In a moderately cheerful frame of mind I strolled the few yards that separated me from my club--intent on dining. In my averseness to solitude I sat down at a table where sat already a little, bald-headed, false-toothed Anglo-Indian, a man who bored me into fits of nervous excitement. He was by way of being an incredibly distant uncle of my own. As a rule I avoided him, to-night I dined with him. He was a person of interminable and incredibly inaccurate reminiscences. His long residence in an indigo-producing swamp had affected his memory, which was supported by only very occasional visits to England.
He told me tales of my poor father and of my poor, dear mother, and of Mr. Bromptons and Mrs. Kenwards who had figured on their visiting lists away back in the musty sixties.
"Your poor, dear father was precious badly off then," he said; "he had a hard struggle for it. I had a bad time of it too; worm had got at all my plantations, so I couldn't help him, poor chap. I think, mind you, Kenny Granger treated him very badly. He might have done something for him--he had influence, Kenny had."
Kenny was my uncle, the head of the family, the husband of my aunt.
"Oh, I know, I know," the old man mumbled, "but still, for one's only brother ... However, you contrive to do yourselves pretty well. You're making your pile, aren't you? Someone said to me the other day--can't remember who it was--that you were quite one of the rising men--quite one of _the_ men."
"And now I see," he went on, lifting up a copy of a morning paper, over which I had found him munching his salmon cutlet, "now I see your sister is going to marry a cabinet minister. Ah!" he shook his poor, muddled, baked head, "I remember you both as tiny little dots."
"Why," I said, "she can hardly have been born then."
"Oh, yes," he affirmed, "that was when I came over in '78. She remembered, too, that I brought her over an ivory doll--she remembered."
"Oh, I called two or three weeks--no, months--ago. She's the image of your poor, dear mother," he added, "at that age; I remarked upon it to your aunt, but, of course, she could not remember. They were not married until after the quarrel."
A sudden restlessness made me bolt the rest of my tepid dinner. With my return to the upper world, and the return to me of a will, despair of a sort had come back. I had before me the problem--the necessity--of winning her. Once I was out of contact with her she grew smaller, less of an idea, more of a person--that one could win. And there were two ways. I must either woo her as one woos a person barred; must compel her to take flight, to abandon, to cast away everything; or I must go to her as an eligible suitor with the Etchingham acres and possibilities of a future on that basis. This fantastic old man with his mumbled reminiscences spoilt me for the last. One remembers sooner or later that a county-man may not marry his reputed sister without scandal. And I craved her intensely.