“All sorts of things.”
Reckage turned pale from dissatisfied inquisitiveness.
“I think, too,” he answered, “but I can throw out a word now and again.”
Then, making the remark that he was not dressed for dinner, he left the room.
CHAPTER V
The dinner, in the ordering of which the host had expended all his gastronomical knowledge and much anxiety, seemed long. Orange found himself opposite the famous portrait of “Edwyn, Lord Reckage of Almouth,” which represents that nobleman elaborately dressed, reclining on a grassy bank by a spring of water, with a wooded landscape, a sunrise, and a squire holding two horses in the distance. Robert studied, and remembered always, every detail of that singular composition. The warrior's shield, with its motto “Magica sympathia,” his fat white hands, velvet breeches, steel cuirass, and stiff lace collar remained for days a grotesque image before his mind. He traced, too, a certain resemblance between Reckage and that ancestor—they both wore pointed red beards, both were fair of skin, both had a dreaming violence in their blue eyes.
“You must have some pheasant,” said his lordship, at last. “You are eating nothing. And that Burgundy, you know, is unique of its kind. It was a present from the Emperor of the French to mamma. Her people were civil to him when he was regarded as a sort of adventurer. And he never forgot it. He's a very decent fellow. I dined with him at the Tuileries—did I mention it?”
Robert replied that he fancied he had heard of the occurrence.