One morning in the early winter, Colonel Orpington walked into the Beaufort Club, and taking his letters from the hall-porter as he passed, entered the coffee-room and took possession of the table which for many years he had been accustomed to regard as almost his own.
There was no occasion for him to order any breakfast, so well were his ways known in that establishment, of which he was not merely one of the oldest, but one of the most conspicuous of the members. The officers of the household, from Riboulet the chef and Woodman the house-steward down to the smallest page-boys, all held the Colonel in very wholesome reverence; and amongst the twelve hundred members on the books, the behests of none were more speedily obeyed than his.
While the repast was preparing, Colonel Orpington glanced over the envelopes of the letters which he had taken from the porter and laid on the table in military order before him. They are many and various: heavy official-looking letters, thin-papered missives from the Continent, and two or three delicate little notes. The Colonel selects one of these last, which is addressed in an obviously foreign hand, though bearing a London post-mark; the others are put aside; the dainty double-eyeglasses are brought from their hiding-place inside his waistcoat and adjusted across his nose, and he falls to the perusal of the little note. A difficult hand to read apparently, for the Colonel, though somewhat careful of showing any symptoms of loss of sight to the more youthful members of the club then present, by whom he has a certain suspicion he is looked upon as a fogey, has to hold it in various lights and twist it up and down before he can master its contents. When he has mastered them they do not appear to be of a particularly reassuring character; for the Colonel shakes his head, utters a short low whistle, and is stroking his chin with his hand, as though deep in thought, when the advanced guard of his breakfast makes its appearance.
"'Coming back at once,'" says the Colonel to himself; "at least, so far as I can make out Clarisse's confoundedly cramped handwriting. 'Coming back at once,' and from what she can make out from Fanny's talk, not in the best of tempers either, and likely to bring matters to an end; and Clarisse thinks I must declare myself at once. Well, I don't see why not.
"'Gad, it seems to me an extraordinary thing that I, who have been under fire so many times in these kind of affairs, should have been hesitating and hanging back and beating about the bush for so long with this girl! To be sure, she is quite unlike many of the others; more like a person in society, or rather, like what used to be society in my time: what goes by that name now is a very different thing. There's a sort of air of breeding about her, and a kind of noli me tangere sort of thing mixed up with all her attractiveness, that makes the whole business a very different thing from the ordinary throwing the handkerchief and being happy ever after.
"Coming back, eh! My young friend Derinzy--member here, by-the-way; letters had better go to one of the other clubs in future; it is best to be on the safe side. Coming back, eh! And now what are--what parents call--his 'intentions,' I wonder? Scarcely so 'strictly honourable' as the middle-class father longs to hear professed by enamoured aristocrats. If he meant marriage, he would certainly have proposed before he left town, when, if all I learn is true, he was so wildly mad about the girl he would not have left her to---- And yet, perhaps, that is the very reason, though she said nothing, she has evidently been pleased by the attentions which I have shown her; and this perhaps has caused her to slack off in her correspondence with this young fellow, or to influence its warmth, or something of that kind, and this may have had the effect of bringing him to book.
"If he were to declare off, how would that suit me? Impossible to say. In the fit of rage and disgust with him, she might say yes to anything I asked her; on the other hand, she might have a fit of remorse, and think that it was all from having listened to the blandishments of this serpent she lost a chance of enjoying a perpetual paradise with that bureaucratic young Adam.
"There is the other fellow, too--the young man 'in her own station of life'--shopkeeper, mechanic, whatever he is. Clarisse seems to have some notion that he is coming to the fore, though I don't think there is any chance for him. The girl's tastes lie obviously in quite a different line, and I am by no means certain that his being in the race is a bad thing for me. However, it's plainly time that something must be done; and now, how to do it?"
He threw down his napkin before him as he spoke and rose from the table. The young men who had been breakfasting near him, though perhaps they might have thought him a fogey, yet envied the undeniable position he held in society; envied him, above all, the perfect freshness and good health and the evident appetite with which he had just consumed his meal, while they were listlessly playing with highly-spiced condiments, or endeavouring to quench the flame excited by the previous night's dissipation with effervescing drinks. Sir Coke Only, the great railway contractor and millionaire, whose neighbouring table was covered with prospectuses and letters on blue paper, propounding schemes in which thousands were involved, envied the Colonel that consummate air of good breeding which he, the millionaire, knew he could never acquire, and that happy idleness which never seemed in store for him. The perfectly-appointed brougham, with its bit-champing, foam-tossing gray horse, stood at the club-door, waiting to whirl the man of business into the City, where he would be unceasingly occupied till dusk; "while that feller," as Sir Coke remarked to himself, "will be lunching with marchionesses and dropping into the five o'clock tea with duchesses, and taking it as easy as though he were as rich as Rothschild."
Perhaps the Colonel knew of the envy which he excited; he was certainly not disturbed, and perhaps even pleased, by it. He sauntered quietly into the waiting-room, walked to the window, and stood gazing unconsciously at the black little London sparrows hopping about in the black little bit of ground which was metropolitan for a garden, and lay between the club and Carlton House Terrace, while he collected his thoughts. Then he sat down at a table and wrote as follows: