Part 10

"Oh, stuff--you are in love with Iris, my boy," he suddenly threw at me. "I've acquired a taste for plain-speaking, you see," he added as I stared at him.

"What you needed was a touch of decency," I could only suggest.

"You only say that because you think you have a reputation to keep up," he said wearily. "Why on earth shouldn't you be in love with Iris if you want to be? I am."

Verily, Red Antony had changed in two years! It was never his way before to tell the truth about himself. And now ... or was it, my confusion asked, just a fancy on his part, born that moment of a desire to disturb me. His vanity had always inclined him to disturb and startle, whether by a lie or by a truth. And one is always confounded by the sudden froth of a fool's mind.

"Anyway, it's the sort of thing one keeps to oneself," I said,--lamely, I suppose. He had so much of an advantage over one in any unseemly discussion.

"Remarkable amount of good that seems to have done you," he quizzed me, mildly. But he seemed to be taking as little heed of me as what he said to me, his attention was all for the windows of the ballroom. There was something pitiable about the way his eyes followed the scene from our vantage, as any poor alien might bitterly watch the revelries of a strange country.

"I heard this afternoon," he said, "that there was a party here to-night--and when I saw you on Piccadilly I knew where you must be going, so I suddenly thought I'd come too. Just to have a look at my betters enjoying themselves, you know.

"If you were a human being instead of a gentleman," he said steadily, "you'd be telling a man something. You'd tell him, for instance, if the marriage is a success, and if Iris is happy, and what her recreations are, and so on. Wouldn't you now?"

"Oh, Antony, what a dolt you are!" I told him. "If you'd only approach a man properly, without any of that bluff and bluster that so gets on one's nerves, one might tell you quite a lot."

In spite of that, however--"that candour peculiar to habitual liars who read novels"--I was thinking very hard about what exactly I would tell him about Iris, for Antony evoked the truth as little as he indulged in it.

"Of course the marriage is a success," I said. "And as to Iris being happy I've never seen any reason to doubt it."

"So long as she's got health, beauty, riches, sort of thing, eh!" he added with a laugh. "I just wondered, that's all. Mexico is the devil of a country for wondering in...."

I looked at my watch and saw that it was nearly three. The ballroom was deserted, and I could imagine the crowd in the supper-room.... I would make some excuse to Iris to-morrow, I thought, and suggested to Antony that we might have a last drink at my flat, so that he could tell me some of his news.

The decanter was empty and the night done when at last Antony left me--having told me many amusing tales of his experiences in Mexico and the West, in which of course he was always the first mover and main _motif_; and that he had come back to England with many good ideas of how to make certain money, if he could only find the capital. "We must talk seriously about all that one of these days, Ronnie," said he.

As a matter of fact, Antony's frequent ideas for making fortunes--out of the mugs, of course--weren't quite the silly vapourings of the usual waster, for he had a strain of financial genius which, if he could but have concentrated on anything, might long ago have made him a rich man. And so now I was less sceptical about his ability than about his seriousness.

"And is brother Roger as rich as he was?" he had asked me.

"Well, he seems to manage very well. But one never really knows about Roger," I said. "There's always rumours, of course, that he's stacked money on a horse, an oil well, or a silver mine; but he never shows any excitement about it."

"That," said Antony, "is because he's lucky. Plucky too, but mainly lucky." ...

"But about you--how on earth are you going to live? and at the Carlton?"

"For a wonder they dealt me some good cards now and then," he vaguely explained, with a laugh. "And when that's gone--well, I must make some more, that's all, Ronnie. And, bless your heart, there's always you to lend a man a fiver, so I won't starve."

I was not surprised when Antony, with his wonted casual neglect of such things, did not turn up to lunch the next day. But I was surprised to hear why--from Iris, later in the afternoon.

"And so that's why you didn't come to the party last night," she accused me as she came in.

She had been bewildered that morning by an unfamiliar voice on the telephone, but of course he had not needed to stress the fact that he was a "relation by marriage" before she had guessed who he was; and had lunched with him at Kettner's. And she was in one of those matter-of-fact moods which made it difficult to discover if she was very pleased or not by Antony's re-appearance.

"He was very nice," she said, "and full of a thousand and odd things to say, and some of them very odd indeed. Like a boy back home for the holidays, he seems...."

"The sort of boy some one I know by sight wouldn't like to meet again on a dark night in a bad temper," I threw in, reminiscently.

"My dear, you are getting very difficult!" she protested. "And you weren't very nice to poor Antony last night, maybe, for he said he had found you a trifle suspicious."

"I suspicious! Why, the man's full of it, he throws the stuff about like ink--he's suspicious even of me, the only friend he's got!"

"You had better glower at him not at me, Ronnie. And anyway, he's quite changed now, you will soon not be able to see him for tea-parties and the like! There's two lots of people in the world, he said, those who take tea and those who don't; you can either have your headache from boredom or from drink--and Antony is now going to try the first kind."

And as I stared rather satirically at her, Iris suddenly sat up in her chair and became very serious. "It's quite true, Ronnie--and if you're the man you've led me to believe you are, you will take a hand and help. The poor man realises he has made a horrible mess of his life, and he realises that it hasn't been worth it. He's tired of wandering, and he's tired of being an outsider...."

"You don't mean to tell me he said that!"

"Not in those very words," she admitted, "but he was very sweet and pathetic, and I think he might be given a chance...."

"A chance at what?" I asked bluntly.

"Well, whatever it is men are given a chance about. Don't, please, be thick-headed, Ronnie. I suppose he wants to get back."

"What, into the divorce court again!"

Iris jumped up from her chair, and there was no smile on the face she turned to me.

"I think you are being horrible about him, perfectly beastly. And you say you are a friend of his!..."

"Iris, for the Lord's sake don't let us get dramatic about Antony--and we can't do it half so well as he can, anyway." And as she turned away with that little grimace of contempt that she reserved for peculiarly tiresome people, I got up from my chair the better to defend myself. And I was getting very hot and bothered about the whole thing, too. "Don't you see that it's exactly because I'm a friend of his and know him pretty well that I know all this 'getting back' talk is simply stuff?" I put to her. "My dear, I've been 'sympathetic' about Antony for years, but it's never done him or myself any good--simply because there's never one circumstance in life when he will give up his vanities and bravadoes, he's so full of silly contempt that he will never even compromise. It's not possible to help a man who won't help himself...."

"The one after that in my copy-book was 'every cloud has a silver lining,'" Iris said dangerously.

"You are being unfair about Antony," she said. "You aren't allowing for the least change in him since he went away. And you are judging him entirely by his old weaknesses, without giving him any credit for new thoughts and--and longings...." I couldn't help grimly thinking of the quickly emptied decanter the night before, but I didn't interrupt. Iris is following a theory, I thought, and she won't find herself out until she has made a pet-dog of it and it makes a mess of her cushions.

"It's a perfectly human desire to want to get back into the world," she said. "Not, of course, the silly dull world, but that of affairs and the like. The city, for instance...."

"Anyway, Iris, your intentions are very honourable--but what are you going to do about it? How will you begin?"

"Isn't it perfectly obvious that to begin with he and Roger must make up their wretched quarrel or whatever it is?" she rather impatiently put to me. "I've always thought it absurd and childish, this civil war kind of thing, but now I think it's horrible too--the rich brother not even allowing the poor one into his house! Like silly schoolboys playing a cruel game...." she added desperately.

I laughed at that, but insincerely.

"Surely you know your husband and his brother well enough to know that neither of them will ever do what they don't want to do! Really, my dear, it will be much better for every one, but mainly you, not to interfere between them....

"It's a silly idea, anyway," I added, "because even if Roger consented, which isn't probable, Antony would see him to blazes before he'd enter his house. I've tried 'em both, you know."

It was a little perturbing to have Iris pat my shoulder on that mockingly, and say: "There, there, everything will be all right--for who but Antony himself suggested it to me at lunch time?"

And she went on, my mind puzzled with this hard fact--Antony had told Iris that he wanted to make friends with Roger! Antony, the most obstinate braggart in the world!

"I chanced the subject, of course," Iris was saying, "and Antony agreed that it was the silliest thing in a silly life, and that he would like to put it right.... Surely they can't still be going on about that silly schoolboy quarrel you once told me about!"

"Oh, the quarrel! the quarrel was nothing, just a lid to the thing. The trivialest thing for a blaze of temper that I ever saw. But they must have hated each other for years."

She put her hands to her ears in mockery.

"Oh, dear! You're as bad and silly and sinister as they are! I'm terribly disappointed in you as a man of wise counsel, Ronnie. Grown up men don't go on hating each other for ever and ever, simply because they are made different--"

"Or simply because they are made the same," I broke in.

"Oh, chicken-food!" Iris rudely said. "Anyway, I'm going to speak to Roger about it...."

"Well," said I, "he won't speak to you about it. He will just be silent, and let you go on speaking--and when you've finished you can begin again." I got that gibe in just in time, as between the door-mat and the door, so to speak....

And I judged that it must have been very much as I said, for when I saw Iris again she was not even decently communicative about it, so that I had impatiently to accuse her of being the kind of woman who would liefer not mention her failures. But she said she hadn't failed, "and anyway the word 'failure' seems rather portentous about so childish a matter.

"He was like a blank wall," she explained. "Or rather not a blank one, for he's never quite that. And, of course, his sort of silence made me lose my head as usual, so that I might just as well have been prattling about the cultivation of sweet potatoes as about poor Antony, for all the good I did. And in the end he merely said he would see about it, or words to that effect."

"Or no effect," I amended, finally.

But she did not tell me till much later that Roger had listened to her speech about Antony, an extremely unusual subject between them, with such a fine show of interest as he didn't generally lend to what she said; so that she had thought the thing was going on splendidly until, when she had finished, he had smiled, and murmured:--

"I wonder what other reason there could possibly be for Antony's wanting to make it up except that we are both acquainted with my wife...."

VI

So the matter dropped from my mind, except that I now and then gave a thought to Antony's queer idea, how and why on earth he had come to humble himself so--for that was the way the man would look at it. But I could not discover a hint of his possible motive until some days later; when, having asked Iris what he was about, for he hadn't come near me since that night of his arrival (obviously because he had no present use for me), she said he seemed to be dashing about the City seeing people, and, she hoped, profitably: "For I never see him but he has a pound or more registered on his taxi. But I daren't lecture him in case he loses his dash, and economises by not going to the City at all. For I think," she said with a hard look at me, "there's some good to come out of Antony yet."

So that was it, then--Antony actually was taking something seriously for once! He really had brought back money schemes, big schemes of course, needing substantial backing, for like every other spendthrift he could only think in millions--and that was why he had suddenly found a use for Roger, the clever boy of the family!

But I dared not tell Iris my idea of Antony's purpose in making up the quarrel, for she was already surprised and displeased enough by what she thought my "harsh" attitude about him. "I never knew you to be so wretchedly biased," she had been surprised into saying; and so she wouldn't now give much credence to my psychologising of Antony--who was cunning enough to have realised, maybe from something she had let drop, that I was in no mood to be again used by him, and therefore did not come near me.

It was only a few days after Iris had told me of his costly vagabondage about the City that she informed me, ever so casually, that Roger was going to give a "Nigel Poole" dinner-party on the Friday night. She said it so casually that I thought I hadn't heard aright.

"A _what_ party?"

"Oh, come, Ronnie! you know very well that Roger has given a dinner-party on this particular Friday of every year in honour of Sir Nigel, the founder of the house of Poole--"

"I know all about old Nigel, and that's a deal too much," I broke in. "But would you tell me where Roger has kept this annual dinner hidden, for I've never heard of it in all the years I've known him?"

"That's because of the life you lead," she pointed out. "You are too recluse, too celibate, too oblivious of the banal festivities of more frivolous but more human people. And I might add--"

"You might add, my dear, what this dinner is about and what the deuce Sir Nigel Poole, Bart., and bankrupt, has to do with it?"

"Ronnie, you mustn't be rude about my husband's family--you know very well that they go to all the best Hunt Balls and that all-their-people-are-Service-people. And as for the dinner, why! it's about nothing in particular--what are dinners ever about except a table? Poor old Nigel Poole is just a kind of plausible excuse to dress ourselves up in his period and kick our heels up a bit. The only thing that won't be eighteenth century will be the champagne, unless its corked--and, of course, you, if you are going to pull a face like that about it.

"This very moment," she said, "we will go to Clarkson's, where we will fit you up with a very fine line in gents' eighteenth-century suitings. And a wig, Ronnie, will lend an intriguing appearance to what I might call--well, you know, a rather discouraging scarcity...."

As it turned out on the Friday night, it was a very pretty spectacle. We were a square party of men and women about the long oak table, five down each side with our host and hostess at each end; and not one of us but was decked in the finery of _circa_ 1780, and with a great deal more care and less anachronism than is usually remarkable in such masquerades. We men silked, breeched, sheathed, ruffled, and bewigged; and the women with their laces and powdered hair looking to my mind vastly improved upon their reality. Even Iris, her tawny hair whitened to the convention and extravagantly retreating from her ears and forehead to a pinnacle (how in the world she arranged it so I could never guess!), her little, exquisite features thus quite prominently lovely, looked less wild and more worldly, as of this world and not another; altogether of a more demure elegance--an expression which, as Roger said in brazenly asking us to admire his lady's looks, became her very prettily.

We were all, it must be understood, talking the speech of the period, as far as each could remember its conceits and mannerisms. Of course we all mixed things up a good deal--except Roger, who had insisted on it from our entrance, and was much more adept at the foolery of the verbiage. He was in the high good spirits that such make believe generally put him in; and was always seen in his best light as a host, as lavish of good humour as of wine, both, of course, flowing the more readily as the hour increased. And now his consistent and amusing use of his ancestor's way of speech added a great deal to the fun--in which Iris was sharing no less than I. Indeed, she has often told me since that she could have lived smoothly enough with Roger if all life were a masquerade--for Roger, it seemed, was a man who would take to fineness as a _beau geste_, where he would see you to the deuce in reality.

Our host, in all his finery of black silks and white laces, was sitting at the end of the table facing the window; and on the oak panelled wall on his right, as it were dominating us all, was the only portrait in the room, a full-length of the host of our fancy: Sir Nigel, the first baronet, by Gainsborough--a very gallant but misguided gentleman, as Roger said of him. Misguided indeed, if one can judge by what mention of him can be found in the more obscure annals of his time (for Sir Nigel's fame among his contemporaries was not such as to ensure its perpetuity by even the least responsible historian); a rake who turned his coat this way and that to suit his interests just a little too outrageously even for that period, won and as discreditably lost a fortune or two; who was adjudged a sot and bankrupt, and then half confounded opinion by certain strategies of war which had nearly won us back our American colonies but for highly-placed incompetence; and in the end had surely won a higher prize than a paltry baronetcy but for his incurable passion for double-dealing, in which, as the years and the bottle took him, his wits seem to have lost much of their dexterity. His figure stared down at us now, stout, flushed, and rather blatant, and genial enough but for something dour about the cast of his eyes; and with very little such damned nonsense as cultivation about him, but a great deal of jaw.... He had come, I thought, by a rare honour: such a one as is not often lavished on many worthier shades--and, as I looked round at the glasses and the flushed faces of the company, an honour done in no other way than that which Sir Nigel himself would have chosen.

Much was said that amused us that night which, if repeated now outside that setting, would naturally make but a very pale and artificial show.... It was past eleven and we were still about the table, when I saw Roger almost furtively raise a glass to the portrait and carry it to his lips; but as he did so he caught my eye on him, and at once set the glass down untouched.

"I stand rebuked, Ronnie. It would become us all to share this toast--to Sir Nigel!" And with that he jumped up in his place and held his glass up.

"_Caballeros!_" he gravely addressed us. "There is but one thing to-night that would surprise our host on the wall and in our hearts, but would add vastly to his pleasure at our entertainment--that the ladies will toast him with us! But let it be as you sit, and in silence--Silence, the only God Sir Nigel never worshipped!" We drank.

"Nay, Sir Roger, you do me a great injustice! I was perforce often silent--and close on this very hour."

We all slewed round at the voice from the window.

"My God! The very man!" cried young Riverdale.

And it was--Sir Nigel as ever he lived, or rather, was painted! Heady with wine though we may have been--the very man himself surely stood there! The likeness was scrupulous, the resemblance of face alone, as he stood surveying us from the open window with his hat carried as in the portrait, was startling, ludicrous. The colour of the clothes, the very feather in the hat, were as though taken from the oil of the portrait; not one thing was amiss in the disguise, not even that well-dined look of Sir Nigel's time!

A full half-minute must have passed in startled, amused silence, while we all stared at the apparition, and he handsomely stared back at us--we all except Iris who, I saw from the corner of my eye, had not turned in her chair at the voice, but was looking straightly in front of her, a little crooked smile about her mouth. The reason for the "Nigel Poole" party, which she had suggested to Roger, was now well out! And, still in that half-minute, I twisted my head to take stock of our host standing at his end of the table--and, I don't quite know why, was amazed to see that he was not looking at Antony but at his wife, thoughtfully, ever so thoughtfully, just for a second....

Antony's smile was mainly to Roger, and after the first second he was wonderfully answered. Roger let drop his empty glass so that it shattered on the table, then strode across the room towards his brother, both hands outstretched to meet him.

"Welcome to my house, Sir Nigel," said he, and the brothers very handsomely took each the other's hands.

[I never thought to see two grown men enjoy tomfoolery so seriously as did these two brothers from this moment on.]

"You do me a great honour," continued Roger as he led his brother towards us, "but you also put me to a degree of shame--"

"Why, sir, I never yet shamed any man by my presence in his house!" And the blustering cry, one knew, might as well have been Sir Nigel's as Red Antony's.

"I meant no such reflection," Roger protested smoothly. "I am merely shamed that you did not trust my hospitality some hours before, so that you could have been of our company over dinner."

"I protest, Sir Roger, that you make me too welcome! But I assure you we keep a very good table in the place I come from--" (And it was obvious enough that Antony had dined as extremely well as the heartiest of us.)

"And that, had I known of this honour, I would have asked one the less--for you, Sir Nigel, will now make the thirteenth about the table."

(I'll bet Iris never thought of that, though!)

"Egad, I play in luck to-night, then! For I'd have you know, Sir, that thirteen is a number much favoured in the place I've just left."

By now they had reached Roger's end of the table and stood there, the objects of our very amused attention. And a fine pair of men they made, those brothers!

"I'll present the company to you--" Roger was saying when Antony took him quickly up.

"Nay, nay--let them be! I dare swear that none will be so abashed as not to reveal themselves aptly enough!" And at that he sent a great laugh rocking down the table, a magnificent laugh, an epic laugh, explaining himself and us, waving and rocking among the multitude of glasses--which, to my heated fancy, seemed to clink as at the hail of one they knew to be their master.

Only Roger among us did not laugh, nor smile but abstractedly. He showed only concern as to his last guest's entertainment; and was now directing an amused servant to place a chair beside his own at the table, when Antony turned from us to him with the amiable inquiry: "And the fairest of all, that most brilliant ornament in a brilliant room--I take to be your lady, Sir Roger?"