Mrs. Delarayne put a finger to her lips, but it was too late. There was a sound of music being roughly folded up, and Cleopatra turned away from the piano.

"If you're all going to talk," she said, looking a little pale, "it's no use my singing, is it? I can wait a moment."

"Sorry, old girl," Leonetta cried. "It was only me. I'm dumb now."

Mrs. Delarayne had risen and was urging her elder daughter back to the piano. Sir Joseph was also trying his hand at persuasion, and when Miss Mallowcoid and Agatha added their prayers to the rest, Cleopatra at last spread her music out again, and the song began.

Those, however, who know the swing and gaiety of _Les epouseuses du Berry_, will hardly require to be told how hopeless was the effect of it when sung by a voice which, owing to recent and unabated vexation, was continually on the verge of tears. Nothing, perhaps, is more thoroughly tragic than a really lively melody intoned by a voice quavering with emotion, and even Sir Joseph, who did not understand a word of the song, was deeply grateful when it was all over.

Mrs. Delarayne made determined efforts at restoring the natural and spontaneous good cheer which the party appeared to have lost, but her exertions were only partially successful, and although Agatha Fearwell and Cleopatra sang other songs, the recollection of that tragico-comic _Les epouseuses du Berry_ had evidently sunk too deeply to be removed.

That night, as Cleopatra was taking leave of her mother, in the latter's bedroom, she lingered a little at the door.

"What is it, my darling?" Mrs. Delarayne demanded. "Do you want to ask me something?"

"Yes, Edith," Cleopatra replied slowly, looking down at the handle she was holding. "I am perfectly prepared to admit that Leo did not perhaps intend to be offensive over my song, although, of course, as you know she ruined the whole thing; but anyhow, do you think that she has any right, so soon after meeting him, to call Mr. Malster 'Denis'? Isn't it rather bad form?"

Mrs. Delarayne sighed. "Very bad form, my dear, very bad form," she replied. "Of course, I admit, it's very bad form. But for all we know, he may have asked her to do it. You see, both you and I call him 'Denis,' and I suppose he thought it would sound odd if Leo did not also."

Still Cleopatra lingered. She wanted to say more, and Mrs. Delarayne divined that she wanted to say more. The words, however, were hard to find, and, at last, bidding her mother "Good-night," she departed only half comforted.

CHAPTER VIII

Lord Henry felt he had done his best for England, and now his mind turned covetously towards a country and a clime where his best promised to yield richer and better fruit. He had mended society's nervous wrecks so long that he had come to look upon the whole modern world as a machine too hopelessly out of gear to repay his skilful efforts.

"People who never sit down to a meal with an appetite," he would say, "people whose bodies are as surcharged as their houses with superfluous loot, cannot hope to be well, physically or spiritually. We live on an island huddled together, and yet we grow every day further apart. For the acquisition of superfluous loot means incessant strife. The worst sign of the times is that abstract terms no longer mean the same thing to any two people. Individualism is thus destroying even the value of language. Because where each man has his individual view a common language itself becomes an impossibility. The effort of the Middle Ages was to convert Europe into a single nation. The effort of the modern or 'Muddle' Age, is to convert each single nation into a Europe. That is why abstract terms are slowly losing their value as the current coin of speech."

St. Maur had attached himself to Lord Henry as a kind of voluntary or honorary secretary. He assisted his master where and when he could, and felt that he was more than adequately repaid in the enormous amount he learnt from him.

"Is there no remedy?" he demanded seriously on a day early in August, when the prospect of losing his friend was weighing more heavily than usual upon him. The two were sitting talking in the study of Lord Henry's cottage which stood in a lane off the London road, about two miles north of Ashbury, where his sanatorium was situated.

"There is a remedy, of course," replied Lord Henry. "It would consist in uniting modern nations afresh by means of a powerful common culture. It is only then that men can be guided and led, for it is only then that they can understand what they are taught about life and humanity. In the Middle Ages a common culture was so universal, that even the barriers of nationality did not prevent men from understanding one another. Now there is such a total lack of a uniform culture that men of the same nation speak an unknown tongue to one another. That is the recipe for stupidity."

"But cannot this new uniform culture be created?" St. Maur insisted.

"It would mean a great new religion," Lord Henry answered. "And we are all too much exhausted for such a stupendous undertaking. New religions depend in the first place upon the belief in great men, and where are the great men of to-day? Only those whose coarse impudence has made them forget their limitations start new religions nowadays. And look at the result!"

"There are enough of them at all events," suggested St. Maur.

"Exactly,--their number is the best comment on their futility."

"But surely the effort, general as it is, shows that people agree with you, and feel the need that you see and recognise?"

"Yes, but the arrogance with which they pretend to supply the need themselves, is the best proof of how deeply they misunderstand the gravity of their plight. Look at these Theosophists, Spiritualists, and members of the Inner Light,--mere cliques, mere handfuls of uninspired and uninspiring cranks. They'll never spread a uniform and unifying culture. They cannot therefore make language once more a common currency for thought."

Aubrey St. Maur had endeared himself to Lord Henry chiefly by the inordinate beauty of his person, his exuberant health, and his modesty.

He was wealthy and the only son of a wealthy father. All the "loot" of the de Porvilliers had come to him through his mother, and to Lord Henry's surprise had failed to turn his head. On the contrary, it had if anything filled him with a feeling of guilt, or perhaps that which is most akin to guilt--obligation. And he had long wondered how best he could discharge this obligation to the world. In Lord Henry's company he had elected to find a solution to this problem.

But Lord Henry did not want the youth to join him on his journey to China. The love the young nobleman still felt for his native country bade him leave this promising member of it, if only as a forlorn hope, to prove to Englishmen that here and there, at ever more distant intervals, their blood was still capable of producing something that was eminently desirable.

"You will succeed your father in the Upper House," he said to St. Maur on this occasion, when the latter expressed the desire to become a pious mandarin, "and you will, I trust, be an example of health and wisdom to all. The faith in blood and lineage wants people like you. There is so precious little to which it can be pinned nowadays."

"That's all very well," protested St. Maur. "But you are deserting the battlefield, and leaving an unfledged pupil in charge. Is this nothing to you? Are you incapable of becoming attached to anybody? Without fishing for compliments, is it nothing to you to break our friendship in this way?"

Lord Henry, who as usual was curling his mesh of hair with his fingers, cast a sidelong glance full of meaning at his friend and smiled.

"My dear boy, if it hadn't been for you," he said, "I should not be here now. Do you suppose it amuses me to investigate the unsavoury details of every society lady's nervous affliction? Do you suppose I'm flattered by such and such a Guardsman's encomiums when I have cured his stammer, or his inability to proceed beyond the letter 'P' when writing a letter?"

"What is your real purpose in going to China?" persisted the younger man. "I shan't divulge. Can't you tell me?"

"In the first place, my dear boy," Lord Henry replied, "curiosity. I honestly want to see how Chinamen have escaped the madness that is overtaking Europe. Secondly, I have a heart, and I love my country, and I cannot witness my country's decline. Thirdly, and chiefly,--but this is a secret,--I feel that now it is the duty of all enlightened Western Europeans, who have seen the madness of European civilisation, to hasten to the last healthy spot on earth and to preach the Gospel of Europophobia,--that is to say, to warn the wise East against our criminal errors, and to save it from becoming infected by our diseases.

If the world is to be saved, a _cordon sanitaire_ must be established round Europe and everything like Europe; for Europe has now become a pestilence."

St. Maur who had been standing at the window with his back turned to his friend swung suddenly round, his face illumined as if by an inspiration.

"By Jove," he cried, "that is an idea! That is indeed a crusade! I hadn't thought of that!"

"It is the only beneficent direction in which I feel I can use my powers," said Lord Henry gravely. "It is, if you will, my religion. I feel I am called to be a missionary to the East, to preach the solemn warning against Western civilisation."

"God!" St. Maur exclaimed, "that's an idea with which to fire a generation. It is a new gospel; a new gospel of sin and the Devil."

"I assure you," Lord Henry rejoined, "the bulk of the men at my club would not turn a hair at the suggestion. They would simply turn their papers over, nod significantly at each other, and whisper, 'The fellow's not all there.'"

At this moment Lord Henry's man, Fordham, entered the room.

"Yes?" his master grunted from the depths of his chair.

"A lady to see you, my lord," replied the man.

"I'm out."

"That's what I said, my lord."

"Well?"

"The lady said that was all nonsense; she 'ad called at the Sanatorium, and they'd said you was 'ere."

"Then her name's Delarayne," said Lord Henry.

"Yes, that's it, my lord."

"Very well, then, show her up."

"That woman's a wonder," St. Maur exclaimed. "It is a boiling hot day; at any moment there may be a storm; there was probably no fly at the station,--there never is when I come,--and she must have walked the whole of the two miles in the dust. She has an eye on you, my friend."