But more than ever he began to wish that he had stayed in the playground.
When he reached the hall he stood there for some moments in anxious deliberation over his best course of proceeding. His main idea was to lie in wait somewhere for Dick, and try the result of an appeal to his better feelings to acknowledge his outcast parent and abdicate gracefully.
If that failed, and there was every reason to expect that it would fail, he must threaten to denounce him before the whole party. It would cause a considerable scandal no doubt, and be extremely repugnant to his own feelings, but still he must do it, or frighten Dick by threatening to do it, and at all hazards he must contrive during the interview to snatch or purloin the magic stone; without that he was practically helpless.
He looked round him: the study was piled up with small boys' hats and coats, and in one corner was a kind of refined bar, where till lately a trim housemaid had been dispensing coffee and weak lemonade; she might return at any moment, he would not be safe there.
Nor would the dining-room be more secluded, for in it there was an elaborate supper being laid out by the waiters which, as far as he could see through the crack in the door, consisted chiefly of lobsters, trifle, and pink champagne. He felt a grim joy at the sight, more than he would suffer for this night's festivities.
As he stole about, with a dismal sense of the unfitness of his sneaking about his own house in this guilty fashion, he became gradually aware of the scent of a fine cigar, one of his own special Cabañas. He wondered who had the impudence to trespass on his cigar-chest; it could hardly be one of the children.
He traced the scent to a billiard room which he had built out at the side of the house, which was a corner one, and going down to the door opened it sharply and walked in.
Comfortably imbedded in the depths of a long well-padded lounging chair, with a spirit case and two or three bottles of soda water at his elbow, sat a man who was lazily glancing through the Field with his feet resting on the mantelpiece, one on each side of the blazing fire. He was a man of about the middle size, with a face rather bronzed and reddened by climate, a nose slightly aquiline and higher in colour, quick black eyes with an uneasy glance in them, bushy black whiskers, more like the antiquated "Dundreary" type than modern fashion permits, and a wide flexible mouth.
Paul knew him at once, though he had not seen him for some years; it was Paradine, his disreputable brother-in-law—the "Uncle Marmaduke" who, by importing the mysterious Garudâ Stone, had brought all these woes upon him; he noticed at once that his appearance was unusually prosperous, and that the braided smoking coat he wore over his evening clothes was new and handsome. "No wonder," he thought bitterly, "the fellow has been living on me for a week!" He stood by the cue-rack looking at him for some time, and then he said with a cold ironic dignity that (if he had known it) came oddly from his boyish lips: "I hope you are making yourself quite comfortable?"