The Record of Nicholas Freydon / An Autobiography

by A. J. Dawson

G.F. shrugged his shoulders, with a comic look in my direction. 'Feminine honesty! Take the silver, and tell the cabman to charge me! Freydon, perhaps you'd be kind enough to see this brigand and her friend to their cab, will you? I think we are all clear about that article, aren't we? Right! On your way ask Stone to come in and see me, will you?'

So he bowed us out, and I, in a state of most agreeable fluster, escorted the ladies to their waiting cab.

'Good-bye, Mr. Freydon,' said Mabel Foster as she gave me her softly gloved little hand over the cab door. And, from that moment, I was her slave; only realising some few minutes later that I had been so unpardonably rude as never even to have glanced in Miss Prinsep's direction, to say nothing of bidding her good-bye.

Miss Foster's was a well recognised and conventional kind of beauty, very telling to my inexperienced eyes, and richly suggestive of romance. Her eyes were large, dark, and, as the novelists say, 'melting.' Her face was a perfectly regular oval, having a clear olive complexion, with warm hints of subdued colour in it. Her lips were most provocative, and all about the edges of that dark cloud, her hair, the light played fitfully through a lattice of stray tendrils. A very pretty picture indeed, Miss Foster was perfectly conscious of her charms, and a mistress of coquettishness in her use of them. A true child of pleasure-loving Sydney, she might have posed with very little preparation as a Juliet or a Desdemona, and to my youthful fancy carried about with her the charming gaiety and romantic tenderness of the most delightful among Boccaccio's ladies. (Sydney was just then beginning to be referred to by writers as the Venice of the Pacific, and I was greatly taken with the comparison.)

A week or so later, I was honoured by an invitation to dine at my chief's house one Saturday night; and from that point onward my visits became frequent, my subjugation unquestioning and complete. This was the one brief period of my youth in which I flung away prudence and became youthfully extravagant, not merely in thought but in the expenditure of money. I suppose fully half my salary, for some time, was given to the purchase of sweets and flowers, pretty booklets and the like, for Mabel Foster; and, of the remainder of my earnings, the tailor took heavier toll than he had ever done before.

For example, when that first invitation to dinner reached me--on a Monday--I had never had my arms through the sleeves of a dress-coat. Mr. Smith kindly offered the loan of his time-honoured evening suit, pointing out, I dare say truly, that such garments were being 'cut very full just now.' But, no; I felt that the occasion demanded an epoch-marking plunge on my part; and to this end Mr. Smith was good enough to introduce me to his own tailor, through whom, as I understood, I could obtain the benefit of some sort of trade reduction in price, by virtue of Mr. Smith's one time position as a commercial traveller.

During the week the eddies caused by my plunge penetrated beyond the world of tailoring, and doubtless produced their effect upon the white tie and patent leather shoe trade. But despite my lavish preparations, Saturday afternoon found me in the blackest kind of despair. Fully dressed in evening kit, I had been sitting on my bed for an hour, well knowing that all shops were closed, and facing the lamentable fact that I had no suitable outer garment with which to cloak my splendour on the way to Potts Point. It was Mr. Smith who discovered the omission, and he, too, who had made me feel the full tragedy of it. The covert coat he pressed upon me would easily have buttoned behind my back, and Mrs. Hastings's kindly offer of a shawl (a vivid plaid which she assured me had been worn and purchased by no less an authority upon gentlemen's wear than her father) had been finally, almost bitterly, rejected by me.

It was then, when my fate seemed blackest to me, that Mr. Smith discovered in the prolific galleries of his well-stored memory the fact that it was perfectly permissible for a gentleman in my case to go uncovered by any outer robe, providing--and this was indispensable--that he carried some preferably light cloak or overcoat upon his arm.

'And the weather being close and hot, too, as it certainly is to-night, I'll wager you'll find you're quite in the mode if you get to Potts Point with my covert coat on your arm. So that settles it.'

It did; and I was duly grateful. It certainly was a hot evening, and in no sense any fault of Mr. Smith's that its warmth brought a heavy thunderstorm of rain just as I began my walk up the long hill at Potts Point, so that, taking shelter here and there, as opportunity offered, but not daring to put on the enormously over-large coat, I finally ran up to the house in pouring rain, with a coat neatly folded over one arm. A few years later, no doubt, I should have been glad to slip the coat on, or fling it over my head. But--it did not happen a few years later....