For it must be confessed that the Prince’s first impression of this long-desired civilisation was one of disappointment. It was undoubtedly dull in Mr. Cato’s house. Mr. Cato was out all day; and though his aunt was a dear old lady in her way, and his sisters two of the most charitable creatures in the neighbourhood, nobody would have called them lively company for a Missing Link. The indoor life told upon his health; the clockwork regularity of the daily round and the entire absence of events reduced his spirits to the lowest depth. He had been accustomed in his childhood to the happy vicissitudes of forest life; to the pleasure of escaping thunderstorms and beasts of prey; to the relief of calm sleep after weeks of storm-rocked trees; to the wild delight after long hunger of finding more than he could eat. It maddened him to hear these old ladies chattering over tiny pulsations of monotony as it they were events; to hear them discussing the paltry British weather under an impervious roof; to hear them talk of burglars in the next parish as if they were tigers on the lower branches; to learn that Julia’s quarrel with Mrs. Armstrong had ended in changing her doctor, when he had pictured her tearing handfuls of fur out of Mrs. Armstrong’s back. He longed to throttle the smug butcher who brought the daily tray of meat, robbing life of all the pleasure of desire.
When he first arrived the Prince had been so easily amused. It was enough for him to sit at a window and watch the men mending the road; to follow the housemaid from room to room and see her make the beds; to help to screw a leaf into the dining-room table; to dust Mr. Cato’s books. It was, therefore, a great surprise to his host when he blurted this out one evening. Had it been one of his nephews from the country—his youngest sister married the Rector of Woolcombing—Mr. Cato would have known what to do; he would have treated him to some of those amusements which are provided for country nephews; taken him to the British Museum, South Kensington, the Tower of London, or the College of Mining in Jermyn Street; he would have contrived little outings on omnibuses, ending with tea at an Aërated Bread shop. But the Prince seemed too old for these things; the weather was bad; Mr. Cato was busy, and he had determined to keep him at Hampstead till things had settled down and he knew his proper social value.
IX
That was one of Mr. Cato’s chief preoccupations. What was the Prince’s social station in England? How much deference might be demanded of the world? Who were the people to whose company he had a natural right? One must neither prejudice his future by assuming too low a value for him, nor expose him to any rebuff by claiming too much.
The question was one beyond Mr. Cato’s own competence. His thoughts turned to his nephew Pendred. Not a country nephew this, with any implication of humbleness. Quite the contrary; Pendred Lillico, ex-Lieutenant of the Grenadiers, son of Mr. Cato’s half-sister, who had married a hitherto obscure baronet in the days of her beauty. Pendred was a dancing man, a well-known man, a pattern of manners, an arbiter of fashions. They rarely met: Mr. Cato was secretly afraid of his nephew; Pendred seldom had occasion to boast of his uncle.
He arrived on his motor-car—small, fair, translucent, admirable. The occasion suited him. Appreciation was his métier—appreciation of frocks, laces, china, women, men. He knew hallmarks, pottery-marks, marks of breeding, marks of coming success. Mr. Cato passed the morning before his arrival in a restless state; he was nervous as to the verdict.
‘How much a year, do you say?’ asked Pendred, in his touching little glass voice.
‘Two thousand.’
‘H’m ... Borneo.... Can I see him?’
‘But that makes no difference, does it?’