“Let me return to yourselves. You Musical Bank Managers are very much such a body of men as your country needs—but when I was here before you had no figurehead; I have unwittingly supplied you with one, and it is perhaps because you saw this, that you good people of Bridgeford took up with me. Sunchildism is still young and plastic; if you will let the cock-and-bull stories about me tacitly drop, and invent no new ones, beyond saying what a delightful person I was, I really cannot see why I should not do for you as well as anyone else.
“There. What I have said is nine-tenths of it rotten and wrong, but it is the most practicable rotten and wrong that I can suggest, seeing into what a rotten and wrong state of things you have drifted. And now, Mr. Mayor, do you not think we may join the Mayoress and Mrs. Humdrum?”
“As you please, Mr. Higgs,” answered the Mayor.
“Then let us go, for I have said too much already, and your son George tells me that we must be starting shortly.”
As they were leaving the room Panky sidled up to my father and said, “There is a point, Mr. Higgs, which you can settle for me, though I feel pretty certain how you will settle it. I think that a corruption has crept into the text of the very beautiful—”
At this moment, as my father, who saw what was coming, was wondering what in the world he could say, George came up to him and said, “Mr. Higgs, my mother wishes me to take you down into the storeroom, to make sure that she has put everything for you as you would like it.” On this my father said he would return directly and answer what he knew would be Panky’s question.
When Yram had shown what she had prepared—all of it, of course, faultless—she said, “And now, Mr. Higgs, about our leave-taking. Of course we shall both of us feel much. I shall; I know you will; George will have a few more hours with you than the rest of us, but his time to say goodbye will come, and it will be painful to both of you. I am glad you came—I am glad you have seen George, and George you, and that you took to one another. I am glad my husband has seen you; he has spoken to me about you very warmly, for he has taken to you much as George did. I am very, very glad to have seen you myself, and to have learned what became of you—and of your wife. I know you wish well to all of us; be sure that we all of us wish most heartily well to you and yours. I sent for you and George, because I could not say all this unless we were alone; it is all I can do,” she said, with a smile, “to say it now.”
Indeed it was, for the tears were in her eyes all the time, as they were also in my father’s.
“Let this,” continued Yram, “be our leave-taking—for we must have nothing like a scene upstairs. Just shake hands with us all, say the usual conventional things, and make it as short as you can; but I could not bear to send you away without a few warmer words than I could have said when others were in the room.”
“May heaven bless you and yours,” said my father, “forever and ever.”
“That will do,” said George gently. “Now, both of you shake hands, and come upstairs with me.”
When all three of them had got calm, for George had been moved almost as much as his father and mother, they went upstairs, and Panky came for his answer. “You are very possibly right,” said my father—“the version you hold to be corrupt is the one in common use amongst ourselves, but it is only a translation, and very possibly only a translation of a translation, so that it may perhaps have been corrupted before it reached us.”
“That,” said Panky, “will explain everything,” and he went contentedly away.
My father talked a little aside with Mrs. Humdrum about her granddaughter and George, for Yram had told him that she knew all about the attachment, and then George, who saw that my father found the greatest difficulty in maintaining an outward calm, said, “Mr. Higgs, the streets are empty; we had better go.”
My father did as Yram had told him; shook hands with everyone, said all that was usual and proper as briefly as he could, and followed George out of the room. The Mayor saw them to the door, and saved my father from embarrassment by saying, “Mr. Higgs, you and I understand one another too well to make it necessary for us to say so. Goodbye to you, and may no ill befall you ere you get home.”
My father grasped his hand in both his own. “Again,” he said, “I can say no more than that I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
As he spoke he bowed his head, and went out
