An Unpardonable Liar | Page 9

all manner of accident and sundry profane dealings not intended for The Times or Exeter hall, comes back to sojourn in quiet "Christom" places, a lamb in temper, a lion at heart, an honest soul who minds his own business, is enemy to none but the malicious, and lives in daily wonder that the wine he drank the night before gets into trouble with the waters drunk in the morning. And the days, weeks and months go on, but Baron remains, having seen population after population of water drinkers come and go. He was there years ago. He is there still, coming every year, and he does not know that George Hagar has hung him at Burlington House more than once, and he remembers very well the pretty girl he did not marry, who also, on one occasion, joined the aristocratic company "on the line."
This young and pretty girl--Miss Mildred Margrave--came and went this morning, and a peculiar, meditative look on her face, suggesting some recent experience, caused the artist to transfer her to his notebook. Her step was sprightly, her face warm and cheerful in hue, her figure excellent, her walk the most admirable thing about her--swaying, graceful, lissom--like perfect dancing with the whole body. Her walk was immediately merged into somebody else's--merged melodiously, if one may say so. A man came from the pump-room looking after the girl, and Hagar remarked a similar swaying impulsion in the walk of both. He walked as far as the gate of the pump-room, then sauntered back, unfolded a newspaper, closed it up again, lit a cigar, and, like Hagar, stood watching the crowd abstractedly. He was an outstanding figure. Ladies, as they waited, occasionally looked at him through their glasses, and the Duchess of Brevoort thought he would make a picturesque figure for a reception--she was not less sure because his manner was neither savage nor suburban. George Hagar was known to some people as "the fellow who looks back of you." Mark Telford might have been spoken of as "the man who looks through you," for, when he did glance at a man or woman, it was with keen directness, affecting the person looked at like a flash of light to the eye. It is easy to write such things, not so easy to verify them, but any one that has seen the sleuthlike eyes of men accustomed to dealing with danger in the shape of wild beasts or treacherous tribes or still more treacherous companions, and whose lives depend upon their feeling for peril and their unerring vigilance can see what George Hagar saw in Mark Telford's looks.
Telford's glance went round the crowd, appearing to rest for an instant on every person, and for a longer time on Hagar. The eyes of the two men met. Both were immediately puzzled, for each had a sensation of some subterranean origin. Telford immediately afterward passed out of the gate and went toward the St. Cloud gardens, where the band was playing. For a time Hagar did not stir, but idled with his pencil and notebook. Suddenly he started, and hurried out in the direction Telford had gone.
"I was an ass," he said to himself, "not to think of that at first."
He entered the St. Cloud gardens and walked round the promenade a few times, but without finding him. Presently, however, Alpheus Richmond, whose beautiful and brilliant waistcoat and brass buttons with monogram adorned showed advantageously in the morning sunshine, said to him: "I say, Hagar, who's that chap up there filling the door of the summer house? Lord, rather!"
It was Telford. Hagar wished for the slightest pretext to go up the unfrequented side path and speak to him, but his mind was too excited to do the thing naturally without a stout pretext. Besides, though he admired the man's proportions and his uses from an artistic standpoint, he did not like him personally, and he said that he never could. He had instinctive likes and dislikes. What had startled him at the pump-room and had made him come to the gardens was the conviction that this was the man to play the part in the scene which, described by Mrs. Detlor, had been arranging itself in a hundred ways in his brain during the night--the central figures always the same, the details, light, tone, coloring, expression, fusing, resolving. Then came another and still more significant thought. On this he had acted.
When he had got rid of Richmond, who begged that he would teach him how to arrange a tie as he did--for which an hour was appointed--he determined, at all hazards, to speak. He had a cigar in his pocket, and though to smoke in the morning was pain and grief to him, he determined to ask for a match, and