It was long before Hugh would leave the box, for he was one of those who like to say “Thank you!” when they have enjoyed themselves, and the procession had to pass again and again before he and the rest of the house were in the least satisfied. Then Mr. Amherst had to explain that Andrew Robb was not present, he had to thank his friends, he had to say that their pleasure was his, and that he did not know when he had been so deeply touched. Yes, and Mr. Robb really was not present.
Eventually, however, the three left the house. Hugh was going on to his dance, and saw the two sisters into their motor. There was a block ahead of them, and till it cleared he talked to them through the window.
“I shall come to ‘Gambits’ every night,” he announced, “and all day I shall search for Andrew Robb.”
“And when you find him?” asked Peggy.
“I shall black his boots, if he will let me. I shall learn to fold clothes and apply for a place as his valet. What a heavenly mind he must have! I——”
And the block dissolved and the motor moved.
CHAPTER IV
THE windows were all wide open, and a hot breeze of July, strong enough almost to be called a wind, and laden with the scents of summer and the hum of bees, poured boisterously into the room, stirring the papers on the table and ruffling the grayish wiry hair of the writer. But this invasion of the wind was clearly a thing often experienced, and, though apparently welcomed, suitably guarded against, for the copious papers that fluttered and rustled so busily to its touch were made secure from disarrangement by stones and various small fragments that were placed on top of their orderly heaps in order to prevent their taking flight. Thus, at the right hand of the writer, on a little shelf of these flutterers bound together by an elastic band and neatly docketed “Parish Accounts,” there stood a small piece of basaltic rock, with a paper label gummed to it, lettered in minute old English type, “Ye Sea of Galilee, 1902.” “Ye Dead Sea, 1902,” a softer piece of pumice-stone, prevented “Household Accounts (Stables)” from sowing themselves over the room; while a larger slab of white marble—lay-brother, so to speak, to the first two, and labelled “Acropolis, 1902” in Greek characters—kept the very small packet of “Letters unanswered” in place; and a fragment, with its ticket “St. Peter’s, Rome,” not stating, however, from what part of the church it had been pilfered, kept Barr’s last list of “Seeds for the Flower Garden” from going there. Bits of Jerusalem and Nazareth were similarly useful.
The room was large, square, and commodious; lived in, as was evident from a first glance, by some one who knew what he wanted in his study, and put all things in their places; while a glance at his rather keen and severe face might suggest that he had a slight tendency to put people in their places also. There was nothing fortuitous or haphazard about his arrangements; one felt instinctively that the owner kept about him only such things as were in constant use, as, for instance, Barr’s catalogue of seeds or that formed part of the constant background of his mind, under which head we may class a terra-cotta reproduction of Michael Angelo’s Moses, that stood on the top of a revolving bookcase in the window, and a framed map of the Roman Forum (1904), with the latest excavations outlined in red. Bookshelves took up the bulk of the wall-space, which was otherwise decorated with prints of a Biblical character. The floor was covered with red carpet, cut up by black lines into lozenge-shaped squares, in the centre of each of which was a fleur-de-lis, and it, like the prints and the weights that kept papers in their places, had a serious and slightly ecclesiastical suggestion about it. But just as nobody in this world is entirely cut out of one piece, but is, to some extent, at any rate, of the nature of patchwork, so too this room reflected a few slightly lighter characteristics. A couple of golf balls, for instance, stood on the chimney-piece just below the Sistine Madonna, bearing the marks of strenuous if slightly misdirected usage, and in the centre of it was a pipe-rack, with half a dozen well-coloured companions of the mouth in it. Here again ecclesiasticism a little reasserted itself, for the rack was of fumed oak, carved in a debased Gothic manner to represent a church window. A very bulky and much-wadded sofa, of the type inexplicably known as “Chesterfield,” denoted that there were moments in which the flesh might be tired if not weak, while even there the eye—unless closed—would, wherever it looked, be braced by the contemplation of mottoes printed in large and very legible type. They were all most suitable, and a baby in arms could have seen their applicability. Thus on the jamb of each of the bookcases was a printed scroll, “Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,” while on the pipe-rack, humorously enough, though perhaps slightly incongruously, since it crossed the sill of the Gothic church window, was written the quaintly altered quotation, “The earliest pipe of half-awakened birdseye”; a calendar on the table was somewhat more prosaically inscribed “Pereunt et imputantur,” and also “Days and moments quickly flying”; and across the gold frame of the Sistine Madonna—again making up in suitability what it lacked in ingenuity—was printed “Gloria in Excelsis.” A slightly wider flight of fancy, however, was exhibited on the varnished wooden rim of the writing-table itself, for here, in three-inch letters, was carved, “My tongue is the pen of a ready writer.”
At this moment the truth and literal applicability of the text was not quite being fulfilled. Leaving his tongue out of the question, the writer was ready and his pen was ready, but the pen was poised, and the writer was not writing. He had, in fact, got to the last paragraph of the address he was going to give at the Mannington Literary and Scientific Club, or, as Canon Alington playfully called it, “The Literific,” on Tuesday evening next, on the very suggestive and interesting subject “The True Test of Literary and Artistic Immortality.” And the last paragraph he always held was the most important of all, for it was like the last well-directed hammer-blow that drives a nail-head flush with the board into which it has been tapped. In fact, several minutes before he had written on his blotting-paper in dotted lines, “C’est le dernier pas qui coûte,” and had determined to have it put more permanently on to the inside margin of his blotting-book, so that it should always be before him when he was engaged in literary composition. He wanted a sounding conclusion, a last well-directed blow, and he sat there some five minutes without writing. Then he gave a little shake to his stylographic pen, and wrote: