Roden's Corner Part 29

They hurried toward Cornish and White, who were now alone on the path.

White had rolled up his sleeve, and was tying his handkerchief round his arm with his other hand and his teeth.

"It is nothing," he said. "One of the devils had a knife. Must get my sleeve mended to-morrow."

CHAPTER XXIII.

A REINFORCEMENT.

"Prends moy telle que je suy."

When Major White came down to breakfast at his hotel the next morning, he found the large room deserted and the windows thrown open to the sun and the garden. He was selecting a table, when a step on the verandah made him look up. Standing in the window, framed, as it were, by suns.h.i.+ne and trees, was Marguerite Wade, in a white dress, with demure lips, and the complexion of a wild rose. She was the incarnation of youth--of that spring-time of life of which the sight tugs at the strings of older hearts; for surely that is the only part of life which is really and honestly worth the living.

Marguerite came forward and shook hands gravely. Major White's left eyebrow quivered for a moment in indication of his usual mild surprise at life and its changing surface.

"Feeling pretty--bobbish?" inquired Marguerite, earnestly.

White's eyebrow went right up and his gla.s.s fell.

"Fairly bobbish, thank you," he answered, looking at her with stupendous gravity.

"You look all right, you know."

"You should never judge by appearances," said White, with a fatherly severity.

Marguerite pursed up her lips, and looked his stalwart frame up and down in silence. Then she suddenly lapsed into her most confidential manner, like a schoolgirl telling her bosom friend, for the moment, all the truth and more than the truth.

"You are surprised to see me here; thought you would be, you know. I knew you were in the hotel; saw your boots outside your door last night; knew they must be yours. You went to bed very early."

"I have two pairs of boots," replied the major, darkly.

"Well, to tell you the truth, I have brought papa across. Tony wrote for him to come, and I knew papa would be no use by himself, so I came.

I told you long ago that the Malgamite scheme was up a gum-tree, and that seems to be precisely where you are."

"Precisely."

"And so I have come over, and papa and I are going to put things straight."

"I shouldn't if I were you."

"Shouldn't what?" inquired Marguerite.

"Shouldn't put other people's affairs straight. It does not pay, especially if other people happen to be up a gum-tree--make yourself all sticky, you know."

Marguerite looked at him doubtfully. "Ah!" she said. "That's what--is it?"

"That's what," admitted Major White.

"That is the difference, I suppose, between a man and a woman," said Marguerite, sitting down at a small table where breakfast had been laid for two. "A man looks on at things going--well, to the dogs--and smokes and thinks it isn't his business. A woman thinks the whole world is her business."

"So it is, in a sense--it is her doing, at all events."

Marguerite had turned to beckon to the waiter, and she paused to look back over her shoulder with shrewd, clear eyes.

"Ah!" she said mystically.

Then she addressed herself to the waiter, calling him "Kellner," and speaking to him in German, in the full a.s.surance that it would be his native tongue.

"I have told him," she explained to White, "to bring your little coffee-pot and your little milk-jug and your little pat of b.u.t.ter to this table."

"So I understood."

"Ah! Then you know German?" inquired Marguerite, with another doubtful glance.

"I get two pence a day extra pay for knowing German."

Marguerite paused in her selection, of a breakfast roll from a silver basket containing that Continental choice of breads which look so different and taste so much alike.

"Seems to me," she said confidentially, "that you know more than you appear to know."

"Not such a fool as I look, in fact."

"That is about the size of it," admitted Marguerite, gravely. "Tony always says that the world sees more than any one suspect. Perhaps he is right."

And both happening to look up at this moment, their glances met across the little table.

"Tony often is right," said Major White.

There was a pause, during which Marguerite attended to the two small coffee-pots for which she had such a youthful and outspoken contempt.

The privileges of her s.e.x were still new enough to her to afford a certain pleasure in pouring out beverages for other people to drink.

"Why is Tony so fond of The Hague? Who is Mrs. Vansittart?" she asked, without looking up.

Major White looked stolidly out of the open window for a few minutes before answering.

"Two questions don't make an answer."

"Not these two questions?" asked Marguerite, with a sudden laugh.

"No; Mrs. Vansittart is a widow, young, and what they usually call 'charming,' I believe. She is clever, yes, very clever, and she was, I suppose, fond of Vansittart; and that is the whole story, I take it."

"Not exactly a cheery story."

"No true stories are," returned the major, gravely.

But Marguerite shook her head. In her wisdom--that huge wisdom of life as seen from the threshold--she did not believe Mrs. Vansittart's story.