Often I had read in the newspapers of the splendid mediæval castle which he had bought from the Earl of Weymount, a castle perched high upon the granite rocks facing the Channel, between the Lizard and St. Ruan. He had spent a fortune in restoring it, yet he very seldom visited it. The historic place, with its wind-swept surroundings, was given over to his agent at Truro and to a caretaker.
As a matter of fact, I had once seen it while on a summer tour in Cornwall five years before, a great square keep with four towers, storm-worn and forbidding—one of the most perfect specimens of the mediæval castles in England. I had been told by the man who drove the hired car about its history, how in the early fourteenth century it had been the home of William Auberville, a favourite of Edward II. From the Aubervilles the old fortress had passed a century later into the Weymount family, and had been their ancestral home for centuries.
I chanced to mention that I had seen the castle, whereupon the millionaire smiled, and remarked:
“I fear that I’ve not been there lately. I am so very seldom in England nowadays. Besides, the old place is so cold and gloomy. It is draughty even on a summer’s day. My wife liked it when we were married—liked it until somebody told her of a family legend, how Hugh de Weymount, in the fifteenth century, walled up his wife in the north tower and left her to starve to death. Ever since she heard that story she has hated the old place. But,” he added with a hard laugh, “it is most probably not true, and if the gallant knight actually did such a thing, perhaps, after all, the lady deserved it!”
My friend certainly seemed soured against the opposite sex. And surely he had just cause to be if his wife, in order to spite him, had deliberately lost the heir, little Oswald De Gex, in Westbourne Grove.
It was a strange thing that the heir of one of the wealthiest men in Britain should have been abandoned in Bayswater. As a bachelor, I wondered as to the state of mind of the mother—a mother who could take out her child on a winter’s night, without hat or coat, and deliberately cast him adrift just to annoy her husband.
But the gentler sex in these days of drugs and dancing are, it must be admitted, strangely abnormal. Women with crazes abound everywhere. That women are emancipated from the almost Oriental thraldom in which they lived in the days of Victoria the Good is a bright sign of our times—the times of discovery, refinement, and mutual happiness of all classes. But certain circles—those circles wherein women take drugs to enable them to dance the better, circles where opium is smoked, and where morals do not count, where religion is scoffed at and relegated to the limbo of an out-of-date fiction, and where only the possessor of money counts, there is a strange and mysterious phase of Society indescribable by the pen. Only those who know of them by personal experience—the experience of “fast living”—can understand it. And even the man-about-town stands aghast at the ultra-modern crazes.
As we sat chatting in that quiet comfortable room, I confess that I became rather fascinated by my host. Perhaps he was a trifle too cynical at times, but his matrimonial trouble no doubt accounted for it.
Suddenly he rose and stretched himself rather wearily, I thought. The thin, delicate hand which held his cigar was long and tapering, and upon his finger was an antique Florentine ring in the form of a small emerald moth. I particularly noticed it as of very unusual pattern. I recollected seeing one of the same design in the Louvre Museum in Paris several years before.