Fate has a fine unseemliness, now and then, in her dispensations. It was in a house leased for the service of shame, among brazen foreign women whose hard black eyes belied the respect of their voices, that Lumsden was forced from time to time to plumb the depth of tenderness that lurked in his own heart. He loved his little son as he loved nothing else in the world. And the boy was stone blind from birth.
II
TWO TELEGRAMS
Sir Bryan sat in his study at Mount Street one dark Saturday afternoon late in December, sucking happily upon a calcined briar, but with a watchful eye on the clock, for it was nearly time he began to dress. He was by now a man of thirty-seven or thirty-eight, with a beautiful but rather battered face, strikingly like certain portraits of Marshal Blucher. He had heavy shoulders, straight legs, and lean flanks. His enemies and men who boxed with him said his arms were disproportionate even to his height. His hair was fair and longer than most men wear it to-day: it was thinning over his forehead, and his wavy moustache was streaked with gray. There are people, like buildings, who, for all their size and show, we suspect of being hurriedly and cheaply put together. The paucity or poverty of material shows somewhere: in a mouth that doesn't quite shut, in ears that protrude—hair badly planted on the scalp. No better description of Lumsden could be ventured than that he seemed to have been built slowly and with a good deal of thought. He was expensive in grain, like the pipe he was smoking or the tie he was wearing.
He had been golfing all the afternoon, and was dressed, with happy slouchiness, in a brown flannel suit and a limp shirt-collar. His soft white waistcoat was a little soiled and lacked a button. The room he sat in was clear and light, but simply furnished, a refuge in fact from other splendors. Estampes galantes of Fragonard and the younger Morean decorated its walls sparsely. There was only one photograph, of a woman, which stood by itself in a narrow gilt frame on a side table. It was a large modern chiaroscuro affair. One noted frail emergent shoulders, a head turned aside, delicate lines of neck and chin, and a cloud of hair.
A dark, discreet man-servant knocked and showed his face in the doorway.
"Gentleman to see you, sir."
"Who is it, Becket?"
"Mr. Dollfus, sir."
"Oh! show him up!" But with the precipitancy of his race Mr. Dollfus had shown himself up, and entered hard upon the man's heels.