Meet Mr Mulliner Read Online Free

flitting past Farmer Higgins’s pigsty and the Dog and Duck at
Pondlebury Parva and splashing through the brook Wipple at the point where it
joins the River Wopple, we can safely assume that, wherever else he went, he
got plenty of exercise.
    But the pleasantest of functions must end,
and, just as the setting sun was gilding the spire of the ivy-covered church of
St. Barnabas the Resilient, where George as a child had sat so often, enlivening
the tedium of the sermon by making faces at the choirboys, a damp and
bedraggled figure might have been observed crawling painfully along the High
Street of East Wobsley in the direction of the cosy little cottage known to its
builder as Chatsworth and to the village tradesmen as “Mulliner’s.”
    It was George, home from the
hunting-field.
     
    Slowly George Mulliner made his way to the
familiar door, and, passing through it, flung himself into his favourite chair.
But a moment later a more imperious need than the desire to rest forced itself
upon his attention. Rising stiffly, he tottered to the kitchen and mixed
himself a revivifying whisky-and-soda. Then, refilling his glass, he returned
to the sitting-room, to find that it was no longer empty. A slim, fair girl,
tastefully attired in tailor-made tweeds, was leaning over the desk on which he
kept his Dictionary of English Synonyms .
    She looked up as he entered, startled.
    “Why, Mr Mulliner!” she exclaimed. “What
has been happening? Your clothes are torn, rent, ragged, tattered, and your
hair is all dishevelled, untrimmed, hanging loose or negligently, at loose ends!”
    George smiled a wan smile.
    “You are right,” he said. “And, what is
more, I am suffering from extreme fatigue, weariness, lassitude, exhaustion,
prostration, and languor.”
    The girl gazed at him, a divine pity in
her soft eyes.
    “I’m so sorry,” she murmured. “So very
sorry, grieved, distressed, afflicted, pained, mortified, dejected, and upset.”
    George took her hand. Her sweet sympathy
had effected the cure for which he had been seeking so long. Coming on top of
the violent emotions through which he had been passing all day, it seemed to
work on him like some healing spell, charm, or incantation. Suddenly, in a
flash, he realised that he was no longer a stammerer. Had he wished at that
moment to say, “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers,” he could have
done it without a second thought.
    But he had better things to say than that.
    “Miss Blake—Susan—Susie.” He took her
other hand in his. His voice rang out clear and unimpeded. It seemed to him
incredible that he had ever yammered at this girl like an overheated
steam-radiator. “It cannot have escaped your notice that I have long
entertained towards you sentiments warmer and deeper than those of ordinary
friendship. It is love, Susan, that has been animating my bosom. Love, first a
tiny seed, has burgeoned in my heart till, blazing into flame, it has swept
away on the crest of its wave my diffidence, my doubt, my fears, and my
foreboding, and now, like the topmost topaz of some ancient tower, it cries to
all the world in a voice of thunder: ‘You are mine! My mate! Predestined to me
since Time first began!’ As the star guides the mariner when, battered by boiling
billows, he hies him home to the haven of hope and happiness, so do you gleam
upon me along life’s rough road and seem to say, ‘Have courage, George! I am
here!’ Susan, I am not an eloquent man—I cannot speak fluently as I could
wish—but these simple words which you have just heard come from the heart, from
the unspotted heart of an English gentleman. Susan, I love you. Will you be my
wife, married woman, matron, spouse, help-meet, consort, partner or better half?”
    “Oh, George!” said Susan. “Yes, yea, ay,
aye! Decidedly, unquestionably, indubitably, incontrovertibly, and past all
dispute!”
    He folded her in his arms. And, as he did
so, there came from the street outside —faintly, as