THE COINING OF A NICKNAME.
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 mediævalist myself," she observed, and prepared to endure the
penalty of an _exposé_ 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."