They must be trying the electric light. Then he laughed suddenly. It tickled his fancy--apt to be vagrant--to think how this gigantic modern sham, full of false civilisation, full of lifts, lounges, bars, winter-gardens, a real up-to-date, twentieth-century substitute for a home, engineered on the latest American lines, must look to any home-bound ship passing up channel. A beacon distinctly; but a beacon warning the world against what?
"Trinity House and Betty Cam had better settle it between them," he muttered to himself, as, turning at right angles, he set off over the moorland to the "Crooked Ewe," where Peter Ramsay and Ted Cruttenden were awaiting him.
He had picked up the former crossing over from Cardiff to Ilfracombe, and finding he had a few days to spare before taking up his new appointment, Ned had asked him to come on with him and see the prettiest part of Cornwall, and perhaps stop a night with his uncle Sir Geoffrey Pentreath--if there was room.
He wondered rather how Helen had found this room, as he looked round the long lunch table; but, as his uncle confided to him, half of the guests belonged to the hotel. There had been a committee of ways and means, and several people--notably Mr. Robert Jenkin, who was sitting next Helen--were over from Wellhampton for the day. Yes! that was Mr. Hirsch at her other side, a most able man, but rather too near his bête noire, Mr. Jenkin, to show to advantage.
As a matter of fact, Mr. Hirsch was making himself extremely disagreeable to his enemy by insisting on keeping the conversation at a much higher level of culture than any to which Mr. Jenkin could aspire, for he had begun and gone on with life for a considerable time as a local ironmonger. Then fortune had favoured him, and he became the local millionaire, remaining still, however, so Mr. Hirsch declared, "the petty tradesman."
The latter was a very clever, very dapper little German Jew, with nothing to show his ancestry and his age, except a slight foreign lisp, and a still more slight tendency to size below the last button of his waistcoat, a tendency which gave him more concern than it need have done, since it really only showed in profile. For the rest, he was inscrutably good-natured. Money stuck to him, and his many kindnesses never interfered with his keen eye for business--or beauty.
It was Helen's handsome, melancholy face which had been the secret of his interest in Sir Geoffrey's venture; on the principle of opposites, it is to be supposed, since he was a frank pagan, a bon viveur born.
So he talked lightly of Rome, and a few of the crowned heads of Europe with whom he had a bowing acquaintance; but finding this rather too interesting to Mr. Jenkin, he settled down on Bayreuth, and gossiped Parsifal, becoming after a time really engrossed, and saying almost with tears in his eyes, "Ah! my dear lady, how I should love to show you it."
He felt seriously sentimental; in truth, the remark was as near a proposal as he had gone for quite a number of years.
"We intend, Mrs. Tressilian," put in Mr. Jenkin, not to be outdone, "to get the Yaller Peking band down from the Halls durin' our season--July-August. It'll play durin' meals, an' after dinner in the Pirates' Pavilion. An' I'm sure, Mrs. Tressilian, the conductor--he ain't really a Chinaman, ma'am, the pig-tail bein' only a thing to catch on--ha! ha! ha! that ain't a bad joke, is it, Hirsch? Pig-tails a thing to catch on to--ha! ha! ha!"