Humorous stories; Valets -- Fiction; Washington (State) -- Fiction
For my own part, I was also at some pains with my attire going
consciously a bit further with details than Cousin Egbert, thinking it
best the Honourable George should at once observe a change in my
bearing and social consequence so that nothing in his manner toward me
might embarrassingly publish our former relations. The stick, gloves,
and monocle would achieve this for the moment, and once alone I meant
to tell him straight that all was over between us as master and man,
we having passed out of each other’s lives in that respect. If
necessary, I meant to read to him certain passages from the so-called
“Declaration of Independence,” and to show him the fateful little card
I had found, which would acquaint him, I made no doubt, with the great
change that had come upon me, after which our intimacy would rest
solely upon the mutual esteem which I knew to exist between us. I mean
to say, it would never have done for one moment at home, but finding
ourselves together in this wild and lawless country we would neither
of us try to resist America, but face each other as one equal native
to another.
Waiting on the station platform with Cousin Egbert, he confided to the
loungers there that he was come to meet his friend Judge Basingwell,
whereat all betrayed a friendly interest, though they were not at all
persons that mattered, being of the semi-leisured class who each day
went down, as they put it, “to see Number Six go through.” There was
thus a rather tense air of expectancy when the train pulled in. From
one of the Pullman night coaches emerged the Honourable George,
preceded by a blackamoor or raccoon bearing bags and bundles, and
followed by another uniformed raccoon and a white guard, also bearing
bags and bundles, and all betraying a marked anxiety.
One glance at the Honourable George served to confirm certain fears I
had suffered regarding his appearance. Topped by a deer-stalking
fore-and-aft cap in an inferior state of preservation, he wore the
jacket of a lounge-suit, once possible, doubtless, but now demoded,
and a blazered golfing waistcoat, striking for its poisonous greens,
trousers from an outing suit that I myself had discarded after it came
to me, and boots of an entirely shocking character. Of his cravat I
have not the heart to speak, but I may mention that all his garments
were quite horrid with wrinkles and seemed to have been slept in
repeatedly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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