Mrs. Beverley, who, on account of her reckless expenditure, had been nicknamed “The Wild Widow” by a certain set in Society, had gone up to Perthshire to join a gay house-party at a shooting lodge near Crieff, leaving Sylvia at home at Upper Brook Street.
After the girl there was dangling a Peer of the Realm, twice her age, in the person of Viscount Hendlewycke, a penniless man, whose family tree ran back to the days of Richard Cœur de Lion, and who, in his youth, had been distinguished by his two appearances in the Divorce Court as co-respondent.
Hendlewycke, with his bald head and his pretence to golf, was the best fish that Mrs. Beverley had captured as the prospective husband of Sylvia. Hendlewycke Castle, near Alnwick, in Northumberland, was a magnificent old place, now let by the Viscount’s trustee in Bankruptcy to a Lancashire cotton-waste dealer who aspired to a baronetcy, and Mrs. Beverley, with her acuteness and her wealth, saw that she could easily reinstate “Roddy,” as he was known in society, providing he made Sylvia Lady Hendlewycke.
Such an event would be the crowning of her great social ambitions in London.
Sylvia, however, was not blind. Neither was Geoffrey Falconer. Geoffrey had met “Roddy” several times. In him the young man found a degenerate roué, who, having run through his fortune, had also so lost his self-respect that he would borrow a “fiver” from all and sundry, and in most cases forget to pay it back. Of club and hotel servants he had been driven to borrow money, and to a dozen butlers in country houses he was indebted for “just a couple of quid for my railway fare. I’ll send it back to you when I get up to town.”
To men at White’s, the Wellington, Wells’, the Devonshire, and Boodles, “Roddy” Hendlewycke was known as “a bad egg.” Why “The Wild Widow” from Argentina had taken him under her wing, nobody could imagine—except, of course, she wanted an old title for her daughter.
Sylvia was compelled to tolerate him in order not openly to offend her mother, but she was heartily sick of him, and was seen as little as possible in his company. With Geoffrey she was perfectly frank, and they entirely understood each other. Therefore, it was not at all surprising that one day, her mother being absent, she suggested to the young man that he should drive her out for the day in her mother’s big cream-coloured Rolls-Royce.
The suggestion was at once adopted, and on the Saturday morning the pair left London for a day’s outing.
The car had scarcely left the garage at the rear of South Audley Street, where, with others belonging to people in the neighbourhood, it was kept, when a well-dressed man of about forty entered the yard and approaching the man in charge, exclaimed:
“I see Mrs. Beverley’s Royce has just gone out. Did you get to know what I want?”