II.
THE COINING OF A NICKNAME.
When it was no later than the middle of June, Adela Ferrars, having her reputation to maintain, ventured to sum up the season. It was, she said, a Ruston-cum-Violetta season. Violetta's doings and unexampled triumphs have, perhaps luckily, no place here; her dancing was higher and her songs more surpassing in another dimension than those of any performer who had hitherto won the smiles of society; and young men who are getting on in life still talk about her. Ruston's fame was less widespread, but his appearance was an undeniable fact of the year. When a man, the first five years of whose adult life have been spent on a stool in a coal merchant's office, and the second five somewhere (an absolutely vague somewhere) in Southern or Central Africa, comes before the public, offering in one closed hand a new empire, or, to avoid all exaggeration, at least a province, asking with the other opened hand for three million pounds, the public is bound to afford him the tribute of some curiosity. When he enlists in his scheme men of eminence like Mr. Foster Belford, of rank like Lord Semingham, of great financial resources like Dennison Sons & Company, he becomes one whom it is expedient to bid to dinner and examine with scrutinising enquiry. He may have a bag of gold for you; or you may enjoy the pleasure of exploding his prestige; at least, you are timely and up-to-date, and none can say that your house is a den of fogies, or yourself, in the language made to express these things (for how otherwise should they get themselves expressed?) on other than "the inner rail."
It chanced that Miss Ferrars arrived early at the Seminghams, and she talked with her host on the hearth-rug, while Lady Semingham was elaborately surveying her small but comely person in a mirror at the other end of the long room. Lord Semingham was rather short and rather stout; he hardly looked as if his ancestors had fought at Hastings—perhaps they had not, though the peerage said they had. He wore close-cut black whiskers, and the blue of his jowl witnessed a suppressed beard of great vitality. His single eye-glass reflected answering twinkles to Adela's pince-nez, and his mouth was puckered at the world's constant entertainment; men said that he found his wife alone a sufficient and inexhaustible amusement.
"The Heathers are coming," he said, "and Lady Val and Marjory, and young Haselden, and Ruston."
"Toujours Ruston," murmured Adela.
"And one or two more. What's wrong with Ruston? There is, my dear Adela, no attitude more offensive than that of indifference to what the common herd finds interesting."
"He's a fright," said Adela. "You'd spike yourself on that bristly beard of his."
"If you happened to be near enough, you mean?—a danger my sex and our national habits render remote. Bessie!"
Lady Semingham came towards them, with one last craning look at her own back as she turned. She always left the neighbourhood of a mirror with regret.
"Well?" she asked with a patient little sigh.
"Adela is abusing your friend Ruston."
"He's not my friend, Alfred. What's the matter, Adela?"
"I don't think I like him. He's hard."
"He's got a demon, you see," said Semingham. "For that matter we all have, but his is a whopper."
"Oh, what's my demon?" cried Adela. Is not oneself always the most interesting subject?
"Yours? Cleverness; He goads you into saying things one can't see the meaning of."
"Thanks! And yours?"
"Grinning—so I grin at your things, though I don't understand 'em."
"And Bessie's?"
"Oh, forgive me. Leave us a quiet home."
"And now, Mr. Ruston's?"
"His is——"
But the door opened, and the guests, all arriving in a heap, just twenty minutes late, flooded the room and drowned the topic. Another five minutes passed, and people had begun furtively to count heads and wonder whom they were waiting for, when Evan Haselden was announced. Hot on his heels came Ruston, and the party was completed.
Mr. Otto Heather took Adela Ferrars in to dinner. Her heart sank as he offered his arm. She had been heard to call him the silliest man in Europe; on the other hand, his wife, and some half-dozen people besides, thought him the cleverest in London.
"That man," he said, swallowing his soup and nodding his head towards Ruston, "personifies all the hideous tendencies of the age—its brutality, its commercialism, its selfishness, its——"
Miss Ferrars looked across the table. Ruston was seated at Lady Semingham's left hand, and she was prattling to him in her sweet indistinct little voice. Nothing in his appearance warranted Heather's outburst, unless it were a sort of alert and almost defiant readiness, smacking of a challenge to catch him napping.
"I'm not a mediævalist myself," she observed, and prepared to endure the penalty of an exposé of Heather's theories. During its progress, she peered—for her near sight was no affectation—now and again at the occasion of her sufferings. She had heard a good deal about him—something from her host, something from Harry Dennison, more from the paragraphists who had scented their prey, and gathered from the four quarters of heaven (or wherever they dwelt) upon him. She knew about the coal merchant's office, the impatient flight from it, and the rush over the seas; there were stories of real naked want, where a bed and shelter bounded for the moment all a life's aspirations. She summed him up as a buccaneer modernised; and one does not expect buccaneers to be amiable, while culture in them would be an incongruity. It was, on the whole, not very surprising, she thought, that few people liked William Roger Ruston—nor that many believed in him.
"Don't you agree with me?" asked Heather.
"Not in the least," said Adela at random.
The odds that he had been saying something foolish were very large.
"I thought you were such friends!" exclaimed Heather in surprise.
"Well, to confess, I was thinking of something else. Who do you mean?"
"Why, Mrs. Dennison. I was saying that her calm queenly manner——"
"Good gracious, Mr. Heather, don't call women 'queenly.' You're like—what is it?—a 'dime novel.'"
If this comparison were meant to relieve her from the genius' conversation for the rest of dinner, it was admirably conceived. He turned his shoulder on her in undisguised dudgeon.
"And how's the great scheme?" asked somebody of Ruston.
"We hope to get the money," he said, turning for a moment from his hostess. "And if we do that, we're all right."
"Everything's going on very well," called Semingham from the foot of the table. "They've killed a missionary."
"How dreadful!" lisped his wife.
"Regrettable in itself, but the first step towards empire," explained Semingham with a smile.
"It's to stop things of that kind that we are going there," Mr. Belford pronounced; the speech was evidently meant to be repeated, and to rank as authoritative.
"Of course," chuckled Semingham.
If he had been a shopman, he could not have resisted showing his customers how the adulteration was done.
In spite of herself—for she strongly objected to being one of an admiring crowd, and liked a personal cachet on her emotions—Adela felt pleasure when, after dinner, Ruston came straight to her and, displacing Evan Haselden, sat down by her side.