"Why was the man so civil, and what does he know about my life in Venice forty years ago?"
Those were the questions which had agitated the Frenchman's mind during that brief remnant of the night which he had spent in restless wakefulness, and they had proved unanswerable. Caution might have prompted him to avoid Lord Lavendale's house and turn a deaf ear to that nobleman's civilities; but anxiety made him curious, and fear of the future made him bold in the present. He wanted to know the extent of Lavendale's knowledge of his own past life, and to that end he accepted his lordship's invitation. His vanity again, which was large, made him suppose himself a match for Lord Lavendale in any intellectual encounter.
"If he has courted me in order to pump me for the secrets of the past, he will find he has wasted his trouble," thought Mr. Fétis, as his chair was being carried through perilous St. Giles's.
It was eleven o'clock, a late hour for supper; but Lord Lavendale had been at the House of Lords, and had dined with some of his brother peers after the debate. Supper had been prepared in the late lord's private sitting-room, a small triangular parlour at the end of a stately suite of reception-rooms, a room which had been rarely used of late, but which Herrick, for some unexplained motive, had selected as the scene of this evening's entertainment. It was altogether the cosiest room in the house, and with a heaped-up fire of sea-coal and oak logs in the wide grate, a small round table laid for supper, a pair of silver candelabra holding a dozen wax candles, and a side table loaded with all the materials for a jovial evening, the little triangular parlour looked the very picture of comfort.
The brightness and warmth of the room had an agreeable effect upon Mr. Fétis, who had been chilled and depressed for the moment by those cold and empty apartments through which a footman had ushered him by the light of a single candle, borne aloft as the man stalked in advance with a ghostlike air.
"Let me perish, my lord, but your empty saloons have given me the shivers," said Fétis, as he warmed his spindleshanks at the blaze; "your tall footman looked like a spectre."
"Come, come, Mr. Fétis, you are not the kind of man to believe in apparitions," said Durnford gaily. "I think we are all materialists here, are we not? We accept nothing for truth that cannot be mathematically demonstrated."
Lavendale looked grave. "It is not every sceptic who is free from superstition," he said. "There are men who cannot believe in a Personal God, and who will yet tremble at a shadow. I have known an infidel who would scoff at the Gospel, stand up for the story of the Witch of Endor."
Mr. Fétis shrugged his shoulders, and did not pursue the argument.
The butler and a pair of footmen brought in the hot dishes, and opened a magnum of champagne, and supper began in serious earnest—one of those exquisite suppers for which Lavendale had been renowned in his wild youth, when he had vied with the Regent Philip in the studied extravagance of his table.