In the dining-room of a great house in Carlton House Terrace three
persons sat at meat. They made, against the spacious simplicities of
great wealth and good taste, an austere picture in black and white.
Reading from left to right they were my lord the Marquess of Vest, his
delightful lady, and Mr. Dunn, private secretary to my lord.
They made a silent company. Lord Vest was never of a very talkative
habit: my lady was always very gentle, and did her best to please him on
all occasions: while Mr. Dunn’s duties did not embrace speaking unless
he was spoken to.
Eight candles in tall candlesticks of ancient silver played their timid
light upon the polished surface of the wide table; and in the calm air
of the summer evening the flames of the candles were so still that a
fanciful eye might have charged them with the beauty of flowers of
twilight. Young Mr. Dunn’s was a fanciful eye, but to him they appeared
to be as poppies of the night; for the poppy is an evil flower.
The curtains were not drawn across the windows, that Lord Vest might
lose nothing of the sweet evening air, which he always held to be good
for him until it gave him a cold in the head. Over his employer’s
shoulder Mr. Dunn could see the lights of the Mall glowing against the
dark tapestry of St. James’s Park. To the left, twilight draped the
Horse Guards and the great buildings of Government, whence, had Mr. Dunn
only known, the owls were at that moment fleeing on their ominous
business. To the right, night fought with day for the honour of
shrouding the palace of the King of England, who is also Emperor of
India and Protector of the Faith, which some people nowadays seem
inclined to forget. Great automobiles would every now and then pass to
and fro between the noble trees that delight those who have the leisure
to walk about the avenue of the Mall.
Mr. Dunn would have found it, at that moment, very agreeable to be
walking about the avenue of the Mall. Mr. Dunn would, in point of fact,
have parted with money to exchange places with the meanest walker in
London; for the situation of private secretary to a lord is not always
what the well-informed call a sinecure. Mr. Dunn was just thinking how
nice it would be to have a sinecure, whatever it might be, when the
second butler winked at him. The second butler thought the whole affair
very funny, and the silence very funny indeed. The second butler thought
he knew everything. Mr. Dunn made a mental note to the effect that he
must not forget, immediately after dinner, to tell the second butler
that he was an ass. That is if he, Mr. Dunn, was alive.
Now for Lord Vest, so much has been written of the early beginnings of
that powerful and ill-fated nobleman that it would be impertinent, at
this hour, to give more than a broad outline of his life. Mr. Justinian
Pant was an Australian gentleman of great fortune who had in the past
decade been raised to a baronetcy (Sir Justinian Pant, Bart.), a barony
(Lord Pant of Warboys, in the county of Huntingdonshire), a viscounty
(Viscount Pant of Warboys), an earldom (the Earl of Cowden, in the
county of Sussex) and a marquisate (the Marquess of Vest, in the county
of Cornwall) for services to the State. The bulletin announcing his last
ennoblement had been welcomed by all England with every appearance of
pleasure and gratification: that is, if one can judge by the newspapers
of the day: as, of course, one can. The mere fact that the barony of
Warboys, the earldom of Cowden, and the marquisate of Vest, were
welcomed far otherwise by the newspapers of Australia gave the envious
grounds for saying that the newspapers of England were prejudiced in the
great man’s favour for the reason that he owned most of them: which is
tantamount to saying that the glorious press of England is not free, an
insinuation that one cannot deign to answer but with a dignified
silence.
Of the early activities in Australia of Justinian Pant little of a
definite nature is known. The Australian papers, at the time of Mr.
Pant’s first elevation to the peerage, were rife with information on the
subject, but the voice of envy is ever loud; and one, an Adelaide
society journal, was so far lacking in the respect due to the
mother-country as to belittle the English peerage by saying that the
lord in question would no doubt make a very good lord, as lords go, but
only so long as he did not go back to Australia, where there was a
warrant out for his arrest on a charge of petty larceny while employed
as a bell-boy in a First-Class Family Hotel in Melbourne.
The tale of this man’s venture on London may entertain the curious and
inspire the ambitious, for it tells how one evening fifteen years ago
Justinian Pant stood in Piccadilly Circus, wondering what he would do
next. Starvation was indicated, for in his pocket there was only one
penny. And he was about to send up a prayer to God for guidance when he
was distracted by falling into conversation with an old native of the
Circus, from whom he was amazed to learn that the old man had expected
his coming and had been awaiting him for some time with impatience.
Mr. Pant was not yet a master of men and could therefore afford to show
surprise, which he did after the Colonial manner by swearing through his
nose and whistling between his teeth. Whereupon the ancient man
confessed to being a soothsayer and told how it had been revealed to him
in a dream that a young man with a face similar in every detail to the
face of Mr. Pant, which was of a somewhat unusual shape, would one
night come into Piccadilly Circus from Australia and give him, the
soothsayer, the sum of one pound in cash, and how from that moment the
Australian would rise with remarkable velocity to be the greatest Force
in England.
Justinian Pant was not unwilling to be a Force, and asked eagerly for
more precise information as to the steps to be taken: adding that he had
only one penny on him, but would be pleased to owe the old gentleman the
small sum of nineteen shillings and eleven pence.
“Buy an evening paper and look at the advertisements,” said the ancient
man, for he earned his living by the sale of evening papers. And whilst
the Australian reluctantly exchanged his last penny for an evening
paper, the old soothsayer spat into the gutter and said harshly:
“Justinian Pant, you will be a Force. You will be a Napoleon. You will
be a lord. You will make wars, unmake Parliaments, shuffle Cabinets and
reshuffle Cabinets. You will be the first person in the world to
discover how to make the maximum amount of money out of the execution of
a murderer. You will give away your dearest friends on all occasions of
possible profit, while standing by them through thick and thin when
nothing is to be gained by standing anywhere else. You will be as a
thorn in the sides of upright men, and as a bastinado upon the behinds
of those who are down. You will be successful in all things; and honours
shall shower upon you like gold on a commercial traveller selling beer
by the yard. You will marry a lady of quality, and be an honourary
member of the most exclusive night-clubs. You will love your wife,
after your fashion. You will be jealous of her, after your fashion. And
you will forget to pay me the sum of nineteen shillings and eleven pence
which you owe me. For that reason, as also because all things must have
an end, whether it is the might of Empires or the beneficial effects of
alcohol--even, Justinian Pant, as the first news of your high destiny
comes to you in Piccadilly Circus, so the first knell of your awful doom
will be cried by a bird of wise omen that will perch on the left wing of
the Eros on the fountain over yonder. So it is written. I have spoken.”
And the ancient man disappeared among the crowds by the Underground
Station, leaving Justinian Pant to gape at a copy of the evening paper
of the night before last.
Nor did the contents of the days that followed put an end to his
astonishment; for as it was written, so it happened, even to the lady of
quality for a wife, whom Lord Vest loved violently. Young Mr. Dunn
appears, however, to have been an afterthought in the nobleman’s
destiny. How much rather young Mr. Dunn had remained forever unthought
of! But it is written that every cloud is full of rain and it is no use
crying into spilled milk when you have a handkerchief.