A figure with battered face above vest and pants bounded
from its room. “No!” Bob roared.
“No!”
“No!” Mrs. Chater echoed, not knowing
to what the negative applied, but hysterically commanding
it.
“No!” screamed the agitated servants,
one to another.
“No! no doctor!” bellowed Bob; grabbed
the can from his mother; shot back to his room.
“No doctor!” Mrs. Chater screamed to the
white-faced pack upon the stairs; fled after him.
“My boy! Tell me!”
Her boy raised his dripping face from the basin.
“For God’s sake shut the door!”
he roared.
She did. “Tell me!” she trembled.
“It’s that damned girl.”
“That girl?”
“Miss Humfray!”
“Miss Humfray! Done that to you! Oh,
your poor face! Your poor face!”
“No!—no! Do be quiet, mother!
Some infernal man she goes about with in the Park!
I spoke to him and he set on me!”
“The infamous creature! The wicked, infamous
girl! A bad girl, I knew it!—”
Agitated tapping at the door: “The cotton-wool
m’am.” “Sticking-plaster,
m’am.” “’Ot bottle, m’am.”
“Go away!” roared Bob. “Go
away! O-oo, my face!” He hopped in wrath
and pain. “Send those damned women away!”
Mrs. Chater rushed to the door. Passing, she
for the first time caught full sight of her son’s
face now that the hot water had exposed its wreck.
“Oh, your eyes! Your poor eyes! They’re
closing up!”
Bob staggered to the mirror; discovered the full horror
of his marred beauty. “Curse it!”
he groaned and gave an order.
Mrs. Chater flew to the telephone.
In the office of Mr. Samuel Hock, purveyor of meat,
by appointment, to the Prince of Wales, the telephone
bell sharply rang. Mr. Hock stepped to the receiver,
listened, then bellowed an order into the shop:
“One of beefsteak to 14 Palace Gardens, sharp!”
A Cab For 14 Palace Gardens.
With tremendous strides, with emotion roaring in and
out his nostrils in gusty blasts of fury, my passionate
George encompassed the Park this way and that until
he came at length upon his trembling Mary.
Save for that first blow where Bob’s ring had
marked his cheek he had suffered but little in the
fight—sufficiently, notwithstanding, coupled
with his colossal demeanour, for Mary’s eyes
to discover that something was amiss.
She came to him; cried at a little distance:
“Oh, dearest, I—I could not meet
you at the seat.”
Then she saw more clearly. She asked: “What
has happened?” and stood with quivering lip
recording the flutters of her heart.
George took one hand; patted it between both his.
For the moment his boiling anger cooled beneath grim
relish of his news. “I’ve pretty
well killed that Chater swine,” he said.
