_Sibyl_ (in a muffled voice): "N-no; he ... he ... didn't. He--overrated his strength. He--he--oh, _how_ can I tell you? He was so anxious to play a great part in public affairs ... but he had lost all his energy...." (Sitting up with flushed cheeks--damnably good-looking, Roger feels.) "_Well_! What can I do for you? You've failed _me_. But I suppose you've come here to ask me to help you in some way. Men don't generally waste their time on afternoon calls without a motive. What is it? I've got no influence anywhere since Francis died" (a sob). "So it's no good asking _me_ to write to Lord Wiltshire or to Spavins. I hear you are out of favour at the F.O. It's not _my_ fault, is it? It's all due to your gallivanting after missionaries' wives...." (Roger looks sullen.) ... "Heigh ho! I expect with all this crying and tousling among cushions, to hide I _was_ crying from your cynical eyes, I'd better go into my room and bathe my face before the butler brings in the tea.... _There!_ you can pull up two of the blinds--when I am gone--my eyes are so red--and you can look at some of my new books till I come in to make the tea. You mustn't _dream_ of going before we've had tea and finished our talk."
"I suppose," said Sibyl a quarter of an hour later when they were discussing tea and tea-cake and pate-de-foie sandwiches and assorted cakelets, "what you really came to ask was would I present this Lucy-pucy of yours at Court. But, my _dear_, I shall be in mourning for a year, and the Queen----"
"_Lord_ no! Such a thing never entered my head. It would scare Lucy into fits. I hope before next season comes round I shall be back in Africa--or somewhere. So far as I connected Lucy with this visit I might have intended to ask you to let me bring her here one day, and for you to be kind to her ... not frighten her, as you very well could do, pretending all the time to be her best friend...."
_Sibyl_: "Well: I'll tell you what you shall do. You must remember I'm in mourning, of course.... We always have to think of what the servants will say.... And--ah! Did I tell you? Aunt Christabel is here. I sent her out the longest drive I could think of, so that we might have our afternoon alone; still, she's staying here till I emerge from the deepest of my mourning.... By the bye she's _horrified_ at your marriage, just as she used to be horrified at the idea of your marrying _me_.... Well, bring your Lucy over one day at the end of July and I'll just have a look at her. And then, in the autumn--say October--you and she, and of course if you like to have them, Maurice and Geoffrey too, could come here for the shooting. _Of course_ I shan't have a regular party; but somebody must come and shoot the pheasants. The Queen couldn't object to that. I've asked a man--I did before Francis's death--to come. You might like to meet him: a Sir Willowby Patterne.... Dare say you've heard of him?"
_Roger_: "I've heard no _good_ of him...."
"Oh, what tittle-tattlers and scandal-mongers you men are! I think he's so amusing, and every one says he's a splendid shot.... However, we will make up just a _tiny_ party and you and Lucy shall entertain for me. I shall purposely be very little seen and shall give out my cousins have come over to help me with my guests.... And, _Roger_! If I am to help you you must help _me_. The doctor says I positively _must_ take up my riding again unless I am to drift into being an invalid. Couldn't you--sometimes--whilst you're down in this part of the world--come over and ride with me? I can 'mount' you. You could ride poor Francis's cob ... not showy but very steady."
"I will, when I come back from town," said Roger, and took his departure, not at all dissatisfied with his afternoon.
Two days afterwards he thought it might be prudent to see how things were going at the Foreign Office. So he went up to town, changed into town togs at Hankey's (where their flat was becoming a white elephant, owing to Lucy's dislike to London, so he arranged to give it up), and betook himself to Downing Street, and asked to see Mr. Bennet Molyneux. "Mr. Bennet Molyneux," he was presently told, "is very sorry, sir, but he is much engaged this morning; would you go into the Department and see one of the young gentlemen there?"
The Department was a large, long room with a cubby-hole at its further end for the accommodation of the senior clerk, a sort of school prefect who had to keep order among the high-spirited juniors and therefore required to work a little apart from them. When Brentham entered the main room, announced by the office messenger, he recognized two friends of yore and several new, ingenuous faces. There also emerged from the cubby hole a man whom he had known as a junior three years previously: an agreeable gentleman of agricultural and sporting tastes, who, because of his occasional remonstrances and enforcement of discipline, was known as "Snarley Yow or the Dog Fiend." Then there were "Rosie" Walrond and Ted Parsons. (The others do not matter in this narrative: they merely served as chorus and acclaimers of the witticisms of the elder boys. They were all nice to look at, all well-mannered and all well-dressed.) "Rosie" Walrond was a young man--older than he looked--with wavy flaxen hair and mocking grey eyes, and an extremely cynical manner overlying an exceedingly kind heart.
_Walrond_: "Hullo! Here's _Brentham_, the rescuer of beleaguered Gospellers. We've got a grudge against you. You came here months ago and were closeted with Spavins and never gave us a look-in. And we were dying to hear all about the elopement and its sequel. We were prepared to subscribe to a wedding present for a teller of good stories...."
Then he added: "D'you admire my grotto?"
Brentham, after the necessary greetings and introductions, strode up to "Rosie's" desk. Its ledges and escarpments were piled with rock specimens on which tattered, brown, and half-decipherable labels had been pasted.
"_My mineral specimens_ ... from" (he checked himself) ... "from East Africa! Then you _never_ sent them on?"
"My _dear_ chap! Where was I to send them to? The Consular Mail bags--two of them--arrived here all right, addressed to me, but nary a letter with them or any directions. Also two skulls which, as you see, decorate our mantelpiece, and which I am proposing to have mounted in silver at Snarley's expense for our Departmental Dinner. Meantime, I have arranged my desk as a grotto, in spite of the office cleaner's objections...."
_Brentham_: "I suppose the letter of directions went astray. I asked you to send the rocks to the School of Mines and the skulls to the Natural History Museum. However, I'll take them all away presently in a cab."
"But _not_ the skulls, I beg, just as we were being initiated into Devil worship by Snarley, who has learnt the Black Mass...."
"Yes, the skulls, too. They're most important----"
"But so are _we_," said Parsons.
Then followed half an hour of chaff, out of which Roger gleaned no grain of information as to his own probable fate and was too diffident to ask outright if any decision as to his return had been arrived at. He accepted an invitation to dine with the Department at the Cheshire Cheese and meet Arthur Broadmead; then drove to the School of Mines in Jermyn Street, handed in his rocks and asked the Curator for a report on them, at his leisure. After that, Professor Flower and the skulls; which were those of two men of that Hamitic race colonizing the Happy Valley. He had found them lying about on the outskirts of a village and had received the careless permission of the villagers to take them away. They might serve to determine the relationships of this incongruous type.
*CHAPTER XVI*
*SIBYL AS SIREN*
In August, 1889, Lucy conveyed to Roger her belief that she was going to have a child.
"But that is no reason you should not come down with me to Sibyl's place in Scotland. You can't be going to have a baby till--till well on in the winter, and meantime a stay in the Highlands will brace you up. Of course as Sibyl is in mourning she can only have a very small house party--just two or three men like myself to shoot the grouse, rabbits and stags. I don't suppose there will be any women there except her aunt and you." Lucy acquiesced unwillingly.
She was living once more with her parents, while Roger's plans were so unsettled. The rooms at Hankey's had been given up, and on his frequent journeys to London--mainly on Sibyl's business--he slept at Aunt Pardew's Hotel in Great Ormond Street, where they made him very comfortable. He had taken Lucy over to Engledene twice in July--once he had left her there a whole afternoon, _tete-a-tete_ with the still languid young widow. On that occasion he had purposely ridden over to Tilehurst to see Mr. Baines with more news--sent on by Callaway from Unguja--about Ann Anderson and the restoration of Hangodi station, and what the Mission proposed to do in regard to a memorial grave-stone. It tickled his sense of humour that he should improve his acquaintance with John's father and thus allay any local feeling against Lucy: his visits there not only cheered the Aerated Waters' manufacturer, but they enraged Mrs. Baines.