Lady Firmanence’s observations upon the family history of Mr. and Mrs. Lucian Damerel sent Lord Saxonstowe to their house at seven o’clock the following evening with feelings of pleasant curiosity. He had been out of the world—as that phrase is known by people whose chief idea of life is to live in social ant-heaps—long enough to enjoy a renewed acquaintance with it, and since his return to England had found a hitherto untasted pleasure in studying the manners and customs of his fellow-subjects. He remembered little about them as they had presented themselves to him before his departure for the East, for he was then young and unlicked: the five years of comparative solitude which he had spent in the deserts and waste places of the earth, only enlivened by the doubtful company of Kirghese, Tartars, and children of nature, had lifted him upon an eminence from whence he might view civilised humanity with a critical eye. So far everything had amused him—it seemed to him that never had life seemed so small and ignoble, so mean and trifling, as here where the men and women were as puppets pulled by strings which fate had attached to most capricious fingers. Like all the men who come back from the deserts and the mountains, he gazed on the whirling life around him with a feeling that was half pity, half contempt. The antics of the puppets made him wonder, and in the wonder he found amusement.

Mr. and Mrs. Lucian Damerel, as befitted young people untroubled by considerations of economy, resided in one of those smaller streets in Mayfair wherein one may find a house large enough to turn round in without more than an occasional collision with the walls. Such a house is not so comfortable as a suburban residence at one-tenth the rent, but it has the advantage of being in the middle of the known world, and if its frontage to the street is only one of six yards, its exterior may be made pretty and even taking by a judicious use of flowering plants, bright paint, and a quaint knocker. The interior is usually suggestive of playing at doll’s house; but the absence of even one baby makes a great difference, and in Lucian’s establishment there were no children. Small as it was, the house was a veritable nest of comfort—Lucian and Haidee had the instinct of settling themselves amongst soft things, and surrounding their souls with an atmosphere of Æsthetic delight, and one of them at least had the artist’s eye for colour, and the true collector’s contempt for the cheap and obvious. There was scarcely a chair or table in the rooms sacred to the householders and their friends which had not a history and a distinction: every picture was an education in art; the books were masterpieces of the binder’s craft; the old china and old things generally were the despair of many people who could have afforded to buy a warehouse full of the like had they only known where to find it. Lucian knew, and when he came into possession of Lord Simonstower’s legacy he began to surround himself with the fruits of money and knowledge, and as riches came rolling in from royalties, he went on indulging his tastes until the house was full, and would hold no more examples of anything. But by that time it was a nest of luxury wherein even the light, real and artificial, was graduated to a fine shade, where nothing crude in shape or colour interfered with the delicate susceptibilities of a poetic temperament.

When Lord Saxonstowe was shown into the small drawing-room of this small house he marvelled at the cleverness and delicacy of the taste which could make so much use of limited dimensions. It was the daintiest and prettiest room he had ever seen, and though he himself had small inclinations to ease and luxury of any sort, he drank in the pleasantness of his surroundings with a distinct sense of personal gratification. The room was empty of human life when he entered it, but the marks of a personality were all over it, and the personality was neither masculine nor feminine—it was the personality of a neuter thing, and Saxonstowe dimly recognised that it meant Art. He began to understand something of Lucian as he looked about him, and to conceive him as a mind which dominated its enveloping body to a love of beauty that might easily degenerate into a slavedom to luxury. He began to wonder if Lucian’s study or library, or wherever he worked, were similarly devoted to the worship of form and colour.

He was turning over the leaves of an Italian work, a book sumptuous in form and wonderful in its vellum binding and gold scroll-work, when a rustle of skirts aroused him from the first stages of a reverie. He turned, expecting to see his hostess—instead he saw a young lady whom he instinctively recognised as Miss Chilverstone, the girl of the merry eyes and the innumerable freckles of ten years earlier. He looked at her closely as she approached him, and he saw that the merry eyes had lost some of their roguery, but were still frank, clear, and kindly; some of the freckles had gone, but a good many were still there, adding piquancy to a face that had no pretensions to beauty, but many to the charms which spring from the possession of a kindly heart and a purposeful temperament. Good temper and good health appeared to radiate from Miss Chilverstone; the active girl of sixteen had developed into a splendid woman, and Lord Saxonstowe, as she moved towards him, admired her with a sudden recognition of her feminine strength—she was just the woman, he said to himself, who ought to be the mate of a strong man, a man of action and purpose and determination.

She held out her hand to him with a frank smile.

‘Do you remember me?’ she said. ‘It is quite ten years since that fateful afternoon at Simonstower.’

‘Was it fateful?’ he answered. ‘Yes, I remember quite well. In those days you were called Sprats.’

‘I am still Sprats,’ she answered, with a laugh. ‘I shall always be Sprats. I am Sprats to Lucian and Haidee, and even to my children.’

‘To your children?’ he said wonderingly.

‘I have twenty-five,’ she replied, smiling at his questioning look. ‘But of course you do not know. I have a private orphanage, all of my own, in Bayswater—it is my hobby. If you are interested in babies and children, do come to see me there, and I will introduce you to all my charges.’

‘I will certainly do that,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it hard work?’

‘Isn’t everything hard work that is worth doing?’ she answered. ‘Yes, I suppose it is hard work, but I like it. I have a natural genius for mothering helpless things—that is why I occasionally condescend to put on fine clothes and dine with children like Lucian and Haidee when they entertain great travellers who are also peers of the realm.’

‘Do they require mothering?’ he asked.

‘Very much so sometimes—they are very particular babies. I come to them every now and then to scold them, smack them, straighten them up, and see that they are in no danger of falling into the fire or upsetting anything. Afterwards I dine with them in order to cheer them up after the rough time they have had.’

Saxonstowe smiled. He had been watching her closely all the time.

‘I see,’ he said, ‘that you are still Sprats. Has the time been very rough to-day?’

‘Somewhat rough on poor Haidee, perhaps,’ answered Sprats. ‘Lucian has wisely kept out of the way until he can find safety in numbers. But please sit down and tell me about your travels until our hostess appears—it seems quite funny to see you all in one piece after such adventures. Didn’t they torture you in some Thibetan town?’ she inquired, with a sudden change from gaiety to womanly concern.

‘They certainly were rather inhospitable,’ he answered. ‘I shouldn’t call it torture, I think—it was merely a sort of gentle hint as to what they would do if I intruded upon them again.’

‘But I want to know what they did,’ she insisted. ‘You look so nice and comfortable sitting there, with no other sign of discomfort about you than the usual I-want-my-dinner look, that one would never dream you had gone through hardships.’

Saxonstowe was not much given to conversation—his nomadic life had communicated the gift of silence to him, but he recognised the sympathetic note in Miss Chilverstone’s voice, and he began to tell her about his travels in a somewhat boyish fashion that amused her. As he talked she examined him closely and decided that he was almost as young as on the afternoon when he occasioned such mad jealousy in Lucian’s breast. His method of expressing himself was simple and direct and schoolboyish in language, but the exuberance of spirits which she remembered had disappeared and given place to a staid, old-fashioned manner.

‘I wonder what did it?’ she said, unconsciously uttering her thought.

‘Did what?’ he asked.

‘I was thinking aloud,’ she answered. ‘I wondered what had made you so very staid in a curiously young way—you were a rough-and-tumble sort of boy that afternoon at Simonstower.’

Saxonstowe blushed. He had recollections of his youthfulness.

‘I believe I was an irrepressible sort of youngster,’ he said. ‘I think that gets knocked out of you though, when you spend a lot of time alone—you get no end of time for thinking, you know, out in the deserts.’

‘I should think so,’ she said. ‘And I suppose that even this solitude becomes companionable in a way that only those who have experienced it can understand?’

He looked at her with some surprise and with a new interest and strange sense of kinship.

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘That’s it—that is it exactly. How did you know?’

‘It isn’t necessary to go into the deserts and steppes to feel a bit lonely now and then, is it?’ she said, with a laugh. ‘I suppose most of us get some sort of notion of solitude at some time or other.’

At that juncture Haidee entered, and Saxonstowe turned to her with a good deal of curiosity. He was somewhat surprised to find that ten years of added age had made little difference in her. She was now a woman, it was true, and her girlish prettiness had changed into a somewhat luxurious style of beauty—there was no denying the loveliness of face and figure, of charm and colour, he said to himself, but he was quick to observe that Haidee’s beauty depended entirely upon surface qualities. She fell, without effort or consciousness, into poses which other women vainly tried to emulate; it was impossible to her to walk across a room, sit upon an unaccommodating chair, or loll upon a much becushioned sofa in anything but a graceful way; it was equally impossible, so long as nothing occurred to ruffle her, to keep from her lips a perpetual smile, or inviting glances from her dark eyes. She reminded Saxonstowe of a fluffy, silky-coated kitten which he had seen playing on Lady Firmanence’s hearthrug, and he was not surprised to find, when she began to talk to him, that her voice had something of the feline purr in it. Within five minutes of her entrance he had determined that Mrs. Damerel was a pretty doll. She showed to the greatest advantage amidst the luxury of her surroundings, but her mouth dropped no pearls, and her pretty face showed no sign of intellect, or of wit, or of any strong mental quality. It was evident that conversation was not Mrs. Damerel’s strong point—she indicated in an instinctive fashion that men were expected to amuse and admire her without drawing upon her intellectual resources, and Saxonstowe soon formed the opinion that a judicious use of monosyllables would carry her a long way in uncongenial company. Her beauty had something of sleepiness about it—there was neither vivacity nor animation in her manner, but she was beautifully gowned and daintily perfect, and as a picture deserved worship and recognition.

Saxonstowe was presently presented to another guest, Mrs. Berenson, a lady who had achieved great distinction on the stage, and who claimed a part proprietorship in Lucian Damerel because she had created the part of the heroine in his tragedy, and almost worn herself to skin and bone in playing it in strenuous fashion for nearly three hundred nights. She was now resting from these labours, and employing her leisure in an attempt to induce Lucian to write a play around herself, and the project was so much in her mind that she began to talk volubly of it as soon as she entered his wife’s drawing-room. Saxonstowe inspected her with curiosity and amusement. He had seen her described as an embodiment of sinuous grace; she seemed to him an angular, scraggy woman, whose joints were too much in evidence, and who would have been the better for some addition to her adipose tissue. From behind the footlights Mrs. Berenson displayed many charms and qualities of beauty—Saxonstowe soon came to the conclusion that they must be largely due to artificial aids and the power of histrionic art, for she presented none of them on the dull stage of private life. Her hair, arranged on the principle of artful carelessness, was of a washed-out colour; her complexion was mottled and her skin rough; she had an unfortunately prominent nose which evinced a decided partiality to be bulbous, and her mouth, framed in harsh lines and drooping wrinkles, was so large that it seemed to stretch from one corner of an elongated jaw to the other. She was noticeable, but not pleasant to look upon, and in spite of a natural indifference to such things, Saxonstowe wished that her attire had been either less eccentric or better suited to her. Mrs. Berenson, being very tall and very thin, wore a gown of the eighteenth-century-rustic-maiden style, made very high at the waist, low at the neck, and short in the sleeves—she thus looked like a lamp-post, or a bean-stalk, topped with a mask and a flaxen wig. She was one of those women who wear innumerable chains, and at least half-a-dozen rings on each hand, and she had an annoying trick of clasping her hands in front of her and twisting the chains round her fingers, which were very long and very white, and apt to get on other people’s nerves. It was also to be observed that she never ceased talking, and that her one subject of conversation was herself.

As Saxonstowe was beginning to wish that his host would appear, Mr. Eustace Darlington was announced, and he found himself diverted from Mrs. Berenson by a new object of interest, in the shape of the man whom Mrs. Damerel had jilted in order to run away with Lucian. Mr. Darlington was a man of apparently forty years of age; a clean-shaven, keen-eyed individual, who communicated an immediate impression of shrewd hard-headedness. He was very quiet and very self-possessed in manner, and it required little knowledge of human nature to predict of him that he would never do anything in a hurry or in a perfunctory manner—a single glance of his eye at the clock as eight struck served to indicate at least one principal trait of his character.

‘It is utterly useless to look at the clock,’ said Haidee, catching Mr. Darlington’s glance. ‘That won’t bring Lucian any sooner—he has probably quite forgotten that he has guests, and gone off to dine at his club or something of that sort. He gets more erratic every day. I wish you’d talk seriously to him, Sprats. He never pays the least attention to me. Last week he asked two men to dine—utter strangers to me—and at eight o’clock came a wire from Oxford saying he had gone down there to see a friend and was staying the night.’

‘I think that must be delightful in the man to whom you are married,’ said Mrs. Berenson. ‘I should hate to live with a man who always did the right thing at the right moment—so dull, you know.’

‘There is much to be said on both sides,’ said Darlington dryly. ‘In husbands, as in theology, a happy medium would appear to be found in the via media. I presume, Mrs. Berenson, that you would like your husband to wear his waistcoat outside his coat and dine at five o’clock in the morning?’

‘I would prefer even that to a husband who lived on clock-work principles,’ Mrs. Berenson replied. ‘Eccentricity is the surest proof of strong character.’

‘I should imagine,’ said Sprats, with a glance at Saxonstowe which seemed to convey to him that the actress was amusing. ‘I should imagine that Lord Saxonstowe and Mr. Darlington are men of clock-work principles.’

Mrs. Berenson put up her pince-nez and favoured the two men with a long, steady stare. She dropped the pince-nez with a deep sigh.

‘They do look like it, don’t they?’ she said despairingly. ‘There’s something in the way they wear their clothes and hold their hands that suggests it. Do you always rise at a certain hour?’ she went on, turning to Saxonstowe. ‘My husband had a habit of getting up at six in summer and seven in winter—it brought on an extraordinary form of nervous disease in me, and the doctors warned him that they would not be responsible for my life if he persisted. I believe he tried to break the habit off, poor fellow, but he died, and so of course there was an end of it.’

Ere Saxonstowe could decide whether he was expected to reply to the lady’s question as to his own habits, the sound of a rapidly driven and sharply pulled-up cab was heard outside, followed by loudly delivered instructions in Lucian’s voice. A minute later he rushed into the drawing-room. He had evidently come straight out of the cab, for he wore his hat and forgot to take it off—excitement and concern were written in large letters all over him. He began to gesticulate, addressing everybody, and talking very quickly and almost breathlessly. He was awfully sorry to have kept them waiting, and even now he must hurry away again immediately. He had heard late that afternoon of an old college friend who had fallen on evil days after an heroic endeavour to make a fortune out of literature, and had gone to him to find that the poor fellow, his wife, and two young children were all in the last stages of poverty, and confronting a cold and careless world from the insecure bastion of a cheap lodging in an unknown quarter of the town named Ball’s Pond. He described their plight and surroundings in a few graphic sentences, looking from one to the other with quick eager glances, as if appealing to them for comprehension, or sympathy, or assent.

‘And of course I must see to the poor chap and his family,’ he said. ‘They want food, and money, and lots of things. And the two children—Sprats, you must come back with me just now. I am keeping the cab—you must come and take those children away to your hospital. And where is Hoskins? I want food and wine for them; he must put it on top of the hansom.’

‘Are we all to go without dinner?’ asked Mrs. Damerel.

‘By no means, by no means!’ said Lucian. ‘Pray do not wait longer—indeed I don’t know when I shall return, there will be lots to do, and——’

‘But Sprats, if she goes with you, will go hungry,’ Mrs. Damerel urged.

Lucian stared at Sprats, and frowned, as if some deep mental problem had presented itself to him.

‘You can’t be very hungry, Sprats, you know,’ he said, with visible impatience. ‘You must have had tea during the afternoon—can’t you wait an hour or two and we’ll get something later on? Those two children must be brought away—my God! you should see the place—you must come, of course.’

‘Oh, I’m going with you!’ answered Sprats. ‘Don’t bother about us, you other people—angels of mercy are not very pleasant things at the moment you’re starving for dinner—go and dine and leave Lucian to me; I’ll put a cloak or something over my one swell gown and go with him. Now, Lucian, quick with your commissariat arrangements.’

‘Yes, yes, I’ll be quick,’ answered Lucian. ‘You see,’ he continued, turning to Saxonstowe with the air of a child who has asked another child to play with it, and at the last moment prefers an alternative amusement; ‘it’s an awful pity, isn’t it, but you do quite understand? The poor chap’s starving and friendless, you know, and I don’t know when I shall get back, but——’

‘Please don’t bother about me,’ said Saxonstowe; ‘I quite understand.’

Lucian sighed—a sigh of relief. He looked round; Sprats had disappeared, but Hoskins, a staid and solemn butler, lingered at the door. Lucian appealed to him with the pathetic insistence of the man who wants very much to do something, and is not quite sure how to do it.

‘Oh, I say, Hoskins, I want—some food, you know, and wine, and——’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Hoskins. ‘Miss Chilverstone has just given me instructions, sir.’

‘Oh, then we can go!’ exclaimed Lucian. ‘I say, you really mustn’t mind—oh! I am forgetting that I must take some money,’ he said, and hurriedly left the room. His wife sighed and looked at Darlington.

‘I suppose we may now go to dinner,’ she said. ‘Lucian will sup on a sandwich somewhere about midnight.’

In the hall they found Sprats enveloped in an ulster which completely covered her dinner-gown; Lucian was cramming a handful of money, obviously taken at random from a receptacle where paper-currency and gold and silver coins were all mingled together, into a pocket; a footman was carrying a case of food and wine out to the cab. Mrs. Berenson insisted on seeing the two apostles of charity depart—the entire episode had put her into a good temper, and she enlivened the next hour with artless descriptions of her various states of feeling. Her chatter amused Saxonstowe; Darlington and Mrs. Damerel appeared to have heard much of it on previous occasions, and received it with equanimity. As soon as dinner was over she announced that if Lucian had been at home she had meant to spend the rest of the evening in expounding her ideas on the subject of the wished-for drama to him, but as things were she would go round to the Empire for an hour—she would just be in time, she said, to see a turn in which the performer, a contortionist, could tie himself into a complicated knot, dislocate every joint in his body, and assume the most grotesque positions, all without breaking himself in pieces.

‘It is the grimmest performance,’ she said to Saxonstowe; ‘it makes me dream, and I wake screaming; and the sensation of finding that the dream is a dream, and not a reality, is so exquisite that I treat myself to it at least once a week. I think that all great artists should cultivate sensations—don’t you?’

Upon this point Saxonstowe was unable to give a satisfactory answer, but he replied very politely that he trusted Mrs. Berenson would enjoy her treat. Soon after her departure he made his own adieu, leaving Mrs. Damerel to entertain Darlington and two or three other men who had dropped in after dinner, and who seemed in nowise surprised to find Lucian not at home.