Hepburn had never heard of him, neither had Joline, and Grafton knew him not.
I looked at the speakers. Was it possible I was as old as they seemed to intimate?
“Delafield hasn’t been regular at the club for many a long day,” I said—clinging to a straw. “I doubt if he’s been inside the door for five years—so it isn’t very strange you haven’t met. But you all know of him. He was the Delafield of the Hawkins-Delafield affair.”
The blank look on the faces of my companions surprised and, I admit, shocked me. It was ridiculous, but Osborne’s laugh grated, and I welcomed Chandler’s interrupting question, even though it pronounced sentence on my senility.
“Yes—I’ll tell you the story,” I answered, “but after retailing to members of this club something that was absolutely discussed to death here, and labelling it a ‘story,’ I shall never address you again except as ‘my sons.’”
“Father, may I have a cigar?” asked Chandler, as he rang the bell.
I signed the check.
“Jack Delafield was a man of good family,” I began, “but to vary the conventional opening and adhere to the truth, I may as well say his parents were honest though not poor. He was a fellow of many talents, so many, in fact, that he became known as a ‘versatile genius.’ He never attained a more notable title. Not that he hid his talents under a napkin. He sealed their fate in a bottle—in many bottles. I’m afraid we didn’t do much to help him here. Everyone thought he’d come out all right in the long run, and when he lost his money and settled down seriously to the law, his friends supposed his wild oats had all been sown. But somebody left him more money, and back he went to literature and painting, and music. The old set welcomed him with open arms, but didn’t help him to write, or paint or practise. Then Miss—well, I won’t say what girl—put him on probation, and he wrote two really notable stories before the probation was declared unsatisfactory. After that he never seemed to care much about anything except art, and he took that out in dreaming of the things he didn’t do. Yet no one seemed to blame him much, perhaps everybody liked him too well, and nobody loved him enough. Anyway he went from bad to worse, until ‘poor fellow’ used to be coupled with his name, and Delafield in various states of intoxication became a familiar sight in these rooms.
“He must have been a handsome fellow before drink coarsened and aged him, for he was still good looking, though prematurely old, when I first met him, shortly after my election to the club. About that time Galloway gave his bachelor dinner in the private dining-room upstairs. I attended as one of the ushers, and there were perhaps a dozen other guests—among them Delafield. The dinner was as most such dinners are, a toast for every sentiment, and sentiments galore, so when we adjourned to the grill-room for coffee, Jack tipped his chair against the wall over there and fell asleep. We sat about the centre-table smoking, and testing some remarkable port sent to grace the occasion.
“I don’t recall what led up to the conversation, but I do remember that the general subject was women, and that Hawkins coupled the name of—well, a decent girl, with a remark so coarse that most of us stopped talking, though two or three laughed. It was a speech such as I suppose you’ve all heard made at some time or another, and which always seems to receive the tribute of a laugh before being buried in the silence of self-respecting men.