They made a silent company. Lord Vest was never of a very talkative habit: my lady was always very gentle, and did her best to please him on all occasions: while Mr. Dunn’s duties did not embrace speaking unless he was spoken to.
Eight candles in tall candlesticks of ancient silver played their timid light upon the polished surface of the wide table; and in the calm air of the summer evening the flames of the candles were so still that a fanciful eye might have charged them with the beauty of flowers of twilight. Young Mr. Dunn’s was a fanciful eye, but to him they appeared to be as poppies of the night; for the poppy is an evil flower.
The curtains were not drawn across the windows, that Lord Vest might lose nothing of the sweet evening air, which he always held to be good for him until it gave him a cold in the head. Over his employer’s shoulder Mr. Dunn could see the lights of the Mall glowing against the dark tapestry of St. James’s Park. To the left, twilight draped the Horse Guards and the great buildings of Government, whence, had Mr. Dunn only known, the owls were at that moment fleeing on their ominous business. To the right, night fought with day for the honour of shrouding the palace of the King of England, who is also Emperor of India and Protector of the Faith, which some people nowadays seem inclined to forget. Great automobiles would every now and then pass to and fro between the noble trees that delight those who have the leisure to walk about the avenue of the Mall.
Mr. Dunn would have found it, at that moment, very agreeable to be walking about the avenue of the Mall. Mr. Dunn would, in point of fact, have parted with money to exchange places with the meanest walker in London; for the situation of private secretary to a lord is not always what the well-informed call a sinecure. Mr. Dunn was just thinking how nice it would be to have a sinecure, whatever it might be, when the second butler winked at him. The second butler thought the whole affair very funny, and the silence very funny indeed. The second butler thought he knew everything. Mr. Dunn made a mental note to the effect that he must not forget, immediately after dinner, to tell the second butler that he was an ass. That is if he, Mr. Dunn, was alive.
Now for Lord Vest, so much has been written of the early beginnings of that powerful and ill-fated nobleman that it would be impertinent, at this hour, to give more than a broad outline of his life. Mr. Justinian Pant was an Australian gentleman of great fortune who had in the past decade been raised to a baronetcy (Sir Justinian Pant, Bart.), a barony (Lord Pant of Warboys, in the county of Huntingdonshire), a viscounty (Viscount Pant of Warboys), an earldom (the Earl of Cowden, in the county of Sussex) and a marquisate (the Marquess of Vest, in the county of Cornwall) for services to the State. The bulletin announcing his last ennoblement had been welcomed by all England with every appearance of pleasure and gratification: that is, if one can judge by the newspapers of the day: as, of course, one can. The mere fact that the barony of Warboys, the earldom of Cowden, and the marquisate of Vest, were welcomed far otherwise by the newspapers of Australia gave the envious grounds for saying that the newspapers of England were prejudiced in the great man’s favour for the reason that he owned most of them: which is tantamount to saying that the glorious press of England is not free, an insinuation that one cannot deign to answer but with a dignified silence.
Of the early activities in Australia of Justinian Pant little of a definite nature is known. The Australian papers, at the time of Mr. Pant’s first elevation to the peerage, were rife with information on the subject, but the voice of envy is ever loud; and one, an Adelaide society journal, was so far lacking in the respect due to the mother-country as to belittle the English peerage by saying that the lord in question would no doubt make a very good lord, as lords go, but only so long as he did not go back to Australia, where there was a warrant out for his arrest on a charge of petty larceny while employed as a bell-boy in a First-Class Family Hotel in Melbourne.
The tale of this man’s venture on London may entertain the curious and inspire the ambitious, for it tells how one evening fifteen years ago Justinian Pant stood in Piccadilly Circus, wondering what he would do next. Starvation was indicated, for in his pocket there was only one penny. And he was about to send up a prayer to God for guidance when he was distracted by falling into conversation with an old native of the Circus, from whom he was amazed to learn that the old man had expected his coming and had been awaiting him for some time with impatience.
Mr. Pant was not yet a master of men and could therefore afford to show surprise, which he did after the Colonial manner by swearing through his nose and whistling between his teeth. Whereupon the ancient man confessed to being a soothsayer and told how it had been revealed to him in a dream that a young man with a face similar in every detail to the face of Mr. Pant, which was of a somewhat unusual shape, would one night come into Piccadilly Circus from Australia and give him, the soothsayer, the sum of one pound in cash, and how from that moment the Australian would rise with remarkable velocity to be the greatest Force in England.
Justinian Pant was not unwilling to be a Force, and asked eagerly for more precise information as to the steps to be taken: adding that he had only one penny on him, but would be pleased to owe the old gentleman the small sum of nineteen shillings and eleven pence.
“Buy an evening paper and look at the advertisements,” said the ancient man, for he earned his living by the sale of evening papers. And whilst the Australian reluctantly exchanged his last penny for an evening paper, the old soothsayer spat into the gutter and said harshly: