“Come, Jack. Simpson of the Exchange must have been waiting an hour for you. My son is like King John, gentlemen—he has lost bag and baggage to the sea.”
They parted with ironical smiles, my lord spreading himself like an Indian in full sail.
“Who the devil may Simpson be?” asked the son, bluntly.
His father frowned.
“My recommendation, sir.” And in a lower voice: “The first tailor in the kingdom, you booby; the one reputation that might carry shot into those gentlemen’s hulls. Such is the world, sir, that you can be put in countenance by uttering the name of your tailor.”
Concerning his adventures, John Gore spoke with the grim reserve of a man who had learned that the least impressive thing in this world is to boast. He had lost his ship and seen the walls of an African prison, an ironical climax to a seventeenth-century Odyssey. More from incidental allusions than from any coherent confession, his father learned that he had touched even Japan and far Cathay, his knight-errantry of the sea carrying him into more than one valiant skirmish. An unhappy whim had lured him, when homeward-bound, into the blue sea of the Phœnicians and the Greeks, there to be pounced upon by a squadron of African rovers. They had carried his decks by boarding after a five hours’ fight.
My lord listened with an air of fatherly condescension before reverting to the eternal topic of clothes.
“I must turn you loose in my wardrobe, Jack, my man. You can contrive a makeshift for a week or two. We must have Simpson in for you to-morrow.”
His manner was semijocular and genial, as though this man of many oceans were still a boy poling a punt on an ancestral fish-pond. My lord had never travelled, save into France and Holland, and the wild by-ways of the world had no significance for him. As a courtier and an aristocrat he was a complete and perfect figure, and the life of a gentleman about court had given him the grandiose attitude of one who had turned the last page of worldly philosophy. He had said what he pleased for many years to the great majority of people with whom he had come in contact. His “air” itself suggested the majestic finality of experience.
They supped together in the house of St. James’s Street, my lord asking questions in a perfunctory fashion, often interrupting the replies by irrelevant digressions and displaying the careless contempt of the egotist for those superfluous subjects of which he condescended to be ignorant. It appeared to the son that the father was preoccupied by other matters. It was only when they came to the discussion of certain questions concerning property that my lord showed some of the acumen of the master of the many tenants.