"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 pa.s.sed, 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 mediaevalist myself," she observed, and prepared to endure the penalty of an _expose_ 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 p.r.o.nounced; 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 a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sented, "it"s pretty new to me. A year ago I hadn"t a dress coat."
"The G.o.ds are giving you a second youth then."
"Well, I take it. I don"t know that I have much to thank the G.o.ds 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,