"Vain superstition!" he guffawed, as he stretched out his long tenuous hands. "O ye upper-middle-class British Pharisees, that ye should condescend! Who is this weak vessel that would consult the stars? Not, I trow and trust, a daughter of the late Sir John Stubberfield, Bart.?"
"The late Sir John Stubberfield, Bart." was a symbol erected permanently in his mind, with which he toyed when he was moved to exercise his fancy at the expense of his countrymen.
"Not a daughter of Sir John," I assured him. "An even more potent personage."
"Impossible, my boy! A veritable daughter of Sir John stands at the apex of human endeavour. She is the crown of social, political and philosophical beatitude. Do you forget that it was a daughter of Sir John Stubberfield, Bart., who married a Prosser? Do you forget it was a daughter of Sir John Stubberfield, Bart., who had issue an heir male, a little Prosser?"
"Peace, peace, my good Theodore. You have a bare half-hour in which to read the stars in their courses for a fair unknown. And I beg that you will treat her tenderly, for she is a brave woman and an unhappy."
"Aha!" The Ogre—the name he was known by in the family—sighed a romantic sympathy. It may seem out of harmony with the terms in which I have endeavoured to render the personality of this Berserk, but he had an almost Quixotic development of the sense of chivalry. Nothing so greatly delighted this champion of lost causes as to succour those who were in distress.
"Produce the languishing vestal, so that the arts of the necromancer may sustain her. But stay, my boy; before we go further, may I suggest that you conform to the conventional practice of confiding the name she goes by among men?"
"Certainly. Her name is Mrs. Nevil Fitzwaren."
"Aha!" The Ogre swung half round in his writing-chair to confront me. He seemed like a satyr, and the twin moons that were his eyes began to magnetise me with their uncanny effulgence. "A woman about thirty, of foreign extraction?"
"Ye—es."