“Now you’re beginning to talk nonsense!” Lady Muriel cried. “But you do like Music, don’t you? You said so just now.”
“Do I like Music?” the Doctor repeated softly to himself. “My dear Lady Muriel, there is Music and Music. Your question is painfully vague. You might as well ask ‘Do you like People?’ ”
Lady Muriel bit her lip, frowned, and stamped with one tiny foot. As a dramatic representation of ill-temper, it was distinctly not a success. However, it took in one of her audience, and Bruno hastened to interpose, as peacemaker in a rising quarrel, with the remark “I likes Peoples!”
Arthur laid a loving hand on the little curly head. “What? All Peoples?” he enquired.
“Not all Peoples,” Bruno explained. “Only but Sylvie—and Lady Muriel—and him—” (pointing to the Earl) “and oo—and oo!”
“You shouldn’t point at people,” said Sylvie. “It’s very rude.”
“In Bruno’s World,” I said, “there are only four People—worth mentioning!”
“In Bruno’s World!” Lady Muriel repeated thoughtfully. “A bright and flowery world. Where the grass is always green, where the breezes always blow softly, and the rain-clouds never gather; where there are no wild beasts, and no deserts—”
“There must be deserts,” Arthur decisively remarked. “At least if it was my ideal world.”
“But what possible use is there in a desert?” said Lady Muriel. “Surely you would have no wilderness in your ideal world?”
Arthur smiled. “But indeed I would!” he said. “A wilderness would be more necessary than a railway; and far more conducive to general happiness than church-bells!”
“But what would you use it for?”
“To practise music in,” he replied. “All the young ladies, that have no ear for music, but insist on learning it, should be conveyed, every morning, two or three miles into the wilderness. There each would find a comfortable room provided for her, and also a cheap secondhand pianoforte, on which she might play for hours, without adding one needless pang to the sum of human misery!”
Lady Muriel glanced round in alarm, lest these barbarous sentiments should be overheard. But the fair musician was at a safe distance. “At any rate you must allow that she’s a sweet girl?” she resumed.
“Oh, certainly. As sweet as eau sucrée, if you choose—and nearly as interesting!”
“You are incorrigible!” said Lady Muriel, and turned to me. “I hope you found Mrs. Mills an interesting companion?”
“Oh, that’s her name, is it?” I said. “I fancied there was more of it.”
“So there is: and it will be ‘at your proper peril’ (whatever that may mean) if you ever presume to address her as ‘Mrs. Mills.’ She is ‘Mrs. Ernest—Atkinson—Mills’!”
“She is one of those would-be grandees,” said Arthur, “who think that, by tacking on to their surname all their spare Christian-names, with hyphens between, they can give it an aristocratic flavour. As if it wasn’t trouble enough to remember one surname!”
By this time the room was getting crowded, as the guests, invited for the evening-party, were beginning to arrive, and Lady Muriel had to devote herself to the task of welcoming them, which she did with the sweetest grace imaginable. Sylvie and Bruno stood by her, deeply interested in the process.
“I hope you like my friends?” she said to them. “Specially my dear old friend, Mein Herr (What’s become of him, I wonder? Oh, there he is!), that old gentleman in spectacles, with a long beard?”
“He’s a grand old gentleman!” Sylvie said, gazing admiringly at “Mein Herr,” who had settled down in a corner, from which his mild eyes beamed on us through a gigantic pair of spectacles. “And what a lovely beard!”
“What does he call his-self?” Bruno whispered.
“He calls himself ‘Mein Herr,’ ” Sylvie whispered in reply.
Bruno shook his head impatiently. “That’s what he calls his hair, not his self, oo silly!” He appealed to me. “What doos he call his self, Mister Sir?”
“That’s the only name I know of,” I said. “But he looks very lonely. Don’t you pity his grey hairs?”
“I pities his self,” said Bruno, still harping on the misnomer; “but I doosn’t pity his hair, one bit. His hair can’t feel!”
“We met him this afternoon,” said Sylvie. “We’d been to see Nero, and we’d had such fun with him, making him invisible again! And we saw that nice old gentleman as we came back.”
“Well, let’s go and talk to him, and cheer him up a little,” I said: “and perhaps we shall find out what he calls himself.”
XI
The Man in the Moon
The children came willingly. With one of them on each side of me, I approached the corner occupied by “Mein Herr.” “You don’t object to children, I hope?” I began.
“Crabbed age and youth cannot live together!” the old man cheerfully replied, with a most genial smile. “Now take a good look at me, my children! You would guess me to be an old man, wouldn’t you?”
At first sight, though his face had reminded me so mysteriously of “the Professor,” he had seemed to be decidedly a younger man: but, when I came to look into the wonderful depth of those large dreamy eyes, I felt, with a strange sense of awe, that he was incalculably older: he seemed to gaze at us out of some bygone age, centuries away.
“I don’t know if oo’re an old man,” Bruno answered, as the children, won over by the gentle voice, crept a little closer to him. “I thinks oo’re eighty-three.”
“He is very exact!” said Mein Herr.
“Is he anything like right?” I said.
“There are reasons,” Mein Herr gently replied, “reasons which I am not at liberty to explain, for not mentioning definitely any Persons, Places, or Dates. One remark only I will permit myself to make—that the period of life, between the ages of a hundred-and-sixty-five and a hundred-and-seventy-five, is a specially safe one.”
“How do you make that out?” I said.
“Thus. You would consider swimming to be a very safe amusement, if you scarcely ever heard of anyone dying of it. Am I not right in thinking that you never heard
