between man and man, friendships which neither woman can mar nor death destroy. Rufus Bennett had always believed that his friendship for Mr. Mortimer was of this order. They had been boys together in the same small town, and had kept together in after years. They had been Damon and Pythias, David and Jonathan. But never till now had they been cooped up together in an English country-house in the middle of a bad patch of English summer weather. So this afternoon Mr. Bennett, in order to avoid his life-long friend, had gone to bed.
He awoke now with a start, and a moment later realized what it was that had aroused him. There was music in the air. The room was full of it. It seemed to be coming up through the floor and rolling about in chunks all round his bed. He blinked the last fragments of sleep out of his system, and became filled with a restless irritability.