merely. He never met them elsewhere except at the card-table. But
they all seemed to approach the game in the spirit of co-sufferers,
as if it were indeed a drug against the secret ills of existence;
and every day as the sun declined over the countless roofs of the
town, a mellow, pleasurable impatience, resembling the impulse of a
sure and profound friendship, lightened his professional labours.
And now this pleasurable sensation went out of him with something
resembling a physical shock, and was replaced by a special kind of
interest in his work of social protection – an improper sort of
interest, which may be defined best as a sudden and alert mistrust
of the weapon in his hand.
CHAPTER VI
The lady patroness of Michaelis, the ticket-of-leave apostle of
humanitarian hopes, was one of the most influential and
distinguished connections of the Assistant Commissioner’s wife,
whom she called Annie, and treated still rather as a not very wise
and utterly inexperienced young girl. But she had consented to
accept him on a friendly footing, which was by no means the case
with all of his wife’s influential connections. Married young and
splendidly at some remote epoch of the past, she had had for a time
a close view of great affairs and even of some great men. She
herself was a great lady. Old now in the number of her years, she
had that sort of exceptional temperament which defies time with
scornful disregard, as if it were a rather vulgar convention
submitted to by the mass of inferior mankind. Many other
conventions easier to set aside, alas! failed to obtain her
recognition, also on temperamental grounds – either because they
bored her, or else because they stood in the way of her scorns and
sympathies. Admiration was a sentiment unknown to her (it was one
of the secret griefs of her most noble husband against her) –
first, as always more or less tainted with mediocrity, and next as
being in a way an admission of inferiority. And both were frankly
inconceivable to her nature. To be fearlessly outspoken in her
opinions came easily to her, since she judged solely from the
standpoint of her social position. She was equally untrammelled in
her actions; and as her tactfulness proceeded from genuine
humanity, her bodily vigour remained remarkable and her superiority
was serene and cordial, three generations had admired her
infinitely, and the last she was likely to see had pronounced her a
wonderful woman. Meantime intelligent, with a sort of lofty
simplicity, and curious at heart, but not like many women merely of
social gossip, she amused her age by attracting within her ken
through the power of her great, almost historical, social prestige
everything that rose above the dead level of mankind, lawfully or
unlawfully, by position, wit, audacity, fortune or misfortune.
Royal Highnesses, artists, men of science, young statesmen, and
charlatans of all ages and conditions, who, unsubstantial and
light, bobbing up like corks, show best the direction of the
surface currents, had been welcomed in that house, listened to,
penetrated, understood, appraised, for her own edification. In her
own words, she liked to watch what the world was coming to. And as
she had a practical mind her judgment of men and things, though
based on special prejudices, was seldom totally wrong, and almost
never wrong-headed. Her drawing-room was probably the only place
in the wide world where an Assistant Commissioner of Police could
meet a convict liberated on a ticket-of-leave on other than
professional and official ground. Who had brought Michaelis there
one afternoon the Assistant Commissioner did not remember very
well. He had a notion it must have been a certain Member of
Parliament of illustrious parentage and unconventional sympathies,
which were the standing joke of the comic papers. The notabilities
and even the simple notorieties of the day brought each other
freely to that temple of an old woman’s not ignoble curiosity. You
never could guess whom you were likely to come upon being received
in semi-privacy within the faded blue silk and gilt frame screen,
making a cosy nook for a couch and a few arm-chairs in the great
drawing-room, with its hum of voices and the groups of people