He had met Margaret Brandt for the first time at a Ladies' Banquet of
the Whitefriars Club.
Providence,--I insist upon this. No mere chance set them next to one
another at that hospitable board,--Providence, forecasting the future,
placed them side by side, and he was introduced to her by his good
friend Adam Black, who had the privilege of her acquaintance and sat
opposite enjoying them greatly.
For they were both eminently good to look upon;--Margaret, tall and
slender, and of a most gracious figure and bearing, with thoughtful,
dark-blue eyes, a very charming face accentuated by the
characteristics of her northern descent, and a wealth of shining brown
hair coiled about her shapely head;--Graeme, tall, clean-built, of an
outdoor complexion, with nothing of the student about him save his
deep, reflective eyes, and the little lines in the corners which
wrinkled up so readily at the overflowing humours of life.
It was Charles Pixley--Charles Svendt Pixley, to accord him fullest
justice, which I am most anxious to do--who brought her, and to that
extent we are his debtors.
Though why Pixley should be a Whitefriar passes one's comprehension.
His pretensions to literature were, I should say, bounded by his Stock
Exchange notebook and his betting-book. He had not even read Graeme's
latest, though it was genuinely in its second--somewhat
limited--edition, and he did not even smile affably when Adam Black
introduced them. Graeme, however, had no fault to find with him for
that. There were others in like dismal case.
Pixley nodded cursorily at the introduction, with a
"How-d'ye-do-who-the-deuce-are-you?" expression on his face. He struck
Graeme as not bad-looking, in a somewhat over-fed and self-indulgent
fashion, and inclined to superciliousness and self-complacency, if not
to actual superiority and condescension. It occurred to him afterwards
that this might arise from his absorption in his companion, for he
turned again at once to Miss Brandt and began chattering like a lively
and intelligent parrot.
Graeme was one of the silent and observant ones, and he could not but
think how beneficent Nature is in casting us in many moulds. If we
were all built alike, he thought, and all dribbled smart inanities,
and nothing but inanities, with the glibness of a Charles Pixley, what
a world it would be!
However, it was Charles Pixley who brought Margaret Brandt to that
dinner, and Graeme sat on the other side of her there. And so, Charles
Svendt--blessings on thee, unworthy friar though thou be!
And presently, Miss Brandt, wearying no doubt of _perdrix, perdrix,
toujours perdrix_,--that is to say of Charles's sprightly chatter, of
which she doubtless got more than enough at home,--essayed
conversation with the silent one at her other side, and, one may
suppose, found it more to her taste, or more of a novelty, than the
Pixley outflow.
For, once started, she and Graeme talked together most of the
evening--breaking off reluctantly to drink various toasts to people in
whom they had, at the moment, no remotest interest whatever, and
recovering the thread of their conversation before they resumed their
seats.
Only one toast really interested Graeme, and that was "The Ladies--the
Guests of the Evening"; and that he drank right heartily, with his
eyes on Miss Brandt's sparkling face, and if it had been left to
himself he would have converted it from plural to singular and drunk
to her alone.
Adam Black, excellent fellow, and gifted beyond most with wisdom and
insight, and the condensed milk of human kindness, took upon himself
the burden of Pixley, and engaged that eminent financier so deeply in
talk concerning matters of import, that Miss Brandt and Graeme found
themselves at liberty to enjoy one another to their hearts' content.
They talked on many subjects--tentatively, and as sounding novel
depths--in a way that occasioned one of them, at all events, very
great surprise. Indeed, it seemed to him afterwards that, for a silent
and observant man, he had been led into quite unwonted, but none the
less very enjoyable, ways. He went home that night feeling very much
as Columbus must have done when his New World swam before his eyes in
misted glory. He too had sighted a new world. He had discovered
Margaret Brandt.
She had travelled widely over Europe, he learned, and was looking
forward with eagerness to another tour in the near future. They
discovered a common liking for many of the places she had visited.
She was a wide and intelligent reader. To him it was a rare pleasure
to meet one.
"New places, and new books, and new people are always a joy to me,"
she said, in a glow of naïve enthusiasm. And then she blushed slightly
lest he should discover a personal application in the last-named, or
even in the last two.
But Graeme was thinking of her, and was formulating her character from
the delicious little bits of self-revelation which slipped out every
now and again.
"Yes," he said, "new things are very enjoyable, and in these times
there is no lack of them. The tendency, I should say, is towards
superfluity. But new places----! There are surely not many left except
the North Pole and the South. Everybody goes everywhere nowadays, and
you tumble over friends in Damascus and find your tailor picnicking on
the slopes of Lebanon."
Now, as it chanced,--if you admit such a thing as chance in so tangled
a coil as this complex world of ours,--Adam Black had just tucked
Charles Pixley into a close little argumentative corner, and given him
food for contemplation, and catching Graeme's last remark, he smiled
across the table, and in a word of four letters dropped a seed into
several lives which bore odd fruit and blossom.
"Ever been to Sark, Graeme?" he asked.
"Sark? No. Let me see----"
"Channel Islands. You go across from Guernsey. If ever you want relief
from your fellows--to finish a book, or to start one, or just to
grizzle and find yourself--try Sark. It's the most wonderful little
place, and it's amazing how few people know it."
Then Charles Pixley bethought him of a fresh line of argument, and
engaged Black, and was promptly shown the error of his ways; and
Margaret Brandt and Graeme resumed their discussion of places and
books and people. And before that evening ended, with such affinity of
tastes, their feet were fairly set in the rosy path of friendship.
Now that is how it all began, and that explains what happened
afterwards when the right time came.
Chance, forsooth! We know better.