Mr. George de Bohun had acquired—perhaps from his father—an unusual reverence for the gem which he believed, with a mystical devotion curious in a business man, to be in some way the tutelary genius of his House. He would frequently tell young Richard, his heir, during the boyhood of that philanthropist, the story of how Catherine the Great herself had given it to his own father, the grandfather of the lad, when that powerful genius was engaged upon a secret diplomatic mission to the Russian Court. Hence had the emerald come to be known by the title of "The Emerald of Catherine the Great" in the private circle of the de Bohuns—pronounced "Deboons." That it should be preserved in the family, certainly never sold and—please God!—never lost, was a religion with George, which grew more fanatical as he approached the tomb. He came, perhaps from an idea inherited from his father, to regard it as a necessary condition of their prosperity, and he imbued his son Richard with I know not what vague fears of disaster should its possession be abandoned or should the stone itself be mislaid.
This second in the great line, George de Bohun—pronounced Deboon—the son of its founder, though born as long ago as 1780, lived to see the inauguration of the Hyde Park Exhibition by Queen Victoria in 1851, and, having refused a peerage, closed his eyes in the fine country house known as Paulings.
This mansion was—and is—situated in Herts, at no more than twenty-five miles from Westminster. The successful Russian merchant purchased it upon advantageous terms from the bankrupt and disreputable Parrall family, whose last and seventeenth representative not only proved incapable of preserving the patrimony of his ancestors, but had joined the Romish Church and perished miserably at Boulogne.
Richard de Bohun was of course the "Dirty Dick" of mid-Victorian politics, and an intimate friend of Lord Palmerston. There is little to record of him except that after doing good and lucrative work in two administrations he also refused a peerage; in which he was wise, for though the family fortunes had not diminished, the general increase of wealth around him made his position less conspicuous than that of his father had been in the City of London. Indeed, the family was now no longer connected with trade.
He died—as he had been born—at Paulings, a country house of such absorbing interest that I shall later be compelled to describe it in accurate if tedious terms.
The now reigning de Bohun, called Humphrey—after an illustrious ancestor, the Humphrey de Bohun who fought at Bannockburn under Edward II and undoubtedly held land, through his wife, in the neighbourhood of Boston—the son of this statesman, is the Mr. de Bohun—pronounced Deboon—of our own day: the highly respected Home Secretary who has already passed with such distinction through what he himself will call the Cursus honorum, having been Parliamentary Secretary to Harry Gates during all of the great Paramooka Scandal—when he was the Baby of the House—then successively rejected by Middleham West after the Seychelles Scandal—when Gates went to the Lords—elected after a second attempt by Middleham East, Under-Secretary during the period of the Second General Strike and at last, after the usual vicissitudes of public life, occupying the exalted position which he still adorns.
His figure is familiar to the public, I fear, rather by early photographs than by recent portraits. He is a man tall and carefully clothed, with a rather weary expression, set on a long face, with insufficient grey hair neatly brushed. He is of a courteous demeanour. He is much attached to his country life at Paulings, so happily convenient to London, and sheltered from the large growth of suburban villas about it by a dense fringe of more or less ancient trees. He is a widower, possessed of three motor cars, but with only a flat in town. He has refused a baronetcy, for he has (alas!) no son, but one daughter, now just entering her nineteenth year. The name of the charming child is Marjorie, and it was but recently, upon her eighteenth birthday, the 15th of January, that her father somewhat solemnly presented her with the famous heirloom.
He had used no little ceremonial, speaking a little pompously of her dead mother—a Ginningham—of the immemorial traditions of their house, and with curious insistence upon the supposed influence of the jewel upon their fortunes. He smiled somewhat lugubriously as he touched that point, but Marjorie, though not extravagantly intelligent, had brains enough to believe in omens, mascots, talismans, and was proud, as a girl should be at her age, to enter upon the possession of the Sacred Gem of the de Bohuns.
Her father had discarded, for so great an occasion, the Victorian gold setting which, he was assured by Mr. Marolovitch and other experts, was in deplorable taste. The jewel was now set once more—by Mr. Marolovitch—as a brooch, since a woman was to wear it. The new setting was in platinum, designed in the finest taste of Berlin, with writhing curves and dead square divisions of the most entrancing variety. Large as the Emerald was, and its new Prussian setting adequately broad, yet the whole lay easily on the palm.
If it be not blasphemy to suggest any inefficiency in our Teutonic cousins, I should suggest that the pin was a thought too long and capable, on careless handling, of biting the hand that fed it. But for any such trifling defect the grey colour of the new and more expensive mounting, resembling that of a leaded grate, and the awful severity of its odd rectangles and unexpected heavings of its re-entrant curves, made ample atonement. Such was the aspect of the Emerald of Catherine the Great in the winter when it entered upon its liveliest activities.