Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/155

 The illustrated pages of the various papers reproduced photographs of the wrecked car, and of the poplar tree with the wound on its trunk indicated by a black cross. There were pictures of the Pelican Inn, and of the crowded road, and of Sir Magnus Ord leaving his car. Sorrell read what the driver of the motor lorry had to say about the accident, and what a local garage proprietor thought about it, and what he himself was supposed to have said about it. One paper produced a photograph of Thomas Roland—"The Man who asked for Silence." Gentlemen of the press were discovered entering the hotel by back doors, and even by a passage window, and one adventurer was found outside the door of Ethel's room, waiting to question one—of the nurses.

Scott, slipping out noiselessly with that tense, stiff, patched face of his, walked into the gatherer of news.

"Excuse me, sir, but how?"

"What do you want?"

"I'm a journalist, sir."

"O,—hell!" said the husband softly, "can't you people let us alone?"

For there was just a little flicker of hope fluttering like a bird in that silent room. The flame still lived, and poor Scott seemed to stand watching the flame, and holding his breath. If his wife rallied sufficiently there was to be an operation, and to Scott every noise or sound of movement of the hotel was like a gust of wind troubling that feeble flame. When he was not sitting in his wife's room he had a chair in the corridor, and he spent the whole of the first night in that chair.

It is almost impossible to silence an hotel, however considerate people may be, and Sir Magnus Ord's pet fad was a professional detestation of all noise. Discords impinging upon the brain, and helping to exhaust it. His prejudice against all noise added itself to Scott's suppressed anguish of restlessness. He appealed to Roland.

"I say, how many people have you in the hotel?"

"About twenty. I have turned away all new-comers."

"Look here, my dear chap,—I'll rent the whole of your hotel for three weeks—if you can persuade everyone to clear out. It's not a question of money."

"It isn't. I'll do it."