He had much to contend with; above all, an antecedent prejudice against the Cookes, in reality a prejudice against the world, the flesh, and the devil, natural to any quiet community, and of which Mohair and its appurtenances were taken as the outward and visible signs.  Older people came to Asquith for simplicity and rest, and the younger ones were brought there for these things.  Nearly all had sufficient wealth to seek, if they chose, gayety and ostentation at the eastern resorts.  But Asquithians held gayety and ostentation at a discount, and maintained there was gayety enough at home.

If any one were fitted to overcome this prejudice, it was Mrs. Cooke.  Her tastes and manners were as simple as her gowns.  The Celebrity, by arts unknown, induced Mrs. Judge Short and two other ladies to call at Mohair on a certain afternoon when Mr. Cooke was trying a trotter on the track.  The three returned wondering and charmed with Mrs. Cooke; they were sure she had had no hand in the furnishing of that atrocious house.  Their example was followed by others at a time when the master of Mohair was superintending in person the docking of some two-year-olds, and equally invisible.  These ladies likewise came back to sing Mrs. Cooke’s praises.  Mrs. Cooke returned the calls.  She took tea on the inn veranda, and drove Mrs. Short around Mohair in her victoria.  Mr. Cooke being seen only on rare and fleeting occasions, there gradually got abroad a most curious misconception of that gentleman’s character, while over his personality floated a mist of legend which the Celebrity took good care not to dispel.  Farrar, who despised nonsense, was ironical and non-committal when appealed to, and certainly I betrayed none of my client’s attributes.  Hence it came that Asquith, before the house-warming, knew as little about Farquhar Fenelon Cooke, the man, as the nineteenth century knows about William Shakespeare, and was every whit as curious.  Like Shakespeare, Mr. Cooke was judged by his works, and from these he was generally conceded to be an illiterate and indifferent person of barbarous tastes and a mania for horses.  He was further described as ungentlemanly by a brace of spinsters who had been within earshot on the veranda the morning he had abused the Asquith roads, but their evidence was not looked upon as damning.  That Mr. Cooke would appear at the cotillon never entered any one’s head.

Thus it was, for a fortnight, Mr. Cooke maintained a most rigid seclusion.  Would that he had discovered in the shroud of mystery the cloak of fame!

THE CELEBRITY

By Winston Churchill

VOLUME 2.

CHAPTER V