One of the numerous advantages attached to an hereditary title is the certainty that a hearer of some sort or another will always be forthcoming. A commoner finds himself snubbed or quietly abandoned so soon as his reputation for the utterance of egoisms and platitudes is sufficiently established, but there are always plenty of people ready and willing to be bored by a lord. A high-class club is, moreover, a very mushroom-bed of bores, where elderly gentlemen who have traveled quite a distance down the road of life, without finding out that it is bordered on either side by a series of small events not worth commenting upon, meet to discuss trivialities.
“Truth is,” said his lordship to one of these persons, “this Malgamite scheme is one of the largest charities that I have conducted, and carries with it certain responsibilities—yes, certain responsibilities.”
And he assumed a grave air of importance almost amounting to worry. For Lord Ferriby did not know that a worried look is an almost certain indication of a small mind. Nor had he observed that those who bear the greatest responsibilities, and have proved themselves worthy of the burden, are precisely they who show the serenest face to the world.
It must not, however, be imagined that Lord Ferriby was in reality at all uneasy respecting the Malgamite scheme. Here again he enjoyed one of the advantages of having been preceded by a grandfather able and willing to serve his party without too minute a scruple. For if the king can do no wrong, the nobility may surely claim a certain immunity from criticism, and those who have allowance made to them must inevitably learn to make allowance for themselves. Lord Ferriby was, in a word, too self-satisfied to harbour any doubts respecting his own conduct. Self-satisfaction is, of course, indolence in disguise.
It was easy enough for Lord Ferriby to persuade himself that Cornish was wrong and Roden in the right; especially when Roden, in the most gentlemanly manner possible, paid a cheque, not to Lord Ferriby direct, but to his bankers, in what he gracefully termed the form of a bonus upon the heavy subscription originally advanced by his lordship. There are many people in the world who will accept money so long as their delicate susceptibilities are not offended by an actual sight of the cheque.
“Anthony Cornish,” said Lord Ferriby, pulling down his waistcoat, “like many men who have had neither training nor experience, does not quite understand the ethics of commerce.”
His lordship, like others, seemed to understand these to mean that a man may take anything that his neighbour is fool enough to part with.
Joan was willing enough to accompany her father, because, in the great march of social progress, she had passed on from charity to sanitation, and was convinced that the mortality among the malgamiters, which had been more than hinted at in the Ferriby family circle, was entirely due to the negligence of the victims in not using an old disinfectant served up in artistic flagons under a new name. Permanganate of potash under another name will not only smell as sweet, but will perform greater sanitary wonders, because the world places faith in a new name, and faith is still the greatest healer of human ills.
Joan, therefore, proposed to carry to The Hague the glad tidings of the sanitary millennium, fully convinced that this had come to a suffering world under the name of “Nuxine,” in small bottles, at the price of one shilling and a penny halfpenny. The penny halfpenny, no doubt, represented the cost of bottle and drug and the small blue ribbon securing the stopper, while the shilling went very properly into the manufacturer's pocket. It was at this time the fashion in Joan's world to smell of “Nuxine,” which could also be had in the sweetest little blue tabloids, to place in the wardrobe and among one's clean clothes. Joan had given Major White a box of these tabloids, which gift had been accepted with becoming gravity. Indeed, the major seemed never to tire of hearing Joan's exordiums, or of watching her pretty, earnest face as she urged him to use “Nuxine” in its various forms, and it was only when he heard that cigar-holders made of “Nuxine” absorbed all the deleterious properties of tobacco that his stout heart failed him.
“Yes,” he pleaded, “but a fellow must draw the line at a sky-blue cigar-holder, you know.”