The Classic Mystery Collection - Arthur Conan Doyle [253]
A cab rolled smoothly to the kerb, and the driver received his instructions with a majestic nod.
'Another reason I have for suggesting Sheppard's,' continued Trent, feverishly lighting a cigarette, 'is that I am going to be married to the most wonderful woman in the world. I trust the connection of ideas is clear.'
'You are going to marry Mabel!' cried Mr Cupples. 'My dear friend, what good news this is! Shake hands, Trent; this is glorious! I congratulate you both from the bottom of my heart. And may I say--I don't want to interrupt your flow of high spirits, which is very natural indeed, and I remember being just the same in similar circumstances long ago--but may I say how earnestly I have hoped for this? Mabel has seen so much unhappiness, yet she is surely a woman formed in the great purpose of humanity to be the best influence in the life of a good man. But I did not know her mind as regarded yourself. Your mind I have known for some time,' Mr Cupples went on, with a twinkle in his eye that would have done credit to the worldliest of creatures. 'I saw it at once when you were both dining at my house, and you sat listening to Professor Peppmuller and looking at her. Some of us older fellows have our wits about us still, my dear boy.'
'Mabel says she knew it before that,' replied Trent, with a slightly crestfallen air. 'And I thought I was acting the part of a person who was not mad about her to the life. Well, I never was any good at dissembling. I shouldn't wonder if even old Peppmuller noticed something through his double convex lenses. But however crazy I may have been as an undeclared suitor,' he went on with a return to vivacity, 'I am going to be much worse now. As for your congratulations, thank you a thousand times, because I know you mean them. You are the sort of uncomfortable brute who would pull a face three feet long if you thought we were making a mistake. By the way, I can't help being an ass tonight; I'm obliged to go on blithering. You must try to bear it. Perhaps it would be easier if I sang you a song--one of your old favourites. What was that song you used always to be singing? Like this, wasn't it?' He accompanied the following stave with a dexterous clog-step on the floor of the cab:
'There was an old nigger, and he had a wooden leg. He had no tobacco, no tobacco could he beg. Another old nigger was as cunning as a fox, And he always had tobacco in his old tobacco-box.
'Now for the chorus!
'Yes, he always had tobacco in his old tobacco-box.
'But you're not singing. I thought you would be making the welkin ring.'
'I never sang that song in my life,' protested Mr Cupples. 'I never heard it before.'
'Are you sure?' enquired Trent doubtfully. 'Well, I suppose I must take your word for it. It is a beautiful song, anyhow: not the whole warbling grove in concert heard can beat it. Somehow it seems to express my feelings at the present moment as nothing else could; it rises unbidden to the lips. Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaketh, as the Bishop of Bath and Wells said when listening to a speech of Mr Balfour's.'
'When was that?' asked Mr Cupples.
'On the occasion,' replied Trent, 'of the introduction of the Compulsory Notification of Diseases of Poultry Bill, which ill-fated measure you of course remember. Hullo!' he broke off, as the cab rushed down a side street and swung round a corner into a broad and populous thoroughfare, 'we're there already'. The cab drew up.
'Here we are,' said Trent, as he paid the man, and led Mr Cupples into a long, panelled room set with many tables and filled with a hum of talk. 'This is the house of fulfilment of craving, this is the bower with the roses around it. I see there are three bookmakers eating