Robert Grimshaw was a man of thirty-five, who, by reason that he allowed himself the single eccentricity of a very black, short beard, might have passed for fifty. His black hair grew so far back upon his brow that he had an air of incipient baldness; his nose was very aquiline and very sharply modelled at the tip, and when, at a Christmas party, to amuse his little niece, he had put on a red stocking-cap, many of the children had been frightened of him, so much did he resemble a Levantine pirate. His manners, however, were singularly unnoticeable; he spoke in habitually low tones; no one exactly knew the extent of his resources, but he was reputed rather “close,” because he severely limited his expenditure. He commanded a cook, a parlourmaid, a knife-boy, and a man called Jervis, who was the husband of his cook, and he kept them upon board wages. His habits were of an extreme regularity, and he had never been known to raise his voice. He was rather an adept with the fencing-sword, and save for his engagement to Katya Lascarides and its rupture he had had no appreciable history. And, indeed, Katya Lascarides was by now so nearly forgotten in Mayfair that he was beginning to pass for a confirmed bachelor. His conduct with regard to Pauline Lucas, whom everybody had expected him to marry, was taken by most of his friends to indicate that he had achieved that habit of mind that causes a man to shrink from the disturbance that a woman would cause to his course of life. Himself the son of an English banker and of a lady called Lascarides, he had lost both his parents before he was three years old, and he had been brought up by his uncle and aunt, the Peter Lascarides, and in the daily society of his cousins, Katya and Ellida. Comparatively late—perhaps because as Ellida said, he had always regarded his cousins as his sisters—he had become engaged to his cousin Katya, very much to the satisfaction of his uncle and his aunt. But Mrs. Lascarides having died shortly before the marriage was to have taken place, it was put off, and the death of Mr. Lascarides, occurring four months later, and with extreme suddenness, the match was broken off, for no reason that anyone knew altogether. Mr. Lascarides had, it was known, died intestate, and apparently, according to Greek law, Robert Grimshaw had become his uncle’s sole heir. But he was understood to have acted exceedingly handsomely by his cousins. Indeed, it was a fact Mr. Hartley Jenx had definitely ascertained, that upon the marriage of Ellida to Paul Langham, Robert Grimshaw had executed in her benefit settlements of a sum that must have amounted to very nearly half his uncle’s great fortune. Her sister Katya, who had been attached to her mother with a devotion that her English friends considered to be positively hysterical, had, it was pretty clearly understood, become exceedingly strange in her manner after her mother’s death. The reason for her rupture with Robert Grimshaw was not very clearly understood, but it was generally thought to be due to religious differences. Mrs. Lascarides had been exceedingly attached to the Greek Orthodox Church, whereas, upon going to Winchester, Robert Grimshaw, for the sake of convenience and with the consent of his uncle, had been received into the Church of England. But whatever the causes of the rupture, there was no doubt that it was an occasion of great bitterness. Katya Lascarides certainly suffered from a species of nervous breakdown, and passed some months in a hydropathic establishment on the Continent; and it was afterwards known by those who took the trouble to be at all accurate in their gossip that she had passed over to Philadelphia in order to study the more obscure forms of nervous diseases. In this study she was understood to have gained a very great proficiency, for Mrs. Clement P. Van Husum, junior, whose balloon-parties were such a feature of at least one London season, and who herself had been one of Miss Lascarides’ patients, was accustomed to say with all the enthusiastic emphasis of her country and race—she had been before marriage a Miss Carteighe of Hoboken, N.Y.—that not only had Katya Lascarides saved her life and reason, but that the chief of the Philadelphian Institute was accustomed always to send Katya to diagnose obscure cases in the more remote parts of the American continent. It was, as the few friends that Katya had remaining in London said, a little out of the picture—at any rate, of the picture of the slim, dark and passionate girl with the extreme, pale beauty and the dark eyes that they remembered her to have had.
But there was no knowing what religion might not have done for this southern nature if, indeed, religion was the motive of the rupture with Robert Grimshaw; and she was known to have refused to receive from her cousin any of her father’s money, so that that, too, had some of the aspect of her having become a nun, or, at any rate, of her having adopted a cloisteral frame of mind, devoting herself, as her sister Ellida said, “to good works.” But whatever the cause of the quarrel, there had been no doubt that Robert Grimshaw had felt the blow very severely—as severely as it was possible for such things to be felt in the restrained atmosphere of the more southerly and western portions of London. He had disappeared, indeed, for a time, though it was understood that he had been spending several months in Athens arranging his uncle’s affairs and attending to those of the firm of Peter Lascarides and Company, of which firm he had become a director. And even when he returned to London it was to be observed that he was still very “hipped.” What was at all times most noticeable about him, to those who observed these things, was the pallor of his complexion. When he was in health, this extreme and delicate whiteness had a subcutaneous flush like the intangible colouring of a China rose. But upon his return from Athens it had, and it retained for some time, the peculiar and chalky opacity. Shortly after his return he engrossed himself in the affairs of his friend Dudley Leicester, who had lately come into very large but very involved estates. Dudley Leicester, who, whatever he had, had no head for business, had been Robert Grimshaw’s fag at school, and had been his almost daily companion at Oxford and ever since. But little by little the normal flush had returned to Robert Grimshaw’s face; only whilst lounging through life he appeared to become more occupied in his mind, more reserved, more benevolent and more gentle.
It was on observing a return of the excessive and chalk-like opacity in Robert Grimshaw’s cheeks that Ellida, when that afternoon he called upon her, exclaimed:
“What’s the matter? You know you aren’t looking well. One would think Peter was dead.”
“You’ve got,” he said, “to put on your things and come and see them off at the station.”
“I?” she protested. “What are they to me?”
He passed his hand over his forehead.
“I’ve got to go,” he said. “I don’t want to, but I’ve got to. I’ve got to see the last of Pauline.”
Ellida said: “Oh!”
“It’s not,” he answered, “a question of what you are to them, but of what I am to you. You’re the only sister I’ve got in the world.”