We have said that Maude thought that Mr. Hawkey Sharpe's love-making, with all its euphonious platitudes, was known to him and to herself alone.
In this she was mistaken, as Hawkey's sister Deborah, Mrs. Lindsay, was in his confidence in that matter, and quite au fait of its doubtful progress. She did not appear at dinner that evening, but dined in her own room, and then betook her to her brother's sanctum, or 'den,' as he called it—a picturesque old panelled apartment, in what was named the Beatoun wing—which had a quaint stone fireplace, the grate of which was full of August flowers then, but at the hearth of which in the winter of the year before Pinkeyfield was fought, his Eminence had been wont to toast his scarlet-slippered toes.
The furniture was quite modern. Fishing and shooting gear, with whips, spurs, billiard cues, a few soiled books on farriery and racing, were its chief features now; while sporting calendars, etc., strewed the table, with a few note and account books, and letters of minor importance.
After gloomily referring to his late interview with Maude Lindsay, he assisted himself to a briar-root pipe from a nice arrangement of meerschaums and other pipes stuck in an oaken and steel mounted horseshoe on the broad mantel-shelf, and prepared to soothe himself with 'a weed' and the contents of a remarkably long tumbler—brandy and soda—sent up, per Mr. Trotter, from the pantry of old Funnell, the butler, for his delectation; while his pale and sallow-visaged sister was content to sip from a slender glass a decoction of some medical stuff prescribed for chronic low spirits and weak action of the heart—an affliction under which she laboured, and to which, no doubt, her pallid and at times stone-coloured complexion was attributable.
Always calm in demeanour, she was otherwise unlike her brother Hawkey, who was not particular to a shade in anything (provided he was not found out), and she was outwardly a model of religion and propriety, blended with hypocrisy, which—according to Rochefoucauld—is the homage that vice pays to virtue.
Attired in a luxurious dressing-gown and tasselled smoking cap, Mr. Sharpe lounged in a cosy easy-chair, shooting his huge cuffs forward from time to time, and stroking his sandy, ragged moustache, in what he thought to be 'good style.'
Instead of being thick and podgy, as his humble origin might suggest, his hands, we must admit, were rather thin, with long spiky filbert nails, reminding one—with all their cultivated whiteness—of the talons of a bird of prey.
'Deuced good thing for us, Deb, that codicil was never completed,' said he (for about the hundredth time), breaking a pause; 'but still we have now that fellow, Roland Lindsay, back again, ready to overhaul matters, after escaping Arab bullets and swords, desert fever, and the devil only knows what more.'
'You forget that this is his home,' said she, with a little touch of womanly feeling for the moment, 'or he deems it as such.'
'So long as you permit it, I suppose.'