CHAPTER 4

Uncertain to the last moment, Harvey did at length hurry into his dress clothes, and start for Fitzjohn Avenue.  He had little mind for the semi-fashionable crowd and the amateur music, but he could not answer Mrs. Bennet Frothingham with any valid excuse, and, after all, she meant kindly towards him.  Why he enjoyed so much of this lady’s favour it was not easy to understand; intellectual sympathy there could be none between them, and as for personal liking, on his side it did not go beyond that naturally excited by a good-natured, feather-brained, rather pretty woman, whose sprightliness never passed the limits of decorum, and who seemed to have better qualities than found scope in her butterfly existence.  Perhaps he amused her, being so unlike the kind of man she was accustomed to see.  His acquaintance with the family dated from their social palingenesis, when, after obscure prosperity in a southern suburb, they fluttered to the northern heights, and were observed of the paragraphists.  Long before that, Bennet Frothingham had been known in the money-market; it was the ‘Britannia’ —­ Loan, Assurance, Investment, and Banking Company, Limited —­ that made him nationally prominent, and gave an opportunity to his wife (in second marriage) and his daughter (by the first).  Three years ago, when Carnaby (already lured by the charms of Sibyl Larkfield) presented his friend Rolfe as ‘the man who had been to Bagdad’, Alma Frothingham, not quite twenty-one, was studying at the Royal Academy of Music, and, according to her friends, promised to excel alike on the piano and the violin, having at the same time a ‘really remarkable’ contralto voice.  Of late the young lady had abandoned singing, rarely used the pianoforte, and seemed satisfied to achieve distinction as a violinist.  She had founded an Amateur Quartet Society, whose performances were frequently to be heard at the house in Fitzjohn Avenue.

Last winter Harvey had chanced to meet Alma and her stepmother at Leipzig, at a Gewandhaus concert.  He was invited to go with them to hear the boys’ motet at the Thomaskirche; and with this intercourse began the change in their relations from mere acquaintance to something like friendship.  Through the following spring Rolfe was a familiar figure at the Frothinghams’; but this form of pleasure soon wearied him, and he was glad to escape from London in June.  He knew the shadowy and intermittent temptation which beckoned him to that house; music had power over him, and he grew conscious of watching Alma Frothingham, her white little chin on the brown fiddle, with too exclusive an interest.  When ‘that fellow’ Cyrus Redgrave, a millionaire, or something of the sort, began to attend these gatherings with a like assiduity, and to win more than his share of Miss Frothingham’s conversation, Harvey felt a disquietude which happily took the form of disgust, and it was easy enough to pack his portmanteau.