The God in the Car: A Novel

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."

CHAPTER III

MRS. DENNISON'S ORDERS

Next door to Mrs. Dennison's large house in Curzon Street there lived, in a small house, a friend of hers, a certain Mrs. Cormack. She was a Frenchwoman, who had been married to an Englishman, and was now his most resigned widow. She did not pretend to herself, or to anybody else, that Mr. Cormack's death had been a pure misfortune, and by virtue of her past trials – perhaps, also, of her nationality – she was keenly awake to the seamy side of matrimony. She would rhapsodise on the joys of an ideal marriage, with a skilful hint of its rarity, and condemn transgressors with a charitable reservation for insupportable miseries. She was, she said, very romantic. Tom Loring, however (whose evidence was tainted by an intense dislike of her), declared that affaires du cœur interested her only when one at least of the parties was lawfully bound to a third person; when both were thus trammelled, the situation was ideal. But the loves of those who were in a position to marry one another, and had no particular reason for not following that legitimate path to happiness, seemed to her (still according to Tom) dull, uninspiring – all, in fact, that there was possible of English and stupid. She hardly (Tom would go on, warming to his subject) believed in them at all, and she was in the habit of regarding wedlock merely as a condition precedent to its own violent dissolution. Whether this unhappy mode of looking at the matter were due to her own peculiarities, or to those of the late Mr. Cormack, or to those of her nation, Tom did not pretend to say; he confined himself to denouncing it freely, and to telling Mrs. Dennison that her next-door neighbour was in all respects a most undesirable acquaintance; at which outbursts Mrs. Dennison would smile.

Mrs. Dennison, coming out on to the balcony to see if her carriage were in sight down the street, found her friend close to her elbow. Their balconies adjoined, and friendship had led to a little gate being substituted for the usual dwarf-wall of division. Tom Loring erected the gate into an allegory of direful portent. Mrs. Cormack passed through it, and laid an affectionate grasp on Maggie Dennison's arm.

"You're starting early," she remarked.

"I'm going a long way – right up to Hampstead. I've promised Harry to call on some people there."

"Ah! Who?"

"Their name's Carlin. He knows Mr. Carlin in business. Mr. Carlin's a friend of Mr. Ruston's."

"Oh, of Ruston's? I like that Ruston. He is interesting – inspiring."

"Is he?" said Mrs. Dennison, buttoning her glove. "You'd better marry him, Berthe."

"Marry him? No, indeed. I think he would beat one."

"Is that being inspiring? I'm glad Harry's not inspiring."

"Oh, you know what I mean. He's a man who – "

Mrs. Cormack threw up her arms as though praying for the inspired word. Mrs. Dennison did not wait for it.

"There's the carriage. Good-bye, dear," she said.