The charming cloisonné clock in Gaveston’s dressing-room was busily preparing to strike eight.
He gave a last glimpse in the cheval-glass at his elaborately pleated dress-shirt, in which gleamed three studs of solid amber, each with an embedded fly. In the further distances of Oylecombe Towers clanged a gong, and the young man went down to the great ancestor-hung hall with his usual good intention of being the life and soul of the party.
Lord and Lady Jordan stepped forward to welcome their remarkable guest.
His Lordship’s face was unfamiliar to Gaveston. A slightly older generation had known its fine, hawk-like features extremely well. He had long been conspicuous in the entourage of the late King, but changed traditions at Court had latterly made the first holder of the Jordan Barony an almost unrecognized figure on the Mall. Nowadays, though his town-house was not a hundred miles from Park Lane, he lived in rural seclusion at the Towers, with occasional visits to the City of London itself. His knowledge of the world, however, remained wide. With the same facility and gestures he could talk of shells and bears, eagles and bulls, of Brazil and both the Bethlehems, while the motto Si Vis Pacem, entwined aposiopesically about his escutcheon, well exemplified his Liberal political instincts.
Gaveston touched her ladyship’s hand with his lips.
Considerably younger than her husband, and only comparatively recently married, she too was one of those tantalizingly complex personalities which only an old landed aristocracy can evolve. Born in Latvia, and educated in a pensionnat hard by Warsaw, she was at once mondaine and mystic. Her keen sense of social values would have shamed Debrett or Burke themselves, but at the same time she appeared to be an eager searcher after the greater and more eternal aspects of Truth, an untiring student of Burnt Njal and other Oriental works upon religion, and indefatigable in her study of the lesser-known works of Freud, of which she read even the appendices; (the German language presented few difficulties to her.)
“Delighted,” murmured Gaveston, as the other guests were presented to him. “The usual set!” he said inwardly.
So that was Sir Nicholas Gomme, was it? Gaveston looked at him with interest, for the famous Irish Secretary had been specially asked, he knew, to meet the rising young man from Wallace. How many chapters of contemporary history had not risen Minerva-like from that quasi-Napoleonic cranium! Free Trade legislation, concerti, wars and rumours of wars, sonnets, bridge-debts, and snuff-boxes. Nothing was too modern to appeal to his vivid imagination; he was an admitted adept in New thought and Art Nouveau, and had acquired a deserved reputation in three continents for his philately. A man who had lived! And Gaveston looked at Sir Nicholas’ silvering hair not without respect.
And there was Tierra del Fuego, the painter of the moment. Gaveston had last seen him in the Régale, in those ludicrously far-off days of his Bohemian life in London. He painted everything in curves. In Chelsea they spoke of him reverently as Le père du globisme, but, like many an original theorist, he was a poor conversationalist.