His face was closely shaven, except for a thin, silky, black moustache, which he wore with long waxed ends. He was foppishly dressed in the latest fashion, and displayed a profusion of jewellery. But there was something about him so arrogant and self-opinionated, something so coldly contemptuous of other men's feelings and opinions whenever they chanced to clash with his own, that Lionel had not been ten minutes in his company before he said to himself that Mr. Percy Osmond was very different from Mr. Percy Osmond's brother, and could never be included by him among the few men he numbered as his friends.
"So you want to pin me down to a date, do you?" said Kester as they sat down in the smoking-room at the club.
"I should certainly like, to fix you, now that I am here," answered Lionel.
"How would this day fortnight suit you?"
"No time could suit me better. And if Mr. Osmond will honour me by coming down to Park Newton at the same time, I need hardly say how pleased I shall be to see him there."
"Very kind of you, I'm sure," said Osmond. "Glad to run down to your place, especially as St. George is going. Am thinking of buying a quiet little country roost myself. Town life is awfully wearing, you know."
Kester laughed aloud. "Osmond would commit suicide before he had been in the country a month," he said. "He is one of those unhappy mortals who cannot live away from bricks and mortar. The shady side of Pall Mall is dearer to him than all the county lanes and hayfields in the world."
"You do me an injustice--really," said Osmond. "Some of my tastes are quite idyllic. No one, for instance, could be fonder of clotted cream than I am. I never shoot, myself--haven't muscle enough for it, you know--yet I have a weakness for grouse pie that almost verges on the sublime."
"Or the ridiculous," interposed Kester.
"By-the-by, I hope you are not without a billiard-table at your place," said Osmond, with that affected little cough which was peculiar to him.
"We have a table on which you shall play all day long if you choose," said Lionel.
"Then I'll come. Country air and billiards charming combination! Yes, you may expect to see me at the same time that you see St. George."
He made a memorandum of the date in his tablets; and after a little further talk, he shook hands with Lionel and went, leaving the two cousins together.
Kester looked after him with a sneer. "There goes another gilded fool," he said.
"I thought you introduced him to me as your particular friend," said Lionel.
"I called him my particular friend because he is rich. I can't afford to call any poor man my friend."
"My reason for inviting him to Park Newton was partly because I thought it would please you to have him there at the same time as yourself, and partly out of compliment to his brother, whom I respect and like exceedingly."
"Don't mistake me. I am glad you have asked him down to the old place. As I said before, he is rich, and some day or other he may be useful to me. All the same, he's an awful screw, and thinks as much of one sovereign as I do of five."
"How long have you known him?" asked Lionel.
"For a dozen years at the least. When he was twenty-one he came in for a fortune of twelve thousand pounds. This he contrived to get through very comfortably in the course of a couple of seasons. Then came the climax. For two years longer he managed to pick up a precarious crust among the different friends and acquaintances whom he had made during his more prosperous days. Then, when everybody had become thoroughly tired of him, he crossed the Atlantic. For the next four years he was lost sight of utterly. When heard of again, he had sunk to the position of marker in a billiard-saloon at New Orleans. After that, he was heard of in several places, but always in dreadfully low water. Then came the story of a murder in which he was said to be somehow mixed up, but nobody on this side seemed ever to get at the truth about it; and the next thing we heard about him was something altogether different. An old maiden aunt had died and had left the scapegrace eighty thousand pounds. Such as you saw him to-day, he turned up in London three months ago. Bitter experience has taught him the value of money. Still he has his weaknesses. What those weaknesses are it is my business just now to find out."
CHAPTER X.
MASTER AND MAN.
"Shall I shut the window, sir? The evening is rather cold."
It was Pierre Janvard, the body-servant of Mr. Kester St. George, who spoke. The place was a room at Park Newton, for Kester had come there on his promised visit. The same suite of rooms had been allotted to him that had been his during his uncle's lifetime--the same furniture was still in them: everything seemed unchanged. "Do you hear the bells, sir?" continued Pierre. "The village ringers are having their Wednesday evening practice. They always used to practise on Wednesday evenings, sir, if you remember. It seems only like yesterday since you left Park Newton."
To all this Mr. St. George vouchsafed no reply. He was dressing for dinner, a process to which he always attached much importance, and was just at that moment engaged with the knot of his white tie. He was evidently in anything but an amiable mood--a fact of which Pierre was perfectly aware, but did not seem to mind in the least.
"Do you remember, sir, talking to me one evening when you were dressing for dinner, just as it might be now, of what you would do, sir, and what alterations you would make, when Park Newton was all your own? You would build a new wing, and a new entrance-ball, and cut a fresh carriage-drive through the park. And then the stables were to be rebuilt, and the gardens altered and improved, and----"
"Pierre, you are a fool," said Mr. St. George, with emphasis.
The ghost of a smile flickered across the valet's staid features, but he did not answer.
Mr. St. George looked at his watch. It still wanted half an hour to dinner-time. He felt in no humour for seeing either Osmond or his cousin till they should all meet at table. He would stroll as far as the little summerhouse on the Knoll, and look once more on a scene that he remembered so well. He put on a light overcoat and a soft hat, and, going leisurely downstairs, he went slowly through the picture-gallery and the conservatory, and let himself out by a side door into the grounds at the back of the house. Every step that he took was haunted for him with memories of the past. His heart was full of bitterness and resentment that Fate, as he called it, should have played with him at such a terrible game of cross purposes, and have ended by winning everything from him. "If I had never been brought up to look upon it as sure to be one day my own," he said, "I could have borne to see it another man's without regret. Pierre is right: I did dream and plan and say to myself that I would do this thing and that thing when the time came for me to be master here. And now I, Kester St. George, am nothing better than a pauper and a blackleg, and am here on sufferance--an invited guest under the very roof that ought in justice to be mine!"
He took the winding path through the plantation that led to the summit of the Knoll. The summerhouse was unlocked as usual. He went in and sat down. The scene before him and around him was very pleasant to look upon, lighted up, as it was just then, by the fading splendours of an April sunset. The Hall itself, clasped tenderly round with shrubberies of softest green, lay close at his feet. Far and wide on either side stretched the Park, with its clumps of noble old trees that had seen generation after generation of the St. Georges come and go like creatures of a day, and still flourished unchanged. Away in the distance could be seen Highworth and other prosperous farms, all part and parcel of the Park Newton estate.
"All this belongs of right to