“I have not heard whether his Majesty will receive me.”
Grenfell started, and stared at him. Had it come to this already? Was the mind gone and the intellect shattered?
“You spoke of a day in the country somewhere,” reiterated Grenfell “St. Germains, or Versailles.”
“Very true. I am most grateful for your reminder. It will be charming. I am quite in the humour for a few pleasant people, and I hope the weather will favour us.”
“Good-night,” said Grenfell abruptly, and left the room.
CHAPTER LIX. MR. GRENFELL’S ROOM
Mr. Grenfell sat in an easy-chair, wrapped in a most comfortable dressing-gown, and his feet encased in the softest of slippers, before a cheery wood fire, smoking. His reflections were not depressing. The scene from which he had just come satisfied him as to a fact—which men like Grenfell have a sort of greedy appetite to be daily assured of—that “Money is not everything in this world.” Simple as the proposition seems, it takes a long and varied knowledge of life to bring home that conviction forcibly and effectually. Men are much more prone to utter it than to believe it, and more ready to believe it than to act upon it.
Now, though Grenfell was ready to admit that “Money was not everything,” he coupled it with what he believed to be just as true—that it was a man’s own fault that made it so. He instanced to his mind the old man he had just quitted, and who, except in the quality of years, was surrounded with everything one could desire—name, fortune, station, more than average abilities, and good health—and yet he must needs fall in love! By what fatality was it that a man always chose the worst road? What malevolent ingenuity ever selected the precise path that led to ruin? Were there no other vices he could have taken to? Wine, gambling, gluttony, would have spared his intellect for a year or two certainly. The brains of old people stand common wear and tear pretty well; it is only when the affections come to bear upon the mind that the system gives way. That a man should assume old age gracefully and becomingly, the heart ought to decay and grow callous, just as naturally as hair whitens and teeth fail. Nature never contemplated such a compact as that the blood at seventy should circulate as at thirty, and that the case-hardened, world-worn man should have a revival of Hope, Trustfulness, and Self-delusion. It was thus Grenfell regarded the question, and the view was not the less pleasing that he felt how safely he stood as regards all those seductions which fool other men and render their lives ridiculous. At all events, the world should not laugh at him. This is a philosophy that suffices for a large number of people in life; and simple as the first element of it may seem, it involves more hard-heartedness, more cruel indifference to others, and a more practical selfishness, than any other code I know of.
If he was well pleased that Vyner should “come all right again,” it was because he liked a rich friend far better than a poor one; but there mingled with his satisfaction a regret that he had not made overtures to the Vyners—the “women,” he called them—in their hour of dark fortune, and established with them a position he could continue to maintain in their prosperity. “Yes,” thought he, “I ought to have been taught by those people who always courted the Bourbons in their exile, and speculated on their restoration.” But the restoration of the Vyner dynasty was a thing he had never dreamed of. Had he only had the very faintest clue to it, what a game he might have played! What generous proffers he might have made, how ready he might have been with his aid! It is only just to him to own that he very rarely was wanting in such prescience; he studied life pretty much as a physician studies disease, and argued from the presence of one symptom what was to follow it.