Really, it was a very interesting place archæologically, if only you could have got rid of the Pamments.
Amaryllis made no remark during this mumbling history. Iden thought she was listening intently. At the conclusion he was just moving her—for she was passive now, like a piece of furniture—when he spied someone at a window.
Off came the great white hat, and down it swept till the top brushed the grass in the depth of his homage. It was a bow that would have delighted a lady, so evidently real in its intent, so full of the gentleman, so thoroughly courtier-like, and yet honest. There was nothing to smile at in that bow; there was not a young gentleman in Belgravia who could bow in that way, for, in truth, we have forgotten how to bow in this generation.
A writing and talking is always going on about the high place woman occupies in modern society, but the fact is, we have lost our reverence for woman as woman; it is after-dinner speech, nothing more, mere sham. We don’t venerate woman, and therefore we don’t bow.
Grandfather Iden’s bow would have won any woman’s heart had it been addressed to her, for there was veneration and courtesy, breeding, and desire to please in it.
XVI
The man he had seen at the window was young Raleigh Pamment, the son and heir.
He had been sitting in an easy chair, one leg over the arm, busy with a memorandum book, a stump of pencil, and a disordered heap of telegrams, letters, and newspapers.
Everybody writes to Mr. Gladstone, a sort of human lion’s mouth for postcards, but Raleigh junior had not got to manage the House of Commons, the revenue, the nation, the Turks, South Africa, the Nile, Ganges, Indus, Afghanistan, sugar, shipping, and Homer.
Yet Raleigh junior had an occasional table beside him, from which the letters, telegrams, newspapers, and scraps of paper had overflowed on to the floor. In a company’s offices it would have taken sixteen clerks to answer that correspondence; this idle young aristocrat answered it himself, entered it in his day book, “totted” it up, and balanced the—the residue.
Nothing at all businesslike, either, about him—nothing in the least like those gentlemen who consider that to go in to the “office” every morning is the sum total of life. A most unbusinesslike young fellow.
A clay pipe in his mouth, a jar of tobacco on another chair beside him, a glass of whiskey for a paperweight on his telegrams. An idle, lounging, “bad lot;” late hours, tobacco, whiskey, and ballet-dancers writ very large indeed on his broad face. In short, a young “gent” of the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Not the slightest sign of “blue blood” anywhere; not even in the cut of his coat, no Brummel-like elegance; hardly a Bond Street coat at all—rough, large, coarse cloth. If he had stood at the door of a shop he would have done very well indeed for a shopkeeper, the sort that drives about in a cart for orders.
Of his character nothing could be learned from his features. His face was broad, rather flat, with a short but prominent nose; in spite of indulgence, he kept a good, healthy, country colour. His neck was thick, his figure stout, his hands big—a jovial, good-tempered looking man.
His neck was very thick, treelike; a drover’s neck, no refinement or special intelligence indicated there; great power to eat, drink, and sleep—belly energy.
But let no one, therefore, suppose that the members of the upper ten thousand are any thicker in the neck, or more abdominal in their proclivities, or beneath the culture of the day. Take five hundred “blue bloods,” and you will find among them a certain proportion of thick-necked people; take five hundred very common commoners, and you may count exactly the same number interspersed.
The Pamments were simply Englishmen, and liable to be born big, with broad faces, thick necks, and ultimate livers. It was no disgrace to Raleigh, that jolly neck of his.
Unless you are given to aesthetic crockery, or Francesco de Rimini, I think you would rather have liked him; a sort of fellow who would lend you his dogs, or his gun, or his horse, or his ballet-dancer, or his credit—humph!—at a moment’s notice. But he was a very “bad lot;” they whispered it even in dutiful Woolhorton.
He got rid of money in a most surprising way, and naturally had nothing to show for it. The wonderful manner in which coin will disappear in London, like water into deep sand, surpasses the mysteries of the skies. It slips, it slides, it glides, it sinks, it flies, it runs out of the pocket. The nimble squirrel is nothing to the way in which a sovereign will leap forth in town.
Raleigh had a good allowance, often supplemented by soft aunts, yet he frequently walked for lack of a cab fare. I can’t blame him; I should be just as bad, if fortune favoured me. How delicious now to walk down Regent Street, along Piccadilly, up Bond Street, and so on, in a widening circle, with a thousand pounds in one’s pocket, just to spend, all your own, and no need to worry when it was gone. To look in at all the shops and pick up something here and something yonder, to say, “I’ll have that picture I admired ten years ago; I’ll have a bit of real old oak furniture; I’ll go to Paris—” but Paris is not a patch on London. To take a lady—the lady—to St. Peter Robinson’s, and spread the silks of the earth before her feet, and see the awakening delight in her eyes and the glow on her cheek;
