“YOU are earlier than I expected, Geoffrey.”
Gastineau, as he spoke, laid down the book he was reading and stretched out his hand to Herriard with a smile. “Was the dinner worth going to—apart from business?”
“Oh, yes; it wasn’t bad.” Herriard brought up a chair and sat down with a yawn.
“Tell me all about it.”
“Not much to tell that would amuse you, I’m afraid. The usual assemblage of self-seekers; I myself being no exception.”
“Yes,” Gastineau agreed, with a little cynical laugh that seemed characteristic of the man. “It is inevitable, as the world goes to-day. All tradesmen, advertising their wares, only in our plane of life they happen to be intellectual goods we want to dispose of. There is not much point in being clever, Geof, unless we bring samples of our brains into market and make the world think the bulk is equal in quality all through.”
“In some, perhaps rare, cases it is,” Herriard observed. “Yours, my dear friend, for instance.”
Gastineau shook his head with a meaning smile. “You didn’t know much of me in my living days. If they were not over I would not tell you what a humbug I was. Oh, yes,” he replied to the other’s gesture of protest; “I had a certain amount of brains, more than most people, if you like; and that is not saying much. But let me assure you, my dear Geof, that their principal employment when I was fighting the world, was in minimizing my defects and exaggerating my cleverness; in short, working with all my might to make the world take me for a wonderfully clever genius, and to ascribe to abnormal brain-power what was really due to carefully directed push and discriminating powers of showing off.”
“It is difficult to believe,” Herriard returned with mock gravity, “in face of the astounding modesty with which you tell it.”
“Ah!” Gastineau sighed wearily, with a strong man’s check on despair. “It is all over now. No more use in keeping on the mask: I can throw it off, and be comfortable. Well, go on about the dinner. The usual dozen and a half of snobs and fools, brave women and fair men, eh?”
“The majority certainly answered your description. Lord and Lady Greystoke were there; he looking something between a professional conjurer and an Italian waiter, she like a faded doll left too long in the toy-shop window and touched up for sale with a dab of vermilion on each cheek.”
“Ah, yes. I remember her years ago. She always had that etiolated look.”
“I wonder how Greystoke, with his taste for southern colouring, came to marry her. He talked Italy all dinner and was hovering about Sicily when I left.”
“She had eight thousand a year,” Gastineau explained, “the depth of the gold at her bankers compensated for the pale straw of her colouring. Whom did you take in?”
“Mrs. Roderick Capel, a doll of another description.”
“Yes, of the mechanical and talking variety.” Gastineau laughed. “At least, she chattered.”
“About herself the whole time; with a perfect genius for making a long sermon from an unpromising text which must have stirred the admiration of the Dean of Stanborough who was her other neighbour.”
“Ah, she has caught the disease egoitis in a virulent form from her husband who was once a commercial traveller,” Gastineau commented. “He used to travel in millinery: he now travels in Roderick Capel, Esquire, M.P. etc., etc., and with the same push that gave him his first hundred pounds. I know the fellow; won a big case for him about ten years ago. He was so irrepressibly offensive that I nearly threw the brief at his head. The only man I felt I could never snub. Who else?”
“Let me see. Oh, the Tayntons.”
“Don’t know them.”
“Negligible quantities, except so far as the commisariat is concerned. Lady Mary, a greedy monosyllabic nonentity, and he a ventriloquist’s puppet, wooden, and as symmetrical as a wax-work with a movable lower jaw that looks as though it were worked by a string.”
“How ready people are to waste their hospitality on titled lay figures,” Gastineau observed contemptuously.
“Then,” Herriard continued, “there was Briscoe, the new member for Wroxby, very pleased with himself; a wig-block of a Guardsman invited probably for table-dressing purposes; and a German doctor.”
“Variety, at least.” Gastineau lay back with a smile, watching Herriard with half-closed eyes. “What was the German doctor doing there?”
“Come over here for some big operation, I heard.”
“Ah! What is his name?”
“I did not catch it.”
“Ah!” Gastineau’s eyes contracted curiously. “He did not interest you?”
“Not particularly. Although he was probably the most interesting person there. But he was not near me; I had, when the ladies went, to endure the banal egoism of my fellow M.P.”
“The social tax levied by stupidity on intellect.” Gastineau roused himself again. “Ah, my dear Geoffrey, we must not be impatient with fools and bores. If every one were clever and interesting we should be lost in the crowd. Now; the Rullington case. Is the day fixed?”
“It is only five down the list,” Herriard answered, taking some memoranda from his pocket. “One case is a big one, but Dancer tells me there is a great possibility of its being settled. So Rullington may come on at any time.”
“You found my notes for your speech clear, eh?”
“Quite, thank you. I ought to do something there. I only wish I could do justice to your ideas.”
Gastineau seemed rather darkly preoccupied. “Oh, my dear fellow,” he replied, almost mechanically, “you’ll do me and yourself justice enough if only you make up your mind to it. Confidence, confidence is the nine points of pleading.”
“And the tenth?” Herriard laughed.
“Is composed of equal parts of law and luck. You ought to make a big hit here, Geof. It’s a fighting case, if ever there was one; the sort of case where, even with losing it a foregone conclusion, a man who can seize the chance is sure to send up his reputation.”
“I’m afraid of Lady Rullington.”
“Never mind her, as long as you are not afraid of yourself.”
“She may break down under Maxwell’s cross-examination.”
“Maxwell’s line of comity will naturally be to bully her into damaging admissions; so much the better for you. A better man for our purpose could not lead against you. You can have the chivalrous stop out all along, and make capital out of his treatment of your witness. Do everything to get the sympathy, at least of the public, with you, and fight, fight, fight; then, whatever the result, you, Geoffrey Herriard, will score heavily.”
“Thanks to you.”
“Oh, you know I am only too grateful to find a means of utilizing what must otherwise now be a buried talent. By the way, talking of causes célèbres, what is the latest about the Vaux House affair.”
“I have heard of no further development.”
“Of course every one is talking about it?”
“It is a perfect conversational windfall.”
“I hope, for your sake, my dear boy, the Rullington case will not come on till the Lancashire has talked itself out.”
Herriard laughed. “It promises to do so, unless it gets a second wind from some sensational development.”
Gastineau shook his head. “I don’t see much chance of that.”
“No,” Herriard agreed. “Only the finding of the owner of the discovered weapon.”
“Have you heard any rumour of that?” the question came sharply.
“Oh, nothing tangible,” Herriard answered. “Of course, everybody thinks it necessary and smart to have a theory.”
“And names are mentioned?”
“Oh, yes. Half the smart women in town are pointed at, many of whom were not even at the ball.”
Gastineau laughed confidently. “Then there is safety in numbers—for the real culprit. Our old friend, no doubt, the spretæ injuria formæ for motive. Well, let us hope two things, one that for the lady’s sake it won’t come out further, and, secondly, if it does, that Geoffrey Herriard will be retained for the defence.”
“It would be the trial of the century.”
“Quite. Thanks for coming in. Look here, by-the-bye,” Gastineau reached to the table that stood by him, and took up some pages of manuscript. “I have got out a peroration for your speech in Rullington, supposing it comes to that stage. I got my mind full of the case, and I can’t help making speeches as I lie here. I think it is rather taking, if I may say so.”
“You need not say so, at any rate,” Herriard laughed. “It would not be your speech if it wasn’t effective.”
“Ah, well, it is just the sort of thing that used to go down with them. There’s your part.” He tossed the papers towards Herriard. “Take it and learn it. And now, good-night. By the way,” he added, with a half yawn as Herriard pressed his hand and turned to go, “you can’t recollect the name of the German medico you met to-night?”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” the other answered. “Why?”
“Oh, nothing. A sick man’s trivial curiosity, a failing I never had time for when I lived in the busy world. Good-night. A demain.”
As the door closed upon Herriard, a strange look of suspicion had come over Gastineau’s face.