The Fortunate Youth Part 14

The Archdeacon smiled humorously. He was a spare man of seventy, with thin, pointed, clean-shaven face, and clear blue eyes like Miss Winwood's. "If there's a situation, my dear Ursula, with which you can't grapple," said he, "it must indeed be extraordinary."

She narrated what had occurred, and together they bent over the unconscious youth. "I would suggest," said she, "that we put him into the carriage, drive him up to the house, and send for Dr. Fuller."

"I can only support your suggestion," said the Archdeacon.

So the coachman came down from his box and helped them to lift the young man into the landau; and his body swayed helplessly between Miss Winwood and the Archdeacon, whose breeches and gaiters were smeared with dust from his heavy boots. A few moments afterwards he was carried into the library and laid upon a sofa, and Miss Winwood administered restoratives. The deep stupor seemed to pa.s.s, and he began to moan.

Miss Winwood and the housekeeper stood by his side. The Archdeacon, his hands behind his back, paced the noiseless Turkey carpet. "I hope,"

said he, "your doctor will not be long in coming."

"It looks like a sunstroke," the housekeeper remarked, as her mistress scrutinized the clinical thermometer.

"It doesn't," said Miss Winwood bluntly. "In sunstroke the face is either congested or clammy. I know that much. He has a temperature of 103."

"Poor fellow!" said the Archdeacon.

"I wonder who he is," said Miss Winwood.

"Perhaps this may tell us," said the Archdeacon.

From the knapsack, carelessly handled by the servant who had brought it in, had escaped a book, and the servant had laid the book on the top of the knapsack. The Archdeacon took it up.

"Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici and Urn Burial. On the flyleaf, 'Paul Savelli.' An undergraduate, I should say, on a walking tour."

Miss Winwood took the book from his hands--a little cheap reprint. "I'm glad," she said.

"Why, my dear Ursula?"

"I'm very fond of Sir Thomas Browne, myself," she replied.

Presently the doctor came and made his examination. He shook a grave head. "Pneumonia. And he has got it bad. Perhaps a touch of the sun as well." The housekeeper smiled discreetly. "Looks half-starved, too.

I'll send up the ambulance at once and get him to the cottage hospital."

Miss Winwood, a practical woman, was aware that the doctor gave wise counsel. But she looked at Paul and hesitated. Paul's destiny, though none knew it, hung in the balance. "I disapprove altogether of the cottage hospital," she said.

"Eh?" said the doctor.

The Archdeacon raised his eyebrows. "My dear Ursula, I thought you had made the Morebury Cottage Hospital the model of its kind."

"Its kind is not for people who carry about Sir Thomas Browne in their pocket," retorted the disingenuous lady. "If I turned him out of my house, doctor, and anything happened to him, I should have to reckon with his people. He stays here. You'll kindly arrange for nurses. The red room, Wilkins,--no, the green--the one with the small oak bed. You can't nurse people properly in four-posters. It has a south-east aspect"--she turned to the doctor--"and so gets the sun most of the day. That's quite right, isn't it?"

"Ideal. But I warn you, Miss Winwood, you may be letting yourself in for a perfectly avoidable lot of trouble."

"I like trouble," said Miss Winwood.

"You're certainly looking for it," replied the doctor glancing at Paul and stuffing his stethoscope into his pocket. "And in this case, I can promise you worry beyond dreams of anxiety."

The word of Ursula Winwood was law for miles around. Dr. Fuller, rosy, fat and fifty, obeyed, like everyone else; but during the process of law-making he had often, before now, played the part of an urbane and gently satirical leader of the opposition.

She flashed round on him, with a foolish pain through her heart that caused her to catch her breath. "Is he as bad as that?" she asked quickly.

"As bad as that," said the doctor, with grave significance. "How he managed to get here is a mystery!" Within a quarter-of-an-hour the unconscious Paul, clad in a suit of Colonel Winwood's silk pyjamas, lay in a fragrant room, hung with green and furnished in old, black oak.

Never once, in all his life, had Paul Kegworthy lain in such a room.

And for him a great house was in commotion. Messages went forth for nurses and medicines and the paraphernalia of a luxurious sick-chamber, and-the lady of the house being absurdly anxious--for a great London specialist, whose fee, in Dr. Fuller's quiet eyes, would be amusingly fantastic.

"It seems horrible to search the poor boy's pockets," said Miss Winwood, when, after these excursions and alarms the Archdeacon and herself had returned to the library; "but we must try to find out who he is and communicate with his people. Savelli. I've never heard of them. I wonder who they are."

"There is an historical Italian family of that name," said the Archdeacon.

"I was sure of it," said Miss Winwood.

"Of what?"

"That his people--are--well--all right."

"Why are you sure?"

Ursula was very fond of her uncle. He represented to her the fine flower of the Church of England--a gentleman, a scholar, an ideal physical type of the Anglican dignitary, a man of unquestionable piety and Christian charity, a personage who would be recognized for what he was by Hottentots or Esquimaux or attendants of wagon-lits trains or millionaires of the Middle West of America or Parisian Apaches. In him the branch of the family tree had burgeoned into the perfect cleric.

Yet sometimes, the play of light beneath the surface of those blue eyes, so like her own, and the delicately intoned challenges of his courtly voice, exasperated her beyond measure. "It's obvious to any idiot, my dear," she replied testily. "Just look at him. It speaks for itself."

The Archdeacon put his thin hand on her plump shoulder, and smiled. The old man had a very sunny smile. "I'm sorry to carry on a conversation so Socratically," said he. "But what is 'it'?"

"I've never seen anything so physically beautiful, save the statues in the Vatican, in all my life. If he's not an aristocrat to the finger tips, I'll give up all my work, turn Catholic, and go into a nunnery--which will distress you exceedingly. And then"--she waved a plump hand--"and then, as I've mentioned before, he reads the Religio Medici. The commonplace, vulgar young man of to-day no more reads Sir Thomas Browne than he reads Tertullian or the Upanishads."

"He also reads," said the Archdeacon, stuffing his hand into Paul's knapsack, against whose canvas the stiff outline of a book revealed itself--"he also reads"--he held up a little fat duodecimo--"the Chansons de Beranger."

"That proves it," cried Miss Winwood.

"Proves what?"

His blue eyes twinkled. Having a sense of humour, she laughed and flung her great arm round his frail shoulders. "It proves, my venerable and otherwise distinguished dear, that I am right and you are wrong."

"My good Ursula," said he, disengaging himself, "I have not advanced one argument either in favour of, or in opposition to, one single proposition the whole of this afternoon."

She shook her head at him pityingly.

The housekeeper entered carrying a double handful of odds and ends which she laid on the library table--a watch and chain and cornelian heart, a cigarette case bearing the initials "P.S.," some keys, a very soiled handkerchief, a sovereign, a shilling and a penny. Dr. Fuller had sent them down with his compliments; they were the entire contents of the young gentleman's pockets.

"Not a card, not a sc.r.a.p of paper with a name and address on it?" cried Miss Winwood.

"Not a sc.r.a.p, miss. The doctor and I searched most thoroughly."

"Perhaps the knapsack will tell us more," said the Archdeacon.

The knapsack, however, revealed nothing but a few toilet necessaries, a hunk of stale bread and a depressing morsel of cheese, and a pair of stockings and a shirt declared by the housekeeper to be wet through. As the Beranger, like the Sir Thomas Browne, was inscribed "Paul Savelli,"

which corresponded with the initials on the cigarette case, they were fairly certain of the young man's name. But that was all they could discover regarding him.

"We'll have to wait until he can tell us himself," said Miss Winwood later to the doctor.