“I’m devoted to her.” He paused. “Dear little thing!” he added.
She rose and moved to the door. There was a nasty gleam in her eyes.
“You aren’t going?” he said.
“I shall be back in a moment. I’m going to bring your poor little office-boy up here. He must be missing you.”
He sprang up, but she had gone. Leaning over the banisters, he heard a door open below, then a short conversation, and finally footsteps climbing the stairs.
It was pitch dark on the landing. He stepped aside, and they passed without seeing him. Master Bean was discoursing easily on cocoa, the processes whereby it was manufactured, and the remarkable distances which natives of Mexico had covered with it as their only food. The door opened, flooding the landing with light, and Mr. Ferguson, stepping from ambush, began to descend the stairs.
The girl came to the banisters.
“Mr. Ferguson!”
He stopped.
“Did you want me?” he asked.
“Are you going back to your office?”
“I am. I hope you will enjoy Bean’s society. He has a fund of useful information on all subjects.”
He went on. After a while she returned to the room and closed the door.
Mr. Ferguson went into his office and sat down.
There was once a person of the name of Simeon Stylites, who took up a position on top of a pillar and stayed there, having no other engagements for thirty years. Mr. Ferguson, who had read Tennyson’s poem on the subject, had until to-night looked upon this as pretty good thing. Reading the lines:
“… thrice ten years,
Thrice multiplied by superhuman pangs,
In hunger and in thirsts, fevers and colds,
In coughs, aches, stitches, ulcerous throes and cramps, …
Patient on this tall pillar I have borne.
Rain, wind, frost, heat, hail, damp, and sleet, and snow,
he had gathered roughly, as it were, that Simeon had not been comfortable. He had pitied him. But now, sitting in his office-chair, he began to wonder what the man had made such a fuss about. He suspected him of having had a touch of the white feather in him. It was not as if he had not had food. He talked about “hungers and thirsts,” but he must have had something to eat, or he could not have stayed the course. Very likely, if the truth were known, there was somebody below who passed him up regular supplies of cake and cocoa.
He began to look on Simeon as an overrated amateur.
Sleep refused to come to him. It got as far as his feet, but no farther. He rose and stamped to restore the circulation.
It was at this point that he definitely condemned Simeon Stylites as a sybaritic fraud.
If this were one of those realistic Zolaesque stories I would describe the crick in the back that—but let us hurry on.