"Nothing like a long war for enriching clever tradesmen," said Chevenix. "Now, I really think it very estimable in Topsparkle, considering his low origin, that he manages to pass for almost a gentleman."
"I know he is much genteeler than many of us, and far more courteous," said Bolingbroke.
"Ah, that is his chief mistake. He overdoes the courtly air. He is monotonous in his gentility, and has none of the easy variety which belongs to high breeding. He has all the faults of a novice in the art of good manners."
That refined air and superficial polish, which satisfied society at large, revolted Lord Lavendale. He hated mincing manners in any man, but most of all in Vyvyan Topsparkle. He hated the man's small white hands and smooth feminine tones of voice, hated his pencilled eyebrows and white-lead complexion, his slim waist and attenuated legs.
He told himself that this aversion of his was but a natural instinct, an innate revulsion of the mind at the aspect of hidden sin; yet in his heart of hearts it was as Judith's husband he hated this man. He thought of him as her owner, the wretch who had bought her with his fortune, who held her captive by the malignant power of his ill-gotten wealth—who in the privacy of domestic life might insult and bully her, for anything Lavendale knew to the contrary. That smooth Janus countenance had doubtless its darker side; and he who in public was ever the adoring husband might be a tyrant in private.
Stimulated by this ill-feeling, Lavendale was more than ever bent on ferreting out the secret of Mr. Topsparkle's early life, and the fate of that Italian mistress whom he had for a little while acknowledged as his wife. He had exhausted all his own and Philter's powers of research, and had come by no proof or even circumstantial evidence of guilt. There was but one person likely to know all Mr. Topsparkle's secrets, and he would be unlikely to reveal them. That person was Fétis, the confidential valet, whom Lavendale had met sometimes in the corridors at Ringwood Abbey, looking the very essence of discretion and respectful dumbness.
"Difficult to get a man to speak when all his interests are in favour of silence," thought Lavendale.
He communicated his perplexities to his friend Durnford. Since his lordship's renunciation of Irene they were more brotherly together than ever they had been.
"And I, too, am devoured with curiosity about Topsparkle's past life," said Herrick; "that hidden picture with its strange likeness to the girl I love has mystified me consumedly. 'Tis but a chance likeness, of course, since we can trace Irene's lineage into the remote past without coming upon any track of an Italian marriage. I have examined the Bosworth family-tree—you must have noticed it framed and glazed in the dining-parlour—and there is not a foreign twig in all its ramifications. Yet when I ponder on my dear one's passion for music, her ardent impulsive temperament, her southern style of beauty, I am at a loss to comprehend how that sober British tree can have put forth so bright a flower. In any case I should like to know more about that lovely girl whose picture is hidden in Mr. Topsparkle's sanctum. By his pallor when he caught us looking at the portrait, one might guess he has painful memories of the original."