“So I find you established?” said Warkworth, smiling, to the lady with the nails, while Delafield nodded to him from the top of the steps and Meredith ceased to chatter.
“I haven’t a hand, I fear,” said Julie. “Will you have some tea? Ah, Léonie, tu vas en faire de nouveau, n’est-ce pas, pour ce monsieur?”
A little woman in black, with a shawl over her shoulders, had just glided into the room. She had a small, wrinkled face, bright eyes, and a much-flattened nose.
“Tout de suite, monsieur,” she said, quickly, and disappeared with the teapot. Warkworth guessed, of course, that she was Madame Bornier, the foster-sister—the “Propriety” of this ménage.
“Can’t I help?” he said to Julie, with a look at Delafield.
“It’s just done,” she said, coldly, handing a nail to Delafield. “Just a trifle more to the right. Ecco! Perfection!”
“Oh, you spoil him,” said Meredith. “And not one word of praise for me!”
“What have you done?” she said, laughing. “Tangled the cord—that’s all!”
Warkworth turned away. His face, so radiant as he entered, had settled into sharp, sudden lines. What was the meaning of this voice, this manner? He remembered that to his three letters he had received no word of reply. But he had interpreted that to mean that she was in the throes of moving and could find no time to write.
As he neared the tea-table, Lord Lackington looked up. He greeted the newcomer with the absent stateliness he generally put on when his mind was in a state of confusion as to a person’s identity.
“Well, so they’re sending you to D⸺? There’ll be a row there before long. Wish you joy of the missionaries!”
“No, not D⸺,” said Warkworth, smiling. “Nothing so amusing. Mokembe’s my destination.”
“Oh, Mokembe!” said Lord Lackington, a little abashed. “That’s where Cecil Ray, Lord R.’s second son, was killed last year—lion-hunting? No, it was of fever that he died. By-the-way, a vile climate!”
“In the plains, yes,” said Warkworth, seating himself. “As to the uplands, I understand they are to be the Switzerland of Africa.”
Lord Lackington did not appear to listen.
“Are you a homoeopath?” he said, suddenly, rising to his full and immense stature and looking down with eagerness on Warkworth.
“No. Why?”
“Because it’s your only chance, for those parts. If Cecil Ray had had their medicines with him he’d be alive now. Look here; when do you start?” The speaker took out his notebook.
“In rather less than a month I start for Denga.”
“All right. I’ll send you a medicine-case—from Epps. If you’re ill, take ’em.”
“You’re very good.”
“Not at all. It’s my hobby—one of the last.” A broad, boyish smile flashed over the handsome old face. “Look at me; I’m seventy-five, and I can tire out my own grandsons at riding and shooting. That comes of avoiding all allopathic messes like the devil. But the allopaths are such mean fellows they filch all our ideas.”
The old man was off. Warkworth submitted to five minutes’ tirade, stealing a glance sometimes at the group of Julie, Meredith, and Delafield in the farther window—at the happy ease and fun that seemed to prevail in it. He fiercely felt himself shut out and trampled on.
Suddenly, Lord Lackington pulled up, his instinct for declamation qualified by an equally instinctive dread of boring or being bored. “What did you think of Montresor’s statement?” he said, abruptly, referring to a batch of army reforms that Montresor the week before had endeavored to recommend to a sceptical House of Commons.
“All very well, as far as it goes,” said Warkworth, with a shrug.
“Precisely! We English want an army and a navy; we don’t like it when those fellows on the Continent swagger in our faces, and yet we won’t pay either for the ships or the men. However, now that they’ve done away with purchase—Gad! I could fight them in the streets for the way in which they’ve done it!—now that they’ve turned the army into an examination-shop, tempered with jobbery, whatever we do, we shall go to the deuce. So it don’t matter.”
“You were against the abolition?”
“I was, sir—with Wellington and Raglan and everybody else of any account. And as for the violence, the disgraceful violence with which it was carried—”
“Oh no, no,” said Warkworth, laughing. “It was the Lords who behaved abominably, and it’ll do a deal of good.”
Lord Lackington’s eyes flashed.
“I’ve had a long life,” he said, pugnaciously. “I began as a middy in the American war of , that nobody remembers now. Then I left the sea for the army. I knocked about the world. I commanded a brigade in the Crimea—”
“Who doesn’t remember that?” said Warkworth, smiling.
The old man acknowledged the homage by a slight inclination of his handsome head.
“And you may take my word for it that this new system will not give you men worth a tenth part of those fellows who bought and bribed their way in under the old. The philosophers may like it, or lump it, but so it is.”
Warkworth dissented strongly. He was a good deal of a politician, himself a “new man,” and on the side of “new men.” Lord Lackington warmed to the fight, and Warkworth, with bitterness in his heart—because of that group opposite—was nothing loath to meet him. But presently he found the talk
