“An absolute throwback has turned up at Hill Street,” said Cheriton, impressively. “If you want to see a living and breathing Gainsborough walking and talking in twentieth-century London call on Caroline Crewkerne some wet afternoon.”
George Betterton was not at all æsthetically minded. But like so many of his countrymen he always had a taste for “something fresh.”
“I will,” he said. And he spoke as if he meant it.
Then it was that Cheriton grew suddenly alive to the magnitude of his indiscretion. Really he had acted with consummate folly! He had a clear start of all the field, yet through an unbridled natural enthusiasm and a lifelong love of imparting information he must needs within an hour set one of the most dangerous men in England upon the scent.
George Betterton had his limitations, but where the other sex was concerned he was undoubtedly that, as Cheriton had reason to know. A widower of nine-and-fifty, who had buried two wives without finding an heir to his great estates, there was little doubt that he meant to come up to the scratch for the third time, although to be sure of late his courses had not seemed to lead in that direction. But Caroline Crewkerne, who knew most things, seemed quite clear upon the point.
Yes, George Betterton’s “I will” had a sinister sound about it. Cheriton himself was five-and-sixty and a bachelor, and in his heart of hearts he had good reason to believe that he was not a marrying man. He had long owed his primal duty to a position in the world; and, to the scorn of his family and the amusement of his friends, he had not yet fulfilled it. He was too fond of adventures, he declared romantically—a confession that a man old enough to be a grandfather ought to be ashamed to make, declared the redoubtable Caroline, with her most fearsome snort. More than once, it is true, Cheriton had fancied he had seen the writing on the wall. But when his constitutional apathy permitted him to examine it more closely, he found it had been written for some one else.
However, he had come away from Hill Street that evening in such a state of suppressed enthusiasm, that in his present mood he was by no means sure that he had not seen the writing again. It was certainly odd that a man with his record and at his time of life should have any such feeling. But there is no accounting for these things. Therefore he left the theater with an idea taking root in him that he had been guilty of an act of gross folly in blowing the trumpet so soon. Why should he help to play Caroline’s game? He should have left it to her to summon this Richmond to the field.
“Caroline will lead him a dance, though,” mused Cheriton on the threshold of Ward’s. “And I know how to handle the ribands better than he does. He’s got the mind of a dromedary, thank God!”
In the meantime the cause of these reflections was lying very forlorn and very wide-awake in the most imposing chamber in which she had ever slept. The bed was large, but cold; the chintz hangings were immaculate, but unsympathetic; the engravings of classical subjects and of august relations whom she had never seen with which the walls were hung, the austere magnificence of the furniture, and the expensive nature of the bric-à-brac, made Miss Perry yearn exceedingly for the cheerful simplicity of Slocum Magna.
Almost as far back as Miss Perry could remember, it had been given to her before attempting repose to beat Muffin over the head with a pillow. But in this solemn piece of upholstery, which apparently had been designed for an empress, such friendly happenings as these were out of the question.