“Well,” suggested Baldwin, filling up the pause, “if you’re really keen on adventure, hardship, the philosophic-tramp business which is now the fashionable cult, there’s no harm that I can see if you roughed it for a year or two.”
—“Dressed in a suit of rags from Clarkson’s, along Broad Highways carefully laid with red carpet?” Stuart grinned. For a moment the leprechaun spirit bade him give up the attempt to lay bare the twists and turns of his mental asceticism; and instead, draw exquisite enjoyment from Baldwin’s conception of a Walt Whitman-esque existence. Then the metaphysician rejected this outlet as cheap and easy; argued that there must be means whereby three grown men of moderate intellect could be convinced of anything, if sufficient trouble be taken. The metaphysician was always inclined to be very severe with the leprechaun; but in this case the leprechaun had the last word, whispering that it would be a glorious stunt if Khalif, Vizier and One-eyed Calendar, could indeed be forced to understanding by dint of sheer brilliant reasoning. And since Stuart was above all things a Stuntorian, he forthwith tackled the task.
“Read Kipling, any of you?”
They had all read Kipling. That is to say, Uncle Arthur had chuckled in secret over “Stalky and Co.”; Uncle Derwent had seen and appreciated Forbes Robertson in the “Light that Failed,” and Uncle Baldwin remembered, at the time of the Boer war, giving a guinea to a pretty girl who had declaimed the “Absent-minded Beggar.”
“D’you know ‘Diego Valdez’? It’s in the ‘Five Nations.’”
“No,” from Derwent and Arthur. Baldwin, idly chalking cues for want of better employment, said that he might recognize it if he heard it.
Without preamble or apology, Stuart abruptly flung at them the bitter complaint of the Spanish Admiral:
“The God of fair beginnings
Hath prospered here my hand ...”
—Fair beginnings, indeed, for the son of the house of Heron. The oak-panelled walls, the expensive full-sized billiard-table, the scent of good cigars, the attentive faces of his three listeners, all seemed to shout this fact aloud.