"If I were thirty years younger," Broadcastle was saying even now, as he did full justice to the celery mayonnaise, "I should say we were made for each other."
"Since two single people may be made for each other," laughed Mrs. Wynyard, "I wonder if two married people can't be unmade for each other. Perhaps that is just what has happened to us!"
"I'll think that over," replied the Colonel with mock gravity. "I don't want to commit myself on so serious a hypothesis, without due reflection."
They were the only ones who were thoroughly at ease. Barclay and Natalie, unstrung by the events of the day, ate little and talked listlessly. Dorothy, victim to an inward excitement which was half happiness and half disappointment, chattered feverishly. Rathbawne was wrapped in his own thoughts, and his wife, innocently unobservant of emotional manifestations in any and every other, but pathetically sensitive to the slightest evidence of mental perturbation in this stern, kind man, between herself and whom existed a devotion dog-like in its silence and intensity, watched his clouded face with an anxiety which she made no effort to conceal. The dinner dragged hopelessly, until she shook herself into a bewildered realization that it was over, folded her napkin scrupulously, dusted a few crumbs from the black-satin slope of her obsolete lap, and, followed by her daughters and Mrs. Wynyard, left the men to their cordials and cigars.
The latter drew their chairs nearer, as the door closed, made little clearings in the wilderness of finger-bowls, silver, and discarded napkins, for the accommodation of their coffee-cups and cordial glasses, and, lighting the long Invincibles which were Rathbawne's sole extravagance, inhaled that first matchless whiff of smoke which makes a whole day of anxiety and vexation seem to have been worth the while.
It is a moment apart and sui generis, this, and is rivaled only by that of early morning realization that one is awake—and not obliged to get up. It is apt to pass in silence, for a newly lit cigar is like a newly married wife: a man is deliberately oblivious to all else. The moment, too, is one of readjustment, of hasty mental survey of the chatter that has passed, and of preparation for the essentially dissimilar talk to come. With men of the mental calibre of the three here assembled this opportunity is sacred to some of the gravest and most vital thoughts which they exchange. Peter Rathbawne, in particular, whenever he reviewed the paramount conversations of his life, seemed to find their significance indissolubly fused with the fragrance of Havana cigars and the taste of kümmel or yellow Chartreuse.
His eyes dwelt thoughtfully upon his companions during the pause which followed. First, on Broadcastle. He could depend upon him as he could depend upon no other man on earth. They had fought side by side in many a tight place in the black days of '62, and in many another, full as tight, since then, on battlefields commercial and political. It is doubtful whether so much as a single word of admiration or affection had ever passed between them. It is equally doubtful whether anything could have been more entirely superfluous than such a voicing of self-evident sentiments.
John Barclay, too! Peter Rathbawne, with what had been natural shrewdness at the outset now sharpened almost to clairvoyance by his years of dealing with a multiplicity of men and things, understood the Lieutenant-Governor absolutely, and admired him with all the force of his rugged nature. And Rathbawne was not given to admiring people. His business experience had not fostered the spirit of hero-worship. He had seen too much for that. But in the two men before him he recognized qualities so unusual, and in many ways so similar, that he was proud to count them friends.
For the moment, however, as he took stock of them, he was measuring them by a new standard, more rigid, more severe than he had hitherto had reason to apply. It is one thing to trust a man implicitly, and another thing entirely to try to tell him so. For silence is most golden in the specification of friendship, and when employed in the particularizing of intimate emotion the silver of speech is apt to turn to veriest tinsel.
Yet the occasion was one which demanded speech. Moreover, and in direct opposition to his inclinations and the precedents he had established, he was forced not only to give practical expression to his feeling for Broadcastle and Barclay, but, what humiliated as well as annoyed him, to confess himself incapable of dealing with a question which confronted him. It was the first time within his recollection when he had mistrusted his own judgment.