The next moment Garry stepped back beside Dulcie Soane, who had turned white as a flower and was gazing at Skeel as though she had seen a ghost.
“Do you suppose he can be the same man your mother knew?” he whispered, dropping his arm and taking her trembling hand in a firm clasp.
“I don’t know.... I seem to feel so.... I can’t explain to you how it pierced my heart—the sound of his name.... Oh, Garry!—suppose it is true—that he is the man my mother knew—and cared for!”
Before he could speak, cocktails were served, and Adolf Gerhardt, a large, bearded, pompous man, engaged him in explosive conversation:
“Yes, this fellow Corot Mandel is producing a new spectacle-play on my lawn to-morrow evening. Your family and your guests are invited, of course. And for the dance, also——” He included Dulcie in a pompous bow, finished his cocktail with another flourish:
“You will find my friend Skeel very attractive,” he went on. “You know who he is?—the Murtagh Skeel who writes those Irish poems of the West Coast—and is not, I believe, very well received in England just now—a matter of nationalism—patriotism, eh? Why should it surprise your Britisher, eh?—if a gentleman like Murtagh Skeel displays no sympathy for England?—if a gentleman like my friend, Sir Roger Casement, prefers to live in Germany?”
Garry, under his own roof, said pleasantly:
“It wouldn’t do for us to discuss those things, I fear, Mr. Gerhardt. And your Irish lion seems to 318 be very gentle and charming. He must be fascinating to women.”
Gerhardt threw up his hands:
“Oh, Lord! They would like to eat him! Or be eaten by him! You know? It is that way always between the handsome poet and the sex. Which eats which is of no consequence, so long as they merge. Eh?” And his thunderous laughter set the empty glasses faintly ringing on the butler’s silver tray.