And Now Good-bye Read Online Free

buttoned at the back. His hair was touched
with silver over the temples, but otherwise he looked younger than his age,
which was forty-three. His eyes were grey, deep-set, and very bright; he had
a strong, rugged profile, and an expression which, in its stern setting, was
rather astonishingly winsome. Dr. Ringwood often told him he had missed his
vocation in being a parson—he should have been an actor. “With
that face you could have been the answer to the maiden’s prayer,”
he used to say, and Howat was always, beyond his amusement, a little puzzled,
and beyond his puzzlement, a little grieved. There seemed such a lot of
irrelevance in the world. He was dimly aware that he might be considered not
bad-looking, but, so far as the matter affected him at all, he found it
rather tiresome. Some of the girls at the chapel, for instance, whenever
there was a bazaar or a social—so silly and pointless, all that sort of
thing. Anyhow, he had never tried to trade on his looks, and most certainly
never attempted any gallant airs.
    Proceeding along School Lane he entered the High Street. It had stopped
raining, but the roadway and pavements were covered with a film of brown mud
which glittered in the light of some of the shops. The sky was already
yellowing into a kind of twilight; probably there would be fog again later
on. People passed dimly by with a nod or a greeting—women doing their
marketing, unemployed men lounging around, business folk bustling about the
town, and so on. He had to keep his eyes well open—people were so
offended if he didn’t see them, they were always prone to think he had
cut them deliberately. Whom should he visit first? Higgs would be at his
place in the High Street; Mrs. Roseway lived over at Hill Grove; there was
young Trevis in Mansion Street, close by. Better leave Mrs. Roseway till
afternoon—she wouldn’t like him to call before everything in the
house had been put to rights’, though, Heaven knew, he wasn’t the
man to notice whether things of that sort were right or not. Young Trevis
then, it might as well be; and he was walking briskly along with this
intention when a little girl suddenly ran up to him. “Please, Mr.
Freemantle, Aunty says will you come and see her at once, as she’s been
took very had in the night.”
    He stared down with a kind of surprised vagueness and then identified the
child as Nancy Kerfoot, one of his Sunday School youngsters. Her aunt, he
knew, was Miss Letitia Monks, and lived in the end house in Lower George
Street. “Very well, my dear,” he replied. “Run along and
tell your Aunty I’ll come.”
    It wouldn’t do to ignore a summons of that sort, despite the fact
that he had been abruptly sent for by Miss Monks on several previous
occasions. She was a character, the old lady, and he had always rather liked
her, despite the fact that her piercing voice, her equally piercing eyes, her
stern old- fashioned principles, and her quite spotless four-roomed cottage
in which she lived on a very few shillings a week, made him feel
uncomfortably like a large fly in the presence of a small but exceptionally
strong-willed spider. There was something indubitably wonderful about her, he
felt; she was eighty-nine, and had never been further away from Browdley than
Blackpool. Moreover, she had worked in the same cotton-mill for half a
century, had invested all her savings in that same cotton-mill, and during
the last few years had lost the greater part of them.
    He hastened towards Lower George Street, and outside the end house saw
Ringwood’s battered Morris-Cowley. As he approached, Ringwood himself
came out of the doorway—an elderly, apple-cheeked, rather shrewd-
looking general practitioner.
    “Hullo, Freemantle. You been sent for too?”
    “Yes.”
    “Go along then. Mustn’t keep you. It’s no false alarm
this time, I’m afraid.”
    “You think not?”
    “Bet you a shilling not.”
    Ringwood was