Читать книгу Honor of Thieves - Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne - Страница 4
ОглавлениеCHAPTER I.
THE ANTECEDENTS OF PATRICK ONSLOW.
Miss Rivers picked out the name of Patrick Onslow in the society paper which lay upon her knee, and drew idle circles round it with a pink ball-pencil. Fairfax tugged at his mustache, and returned to the subject which they had been discussing.
“The fellow has,” said Fairfax, “a genial insolence of manner which seems rather taking with some people. But I confess I shouldn’t have thought him the man you would have cared to see twice, Amy.”
“You’re prejudiced, obviously; and I’ve a good mind to say maliciously prejudiced. I don’t know how much you saw of him, because I can’t be invited to a Wanderers’ Club dinner; you don’t know how much I saw of him, because you missed some distant train and didn’t come here to the ball last night. But I’ll tell you: I saw all I could. He’s perfectly and entirely charming. He’s been everywhere, done everything, and he isn’t a bit blasé.”
“I heard,” said Fairfax, “that Mrs. Shelf was lionizing Onslow round last night as the great traveler. Does he belong to the advertising variety of globe-trotter? Did he sit in a side room and hold a small audience spellbound with a selection from his adventures?”
Miss Rivers shrugged her shoulders. “Not he. But you know what Mrs. Shelf is when she gets any show person at one of her functions. The poor man had to stand it for a while, because she held on to him as though he might have been her fan. But he escaped as soon as he decently could by saying he wanted to dance. He asked me to give him the fourth waltz. I did it out of sheer pity, because I saw Mrs. Shelf’s thumbscrews were making him writhe.”
“’Shows how little a man knows about the girl he’s engaged to. Now, I had always imagined that, having the pick of the men, you invariably wrote down the best dancers, and never saddled yourself with a stranger who was a very possible duffer.”
Amy Rivers laughed. “That’s generalizing. But it was different last night, because, so to speak, I’m a member of the household here. A ward counts as a sort of niece, doesn’t she? Or between that and an adopted daughter? But, anyway, it was out of sheer pity for Mr. Onslow in the first instance, and it was with distinct qualms that I let him take me down to dance. I quite intended, after half a round, to say the room was too crowded, and go and sit somewhere. That is to say, I made up my mind to do this when he asked me. However, when I dropped my fingers on his arm to go down-stairs, I had my doubts. You know after two seasons one gets instinctively to know by the first touch how a man will dance. And when he put his arm around me, and we moved to the music, I felt like going on forever. Waltzing is hard just now, because it’s in a transition state between two styles; but his dancing was something to dream about. We started off with the newest quick waltz. Hamilton, it was just lovely! He was so perfect that just for experiment I altered my step—by degrees, you know. Automatically, and without anything being seen, he changed too; and we were dancing the old slow glide before I knew. And his steering was perfect. In that whirling, teeming, tangled mob he never bumped me once. I gave him two more waltzes, and cut another couple in his favor.”
“Which makes five in all,” said Fairfax, rather stiffly.
Amy Rivers took his hand and patted it. “Don’t be cross, dear. You know how I love a good dance, and one doesn’t meet a partner like Mr. Onslow every day. I suppose he’s done his waltzing in Vienna and Paris, and Yorkshire, and New Orleans, as well as here in London; and by averaging them all up he can’t help but be good.”
“Is it from going to those places that Mrs. Shelf called him the Great Traveler?”
“Of course not! Hamilton, how stupid you are about him! Why, he’s rummaged about in every back corner of the world, so they say.”
“So they say, yes! Teheran to Timbuctoo. But what does he say himself about his wanderings beyond the tram-lines? Shuffles mostly, doesn’t he? And who’s met him anywhere? Not a soul will come forward to speak. I tell you, Amy, there’s something uncanny about this Patrick Onslow. He turns up here periodically in London after some vague exploring trip to a place that isn’t mapped, and you can never pin him to tell exactly where he’s been. He comes with money, spends it en prince, and then goes off again, nominally perhaps to the Gobi Desert, and returns with another cargo.”
“How romantic!” said Miss Rivers.
“Yes, isn’t it?” said her fiancé drily. “If he’d lived a century earlier, one would have said he’d got a sound business connection as a pirate somewhere West Indies way. As this year is eighteen ninety-three, and that explanation’s barred, one simply has to accept him as an uncomfortable mystery.”
“Hamilton, how absurd you are! Wherever did all this rigmarole come from?”
“From the club, and London gossiping places generally. I suppose we ought to be indebted to Onslow for providing us with something to talk about.”
“But tell me; if his antecedents are so queer, how is it he goes about so much here? He’s apparently asked everywhere—at least, so Mrs. Shelf says—and he knows everybody who’s worth knowing.”
Fairfax laughed. “Why does London society take up with an ex-bushranger from Australia, or a glorified advertising cowboy from the wild, wild West? Simply because London society is extremely parochial, and gets desperately bored with its own little self undiluted. Now, Onslow has undoubtedly wandered about outside the parish; and occasionally he lets drop hints which make one think he’s seen some queerish ups and downs in places where polite society doesn’t go; and, in fact, he preserves a good-humored reticence about most of his doings. This makes people thoughtful and speculative. If a Chinese extradition warrant was to turn up to-morrow to arrest him for sticking up a three-button mandarin beyond the Great Wall, nobody would be a bit surprised; or if he were to tell the City this afternoon that he’d a concession for a silver mine in an unexplored part of Venezuela which he wished to dispose of at reasonable rates, we’d take it with pleased equanimity. Now, you know, Amy, there’s a fearful joy in entertaining a man of that stamp.”
“Especially when he’s as fascinating as Mr. Onslow can be when he chooses. And such a waltzer! But you speak as if he was a savage from some back settlement, come into decent society for the first time. He isn’t that in the least. He’s a gentleman distinctly.”
“My dear Amy, I never meant to suggest that he was not. There’s no particular secret about his life. He comes of a good west-county family; was a Harrow boy, and played in their eleven; went through Cambridge; and afterwards found a berth in the Diplomatic Service. Then, by way of variety, he got engaged to be married to a girl who jilted him; on the strength of which he began to run wild. He started on six months’ leave for a trip into Tibet, but he stayed beyond the limits of the postal system for two years and a half, and when he got back to England the Diplomatic Corps found that they could get on very well without him. So he continued his rambles. He doesn’t seem able to settle down.”
“That’s because he can’t forget the girl who threw him over,” exclaimed Miss Rivers. “How awfully romantic! I wonder who she was? She couldn’t have been anybody nice, or she wouldn’t have done it, because he’s a regular dear. And fancy his remembering her all this time! I just love him for it.”
“Some fellows,” remarked Fairfax judiciously, “would get jealous if the girl they were going to marry talked about another man this way.”
Miss Rivers reassured him first practically, and then in words. “You goose!” said she; “if I cared for him in that way, don’t you see, I shouldn’t have spoken about him to you at all.”
Fairfax did not answer directly. He kissed her thoughtfully, and after a while he said: “I’m not superstitious, dear, as a general thing. Work in a shipping office tends to make one painfully matter of fact. But for all that, I wish this fellow Onslow would either marry or get crumpled up in a cab accident, or have himself safely fastened down out of harm’s way somewhere. I’ve got a foreboding, Amy, that he’s going to do a bad turn either to you or to me—which means both of us. I know it’s absurd, but I can’t get rid of it.”
“How creepy!” said Amy Rivers. “But what nonsense, Hamilton!”
