neither a sour Puritan nor a grim-visaged household tyrant, but really a very good and understanding sort of fellow, and, within reasonable limits, as tolerant as anyone could ask. The old boy, in fact, had been “a bit of a buck himself” in his younger days, and had seen his share of the flesh and the devil, and was quite willing to make allowances for the wilder escapades of youth, so long as a reasonable decorum and moderation were observed.
But there, alas! was the rub—as Morison himself would ruefully admit. He was himself such a mad, scapegrace sort of fellow that his acts sometimes passed all the bounds of decorum and propriety, and for that reason “the governor” was always “having him in upon the carpet.”
There, in fact, was the whole setting. The governor existed for the sole purpose of “having him in upon the carpet”—one never saw them in any other way, but when Morison spoke about it one saw them in this way with blazing vividness. And this picture—the picture of Morison going in “upon the carpet”—was a very splendid one.
First, one saw Morison pacing nervously up and down in a noble and ancient hall, puffing distractedly on a cigarette and pausing from time to time in an apprehensive manner before the grim, closed barrier of an enormous seventeenth-century door which was tall and wide enough for a knight in armour to ride through without difficulty, and before whose gloomy and overwhelming front Morison looked very small and full of guilt. Then, one saw him take a last puff at his cigarette, brace his shoulders in a determined manner, knock on the panels of the mighty door, and in answer to a low growl within, open the door and advance desperately into the shadowed depths of a room so immense and magnificent that Morison looked like a single little sinner walking forlornly down the nave of a cathedral.
At the end of this terrific room, across an enormous space of carpet, sat “the governor.” He was sitting behind a magnificent flat desk of ancient carved mahogany, in the vast shadowed depths behind him storeyed rows of old bound volumes climbed dizzily up into the upper darkness and were lost. And men in armour were standing grimly all around, and the portraits of the ancestors shone faintly in the gloom, and the old worn mellow colours of the tempered light came softly through the coloured glass of narrow Gothic windows which were set far away in recessed depths of the impregnable mortared walls.
Meanwhile “the governor” was waiting in grim silence as Morison advanced across the carpet. The governor was a man with beetling bushy
