M. le Baron rose from his seat, and turned on me with a beaming face.
‘Happy to renew your acquaintance, Mr Bickerdike,’ he said. ‘You are a student of the game?’
‘Not much better, I think,’ I answered. ‘I am still in my novitiate.’
‘You would not care—?’
‘O, no, I thank you! I’m not gull enough to invite my own plucking.’
It was a verbal stumble rather than a designed impertinence on my part, and I winced over my own rudeness the moment it was uttered, the more so for the composure with which it was received.
‘No, that would be foolish, indeed,’ said M. le Baron.
I floundered in a silly attempt to right myself.
‘I mean—I only meant I’m just a rotten muff at the game, while you—’ I stuck, at a loss.
‘While I,’ he said with a smile, ‘have just, like David, brought down the giant Stothard with a lucky shot.’
He touched my arm in token of the larger tolerance; and, in some confusion, I made a movement as of invitation, towards the table in the window.
‘I am obliged,’ he said, ‘but I have this moment recalled an appointment.’ ‘So,’ I thought, ‘in inventing a pretext for declining, he administers a gentle rebuke to my cubbishness.’ ‘You found your friend, I hope,’ he asked, ‘when you left the Montesquieu on ‘that occasion?’
‘Kennett? Yes,’ I answered; and added, moved to some expiatory frankness; ‘it is odd, by the by, M. le Baron, that our second meeting should associate itself with the same friend. I am going down tomorrow, as it happens, on a visit to his people.’
‘No,’ he said: ‘really? That is odd, indeed.’
He shook hands with me, and left the room. Standing at the window a moment after, I saw him going City-wards along the Strand, looking, with his short thick legs and tailed morning coat, for all the world like a fat jaunty turtle on its way to Birch’s.
Now I fancied I had seen the last of the man; but I was curiously mistaken. When I arrived at Waterloo Station the next day, there, rather to my stupefaction, he stood as if awaiting me, and at the barrier—my barrier—leading to the platform for my train, the two o’clock Bournemouth express. We passed through almost together.
‘Hullo!’ I said. ‘Going south?’
He nodded genially. ‘I thought, with your permission, we might be travelling companions.’
‘With pleasure, of course. But I go no further than the first stop—Winton.’
‘Nor I.’
‘O, indeed? A delectable old city. You are putting up there?’
‘No, O no! My destination, like yours, is Wildshott.’
‘Wildshott! You know the Kennetts then?’
‘I know Sir Calvin. His son, your friend, I have never met. It is odd, as you said, that our visits should coincide.’
‘But you must have known yesterday—if you did not know in Paris. Why in the name of goodness did you not—’ I began; and came to a rather petulant stop. This secrecy was simply intolerable. One was pulled up by it at every turn.
‘Did I not?’ he said blandly. ‘No, now I come to think of it— O, Louis, is that an empty compartment? Put the rugs in, then, and the papers.’
He addressed a little vivid-eyed French valet, who stood awaiting his coming at an opened door of a carriage. Le Sage climbed in with a breathing effort, and I followed sulkily. Who on earth, or what on earth, was the man? Nothing more nor less than what he appeared to be, he might have protested. After all, not himself, but common gossip, had charged him with necessitousness. He might be as rich as Croesus, for all I knew or he was likely to say. Neediness was not wont to valet it, though insolvency very well might. But he was a friend of Sir Calvin, a most exclusive old Bashaw; and, again, he was said to play chess for half-crowns. O! it was no good worrying: I should find out all about him at Wildshott. With a grunt of resignation I sank into the cushions, and resolutely put the problem from me.
But the fellow was an engaging comrade for a journey—I will admit so much. He was observant, amusing, he had a fund of good tales at his command, and his voice, without unpleasant stress; was softly penetrative. Adapted to anecdote, moreover, his habit of secrecy, of non-committal, made for a sort of ghostly humour which was as titillating as it was elusive; and the faint aroma of snuff, which was never absent from him, seemed somehow the appropriate atmosphere for such airy quibbles. It surrounded him like an aura—not disagreeably; was associated with him at all times—as one associates certain perfumes with certain women—a particular snuff, Macuba I think it is called, a very delicate brand. So he is always recalled to me, himself and his rappee inseparable.
Wildshott, the Hampshire seat of the Kennetts, stands off the Winton-Sarum road, at a distance of some six miles from the former, and some three and a half from the sporting town of Longbridge, on the way to the latter. The house is lonely situated in wild but beautiful country, lying as it does in the trough of the great downs whose summits hereabouts command some of the most spacious views in the County. A mile north-east, footing a gentle incline, shelters the village of Leighway; less than a mile away, in a hollow of the main road, stands a wayside tavern called the Bit and Halter; and, with these two exceptions, no nearer neighbour has Wildshott than the tiny Red Deer inn, which perches on a high lift of the downs a mile and a half distant, rising north.
The stately, wrought-iron gates of Wildshott open from the main road. Thence a drive of considerable extent reaches to the house, which is a rectangular red-brick Jacobean structure, with stone string-courses and a fine porch, having a great shell over it. There are good stables contiguous, and the grounds about are ample and well timbered—almost too well timbered, it might be thought by some people, since the closeness of the foliage gives an effect of gloom and solemnity to a building which, amid freer surroundings, should have nothing but grace and frankness to recommend it. But settled as it is in the wash of the hills, with their moisture draining down upon it, growth and greenness have become a tradition of its life, and as such not to be irreverently handled by succeeding generations of Kennetts.
All down the west boundary of the upper estate—which, to its northernmost limit, breaks upon that bare hill on whose summit, at closer range now, the little Red Deer inn sits solitary—runs a wide fringe of beech-wood, which is continued to the high road, and thence, on the further side, dispersed among the miscellaneous plantations which are there situated. The highway itself roughly bisects the property—the best of whose grass and arable lands are contained in the southern division—and can be reached from the house, if one likes, through the long beech-thicket by way of a narrow path, which, entering near the stables, runs as far as the containing hedge, in which, at some fifty yards from the main entrance, is a private wicket, leading down by a couple of steps to the road. This path is known, through some superstitious association, as the Bishop’s Walk, and is little used at any time, the fact that it offers a short cut from the house to the lower estate being regarded,