Arabella’s first action on reaching Park Street again was to run up to her bedchamber, and without pausing to remove her bonnet to sit down at the little table in the window, and prepare to write a letter. But in spite of the evident urgency of the matter she had no sooner written her opening words than all inspiration appeared to desert her, and she sat staring out of the window, while the ink dried on her pen. At last she drew a breath, dipped the pen in the standish again, and resolutely wrote two lines. Then she stopped, read them over, tore up the paper, and drew a fresh sheet towards her.

It was some time before she had achieved a result that satisfied her, but it was done at last, and the letter sealed up with a wafer. She then rang the bell-pull, and upon a housemaid’s coming in answer to the summons desired the girl to send Becky to her, if she could be spared from her duties. When Becky presently appeared, shyly smiling and twisting her hands together in her apron, Arabella held out the letter, and said: “If you please, Becky, do you think you could contrive to slip out, and—and carry that to Mr. Beaumaris’s house? You might say that I have asked you to go on an errand for me, but—but I shall be very much obliged to you if you will not disclose to anyone what it is!”

“Oh, miss!” breathed the handmaid, scenting a romance. “As though I would say a word to a living soul!”

“Thank you! If—if Mr. Beaumaris should be at home, I should be glad if you would wait for an answer to the letter!”

Becky nodded her profound understanding of this, assured Arabella that she might trust her through fire and water, and departed.

Nothing could have been more conspiratorial than her manner of entering Arabella’s room half-an-hour later, but she brought bad news: Mr. Beaumaris had gone into the country three days ago, and had said that he might be away from London for a week.

XV

Mr. Beaumaris returned to his London house in time to partake of a late breakfast on Tuesday morning, having been absent for six days. It had been considered probable by his dependants that he would be away for a full week, but as he rarely gave any positive information on his movements, counted no cost, and had accustomed his highly-paid servants to live in a constant state of expectation of being obliged, at a moment’s notice, to provide suitable entertainment for himself, or for a score of guests, his premature arrival caused no one any dismay. It caused one member of his household a degree of joy bordering on delirium. A ragged little mongrel, whose jauntily curled tail had been clipped unhappily between his legs for six interminable days, and who had spent the major part of this time curled into a ball on the rug outside his master’s door, refusing all sustenance, including plates of choice viands prepared by the hands of the great M. Alphonse himself, came tumbling down the stairs, uttering canine shrieks, and summoned up enough strength to career madly round in circles before collapsing in an exhausted, panting heap at Mr. Beaumaris’s feet. It spoke volumes for the light in which Mr. Beaumaris’s whims were regarded by his retainers that the condition to which his disreputable protégé had wilfully reduced himself brought every member of the household who might have been considered in some way responsible into the hall to exonerate himself from all blame. Even M. Alphonse mounted the stairs from his basement kingdom to describe to Mr. Beaumaris in detail the chicken-broth, the ragout of rabbit, the shin of beef, and the marrow-bone with, which he had tried to tempt Ulysses’ vanished appetite. Brough broke in on his Gallic monologue to assure Mr. Beaumaris that he for one had left nothing undone to restore Ulysses’ interest in life, even going to the lengths of importing a stray cat into the house, in the hope that this outrage would galvanize one notoriously unsympathetic towards all felines to activity. Painswick, with a smug air that rendered him instantly odious to his colleagues, drew attention to the fact that it had been his superior understanding of Ulysses’ processes of thought which Mr. Beaumaris had to thank for him finding himself still in possession of his low-born companion: he had conceived the happy notion of giving Ulysses one of Mr. Beaumaris’s gloves to guard.

Mr. Beaumaris, who had picked Ulysses up, paid no heed to all these attempts at self-justification, but addressed himself to his adorer. “What a fool you are!” he observed. “No, I have the greatest dislike of having my face licked, and must request you to refrain. Quiet, Ulysses! quiet! I am grateful to you for your solicitude, but you must perceive that I am in the enjoyment of my customary good health. I would I could say the same of you. You have once more reduced yourself to skin and bone, my friend, a process which I shall take leave to inform you I consider as unjust as it is ridiculous. Anyone setting eyes on you would suppose that I grudged you even the scraps from my table!” He added, without the slightest change of voice, and without raising his eyes from the creature in his arms: “You would also appear to have bereft my household of its senses, so that the greater part of it, instead of providing me with the breakfast I stand in need of, is engaged in excusing itself from any suspicion of blame and—I may add—doing itself no good thereby.”

Ulysses, to whom the mere sound of Mr. Beaumaris’s voice was ecstasy, looked adoringly up into his face, and contrived to lick the hand that was caressing him. On his servants, Mr. Beaumaris’s voice operated in quite another fashion: they dispersed rapidly, Painswick to lay out a complete change of raiment; Brough to set the table in the breakfast-parlour; Alphonse to carve at lightning speed several slices of a fine York ham, and to cast eggs and herbs into a pan; and various underlings to grind coffee-beans, cut bread, and set kettles on to boil. Mr. Beaumaris tucked Ulysses under one arm, picked up the pile of letters from the table in the hall, and strolled with them into his library. To the zealous young footman who hastened to fling open the door for him, he said: “Food for this abominable animal!”—a command which, relayed swiftly to the kitchen, caused M. Alphonse to command his chief assistant instantly to abandon his allotted task, and to prepare a dish calculated to revive the flagging appetite of a Cambaceres.

Mr. Beaumaris, tossing a pile of invitations and bills aside, came upon a billet which had not been delivered through the medium of the Penny Post, and which was superscribed, Urgent. The writing, certainly feminine, was unknown to him. “Now, what have we here, Ulysses?” he said, breaking the wafer.

They had not very much. “Dear Mr. Beaumaris,” ran the missive, “I should be very much obliged to you if you would do me the honour of calling in Park Street as soon as may be convenient to you, and requesting the butler to inform me of the event. I remain, Ever yours most sincerely, Arabella Tallant.”

This model of the epistolary art, which had caused Miss Tallant so much heart-searching, and so many ruined sheets of hot-pressed notepaper, did not fail of its effect. Mr. Beaumaris cast aside the rest of his correspondence, set Ulysses down on the floor, and bent his powerful mind to the correct interpretation of these few, heavily underlined words. He was still engaged on this task when Brough entered the room to announce that his breakfast awaited him. He carried the letter into the parlour, and propped it against the coffee-pot, feeling that he had not yet got to the bottom of it. At his feet, Ulysses, repairing with enthusiasm the ravages of his protracted fast, was rapidly consuming a meal which might have been judged excessive for the satisfaction of the appetite of a boa-constrictor.

“This,” said Mr. Beaumaris, “was delivered here three days ago, Ulysses!”

Ulysses, whose keen olfactory sense had discovered the chicken giblet cunningly hidden in the middle of his plate, could spare no more than a perfunctory wag of the tail for this speech; and to Mr. Beaumaris’s subsequent demand to know what could be in the wind he returned no answer at all. Mr. Beaumaris pushed away the remains of his breakfast, a gesture which was shortly to operate alarmingly on the sensibilities of the artist belowstairs, and waved aside his valet, who had just entered the room. “My town dress!” he said.

“I have it ready, sir,” responded Painswick, with dignity. “There was just one matter which I should perhaps mention.”

“Not now,” said Mr. Beaumaris, his eyes still bent upon Miss Tallant’s tantalizing communication.

Painswick bowed, and withdrew. The matter was not, in his fastidious estimation, of sufficient importance to justify him in intruding upon his employer’s evident preoccupation; nor did he broach it when Mr. Beaumaris presently came upstairs to change his riding-dress for the blue coat, yellow pantaloons, chaste waistcoat, and gleaming Hessians with which he was wont to gratify the eyes of beholders in the Metropolis. This further abstention was due, however, more to the sense of irretrievable loss which had invaded his soul on the discovery that a shirt was missing from Mr. Beaumaris’s execrably packed portmanteau than from a respect for his master’s abstraction. He confined his conversation to bitter animadversions on the morals of inn-servants, and the depths of depravity to which some unknown boots had sunk in treating Mr. Beaumaris’s second-best pair of Hessians with a blacking fit only to be used on the footwear of country squires. He could hardly flatter himself that Mr. Beaumaris, swiftly and skilfully arranging the folds of his neckcloth in the mirror, or delicately paring his well-cared-for fingernails, paid the least heed to his discourse, but it served in some measure to relieve his lacerated feelings.