‘I love a repulsive face.’
‘He drinks like a fish.’
‘I love a man who drinks. Oh, Mr. Lillico, we mustn’t be too censorious about the conduct of great people; they are exposed to innumerable temptations of which we know nothing.’
This was the famous Miss Dillwater, whose métier in life was loyalty—loyalty to every kind of Royal personage, but more particularly to the unfortunate. From her earliest childhood her dreams had been wholly concerned with kings and queens; in the daytime she thought over the clever answers she would make to monarchs whom she found sitting incognito in parks, and pictured herself kneeling in floods of tears when summoned to the palace the next morning. She had pursued Don Carlos from hotel to hotel for years; and only deserted his cause at last to follow King Milan into exile. Every spring she returned to London to lay a wreath on the grave of Mary Queen of Scots, and to conspire with other dangerous people for the restoration of Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria, our rightful monarch, to the throne of England. Tears coursed down her cheeks when Pendred introduced her, and it was a considerable embarrassment to the Prince when she seized his hairy hand and pressed it fervently to her lips. She followed him about the rest of the evening, with a melancholy smile on her wan face.
‘Oh, Mr. Lillico,’ she said, in an aside to Pendred; ‘I can never thank you enough. He’s wonderful. That great jaw! those big teeth! those long arms! that brow! He reminds me of one of Charlotte Brontë’s heroes. I do love a man!’
The Prince was one of the magnetic centres of the gathering; the particles regrouped themselves as he moved about from place to place. There was one moment when he was comparatively deserted; everyone was crowding round a lady in black; angry cries issued from the group. Lady Lillico hurried up to him.
‘Pray come over here, Prince, and listen to what Miss Dillwater’s sister is saying. She is about to reveal the great secret about Guy de Maupassant and Marie Bashkirtseff. She’s a great literary authority, you know. I’ve not read anything by either of them myself as yet, but I’m deeply interested. We are all Bashkirtseffites or Maupassantists now.’
But unfortunately, they were too late for the secret; they came in only for the broken crumbs of it.
‘I was Marie’s greatest friend,’ Miss Sophie was saying; ‘and you may depend upon it, what I tell you is true. That is the reason why they never married. I am a delicate-minded woman, and nothing should have dragged this secret from me if I had not felt the overwhelming importance of it to literature.’
‘The charge is false!’ bellowed a furious voice.