The Prophet of Berkeley Square | Page 5

carried to bed?" shook his head mournfully and then
resumed his reading.
While he thus employs his time, we must say a word or two about him.
Mr. Hennessey Vivian was now a man of thirty-eight, of excellent
fortune, of fine connections, and of admirable disposition. He had
become an orphan as soon as it was in his power to do so, having lost
his father--Captain Vivian of Her Majesty's Tenth Lancers--some
months before, and his mother--who had been a Merillia of Chipping
Sudbury--a few minutes after his birth. In these unfortunate
circumstances, over which he, poor infant, had absolutely no
control--whatever unkind people might say!--he devolved upon his
mother's mother, the handsome and popular Mrs. Merillia, who
assumed his charge with the rosy alacrity characteristic of her in all her
undertakings. With her the little Hennessey had passed his infantine
years, blowing happy bubbles, presiding over the voyages of his own
private Noah--from the Army and Navy Stores, with two hundred
animals of both sexes!--eating pap prepared by Mrs. Merillia's own
/chef/, and sleeping in a cot hung with sunny silk that might have
curtained Venus or have shaken about Aurora as she rose in the first
morning of the world. From her he had acquired the alphabet and many
a ginger-nut and decorative bonbon. And from her, too, he had set forth,

with tears, in his new Eton jacket and broad white collar, to go to Mr.
Chapman's preparatory school for little boys at Slough. Here he
remained for several years, acquiring a respect for the poet Gray and a
love of Slough peppermint that could only cease with life. Here too he
made friends with Robert Green, son of Lord Churchmore, who was
afterwards to be a certain influence in his life. His existence at Slough
was happy. Indeed, so great was his affection for the place that his
removal to Eton cost him suffering scarcely less acute than that which
presently attended his departure from Eton to Christchurch. Over his
sensations on leaving Oxford we prefer to draw a veil, only saying that
his last outlook--as an undergraduate--over her immemorial towers was
as hazy as the average Cabinet Minister's outlook over the events of the
day and the desires of the community.
But if the moisture of the Prophet did him credit at that painful period
of his life, it must be allowed that his behaviour on being formally
introduced into London Society showed no puling regret, no backward
longings after echoing colleges, lost dons and the scouts that are no
more. He was quite at his ease, and displayed none of the high- pitched
contempt of Piccadilly that is often so amusingly characteristic of the
young gentlemen accustomed to "the High."
Mrs. Merillia, who had been a widow ever since she could remember,
possessed the lease of the house in Berkeley Square in which the
Prophet was now sitting. It was an excellent mansion, with everything
comfortable about it, a duke on one side, a Chancellor of the Exchequer
on the other, electric light, several bathrooms and the gramophone.
There was never any question of the Prophet setting up house by
himself. On leaving Oxford he joined his ample fortune to Mrs.
Merillia's as a matter of course, and they settled down together with the
greatest alacrity and hopefulness. Nor were their pleasant relations once
disturbed during the fifteen years that elapsed before the Prophet
applied his eye to the telescope in the bow window and gave Mr.
Ferdinand the instructions which have just been recorded.
These fifteen years had not gone by without leaving their mark upon
our hero. He had done several things during their passage. For instance,

he had written a play, very nearly proposed to the third daughter of a
London clergyman and twice been to the Derby. Such events had, not
unnaturally, had their effect upon the formation of his character and
even upon the expression of his intelligent face. The writing of the
play--and, perhaps, its refusal by all the actor-managers of the town--
had traced a tiny line at each corner of his mobile mouth. The third
daughter of the London clergyman--his sentiment for her--had taught
his hand the slightly episcopal gesture which was so admired at the
Lambeth Palace Garden Party in the summer of 1892. And the great
race meeting was responsible for the rather tight trousers and the
gentleman-jockey smile which he was wont to assume when he set out
for a canter in the Row. From all this it will be guessed that our Prophet
was exceedingly amenable to the influences that throng at the heels of
the human destiny. Indeed, he was. And some few months before this
story opens it came about that he encountered a gentleman who was, in
fact, the primary cause