The Lady Paramount | Page 6

"Hello. Is that you, old Rosygills?" Anthony said, with a phlegm that
seemed rather premeditated.

"Now, what a question," protested the other, advancing to meet him. He
walked with an odd kind of buoyant, measured step, as if he were
keeping time to a silent dance-tune. "All I can tell you is that it's
someone very nice and uncommonly like me. You should know at your
age that a person's identity is quite the most mysterious mystery under
heaven. You really must n't expect me to vouch for mine.
How-d'ye-do?"
He extended, casually, in the manner of a man preoccupied, a plump,
pink left hand. With his right hand he held up and flaunted, for
exhibition, a drooping bunch of poppies, poignantly red and green: the
subject, very likely, of his preoccupation, for, "Are n't they beauties?"
he demanded, and his manner had changed to one of fervour, nothing
less. "They 're the spoils of a raid on Farmer Blogrim's chalk-pit. If
eyes were made for seeing, see and admire--admire and confess your
admiration."
He shook them at Anthony's face. But as Anthony looked at them with
composure, and only muttered, "H'm," "Oh, my little scarlet starlets,"
he purred and chirped to the blossoms, "would n't the apathetic man
admire you?"
And he clasped them to his bosom with a gesture that was reminiscent
of the grateful prima-donna.
"They look exactly as if I had plucked them from the foreground of a
Fifteenth Century painting, don't they?" he went on, holding them off
again. "Florentine, of course. Ah, in those days painting was a fine art,
and worth a rational being's consideration,--in those days, and in just
that little Tuscan corner of the world. But you," he pronounced in deep
tones, mournfully, "how cold, how callous, you are. Have you no soul
for the loveliness of flowers?"
Anthony sighed. He was a tall young man, (thirty, at a guess), tall and
well set-up, with grey eyes, a wholesome brown skin, and a nose so
affirmatively patrician in its high bridge and slender aquilinity that it
was a fair matter for remark to discover it on the face of one who
actually chanced to be of the patrician order. Such a nose, perhaps,

carried with it certain obligations--an obligation of fastidious dressing,
for example. Anthony, at any rate, was very fastidiously dressed indeed,
in light-grey tweeds, with a straw hat, and a tie that bespoke a practised
hand beside a discerning taste. But his general air, none the less,--the
expression of his figure and his motions, as well as of his face and
voice,--was somehow that of an indolent melancholy, a kind of
unresentful disenchantment, as if he had long ago perceived that cakes
are mostly dough, and had accommodated himself to the perception
with a regret that was half amusement.
His friend, by contrast, in loose white flannels, with a flannel shirt and
a leather belt, with yellowish hair, waving, under a white flannel
cricket-cap, a good inch longer than the conventional cut, was plainly a
man who set himself above the modes: though, in his plump, pink way
debonair and vivacious, not so tall as Anthony, yet tall enough never to
be contemned as short, and verging upon what he was fain to call "the
flower of a sound man's youth, the golden, gladsome, romantic age of
forty," he looked delightfully fresh, and wide-awake, and cheerful, and
perfectly in the scheme of the blue day and the bird-notes and the
smiling country. Permit me to introduce Mr. Adrian Willes, by
vocation a composer and singer of songs, and--"contrapuntally," as he
would explain--Anthony Craford's housemate, monitor, land-agent, and
man of business.
Anthony sighed.
"I 'll tell you what I admire," he answered drily. "I admire the transports
of delight with which you hail my unexpected home-coming. The last
you knew, I was in California; and here I might have tumbled from the
skies."
Adrian regarded him with an eye in which, I think, kindled a certain
malicious satisfaction.
"Silence," he said, "is the perfectest herald of joy. Besides, you must n't
flatter yourself that your home-coming is so deucedly unexpected,
either. I 've felt a pricking in my thumbs any time these three months;
and no longer ago than yesterday morning, I said to my image in the

glass, as I was shaving, 'I should n't wonder if Tony turned up
to-morrow,' said I."
"That was merely your uneasy conscience," Tony expounded. "When
the cat's away, the mice are always feeling prickings in their thumbs."
"Oh, if you stoop to bandying proverbs," retaliated Adrian, "there's a
proverb about a penny." He raised his bunch of poppies, and posed it
aloft before him, eyeing it, his head cocked a little to one side, in
critical enjoyment. "Shall we set out for the house?" he