The Four Faces | Page 2

for him--I simply can't afford to live there now, as
you know, and for months I have been tryin' to let it. I told him about it,
and he asked if he might see it, and--well, the thing's done; he has it
now, as I say, on a seven years' lease."
"Then why worry?"
"I am not worryin'--I never worry--the most foolish thing any man can
do is to worry. All I say is--I should like to know somethin' more about
the feller. He may be quite all right--I have not the least reason for
supposin' he isn't--but my wife has taken a strong dislike to him. She
says she mistrusts him. She has said so from the beginnin'. After he had
asked to see me that mornin', the mornin' he called for his gloves, and
we had talked about the house, I invited him to lunch and introduced
him to my wife. Since then he has dined with us several times,
and--well, my wife is most insistent about it--she declares she is sure he
isn't what he seems to be, and she wanted me not to let him the house."

"Women have wonderful intuition in reading characters."
"I know they have, and that's why I feel--well, why I feel just the least
bit uneasy. What has made me feel so to-day is that I have just heard
from Sir Harry Dawson, who is on the Riviera, and he says that he
doesn't know Hugesson Gastrell, has never heard of him. There, read
his letter."
Seated in my club on a dull December afternoon, that was part of a
conversation I overheard, which greatly interested me. It interested me
because only a short time before I had, while staying in Geneva,
become acquainted at the hotel with a man named Gastrell, and I
wondered if he could be the same. From the remarks I had just heard I
suspected that he must be, for the young man in Geneva had also been
an individual of considerable personality, and a good conversationalist.
If I had been personally acquainted with either of the two speakers,
who still stood with their backs to the fire and their hands under their
coat-tails, talking now about some wonderful run with the Pytchley, I
should have told him I believed I had met the individual they had just
been discussing; but at Brooks's it is not usual for members to talk to
other members unintroduced. Therefore I remained sprawling in the big
arm-chair, where I had been pretending to read a newspaper, hoping
that something more would be said about Gastrell. Presently my
patience was rewarded.
"By the way, this feller Gastrell who's taken my house tells me he's
fond of huntin'," the first speaker--whom I knew to be Lord Easterton, a
man said to have spent three small fortunes in trying to make a big
one--remarked. "Said somethin' about huntin' with the Belvoir or the
Quorn. Shouldn't be surprised if he got put up for this club later."
"Should you propose him if he asked you?"
"Certainly, provided I found out all about him. He's a gentleman
although he is an Australian--he told Houston and Prince he was born
and educated in Melbourne, and went to his uncle in Tasmania
immediately he left school; but he hasn't a scrap of that ugly Australian

accent; in fact, he talks just like you or me or anybody else, and would
pass for an Englishman anywhere."
Without a doubt that must be the man I had met, I reflected as the two
speakers presently sauntered out of the room, talking again of hunting,
one of the principal topics of conversation in Brooks's. I, Michael
Berrington, am a man of leisure, an idler I am ashamed to say, my
parents having brought me up to be what is commonly and often so
erroneously termed "a gentleman," and left me, when they died, heir to
a cosy little property in Northamptonshire, and with some £80,000
safely invested. As a result I spend many months of the year in travel,
for I am a bachelor with no ties of any kind, and the more I travel and
the more my mind expands, the more cosmopolitan I become and the
more inclined I feel to kick against silly conventions such as this one at
Brooks's which prevented my addressing Lord Easterton or his
friend--men I see in the club every day I am there, and who know me
quite well by sight, though we only stare stonily at each other--and
asking more about Gastrell.
So Lady Easterton had taken an instinctive dislike to this young man,
Hugesson Gastrell, and openly told her husband that she mistrusted him.
Now, that was curious, I reflected, for I had spoken to him several
times while in Geneva,