CHAPTER IV.

THE QUEST OF THE DOG

Gilead had often encountered in the _Daily Post_--sandwiched, say, between a heart-moving appeal on behalf of the outcast and houseless, and a last drowning cry for help from a soul almost submerged--a plea for some dog or cat seeking a kind home, and had reflected on the curious variety and varied quality of the petitions which a medium for benevolence was calculated to attract. He hoped that those, thus fondly appealing to charity for their animal beloveds, were in the habit of scrutinizing the lists in which their advertisements appeared, and of justifying their own title to help in one form by vouchsafing it in another. But he believed he had always noticed that an excessive devotion to animals entailed a rather ironic attitude towards the needs of the human family, and it was in no very sympathetic mood, therefore, that he read the first words of the following advertisement, which his secretary one morning pointed out to him:--

“_Will anyone give a kind home to Pilot, a dog. O, please do help! This is genuine. No money-lenders need apply. Address Judy, Marshlock Old Rectory, Shipton-on-Thames._”

“Why do you show me this, Nestle?” he said, looking up.

“Excuse me, sir,” said the secretary. “Have you read to the end?”

Gilead bent to the paper again, and smiled.

“What a very odd advertisement!” he said. “Is it nonsense or innocence, do you think?”

The secretary shrugged his shoulders slightly.

“Supposing we ask Miss Halifax’s opinion, Mr Balm?”

Gilead said “certainly,” and leaned back in his chair as the secretary carried the paper to the young lady, who was engaged at her desk over correspondence.

“Do you take that for a hoax, Miss Halifax?”

The beautiful amanuensis read and considered.

“No, Mr Balm,” she said. “This was written, I am sure, by some distressed child, whose people take in the _Daily Post_. If it were a hoax, some covering address would have been given.”

Gilead rose.

“Give me the paper, please,” he said.

She smiled, rather wistfully.

“I knew the very suggestion of a child would win you,” she said.

He looked at her kindly.

“It is your feminine perspicacity that wins me,” he said. “I cannot tell you how it touches me to find us all three in such accord over this business of humanitarianism, and so superior, in its pursuit, to ignoble jealousies and misunderstandings.”

That was a tribute to the secretary, who had never shewn the least resentment over the lady’s inclusion in the inner confidences of his Chief. Nestle stood quiet a moment or two, as Gilead, having spoken, left the room; and then, moving softly, addressed a word to the amanuensis. She waved him away; and he saw at once, to his curious concern, that she was crying.

Gilead, foreseeing a long day and a queer experience, drove to Paddington Station, whence he took a train presently to a distant up-river junction, from which a short branch line carried him leisurely to Shipton-on-Thames. It was a quiet torrid day in late April, hot as the ideal Midsummer, and, after asking his direction, he started on foot across the fields for the Old Rectory, which, it appeared, was situated at no great distance away on the banks of the river. His path was a pleasant one, remote and peaceful, leading him by sweet-smelling pastures and lanes to a waterside hamlet, where a scrap of church-tower, ruined and ivy-grown, and a fragment of antique graveyard at its foot spoke of some ancient benefice long since discontinued or translated. He was looking about in this sleepy retreat for someone to correct his way for him, when a sound of youthful voices breaking out if a leafy road reached his ears, and he saw two children, a boy and a girl, turn a corner and make in his direction. He advanced to meet them.

“Can you tell me the way to the Old Rectory?” he asked.

The boy went on without answering, but, finding that his little companion had stopped embarrassed, swaggered round and came back.

“Beg your pardon?” he said.

Gilead repeated his question.

“Well, we’re going there,” said the boy. “You can come with us, if you like.”

He was a meaty youth of some twelve summers, with an imbecile self-satisfied face and porky eyes; but his stylish white flannels and little Oxford-blue blazer with the yellow badge on its pocket spoke him quite the riverside dandy.

Gilead fell into pace with the two, and the little girl kept peeping up at him from the other side of her cavalier. She was the dearest charmer of nine, dressed in a sort of sweet Directory frock with heliotrope sprays; and the shepherd’s straw hat on her head had its mauve ribbon poked full of real daisies.

Presently the boy, shouldering his companion a little apart, spoke something in her ear, and she whispered back “O, Georgy!” and flushed as pink as an apple-blossom.

“Please,” she said, being nudged to the soft impeachment, “Georgy says he believes you must have come about Pilot.”

Gilead smiled, oddly enlightened.

“The dog mentioned in the advertisement?” he said. “Did you put it in?”

“No, I did,” said the boy, sniggering. “I say, what a lark! Have you really come about him?”

“Supposing I have,” said Gilead; “what then?”

The boy grinned, but did not answer.

“Is this Judy, by any chance?” asked the young man.

“Yes, it is,” said the boy.

“Your sister?”

“Not much. I say, you know!” exclaimed the youth. “Her name’s Brown. My name’s George Wimble. My father’s Captain Wimble. We live at the Court. I only made it up for her, and got old Gask the stationer to send it on.”

“I see,” said Gilead. “What was that about no moneylenders applying?”

“O! I don’t know,” said the boy. “You aren’t one, are you?”

“No, I’m not one.”

“I made it up out of the advertisements,” said Master Wimble. “They always put in that sort of thing. I did it for her.”

“Father said I might,” ventured the little girl, between apology and self-defence. “At leastways he said I might try and find a good home for him.”

“He didn’t mean that way, you bet,” said the boy, glancing slyly up at the stranger.

“No,” said Judy, her small mouth tightening a little. “When he saw it in the newspaper this morning he was simply furiated. He is a very boracic man.”

The boy stifled an explosion.

“Isn’t she funny?” he whispered.

“O! boracic,” said Gilead; and added, in some vague association of ideas, “Is he a doctor?--O! no; a clergyman, I suppose?”

The boy plucked his sleeve.

“He’s neither the one nor the other,” he confided to his private ear. “He’s a radical.” He spoke the word with a weight of social significance. “He stood for Henley in the last by-election, but our man beat him at the post. He doesn’t live here. He’s only taken the house for the summer. He isn’t a gentleman, you know; he’s a radical; but _she’s_ all right.”

The magnificence of the distinction quite silenced Gilead. He walked on while the boy strutted on; but suddenly he was moved very sweetly to feel little confiding fingers thrust into his.

“Please,” said the little girl, who had slipped round to his side, “have you really and truly come about Pilot?”

“Really and truly,” said Gilead, looking down with a smile. “Do you want to part with him?”

“No,” said the child, flushing very pink.

“Perhaps someone else does?” suggested Gilead.

“Yes, father.”

“Shall I see _him_ about it, then?” She did not answer. “What’s wrong with him--the dog, I mean?” asked the young man.

The boy answered for her, with a contemptuous laugh.

“He bit somebody. Anybody would have, _her_.”

Gilead kept a discreet silence.

“Here’s the gate of the Rectory, if you want to see Mr Brown,” said the boy, stopping; and then Gilead saw that the little girl was in floods of tears. He bent down, very concerned.

“If he _has_ to go, Judy,” he whispered, “he shall find a good friend.”

“O! don’t be such a ninny,” said the boy. “What’s a dog anyway? I’m not going to go fishing with you, you know, if you’re going on like this.”

He walked off, whistling. She sniffed once or twice, dried her eyes on her sleeve, and fled after him. Gilead, watching the two a moment, turned through a gate into a leafy drive, which swept round a semi-circle of lawn to the front of a white-latticed creeper-hung house of two storeys, where, ringing the bell, he sent in his card to Mr Brown.

He had not waited a minute in an untidy tobacco-reeking study, into which he had been informally and rather suspiciously shown, when a gentleman came hurrying in with an air of effusive cordiality which took him completely by surprise.

“Mr Balm?” said the gentleman. “This is kind of you--this is more than kind. To come in person to answer my appeal? I had not expected such distinction, such consideration, and it makes me proud. Pray take a chair, sir, and let us discuss this matter.”

Gilead, immensely perplexed, bowed and seated himself. He saw before him a fluffy fiery little man, wearing spectacles like burning glasses, and clad in a blazing rhubarb tweed, with knickerbockers and bright brown shoes. He was snappy in his movements, jerky in his speech, and, in disposition, he alternated, it seemed, between white heats of enthusiasm and dead ashes of depression.

“Your Agency, sir,” he said, “justifies its title to being the most prompt and princely institution of its kind. I am favoured in a visit from its founder.”

“Its representative,” corrected Gilead.

Mr Brown raised his hands and eyes with an air of polite deprecation.

“True,” he said; “we know your humour and respect it, Mr Balm. I say no more. I am completely dumb.”

“Well,” said Gilead, a little chilly: “as to the purpose of my visit, sir, I was led to suppose that the--the form of appeal somewhat lacked your sanction.”

“Not at all,” said Mr Brown, with a surprised look. “How could you have gathered that impression when I dictated its terms myself?”

“O! I didn’t know,” said the visitor. “I was misenlightened, no doubt--made the victim very possibly of a trifling hoax.” He smiled. “Then the little lady’s name was an intentional mask?”

“I don’t know, sir, what you mean by a mask,” said Mr Brown with some apparent heat. “It was quoted to illustrate a very genuine sentiment. If you had said a _bait_, I might have admitted the impeachment.”

“A bait, then,” said Gilead--“and a sweet one.”

“I am indebted to you for the term, Mr Balm,” said the gentleman, with a certain dry dignity; “but I can hold it hardly applicable to a personality endowed with such supreme gifts of force and intelligence. I would as soon call the Mother of the Gracchi _sweet_, sir, for my part.”

Gilead felt himself at a loss for words. Could it be possible that the little girl so contradicted her appearance as to be an infant phenomenon of an advanced type?

“Well, sir,” he said, utterly at sea--“a bait of whatever nature you please. In any case, I am to understand, its purpose was to find someone who would be willing to take this discarded pet off your hands?”

Mr Brown rose from his chair.

“Sir--Mr Balm!” he exclaimed.

“To secure a kind home for it,” explained Gilead, “whether because it is old, or because it bites, or--”

Mr Brown seized up a heavy paper-weight, poised it an instant furiously, and replaced it on the desk calmly.

“I think, I am sure,” he said, “that there must be some mistake.”

Gilead, risen also, faced him gravely.

“Would you mind telling me,” he said, “to what you are alluding all this time?”

“I am alluding, sir,” said Mr Brown, with sarcastic emphasis, “to the