The club quartered the three leopards of Anjou, gules regardant on a field argent with the Lys semé argent upon a field azure: in chief a crown royal and supporters, dexter, a lion rampant languetirant, sinister an unicorn, enchainé: gartiered the device, “Honi soit qui mal ‘pense,’” and the legend “Dieu et mon Droit” real. This coat was blazoned above the mantelpiece, on the backs of the sofas, the buttons of the servants’ livery, the notepaper and the china; it was woven into the tapestry; it covered the seats of the chairs; nowhere was the proud title of that house left unsymbolised.
In the general decoration of the hall and of the rooms, enormous masses of perfectly new gilding lit up the interior with a grandeur that recalled Empire indeed, but suggested also the strain inseparable from great possessions; and, in between the gilding, panels of a dead foreign white forbade Mr Burden such repose as he imagined should pervade a London room.
There were, it is true, upon the walls, reproductions of eighteenth century engravings, very charmingly framed in the American manner. The good taste of their arrangement was marked: they were few and widely spread; but of this Mr Burden knew nothing; his age had narrowed him, and he did not comprehend our day.
He stood in the midst of the hall, as might some sea-faring man who had sailed and found a people most unlike his own. He stood and waited. Then the stronger mood returned to him, and he forgot these things; for Lord Benthorpe, Mr Barnett and Mr Harbury had come into the room together. He went forward to meet them.
When they had shaken hands, Mr Barnett, absent-minded as are many men of his calibre, went before them with unconscious mastery, and led them into a little room apart, where they could talk undisturbed; and this had been reserved for him, for in that club Mr Barnett held already the position which in a few years he was to hold in the commonwealth itself. Here, in this small room, were the same good taste, the same grandeur of decoration; but, for Mr Burden, now recovered, no longer the same feeling of ill-ease.
They sat grouped round a table of fumed oak, on which a dainty printed card begged members to pay for the refreshments of their guests, while above them hung a very sensible admonition against the bestowal of gratuities upon the domestics of these regal rooms.
They sat for a full quarter of an hour, talking in sparse and careless sentences, now of politics, now of some book, and each from time to time would look up cheerfully and say that they should be getting to business.
Already had Mr Burden professed his interest in the architecture of the club (for they had drifted on to that topic), when Mr Barnett replied, quite suddenly, that they had but one thing to settle that day, and that thing was the sum which they four must syndicate before the promotion was entered upon. He waited for no comment, but continued with equal abruptness, saying that, so far as he could see, a hundred thousand pounds between them would command all that was required for the security of their further steps; and, when he had said this, he sat silently, with his great hands upon his great knees, looking down upon the floor at his feet.
Lord Benthorpe had the advantage of Mr Barnett in a wider knowledge of the world, and, from his Parliamentary training, a kind of subdued fluency. Mr Barnett had brought out the sum of money almost brutally. He had spoken rather slowly, choosing his words, as he always did. It was a necessity for him, if he was to avoid the slight foreign accent and the suspicion of foreign idiom, which even so he could not quite eliminate. After that hard and broken phrasing, it was a relief to hear Lord Benthorpe. His amiable mouth lay open between each phrase, his eyes roved from one object to another around the room; he sat, indeed, too far from the table to relieve upon it the appetite for movement which pursued his fingers, but he twisted them in and out by way of pastime during his discourse.
“I think,” he said, in a thin voice, well suited to dialectic, “I think the sum is large ... larger perhaps than is necessary. In theory, as it were, there is very little needed.... I know one must always have a platform, as it were ... we shall have initial expenses, so to speak ... but....”