Love stories; Nobility -- Great Britain -- Fiction; Switzerland -- Fiction
Having posted it in the box in the hall, he bethought him that he must
find some place to live in, as the hotel was too expensive for a
permanence, and was making inquiries of the porter as to how he should
set about the matter when a telegram was handed to him. It ran: “All
up as I expected. Meet me Liverpool Street 4.30.—Nurse.”
So Godfrey postponed his search for lodgings, and at the appointed hour
kept the assignation on the platform. The train arrived, and out of it,
looking much more like her old self than she had on the previous day,
emerged Mrs. Parsons with the most extraordinary collection of bundles,
he counted nine of them, to say nothing of a jackdaw in a cage. She
embraced him with enthusiasm, dropping the heaviest of the parcels,
which seemed to contain bricks, upon his toe, and in a flood of
language told him of the peculiar awfulness of the row between his
father and herself which had ensued upon his departure.
“Yes,” she ended, “he flung my money at my head and I flung
it back at his, though afterwards I picked it up again, for it is no use
wasting good gold and silver. And so here I am, beginning life again,
like you, and feeling thirty years younger for it. Now, tell me what
you are going to do?”
Then they went and had tea in the refreshment room, leaving the jackdaw
and the other impediments in charge of a porter, and he told her.
“That’s first-rate,” she said. “I always hated the idea
of seeing you with a black coat on your back. The Queen’s uniform
looks much better, and I want you to be a man. Now you help me into a
cab and by dinner time to-morrow I’ll be ready for you at my house at
Hampstead, if I have to work all night to do it. Terms—drat the
terms. Well, if you must have them, Master Godfrey, ten shillings a
week will be more than you will cost me, and I ought to give you five
back for your company. Now I’ll make a start, for there will be a lot
to do before the place is fit for a young gentleman. I’ve never seen
it but twice, you know.”
So she departed, packed into a four-wheeled cab, with the jackdaw on her
lap, and Godfrey went to Madame Tussaud’s, where he studied the
guillotine and the Chamber of Horrors.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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