So went on the worthy old father—with more, which I forget. I had been on my feet all day, and was what women call “tired,”—when they delight to wheel out arm-chairs and push warmed slippers under wet feet—at least, so I have seen done.
London club-life was new to me; nor was I aware that in this England, this “home,”—words, which abroad we learn to think synonymous and invest with an inexpressible charm,—so large a proportion of the middle classes assume by choice the sort of life which, on foreign service, we put up with of necessity; the easy selfish life into which a male community is prone to fall. The time-honoured United Service, I was acquainted with; but the New Universal was quite a dazzle of brilliant plate, a palace of upholstery. Tom had not come in, but his father showed me over his domains with considerable pride.
“Yes; this is how we live—he at his club and I at mine. We have two tidy bedrooms, somewhere or other, hard by,—and that's all. A very jolly life, I assure you, if one hasn't the gout or the blues; we have kept to it ever since the poor mother died, and Henrietta married. I sometimes tell Tom he ought to settle; but he says it would be slow, and he can't afford it. Hollo! here's the boy.”
Tom—a “boy” six feet high, good-looking and well-dressed, after the exact pattern of a few dozen more, whom we had met strolling arm-in-arm down Pall-Mall—greeted me with great civility, and said he remembered me perfectly—though my unfortunately quick ears detected him asking his father, aside, “where on earth he had picked up that old fogie?”
We dined well—and a good dinner is not a bad thing. As a man gets old, he may be allowed some cheer—in fact, he needs it. Whether, at twenty-four, he needs five courses and half-a-dozen kinds of wine is another question. But Master Tom was my host, so silence! Perhaps I am becoming, “an old fogie.”
After dinner, the colonel opened out warmly upon my business, which his son evidently considered a bore.
“He really did not understand the matter; it was not in his department of public business; the governor always thought they must know everything that was going on, when, in truth, they knew nothing at all. He should be most happy, but had not the least notion what it was in his power to do for Doctor Urquhart.”
Doctor Urquhart laboured to make the young gentleman understand that he really did not want him to do anything, to which Tom listened with that philosophical laissez-faire, kept just within the bounds of politeness, that we of an elder generation are prone to find fault with. At last, an idea struck him.
“Why, father, there's Charteris,—knows everything and everybody—would be just the man for you. There he is.”
And he pointed eagerly to a gentleman, who, six tables off, lounged over his wine and newspaper.