We can turn into Christians later. If we don't--dress like that, I
mean--they'll guess and all want to come to church, except the Jews,
which would bring the judgment of Heaven on us.
"P.P.P.S. Don't be careless and leave this note lying about, for the
under-footman who waits upon you reads all the letters. He steams them
over a kettle. Smith the butler is the only respectable man in this
house."
Alan laughed outright as he finished this peculiar and outspoken
epistle, which somehow revived his spirits, that since the previous day
had been low enough. It refreshed him. It was like a breath of
frosty air from an open window blowing clean and cold into a scented,
overheated room. He would have liked to keep it, but remembering
Barbara's injunctions and the under-footman, threw it onto the fire and
watched it burn. Jeekie coughed to intimate that it was time for his
master to dress, and Alan turned and looked at him in an absent-minded
fashion.
He was worth looking at, was Jeekie. Let the reader imagine a very tall
and powerfully-built negro with a skin as black as a well-polished boot,
woolly hair as white as snow, a little tufted beard also white, a
hand like a leg of mutton, but with long delicate fingers and pink,
filbert-shaped nails, an immovable countenance, but set in it beneath a
massive brow, two extraordinary humorous and eloquent black eyes which
expressed every emotion passing through the brain behind them, that is
when their owner chose to allow them to do so.
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