“Quite ready, Watherston,” he replied, nervously and briskly.
“Sorry to have missed seeing your people,” remarked the polite lad, as they went off arm-in-arm. “Perhaps some other time I may have the pleasure.”
“Perhaps!” he said.
The space of time mentioned by old Chelsfield elapsed, but he prevented himself from enjoying the content of a successful prophet by commencing rather absurdly to break up in health almost immediately after venturing upon the tolerably safe anticipation. Amongst the changes of thirty years was the fact that Chelsfield, as a name, had become better known; even the folk who flew through the main streets of London on motor omnibuses, and had to give nearly all their attention to the holding on of hats, could not evade recognition of the hoardings; the Chelsfield posters declined to be ignored. If you closed your eyes to these, you were nearly sure to encounter the name in your daily paper. If you missed it in your daily paper, it came into the letter-box, marked “Very Important.” If you dodged it there, it confronted you on your theatre programme at night. Leaving the theatre and endeavouring to forget the name, you saw it at a popular corner, being written with great deliberation in illuminated letters, as though some invisible giant had made up his mind to grasp the rudiments of education.
Henry Chelsfield himself was not insensible to the determined appeals, and, going home in his electric brougham, he counted them. Thus one evening he found a dreary gap between the Cobden statue and the Britannia, and immediately made memorandum of the circumstance in his note-book, in order that the deplorable omission might be attended to on the following day. All very well for the advertising agents to send him a box for the theatre, but these people had to be kept up to the mark.
“I can be amiable enough,” he said to the clock inside the brougham, “in private affairs, but I’m very different where money matters are concerned.”
Chelsfield might be flattering himself, or he might be telling the truth; anyhow he was a Londoner, with a Londoner’s weakness for orders for the play. That was why he had left his offices early; that was why he proposed to eat at an unusual hour; that was why, on arriving at Hampstead, he ordered the man to bring the brougham round again at half-past seven. He dined alone, with a portrait of a good-looking woman, painted by Herkomer, facing him; at her side a lad, with small eyes rather close to each other. Chelsfield lifted his glass when the two maids had left the room and said:
“Jessie!”
He did not drink a toast to the boy.
Watherston, from a house nearer the Heath, came in as Chelsfield pretended to smoke a cigarette—he had been thinking that one man in a private box would present a lonely figure to the audience; the gallery would say that he had no friends—and Watherston asked to be excused for once from joining in a game of billiards.