"WHAT IT MUST BE TO YOU--JUST YOU!"
G.Selden, awakening to consciousness two days later, lay and stared at the chintz covering of the top of his four-post bed through a few minutes of vacant amazement.It was a four-post bed he was lying on, wasn't it? And his leg was bandaged and felt unmovable.The last thing he remembered was going down an incline in a tree-bordered avenue.There was nothing more.He had been all right then.Was this a four-post bed or was it not? Yes, it was.And was it part of the furnishings of a swell bedroom--the kind of bedroom he had never been in before? Tip top, in fact? He stared and tried to recall things--but could not, and in his bewilderment exclaimed aloud.
"Well," he said, "if this ain't the limit! You may search ME!"A respectable person in a white apron came to him from the other side of the room.It was Buttle's wife, who had been hastily called in.
"Sh--sh," she said soothingly."Don't you worry.
Nobody ain't goin' to search you.Nobody ain't.There! Sh, sh, sh," rather as if he were a baby.Beginning to be conscious of a curious sense of weakness, Selden lay and stared at her in a helplessness which might have been considered pathetic.
Perhaps he had got "bats in his belfry," and there was no use in talking.
At that moment, however, the door opened and a young lady entered.She was "a looker," G.Selden's weakness did not interfere with his perceiving."A looker, by gee!" She was dressed, as if for going out, in softly tinted, exquisite things, and a large, strange hydrangea blue flower under the brim of her hat rested on soft and full black hair.The black hair gave him a clue.It was hair like that he had seen as Reuben S.Vanderpoel's daughter rode by when he stood at the park gates at Mount Dunstan."Bats in his belfry," of course.
"How is he?" she said to the nurse.
"He's been seeming comfortable all day, miss," the woman answered, "but he's light-headed yet.He opened his eyes quite sensible looking a bit ago, but he spoke queer.He said something was the limit, and that we might search him."Betty approached the bedside to look at him, and meeting the disturbed inquiry in his uplifted eyes, laughed, because, seeing that he was not delirious, she thought she understood.She had not lived in New York without hearing its argot, and she realised that the exclamation which had appeared delirium to Mrs.Buttle had probably indicated that the unexplainableness of the situation in which G.Selden found himself struck him as reaching the limit of probability, and that the most extended search of his person would fail to reveal any clue to satisfactory explanation.
She bent over him, with her laugh still shining in her eyes.
"I hope you feel better.Can you tell me?" she said.
His voice was not strong, but his answer was that of a young man who knew what he was saying.
"If I'm not off my head, ma'am, I'm quite comfortable, thank you," he replied.
"I am glad to hear that," said Betty."Don't be disturbed.
Your mind is quite clear."
"All I want," said G.Selden impartially, "is just to know where I'm at, and how I blew in here.It would help me to rest better.""You met with an accident," the "looker" explained, still smiling with both lips and eyes."Your bicycle chain broke and you were thrown and hurt yourself.It happened in the avenue in the park.We found you and brought you in.You are at Stornham Court, which belongs to Sir Nigel Anstruthers.Lady Anstruthers is my sister.I am Miss Vanderpoel.""Hully gee!" ejaculated G.Selden inevitably."Hully GEE!" The splendour of the moment was such that his brain whirled.As it was not yet in the physical condition to whirl with any comfort, he found himself closing his eyes weakly.
"That's right," Miss Vanderpoel said."Keep them closed.I must not talk to you until you are stronger.Lie still and try not to think.The doctor says you are getting on very well.I will come and see you again."As the soft sweep of her dress reached the door he managed to open his eyes.
"Thank you, Miss Vanderpoel," he said."Thank you, ma'am.And as his eyelids closed again he murmured in luxurious peace:
"Well, if that's her--she can have ME--and welcome!".....
She came to see him again each day--sometimes in a linen frock and garden hat, sometimes in her soft tints and lace and flowers before or after her drive in the afternoon, and two or three times in the evening, with lovely shoulders and wonderfully trailing draperies--looking like the women he had caught far-off glimpses of on the rare occasion of his having indulged himself in the highest and most remotely placed seat in the gallery at the opera, which inconvenience he had borne not through any ardent desire to hear the music, but because he wanted to see the show and get "a look-in" at the Four Hundred.He believed very implicitly in his Four Hundred, and privately--though perhaps almost unconsciously--cherished the distinction his share of them conferred upon him, as fondly as the English young man of his rudimentary type cherishes his dukes and duchesses.The English young man may revel in his coroneted beauties in photograph shops, the young American dwells fondly on flattering, or very unflattering, reproductions of his multi-millionaires' wives and daughters in the voluminous illustrated sheets of his Sunday paper, without which life would be a wretched and savourless thing.
Selden had never seen Miss Vanderpoel in his Sunday paper, and here he was lying in a room in the same house with her.And she coming in to see him and talk to him as if he was one of the Four Hundred himself! The comfort and luxury with which he found himself surrounded sank into insignificance when compared with such unearthly luck as this.