“He! he! Good lad! Gad! you’re a ffoulis all right. Quel garçon!” and with a laugh that he had learned from the accounts of those who had known the Marquess of Steyne, the old rake donned his beaver-hat and started on his quotidian round of the more exclusive clubs.
But as he went out of the door he threw Gaveston a latch-key.
“Catch, m’ boy!” he called to him.
CHAPTER IV
CIRCEAN
And then, in glowing crowded processional, there came for Gaveston a marvellous cavalcade of days and nights in the great metropolis of Empire.
Through the cheerful, childlike bustle of Yuletide, through the chilled, sober, resolute days of New Year, and on to the gay bachelor party which Uncle Wilkinson gave (at Verrey’s, of course) to some of his old colleagues on Twelfth Night, the great book of London opened before him, ateem with strange riddles and alembications.
And what a book! The restless cross-currents of its fantastic figurantes flickered against the dim background of streets with cinematographic speed; and the darting limelight of his imagination would pick out by hazard, here some dark Rembrandtesque intaglio, there some half-perceived and evanescent torso, pearls from this hitherto uncharted sea which now he had to plumb with the magic theodolite of Youth, until at last all the mystery of London should stand revealed to his ardent gaze, as clear as was the mystery of that other City of his life, where, dulcet among the listening spires, hovered the plangent, reverberant bells.…
And so, armed only with a copy, bound in soft dove-grey leather, of A Wanderer in London, Gav would sally forth from the Albany of a morning on magnificent explorations of this astounding new world that awaited his conquest, now threading its equatorial jungles, now penetrating to its uttermost poles, now standing Cortes-like on the very summit of Constitution Hill. Until now he had moved only in the circumscribed orbit of his mother’s Mayfair “set.” But now he could freely climb into the handy taxicab, or on to the humble, but oh! how instructive ’bus, and boldly drive whithersoever his daring imagination might suggest.
“All the way, please, my man,” he would say to the conductors, as to the manner born, handing always a new florin. “No, keep the change.” He seldom passed unnoticed.