CHAPTER SIXTEEN

We reached London somewhat late in the evening—­in the twilight of a summer day.  There was the hurry and bustle of arrival, a hurry and bustle that changed the tenor of my thoughts and broke their train.  As I stood reflecting before the door of the carriage, I felt a friendly pressure of a hand on my shoulder.

“You’ll see to that,” Churchill’s voice said in my ear.  “You’ll set the copyists to work.”

“I’ll go to the Museum to-morrow,” I said.  There were certain extracts to be made for the “Life of Cromwell”—­extracts from pamphlets that we had not conveniently at disposal.  He nodded, walked swiftly toward his brougham, opened the door and entered.

I remember so well that last sight of him—­of his long, slim figure bending down for the entrance, woefully solitary, woefully weighted; remember so well the gleam of the carriage panels reflecting the murky light of the bare London terminus, the attitude of the coachman stiffly reining back the horse; the thin hand that reached out, a gleam of white, to turn the gleaming handle.  There was something intimately suggestive of the man in the motion of that hand, in its tentative outstretching, its gentle, half-persuasive—­almost theoretic—­grasp of the handle.  The pleasure of its friendly pressure on my shoulder carried me over some minutes of solitude; its weight on my body removing another from my mind.  I had feared that my ineffective disclosure had chilled what of regard he had for me.  He had said nothing, his manner had said nothing, but I had feared.  In the railway carriage he had sat remote from me, buried in papers.  But that touch on my shoulder was enough to set me well with myself again, if not to afford scope for pleasant improvisation.  It at least showed me that he bore me no ill-will, otherwise he would hardly have touched me.  Perhaps, even, he was grateful to me, not for service, but for ineffectual good-will.  Whatever I read into it, that was the last time he spoke to me, and the last time he touched me.  And I loved him very well.  Things went so quickly after that.

In a moderately cheerful frame of mind I strolled the few yards that separated me from my club—­intent on dining.  In my averseness to solitude I sat down at a table where sat already a little, bald-headed, false-toothed Anglo-Indian, a man who bored me into fits of nervous excitement.  He was by way of being an incredibly distant uncle of my own.  As a rule I avoided him, to-night I dined with him.  He was a person of interminable and incredibly inaccurate reminiscences.  His long residence in an indigo-producing swamp had affected his memory, which was supported by only very occasional visits to England.

He told me tales of my poor father and of my poor, dear mother, and of Mr. Bromptons and Mrs. Kenwards who had figured on their visiting lists away back in the musty sixties.