“A ’earse,” he muttered. “That’s wot it was—a ’earse.”
[CHAPTER I]
SHELTERED PEOPLE
Lady Betty Heathcote had a reputation in which she took pride for giving successful dinners in a neighborhood where successful dinners were a rule rather than an exception. Her prescription was simple and consisted solely in compounding her social elements by strenuous mixing. She had a faculty for discovering cubs with incipient manes and saw them safely grown without mishap. At her house in Park Lane, politics, art, literature, and science rubbed elbows. Here pictures had been born, plays had had their real premières, novels had been devised, and poems without number, not a few of which were indited to My Lady Betty’s eyebrow, here first saw the light of day.
For all her dynamic energy in a variety of causes, most of them wise, all of them altruistic, Lady Betty had the rare faculty of knowing when to be restful. Tired Cabinet ministers, overworked lords of the Admiralty, leaders in all parties, knew that in Park Lane there would be no questions asked which it would not be possible to answer, that there was always an excellent dinner to be had without frills, a lounge in a quiet room, or, indeed, a pair of pyjamas and a bed if necessary.
But since the desperate character of the war with Germany had been driven home into the hearts of the people of London, a change had taken place in the complexion of many private entertainments and the same serious air which was to be noted in the mien of well-informed people of all classes upon the street was reflected in the faces of her guests. Her scientists were engrossed with utilitarian problems. Her literary men were sending vivid word-pictures of ruined Rheims and Louvain to their brothers across the Atlantic, and her Cabinet ministers conversed less than usual, addressing themselves with a greater particularity to her roasts or her spare bedrooms. Torn between many duties, as patroness to bazaars, as head of a variety of sewing guilds, as president of the new association for the training and equipment of nurses, Lady Heathcote herself showed signs of the wear and tear of an extraordinary situation, but she managed to meet it squarely by using every ounce of her abundant energy and every faculty of her resourceful mind.
Many secrets were hers, both political and departmental, but she kept them nobly, aware that she lived in parlous times, when an unconsidered word might do a damage irreparable. Agents of the enemy, she knew, had been discovered in every walk of life, and while she lived in London’s innermost circle, she knew that even her own house might not have been immune from visitors whose secret motives were open to question. It was, therefore, with the desire to reassure herself as to the unadulterated loyalty of her intimates that she had carefully scrutinized her dinner lists, eliminating all uncertain quantities through whom or by whom the unreserved character of the conversation across her board might in any way be jeopardized. So it was that tonight’s dinner-table had something of the complexion of a family party, in which John Rizzio, the bright particular star in London’s firmament of Art, was to lend his effulgence. John Rizzio, dean of collectors, whose wonderful house in Berkeley Square rivaled the British Museum and the Wallace Collection combined, an Italian by birth, an Englishman by adoption, who because of his public benefactions had been offered a knighthood and had refused it; John Rizzio, who had been an intimate of King Edward, a friend of Cabinet ministers, who knew as much about the inner workings of the Government as majesty itself. Long a member of Lady Heathcote’s circle, it had been her custom to give him a dinner on the anniversary of the day of the acquisition of the most famous picture in his collection, “The Conningsby Venus,” which had, before the death of the old Earl, been the aim of collectors throughout the world.
As usual the selection of her guests had been left to Rizzio, whose variety of taste in friendships could have been no better shown than in the company which now graced Lady Heathcote’s table. The Earl and Countess of Kipshaven, the one artistic, the other literary; their daughter the Honorable Jacqueline Morley; Captain Byfield, a retired cavalry officer now on special duty at the War Office; Lady Joyliffe, who had lost her Earl at Mons, an interesting widow, the bud of whose new affections was already emerging from her weeds; John Sandys, under-secretary for foreign affairs, the object of those affections; Miss Doris Mather, daughter of the American cotton king, who was known for doing unusual things, not the least of which was her recent refusal of the hand of John Rizzio, one of London’s catches, and the acceptance of that of the Honorable Cyril Hammersley, the last to be mentioned member of this distinguished company, gentleman sportsman and man about town, who as everybody knew would never set the world afire.
No one knew how this miracle had happened, for Doris Mather’s brains were above the ordinary; she had a discriminating taste in books and a knowledge of pictures, and just before dinner, upstairs in a burst of confidence she had given her surprised hostess an idea of what a man should be.