Shortly after this there came two despairing letters from Dorothy, telling him that she was in danger of starvation and imploring him to send her some money. The Rector was disturbed. It occurred to him—it was the first time in his life that he had seriously considered such a thing—that it is possible to starve if you have no money. So, after thinking it over for the best part of a week, he sold out ten pounds’ worth of shares and sent a cheque for ten pounds to his cousin, to be kept for Dorothy till she appeared. At the same time he sent a cold letter to Dorothy herself, telling her that she had better apply to Sir Thomas Hare. But several more days passed before this letter was posted, because the Rector had qualms about addressing a letter to “Ellen Millborough”—he dimly imagined that it was against the law to use false names—and of course, he had delayed far too long. Dorothy was already in the streets when the letter reached “Mary’s.”
Sir Thomas Hare was a widower, a good-hearted, chuckle-headed man of about sixty-five, with an obtuse rosy face and curling moustaches. He dressed by preference in checked overcoats and curly-brimmed bowler hats that were at once dashingly smart and four decades out of date. At a first glance he gave the impression of having carefully disguised himself as a cavalry major of the ’nineties, so that you could hardly look at him without thinking of devilled bones with a b. and s., and the tinkle of hansom bells, and the Pink ’Un in its great “Pitcher” days, and Lottie Collins and “Tarara-BOOM-deay.” But his chief characteristic was an abysmal mental vagueness. He was one of those people who say “Don’t you know?” and “What! What!” and lose themselves in the middle of their sentences. When he was puzzled or in difficulties, his moustaches seemed to bristle forward, giving him the appearance of a well-meaning but exceptionally brainless prawn.
So far as his own inclinations went Sir Thomas was not in the least anxious to help his cousins, for Dorothy herself he had never seen, and the Rector he looked on as a cadging poor relation of the worst possible type. But the fact was that he had had just about as much of this “Rector’s Daughter” business as he could stand. The accursed chance that Dorothy’s surname was the same as his own had made his life a misery for the past fortnight, and he foresaw further and worse scandals if she were left at large any longer. So, just before leaving London for the pheasant shooting, he sent for his butler, who was also his confidant and intellectual guide, and held a council of war.
“Look here, Blyth, dammit,” said Sir Thomas prawnishly (Blyth was the butler’s name), “I suppose you’ve seen all this damn’ stuff in the newspapers, hey? This ‘Rector’s Daughter’ stuff? About this damned niece of mine.”
Blyth was a small sharp-featured man with a voice that never rose above a whisper. It was as nearly silent as a voice can be while still remaining a voice. Only by watching his lips as well as listening closely could you catch the whole of what he said. In this case his lips signalled something to the effect that Dorothy was Sir Thomas’s cousin, not his niece.
“What, my cousin, is she?” said Sir Thomas. “So she is, by Jove! Well, look here, Blyth, what I mean to say—it’s about time we got hold of the damn’ girl and locked her up somewhere. See what I mean? Get hold of her before there’s any more trouble. She’s knocking about somewhere in London, I believe. What’s the best way of getting on her track? Police? Private detectives and all that? D’you think we could manage it?”
Blyth’s lips registered disapproval. It would, he seemed to be saying, be possible to trace Dorothy without calling in the police and having a lot of disagreeable publicity.
“Good man!” said Sir Thomas. “Get to it, then. Never mind what it costs. I’d give fifty quid not to have that ‘Rector’s Daughter’ business over again. And for God’s sake, Blyth,” he added confidentially, “once you’ve got hold of the damn’ girl, don’t let her out of your sight. Bring her back to the house and damn’ well keep her here. See what I mean? Keep her under lock and key till I get back. Or else God knows what she’ll be up to next.”
Sir Thomas, of course, had never seen Dorothy, and it was therefore excusable that he should have formed his conception of her from the newspaper reports.
It took Blyth about a week to track Dorothy down. On the morning after she came out of the police court cells (they had fined her six shillings, and, in default of payment, detained her for twelve hours: Mrs. McElligot, as an old offender, got seven days), Blyth came up to her, lifted his bowler hat a quarter of an inch from his head, and enquired noiselessly whether she were not Miss Dorothy Hare. At the second attempt Dorothy understood what he was saying, and admitted that she was Miss Dorothy Hare; whereupon Blyth explained that he was sent by her cousin, who was anxious to help her, and that she was to come home with him immediately.
Dorothy followed him without more words said. It seemed queer that her cousin should take this sudden interest in her, but it was no queerer than the other things that had been happening lately. They took the bus to Hyde Park Corner, Blyth paying the fares, and then walked to a large, expensive-looking house with shuttered windows, on the borderland between Knightsbridge and Mayfair. They went down some steps, and Blyth produced a key and they went in. So, after an absence of something over six weeks, Dorothy returned to respectable society, by the area door.
She spent three days in the empty house before her cousin came home. It was a queer, lonely time. There were several servants in the house, but she saw nobody except Blyth, who brought her her meals and talked to her, noiselessly, with a mixture of deference and disapproval. He could not quite make up his mind whether she was a young lady of family or a rescued Magdalen, and so treated her as something between the two. The house had that hushed, corpse-like air peculiar to houses whose master is away, so that you instinctively went about on tiptoe and kept the blinds over the windows. Dorothy did not even dare to enter any of the main rooms. She spent all the daytime lurking in a dusty, forlorn room at the top of the house which was a sort of museum of bric-à-brac dating from 1880 onwards. Lady Hare, dead these five years, had been an industrious collector of rubbish, and most of it had been stowed away in this room when she died. It was a doubtful point whether the queerest object in the room was a yellowed photograph of Dorothy’s father, aged eighteen but with respectable side-whiskers, standing self-consciously beside an “ordinary” bicycle—this was in 1888; or whether it was a little sandalwood box labelled “Piece of Bread touched by Cecil Rhodes at the City and South Africa Banquet, June 1897.” The sole books in the room were some grisly school prizes that had been won by Sir Thomas’s children—he had three, the youngest being the same age as Dorothy.
It was obvious that the servants had orders not to let her go out of doors. However, her father’s cheque for ten pounds had arrived, and with some difficulty she induced Blyth to get it cashed, and, on the third day, went out and bought herself some clothes. She bought herself a ready-made tweed coat and skirt and a jersey to go with them, a hat, and a very cheap frock of artificial printed silk; also a pair of passable brown shoes, three pairs of lisle stockings, a nasty, cheap little handbag and a pair of grey cotton gloves that would pass for suède at a little distance. That came to eight pounds ten, and she dared not spend more. As for underclothes, nightdresses and handkerchiefs, they would have to wait. After all, it is the clothes that show that matter.
Sir Thomas arrived on the following day, and never really got over the surprise that Dorothy’s appearance gave him. He had been expecting to see some rouged and powdered siren who would plague him with temptations to which, alas! he was no longer capable of succumbing; and this countrified, spinsterish girl upset all his calculations. Certain vague ideas that had been floating about in his mind, of finding her a job as a manicurist or perhaps as a private secretary to a bookie, floated out of it again. From time to time Dorothy caught him studying her with a puzzled, prawnish eye, obviously wondering how on earth such a girl could ever have figured in an elopement. It was very little use, of course, telling him that she had not eloped. She had given him her version of the story, and he had accepted it with a chivalrous “Of course, m’dear, of course!” and thereafter, in every other sentence, betrayed the fact that he disbelieved