“I am employed by Mr. Elmer Ford to guard his son. There are several parties after that boy, Mr. Burns. Naturally he is a considerable prize. Mr. Ford would pay a large sum to get back his only son if he were kidnapped. So it stands to reason he takes precautions.”
“Does Mr. Abney know what you are?”
“No, sir. Mr. Abney thinks I am an ordinary butler. You are the only person who knows, and I have only told you because you have happened to catch me in a rather queer position for a butler to be in. You will keep it to yourself, sir? It doesn’t do for it to get about. These things have to be done quietly. It would be bad for the school if my presence here were advertised. The other parents wouldn’t like it. They would think that their sons were in danger, you see. It would be disturbing for them. So if you will just forget what I’ve been telling you, Mr. Burns—”
I assured him that I would. But I was very far from meaning it. If there was one thing which I intended to bear in mind, it was the fact that watchful eyes besides mine were upon that Little Nugget.
The third and last of this chain of occurrences, the Episode of the Genial Visitor, took place on the following day, and may be passed over briefly. All that happened was that a well-dressed man, who gave his name as Arthur Gordon, of Philadelphia, dropped in unexpectedly to inspect the school. He apologized for not having written to make an appointment, but explained that he was leaving England almost immediately. He was looking for a school for his sister’s son, and, happening to meet his business acquaintance, Mr. Elmer Ford, in London, he had been recommended to Mr. Abney. He made himself exceedingly pleasant. He was a breezy, genial man, who joked with Mr. Abney, chaffed the boys, prodded the Little Nugget in the ribs, to that overfed youth’s discomfort, made a rollicking tour of the house, in the course of which he inspected Ogden’s bedroom—in order, he told Mr. Abney, to be able to report conscientiously to his friend Ford that the son and heir was not being pampered too much, and departed in a whirl of good-humour, leaving everyone enthusiastic over his charming personality. His last words were that everything was thoroughly satisfactory, and that he had learned all he wanted to know.
Which, as was proved that same night, was the simple truth.
IV
I
I owed it to my colleague Glossop that I was in the centre of the surprising things that occurred that night. By sheer weight of boredom, Glossop drove me from the house, so that it came about that, at half past nine, the time at which the affair began, I was patrolling the gravel in front of the porch.
It was the practice of the staff of Sanstead House School to assemble after dinner in Mr. Abney’s study for coffee. The room was called the study, but it was really more of a master’s common room. Mr. Abney had a smaller sanctum of his own, reserved exclusively for himself.
On this particular night he went there early, leaving me alone with Glossop. It is one of the drawbacks of the desert-island atmosphere of a private school that everybody is always meeting everybody else. To avoid a man for long is impossible. I had been avoiding Glossop as long as I could, for I knew that he wanted to corner me with a view to a heart-to-heart talk on Life Insurance.
These amateur Life Insurance agents are a curious band. The world is full of them. I have met them at country-houses, at seaside hotels, on ships, everywhere; and it has always amazed me that they should find the game worth the candle. What they add to their incomes I do not know, but it cannot be very much, and the trouble they have to take is colossal. Nobody loves them, and they must see it; yet they persevere. Glossop, for instance, had been trying to buttonhole me every time there was a five minutes’ break in the day’s work.
He had his chance now, and he did not mean to waste it. Mr. Abney had scarcely left the room when he began to exude pamphlets and booklets at every pocket.
I eyed him sourly, as he droned on about “reactionable endowment,” “surrender-value,” and “interest accumulating on the tontine policy,” and tried, as I did so, to analyse the loathing I felt for him. I came to the conclusion that it was partly due to his pose of doing the whole thing from purely altruistic motives, entirely for my good, and partly because he forced me to face the fact that I was not always going to be young. In an abstract fashion I had already realized that I should in time cease to be thirty, but the way in which Glossop spoke of my sixty-fifth birthday made me feel as if it was due tomorrow. He was a man with a manner suggestive of a funeral mute suffering from suppressed jaundice, and I had never before been so weighed down with a sense of the inevitability of decay and the remorseless passage of time. I could feel my hair whitening.
A need for solitude became imperative; and, murmuring something about thinking it over, I escaped from the room.
Except for my bedroom, whither he was quite capable of following me, I had no refuge but the grounds. I unbolted the front door and went out.
It was still freezing, and, though the stars shone, the trees grew so closely about the house that it was too dark for me to see more than a few feet in front of me.
I began to stroll up and down. The night was wonderfully still. I could hear somebody walking up the drive—one of the
