My blood boiled with rage. I lost all control of myself. I longed to feel his face against my knuckles.
"That"s not true," I said in a rather loud voice.
He started up, and turned round, saying in a hectoring voice, "What was that you said to me? Will you repeat your words?"
"To repeat one"s words," I said quietly, "shows a limited vocabulary, so I will put it thus,--what you said just now about Sinfi Lovell being the mistress of Cyril Aylwin"s cousin is a lie."
"You dare to give me the lie, sir? And what the devil do you mean by listening to our conversation?"
The threatening look that he managed to put into his face was so entirely histrionic that it made me laugh outright. This seemed to damp his courage more than if I had sprung up and shown fight. The man had a somewhat formidable appearance, however, as regards build, which showed that he possessed more than average strength. It was the manifest genuineness of my laugh that gave him pause. And when I sat with my elbows on the table and my face between my palms, taking stock of him quietly, he looked extremely puzzled. The man of the musical voice sat and looked at me as though under a spell.
"I am a young man from the country," I said to him. "To what theatre is your histrionic friend attached? I should like to see him in a better farce than this."
"Do you hear that, De Castro?" said the other. "What is your theatre?"
"If he is really excited," I said, "tell him that people at a public supper-room should speak in a moderate tone or their conversation is likely to be overheard."
"Do you hear this young man from the country, De Castro?" said he.
"You seem to be the Oraculum of the hay-fields, sir," he continued, turning to me with a delightfully humorous expression on his face.
"Have you any other Delphic utterance?"
"Only this," I said, "that people who do not like being given the lie should tell the truth."
"May I be permitted to guess your Christian name, sir? Is it Martin, perchance?"
"Yes," I replied, "and my surname is Tupper." He then got up and laid his hand on the _raconteur"s_ shoulder, and said, "Don"t be a fool, De Castro. When a man looks at another as the author of the _Proverbial Philosophy_ is looking at you, he knows that he can use his fists as well as his pen."
"He gave me the lie. Didn"t you hear?"
"I did, and I thought the gift as entirely gratuitous, _mon cher_, as giving a scuttleful of coals to Newcastle."
The anecdote-monger stood silent, quelled by this man"s voice.
Then turning to me, the man of the musical voice said, "I suppose you know something about my friend Lady Sinfi?"
"I do," I said, "and I am Cyril Aylwin"s kinsman, whom you call his cousin, so perhaps, as every word your friend has said about Sinfi Lovell and me is false, you will allow me to call him a liar."
A look of the greatest glee at the discomfiture of his companion overspread his face.
"Certainly," he said with a loud laugh. "You may call him that, you may even qualify the noun you have used with an adjective if the author of the _Proverbial Philosophy_ can think of one that is properly descriptive and yet not too unparliamentary. So you are Cyril Aylwin"s kinsman. I have heard him," he said, with a smile that he tried in vain to suppress, "I have heard Cyril expatiate on the various branches of the Aylwin family."
"I belong to the proud Aylwins," I said.
The twinkle in his eye made me adore him as he said--"The proud Aylwins. A man who, in a world like this, is proud and knows it, and is proud of confessing his pride, always interests me, but I will not ask you what makes the proud Aylwins proud, sir."
"I will tell you what makes me proud," I said: "my great-grandmother was a full-blooded Gypsy, and I am proud of the descent."
He came forward and held out his hand and said, "It is long since I met a man who interested me"--he gave a sigh--"very long; and I hope that you and I may become friends."
I grasped his hand and shook it warmly.
The anecdote-monger began talking at once about Sinfi, Wilderspin, and Cyril Aylwin, speaking of them in the most genial and affectionate terms. In a few minutes, without withdrawing a word he had said about either of them, he had entirely changed the spirit of every word. At first I tried to resist his sophistry, but it was not to be resisted. I ended by apologising to him for my stupidity in misunderstanding him.
"My dear fellow," said he, "not a word, not a word. I admired the way in which you stood up for absent friends. Didn"t you, D"Arcy?"
At this the other broke out into another mellow laugh. "I did. How"s your kinsman, and how"s Wilderspin?" he said, turning to me. "Did you leave them well?"
We soon began, all three of us, to talk freely together. Of course I was filled with curiosity about my new friends, especially about the liar. His extraordinary command of facial expression, coupled with the fact that he wore no hair on his face, made me at first think he was a great actor; but being at that time comparatively ignorant of the stage, I did not attempt to guess what actor it was. After a while his prodigious acuteness struck me more than even his histrionic powers, and I began to ask myself what Old Bailey barrister it was.
Turning at last to the one called D"Arcy, I said. "You are an artist; you are a painter?"
"I have been trying for many years to paint," he said.
"And you?" I said, turning to his companion.
"He is an artist too," D"Arcy said, "but his line is not painting--he is an artist in words."
"A poet?" I said in amazement.
"A romancer, the greatest one of his time unless it be old Dumas."
"A novelist?"
"Yes, but he does not write his novels, he speaks them."
De Castro, evidently with a desire to turn the conversation from himself and his profession, said, pointing to D"Arcy, "You see before you the famous painter Haroun-al-Raschid, who has never been known to perambulate the streets of London except by night, and in me you see his faithful vizier."
It soon became evident that D"Arcy, for some reason or other, had thoroughly taken to me--more thoroughly, I thought, than De Castro seemed to like, for whenever D"Arcy seemed to be on the verge of asking me to call at his studio, De Castro would suddenly lead the conversation off into another channel by means of some amusing anecdote. However, the painter was not to be defeated in his intention; indeed I noticed during the conversation that although D"Arcy yielded to the sophistries of his companion, he did so wilfully. While he forced his mind, as it were, to accept these sophistries there seemed to be all the while in his consciousness a perception that sophistries they were. He ended by giving me his address and inviting me to call upon him.
"I am only making a brief stay in London," he said; "I am working hard at a picture in the country, but business just now calls me to London for a short time."
With this we parted at the door of the restaurant.
II
It was through the merest accident that I saw these two men again.
One evening I had been dining with my mother and aunt. I think I may say that I had now become entirely reconciled to my mother. I used to call upon her often, and at every call I could not but observe how dire was the struggle going on within her breast between pride and remorse. She felt, and rightly felt, that the loss of Winifred among the Welsh hills had been due to her harshness in sending the stricken girl away from Raxton, to say nothing of her breaking her word with me after having promised to take my place and watch for the exposure of the cross by the wash of the tides until the danger was certainly past.
But against my aunt I cherished a stronger resentment every day. She it was, with her inferior intellect and insect soul, who had in my childhood prejudiced my mother against me and in favour of Frank, because I showed signs of my descent from Fenella Stanley while Frank did not. She it was who first planted in my mother"s mind the seeds of prejudice against Winnie as being the daughter of Tom Wynne.
The influence of such a paltry nature upon a woman of my mother"s strength and endowments had always astonished as much as it had irritated me.
I had not learnt then what I fully learnt afterwards, that in this life it is mostly the dull and stupid people who dominate the clever ones--that it is, in short, the fools who govern the world.
I should, of course, never have gone to Belgrave Square at all had it not been to see my mother. Such a commonplace slave of convention was my aunt, that, on the evening I am now mentioning, she had scarcely spoken to me during dinner, because, having been detained at the solicitor"s, I had found it quite impossible to go to my hotel to dress for her ridiculous seven o"clock dinner.