The God in the Car

Chapter 2

When it was no later than the middle of June, Adela Ferrars, having her reputation to maintain, ventured to sum up the season. It was, she said, a Ruston-cum-Violetta season. Violetta's doings and unexampled triumphs have, perhaps luckily, no place here; her dancing was higher and her songs more surpassing in another dimension than those of any performer who had hitherto won the smiles of society; and young men who are getting on in life still talk about her. Ruston's fame was less widespread, but his appearance was an undeniable fact of the year. When a man, the first five years of whose adult life have been spent on a stool in a coal merchant's office, and the second five somewhere (an absolutely vague somewhere) in Southern or Central Africa, comes before the public, offering in one closed hand a new empire, or, to avoid all exaggeration, at least a province, asking with the other opened hand for three million pounds, the public is bound to afford him the tribute of some curiosity. When he enlists in his scheme men of eminence like Mr. Foster Belford, of rank like Lord Semingham, of great financial resources like Dennison Sons & Company, he becomes one whom it is expedient to bid to dinner and examine with scrutinising enquiry. He may have a bag of gold for you; or you may enjoy the pleasure of exploding his prestige; at least, you are timely and up-to-date, and none can say that your house is a den of fogies, or yourself, in the language made to express these things (for how otherwise should they get themselves expressed?) on other than "the inner rail."

It chanced that Miss Ferrars arrived early at the Seminghams, and she talked with her host on the hearth-rug, while Lady Semingham was elaborately surveying her small but comely person in a mirror at the other end of the long room. Lord Semingham was rather short and rather stout; he hardly looked as if his ancestors had fought at Hastings-perhaps they had not, though the peerage said they had. He wore close-cut black whiskers, and the blue of his jowl witnessed a suppressed beard of great vitality. His single eye-glass reflected answering twinkles to Adela's pince-nez, and his mouth was puckered at the world's constant entertainment; men said that he found his wife alone a sufficient and inexhaustible amusement.

"The Heathers are coming," he said, "and Lady Val and Marjory, and young Haselden, and Ruston."

"Toujours Ruston," murmured Adela.

"And one or two more. What's wrong with Ruston? There is, my dear Adela, no attitude more offensive than that of indifference to what the common herd finds interesting."

"He's a fright," said Adela. "You'd spike yourself on that bristly beard of his."

"If you happened to be near enough, you mean?-a danger my sex and our national habits render remote. Bessie!"

Lady Semingham came towards them, with one last craning look at her own back as she turned. She always left the neighbourhood of a mirror with regret.

"Well?" she asked with a patient little sigh.

"Adela is abusing your friend Ruston."

"He's not my friend, Alfred. What's the matter, Adela?"

"I don't think I like him. He's hard."

"He's got a demon, you see," said Semingham. "For that matter we all have, but his is a whopper."

"Oh, what's my demon?" cried Adela. Is not oneself always the most interesting subject?

"Yours? Cleverness; He goads you into saying things one can't see the meaning of."

"Thanks! And yours?"

"Grinning-so I grin at your things, though I don't understand 'em."

"And Bessie's?"

"Oh, forgive me. Leave us a quiet home."

"And now, Mr. Ruston's?"

"His is--"

But the door opened, and the guests, all arriving in a heap, just twenty minutes late, flooded the room and drowned the topic. Another five minutes passed, and people had begun furtively to count heads and wonder whom they were waiting for, when Evan Haselden was announced. Hot on his heels came Ruston, and the party was completed.

Mr. Otto Heather took Adela Ferrars in to dinner. Her heart sank as he offered his arm. She had been heard to call him the silliest man in Europe; on the other hand, his wife, and some half-dozen people besides, thought him the cleverest in London.

"That man," he said, swallowing his soup and nodding his head towards Ruston, "personifies all the hideous tendencies of the age-its brutality, its commercialism, its selfishness, its--"

Miss Ferrars looked across the table. Ruston was seated at Lady Semingham's left hand, and she was prattling to him in her sweet indistinct little voice. Nothing in his appearance warranted Heather's outburst, unless it were a sort of alert and almost defiant readiness, smacking of a challenge to catch him napping.

"I'm not a medi蓥alist myself," she observed, and prepared to endure the penalty of an expos of Heather's theories. During its progress, she peered-for her near sight was no affectation-now and again at the occasion of her sufferings. She had heard a good deal about him-something from her host, something from Harry Dennison, more from the paragraphists who had scented their prey, and gathered from the four quarters of heaven (or wherever they dwelt) upon him. She knew about the coal merchant's office, the impatient flight from it, and the rush over the seas; there were stories of real naked want, where a bed and shelter bounded for the moment all a life's aspirations. She summed him up as a buccaneer modernised; and one does not expect buccaneers to be amiable, while culture in them would be an incongruity. It was, on the whole, not very surprising, she thought, that few people liked William Roger Ruston-nor that many believed in him.

"Don't you agree with me?" asked Heather.

"Not in the least," said Adela at random.

The odds that he had been saying something foolish were very large.

"I thought you were such friends!" exclaimed Heather in surprise.

"Well, to confess, I was thinking of something else. Who do you mean?"

"Why, Mrs. Dennison. I was saying that her calm queenly manner--"

"Good gracious, Mr. Heather, don't call women 'queenly.' You're like-what is it?-a 'dime novel.'"

If this comparison were meant to relieve her from the genius' conversation for the rest of dinner, it was admirably conceived. He turned his shoulder on her in undisguised dudgeon.

"And how's the great scheme?" asked somebody of Ruston.

"We hope to get the money," he said, turning for a moment from his hostess. "And if we do that, we're all right."

"Everything's going on very well," called Semingham from the foot of the table. "They've killed a missionary."

"How dreadful!" lisped his wife.

"Regrettable in itself, but the first step towards empire," explained Semingham with a smile.

"It's to stop things of that kind that we are going there," Mr. Belford pronounced; the speech was evidently meant to be repeated, and to rank as authoritative.

"Of course," chuckled Semingham.

If he had been a shopman, he could not have resisted showing his customers how the adulteration was done.

In spite of herself-for she strongly objected to being one of an admiring crowd, and liked a personal cachet on her emotions-Adela felt pleasure when, after dinner, Ruston came straight to her and, displacing Evan Haselden, sat down by her side. He assumed the position with a business-like air, as though he meant to stay. She often, indeed habitually, had two or three men round her, but to-night none contested Ruston's exclusive possession; she fancied that the business-like air had something to do with it. She had been taken possession of, she said to herself, with a little impatience and yet a little pleasure also.

"You know everybody here, I suppose?" he asked. His tone cast a doubt on the value of the knowledge.

"It's my tenth season," said Adela, with a laugh. "I stopped counting them once, but there comes a time when one has to begin again."

He looked at her-critically, she thought-as he said,

"The ravages of time no longer to be ignored?"

"Well, the exaggerations of friends to be checked. Yes, I suppose I know most of--"

She paused for a word.

"The gang," he suggested, leaning back and crossing his legs.

"Yes, we are a gang, and all on one chain. You're a recent captive, though."

"Yes," he assented, "it's pretty new to me. A year ago I hadn't a dress coat."

"The gods are giving you a second youth then."

"Well, I take it. I don't know that I have much to thank the gods for."

"They've been mostly against you, haven't they? However, what does that matter, if you beat them?"

He did not disdain her compliment, but neither did he accept it. He ignored it, and Adela, who paid very few compliments, was amused and vexed.

"Perhaps," she added, "you think your victory still incomplete?"

This gained no better attention. Mr. Ruston seemed to be following his own thoughts.

"It must be a curious thing," he remarked, "to be born to a place like Semingham's."

"And to use it-or not to use it-like Lord Semingham?"

"Yes, I was thinking of that," he admitted.

"To be eminent requires some self-deception, doesn't it? Without that, it would seem too absurd. I think Lord Semingham is overweighted with humour." She paused and then-to show that she was not in awe of him-she added,-"Now, I should say, you have very little."

"Very little, indeed, I should think," he agreed composedly.

"You're the only man I ever heard admit that of himself; we all say it of one another."

"I know what I have and haven't got pretty well."

Adela was beginning to be more sure that she disliked him, but the topic had its interest for her and she went on,

"Now I like to think I've got everything."

To her annoyance, the topic seemed to lose interest for him, just in proportion as it gained interest for her. In fact, Mr. Ruston did not apparently care to talk about what she liked or didn't like.

"Who's that pretty girl over there," he asked, "talking to young Haselden?"

"Marjory Valentine," said Adela curtly.

"Oh! I think I should like to talk to her."

"Pray, don't let me prevent you," said Adela in very distant tones.

The man seemed to have no manners.

Mr. Ruston said nothing, but gave a short laugh. Adela was not accustomed to be laughed at openly. Yet she felt defenceless; this pachydermatous animal would be impervious to the pricks of her rapier.

"You're amused?" she asked sharply.

"Why were you in such a hurry to take offence? I didn't say I wanted to go and talk to her now."

"It sounded like it."

"Oh, well, I'm very sorry," he conceded, still smiling, and obviously thinking her very absurd.

She rose from her seat.

"Please do, though. She'll be going soon, and you mayn't get another chance."

"Well, I will then," he answered simply, accompanying the remark with a nod of approval for her sensible reminder. And he went at once.

She saw him touch Haselden on the shoulder, and make the young man present him to Marjory. Ruston sat down and Haselden drifted, aimless and forlorn, on a solitary passage along the length of the room.

Adela joined Lady Semingham.

"That's a dreadful man, Bessie," she said; "he's a regular Juggernaut."

She disturbed Lady Semingham in a moment of happiness; everybody had been provided with conversation, and the hostess could sit in peaceful silence, looking, and knowing that she looked, very dainty and pretty; she liked that much better than talking.

"Who's what, dear?" she murmured.

"That man-Mr. Ruston. I say he's a Juggernaut. If you're in the way, he just walks over you-and sometimes when you're not: for fun, I suppose."

"Alfred says he's very clever," observed Lady Semingham, in a tone that evaded any personal responsibility for the truth of the statement.

"Well, I dislike him very much," declared Adela.

"We won't have him again when you're coming, dear," promised her friend soothingly.

Adela looked at her, hesitated, opened her fan, shut it again, and smiled.

"Oh, I didn't mean that, Bessie," she said with half a laugh. "Do, please."

"But if you dislike him--"

"Why, my dear, doesn't one hate half the men one likes meeting-and all the women!"

Lady Semingham smiled amiably. She did not care to think out what that meant; it was Adela's way, just as it was her husband's way to laugh at many things that seemed to her to afford no opening for mirth. But Adela was not to escape. Semingham himself appeared suddenly at her elbow, and observed,

"That's either nonsense or a truism, you know."

"Neither," said Adela with spirit; but her defence was interrupted by Evan Haselden.

"I'm going," said he, and he looked out of temper. "I've got another place to go to. And anyhow--"

"Well?"

"I'd like to be somewhere where that chap Ruston isn't for a little while."

Adela glanced across. Ruston was still talking to Marjory Valentine.

"What can he find to say to her?" thought Adela.

"What the deuce she finds to talk about to that fellow, I can't think," pursued Evan, and he flung off to bid Lady Semingham good-night.

Adela caught her host's eye and laughed. Lord Semingham's eyes twinkled.

"It's a big province," he observed, "so there may be room for him-out there."

"I," said Adela, with an air of affected modesty, "have ventured, subject to your criticism, to dub him Juggernaut."

"H'm," said Semingham, "it's a little obvious, but not so bad for you."