The two men shook hands cordially, and Richard turned to hurry up-town to his rooms in Twenty-eighth Street, when Fenton called him back.
“You understand, Richard Cœur de Lion, that it was not rudeness that prevented my asking you to join me in a drink. I was thinking of your castle, my boy. It’ll tumble about your head if you put alcohol in the cellar. Good-night, old fellow. I must have some whiskey. Good-night.”
CHAPTER II.
“The Percy-Bartletts,” as Town Tattle always called them in the weekly paragraph that it devoted to their doings, were dining alone, “en tête-à-tête and en famille,” as the husband sometimes remarked in a mildly sarcastic way. Not that Percy-Bartlett was in the habit of being satirical. Far from it! He considered sarcasm and satire the outward and visible—or, rather, audible—sign of an inward and hereditary tendency toward vulgarity. The use of these weapons of speech implied that one possessed both temper and originality—characteristics that were not approved in the set in which the Percy-Bartletts moved. But Percy-Bartlett had, by inheritance, a rather peppery disposition, and a mind naturally given to creative effort. It was greatly to his credit, therefore, that he had rubbed his manners and speech into an almost angelic smoothness, and had so thoroughly stunted such mental qualities as were not included in the accepted flora-of-the-mind recognized by his set that he passed current as a man in no danger of ever saying or doing anything that would attract special attention to him on the part of the world at large. It is not generally known, but it is nevertheless a fact, that it sometimes requires heroic self-restraint to become a “howling swell”—a vulgar term that cannot be avoided by the writer in his effort to convey to the reader the exact social status of Percy-Bartlett. He was known to the lower orders of society as a “howling swell,” which means, of course, that howling was the very last thing in which he would indulge. There are those, the poet tells us, who never sing, and die with all their music in them. In like manner the modern aristocrat is one who never howls, and dies with all his howling in him.
Let it not be thought for a moment that the perfect self-control exercised by Percy-Bartlett indicated that there was nothing in his life to try the temper of either a saint or a howling swell. In fact, the temptation to give way to his hereditary testiness was with him, practically, at all times. Percy-Bartlett had nobly triumphed over all tendency toward originality. His wife had not. It was Mrs. Percy-Bartlett who constantly tried Percy-Bartlett’s temper. If you are a married man, O reader, you will realize the full significance of the assertion, now made with due solemnity and emphasis, that, in spite of this fact, Mr. Percy-Bartlett had never said an unkind word to her, had never crossed her will, had never shown her, by word or deed, that he was bitterly disappointed at her refusal to walk in the very narrow path that society prescribed for her.
It must be acknowledged that there was something in the face and manner of Mrs. Percy-Bartlett that rendered her husband’s hesitancy about opposing her will seemingly explicable. Her dark-brown eyes, golden-brownish hair, clear-cut nose and mouth, and perfect teeth combined to give her a beauty that won from every man a chivalric reverence—from every man, that is, who is awed by the loving-kindness of the Creator in scattering flowers here and there in a weed-choked earth. Furthermore, there was something in Mrs. Percy-Bartlett’s way of using her hands and moving her head that told of a will-power as highly developed as that which had enabled her husband to suppress every inclination to defy the pattern that had been adopted by his set. Percy-Bartlett had used his self-command to destroy originality. Mrs. Percy-Bartlett had made her will-power an ally of her creative genius. The outlook for a permanent peace between them was not bright, but we find them at dinner at a time when the modus vivendi was still in comfortable operation.
“And who sings for you to-night?” asked Percy-Bartlett, his calm, blue eyes resting on his wife coldly. He was a man of thirty-eight, with pale cheeks, thin lips, and immobile countenance. The fifteen years’ difference in the ages of husband and wife was more than borne out by their faces. She looked younger than her years; he was younger than he looked.
“I think,” she answered, “that it will be a great success. The new boy-soprano who has made such a sensation at St. George’s is coming. So is Gordon Mackey, the tenor—you met him one night, you remember. Then Bryant Stanton is to play the ’cello, and Mlle. de Sarçon has promised to sing some of the ‘Falstaff’ music. Several others of less importance will be here,—Barton, the baritone, Miss Ely, the contralto, and so forth. Barton, you know, has been singing my cradle-song at his concerts.”
Percy-Bartlett looked at his wife in a way that was distinctly unsympathetic. He seemed to be thinking that a cradle-song was something of a tour-de-force for a childless woman; but there are many things about a musical genius that a layman cannot hope to understand. Percy-Bartlett had learned his limitations in this direction long ago, and never asked his wife how or why she wrote vocal music that was slowly but surely gaining popularity. It was a cross he had to bear, and, like a perfect gentleman, he bore it in silence.