The deserted palace of Buckingham would once more open its doors, and there were to be Drawing-rooms, whether as regards numbers or brilliancy rivalling any that had ever been held.
We had a strong Government, with a strong majority behind, and speculators on the Stock Exchange were buying for a rise. The Rothschilds of London and Paris and Vienna had all agreed that there should be peace, and it was also understood that a great German Chancellor had kindly condescended to intimate that for the present, at any rate, the sword might be sheathed, and that honest peasant lads, instead of being served up as food for powder, might be usefully employed in agricultural occupations, much to the joy of hotel-keepers on the Rhine, at Baden-Baden and elsewhere. Even in the valleys and mountains of the Alps, in the new nation of Italy, in the gilded palaces of the Sultan on the Bosphorus, there was unusual light-heartedness, for the Eastern Question was indefinitely postponed. The talk of the clubs had ceased to have any reference to politics. A great calm had settled everywhere in the East of London, where poverty makes men Radicals and Social Democrats, and in the West, where the only burning question of the hour is how to put off the day of reckoning to a more convenient season.
If it had not been for the occasional appearance of a wealthy American heiress, whose father had ‘struck ile,’ of a fair Anonyma on horseback, in an exquisitely-appointed equipage in some fashionable thoroughfare, or for a whisper of a scandal in high life, or for a wild adventure now and then of a man about town, or the unexpected collapse of a favourite on the turf, or the disgraceful bankruptcy of a pious banker, society would have been duller than ditch water. As it was, what to do with the heavy hours intervening between luncheon and dinner seemed a problem too difficult for human ingenuity—even when most fitly trained and fairly developed—to solve.
It was precisely at this trying hour Sir Watkin Strahan might be seen lolling idly and discontentedly in one of the many armchairs which adorned the smoking-room of his Piccadilly club. By his side was an emptied glass, the ashes of a defunct cigar, and the usual journals which are humorously supposed to be comic, or to be remarkably witty, or to represent society. He did not look particularly pleased, not even when a brother member, evidently a chip of the same block, seated himself by his side, exclaiming:
‘Holloa, Sir Watkin, what brings yon up to town? I thought you were carrying all before you at Sloville.’
‘Sloville be d---d!’
‘Certainly, my dear friend, if you wish it. What’s Hecuba to me?’
‘Now, look at me, and drop that style of remark.’
We comply with the Baronet’s suggestion, and look at him. He was, after all, a handsome man, carefully dressed and fitted to shine in Belgravia; soft and gentle in manner, sleek as a tiger. Time had dealt gently with him, had spared his head of hair, and saved him from the obesity which attacks most men after a certain age. Mr. Disraeli tells us that the English aristocracy do not read, and live much in the open air. Hence their juvenility. At a distance Sir Watkin looked anywhere between five-and-twenty and fifty. To-day, however, he looked nearer the latter than the former. He did not look like a good man, such as you read of in evangelical biographies or on the tombstones in churchyards and cemeteries. There was a scowl on his forehead, anger in his eye and in his tones.
‘Well,’ said another friend, ‘all I can say is I have just seen ---,’ naming the Liberal whip, ‘and he’s terribly cut up. He thought you were safe for Sloville.’