The New Sonia Wayward Read Online Free PDF Page B

difficulties to us will be plain sailing to her.’
    ‘A lucid mind,’ Wedge said contentedly. ‘Bright and clear and sparkling – although not, between you and me, precisely given to sounding the depths.’
    ‘Certainly not that.’ Petticate, finding his cigar finished, had got to his feet. ‘I don’t remember,’ he said as he shook hands with Wedge, ‘Sonia’s ever getting into deep water.’

 
     
3
    It was in a reasonably contented frame of mind that Colonel Ffolliot Petticate settled himself into a first-class compartment of the 4.45 from Paddington. As he walked past the second-class coaches – cluttered with string bags and brown-paper parcels, sticky with children, and generally given over to the horrors of plebeian life – they had struck him as a vivid illustration of the penury which his resolute conduct during the past forty-eight hours had put him fairly in the way of escaping. Widows in reduced circumstances are a dismal lumber enough; a widower in similar straits must necessarily be not only dismal but ridiculous as well. To sit in the pit and to be there remarked by old companions of the stalls; to drive up in some clever little foreign car to the houses of friends whom one has hitherto visited in a respectable English saloon; to have to think twice about a new suit; or even about picking up half-a-dozen ties in the Burlington Arcade; to slip warily into the shops of licensed grocers for the purpose of buying colonial sherry: Colonel Petticate could visualize only too vividly a sort of intensifying series of such encounters with darkness. He was not a spendthrift, and the breadth of his intellectual and aesthetic interests had the natural consequence of rendering him largely superior to sordid material consideration of any sort. Still, there were limits. And fortune, he knew, would have been ready to cast him remorselessly beyond the pale, had he not risen up before his unlooked-for crisis and declared himself to be the master of his own fate and the captain – indeed the colonel – of his own soul.
    And so far – he told himself – so good. It had been admirable strategy to tackle Wedge straight away. Wedge was cast for the role of his principal dupe – if ‘dupe’, indeed, was not a word exceptionable as carrying inappropriate suggestions of fraud. Perhaps ‘unconscious collaborator’ would be better. Petticate registered a faint grin as he made this silent correction in his own thought. He was really in excellent spirits.
    Wedge had eaten out of his hand. And this desirable state of affairs he had brought off almost without a thought. His own temerity almost scared him in retrospect – although it gratified him too. For he had simply walked in and extemporized. It was only his grand design – only the broadest outline of the beckoning glimmering thing – that had been in the least clear to him. Even now, when he had spent, before catching the train, a meditative hour in his club, he had done nothing to fill in the picture. Just in what circumstances had his wife parted from him? He had no idea. Had she intimated any proposed destination – and, if so, what? He had no idea of this either. To Wedge he had murmured something about Brazil, but that had been by way of more or less airy hypothesis. If Wedge had been more curious, had asked even two or three searching questions, his own trust in the inspiration of the moment might conceivably have failed him. So he must really go about the matter more systematically. Nearly the whole of the spadework, he could see, was yet to do.
    Not, fortunately, that Sonia had made any call upon spadework in the literal sense. The happy circumstances of her decease had obviated the need for any arduous toil at the bottom of the garden from which the dear old girl’s labours had – in Wedge’s rather impertinent image – hitherto excluded the wolf.
    This start of graveyard wit so amused Petticate that he almost laughed aloud. But to have done so