‘Is Rubicon Bezique still played in England? There was a mania for it at that time. The floor of Keeb’s Palladio-Gargantuan hall was dotted with innumerable little tables. I didn’t know how to play. My hostess told me I must “come and amuse the dear old Duke and Duchess of Mull,” and led me to a remote sofa on which an old gentleman had just sat down beside an old lady. They looked at me with a dim kind interest. My hostess had set me and left me on a small gilt chair in front of them. Before going she had conveyed to them loudly—one of them was very deaf—that I was “the famous writer.” It was a long time before they understood that I was not a political writer. The Duke asked me, after a troubled pause, whether I had known “old Mr. Abraham Hayward.” The Duchess said I was too young to have known Mr. Hayward, and asked if I knew her “clever friend Mr. Mallock.” I said I had just been reading Mr. Mallock’s new novel. I heard myself shouting a confused precis of the plot. The place where we were sitting was near the foot of the great marble staircase. I said how beautiful the staircase was. The Duchess of Mull said she had never cared very much for that staircase. The Duke, after a pause, said he had “often heard old Mr. Abraham Hayward hold a whole dinner table.” There were long and frequent pauses—between which I heard myself talking loudly, frantically, sinking lower and lower in the esteem of my small audience. I felt like a man drowning under the eyes of an elderly couple who sit on the bank regretting that they can offer NO assistance. Presently the Duke looked at his watch and said to the Duchess that it was “time to be thinking of bed.”
‘They rose, as it were from the bank, and left me, so to speak, under water. I watched them as they passed slowly out of sight up the marble staircase which I had mispraised. I turned and surveyed the brilliant, silent scene presented by the card-players.
‘I wondered what old Mr. Abraham Hayward would have done in my place. Would he have just darted in among those tables and “held” them? I presumed that he would not have stolen silently away, quickly and cravenly away, up the marble staircase—as I did.
‘I don’t know which was the greater, the relief or the humiliation of finding myself in my bedroom. Perhaps the humiliation was the greater. There, on a chair, was my grand new smoking-suit, laid out for me—what a mockery! Once I had foreseen myself wearing it in the smoking-room at a late hour—the centre of a group of eminent men entranced by the brilliancy of my conversation. And now—! I was nothing but a small, dull, soup-stained, sticking-plastered, nerve-racked recluse. Nerves, yes. I assured myself that I had not seen—what I had seemed to see. All very odd, of course, and very unpleasant, but easily explained. Nerves. Excitement of coming to Keeb too much for me. A good night’s rest: that was all I needed. To-morrow I should laugh at myself.
‘I wondered that I wasn’t tired physically. There my grand new silk pyjamas were, yet I felt no desire to go to bed... none while it was still possible for me to go. The little writing-table at the foot of my bed seemed to invite me. I had brought with me in my portmanteau a sheaf of letters, letters that I had purposely left unanswered in order that I might answer them on KEEB HALL note-paper. These the footman had neatly laid beside the blotting-pad on that little writing-table at the foot of the bed. I regretted that the notepaper stacked there had no ducal coronet on it. What matter? The address sufficed. If I hadn’t yet made a good impression on the people who were staying here, I could at any rate make one on the people who weren’t. I sat down. I set to work. I wrote a prodigious number of fluent and graceful notes.
‘Some of these were to strangers who wanted my autograph. I was always delighted to send my autograph, and never perfunctory in the manner of sending it.... “Dear Madam,” I remember writing to somebody that night, “were it not that you make your request for it so charmingly, I should hesitate to send you that which rarity alone can render valuable.—Yours truly, Hilary Maltby.” I remember reading this over and wondering whether the word “render” looked rather commercial. It was in the act of wondering thus that I raised my eyes from the note-paper and saw, through the bars of the brass bedstead, the naked sole of a large human foot—saw beyond it the calf of a great leg; a nightshirt; and the face of Stephen Braxton. I did not move.
‘I thought of making a dash for the door, dashing out into the corridor, shouting at the top of my voice for help. I sat quite still.
‘What kept me to my chair was the fear that if I tried to reach the door Braxton would spring off the bed to intercept me. If I sat quite still perhaps he wouldn’t move. I felt that if he moved I should collapse utterly.
‘I watched him, and he watched me. He lay there with his body half-raised, one elbow propped on the pillow, his jaw sunk on his breast; and from under his black brows he watched me steadily.
‘No question of mere nerves now. That hope was gone. No mere optical delusion, this abiding presence. Here Braxton was. He and I were together in the bright, silent room. How long would he be content to watch me?