“I am going,” said Uncle Chris steadily, “to find Mrs Peagrim!”
“Good God!” cried Freddie. He followed him, protesting weakly, but the other gave no sign that he had heard. Freddie saw him disappear into the stage-box, and, turning, found Jill at his elbow.
“Where did Uncle Chris go?” asked Jill. “I want to speak to him.”
“He's in the stage-box, with Mrs Peagrim.”
“With Mrs Peagrim?”
“Proposing to her,” said Freddie solemnly.
Jill stared.
“Proposing to Mrs Peagrim? What do you mean?”
Freddie drew her aside, and began to explain.
4.
In the dimness of the stage-box, his eyes a little glassy and a dull despair in his soul, Uncle Chris was wondering how to begin. In his hot youth he had been rather a devil of a fellow in between dances, a coo-er of soft phrases and a stealer of never very stoutly withheld kisses. He remembered one time in Bangalore — but that had nothing to do with the case. The point was, how to begin with Mrs Peagrim. The fact that twenty-five years ago he had crushed in his arms beneath the shadows of the deodars a girl whose name he had forgotten, though he remembered that she had worn a dress of some pink stuff, was immaterial and irrelevant. Was he to crush Mrs Peagrim in his arms? Not, thought Uncle Chris to himself, on a bet. He contented himself for the moment with bending an intense gaze upon her and asking if she was tired.
“A little,” panted Mrs Peagrim, who, though she danced often and vigorously, was never in the best of condition, owing to her habit of neutralizing the beneficient effects of exercise by surreptitious candy-eating. “I'm a little out of breath.”
Uncle Chris had observed this for himself, and it had not helped him to face his task. Lovely woman loses something of her queenly dignity when she puffs. Inwardly, he was thinking how exactly his hostess resembled the third from the left of a troupe of performing sea-lions which he had seen some years ago on one of his rare visits to a vaudeville house.
“You ought not to tire yourself,” he said with a difficult tenderness.
“I am so fond of dancing,” pleaded Mrs Peagrim. Recovering some of her breath, she gazed at her companion with a sort of short-winded archness. “You are always so sympathetic, Major Selby.”
“Am I?” said Uncle Chris. “Am I?”
“You know you are!”
Uncle Chris swallowed quickly.
“I wonder if you have ever wondered,” he began, and stopped. He felt that he was not putting it as well as he might. “I wonder if it has ever struck you that there's a reason.” He stopped again. He seemed to remember reading something like that in an advertisement in a magazine, and he did not want to talk like an advertisement. “I wonder if it has ever struck you, Mrs. Peagrim,” he began again, “that any sympathy on my part might be due to some deeper emotion which — Have you never suspected that you have never suspected —” Uncle Chris began to feel that he must brace himself up. Usually a man of fluent speech, he was not at his best tonight. He was just about to try again, when he caught his hostess' eye, and the soft gleam in it sent him cowering back into the silence as if he wore taking cover from an enemy's shrapnel.
Mrs Peagrim touched him on the arm.
“You were saying — ?” she murmured encouragingly.
Uncle Chris shut his eyes. His fingers pressed desperately into the velvet curtain beside him. He felt as he had felt when a raw lieutenant in India, during his first hill-campaign, when the etiquette of the service had compelled him to rise and walk up and down in front of his men under a desultory shower of jezail-bullets. He seemed to hear the damned things
“Yes?” said Mrs Peagrim.
“Have you never felt,” babbled Uncle Chris, “that, feeling as I feel, I might have felt — that is to say, might be feeling a feeling — ?”
There was a tap at the door of the box. Uncle Chris started violently. Jill came in.
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” she said. “I wanted to speak —”
“You wanted to speak to me?” said Uncle Chris, bounding up. “Certainly, certainly, certainly, of course. If you will excuse me for a moment?”
Mrs Peagrim bowed coldly. The interruption had annoyed her. She had no notion who Jill was, and she resented the intrusion at this particular juncture intensely. Not so Uncle Chris, who skipped out into the passage like a young lamb.
“Am I in time?” asked Jill in a whisper.
“In time?”
“You know what I mean. Uncle Chris, listen to me! You are not to propose to that awful woman. Do you understand?”
Uncle Chris shook his head.
“The die is cast!”
“The die isn't anything of the sort,” said Jill. “Unless — .” She stopped, aghast. “You don't mean that you have done it already?”
