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 pa.s.sing 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 p.r.o.ne 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.
CHAPTER II.
THE COINING OF A NICKNAME.
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-c.u.m-Violetta season. Violetta"s doings and unexampled triumphs have, perhaps luckily, no place here; her dancing was higher and her songs more surpa.s.sing 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-gla.s.s 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 amus.e.m.e.nt.
"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 att.i.tude 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 s.e.x 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."