Noel turned and left the room; but Edward Hawthorn stood still, with his bedroom candle poised reflectively in one hand, looking long and steadfastly with fixed eyes at his father’s and mother’s photographs before him. ‘A grand-looking old man, my father, certainly,’ he said to himself, scanning the fine broad brow and firm but tender mouth with curious attention—‘a grand-looking old man, without a doubt, there’s no denying it. But I wonder why on earth he doesn’t want me to go out to Trinidad? And a beautiful, gentle, lovable old lady, if ever there was one on this earth, my mother!’
CHAPTER II.
You wouldn’t have found two handsomer or finer young fellows on the day of the boatrace, in all London, than the two who started in the new dogcart, at ten o’clock, from the door of Harry Noel’s comfortable chambers in a quaint old house in Duke Street, St James’s. And yet they were very different in type; as widely different as it is possible for any two young men to be, both of whom were quite unmistakable and undeniable young Englishmen.
Harry Noel was heir of one of the oldest families in Lincolnshire; but his face and figure were by no means those of the typical Danes in that distinctively Danish-English county. Sir Walter, his father, was tall and fair—a bluff, honest, hard-featured Lincolnshire man; but Harry himself took rather after his mother, the famous Lady Noel, once considered the most beautiful woman of her time in London society. He was somewhat short and well knit; a very dark man, with black hair, moustache, and beard; and his face was handsome with something of a southern and fiery handsomeness, like his mother’s, reminding one at times of the purest Italian or Castilian stocks. There was undeniable pride about his upper lip and his eager flashing black eye; while his customary nonchalance and coolness of air never completely hid the hot and passionate southern temperament that underlay that false exterior of Pall Mall cynicism. A man to avoid picking a quarrel with, certainly, was Harry Noel, of the Inner Temple, and of Noel Hall, by Boston, Lincolnshire, barrister-at-law.
Edward Hawthorn, on the other hand, was tall and slight, though strongly built; a grand model of the pure Anglo-Saxon type of manhood, with straight fair hair, nearer white almost than yellow, and deep-blue eyes, that were none the less transparently true and earnest because of their intense and unmixed blueness. His face was clear-cut and delicately moulded; and the pale and singularly straw-coloured moustache, which alone was allowed to hide any part of its charming outline, did not prevent one from seeing at a glance the almost faultless Greek regularity of his perfectly calm and statuesque features. Harry Noel’s was, in short, the kind of face that women are most likely to admire: Edward Hawthorn’s was the kind that an artist would rather rejoice to paint, or that a sculptor would still more eagerly wish to model.
‘Much better to go down by the road, you know, Teddy,’ quoth Harry as they took their seats in the new dogcart. ‘All the cads in London are going down by rail, of course. The whole riff-raff of our fellow-man that you’re always talking about so sympathetically, with your absurd notions, overflows to-day from its natural reservoirs in the third class into the upper tanks of first and second. Impossible to travel on the line this morning without getting one’s self jammed and elbowed by all the tinkers and tailors, soldiers and sailors, butchers and bakers and candlestick makers in the whole of London. Enough to cure even you, I should think, of all your nonsensical rights-of-man and ideal equality business.’
‘Have you ever travelled third yourself, to see what it was really like, Harry? I have; and, for my part, I think the third-class people are generally rather kinder and more unselfish than the first or second.’
‘My dear fellow, on your recommendation I tried it last week.—But let that pass, and tell me where are you going to look for your beautiful young lady from Trinidad or Mauritius? You made her the ostensible pretext, you know, for going to the boatrace.’
‘Oh, for that I trust entirely to the chapter of accidents. She said she was going down to see the race from somebody’s lawn, facing the river; and I shall force my way along the path as far as I can get and quietly look out for her. If we see her, I mean to push boldly for an introduction to the somebody unnamed who owns the lawn. Leave the dogcart at some inn or other down, at Putney, stroll along the river casually till you see a beautiful vision of sweet nineteen or thereabout, walk in quietly as if the place belonged to you, and there you are.’
They drove on to Putney through the crowded roads, and put the dogcart up at the Coach and Horses. Then Harry and Edward took to the still more crowded bank, and began to push their way among the densely packed masses of nondescript humanity in the direction of Barnes Bridge.