Читать книгу The Heart of Penelope - Marie Belloc Lowndes - Страница 7

Table of Contents

In one minor, as in so many a major, matter Downing had been exceptionally fortunate. For many returning to their native country after long years there are none to welcome them. Those among their old friends who have not gone where no living man can hope to reach them are scattered here and there, and only affection, faithful in a sense rarely found, troubles to think of how the actual arrival of the wanderer can be made, if not pleasant, at least tolerable. But Downing found a sincere and, what was more precious, a familiar welcome, from the friend, Mr. Julius Gumberg, who had twenty years before sped him on his way with those valuable business introductions with which he had been able to build up a new career, first in America, and later in Persia.

There had been no regular correspondence between them, but now and again, sometimes after an interval of years, a short note, pregnant with shrewd counsel, and written in the tiny and only apparently clear hand which was the epistolary mode of fifty years since, would form the most welcome portion of Downing's home mail. It was characteristic of Mr. Gumberg that he sent no word of congratulation, when the man whom he still regarded as a youthful protégé received his G.C.B., the great outward mark of rehabilitation. But when he learnt that Downing had actually started for England he wrote him a line, adding by way of postscript, 'Of course you will come to me,' and of course Downing had come to him.

Mr. Julius Gumberg was one of those happy Londoners whose dwellings lie between the Green Park and that group of tranquil short streets which still remain, havens of stately peace, within a moment's walk of St. James's and Piccadilly. The portion of the house which looked on St. James's Place had that peculiar air of solid respectability which, in houses belonging to a certain period, seems to apologize for the rakish air of their garden-front. By its bow-windows Mr. Gumberg's house was distinguished on the park side from its more stately neighbours, and his pink blinds were so far historic that they had been noted in a guide-book some forty years before.

Small wonder that, as Mr. Gumberg's guest passed through the door into the broad low corridor which led into his old friend's library, he felt for a moment as if he were walking from the present into the past, an impression heightened by his finding everything, and almost everybody, in the house unchanged, from his host, sitting in a pleasant book-lined room where they had last parted, to the man-servant who had met him with a decorous word of welcome at the door. To be sure, both master and man looked older, but Downing felt that, while in their case the interval of time had left scarce any perceptible mark of its passage, he himself had in the same period lived, and showed that he had lived, a time incalculable.

And how did the traveller returning strike Mr. Julius Gumberg? Alas! as being in every sense quite other than the man, young, impulsive, and with a sufficient, not excessive, measure of originality, whom he had sped on his way to fairer fortunes twenty years before. Now, looking at the tall figure, the broad, slightly-bent shoulders, he saw that youth had wholly gone, that impulse had been so long curbed as to leave no trace on the rugged secretive face, to which had come, indeed, lines of concentration and purpose which had been lacking in that of the young George Downing. Originality now veered perilously near that eccentricity of outward appearance which is apt to overtake those to whom the cut of clothes, the shearing of the hair, have become of no moment. Mr. Gumberg's shrewd eyes had at once perceived that this no longer familiar friend looked Somebody, indeed, many would say a very great and puissant body; but the old man would have been better pleased to have welcomed home a more commonplace hero.

Mr. Gumberg's sharp ears had heard, just outside his door, quick, low interchange of words between his own faithful man-servant and the newly-arrived guest. 'Valet? No, Jackson, I have brought no man. I gave up such pleasant luxuries twenty years ago!' And Jackson had retreated, disappointed of the company of the travelled gentleman's gentleman with whom he had hoped to spend many pleasant moments.