CHAPTER THE FIRST
INTRODUCES OSWALD DE GEX

I had promised to call upon Charles Latimer, my bachelor uncle, a retired naval captain, a somewhat crusty old fellow who lived in Orchard Street, which runs between Oxford Street and Portman Square. I usually went there twice a week. With that intent I took a motor ’bus from Hammersmith Broadway as far as Hyde Park Corner.

As I stepped off the ’bus rain began to fall, so turning up the collar of my coat I hurried up Park Lane, at that hour half deserted.

When half-way up to Oxford Street I turned into one of the small, highly aristocratic streets leading into Park Street as a short cut to Orchard Street. The houses were all of them fine town mansions of the aristocracy, most of them with deep porticos and deeper areas.

Stretton Street was essentially one inhabited by the highest in London society. I had passed through it many times – as a Londoner does in making short cuts – without even noticing the name. The Londoner’s geography is usually only by the landmarks of street corners and “tube” stations.

As I hurried along through the rain, I suddenly heard a man’s voice behind me say:

“Excuse me, sir! But may I speak to you for just one second?”

I turned, and as I halted, a bare-headed young man-servant in livery, with waistcoat of striped black-and-yellow, faced me.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he exclaimed breathlessly, “but will you wait just a moment?”

“What do you want?” I asked, surprised at being thus accosted.

“Would you oblige my master, sir?” inquired the young man eagerly. “He is in some very great trouble. Only a moment, sir. Just come in and see him. Do. Poor fellow! he’s in great trouble. Do come in and see him, sir,” he begged.

Amazed at this appeal, and my curiosity aroused, I consented, and followed the man back to a great stone-built mansion about fifty yards away. The front door in its deep portico stood open, just as the servant had left it when, apparently, he had dashed out into the street to accost the first passer-by.

“I’m sure my master will be most grateful to you, sir,” the young footman said as I crossed the threshold.

We passed through a large square hall and up a great flight of softly-carpeted stairs to the library on the first floor – a big, sombre room, lined with books from floor to ceiling – evidently the den of a studious man.

In the grate there burned a bright log fire, and on either side stood two deep leather arm-chairs. It was a room possessing the acme of cosiness and comfort. Over the fireplace was set a large circular painting of the Madonna and Child – evidently the work of some Italian master of the seventeenth century – while here and there stood several exquisite bronzes.

In the window on the left was set a great carved Renaissance writing-table, and upon it burned an electric lamp with an artistic shade of emerald glass.

A few moments later a man in evening-dress entered hurriedly – almost breathlessly. I judged him to be about forty-five, dark-haired and decidedly handsome, but his complexion was a trifle sallow, and his features had a decidedly Oriental cast.

He greeted me profusely in a quiet, highly refined voice. Though his appearance was foreign, yet he was certainly English.

“I’m really awfully sorry to trouble you, sir,” he said in a tone of profuse apology, “but the fact is that I find myself in a state of considerable perplexity. It is extremely good of you to consent to accompany Horton back here. I only hope that I have not interfered with any appointment you have to keep.”

“Not at all,” I replied, wondering who my host might be, for the whole affair was so sudden and unexpected that I was bewildered.

“Do sit down, and have a cigar,” said my unknown host cheerily, and he took up a large silver box from a side table whereon was set a decanter of whisky, a syphon of soda water and four glasses upon a beautiful old tray of Georgian silver.

I selected a Corona, and sinking into the inviting chair, lit it, while he also took a cigar, and having clipped off the end, lit up as well.

We chatted affably, for my host was certainly geniality itself.

“This is quite an unexpected visit!” I remarked laughing, wondering still why I had been called in.

“Yes,” he said. “I should not have had the pleasure of your acquaintance had it not been for the great trouble I have to-night,” and he drew a deep sigh, while across his dark face passed an expression of pain and regret. “Some men are happy, others are – are, well, unfortunately unhappy in their domestic life. I, alas! am one of the latter,” he added.

“That is very regrettable,” I said sympathetically.

“My wife,” he said hoarsely after a pause, “my wife took out my little boy this evening and deliberately left him in Westbourne Grove – just in order to spite me! Then she rang me up from some call-office and told me what she had done. Put yourself in my place,” he said. “Would you not be indignant? Would you not be filled with hatred – and – ”

“I certainly should,” was my reply. “I’m a bachelor, and sometimes when I see so many unhappy marriages I fear to take the matrimonial plunge myself.”

“Ah! Take my advice and remain single as long as ever you can, my dear sir. I – I haven’t the pleasure of your name.”

“Garfield – Hugh Garfield,” I said.

“Mine is De Gex – Oswald De Gex,” he said. “You may perhaps have heard of me.”

Heard of Oswald De Gex! Of course I had! He was reputed to be one of the wealthiest of men, but he lived mostly in Paris or at his magnificent villa outside Florence. It was common knowledge that he had, during the war, invested a level million sterling in the War Loan, while he was constantly giving great donations to various charities. Somewhat eccentric, he preferred living abroad to spending his time in England, because, it was said, of some personal quarrel with another Member of the House of Commons which had arisen over a debate soon after he had been elected.

I recollected, too, that his wife – whose handsome pictured face so often appeared in the newspapers – was the daughter of a sporting baronet, yet I had never heard any whisper of such matrimonial troubles as he had just revealed to me.

He seemed a most easy-going man, whose clean-shaven face under the softly shaded electric light did not now appear so sallow and foreign as at first. His eyes were dark and rather deeply set, while his mouth was narrow and refined, with a dimple in the centre of his chin. His cast of features was certainly foreign, and handsome withal – a face full of strength and character. When he spoke he slightly aspirated his c’s, and now and then he gesticulated when enthusiastic, due, of course, to his long residence abroad.

Often I had read in the newspapers of the splendid mediæval castle which he had bought from the Earl of Weymount, a castle perched high upon the granite rocks facing the Channel, between the Lizard and St. Ruan. He had spent a fortune in restoring it, yet he very seldom visited it. The historic place, with its wind-swept surroundings, was given over to his agent at Truro and to a caretaker.

As a matter of fact, I had once seen it while on a summer tour in Cornwall five years before, a great square keep with four towers, storm-worn and forbidding – one of the most perfect specimens of the mediæval castles in England. I had been told by the man who drove the hired car about its history, how in the early fourteenth century it had been the home of William Auberville, a favourite of Edward II. From the Aubervilles the old fortress had passed a century later into the Weymount family, and had been their ancestral home for centuries.

I chanced to mention that I had seen the castle, whereupon the millionaire smiled, and remarked:

“I fear that I’ve not been there lately. I am so very seldom in England nowadays. Besides, the old place is so cold and gloomy. It is draughty even on a summer’s day. My wife liked it when we were married – liked it until somebody told her of a family legend, how Hugh de Weymount, in the fifteenth century, walled up his wife in the north tower and left her to starve to death. Ever since she heard that story she has hated the old place. But,” he added with a hard laugh, “it is most probably not true, and if the gallant knight actually did such a thing, perhaps, after all, the lady deserved it!”

My friend certainly seemed soured against the opposite sex. And surely he had just cause to be if his wife, in order to spite him, had deliberately lost the heir, little Oswald De Gex, in Westbourne Grove.

It was a strange thing that the heir of one of the wealthiest men in Britain should have been abandoned in Bayswater. As a bachelor, I wondered as to the state of mind of the mother – a mother who could take out her child on a winter’s night, without hat or coat, and deliberately cast him adrift just to annoy her husband.

But the gentler sex in these days of drugs and dancing are, it must be admitted, strangely abnormal. Women with crazes abound everywhere. That women are emancipated from the almost Oriental thraldom in which they lived in the days of Victoria the Good is a bright sign of our times – the times of discovery, refinement, and mutual happiness of all classes. But certain circles – those circles wherein women take drugs to enable them to dance the better, circles where opium is smoked, and where morals do not count, where religion is scoffed at and relegated to the limbo of an out-of-date fiction, and where only the possessor of money counts, there is a strange and mysterious phase of Society indescribable by the pen. Only those who know of them by personal experience – the experience of “fast living” – can understand it. And even the man-about-town stands aghast at the ultra-modern crazes.

As we sat chatting in that quiet comfortable room, I confess that I became rather fascinated by my host. Perhaps he was a trifle too cynical at times, but his matrimonial trouble no doubt accounted for it.

Suddenly he rose and stretched himself rather wearily, I thought. The thin, delicate hand which held his cigar was long and tapering, and upon his finger was an antique Florentine ring in the form of a small emerald moth. I particularly noticed it as of very unusual pattern. I recollected seeing one of the same design in the Louvre Museum in Paris several years before.

“Ah!” he sighed. “I shall very soon leave London again – thank goodness! Next week I return to Fiesole for the winter. I am no great lover of London – are you, Mr. – Mr. Garfield?”

“My business as an electrical engineer keeps me in London,” was my reply. “Besides, I have recently sustained a very heavy financial loss. If, however, I were independent I should certainly live in the country. London has, to me, become unbearable since the war.”

“Ah! I quite agree,” replied my host. “All our fine British traditions seem to have gone by the board. That, at least, is my own view. But there – perhaps I am getting an old fogey.”

“I don’t think so,” I replied. “Everyone who knows you, Mr. De Gex, is well aware of your up-to-dateness, and your great generosity.”

“Are they?” he asked, smiling wearily. “Personally I care very little. Popularity and prosperity can be manufactured by any shrewd press-agent employed at so much a year. Without publicity, the professional man or woman would never obtain a hearing. These are the days when incompetency properly boomed raises the incompetent to greatness – and even to Cabinet rank. Neither would the society woman ever obtain a friend without her boom,” he went on. “Bah! I’m sick of it all!” he added with a sweep of his thin white hand. “But it is refreshing to talk with you, a stranger.”

He was certainly frank in his criticisms, and I was not at all surprised when he commenced to question me as to my profession, where I lived, and what were my future plans.

I told him quite openly of my position, and that I lived in Rivermead Mansions with my friend Hambledon; and I also mentioned again the financial blow I had just received.

“Well,” he said lazily, “I’m greatly indebted to you, Mr. Garfield, for deigning to come in and see a much-worried man. Ah! you do not know how I suffer from my wife’s hatred of me. My poor little Oswald. Fancy abandoning him in order that the police might find him. But happily he is back. Think of the publicity – for the papers would have been full of my son being lost.” Then, after a pause, he added: “I hope we shall see each other again before I go back to Italy.”

At that moment, the butler, Horton, entered with a card upon a silver salver, whereupon I rose to leave.

“Oh! don’t go yet!” my host urged quickly, as he glanced at the card.

“Is he waiting?” asked Mr. De Gex, turning to his servant.

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh, well. Yes, I’ll see him,” he said. And then, excusing himself, he rose and left, followed by the man.

Why, I wondered, had I been invited there? It seemed curious that this exceedingly rich man was bursting to confide his domestic troubles to a perfect stranger.

I glanced around the handsome, well-furnished room.

Upon the writing-table lay a number of letters, and upon the red blotting-pad was a big wad of Treasury notes, under an elastic band, cast aside heedlessly, as rich men often do.