“This one may be pretty peevish, though; he must have been answering a lot of questions these last twenty-four hours.”
“That’s where you come in. There are times, you know, when I’m almost glad I married. You’ll have to win his heart somehow; let’s see, what shall it be? Dogs? They generally keep dogs. No, I know; gardens. They all keep gardens. You will have to take a really intelligent interest in this one.”
“What is the husband of the gardener doing? The husband of the gardener is looking for footprints on the back lawn. All right. If he seems difficile, I shall ask for cuttings from his lobelias. But I don’t quite see how we’re to explain our presence at the lock. The road there doesn’t go any further. Do we just say we’ve been told he’s got a pretty garden and—”
“On the contrary, we open the conversation by saying ‘Lock!’ Then you get to work.”
“Oo, are we really going to start boating at once? I say, you’ll be pretty tired and pretty late by the time you’ve paddled me six miles upstream.”
“I had thought of obviating that by taking two paddles. Look out, this is going to be Magdalen Bridge, not Brooklyn Bridge; try to have some regard for the safety of the public.”
V
Mr. Burgess Expands
The Gudgeon Inn proved to be empty of visitors, its management at once hospitable to strangers and incurious as to their errand. They secured a quite tolerable bedroom, whose windows looked down over the strip of grass on to the river itself. Luncheon was a hasty meal: Bredon was plainly full of impatience to be off, and Angela accommodated herself to his mood. They hired from the inn not only a canoe, but a substantial length of rope, and most of the journey upstream was in the end accomplished by towing—Miles walking on the bank while Angela steered and gave occasional dabs at the water in the stern. Few things travel quicker than a towed canoe. Indeed, the only circumstance which delayed them was the melancholy presence of a few dredgers, whose crews were occupied in dragging the bed of the stream for further traces of the catastrophe. At one point, where the whole stream was barred in this way, they found it necessary to pull over the bank. But this, fortunately, was the spot at which the boy scouts were encamped; and Bredon looked on with benignant interest while no less than fourteen good deeds were registered in their juvenile Treasury of Merit. The scoutmaster, a man of some age and education, fell into conversation with him while the operation was being conducted.
“Ironical,” said Bredon, “that so much help should have been so close at hand when the accident took place.”
“Well,” said the stranger, “I don’t know that we should have been very much use. You see, we had only just moved in, and that morning the bigger boys had gone over to Wheathampton with the trek-cart to bring our stores over. Only the little ones were here, cleaning up and so on.”
“Then you were over at Wheathampton yourself?”
“Why, no; it’s true I was in camp. But there are endless little details one has to arrange for, and I wasn’t keeping an eye on the stream. Not at all, not at all; the boys enjoy doing it. Good morning to you, sir.”
The plan of campaign had been amended so far as the lock was concerned. If they demanded the opening of the lock, it would be necessary to go further upstream for the look of the thing, and this would be mere waste of time. Bredon hailed the lock-keeper, and asked if they might tie up the boat just underneath while they went over to Shipcote to get some tea. The lock-keeper paused impressively, like one struggling with the fallacy of many questions.
“There isn’t nothing against your tying up the boat there, sir, not if you wished to. But you won’t get no tea at Shipcote, because Mrs. Barley at the inn don’t give teas. No demand for ’em, she says; that’s how it is. You’d have got a nice cup of tea down at the Gudgeon, but you won’t get none not at Shipcote. Of course, if you aren’t in a great hurry, I could ask Mrs. Burgess if she’d put the pot on for you; she do sometimes in the season.”
Miles rightly conjectured that Mrs. Burgess was the lock-keeper’s wife. By a trick of human vanity, we always assume a knowledge of our own surname in conversation with strangers. This was better than anything they had dared to hope for; the offer was speedily accepted; their position was assured; and Angela’s appreciation of the garden would have been merely perfunctory, if it had not been genuinely forced from her by the beauty of what she saw. Within five minutes, she actually found herself applying to Mr. Burgess for horticultural advice; she excelled herself in superlatives; she called her embarrassed husband to witness that Mr. Burgess’ pinks were a fortnight ahead of their own. So completely was she absorbed that in the end it was Mr. Burgess himself, full of importance over recent events, who called their attention to the fact that he was, so to speak, the scene of a tragedy.
“Ah, yes, that drowning business,” said Bredon. “An extraordinary affair—have you ever known the bottom of a canoe stove in like that by running aground on a bit of shingle?”
“No, sir, I haven’t, and you can take it from me that I told you so. For a racing-boat I wouldn’t say, being built for speed and that; but those canoes is built very hard, if you see what I mean. Light, but hard, that’s how it is; it’s the quality of the wood. In a flood, now, I
