“Wimpole!” cried Lord Beaumont, in a sort of ecstasy. “Haven’t you heard of the great modern wit? My dear fellow, he has turned conversation, I do not say into an art—for that, perhaps, it always was—but into a great art, like the statuary of Michaelangelo—an art of masterpieces. His repartees, my good friend, startle one like a man shot dead. They are final; they are—”
Again there came the hilarious roar from the room, and almost with the very noise of it, a big, panting apoplectic old gentleman came out of the inner house into the hall where we were standing.
“Now, my dear chap,” began Lord Beaumont hastily.
“I tell you, Beaumont, I won’t stand it,” exploded the large old gentleman. “I won’t be made game of by a twopenny literary adventurer like that. I won’t be made a guy. I won’t—”
“Come, come,” said Beaumont feverishly. “Let me introduce you. This is Mr. Justice Grant—that is, Mr. Grant. Basil, I am sure you have heard of Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh.”
“Who has not?” asked Grant, and bowed to the worthy old baronet, eyeing him with some curiosity. He was hot and heavy in his momentary anger, but even that could not conceal the noble though opulent outline of his face and body, the florid white hair, the Roman nose, the body stalwart though corpulent, the chin aristocratic though double. He was a magnificent courtly gentleman; so much of a gentleman that he could show an unquestionable weakness of anger without altogether losing dignity; so much of a gentleman that even his faux pas were well-bred.
“I am distressed beyond expression, Beaumont,” he said gruffly, “to fail in respect to these gentlemen, and even more especially to fail in it in your house. But it is not you or they that are in any way concerned, but that flashy half-caste jackanapes—”
At this moment a young man with a twist of red moustache and a sombre air came out of the inner room. He also did not seem to be greatly enjoying the intellectual banquet within.
“I think you remember my friend and secretary, Mr. Drummond,” said Lord Beaumont, turning to Grant, “even if you only remember him as a schoolboy.”
“Perfectly,” said the other. Mr. Drummond shook hands pleasantly and respectfully, but the cloud was still on his brow. Turning to Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, he said:
“I was sent by Lady Beaumont to express her hope that you were not going yet, Sir Walter. She says she has scarcely seen anything of you.”
The old gentleman, still red in the face, had a temporary internal struggle; then his good manners triumphed, and with a gesture of obeisance and a vague utterance of, “If Lady Beaumont … a lady, of course,” he followed the young man back into the salon. He had scarcely been deposited there half a minute before another peal of laughter told that he had (in all probability) been scored off again.
“Of course, I can excuse dear old Cholmondeliegh,” said Beaumont, as he helped us off with our coats. “He has not the modern mind.”
“What is the modern mind?” asked Grant.
“Oh, it’s enlightened, you know, and progressive—and faces the facts of life seriously.” At this moment another roar of laughter came from within.
“I only ask,” said Basil, “because of the last two friends of yours who had the modern mind; one thought it wrong to eat fishes and the other thought it right to eat men. I beg your pardon—this way, if I remember right.”
“Do you know,” said Lord Beaumont, with a sort of feverish entertainment, as he trotted after us towards the interior, “I can never quite make out which side you are on. Sometimes you seem so liberal and sometimes so reactionary. Are you a modern, Basil?”
“No,” said Basil, loudly and cheerfully, as he entered the crowded drawing-room.
This caused a slight diversion, and some eyes were turned away from our slim friend with the Oriental face for the first time that afternoon. Two people, however, still looked at him. One was the daughter of the house, Muriel Beaumont, who gazed at him with great violet eyes and with the intense and awful thirst of the female upper class for verbal amusement and stimulus. The other was Sir Walter Cholmondeliegh, who looked at him with a still and sullen but unmistakable desire to throw him out of the window.
He sat there, coiled rather than seated on the easy chair; everything from the curves of his smooth limbs to the coils of his silvered hair suggesting the circles of a serpent more than the straight limbs of a man—the unmistakable, splendid serpentine gentleman we had seen walking in North London, his eyes shining with repeated victory.
“What I can’t understand, Mr. Wimpole,” said Muriel Beaumont eagerly, “is how you contrive to treat all this so easily. You say things quite philosophical and yet so wildly funny. If I thought of such things, I’m sure I should laugh outright when the thought first came.”
“I agree with Miss Beaumont,” said Sir Walter, suddenly exploding with indignation. “If I had thought of anything so futile, I should find it difficult to keep my countenance.”
“Difficult to keep your countenance,” cried Mr. Wimpole, with an air of alarm; “oh, do keep your countenance! Keep it in the British Museum.”
Everyone laughed uproariously, as they always do at an already admitted readiness, and Sir Walter, turning suddenly purple, shouted out:
“Do you know who you are talking to, with your confounded tomfooleries?”
“I never talk tomfooleries,” said the other, “without first knowing my audience.”
Grant walked across the room and tapped the red-moustached secretary on the shoulder. That gentleman was leaning against the wall regarding the whole scene with a great deal of gloom; but, I fancied, with very particular gloom when his eyes fell on the young lady of the house rapturously listening to Wimpole.
“May I have a word with you outside, Drummond?” asked Grant. “It is about business. Lady Beaumont will excuse us.”
I followed my friend, at his own request, greatly wondering, to this strange
