“Mr. Maturin, would you not provoke my father-in-law!” spoke the lady sharply, and was as sharply told:
“This is men’s business, Eleanour. Now, sir! My son, this lady’s husband, was killed in the war, as you may know. The best men were killed, Mr. Maturin. Fate is not very generous to fine men in time of war. You, I believe, were years ago cashiered from the Brigade for drunkenness in a restaurant?”
“I assure you, sir, that the provocation was more than I could bear,” Mr. Maturin explained with a gravity becoming in one faced by such a misdeed. “I am, you must know, very musical. Perhaps you would hardly think it, but I undoubtedly have a musical flair. And in that wretched restaurant the orchestra would insist on playing Mendelssohn’s Spring Song! Now I put it to you, Sir Guy—and to you, Mrs. de Gramercy, if I may—could a man bear Mendelssohn’s Spring Song over dinner? Yet I bore myself with a fortitude which some of my lighter friends have since been kind enough to think remarkable. I begged the conductor to cease, once, twice, and thrice; and then, you know, I wasted a bottle of wine over his head. I was hasty, let’s face it. But the provocation!”
Dimly spoke Mrs. de Gramercy from the shadows:
“Father, I believe Mr. Maturin has a D.S.O. with a bar.”
“Mr. Maturin,” the old gentleman said, “I apologise if I have seemed to reflect at all on your courage. Such men as you are, I believe, frequently very courageous——”
“Only when drunk, Sir Guy. In which such men as I are very much the same as other men. Were you, may I ask, ever in a trench before an attack?”
“My fighting days were over before Omdurman, sir——”
“Oh, dear, dashing Omdurman! Illustrations by R. Caton Woodville! You will agree with me that one didn’t need the stimulus of alcohol to turn machine-guns on to a lot of septic-looking niggers without even a water-pistol between them, even though they were devils with assegais, darts, catapults or boomerangs. But the Germans needed fighting. I remember——”
“That will do, Mr. Maturin. Your modesty takes as singular a form as your manners. My son, I was saying, was killed in the war, and his son and daughter were left to the charge of their mother. My grandchildren, Mr. Maturin—heirs to an ancient name and a fortune which must, by decent people, be taken as a responsibility rather than as a means for self-indulgence. I have never agreed with that principle of privilege which demands respect for ancient lineage and great fortune: such things alone are merely baubles; and without the dignity of some office and the ardour of some responsibility they can be of no value, but rather of grave detriment, to serious minds.”