An elderly man, in evening-dress and wearing decorations, dashed up to
me saying:
“My dear Hipwell! I hope you haven’t hurt yourself! You tilted your
chair and it slipped from under you! By Jove! you gave your head a
nasty bump on the floor! Are you quite all right?” he asked, placing
his hand upon my shoulder with great anxiety.
“Quite all right!” I laughed faintly. “Please forgive me.” And a few
moments later, one of the servants having replaced my chair, I resumed
my seat amid the laughter and congratulations of the others.
“You might have hurt your head very badly!” remarked an elderly,
well-preserved woman who sat on my left. She was very handsomely
dressed and extremely refined.
“It was entirely my own fault,” I said apologetically. “I, of course,
did not know that the floor was so highly polished.”
“I know. I had the same accident last summer in the Danieli Hotel, in
Venice and hurt myself rather badly. Highly-polished floors are always
extremely dangerous. But, if one lives in an Embassy one has to have
such a floor in the State dining-room, as well as in the ballroom.”
“Is this an Embassy?” I inquired, gazing blankly around the handsome
apartment, with its high, gilded ceiling and fine old portraits upon
the paneled walls.
My companion regarded me strangely and said:
“I really hope, Mr. Hipwell, that you haven’t hurt your head!”
Instantly I saw that by betraying ignorance of my surroundings I would
bring on myself suspicion of being slightly deranged.
“No,” I laughed. “I was only joking, really.”
“You quite alarmed me!” exclaimed my companion, and, bending over me,
she addressed the pretty, auburn-haired young girl on my other hand,
saying:
“Contessina! Did you hear that? Mr. Hipwell has just asked me whether
this is an Embassy--as though he had never been in the British Embassy
in Rome before! It’s too funny. He gave me quite a fright. I thought
that his fall had injured his brain!”
“Signor Hipwell is always joking,” laughed the Little Countess,
speaking in Italian, a language which I happened to know. “One can
never take him seriously. He said all sorts of stupid things to my
father a couple of months ago--pretending that he did not know
him--and all that!”
“Forgive me, Contessina,” I said, bowing, not knowing her name or who
she might be. To my knowledge I had never seen her before that moment.
“But I was joking with your father.”
“As you did with His Excellency the Ambassador when you arrived from
London this morning,” laughed the older woman. “His wife, Lady
Kingscliffe, told me about it.” Then, turning to me, she asked, “Are
you really suffering from loss of memory, as His Excellency has been
fearing?”
“His Excellency need have no cause for apprehension,” I reassured the
elderly lady on my left. Then I turned to my other companion, who was
evidently the unmarried daughter of an Italian Count, and we laughed
together.
Meanwhile my bewildered eyes were taking in every detail of that
unfamiliar and unexpected scene.
The last actual recollection I had had was of being helpless and
terrified in the hands of that desperate gang of criminals at
Camberwell. Yet at that moment the whole scene had been suddenly
transformed, and I was guest at an official dinner given by the
British Ambassador in Rome.
At the head of the table sat His Excellency, a rather spare,
grey-haired man in his diplomatic uniform, with a jeweled cross at his
throat and a ribbon across his shirt-front. Nearly all the other men
were also in the uniform of the various countries they represented,
and wearing stars, ribbons, and neat rows of decorations. To my
surprise, I found myself also wearing diplomatic uniform, with a
foreign order.
The women were all smartly dressed, and many wore wonderful jewels,
which glittered and flashed beneath the electric rays. At the opposite
end of the flower-decked table sat Lady Kingscliffe, a distant
relative of ours, whom I had known nearly all my life.