“Sorry,” said George, having sorted himself out.
“What’s the use of being sorry?” growled the injured man, tenderly feeling his ear. “And what the devil are you doing anyway?”
“Just paying a call,” explained George.
“Doing a what?”
“I’m paying a formal call at this house.”
“Which house?”
“This one. Number sixteen. Waddington, Sigsbee H.”
Mr. Waddington regarded him with unconcealed hostility.
“Oh, you are, are you? Well, it may interest you to learn that I am Sigsbee H. Waddington, and I don’t know you from Adam. So now!”
George gasped.
“You are Sigsbee H. Waddington?” he said reverently.
“I am.”
George was gazing at Molly’s father as at some beautiful work of art—a superb painting, let us say—the sort of thing which connoisseurs fight for and which finally gets knocked down to Dr. Rosenbach for three hundred thousand dollars. Which will give the reader a rough idea of what love can do: for, considered in a calm and unbiased spirit, Sigsbee Waddington was little, if anything, to look at.
“Mr. Waddington,” said George, “I am proud to meet you.”
“You’re what?”
“Proud to meet you.”
“What of it?” said Sigsbee Waddington churlishly.
“Mr. Waddington,” said George, “I was born in Idaho.”
Much has been written of the sedative effect of pouring oil on the raging waters of the ocean, and it is on record that the vision of the Holy Grail, sliding athwart a rainbow, was generally sufficient to still the most fiercely warring passions of young knights in the Middle Ages. But never since history began can there have been so sudden a change from red-eyed hostility to smiling benevolence as occurred now in Sigsbee H. Waddington. As George’s words, like some magic spell, fell upon his ears, he forgot that one of those ears was smarting badly as the result of the impulsive clutch of this young man before him. Wrath melted from his soul like dew from a flower beneath the sun. He beamed on George. He pawed George’s sleeve with a paternal hand.
“You really come from the West?” he cried.
“I do.”
“From God’s own country? From the great wonderful West with its wide open spaces where a red-blooded man can fill his lungs with the breath of freedom?”
It was not precisely the way George would have described East Gilead, which was a stuffy little hamlet with a poorish water-supply and one of the worst soda-fountains in Idaho, but he nodded amiably.
Mr. Waddington dashed a hand across his eyes.
“The West! Why, it’s like a mother to me! I love every flower that blooms on the broad bosom of its sweeping plains, every sun-kissed peak of its everlasting hills.”
George said he did, too.
“Its beautiful valleys, mystic in their transparent, luminous gloom, weird in the quivering, golden haze of the lightning that flickers over them.”
“Ah!” said George.
“The dark spruces tipped with glimmering lights! The aspens bent low in the wind, like waves in a tempest at sea!”
“Can you beat them!” said George.
“The forest of oaks tossing wildly and shining with gleams of fire!”
“What could be sweeter?” said George.
“Say, listen,” said Mr. Waddington, “you and I must see more of each other. Come and have a bite of dinner!”
“Now?”
“Right this very minute. We’ve got a few of these puny-souled Eastern millionaires putting on the nosebag with us tonight, but you won’t mind them. We’ll just look at ’em and despise ’em. And after dinner, you and I will slip off to my study and have a good chat.”
“But won’t Mrs. Waddington object to an unexpected guest at the last moment?”
Mr. Waddington expanded his chest, and tapped it spaciously.
“Say, listen—what’s your name?—Finch?—Say, listen, Finch, do I look like the sort of man who’s bossed by his wife?”
It was precisely the sort of man that George thought he did look like, but this was not the moment to say so.
“It’s very kind of you,” he said.
“Kind? Say, listen, if I was riding along those illimitable prairies and got storm-bound outside your ranch at East Gilead, you wouldn’t worry about whether you were being kind when you asked me in for a bite, would you? You’d say, ‘Step right in, pardner! The place is yours.’ Very well, then!”
Mr. Waddington produced a latchkey.
“Ferris,” said Mr. Waddington in the hall, “tell those galoots down in the kitchen to set another place at table. A pard of mine from the West has happened in for a snack.”
III
I
The perfect hostess makes a point of never displaying discomposure. In moments of trial she aims at the easy repose of manner of a Red Indian at the stake. Nevertheless, there was a moment when, as she saw Sigsbee H. caracole into the drawing-room with George and heard him announce in a ringing voice that this fine young son of the western prairies had come to take potluck, Mrs. Waddington indisputably reeled.
She recovered herself. All the woman in her was urging her to take Sigsbee H. by his outstanding ears and shake him till he came unstuck, but she fought the emotion down. Gradually her glazed eye lost its dead-fishy look. Like Death in the poem, she “grinned horrible a ghastly smile.” And it was with a well-assumed graciousness that she eventually extended to George the quivering right hand which, had she been a less highly civilised woman, would about now have been landing on the side of her husband’s head, swung from the hip.
“Chahmed!” said Mrs. Waddington. “So very, very glad that you were able to come, Mr.—”
She paused, and George, eyeing her mistily, gathered that she wished to be informed of his name. He would have been glad to supply the information, but unfortunately at the moment he had forgotten it himself. He had a dim sort of idea that it began with an F or a G, but
