I looked at him, who had so suddenly, yet so unaffectedly, made almost an intimate of me in the brief hour of acquaintance, tried to appraise the pent brows and the fugitive, almost wistful eyes of Gilbert Maryvale, the “complete man of business.” Those eyes, what were they seeking, or what had they discovered? They saw deeps, I knew, soundings surely unsuspected by these more or less ordinary people, by that old vulture with white plumage, Ludlow—or Belvoir the nonentity—or, certainly, this fancy man Charlton Oxford—or our unimaginative host, Crofts Pendleton—or Sean Cosgrove himself, who from Maryvale’s account must represent the quintessence of insurgency and holy tradition.
These “ordinary people,” I had called them. But were they, any of them, ordinary? My total impression of that company at the Bidding Feast had become one of masks and shadows. Such obvious contradiction as seemed to exist in the case of Maryvale and such duplicity as Ludlow’s might have their subtler likenesses in everyone. Mrs. Belvoir, with her melodious voice, might be a volcano which had never gone up in flame and ruin; this dapper Charlton Oxford might be a leading light of the Society for the Cherishing of Atheism. Crofts Pendleton had assured me that their air of studious interest while rapt in the complexities of cards was a dissembling of fear, but I wondered if it might not be a dissembling of something else as well, something which I could not then grasp intuitively. But I felt its existence, just as a man in a pitch-dark room may be, they say, aware of another presence.
Maryvale, catching me look first at him, then at the absorbed contestants, drew a mistaken deduction.
“No, Mr. Bannerlee, no sign of any of them wanting to give me my place back again. There’s a riveting fascination in cards if you’re keyed right.” I believe he looked a bit ashamed of his cross-bred metaphor. “One of the many forms in which chance plays pranks upon us. All, all thralled.”
“Some more and some less, however.”
“Oh, of course, but my point was that no one escapes the lure. Even the unlikeliest—”
“Mr. Cosgrove, that would be, I have—”
“I think not, I really am sure not. Oh, no.”
“What? You don’t mean his Lordship?”
Maryvale took his pipe in his hand, smiling, waved it. “You do not know us, Mr. Bannerlee. We are really quite a surprising company, we friends of Cosgrove, and his, er, enemies. Now who, beside the respected Mr. Charlton Oxford here, seems to you to personify most thoroughly the spirit of conformity, the one cut out most neatly for a player of auction bridge?”