“Are ces messieurs going to stay for supper?” said Angélique, putting her nut-brown face in at the door. “Because, if they are, I must know in time to get ready.”
“Why, Angélique, I never knew you want more than five minutes to prepare the best omelette soufflée I ever get anywhere out of the Palais Royal!” said Sir Simon.
“Ah! monsieur mocks me,” said Angélique, who was so elated by this public recognition of her omelet talent that, if Sir Simon was not embraced by the nut-brown face on the spot, it was one of those hair-breadth escapes that our lives are full of, and we never give thanks for because we never know of them. “Persuade De Vinton and our young friend here to stop and test it, then!” exclaimed M. de la Bourbonais, holding out both hands to the admiral in his genial, impulsive way. “The garden is our salle-à-manger in this hot weather, so there is plenty of room.” There was something irresistible in the simplicity and cordiality of the offer, and the admiral was about to say he would be delighted, when Sir Simon put in his veto: “No, no, not this evening. You must come and dine with us, Bourbonais; I want you up at the house this evening. But the invitation will keep. We’ll not let Angélique off her omelette soufflée; we’ll come and attack it to-morrow, if these rovers don’t bolt, as they threaten to do.”
And so the conference was broken up, and Raymond accompanied his guests to the garden-gate, promising to follow them in half an hour.
It was a rare event for M. de la Bourbonais to dine at Dullerton Court; he disliked accepting its grand-seignior hospitality, and whenever he consented it was understood there should be nobody to meet him. “I have grown as unsocial as a bear from long habit, mon cher,” he would be sure to say every time Sir Simon bore down on him with an invitation. “I shall turn into a mollusk by-and-by. How completely we are the creatures of habit!” To which Sir Simon would invariably reply with his Johnsonian maxim: “You should struggle against that sort of thing, Bourbonais, and overcome it”; and Raymond would smile, and agree with him. He was too gentle and too thoroughbred to taunt his friend with not following it himself, which he might have done with bitter truth. Sir Simon was the slave of habits and of weaknesses that it was far more necessary to struggle against than Raymond’s harmless little foibles. There are some men who spend one-half of their lives in cheating others, and the other half in trying to cheat themselves. Sir Simon Harness was one of these. Cheating is perhaps a hard word to apply to his efforts to keep up a delusion which had grown so entirely his master that he could scarcely see where the substance ended and where the shadow began. Yet his whole life at present was a cheat. He had the reputation of being the largest land-owner and the wealthiest man in that end of the county, and he was, in reality, one of the poorest. The grand aim of his existence was to live up to this false appearance, and prevent the truth from coming out. It would be a difficult and useless undertaking to examine how far he was originally to blame for the state of active falsehood into which he and his circumstances had fallen. There is no doubt that his father was to blame in the first instance. He had been a very splendid old gentleman, Sir Alexander Harness, and had lived splendidly and died heavily in debt, leaving the estate considerably mortgaged. He had not been more than twenty years dead at the time I speak of, so that his son, in coming into possession, found himself saddled with the paternal debts, and with the confirmed extravagant habits of a lifetime. This made the sacrifices which the payment of those debts necessitated seem a matter of simple impossibility to him. The only thing to be done was to let the Court for a term of years, send away the troops of misnamed servants that encumbered the place, sell off the stud, and betake himself to the Continent and economize. Thus he would have paid off his encumbrances, and come back independent and easy in his mind. But, unluckily, strong measures of this sort did not lie at all in Sir Simon’s way. He talked about going abroad, and had some indefinite notion of “pulling in.” He did run off to Paris and other continental places very frequently; but as he travelled with a courier and a valet, and with all the expenses inseparable from those adjuncts, the excursions did not contribute much towards the desired result. Things went on at the Court in the old way; the same staff of servants was kept up; the same number of parasites who, under pretence of payment for some small debt, had lived in the Court for years, until they came to consider they had a vested life-interest in the property, were allowed to hang on. The new master of Dullerton was loath to do such a shabby thing as to turn them out; and they were sure to die off after a while. Then there was the stud, which Sir Alexander had been so proud of. It had been a terrible expense to set it up, but, being up, it was a pity to let it down; when things were going, they had a way of keeping themselves going. There had always been open house at the Court from time immemorial. In the shooting season people had come down, as a matter of course, and enjoyed the jovial hospitalities of the old squire ever since Dullerton had belonged to him. While his son was there he could not possibly break through these old habits; they were as sacred as the family traditions. By-and-by, when he saw his way to shutting up the place and going abroad, it might be managed. Meanwhile, the old debts were accumulating, and new ones were growing, and Sir Simon was beginning less than ever to see his way to setting things right. If that tough old Lady Rebecca Harness, his step-mother, would but take herself to a better world, and leave him that fifty thousand pounds that reverted to him at her demise, it would be a great mercy. But Lady Rebecca evidently was in no hurry to try whether there was any pleasanter place than this best of all possible worlds, and, in spite of her seventy years, was as hale as a woman of forty. This was a trying state of things to the light-tempered, open-handed baronet; but the greatest trial to him was the fear in which he lived of being found out. He was at heart an upright man, and it was his pride that men looked up to him as one whose character and principles were, like Cæsar’s wife, above suspicion. He had lived up to this reputation so far; but he was conscious of a growing fear that with the increase of difficulties there was stealing on him a lessening of the fine moral sense that had hitherto supported him under many temptations. His embarrassments were creating a sort of mental fog around him; he was beginning to wonder whether his theories about honesty were quite where they used to be, and whether he was not getting on the other side of the border-line between conscience and expediency. Outside it was still all fair; he was the most popular man in the county, a capital landlord—in fact, everybody’s friend but his own. The only person, except the family lawyer, who was allowed to look at the other side of the picture, was M. de la Bourbonais. Sir Simon was too sympathetic himself not to feel the need of sympathy. He must occasionally complain of his hard fate to some one, so he complained to Raymond. But Raymond, while he gave him his sincerest sympathy, was very far from realizing the extent of the troubles that called it forth. The baronet bemoaned himself in a vague manner, denouncing people and things in a general sweep every now and then; but between times he was as gay and contented as a man could be, and Raymond knew far too little of the ways of the world and of human nature to reconcile these conflicting evidences, and deduce from them the facts they represented. He could not apprehend the anomaly of a sane man, and a man of honor, behaving like a lunatic and a swindler; spending treble his income in vanity and superfluity, and for no better purpose than an empty bubble of popularity and vexation of spirit. Of late, however, he had once or twice gained a glimpse into the mystery, and it had given him a sharp pang, which Sir Simon no sooner perceived than he hastened to dispel by treating his lamentations as mere irritability of temper, assuring Raymond they meant nothing. But there was still an uneasy feeling in the latter’s mind. It was chiefly painful to him for Sir Simon’s sake, but it made him a little uncomfortable on his own account. With Raymond’s punctilious notions of integrity, the man who connived at wrong-doing, or in the remotest way participated in it, was only a degree less culpable than the actual wrong-doer; and if Sir Simon had come to the point of being hard up for a fifty-pound note to meet a pressing bill, it was very unprincipled of him to be giving dinners with Johannisberg and Tokay at twenty shillings a bottle, and very wrong of his friends to aid and abet him in such extravagance. One day Sir Simon came in with a clouded brow to unburden himself about a fellow who had the insolence to write for the seventh time, demanding the payment of his “little bill,” and, after a vehement tirade, wound up by asking Raymond to go back and dine with him. “We’ll have up a bottle of your favorite Château Margaux, and drink confusion to the duns and the speedy extermination of the race,” said the baronet. “Come and cheer a fellow up, old boy; nothing clears away the blue devils like discussing one’s worries over a good glass of claret.” Raymond fought off, first on the old plea that he hated going out, etc.; but, finding this would not do, he confessed the truth. He hinted delicately that he did not feel justified in allowing his friend to go to any expense on his account. The innocence and infantine simplicity of this avowal sent Sir Simon into such a hearty fit of laughter that Raymond felt rather ashamed of himself, and began to apologize profusely for being so stupid and having misunderstood, etc., and declared he would go and drink the bottle of Château Margaux all to himself. But after this Sir Simon was more reticent about his embarrassments; and as things went on at the Court in the old, smooth, magnificent way, M. de la Bourbonais began to think it was all right, and that his friend’s want of money must have been a mere temporary inconvenience. In fact, he began to doubt this evening whether it was not all a dream of his that Sir Simon had ever talked of being “hard up.” When he entered the noble dining-room and looked around him, it was difficult to believe otherwise. Massive silver and costly crystal sparkled and flashed under a shower of light from the antique branching chandelier; wax-lights clustered on the walls amidst solemn Rembrandt heads, and fascinating Reynoldses, and wild Salvator Rosas, and tender Claudes, and sunny Canalettos. It was not in nature that the owner of all this wealth and splendor should know what it was to be in want of money. Sir Simon, moreover, was in his element; and it would have puzzled a spectator more versed than Raymond in the complex mechanism of the human heart to believe that the brilliant host who was doing the honors of his house so delightfully had a canker gnawing at his vitals. He rattled away with the buoyant spirits of five-and-twenty; he was brimful of anecdote, and bright with repartee. He drew every one else out. This was what made him so irresistibly charming in society; it was not only that he shone himself, but he had a knack of making other people shine. He made the admiral tell stories of his seafaring life, he drew out Clide about Afghanistan, and spirited M. de la Bourbonais into a quarrel with him about the dates of the Pyramids; never flagging for a moment, never prosing, but vaulting lightly from one subject to another, and all the while leaving his guests under the impression that they were entertaining him rather than he them, and that he was admiring them a vast deal more than he admired himself. A most delightful host Sir Simon was.
“Nothing cheers a man up like the sight of an old friend! Eh, De Winton?” he exclaimed, falling back in his chair, with a thumb thrust into each waistcoat pocket, and his feet stretched out to their full length under the mahogany, the picture of luxury, hospitality, and content.
“Much you know about it!” grunted the admiral, filling his glass—“a man that never wanted to be cheered up in his life!”
Sir Simon threw back his head and laughed. It was wine to him to be rated such a good fellow by his old college chum.
They kept it up till eleven o’clock, puffing their cigars on the terrace, where the soft summer moon was shining beautifully on the fawns playing under the silver spray of the fountain.
“I’ll walk home with you, Raymond,” said Sir Simon when the chime of the stable-clock reminded the count that it was time for him to go.