remember—had to promise to drop him a line.
Gianacchi was there, trying to treat Fillimore with
coldness because the Sportsman had discovered too
many virtues in his Musquito, exalted her indeed into
a favourite for Saturday’s hurdle race, a notability
for which Gianacchi felt himself too modest.
“They say,” Fillimore had written, “that
Musquito has been seen jumping by moonlight”—the
sort of thing to spoil any book. Fillimore was
an acute and weary-looking little man, with a peculiarly
sweet smile and an air of cynicism which gave to his
lightest word a dangerous and suspicious air.
It was rumoured in official circles that he had narrowly
escaped beheading for pointing out too ironically
the disabilities of a Viceroy who insisted on reviewing
the troops from a cushioned carriage with the horses
taken out. Fillimore seemed to think that if
nature had not made such a nobleman a horseman, the
Queen-Empress should not have made him Governor-General
of India. Fillimore was full of prejudices.
Gianacchi, however, found it impossible to treat him
coldly. His smoothness of temperament stood in
the way. Instead, he imparted the melodious
information that Musquito had pecked badly twice at
Tollygunge that morning, and smiled with pathetic
philosophy. “Always let ’em use their
noses,” said Fillimore, and there seemed to
be satire in it. Fillimore certainly had a flair,
and when Beryl Stace presently demanded of him, “What’s
the dead bird going to be on Saturday, Filly?”
he put it generously at her service. Among the
friends of Mr. Stanhope and his company were also
several gentlemen, content, for their personal effect,
with the lustre they shed upon the Stock Exchange—gentlemen
of high finance, who wrote their names at the end
of directors’ reports, but never in the visitors’
book at Government House, who were little more to
the Calcutta world than published receipts for so
many lakhs, except when they were seen now and then
driving, in fleet dogcarts across the Maidan toward
comfortable suburban residences where ladies were
not entertained. They were extremely, curiously,
devoted to business; but if they allowed themselves
any amusement other than company promoting, it was
the theatre, of which their appreciation had sometimes
an odd relation to the merits of performance.
This supper, on the part of Miss Beryl Stace and
one or two others of Mr. Stanhope’s artistes,
might have been considered a return of hospitality
to these gentlemen, since the suburban residences
stood lavishly open to the profession.
Altogether, perhaps, there were fifty people, and an eye that looked for the sentiment, the pity of things, would have distinguished at once on about half the faces, especially those of the women, the used, underlined look that spoke of the continual play of muscle and forcing of feeling. It gave them a shabbily complicated air, contrasting in a strained and sorry way even, with the countenances of the brokers and bankers, where nature had laid