As soon as he was gone, a sigh of relief ran half-unawares through the little square party. They felt some unearthly presence had been removed from their midst. General Claviger turned to Monteith. “That\'s a curious sort of chap,” he said slowly, in his military way. “Who is he, and where does he come from?”
“Ah, where does he come from?—that\'s just the question,” Monteith answered, lighting a cigar, and puffing away dubiously. “Nobody knows. He\'s a mystery. He poses in the role. You\'d better ask Philip; it was he who brought him here.”
“I met him accidentally in the street,” Philip answered, with an apologetic shrug, by no means well pleased at being thus held responsible for all the stranger\'s moral and social vagaries. “It\'s the merest chance acquaintance. I know nothing of his antecedents. I—er—I lent him a bag, and he\'s fastened himself upon me ever since like a leech, and come constantly to my sister\'s. But I haven\'t the remotest idea who he is or where he hails from. He keeps his business wrapped up from all of us in the profoundest mystery.”
“He\'s a gentleman, anyhow,” the General put in with military decisiveness. “How manly of him to acknowledge at once about the cobbler being probably a near relation! Most men, you know, Christy, would have tried to hide it; HE didn\'t for a second. He admitted his ancestors had all been cobblers till quite a recent period.”
Philip was astonished at this verdict of the General\'s, for he himself, on the contrary, had noted with silent scorn that very remark as a piece of supreme and hopeless stupidity on Bertram\'s part. No fellow can help having a cobbler for a grandfather, of course: but he need not be such a fool as to volunteer any mention of the fact spontaneously.
“Yes, I thought it bold of him,” Monteith answered, “almost bolder than was necessary; for he didn\'t seem to think we should be at all surprised at it.”
The General mused to himself. “He\'s a fine soldierly fellow,” he said, gazing after the tall retreating figure. “I should like to make a dragoon of him. He\'s the very man for a saddle. He\'d dash across country in the face of heavy guns any day with the best of them.”
“He rides well,” Philip answered, “and has a wonderful seat. I saw him on that bay mare of Wilder\'s in town the other afternoon, and I must say he rode much more like a gentleman than a cobbler.”
“Oh, he\'s a gentleman,” the General repeated, with unshaken conviction: “a thoroughbred gentleman.” And he scanned Philip up and down with his keen grey eye as if internally reflecting that Philip\'s own right to criticise and classify that particular species of humanity was a trifle doubtful. “I should much like to make a captain of hussars of him. He\'d be splendid as a leader of irregular horse; the very man for a scrimmage!” For the General\'s one idea when he saw a fine specimen of our common race was the Zulu\'s or the Red Indian\'s—what an admirable person he would be to employ in killing and maiming his fellow-creatures!
“He\'d be better engaged so,” the Dean murmured reflectively, “than in diffusing these horrid revolutionary and atheistical doctrines.” For the Church was as usual in accord with the sword; theoretically all peace, practically all bloodshed and rapine and aggression: and anything that was not his own opinion envisaged itself always to the Dean\'s crystallised mind as revolutionary and atheistic.
“He\'s very like the duke, though,” General Claviger went on, after a moment\'s pause, during which everybody watched Bertram and Frida disappearing down the walk round a clump of syringas. “Very like the duke. And you saw he admitted some sort of relationship, though he didn\'t like to dwell upon it. You may be sure he\'s a by-blow of the family somehow. One of the Bertrams, perhaps the old duke who was out in the Crimea, may have formed an attachment for one of these Ingledew girls—the cobbler\'s sisters: I dare say they were no better in their conduct than they ought to be—and this may be the consequence.”
“I\'m afraid the old duke was a man of loose life and doubtful conversation,” the Dean put in, with a tone of professional disapprobation for the inevitable transgressions of the great and the high-placed. “He didn\'t seem to set the example he ought to have done to his poorer brethren.”
“Oh, he was a thorough old rip, the duke, if it comes to that,” General Claviger responded, twirling his white moustache. “And so\'s the present man—a rip of the first water. They\'re a regular bad lot, the Bertrams, root and stock. They never set an example of anything to anybody—bar horse-breeding,—as far as I\'m aware; and even at that their trainers have always fairly cheated \'em.”
“The present duke\'s a most exemplary churchman,” the Dean interposed, with Christian charity for a nobleman of position. “He gave us a couple of thousand last year for the cathedral restoration fund.”
“And that would account,” Philip put in, returning abruptly to the previous question, which had been exercising him meanwhile, “for the peculiarly distinguished air of birth and breeding this man has about him.” For Philip respected a duke from the bottom of his heart, and cherished the common Britannic delusion that a man who has been elevated to that highest degree in our barbaric rank-system must acquire at the same time a nobler type of physique and countenance, exactly as a Jew changes his Semitic features for the European shape on conversion and baptism.
“Oh, dear, no,” the General answered in his most decided voice. “The Bertrams were never much to look at in any way: and as for the old duke, he was as insignificant a little monster of red-haired ugliness as ever you\'d see in a day\'s march anywhere. If he hadn\'t been a duke, with a rent-roll of forty odd thousand a year, he\'d never have got that beautiful Lady Camilla to consent to marry him. But, bless you, women \'ll do anything for the strawberry leaves. It isn\'t from the Bertrams this man gets his good looks. It isn\'t from the Bertrams. Old Ingledew\'s daughters are pretty enough girls. If their aunts were like \'em, it\'s there your young friend got his air of distinction.”
“We never know who\'s who nowadays,” the Dean murmured softly.............