As the low sun fell beneath the horizon verge, he watched the golden wavelet and the crimson sky mingle in one supreme colour study. He heard the night wind come moaning up from misty unknown seas of the farthest South, where the hungry billow lay hushed to rest in eternal ice-fields, where dwelt the mystery and dread of polar wastes.
Then, with the darkening eve, the pageant glided into the vestibule of night and Mr. Stamford somewhat hastily arose, bethinking himself of the dining hour at Chatsworth House. He had not overmuch time to spare, but a few minutes before the appointed hour his cab deposited him beside the Pompeian mosaic which composed the floor of the portico. A wide, cool hall, gay with encaustic tiles, received him, thence to be ushered by the accurately-costumed footman into the drawing-room, already fairly astir with the expected company.
He was not an unfamiliar guest, but his present temper inclined him to consider more closely the curious inequalities of life—the various modes in which persons, not widely differing in tastes and aspirations, are socially encircled. What a contrast was there between the abounding luxury here heaped up, pressed down and running over, and the homely surroundings of his own home, from which nevertheless the danger of departure had well-nigh driven him mad. The parquet floors, the glittering treasures of the overmantels, the lounges, the dado, the friezes, the rare china, the plaques, the antique and the modern collections, each a study, the cost of which would have gone nigh to buy halt Windāhgil.
When the hostess was informed by the imposing butler that dinner was served, and the guests filed into the dining-room, Mr. Stamford was nearly as much astonished by the magnificence of the repast and the concomitants thereof as if he had for the first time in his life beheld such splendours. In earlier days, now almost forgotten, such repasts had been to him sufficiently familiar. But these latter seasons of drought and despair had wholly, or in great part, excluded all thought of the pomps and vanities of life. So he smiled to himself, as he took the arm of Miss Crewit the passée society damsel to whom, by the fiat of Mrs. Grandison, he had been allotted, to find that his first thought was of startled surprise—his second of the habitudes which came to him as by second nature, and a conviction that he must have witnessed such presentments in a former state of existence.
All was very splendid, beyond denial. What was otherwise was æsthetically rare and almost beyond price. Antique carved furniture, mediæval royal relics, a sideboard which looked like an Egyptian sarcophagus, contrasted effectively with the massiveness of the plate, the glory of the glass, the triumph of the matchless Sèvres dinner-service. In perfect keeping was the quiet assiduity of the attendants, the quality of the iced wines, the perfection and finish of the whole entertainment.
“Rather a contrast to the tea-table at Windāhgil!” Harold Stamford said to himself; “not but what I should have been able to do things like this if I could have held on to those Kilbride blocks for another year. Only another year!” and he sighed involuntarily. “It is very fine in its way, though I should be sorry to have to go through this ordeal every evening. Grandison doesn’t look too happy making conversation with that deaf old dowager on his right. He was brighter looking in the old working-time, when he used to drop in at Din Din, where we had a glass of whisky before bedtime with a smoke and a good talk afterwards. Bob certainly read more or less then. He begins to look puffy too; he doesn’t see much of the library now, I’m afraid, except to snore in it.”
Here his fair neighbour, who had finished her soup and sipped her sherry, began to hint an assertion of social rights.
“Don’t you think dear Josie looks a little pale and thin, though she is exquisitely dressed as usual? But I always say no girls can stand the ceaseless excitement, the wild racketing of a Sydney season. Can they, now?”
“To my eye she looks very nice, pale if you like; but you don’t expect roses and lilies with the thermometer at 80° for half the year, except when it’s at 100°.”