“MR. HAMMOND!”
Thus proclaimed the machine stationed outside the door of the principal drawing-room in Berkeley Square. It was the night of the marchioness’s concert, and a stream of splendidly clad dames, rustling in silk and velvet, and flashing in pearls and diamonds, and of meanly clad men, disguised as waiters, except for an occasional red or blue ribbon, slightly suggestive of that worn by a pet cat, was flowing up the stairs, and through the doorway, where the machine checked them off one by one like an automatic turnstile. And the proclamations were by no means a mere empty ceremony, for without them the marchioness would have been quite ignorant of the names of at least half of those with whom she was shaking hands on the other side of the threshold.
The hygienic regulations by which every Board-School child is entitled to a fixed number of cubic feet of space do not apply to the guests of marchionesses, and it was becoming difficult to move through the concert-room without inflicting physical injury on others. The wiser of the late arrivals, or those more familiar with the locality, backed out as soon as they had mumbled the necessary formula of greeting to their hostess, and took refuge in a smaller drawing-room, where the Lady Victoria was holding a levee of her own particular friends. It was to this room that Hammond made his way after bowing over the marchioness’s hand.
Directly he lifted the curtain which screened the open doorway, Lady Victoria, clad in white, with a string of turquoise forget-me-nots round her bared neck, deserted a group of half a dozen other admirers, and came towards him with a frankness which would have jarred harshly on her mother’s notions of finesse.
“That is right, Mr. Hammond. I am so glad you have come into this room. It is cool, it is comfortable, and, what is better, you can’t hear a note of the music.”
“You have forgotten to mention that you are in this room,” replied Hammond. “But I share your views about the music. If we have got to pretend to enjoy art, why can’t it be painting or poetry, or something that won’t positively annoy us?”
“It wouldn’t do for my mother to hear me,” said Victoria, “but I may as well confess to you that I have absolutely no accomplishments. I don’t play the violin, I don’t model in clay, and I don’t even write answers to questions on etiquette in the Young Ladies’ Journal.”
“Surely you kodak?” Hammond pleaded.
Before Lady Victoria could clear herself from the charge, the voice of the machine sounded through the curtain:
“The Dean of Colchester!”
Hammond turned pale.
“Whatever is the dean doing here?” he gasped.
Victoria shrugged her shoulders.
“My mother likes to have the higher clergy at her parties. She thinks their costume gives variety.”
“Whenever I meet that man he asks me for a subscription,” Hammond was beginning, when the dean himself, forewarned by some preternatural intuition, turned aside from the reception-room and came through the curtain.
A glad light beamed out on his face as he bore down upon the pair.
“And how is Lady Victoria? I need not ask. Mr. Hammond, this is fortunate!”
Hammond gave a smile, like that of Mr. Charles Hawtrey on the stage when his stage mother-in-law enters and announces that she has come to spend a stage-day with him.
The Dean of Colchester drew back; then he put his head on one side and smiled indulgently on his victim.
“He is too bad, isn’t he?” This was to Lady Victoria. “But, do you know, I really was going to write to you this week.”
“How much?” Hammond repeated, drearily.
“Lady Victoria, I appeal to you. I am sure you must think me quite mercenary.”
“Hadn’t you better tell him?” suggested the matter-of-fact Victoria.
The dean shook his head in protest.
“I am actually silenced. The fact is that we are just raising a fund to restore the north tower of the Cathedral, and I thought that, as you had been so generous before, you might possibly see your way to give us some assistance.”
“How much?”
“No, really! But if you did feel disposed to do something, however small—”
The voice of the machine was again heard in the offing:
“Mr. Septimus Jones!”
“You had better make haste,” said Victoria to the dean.
The dean cast an imploring look at Hammond.
“I am so ashamed! May I really throw myself on your generosity?”
“How much?”
“I couldn’t possibly—” The curtain was lifted from outside. “Well, fifty pounds?” Hammond took out a pocket-book and began to scribble a memorandum in it. “This is too good of you. I assure you I never expected it.”
The curtain had admitted a pale youth, with light-colored hair, parted in the middle, who held a pair of gloves furtively in one hand, having plainly just made the discovery that no one else had brought gloves, and being distracted in consequence by a desire to smuggle them into a pocket unperceived.
Victoria greeted him with suspicious cordiality.
“It is too bad of you to come so late, Mr. Jones. I haven’t enjoyed myself a bit.”
“No, Lady Victoria, you mustn’t blame me.” At this point he made an effort to slip the hand which contained the gloves into a tail-pocket, but catching the unconscious eye of the dean fixed, as he supposed, on the offending articles, he drew them out again hastily. “I couldn’t get here sooner. My brougham wasn’t ready.”
“You should have come in a cab.”
“No, Lady Victoria, I am sure you don’t mean that I could have come in a horrid cab. I would as soon walk.”
“Don’t you ride a bicycle?”
“Oh yes, Lady Victoria, of course I ride a bicycle—in the morning, in the Park, you know, but not in the streets. You don’t mean that I could have come here on a bicycle, do you?”
By this time he had dexterously transferred the gloves to his other hand, and was again cautiously feeling his way round to his coat-tails, when a sudden movement of Hammond’s, who had just completed his business with the dean, caused the unfortunate youth to take fright and once more relinquish his half-executed design.
“I am afraid you are not in earnest, Mr. Jones.”
“Oh yes, Lady Victoria, I am very earnest. Everybody says I am very earnest. I take life quite seriously—I do, indeed. I go to all sorts of lectures and that kind of thing, you know, to improve my mind.”
“You will have to be careful, then,” put in Hammond as he came up, “or they will make you give them a testimonial, and advertise you in all the papers as a marvellous cure.”
Mr. Jones shrank back.
“Ah, now, Hammond, I am afraid of you, because you are so sarcastic. He was sarcastic then, wasn’t he, Lady Victoria?”
“Not very,” replied the person appealed to. The next instant she gave an imperceptible start.
“Captain Mauleverer!”
“But if you two are going to quarrel I shall go into the next room,” Victoria went on, quickly, beginning to move away.
“Oh no, Lady Victoria,” Mr. Jones remonstrated; “I never quarrel. I am a subscriber to the Peace Society—I really am.”
The Dean of Colchester looked round.
“Then I can leave you in perfect safety,” retorted Victoria, gliding off.
“Dear me! I am afraid that Lady Victoria is sarcastic, too,” Mr. Jones observed, sagaciously, looking after her. “Don’t you think so, Hammond?”
“I have suspected her of it sometimes; but she never admits it, and it is so difficult to prove these things.”
“I will ask the dean; I am sure he is not sarcastic—are you, dean?”
“My dear fellow,” Hammond interrupted, “I am surprised that you should ask such a question. A sarcastic dean would be a moral outrage. You might as well speak of a malicious cathedral.”
The dean thought of his fifty pounds, and smiled like an early Christian martyr commencing an interview with a sharp-set lion.
At this point Hammond’s attention was diverted by the entrance of the latest arrival. As he turned away to greet him, the dean laid a caressing hand on Mr. Jones’s arm.
“Did I hear you say just now that you were a subscriber to—”
Mr. Jones gave a glance round. He was alone with the dean, and the dean was on the wrong side of him. There was no human eye to see the deed. With one swift movement he succeeded in depositing his gloves in their long-sought hiding-place, and then suffered himself to fall an unresisting prey to the north tower of the Colchester Cathedral.
Captain Mauleverer’s face wore a decidedly cross expression as he came into the room. At the sight of Hammond it lighted up, and the two shook hands like old friends.
“So you patronize my aunt’s menagerie?” the captain observed, disrespectfully.
“Well, yes.”
“I should have thought you had too much sense.”
“My dear fellow, you are here yourself,” returned Hammond.
The captain gave an impatient shrug.
“I know, but I shouldn’t be if I could help it. It’s a beastly bore. You can’t smoke, and you can’t drink, and you are expected to sit beside some sentimental woman of fifty and let her gush to you over some beastly novel you haven’t read, and wouldn’t understand if you had.”
Hammond shook his head with a reproving smile.
“Yes, but you should remember that we are not here to please ourselves. We are here to please society.”
“Why should you care about society? You’re not a damned pauper like me. You have everything you want.”
“No one on the face of the earth has everything he wants,” Hammond retorted. “But I see what it is; you are out of sorts. What’s the matter?”
Mauleverer’s only answer was a despairing shrug.
“Been backing a horse?”
“No, it’s not that.”
“What is it, then? Cards?”
“No.”
“Not drink?” in a tone of incredulity.
“No, no.”
“Tell me.”
The captain hesitated for a moment before he gave the answer:
“Girl.”
Hammond let a mild exclamation of surprise escape him. Then he looked at his friend with a certain air of sympathy.
“What should you say if I were to tell you that you and I were in the same boat, old man?”
“You?” The other stared at him in amazement. “You don’t mean to say that there is any girl in England who would refuse you?”
“Suppose there were a girl whom I hadn’t the courage to ask, not because I was afraid of her refusing me, but because I was afraid of her accepting me?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Suppose I had to choose between her and my ambition? Suppose I knew that if I were to ask her to be my wife I might have to abandon my whole career, because society would forbid the banns?”
“I never thought of that,” murmured his friend.
“This very morning,” Hammond went on, “I had a letter from a man who thinks he is acting in my interests to warn me against the woman I love.”
“That is rather rough on you, old man.”
“You see, even a damned millionaire can’t have everything he wants.”
“Miss Yorke!”
The name caused a sensation. Heads were turned from all directions, and the Dean of Colchester and his victim hurried back to the neighborhood of the doorway where Hammond and Mauleverer were standing. At the same time Mr. Despencer slipped in from the next room, and stealthily approached the group.
“What Miss Yorke is that?” asked Mauleverer, innocently.
“The Miss Yorke, I believe, popularly known as Belle Yorke,” Despencer took it on himself to answer. He affected to keep his eyes turned away from Hammond.
“Belle Yorke!” exclaimed Mr. Septimus Jones, with enthusiasm. “Oh, I dote upon her! I think she is perfectly lovely—don’t you, Hammond?”
The Dean of Colchester gave a sound like an ecclesiastical purr.
“Now, this is very fortunate! I have so often wished to see her, but, of course, I daren’t go to those places where she sings. It is so thoughtful of the marchioness to bring her here. Ahem! isn’t there something or other said about her?”
“They say plenty of things about her, but God knows how much of it is true,” remarked Mauleverer.
“Oh, but Mauleverer,” Mr. Jones burst in, “you know when people say so much it must be some of it true, mustn’t it?”
Hammond turned and looked at the three men, one after the other, and then his eyes wandered to Despencer, who was standing by, with a sneer on his thin lips. Here were these four men all looking at the matter from different points of view, none of them apparently with any reason to wish ill to Belle Yorke, two of them evidently friendly towards her, and yet they all doubted her alike.
Before he could speak he saw a sudden change come over their faces. A man had just come hurriedly through the doorway leading from the reception-room. It was the Marquis of Severn; and he was in full dress, with the blue ribbon of the Garter across his shirt-front. He caught sight of his nephew, and strode up to him, his face working with emotion.
“Here, Gerald, come this way; I want to speak to you!” he exclaimed, without heeding the presence of the others.
He seized Mauleverer’s arm, and half led, half thrust him out of the room. One or two of the by-standers saw what was happening, and smiled. Hammond turned sharply on Despencer, whose smile was peculiarly malicious.
“I shall be obliged if you can come with me into the conservatory for five minutes. I wish to speak to you privately,” he said.
Despencer bowed with an air of bland unconcern, and followed him, while the voice outside sounded again:
“Alderman Dobbin!”