Sir Within merely raised his eyebrows, half pitifully, that there were such people; and Grenfell hastened away on his mission. He was back in a moment. “Just caught him getting into a cab; he’ll be delighted—he was delighted when I gave him your message. He goes off to-night, as the waiter said, and apparently full of important news. Vyner, it would seem, has come all right. All he told me was: ‘Sir Gervais will be on his legs again;’ but we’ll have it all after dinner.”
Sir Within heard the tidings with far less interest than Grenfell looked for. He smiled benignly, indeed; he muttered something about being “charmed to hear it;” and then heaved a heavy sigh and sat down with his back to the light. How heartless and unfeeling did it seem to him to have so much compassion for loss of mere fortune, and not one word of sympathy for a broken and bereaved heart! What a world it was! What a world of perverted feeling and misapplied generosity!
Grenfell said something about the epicurism of the lawyer class, and went off to give special directions about the dinner; and the old man dozed, and woke, and wandered on in thought over the past, and dozed again, till his servant came to apprise him it was time to dress.
It was the first time he was to encounter the presence of a stranger after some months of seclusion, and he shrank from the effort, and would have retreated altogether if he could only have found a pretext. Conventionalities are, however, the tyrants of such men as himself, and the bare idea of anything unseemly in politeness was unendurable. He suffered his valet, therefore, to restore him to something of his former appearance. His eyebrows were newly tinted and well arched; his furrowed cheeks were skilfully smoothed over and suffused with a soft, permanent blush; and his whiskers were ingeniously brought into keeping with the vigorous darkness of his raven wig, imparting to him altogether a sort of surcharged vitality, that, to an acute observer, might have imparted a sense little short of horror. The very brilliants of his rings caught a twinkling lustre from his tremulous hands, as though to impress the beholder with the contrast between splendour and decay.
Nor was his manner less unreal than his appearance. With his darkened eyebrows and his diamond studs he had put on his old tone of soft insinuation, and all that was natural in the Man was merged in the crafty devices of the Minister. No wonder was it M’Kinlay was charmed with a tone and address that had done service in Courts. Sir Within thus “warmed to his work,” and actually at last began to feel pleasure in the success he achieved; and even Grenfell, long trained to the habits of the world, was astonished at conversational resources for which he had never given him credit.
Thus happily did the dinner proceed; and when the servants retired, M’Kinlay had arrived at that point of beatitude in which he regarded the company as something superlatively high, and himself fully worthy of it.
“You are on your way to my old friend Vyner, I think?” said Sir Within, with a heartiness that ignored all estrangement between them.
“Yes, Sir; on a pleasanter mission, I rejoice to say, than when I last travelled the same road.”
“He is all right again, I hear,” said Grenfell, who meant, by an abrupt declaration, to disarm all the conventional reserve of the lawyer.
“Well, that would be saying too much, perhaps—too much; but I hope, Mr. Grenfell, he is on the way to it.”