Val Lessing reviewed the prospect, and once again, more wildly than ever, his vagrant heart cried out in protest. Oh! it had been a different life to which he had looked forward in the days that were gone—the mad, glad, foolhardy days when all he had asked of fate was a passage through that highway of adventure, where a thrill lay behind every bush, and a danger at every turn.
Danger—danger—the very word brought exhilaration; the ring of it, the thrill of it, the wild, sweet savour which it bore! Oh, to be out on the highway, away from the treadmill of City life; oh, to wake in the morning, to pull aside a flapping canvas, inhale the clean air blowing over great plains, and across frowning ridges of mountains, to step forth on the day’s quest, sure of nothing, nothing in all the world, but of danger to overcome!
Val Lessing’s home was represented by a bachelor flat, presided over by a respectable middle-aged couple. The mother for whose sake he had resigned himself to a business career had died some years before, but he was still responsible for a young brother and sister, and obliged to make a home for them during holiday seasons. The noisy incursion was not always welcome, all the same the flat became a very dreary place when the lively pair had taken themselves schoolwards once more, and a solitary dinner was a thing to be avoided.
Lessing, as a bachelor, had grown into the habit of taking the evening meal in town, and had discovered a certain very Bohemian restaurant where most excellent cooking was supplied to as odd a looking company as ever assembled within four walls. He found a never-ending interest in watching his fellow diners and pondering over the secrets of their existence. It was at least safe to conclude that they did not share his own ground for complaint! Dinner over, Lessing frequently succumbed to an impulse which drew him towards a large corner house in a square adjoining his flat, wherein a particularly happy family party lived, and loved, and laughed, and extended the most cordial of welcomes to uninvited guests.
Mr Gordon was a business man, who, having accumulated a modest “pile,” had promptly retired from the City, and now devoted himself to the performance of good works for the benefit of others, and the collection of old china for the satisfaction of himself. Mrs Gordon was a matron of the plump and complacent order, an excellent manager, who did not know the meaning of fuss, and whose servants invariably stayed with her for years, and then departed, laden with spoils, to espouse a local baker or grocer, and live happily ever afterwards.
Delia, the daughter, was a minx. She was slim and tall, and had crinkly dark eyebrows, and an oval face, and misty grey eyes with a dreamy, faraway expression, and fringed with a double row of preposterously long eyelashes. She looked particularly dreamy and inaccessible when young men came in to call, and they mentally abased themselves before her, gazing with dazzled eyes at the pinnacle on which she stood, in maiden meditation,—exquisitely, wondrously, crystally unconscious of their own rough existence. And all the time there was not a line of their features, not a kink in their neckties, that that minx Delia did not see with the minuteness of a microscope!
Terence, the son, was walking the hospitals, kept a collection of bones in his coat pocket, and looked upon life as a huge jest organised for his special benefit; loyally returning the compliment by playing jests himself on every available opportunity. In holiday time, he was most useful as a companion to the two scholars with whom he was a prime favourite, but in term time Lessing regarded him with mitigated favour. As a conversationalist he preferred the father; as a confidante, the mother; where Delia was concerned he preferred a tête-à-tête. Terence was a very good sort, but he was apt to be decidedly de trop.
On the evening of the day on which he had been made a director of his company, Lessing took his way to the corner house, and found the amiable quartette disporting themselves after their separate ways in the comfortable sitting-room which was their favourite evening resort. Mr Gordon was reading the latest treatise on Oriental china. Mrs Gordon was knitting mufflers for deep-sea fishermen, and lending an appreciative ear to Delia, who, seated at the grand piano, was singing ballads in a very small but penetratingly sweet voice. It was part of Delia’s minxiness that she elected to sing songs intended for masculine lovers, wherein were set forth panegyrics which might most aptly be applied to herself. On this occasion she was declaiming that “My love is like a red, red rose that’s newly blown in June. Oh, my love’s like a mel-o-dy that’s sweetly played in tune”; and so sweet was the air, so sweet the rose-like bloom of her own youth, that her father’s eyes strayed continuously from his pages, and rested on her with an admiration reverent in its intensity. “She is too beautiful, too pure for this world”; his eyes seemed to say. “Can it be possible that she is really my own daughter?” The mother’s eyes strayed also, but there was no reverence in her gaze. She had been a minx herself.
Terence was reading the latest popular thriller, and from time to time diversifying the entertainment by kicking one of his patent leather pumps into the air, and adroitly fitting his toes into it on its return journey, an accomplishment on which he had wasted golden hours.
They all looked up and smiled a welcome as Val Lessing entered and went round the room greeting each member of the family in turn.