‘Was this in the house?’ he inquired presently.
‘No,’ said Lawford; ‘it was lent to me by a friend—Herbert.’
‘H’m! don’t know him. Anyhow, precious poor stuff this is. This Sabathier, whoever he is, seems to be a kind of clap-trap eighteenth-century adventurer who thought the world would be better off, apparently, for a long account of all his sentimental amours. Rousseau, with a touch of Don Quixote in his composition, and an echo of that prince of bogies, Poe! What, in the name of wonder, induced you to fix on this for your holiday reading?’
‘Sabathier’s alive, isn’t he?’
‘I never said he wasn’t. He’s a good deal too much alive for my old wits, with his Mam’selle This and Madame the Other; interesting enough, perhaps, for the professional literary nose with a taste for patchouli.’
‘Yet I suppose even that is not a very rare character?’ Mr Bethany peered up from the dingy book at his ingenuous questioner. ‘I should say decidedly that the fellow was a very rare character, so long as by rare you don’t mean good. It’s one of the dullest stupidities of the present day, my dear fellow, to dote on a man simply because he’s different from the rest of us. Once a man strays out of the common herd, he’s more likely to meet wolves in the thickets than angels. From what I can gather in just these few pages this Sabathier appears to have been an amorous, adventurous, emotional Frenchman, who went to the dogs as easily and as rapidly as his own nature and his period allowed. And I should say, Lawford, that he made precious bad reading for a poor old troubled hermit like yourself at the present moment.’
‘There’s a portrait of him a few pages back.’
Mr Bethany, with some little impatience, turned back to the engraving. ‘“Nicholas de Sabathier,”’s he muttered. ‘“De,” indeed!’ He poked in at the foxy print with narrowed eyes. ‘I don’t deny it’s a striking, even perhaps, a rather taking face. I don’t deny it.’ He gazed on with an even more acute concentration, and looked up sharply. ‘Look here, Lawford, what in the name of wonder—what trick are you playing on me now?’
‘Trick?’ said Lawford; and the world fell with the tiniest plash in the silence, like a vivid little float upon the surface of a shadowy pool.
The old face flushed. ‘What conceivable bearing, I say, has this dead and gone old roué on us now?’