Sir Dominick Ferrand | Page 5

Jersey Villas might have been vague,
it was not so on the rights and the wrongs of landladies.
Mrs. Ryves's little boy was in the garden as Peter Baron issued from the
house, and his mother appeared to have come out for a moment,
bareheaded, to see that he was doing no harm. She was discussing with
him the responsibility that he might incur by passing a piece of string
round one of the iron palings and pretending he was in command of a
"geegee"; but it happened that at the sight of the other lodger the child
was seized with a finer perception of the drivable. He rushed at Baron
with a flourish of the bridle, shouting, "Ou geegee!" in a manner
productive of some refined embarrassment to his mother. Baron met his
advance by mounting him on a shoulder and feigning to prance an
instant, so that by the time this performance was over--it took but a few
seconds--the young man felt introduced to Mrs. Ryves. Her smile
struck him as charming, and such an impression shortens many steps.
She said, "Oh, thank you--you mustn't let him worry you"; and then as,
having put down the child and raised his hat, he was turning away, she
added: "It's very good of you not to complain of my piano."
"I particularly enjoy it--you play beautifully," said Peter Baron.
"I have to play, you see--it's all I can do. But the people next door don't
like it, though my room, you know, is not against their wall. Therefore
I thank you for letting me tell them that you, in the house, don't find me
a nuisance."
She looked gentle and bright as she spoke, and as the young man's eyes
rested on her the tolerance for which she expressed herself indebted
seemed to him the least indulgence she might count upon. But he only
laughed and said "Oh, no, you're not a nuisance!" and felt more and
more introduced.
The little boy, who was handsome, hereupon clamoured for another
ride, and she took him up herself, to moderate his transports. She stood
a moment with the child in her arms, and he put his fingers exuberantly
into her hair, so that while she smiled at Baron she slowly, permittingly
shook her head to get rid of them.
"If they really make a fuss I'm afraid I shall have to go," she went on.
"Oh, don't go!" Baron broke out, with a sudden expressiveness which
made his voice, as it fell upon his ear, strike him as the voice of another.

She gave a vague exclamation and, nodding slightly but not unsociably,
passed back into the house. She had made an impression which
remained till the other party to the conversation reached the
railway-station, when it was superseded by the thought of his
prospective discussion with Mr. Locket. This was a proof of the
intensity of that interest.
The aftertaste of the later conference was also intense for Peter Baron,
who quitted his editor with his manuscript under his arm. He had had
the question out with Mr. Locket, and he was in a flutter which ought to
have been a sense of triumph and which indeed at first he succeeded in
regarding in this light. Mr. Locket had had to admit that there was an
idea in his story, and that was a tribute which Baron was in a position
to make the most of. But there was also a scene which scandalised the
editorial conscience and which the young man had promised to rewrite.
The idea that Mr. Locket had been so good as to disengage depended
for clearness mainly on this scene; so it was easy to see his objection
was perverse. This inference was probably a part of the joy in which
Peter Baron walked as he carried home a contribution it pleased him to
classify as accepted. He walked to work off his excitement and to think
in what manner he should reconstruct. He went some distance without
settling that point, and then, as it began to worry him, he looked
vaguely into shop-windows for solutions and hints. Mr. Locket lived in
the depths of Chelsea, in a little panelled, amiable house, and Baron
took his way homeward along the King's Road. There was a new
amusement for him, a fresher bustle, in a London walk in the morning;
these were hours that he habitually spent at his table, in the awkward
attitude engendered by the poor piece of furniture, one of the rickety
features of Mrs. Bundy's second floor, which had to serve as his altar of
literary sacrifice. If by exception he went out when the day was young
he noticed that life seemed younger with it; there were livelier
industries to profit by and