“Revolted?”
“Yes, put her foot down—made a stand—refused to go on meekly putting up with Harold’s insane behavior.”
“I don’t understand.”
She gave me a look of pity. “You always were so dense, Reggie. I will tell you the whole thing from the beginning. You remember what I spoke to you about, one day when we were lunching together? Well, I don’t suppose you have noticed it—I know what you are—but things have been getting steadily worse. For one thing, Harold insisted on lengthening his visits to the top room, and naturally Ponsonby complained. Hilda tells me that she had to plead with him to induce him to stay on. Then the climax came. I don’t know if you recollect Amelia’s brother Percy? You must have met him when she was alive—a perfectly unspeakable person with a loud voice and overpowering manners. Suddenly, out of a blue sky, Harold announced his intention of inviting him to stay. It was the last straw. This afternoon I received a telegram from poor Hilda, saying that she was leaving Harold and coming to stay with me, and a few hours later the poor child arrived at my apartment.”
You mustn’t suppose that I stood listening silently to this speech. Every time she seemed to be going to stop for breath I tried to horn in and tell her all these things which had been happening were not mere flukes, as she seemed to think, but parts of a deuced carefully planned scheme of my own. Every time I’d try to interrupt, Ann would wave me down, and carry on without so much as a semi-colon.
But at this point I did manage a word in. “I know, I know, I know! I did it all. It was I who suggested to Harold that he should lengthen the meditations, and insisted on his inviting Percy to stay.”
I had hardly got the words out, when I saw that they were not making the hit I had anticipated. She looked at me with an expression of absolute scorn, don’t you know.
“Well, really, Reggie,” she said at last, “I never have had a very high opinion of your intelligence, as you know, but this is a revelation to me. What motive you can have had, unless you did it in a spirit of pure mischief–-” She stopped, and there was a glare of undiluted repulsion in her eyes. “Reggie! I can’t believe it! Of all the things I loathe most, a practical joker is the worst. Do you mean to tell me you did all this as a practical joke?”
“Great Scott, no! It was like this–-“
I paused for a bare second to collect my thoughts, so as to put the thing clearly to her. I might have known what would happen. She dashed right in and collared the conversation.
“Well, never mind. As it happens, there is no harm done. Quite the reverse, in fact. Hilda left a note for Harold telling him what she had done and where she had gone and why she had gone, and Harold found it. The result was that, after Hilda had been with me for some time, in he came in a panic and absolutely grovelled before the dear child. It seems incredible but he had apparently had no notion that his absurd behavior had met with anything but approval from Hilda. He went on as if he were mad. He was beside himself. He clutched his hair and stamped about the room, and then he jumped at the telephone and called this house and got Ponsonby and told him to go straight to the little room on the top floor and take Amelia’s portrait down. I thought that a little unnecessary myself, but he was in such a whirl of remorse that it was useless to try and get him to be rational. So Hilda was consoled, and he calmed down, and we all came down here in the automobile. So you see–-“
At this moment the door opened, and in came Harold.
“I say—hello, Reggie, old man—I say, it’s a funny thing, but we can’t find Ponsonby anywhere.”
There are moments in a chappie’s life, don’t you know, when Reason, so to speak, totters, as it were, on its bally throne. This was one of them. The situation seemed somehow to have got out of my grip. I suppose, strictly speaking, I ought, at this juncture, to have cleared my throat and said in an audible tone, “Harold, old top,
“Nobody seems to have seen anything of him,” said Harold. “I wonder where he can have got to.”
Hilda came in, looking so happy I hardly recognized her. I remember feeling how strange it was that anybody could be happy just then.
“
“Why, of course,” said Harold. “So he does.”
And he asked Ann to play something on the piano. And pretty soon we had settled down to a regular jolly musical evening. Ann must have played a matter of two or three thousand tunes, when Harold got up.
“By the way,” he said. “I suppose he did what I told him about the picture before he went out. Let’s go and see.”
“Oh, Harold, what does it matter?” asked Hilda.
“Don’t be silly, Harold,” said Ann.
I would have said the same thing, only I couldn’t say anything.
Harold wasn’t to be stopped. He led the way out of the room and upstairs, and we all trailed after him. We had just reached the top floor, when Hilda stopped, and said “Hark!”
It was a voice.
“Hi!” it said. “Hi!”
Harold legged it to the door of the studio. “Ponsonby?”
From within came the voice again, and I have never heard anything to touch the combined pathos, dignity and indignation it managed to condense into two words.
“Yes, sir?”
“What on earth are you doing in there?”
“I came here, sir, in accordance with your instructions on the telephone, and–-“
Harold rattled the door. “The darned thing’s stuck.”
