"Bennett, you've never met my son, I think?"
Mr. Bennett peered at Sam with protruding eyes which gave him the appearance of a rather unusually stout prawn.
"How are you?" he asked, with such intensity that Sam unconsciously found himself replying to a question which does not as a rule call for any answer.
"Very well, thanks."
Mr. Bennett shook his head moodily. "You are lucky to be able to say so! Very few of us can assert as much. I can truthfully say that in the last fifteen years I have not known what it is to enjoy sound health for a single day. Marlowe," he proceeded, swinging ponderously round on Sir Mallaby like a liner turning in the river, "I assure you that at twenty-five minutes past four this afternoon I was very nearly convinced that I should have to call you up on the 'phone and cancel this dinner engagement. When I took my temperature at twenty minutes to six...." At this point the butler appeared at the door announcing that dinner was served.
Sir Mallaby Marlowe's dinner table, which, like most of the furniture in the house had belonged to his deceased father and had been built at a period when people liked things big and solid, was a good deal too spacious to be really ideal for a small party. A white sea of linen separated each diner from the diner opposite and created a forced intimacy with the person seated next to him. Billie Bennett and Sam Marlowe, as a consequence, found themselves, if not exactly in a solitude of their own, at least sufficiently cut off from their kind to make silence between them impossible. Westward, Mr. Mortimer had engaged Sir Mallaby in a discussion on the recent case of Ouseley v. Ouseley, Figg, Mountjoy, Moseby-Smith and others, which though too complicated to explain here, presented points of considerable interest to the legal mind. To the east, Mr. Bennett was relating to Bream the more striking of his recent symptoms. Billie felt constrained to make at least an attempt at conversation.
"How strange meeting you here," she said.
Sam, who had been crumbling bread in an easy and debonair manner, looked up and met her eye. Its expression was one of cheerful friendliness. He could not see his own eye, but he imagined and hoped that it was cold and forbidding, like the surface of some bottomless mountain tarn.
"I beg your pardon?"
"I said, how strange meeting you here. I never dreamed Sir Mallaby was your father."
"I knew it all along," said Sam, and there was an interval caused by the maid insinuating herself between them and collecting his soup plate. He sipped sherry and felt a sombre self-satisfaction. He had, he considered, given the conversation the right tone from the start. Cool and distant. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Billie bite her lip. He turned to her again. Now that he had definitely established the fact that he and she were strangers, meeting by chance at a dinner-party, he was in a position to go on talking.
"And how do you like England, Miss Bennett?"
Billie's eye had lost its cheerful friendliness. A somewhat feline expression had taken its place.
"Pretty well," she replied.
"You don't like it?"
"Well, the way I look at it is this. It's no use grumbling. One has got to realise that in England one is in a savage country, and one should simply be thankful one isn't eaten by the natives."
"What makes you call England a savage country?" demanded Sam, a staunch patriot, deeply stung.
"What would you call a country where you can't get ice, central heating, corn-on-the-cob, or bathrooms? My father and Mr. Mortimer have just taken a house down on the coast and there's just one niggly little bathroom in the place."
"Is that your only reason for condemning England?"
"Oh no, it has other drawbacks."
"Such as?"
"Well, Englishmen, for instance. Young Englishmen in particular. English young men are awful! Idle, rude, conceited, and ridiculous."
Marlowe refused hock with a bitter intensity which nearly startled the old retainer, who had just offered it to him, into dropping the decanter.
"How many English young men have you met?"
Billie met his eye squarely and steadily. "Well, now that I come to think of it, not many. In fact, very few. As a matter of fact, only...."
"Only?"
"Well, very few," said Billie. "Yes," she said meditatively, "I suppose I really have been rather unjust. I should not have condemned a class simply because ... I mean, I suppose there are young Englishmen who are not rude and ridiculous?"
"I suppose there are American girls who have hearts."
"Oh, plenty."
"I'll believe that when I meet one."
Sam paused. Cold aloofness was all very well, but this conversation was developing into a vulgar brawl. The ghosts of dead and gone Marlowes, all noted for their courtesy to the sex, seemed to stand beside his chair, eyeing him reprovingly. His work, they seemed to whisper, was becoming raw. It was time to jerk the interchange of thought back into the realm of distant civility.
"Are you making a long stay in London, Miss Bennett?"
"No, not long. We are going down to the country almost immediately. I told you my father and Mr. Mortimer had taken a house there."
"You will enjoy that."
"I'm sure I shall. Mr. Mortimer's son Bream will be there. That will be nice."
"Why?" said Sam, backsliding.
There was a pause.
"He isn't rude and ridiculous, eh?" said Sam gruffly.
"Oh, no. His manners are perfect, and he has such a natural dignity," she went on, looking affectionately across the table at the heir of the Mortimers, who, finding Mr. Bennett's medical confidences a trifle fatiguing, was yawning broadly, and absently balancing his wine glass on a fork.
"Besides," said Billie in a soft and dreamy voice, "we are engaged to be married!"
§ 3
Sam didn't care, of course. We, who have had the privilege of a glimpse into his iron soul, know that. He was not in the least upset by the news—just surprised. He happened to be raising his glass at the moment, and he registered a certain amount of restrained emotion by snapping the stem in half and shooting the contents over the tablecloth: but that was all.
"Good heavens, Sam!" ejaculated Sir Mallaby, aghast. His wine glasses were an old and valued set.
Sam blushed as red as the stain on the cloth.
"Awfully sorry, father! Don't know how it happened."
"Something must have given you a shock," suggested Billie kindly.
The old retainer rallied round with napkins, and Sir Mallaby, who was just about to dismiss the affair with the polished ease of a good host, suddenly became aware of the activities of Bream. That young man, on whose dreamy calm the accident had made no impression whatever, had successfully established the equilibrium of the glass and the fork, and was now cautiously inserting beneath the latter a section of a roll, the whole forming a charming picture in still life.
"If that glass is in your way...." said Sir Mallaby as soon as he had hitched up his drooping jaw sufficiently to enable him to speak. He was beginning to feel that he would be lucky if he came out of this dinner-party with a mere remnant of his precious set.
"Oh, Sir Mallaby," said Billie, casting an adoring glance at the juggler, "you needn't be afraid that Bream will drop it. He isn't clumsy! He is wonderful at that sort of thing, simply wonderful! I think it's so splendid," said Billie, "when men can do things like that. I'm always trying to get Bream to do some of his tricks for people, but he's so modest, he won't."
"Refreshingly different," Sir Mallaby considered, "from the average drawing-room entertainer."
"Yes," said Billie emphatically. "I think the most terrible thing in the world is a man who tries to entertain when he can't. Did I tell you about the man on board ship, father, at the ship's concert? Oh, it was the most awful thing you ever saw. Everybody was talking about it!" She beamed round the table, and there was a note of fresh girlish gaiety in her voice. "This man got up to do an imitation of somebody—nobody knows to this day who it was meant to be—and he came into the saloon and directly he saw the audience he got stage fright. He just stood there gurgling and not saying a word, and then suddenly his nerve failed him altogether and he turned and tore out of the room like a rabbit. He absolutely ran! And he hadn't said a word! It was the most ridiculous exhibition I've ever seen!"