“Is it possible?”
“You are a searcher for the buried lore of antiquity. Is not that so?” he asked with a certain lofty seriousness.
“I have done a little research among the British saints, but I hardly expected my labours—”
“They honour you,” asserted Cosgrove, but my smile of deprecation and anything further he was about to say were cut off by Pendleton, who relentlessly kept me on the go, and I faced the next guest.
Two men had been partners at this table; I now found myself staring at a waxed moustache, and a very elegantly tapered and needle-pointed specimen of craftsmanship it was. The rest of his face was nothing remarkable, only a little swarthy-purplish with brandy, and a trifle stary-eyed. I was not prepossessed with this gentleman, judging him to be the sort who shows his cleverness to an assorted public in quips to barmaids and dance-hall musicians. His name, “Mr. Charlton Oxford,” struck me as strainedly aristocratic, though no fault of his.
“Chawmed.”
“Aesthete,” flashed through my brain, but a query-note raised itself after the word. “Just plain fool,” I concluded.
“You are being bandied about, aren’t you?”
I was surprised by the fluence and ease of his voice, and his lightening smile, the big darkish man’s who had been dealing the cards so ritualistically a few minutes before. He lifted his weight as if it were that of a bubble, and I saw that indeed he was big, bearing his torso on stanchion-legs. His mass must have been twice mine.
“Gilbert Maryvale, our complete man of business—iron-castings,” said Pendleton, with evident gladness that his tale was over.