CHAPTER XVIII
THE FIFTEENTH EARL OF MOUNT DUNSTAN
James Hubert John Fergus Saltyre--fifteenth Earl of
Mount Dunstan, "Jem Salter," as his neighbours on the Western
ranches had called him, the red-haired, second-class passenger
of the Meridiana, sat in the great library of his desolate
great house, and stared fixedly through the open window at
the lovely land spread out before him. From this particular
window was to be seen one of the greatest views in England.
From the upper nurseries he had lived in as a child he had
seen it every day from morning until night, and it had seemed
to his young fancy to cover all the plains of the earth. Surely
the rest of the world, he had thought, could be but small--
though somewhere he knew there was London where the
Queen lived, and in London were Buckingham Palace and
St. James Palace and Kensington and the Tower, where heads
had been chopped off; and the Horse Guards, where splendid,
plumed soldiers rode forth glittering, with thrilling trumpets
sounding as they moved. These last he always remembered,
because he had seen them, and once when he had walked
in the park with his nurse there had been an excited stir in
the Row, and people had crowded about a certain gate, through
which an escorted carriage had been driven, and he had been
made at once to take off his hat and stand bareheaded until
it passed, because it was the Queen. Somehow from that
afternoon he dated the first presentation of certain vaguely
miserable ideas. Inquiries made of his attendant, when the
cortege had swept by, had elicited the fact that the Royal
Lady herself had children--little boys who were princes and
little girls who were princesses. What curious and persistent
child cross-examination on his part had drawn forth the fact
that almost all the people who drove about and looked so
happy and brilliant, were the fathers or mothers of little boys
like, yet--in some mysterious way--unlike himself? And in
what manner had he gathered that he was different from
them? His nurse, it is true, was not a pleasant person, and
had an injured and resentful bearing. In later years he realised
that it had been the bearing of an irregularly paid
menial, who rebelled against the fact that her place was not
among people who were of distinction and high repute, and
whose households bestowed a certain social status upon their
servitors. She was a tall woman with a sour face and a
bearing which conveyed a glum endurance of a position
beneath her. Yes, it had been from her--Brough her name was
--that he had mysteriously gathered that he was not a desirable
charge, as regarded from the point of the servants' hall
--or, in fact, from any other point. His people were not the
people whose patronage was sought with anxious eagerness.
For some reason their town house was objectionable, and
Mount Dunstan was without attractions. Other big houses
were, in some marked way, different. The town house he
objected to himself as being gloomy and ugly, and possessing
only a bare and battered nursery, from whose windows one
could not even obtain a satisfactory view of the Mews, where
at least, there were horses and grooms who hissed cheerfully
while they curried and brushed them. He hated the town
house and was, in fact, very glad that he was scarcely ever
taken to it. People, it seemed, did not care to come either to
the town house or to Mount Dunstan. That was why he did
not know other little boys. Again--for the mysterious reason
--people did not care that their children should associate with
him. How did he discover this? He never knew exactly.
He realised, however, that without distinct statements, he
seemed to have gathered it through various disconnected talks
with Brough. She had not remained with him long, having
"bettered herself" greatly and gone away in glum satisfaction,
but she had stayed long enough to convey to him things
which became part of his existence, and smouldered in his
little soul until they became part of himself. The ancestors
who had hewn their way through their enemies with battle-
axes, who had been fierce and cruel and unconquerable in
their savage pride, had handed down to him a burning and
unsubmissive soul. At six years old, walking with Brough
in Kensington Gardens, and seeing other children playing
under the care of nurses, who, he learned, were not inclined
to make advances to his attendant, he dragged Brough away
with a fierce little hand and stood apart with her, scowling
haughtily, his head in the air, pretending that he disdained
all childish gambols, and would have declined to join in
them, even if he had been besought to so far unbend.
Bitterness had been planted in him then, though he had not
understood, and the sourness of Brough had been connected
with no intelligence which might have caused her to suspect
his feelings, and no one had noticed, and if anyone had noticed,
no one would have cared in the very least.
When Brough had gone away to her far superior place, and
she had been succeeded by one variety of objectionable or
incompetent person after another, he had still continued to
learn. In different ways he silently collected information, and
all of it was unpleasant, and, as he grew older, it took for
some years one form. Lack of resources, which should of right
belong to persons of rank, was the radical objection to his
people. At the town house there was no money, at Mount
Dunstan there was no money. There had been so little money
even in his grandfather's time that his father had inherited
comparative beggary. The fourteenth Earl of Mount Dunstan
did not call it "comparative" beggary, he called it beggary
pure and simple, and cursed his progenitors with engaging
frankness. He never referred to the fact that in his personable
youth he had married a wife whose fortune, if it had not
been squandered, might have restored his own. The fortune
had been squandered in the course of a few years of riotous
living, the wife had died when her third son was born, which
event took place ten years after the birth of her second, whom
she had lost through scarlet fever. James Hubert John Fergus
Saltyre never heard much of her, and barely knew of her past
existence because in the picture gallery he had seen a portrait
of a tall, thin, fretful-looking young lady, with light ringlets,
and pearls round her neck. She had not attracted him as a
child, and the fact that he gathered that she had been his
mother left him entirely unmoved. She was not a loveable-
looking person, and, indeed, had been at once empty-headed,
irritable, and worldly. He would probably have been no less
lonely if she had lived. Lonely he was. His father was
engaged in a career much too lively and interesting to himself
to admit of his allowing himself to be bored by an unwanted
and entirely superfluous child. The elder son, who was Lord
Tenham, had reached a premature and degenerate maturity
by the time the younger one made his belated appearance, and
regarded him with unconcealed dislike. The worst thing which
could have befallen the younger boy would have been intimate
association with this degenerate youth.
As Saltyre left nursery days behind, he learned by degrees
that the objection to himself and his people, which had at
first endeavoured to explain itself as being the result of an
unseemly lack of money, combined with that unpleasant feature,
an uglier one--namely, lack of decent reputation. Angry
duns, beggarliness of income, scarcity of the necessaries and
luxuries which dignity of rank demanded, the indifference
and slights of one's equals, and the ignoring of one's existence
by exalted persons, were all hideous enough to Lord Mount
Dunstan and his elder son--but they were not so hideous
as was, to his younger son, the childish, shamed frenzy of
awakening to the truth that he was one of a bad lot--a
disgraceful lot, from whom nothing was expected but shifty
ways, low vices, and scandals, which in the end could not even
be kept out of the newspapers. The day came, in fact, when
the worst of these was seized upon by them and filled their
sheets with matter which for a whole season decent London
avoided reading, and the fast and indecent element laughed,
derided, or gloated over.
The memory of the fever of the monstrous weeks which
had passed at this time was not one it was wise for a man
to recall. But it was not to be forgotten--the hasty midnight
arrival at Mount Dunstan of father and son, their haggard,
nervous faces, their terrified discussions, and argumentative
raging when they were shut up together behind locked doors,
the appearance of legal advisers who looked as anxious as
themselves, but failed to conceal the disgust with which they
were battling, the knowledge that tongues were clacking
almost hysterically in the village, and that curious faces
hurried to the windows when even a menial from the great house
passed, the atmosphere of below-stairs whispers, and jogged
elbows, and winks, and giggles; the final desperate, excited
preparations for flight, which might be ignominiously stopped
at any moment by the intervention of the law, the huddling
away at night time, the hot-throated fear that the shameful,
self-branding move might be too late--the burning humiliation
of knowing the inevitable result of public contempt or laughter
when the world next day heard that the fugitives had put
the English Channel between themselves and their country's laws.
Lord Tenham had died a few years later at Port Said,
after descending into all the hells of degenerate debauch.
His father had lived longer--long enough to make of himself
something horribly near an imbecile, before he died suddenly
in Paris. The Mount Dunstan who succeeded him, having
spent his childhood and boyhood under the shadow of the
"bad lot," had the character of being a big, surly, unattractive
young fellow, whose eccentricity presented itself to those
who knew his stock, as being of a kind which might develop
at any time into any objectionable tendency. His bearing was
not such as allured, and his fortune was not of the order
which placed a man in the view of the world. He had no
money to expend, no hospitalities to offer and apparently no
disposition to connect himself with society. His wild-goose
chase to America had, when it had been considered worth
while discussing at all, been regarded as being very much
the kind of thing a Mount Dunstan might do with some
secret and disreputable end in view. No one had heard
the exact truth, and no one would have been inclined to
believe if they had heard it. That he had lived as plain
Jem Salter, and laboured as any hind might have done, in
desperate effort and mad hope, would not have been regarded
as a fact to be credited. He had gone away, he had squandered
money, he had returned, he was at Mount Dunstan again,
living the life of an objectionable recluse--objectionable,
because the owner of a place like Mount Dunstan should be a
power and an influence in the county, should be counted upon
as a dispenser of hospitalities, as a supporter of charities, as
a dignitary of weight. He was none of these--living no one
knew how, slouching about with his gun, riding or walking
sullenly over the roads and marshland.
Just one man knew him intimately, and this one had been
from his fifteenth year the sole friend of his life. He had
come, then--the Reverend Lewis Penzance--a poor and unhealthy
scholar, to be vicar of the parish of Dunstan. Only
a poor and book-absorbed man would have accepted the
position. What this man wanted was no more than quiet, pure
country air to fill frail lungs, a roof over his head, and a
place to pore over books and manuscripts. He was a born
monk and celibate--in by-gone centuries he would have lived
peacefully in some monastery, spending his years in the reading
and writing of black letter and the illuminating of missals.
At the vicarage he could lead an existence which was almost
the same thing.
At Mount Dunstan there remained still the large remnant
of a great library. A huge room whose neglected and half
emptied shelves contained some strange things and wonderful
ones, though all were in disorder, and given up to dust and
natural dilapidation. Inevitably the Reverend Lewis Penzance
had found his way there, inevitably he had gained indifferently
bestowed permission to entertain himself by endeavouring to
reduce to order and to make an attempt at cataloguing.
Inevitably, also, the hours he spent in the place
became the chief sustenance of his being.
There, one day, he had come upon an uncouth-looking boy
with deep eyes and a shaggy crop of red hair. The boy was
poring over an old volume, and was plainly not disposed to
leave it. He rose, not too graciously, and replied to the elder
man's greeting, and the friendly questions which followed.
Yes, he was the youngest son of the house. He had nothing
to do, and he liked the library. He often came there and sat
and read things. There were some queer old books and a lot
of stupid ones. The book he was reading now? Oh, that
(with a slight reddening of his skin and a little awkwardness
at the admission) was one of those he liked best. It was one
of the queer ones, but interesting for all that. It was about
their own people--the generations of Mount Dunstans who had
lived in the centuries past. He supposed he liked it because
there were a lot of odd stories and exciting things in it.
Plenty of fighting and adventure. There had been some splendid
fellows among them. (He was beginning to forget himself
a little by this time.) They were afraid of nothing. They
were rather like savages in the earliest days, but at that
time all the rest of the world was savage. But they were
brave, and it was odd how decent they were very often.
What he meant was--what he liked was, that they were men--
even when they were barbarians. You couldn't be ashamed
of them. Things they did then could not be done now,
because the world was different, but if--well, the kind of men
they were might do England a lot of good if they were alive
to-day. They would be different themselves, of course, in
one way--but they must be the same men in others. Perhaps
Mr. Penzance (reddening again) understood what he meant.
He knew himself very well, because he had thought it all
out, he was always thinking about it, but he was no good
at explaining.
Mr. Penzance was interested. His outlook on the past and
the present had always been that of a bookworm, but he
understood enough to see that he had come upon a temperament
novel enough to awaken curiosity. The apparently
entirely neglected boy, of a type singularly unlike that of
his father and elder brother, living his life virtually alone in
the big place, and finding food to his taste in stories of those
of his blood whose dust had mingled with the earth centuries
ago, provided him with a new subject for reflection.
That had been the beginning of an unusual friendship.
Gradually Penzance had reached a clear understanding of all
the building of the young life, of its rankling humiliation, and
the qualities of mind and body which made for rebellion. It
sometimes thrilled him to see in the big frame and powerful
muscles, in the strong nature and unconquerable spirit, a
revival of what had burned and stirred through lives lived
in a dim, almost mythical, past. There were legends of men
with big bodies, fierce faces, and red hair, who had done big
deeds, and conquered in dark and barbarous days, even Fate's
self, as it had seemed. None could overthrow them, none could
stand before their determination to attain that which they
chose to claim. Students of heredity knew that there were
curious instances of revival of type. There had been a certain
Red Godwyn who had ruled his piece of England before
the Conqueror came, and who had defied the interloper
with such splendid arrogance and superhuman lack of fear
that he had won in the end, strangely enough, the admiration
and friendship of the royal savage himself, who saw, in his,
a kindred savagery, a power to be well ranged, through love,
if not through fear, upon his own side. This Godwyn had
a deep attraction for his descendant, who knew the whole
story of his fierce life--as told in one yellow manuscript and
another--by heart. Why might not one fancy--Penzance
was drawn by the imagining--this strong thing reborn, even
as the offspring of a poorer effete type. Red Godwyn springing
into being again, had been stronger than all else, and had
swept weakness before him as he had done in other and far-off
days.
In the old library it fell out in time that Penzance and the
boy spent the greater part of their days. The man was a
bookworm and a scholar, young Saltyre had a passion for
knowledge. Among the old books and manuscripts he gained
a singular education. Without a guide he could not have
gathered and assimilated all he did gather and assimilate.
Together the two rummaged forgotten shelves and chests, and
found forgotten things. That which had drawn the boy from
the first always drew and absorbed him--the annals of his
own people. Many a long winter evening the pair turned over
the pages of volumes and of parchment, and followed with
eager interest and curiosity the records of wild lives--stories
of warriors and abbots and bards, of feudal lords at ruthless
war with each other, of besiegings and battles and captives
and torments. Legends there were of small kingdoms torn
asunder, of the slaughter of their kings, the mad fightings of
their barons, and the faith or unfaith of their serfs. Here
and there the eternal power revealed itself in some story of
lawful or unlawful love--for dame or damsel, royal lady,
abbess, or high-born nun--ending in the welding of two lives
or in rapine, violence, and death. There were annals of
early England, and of marauders, monks, and Danes. And,
through all these, some thing, some man or woman, place, or
strife linked by some tie with Mount Dunstan blood. In
past generations, it seemed plain, there had been certain of
the line who had had pride in these records, and had sought
and collected them; then had been born others who had not
cared. Sometimes the relations were inadequate, sometimes they
wore an unauthentic air, but most of them seemed, even after
the passing of centuries, human documents, and together built
a marvellous great drama of life and power, wickedness and
passion and daring deeds.
When the shameful scandal burst forth young Saltyre was
seen by neither his father nor his brother. Neither of them
had any desire to see him; in fact, each detested the idea of
confronting by any chance his hot, intolerant eyes. "The
Brat," his father had called him in his childhood, "The Lout,"
when he had grown big-limbed and clumsy. Both he and
Tenham were sick enough, without being called upon to
contemplate "The Lout," whose opinion, in any case, they
preferred not to hear.
Saltyre, during the hideous days, shut himself up in the
library. He did not leave the house, even for exercise, until
after the pair had fled. His exercise he took in walking up
and down from one end of the long room to another. Devils
were let loose in him. When Penzance came to him, he saw their
fury in his eyes, and heard it in the savagery of his laugh.
He kicked an ancient volume out of his way as he strode to and
fro.
"There has been plenty of the blood of the beast in us
in bygone times," he said, "but it was not like this.
Savagery in savage days had its excuse. This is the beast sunk
into the gibbering, degenerate ape."
Penzance came and spent hours of each day with him.
Part of his rage was the rage of a man, but he was a boy
still, and the boyishness of his bitterly hurt youth was a thing
to move to pity. With young blood, and young pride, and
young expectancy rising within him, he was at an hour when
he should have felt himself standing upon the threshold of the
world, gazing out at the splendid joys and promises and
powerful deeds of it--waiting only the fit moment to step forth
and win his place.
"But we are done for," he shouted once. "We are done
for. And I am as much done for as they are. Decent
people won't touch us. That is where the last Mount Dunstan
stands." And Penzance heard in his voice an absolute
break. He stopped and marched to the window at the end of
the long room, and stood in dead stillness, staring out at the
down-sweeping lines of heavy rain.
The older man thought many things, as he looked at his
big back and body. He stood with his legs astride, and
Penzance noted that his right hand was clenched on his
hip, as a man's might be as he clenched the hilt of his sword
--his one mate who might avenge him even when, standing
at bay, he knew that the end had come, and he must fall.
Primeval Force--the thin-faced, narrow-chested, slightly bald
clergyman of the Church of England was thinking--never loses its
way, or fails to sweep a path before it. The sun rises and sets,
the seasons come and go, Primeval Force is of them, and as
unchangeable. Much of it stood before him embodied in this
strongly sentient thing. In this way the Reverend Lewis found
his thoughts leading him, and he--being moved to the depths of a
fine soul--felt them profoundly interesting, and even sustaining.
He sat in a high-backed chair, holding its arms with long
thin hands, and looking for some time at James Hubert John
Fergus Saltyre. He said, at last, in a sane level voice:
"Lord Tenham is not the last Mount Dunstan."
After which the stillness remained unbroken again for
some minutes. Saltyre did not move or make any response,
and, when he left his place at the window, he took up a
book, and they spoke of other things.
When the fourteenth Earl died in Paris, and his younger
son succeeded, there came a time when the two companions
sat together in the library again. It was the evening of a
long day spent in discouraging hard work. In the morning
they had ridden side by side over the estate, in the afternoon
they had sat and pored over accounts, leases, maps, plans. By
nightfall both were fagged and neither in sanguine mood.
Mount Dunstan had sat silent for some time. The pair
often sat silent. This pause was ended by the young man's
rising and standing up, stretching his limbs.
"It was a queer thing you said to me in this room a few
years ago," he said. "It has just come back to me."
Singularly enough--or perhaps naturally enough--it had
also just arisen again from the depths of Penzance's
subconsciousness.
"Yes," he answered, "I remember. To-night it suggests
premonition. Your brother was not the last Mount Dunstan."
"In one sense he never was Mount Dunstan at all,"
answered the other man. Then he suddenly threw out his arms
in a gesture whose whole significance it would have been
difficult to describe. There was a kind of passion in it. "I
am the last Mount Dunstan," he harshly laughed. "Moi qui
vous parle! The last."
Penzance's eyes resting on him took upon themselves the
far-seeing look of a man who watches the world of life without
living in it. He presently shook his head.
"No," he said. "I don't see that. No--not the last.
Believe me.
And singularly, in truth, Mount Dunstan stood still and
gazed at him without speaking. The eyes of each rested
in the eyes of the other. And, as had happened before, they
followed the subject no further. From that moment it dropped.
Only Penzance had known of his reasons for going to
America. Even the family solicitors, gravely holding interviews
with him and restraining expression of their absolute
disapproval of such employment of his inadequate resources,
knew no more than that this Mount Dunstan, instead of wasting
his beggarly income at Cairo, or Monte Carlo, or in Paris
as the last one had done, prefers to waste it in newer places.
The head of the firm, when he bids him good-morning and leaves
him alone, merely shrugs his shoulders and returns to his letter
writing with the corners of his elderly mouth hard set.
Penzance saw him off--and met him upon his return. In
the library they sat and talked it over, and, having done
so, closed the book of the episode.
. . . . .
He sat at the table, his eyes upon the wide-spread loveliness
of the landscape, but his thought elsewhere. It wandered
over the years already lived through, wandering backwards
even to the days when existence, opening before the
child eyes, was a baffling and vaguely unhappy thing.
When the door opened and Penzance was ushered in by a
servant, his face wore the look his friend would have been
rejoiced to see swept away to return no more.
Then let us take our old accustomed seat and begin some
casual talk, which will draw him out of the shadows, and make
him forget such things as it is not good to remember. That
is what we have done many times in the past, and may find
it well to do many a time again.
He begins with talk of the village and the country-side.
Village stories are often quaint, and stories of the country-
side are sometimes--not always--interesting. Tom Benson's
wife has presented him with triplets, and there is great
excitement in the village, as to the steps to be taken to secure
the three guineas given by the Queen as a reward for this
feat. Old Benny Bates has announced his intention of taking
a fifth wife at the age of ninety, and is indignant that it
has been suggested that the parochial authorities in charge of
the "Union," in which he must inevitably shortly take refuge,
may interfere with his rights as a citizen. The Reverend Lewis
has been to talk seriously with him, and finds him at once
irate and obdurate.
"Vicar," says old Benny, "he can't refuse to marry no
man. Law won't let him." Such refusal, he intimates, might
drive him to wild and riotous living. Remembering his last
view of old Benny tottering down the village street in his
white smock, his nut-cracker face like a withered rosy apple,
his gnarled hand grasping the knotted staff his bent body
leaned on, Mount Dunstan grinned a little. He did not smile
when Penzance passed to the restoration of the ancient church
at Mellowdene. "Restoration" usually meant the tearing
away of ancient oaken, high-backed pews, and the instalment
of smug new benches, suggesting suburban Dissenting chapels,
such as the feudal soul revolts at. Neither did he smile
at a reference to the gathering at Dunholm Castle, which
was twelve miles away. Dunholm was the possession of a
man who stood for all that was first and highest in the land,
dignity, learning, exalted character, generosity, honour. He
and the late Lord Mount Dunstan had been born in the same
year, and had succeeded to their titles almost at the same time.
There had arrived a period when they had ceased to know
each other. All that the one man intrinsically was, the other
man was not. All that the one estate, its castle, its village,
its tenantry, represented, was the antipodes of that which the
other stood for. The one possession held its place a silent,
and perhaps, unconscious reproach to the other. Among the
guests, forming the large house party which London social
news had already recorded in its columns, were great and
honourable persons, and interesting ones, men and women
who counted as factors in all good and dignified things
accomplished. Even in the present Mount Dunstan's childhood,
people of their world had ceased to cross his father's
threshold. As one or two of the most noticeable names were
mentioned, mentally he recalled this, and Penzance, quick to
see the thought in his eyes, changed the subject.
"At Stornham village an unexpected thing has happened,"
he said. "One of the relatives of Lady Anstruthers has
suddenly appeared--a sister. You may remember that the
poor woman was said to be the daughter of some rich American,
and it seemed unexplainable that none of her family
ever appeared, and things were allowed to go from bad to
worse. As it was understood that there was so much money
people were mystified by the condition of things."
"Anstruthers has had money to squander," said Mount
Dunstan. "Tenham and he were intimates. The money
he spends is no doubt his wife's. As her family deserted her
she has no one to defend her."
"Certainly her family has seemed to neglect her for years.
Perhaps they were disappointed in his position. Many Americans
are extremely ambitious. These international marriages
are often singular things. Now--apparently without having
been expected--the sister appears. Vanderpoel is the name--
Miss Vanderpoel."
"I crossed the Atlantic with her in the Meridiana," said
Mount Dunstan.
"Indeed! That is interesting. You did not, of course,
know that she was coming here."
"I knew nothing of her but that she was a saloon passenger with a
suite of staterooms, and I was in the second cabin.
Nothing? That is not quite true, perhaps. Stewards and
passengers gossip, and one cannot close one's ears. Of course
one heard constant reiteration of the number of millions her
father possessed, and the number of cabins she managed to
occupy. During the confusion and alarm of the collision, we
spoke to each other."
He did not mention the other occasion on which he had seen her.
There seemed, on the whole, no special reason why he should.
"Then you would recognise her, if you saw her. I heard
to-day that she seems an unusual young woman, and has beauty."
"Her eyes and lashes are remarkable. She is tall. The
Americans are setting up a new type."
"Yes, they used to send over slender, fragile little women.
Lady Anstruthers was the type. I confess to an interest in
the sister."
"Why?"
"She has made a curious impression. She has begun to do things.
Stornham village has lost its breath." He laughed a little.
"She has been going over the place and discussing repairs."
Mount Dunstan laughed also. He remembered what she
had said. And she had actually begun.
"That is practical," he commented.
"It is really interesting. Why should a young woman
turn her attention to repairs? If it had been her father--the
omnipotent Mr. Vanderpoel--who had appeared, one would
not have wondered at such practical activity. But a young
lady--with remarkable eyelashes!"
His elbows were on the arm of his chair, and he had placed
the tips of his fingers together, wearing an expression of such
absorbed contemplation that Mount Dunstan laughed again.
"You look quite dreamy over it," he said.
"It allures me. Unknown quantities in character always
allure me. I should like to know her. A community like
this is made up of the absolutely known quantity--of types
repeating themselves through centuries. A new one is almost
a startling thing. Gossip over teacups is not usually
entertaining to me, but I found myself listening to little Miss
Laura Brunel this afternoon with rather marked attention. I
confess to having gone so far as to make an inquiry or so. Sir
Nigel Anstruthers is not often at Stornham. He is away now.
It is plainly not he who is interested in repairs."
"He is on the Riviera, in retreat, in a place he is fond
of," Mount Dunstan said drily. "He took a companion
with him. A new infatuation. He will not return soon."
