"I'm so blind," said Miss Ferrars plaintively. "Where are my glasses?"
"What do you want to see?" asked Lord Semingham.
"The man in the corner, talking to Mr. Loring."
"Oh, you won't know him even with the glasses. He's the sort of man you must be introduced to three times before there's any chance of a permanent impression."
"You seem to recognise him."
"I know him in business. We are, or rather are going to be, fellow-directors of a company."
"Oh, then I shall see you in the dock together some day."
"What touching faith in the public prosecutor! Does nothing shake your optimism?"
"Perhaps your witticisms."
"Peace, peace!"
"Well, who is he?"
"He was once," observed Lord Semingham, as though stating a curious fact, "in a Government. His name is Foster Belford, and he is still asked to the State Concerts."
"I knew I knew him! Why, Harry Dennison thinks great things of him!"
"It is possible."
"And he, not to be behindhand in politeness, thinks greater of Maggie Dennison."
"His task is the easier."
"And you and he are going to have the effrontery to ask shareholders to trust their money to you?"
"Oh, it isn't us; it's Ruston."
"Mr. Ruston? I've heard of him."
"You very rarely admit that about anybody."
"Moreover, I've met him."
"He's quite coming to the front, of late, I know."
"Is there any positive harm in being in the fashion? I like now and then to talk to the people one is obliged to talk about."
"Go on," said Lord Semingham, urbanely.
"But, my dear Lord Semingham——"
"Hush! Keep the truth from me, like a kind woman. Ah! here comes Tom Loring——How are you, Loring? Where's Dennison?"
"At the House. I ought to be there, too."
"Why, of course. The place of a private secretary is by the side of——"
"His chief's wife. We all know that," interposed Adela Ferrars.
"When you grow old, you'll be sorry for all the wicked things you've said," observed Loring.
"Well, there'll be nothing else to do. Where are you going, Lord Semingham?"
"Home."
"Why?"
"Because I've done my duty. Oh, but here's Dennison, and I want a word with him."
Lord Semingham passed on, leaving the other two together.
"Has Harry Dennison been speaking to-day?" asked Miss Ferrars.
"Well, he had something prepared."
"He had something! You know you write them."
Mr. Loring frowned.
"Yes, and I know we aren't allowed to say so," pursued Adela.
"It's neither just nor kind to Dennison."
Miss Ferrars looked at him, her brows slightly raised.
"And you are both just and kind, really," he added.
"And you, Mr. Loring, are a wonderful man. You're not ashamed to be serious! Oh, yes, I've annoyed—you're quite right. I was—whatever I was—on the ninth of last March, and I think I'm too old to be lectured."
Tom Loring laughed, and, an instant later, Adela followed suit.
"I suppose it was horrid of me," she said. "Can't we turn it round and consider it as a compliment to you?"
Tom looked doubtful, but, before he could answer, Adela cried:
"Oh, here's Evan Haselden, and—yes—it's Mr. Ruston with him?"
As the two men entered, Mrs. Dennison rose from her chair. She was a tall woman; her years fell one or two short of thirty. She was not a beauty, but her broad brow and expressive features, joined to a certain subdued dignity of manner and much grace of movement, made her conspicuous among the women in her drawing-room. Young Evan Haselden seemed to appreciate her, for he bowed his glossy curly head, and shook hands in a way that almost turned the greeting into a deferentially distant caress. Mrs. Dennison acknowledged his hinted homage with a bright smile, and turned to Ruston.
"At last!" she said, with another smile. "The first time after—how many years?"
"Eight, I believe," he answered.
"Oh, you're terribly definite. And what have you been doing with yourself?"
He shrugged his square shoulders, and she did not press her question, but let her eyes wander over him.
"Well?" he asked.
"Oh—improved. And I?"
Suddenly Ruston laughed.
"Last time we met," he said, "you swore you'd never speak to me again."
"I'd quite forgotten my fearful threat."
He looked straight in her face for a moment, as he asked—
"And the cause of it?"
Mrs. Dennison coloured.
"Yes, quite," she answered; and conscious that her words carried no conviction to him, she added hastily, "Go and speak to Harry. There he is."
Ruston obeyed her, and being left for a moment alone, she sat down on the chair placed ready near the door for her short intervals of rest. There was a slight pucker on her brow. The sight of Ruston and his question stirred in her thoughts, which were never long dormant, and which his coming woke into sudden activity. She had not anticipated that he would venture to recall to her that incident—at least, not at once—in the first instant of meeting, at such a time and such a place. But as he had, she found herself yielding to the reminiscence he induced. Forgotten the cause of her anger with him? For the first two or three years of her married life, she would have answered, "Yes, I have forgotten it." Then had come a period when now and again it recurred to her, not for his sake or its own, but as a summary of her stifled feeling; and during that period she had resolutely struggled not to remember it. Of late that struggle had ceased, and the thing lay a perpetual background to her thoughts: when there was nothing else to think about, when the stage of her mind was empty of moving figures, it snatched at the chance of prominence, and thus became a recurrent consciousness from which her interests and her occupations could not permanently rescue her. For example, here she was thinking of it in the very midst of her party. Yet this persistence of memory seemed impertinent, unreasonable, almost insolent. For, as she told herself, finding it necessary to tell herself more and more often, her husband was still all that he had been when he had won her heart—good-looking, good-tempered, infinitely kind and devoted. When she married she had triumphed confidently in these qualities; and the unanimous cry of surprised congratulations at the match she was making had confirmed her own joy and exultation in it. It had been a great match; and yet, beyond all question, also a love match.
But now the chorus of wondering applause was forgotten, and there remained only the one voice which had been raised to break the harmony of approbation—a voice that nobody, herself least of all, had listened to then. How should it be listened to? It came from a nobody—a young man of no account, whose opinion none cared to ask; whose judgment, had it been worth anything in itself, lay under suspicion of being biassed by jealousy. Willie Ruston had never declared himself her suitor; yet (she clung hard to this) he would not have said what he did had not the chagrin of a defeated rival inspired him; and a defeated rival, as everybody knows, will say anything. Certainly she had been right not to listen, and was wrong to remember. To this she had often made up her mind, and to this she returned now as she sat watching her husband and Willie Ruston, forgetful of all the chattering crowd beside.
As to what it was she resolved not to remember, and did remember, it was just one sentence—his only comment on the news of her engagement, his only hint of any opinion or feeling about it. It was short, sharp, decisive, and, as his judgments were, even in the days when he, alone of all the world, held them of any moment, absolutely confident; it was also, she had felt on hearing it, utterly untrue, unjust, and ungenerous. It had rung out like a pistol-shot, "Maggie, you're marrying a fool," and then a snap of tight-fitting lips, a glance of scornful eyes, and a quick, unhesitating stride away that hardly waited for a contemptuous smile at her angry cry, "I'll never speak to you again." She had been in a fury of wrath—she had a power of wrath—that a plain, awkward, penniless, and obscure youth—one whom she sometimes disliked for his arrogance, and sometimes derided for his self-confidence—should dare to say such a thing about her Harry, whom she was so proud to love, and so proud to have won. It was indeed an insolent memory that flung the thing again and again in her teeth.
The party began to melt away. The first good-bye roused Mrs. Dennison from her enveloping reverie. Lady Valentine, from whom it came, lingered for a gush of voluble confidences about the charm of the house, and the people, and the smart little band that played softly in an alcove, and what not; her daughter stood by, learning, it is to be hoped, how it is meet to behave in society, and scanning Evan Haselden's trim figure with wary, critical glances, alert to turn aside if he should glance her way. Mrs. Dennison returned the ball of civility, and, released by several more departures, joined Adela Ferrars. Adela stood facing Haselden and Tom Loring, who were arm-in-arm. At the other end of the room Harry Dennison and Ruston were still in conversation.
"These men, Maggie," began Adela—and it seemed a mere caprice of pronunciation, that the word did not shape itself into "monkeys"—"are the absurdest creatures. They say I'm not fit to take part in politics! And why?"
Mrs. Dennison shook her head, and smiled.
"Because, if you please, I'm too emotional. Emotional, indeed! And I can't generalise! Oh, couldn't I generalise about men!"
"Women can never say 'No,'" observed Evan Haselden, not in the least as if he were repeating a commonplace.
"You'll find you're wrong when you grow up," retorted Adela.
"I doubt that," said Mrs. Dennison, with the kindest of smiles.
"Maggie, you spoil the boy. Isn't it enough that he should have gone straight from the fourth form—where, I suppose, he learnt to generalise——"
"At any rate, not to be emotional," murmured Loring.
"Into Parliament, without having his head turned by——"
"You'd better go, Evan," suggested Loring in a warning tone.
"I shall go too," announced Adela.
"I'm walking your way," said Evan, who seemed to bear no malice.
"How delightful!"
"You don't object?"
"Not the least. I'm driving."
"A mere schoolboy score!"
"How stupid of me! You haven't had time to forget them."
"Oh, take her away," said Mrs. Dennison, and they disappeared in a fire of retorts, happy, or happy enough for happy people, and probably Evan drove with the lady after all.
Mrs. Dennison walked towards where her husband and Ruston sat on a sofa in talk.
"What are you two conspiring about?" she asked.
"Ruston had something to say to me about business."
"What, already?"
"Oh, we've met in the city, Mrs. Dennison," explained Ruston, with a confidential nod to Harry.
"And that was the object of your appearance here to-day? I was flattering my party, it seems."
"No. I didn't expect to find your husband. I thought he would be at the House."
"Ah, Harry, how did the speech go?"
"Oh, really pretty well, I think," answered Harry Dennison, with a contented air. "I got nearly half through before we were counted out."
A very faint smile showed on his wife's face.
"So you were counted out?" she asked.
"Yes, or I shouldn't be here."
"You see, I am acquitted, Mrs. Dennison. Only an accident brought him here."
"An accident impossible to foresee," she acquiesced, with the slightest trace of bitterness—so slight that her husband did not notice it.
Ruston rose.
"Well, you'd better talk to Semingham about it," he remarked to Harry Dennison; "he's one of us, you know."
"Yes, I will. And I'll just get you that pamphlet of mine; you can put it in your pocket."
He ran out of the room to fetch what he promised. Mrs. Dennison, still faintly smiling, held out her hand to Ruston.
"It's been very pleasant to see you again," she said graciously. "I hope it won't be eight years before our next meeting."
"Oh, no; you see I'm floating now."
"Floating?" she repeated, with a smile of enquiry.
"Yes; on the surface. I've been in the depths till very lately, and there one meets no good society."
"Ah! You've had a struggle?"
"Yes," he answered, laughing; "you may call it a bit of a struggle."
She looked at him with grave curious eyes.
"And you are not married?" she asked abruptly.
"No, I'm glad to say."
"Why glad, Mr. Ruston? Some people like being married."
"Oh, I don't claim to be above it, Mrs. Dennison," he answered with a laugh, "but a wife would have been a great hindrance to me all these years."
There was a simple and bona fide air about his statement; it was not raillery; and Mrs. Dennison laughed in her turn.
"Oh, how like you!" she murmured.
Mr. Ruston, with a passing gleam of surprise at her merriment, bade her a very unemotional farewell, and left her. She sat down and waited idly for her husband's return. Presently he came in. He had caught Ruston in the hall, delivered his pamphlet, and was whistling cheerfully. He took a chair near his wife.
"Rum chap that!" he said. "But he's got a good deal of stuff in him;" and he resumed his lively tune.
The tune annoyed Mrs. Dennison. To suffer whistling without visible offence was one of her daily trials. Harry's emotions and reflections were prone to express themselves through that medium.
"I didn't do half-badly, to-day," said Harry, breaking off again. "Old Tom had got it all splendidly in shape for me—by Jove, I don't know what I should do without Tom—and I think I put it pretty well. But, of course, it's a subject that doesn't catch on with everybody."
It was the dullest subject in the world; it was also, in all likelihood, one of the most unimportant; and dull subjects are so seldom unimportant that the perversity of the combination moved Maggie Dennison to a wondering pity. She rose and came behind the chair where her husband sat. Leaning over the back, she rested her elbows on his shoulders, and lightly clasped her hands round his neck. He stopped his whistle, which had grown soft and contented, laughed, and kissed one of the encircling hands, and she, bending lower, kissed him on the forehead as he turned his face up to look at her.
"You poor dear old thing!" she said with a smile and a sigh.
When it was no later than the middle of June, Adela Ferrars, having her reputation to maintain, ventured to sum up the season. It was, she said, a Ruston-cum-Violetta season. Violetta's doings and unexampled triumphs have, perhaps luckily, no place here; her dancing was higher and her songs more surpassing in another dimension than those of any performer who had hitherto won the smiles of society; and young men who are getting on in life still talk about her. Ruston's fame was less widespread, but his appearance was an undeniable fact of the year. When a man, the first five years of whose adult life have been spent on a stool in a coal merchant's office, and the second five somewhere (an absolutely vague somewhere) in Southern or Central Africa, comes before the public, offering in one closed hand a new empire, or, to avoid all exaggeration, at least a province, asking with the other opened hand for three million pounds, the public is bound to afford him the tribute of some curiosity. When he enlists in his scheme men of eminence like Mr. Foster Belford, of rank like Lord Semingham, of great financial resources like Dennison Sons & Company, he becomes one whom it is expedient to bid to dinner and examine with scrutinising enquiry. He may have a bag of gold for you; or you may enjoy the pleasure of exploding his prestige; at least, you are timely and up-to-date, and none can say that your house is a den of fogies, or yourself, in the language made to express these things (for how otherwise should they get themselves expressed?) on other than "the inner rail."
It chanced that Miss Ferrars arrived early at the Seminghams, and she talked with her host on the hearth-rug, while Lady Semingham was elaborately surveying her small but comely person in a mirror at the other end of the long room. Lord Semingham was rather short and rather stout; he hardly looked as if his ancestors had fought at Hastings—perhaps they had not, though the peerage said they had. He wore close-cut black whiskers, and the blue of his jowl witnessed a suppressed beard of great vitality. His single eye-glass reflected answering twinkles to Adela's pince-nez, and his mouth was puckered at the world's constant entertainment; men said that he found his wife alone a sufficient and inexhaustible amusement.
"The Heathers are coming," he said, "and Lady Val and Marjory, and young Haselden, and Ruston."
"Toujours Ruston," murmured Adela.
"And one or two more. What's wrong with Ruston? There is, my dear Adela, no attitude more offensive than that of indifference to what the common herd finds interesting."
"He's a fright," said Adela. "You'd spike yourself on that bristly beard of his."
"If you happened to be near enough, you mean?—a danger my sex and our national habits render remote. Bessie!"
Lady Semingham came towards them, with one last craning look at her own back as she turned. She always left the neighbourhood of a mirror with regret.
"Well?" she asked with a patient little sigh.
"Adela is abusing your friend Ruston."
"He's not my friend, Alfred. What's the matter, Adela?"
"I don't think I like him. He's hard."
"He's got a demon, you see," said Semingham. "For that matter we all have, but his is a whopper."
"Oh, what's my demon?" cried Adela. Is not oneself always the most interesting subject?
"Yours? Cleverness; He goads you into saying things one can't see the meaning of."
"Thanks! And yours?"
"Grinning—so I grin at your things, though I don't understand 'em."
"And Bessie's?"
"Oh, forgive me. Leave us a quiet home."
"And now, Mr. Ruston's?"
"His is——"
But the door opened, and the guests, all arriving in a heap, just twenty minutes late, flooded the room and drowned the topic. Another five minutes passed, and people had begun furtively to count heads and wonder whom they were waiting for, when Evan Haselden was announced. Hot on his heels came Ruston, and the party was completed.
Mr. Otto Heather took Adela Ferrars in to dinner. Her heart sank as he offered his arm. She had been heard to call him the silliest man in Europe; on the other hand, his wife, and some half-dozen people besides, thought him the cleverest in London.
"That man," he said, swallowing his soup and nodding his head towards Ruston, "personifies all the hideous tendencies of the age—its brutality, its commercialism, its selfishness, its——"
Miss Ferrars looked across the table. Ruston was seated at Lady Semingham's left hand, and she was prattling to him in her sweet indistinct little voice. Nothing in his appearance warranted Heather's outburst, unless it were a sort of alert and almost defiant readiness, smacking of a challenge to catch him napping.
"I'm not a mediævalist myself," she observed, and prepared to endure the penalty of an exposé of Heather's theories. During its progress, she peered—for her near sight was no affectation—now and again at the occasion of her sufferings. She had heard a good deal about him—something from her host, something from Harry Dennison, more from the paragraphists who had scented their prey, and gathered from the four quarters of heaven (or wherever they dwelt) upon him. She knew about the coal merchant's office, the impatient flight from it, and the rush over the seas; there were stories of real naked want, where a bed and shelter bounded for the moment all a life's aspirations. She summed him up as a buccaneer modernised; and one does not expect buccaneers to be amiable, while culture in them would be an incongruity. It was, on the whole, not very surprising, she thought, that few people liked William Roger Ruston—nor that many believed in him.
"Don't you agree with me?" asked Heather.
"Not in the least," said Adela at random.
The odds that he had been saying something foolish were very large.
"I thought you were such friends!" exclaimed Heather in surprise.
"Well, to confess, I was thinking of something else. Who do you mean?"
"Why, Mrs. Dennison. I was saying that her calm queenly manner——"
"Good gracious, Mr. Heather, don't call women 'queenly.' You're like—what is it?—a 'dime novel.'"
If this comparison were meant to relieve her from the genius' conversation for the rest of dinner, it was admirably conceived. He turned his shoulder on her in undisguised dudgeon.
"And how's the great scheme?" asked somebody of Ruston.
"We hope to get the money," he said, turning for a moment from his hostess. "And if we do that, we're all right."
"Everything's going on very well," called Semingham from the foot of the table. "They've killed a missionary."
"How dreadful!" lisped his wife.
"Regrettable in itself, but the first step towards empire," explained Semingham with a smile.
"It's to stop things of that kind that we are going there," Mr. Belford pronounced; the speech was evidently meant to be repeated, and to rank as authoritative.
"Of course," chuckled Semingham.
If he had been a shopman, he could not have resisted showing his customers how the adulteration was done.
In spite of herself—for she strongly objected to being one of an admiring crowd, and liked a personal cachet on her emotions—Adela felt pleasure when, after dinner, Ruston came straight to her and, displacing Evan Haselden, sat down by her side. He assumed the position with a business-like air, as though he meant to stay. She often, indeed habitually, had two or three men round her, but to-night none contested Ruston's exclusive possession; she fancied that the business-like air had something to do with it. She had been taken possession of, she said to herself, with a little impatience and yet a little pleasure also.
"You know everybody here, I suppose?" he asked. His tone cast a doubt on the value of the knowledge.
"It's my tenth season," said Adela, with a laugh. "I stopped counting them once, but there comes a time when one has to begin again."
He looked at her—critically, she thought—as he said,
"The ravages of time no longer to be ignored?"
"Well, the exaggerations of friends to be checked. Yes, I suppose I know most of——"
She paused for a word.
"The gang," he suggested, leaning back and crossing his legs.
"Yes, we are a gang, and all on one chain. You're a recent captive, though."
"Yes," he assented, "it's pretty new to me. A year ago I hadn't a dress coat."
"The gods are giving you a second youth then."
"Well, I take it. I don't know that I have much to thank the gods for."
"They've been mostly against you, haven't they? However, what does that matter, if you beat them?"
He did not disdain her compliment, but neither did he accept it. He ignored it, and Adela, who paid very few compliments, was amused and vexed.
"Perhaps," she added, "you think your victory still incomplete?"
This gained no better attention. Mr. Ruston seemed to be following his own thoughts.
"It must be a curious thing," he remarked, "to be born to a place like Semingham's."
"And to use it—or not to use it—like Lord Semingham?"
"Yes, I was thinking of that," he admitted.
"To be eminent requires some self-deception, doesn't it? Without that, it would seem too absurd. I think Lord Semingham is overweighted with humour." She paused and then—to show that she was not in awe of him—she added—"Now, I should say, you have very little."
"Very little, indeed, I should think," he agreed composedly.
"You're the only man I ever heard admit that of himself; we all say it of one another."
"I know what I have and haven't got pretty well."
Adela was beginning to be more sure that she disliked him, but the topic had its interest for her and she went on,
"Now I like to think I've got everything."
To her annoyance, the topic seemed to lose interest for him, just in proportion as it gained interest for her. In fact, Mr. Ruston did not apparently care to talk about what she liked or didn't like.
"Who's that pretty girl over there," he asked, "talking to young Haselden?"
"Marjory Valentine," said Adela curtly.
"Oh! I think I should like to talk to her."
"Pray, don't let me prevent you," said Adela in very distant tones.
The man seemed to have no manners.
Mr. Ruston said nothing, but gave a short laugh. Adela was not accustomed to be laughed at openly. Yet she felt defenceless; this pachydermatous animal would be impervious to the pricks of her rapier.
"You're amused?" she asked sharply.
"Why were you in such a hurry to take offence? I didn't say I wanted to go and talk to her now."
"It sounded like it."
"Oh, well, I'm very sorry," he conceded, still smiling, and obviously thinking her very absurd.
She rose from her seat.
"Please do, though. She'll be going soon, and you mayn't get another chance."
"Well, I will then," he answered simply, accompanying the remark with a nod of approval for her sensible reminder. And he went at once.
She saw him touch Haselden on the shoulder, and make the young man present him to Marjory. Ruston sat down and Haselden drifted, aimless and forlorn, on a solitary passage along the length of the room.
Adela joined Lady Semingham.
"That's a dreadful man, Bessie," she said; "he's a regular Juggernaut."
She disturbed Lady Semingham in a moment of happiness; everybody had been provided with conversation, and the hostess could sit in peaceful silence, looking, and knowing that she looked, very dainty and pretty; she liked that much better than talking.
"Who's what, dear?" she murmured.
"That man—Mr. Ruston. I say he's a Juggernaut. If you're in the way, he just walks over you—and sometimes when you're not: for fun, I suppose."
"Alfred says he's very clever," observed Lady Semingham, in a tone that evaded any personal responsibility for the truth of the statement.
"Well, I dislike him very much," declared Adela.
"We won't have him again when you're coming, dear," promised her friend soothingly.
Adela looked at her, hesitated, opened her fan, shut it again, and smiled.
"Oh, I didn't mean that, Bessie," she said with half a laugh. "Do, please."
"But if you dislike him——"
"Why, my dear, doesn't one hate half the men one likes meeting—and all the women!"
Lady Semingham smiled amiably. She did not care to think out what that meant; it was Adela's way, just as it was her husband's way to laugh at many things that seemed to her to afford no opening for mirth. But Adela was not to escape. Semingham himself appeared suddenly at her elbow, and observed,
"That's either nonsense or a truism, you know."
"Neither," said Adela with spirit; but her defence was interrupted by Evan Haselden.
"I'm going," said he, and he looked out of temper. "I've got another place to go to. And anyhow——"
"Well?"
"I'd like to be somewhere where that chap Ruston isn't for a little while."
Adela glanced across. Ruston was still talking to Marjory Valentine.
"What can he find to say to her?" thought Adela.
"What the deuce she finds to talk about to that fellow, I can't think," pursued Evan, and he flung off to bid Lady Semingham good-night.
Adela caught her host's eye and laughed. Lord Semingham's eyes twinkled.
"It's a big province," he observed, "so there may be room for him—out there."
"I," said Adela, with an air of affected modesty, "have ventured, subject to your criticism, to dub him Juggernaut."
"H'm," said Semingham, "it's a little obvious, but not so bad for you."
Next door to Mrs. Dennison's large house in Curzon Street there lived, in a small house, a friend of hers, a certain Mrs. Cormack. She was a Frenchwoman, who had been married to an Englishman, and was now his most resigned widow. She did not pretend to herself, or to anybody else, that Mr. Cormack's death had been a pure misfortune, and by virtue of her past trials—perhaps, also, of her nationality—she was keenly awake to the seamy side of matrimony. She would rhapsodise on the joys of an ideal marriage, with a skilful hint of its rarity, and condemn transgressors with a charitable reservation for insupportable miseries. She was, she said, very romantic. Tom Loring, however (whose evidence was tainted by an intense dislike of her), declared that affaires du cœur interested her only when one at least of the parties was lawfully bound to a third person; when both were thus trammelled, the situation was ideal. But the loves of those who were in a position to marry one another, and had no particular reason for not following that legitimate path to happiness, seemed to her (still according to Tom) dull, uninspiring—all, in fact, that there was possible of English and stupid. She hardly (Tom would go on, warming to his subject) believed in them at all, and she was in the habit of regarding wedlock merely as a condition precedent to its own violent dissolution. Whether this unhappy mode of looking at the matter were due to her own peculiarities, or to those of the late Mr. Cormack, or to those of her nation, Tom did not pretend to say; he confined himself to denouncing it freely, and to telling Mrs. Dennison that her next-door neighbour was in all respects a most undesirable acquaintance; at which outbursts Mrs. Dennison would smile.
Mrs. Dennison, coming out on to the balcony to see if her carriage were in sight down the street, found her friend close to her elbow. Their balconies adjoined, and friendship had led to a little gate being substituted for the usual dwarf-wall of division. Tom Loring erected the gate into an allegory of direful portent. Mrs. Cormack passed through it, and laid an affectionate grasp on Maggie Dennison's arm.
"You're starting early," she remarked.
"I'm going a long way—right up to Hampstead. I've promised Harry to call on some people there."
"Ah! Who?"
"Their name's Carlin. He knows Mr. Carlin in business. Mr. Carlin's a friend of Mr. Ruston's."
"Oh, of Ruston's? I like that Ruston. He is interesting—inspiring."
"Is he?" said Mrs. Dennison, buttoning her glove. "You'd better marry him, Berthe."
"Marry him? No, indeed. I think he would beat one."
"Is that being inspiring? I'm glad Harry's not inspiring."
"Oh, you know what I mean. He's a man who——"
Mrs. Cormack threw up her arms as though praying for the inspired word. Mrs. Dennison did not wait for it.
"There's the carriage. Good-bye, dear," she said.
Mrs. Dennison started with a smile on her face. Berthe was so funny; she was like a page out of a French novel. She loved anything not quite respectable, and peopled the world with heroes of loose morals and overpowering wills. She adored a dominating mind and lived in the discovery of affinities. What nonsense it all was—so very remote from the satisfactory humdrum of real life. One kept house, and gave dinners, and made the children happy, and was fond of one's husband, and life passed most——Here Mrs. Dennison suddenly yawned, and fell to hoping that the Carlins would not be oppressively dull. She had been bored all day long; the children had been fretful, and poor Harry was hurt and in low spirits because of a cruel caricature in a comic paper, and Tom Loring had scolded her for laughing at the caricature (it hit Harry off so exactly), and nobody had come to see her, except a wretch who had once been her kitchenmaid, and had come to terrible grief, and wanted to be taken back, and of course couldn't be, and had to be sent away in tears with a sovereign, and the tears were no use and the sovereign not much.
The Carlins fortunately proved tolerably interesting in their own way. Carlin was about fifty-five—an acute man of business, it seemed, and possessed by an unwavering confidence in the abilities of Willie Ruston. Mrs. Carlin was ten or fifteen years younger than her husband—a homely little woman, with a swarm of children. Mrs. Dennison wondered how they all fitted into the small house, but was told that it was larger by two good rooms than their old dwelling in the country town, whence Willie had summoned them to take a hand in his schemes. Willie had not insisted on the coal business being altogether abandoned—as Mrs. Carlin said, with a touch of timidity, it was well to have something to fall back upon—but he required most of Carlin's time now, and the added work made residence in London a necessity. In spite of Mr. Carlin's air of hard-headedness, and his wife's prudent recognition of the business aspect of life, they neither of them seemed to have a will of their own. Willie—as they both called him—was the Providence, and the mixture of reverence and familiarity presented her old acquaintance in a new light to Maggie Dennison. Even the children prattled about "Willie," and their mother's rebukes made "Mr. Ruston" no more than a strange and transitory effort. Mrs. Dennison wondered what there was in the man—consulting her own recollections of him in hope of enlightenment.
"He takes such broad views," said Carlin, and seemed to find this characteristic the sufficient justification for his faith.
"I used to know him very well, you know," remarked Mrs. Dennison, anxious to reach a more friendly footing, and realising that to connect herself with Ruston offered the best chance of it. "I daresay he's spoken of me—of Maggie Sherwood?"
They thought not, though Willie had been in Carlin's employ at the time when he and Mrs. Dennison parted. She was even able, by comparison of dates, to identify the holiday in which that scene had occurred and that sentence been spoken; but he had never mentioned her name. She very much doubted whether he had even thought of her. The fool and the fool's wife had both been dismissed from his mind. She frowned impatiently. Why should it be anything to her if they had?
There was a commotion among the children, starting from one who was perched on the window-sill. Ruston himself was walking up to the door, dressed in a light suit and a straw hat. After the greetings, while all were busy getting him tea, he turned to Mrs. Dennison.
"This is very kind of you," he said in an undertone.
"My husband wished me to come," she replied.
He seemed in good spirits. He laughed, as he answered,
"Well, I didn't suppose you came to please me."
"You spoke as if you did," said she, still trying to resent his tone, which she thought a better guide to the truth than his easy disclaimer.
"Why, you never did anything to please me!"
"Did you ever ask me?" she retorted.
He glanced at her for a moment, as he began to answer,
"Well, now, I don't believe I ever did; but I——"
Mrs. Carlin interposed with a proffered cup of tea, and he broke off.
"Thanks, Mrs. Carlin. I say, Carlin, it's going first-rate. Your husband's help's simply invaluable, Mrs. Dennison."
"Harry?" she said, in a tone that she regretted a moment later, for there was a passing gleam in Ruston's eye before he answered gravely,
"His firm carries great weight. Well, we're all in it here, sink or swim; aren't we, Carlin?"
Carlin nodded emphatically, and his wife gave an anxious little sigh.
"And what's to be the end of it?" asked Mrs. Dennison.
"Ten per cent," said Carlin, with conviction. He could not have spoken with more utter satisfaction of the millennium.
"The end?" echoed Ruston. "Oh, I don't know."
"At least he won't say," said Carlin admiringly.
Mrs. Dennison rose to go, engaging the Carlins to dine with her—an invitation accepted with some nervousness, until the extension of it to Ruston gave them a wing to come under. Ruston, with that directness of his that shamed mere dexterity and superseded tact, bade Carlin stay where he was, and himself escorted the visitor to her carriage. Half-way down the garden walk she looked up at him and remarked,
"I expect you're the end."
His eyes had been wandering, but they came back sharply to hers.
"Then don't tell anybody," said he lightly.
She did not know whether what he said amounted to a confession or were merely a jest. The next moment he was off at a tangent.
"I like your friend Miss Ferrars. She says a lot of sharp things, and now and then something sensible."
"Now and then! Poor Adela!"
"Well, she doesn't often try. Besides, she's handsome."
"Oh, you've found time to notice that?"
"I notice that first," said Mr. Ruston.
They were at the carriage-door.
"I'm not dressed properly, so I mustn't drive with you," he said.
"Supposing that was the only reason," she replied, smiling, "would it stop you?"
"Certainly."
"Why?"
"Because of other fools."
"I'll take you as far as Regent's Park. The other fools are on the other side of that."
"I'll chance so far," and, waving his hand vaguely towards the house, he got in. It did not seem to occur to him that there was any want of ceremony in his farewell to the Carlins.
"I suppose," she said, "you think most of us fools?"
"I've been learning to think it less and to show it less still."
"You're not much changed, though."
"I've had some of my corners chipped off by collision with other hard substances."
"Thank you for that 'other'!" cried Mrs. Dennison, with a little laugh. "They must have been very hard ones."
"I didn't say that they weren't a little bit injured too."
"Poor things! I should think so."
"I have my human side."
"Generally the other side, isn't it?" she asked with a merry glance. The talk had suddenly become very pleasant. He laughed, and stopped the carriage. A sigh escaped from Mrs. Dennison.
"Next time," he said, "we'll talk about you, or Miss Ferrars, or that little Miss Marjory Valentine, not about me. Good-bye," and he was gone before she could say a word to him.