The stuff was served, at an alluring price, out of bottles adorned with a seductive label—­a label which had been designed by an impecunious artist who, after running up a rousing bill for drinks, got off payment on the strength of this job.  But the prettiest label in the world could not stone for the mixture within.  Members often complained of feeling queer.  They threatened to resign.  Mr. Parker did not want them to resign; he wanted their subscriptions.  He had a grand way with him on such occasions.  Whenever one of them complained too bitterly or too persistently—­became damned abusive, in fact—­he would patiently wait and see which was the fellow’s favourite newspaper.  That point settled—­it was his lady’s idea, originally—­he would stop the supply of the journal in question, alleging insufficiency of Club revenues.  These Napoleon-like tactics generally brought the offending member to his senses.

Mr. Frederick Parker spent a good deal of his time in endeavouring to mask, under a cloak of boisterous good humour, a really remarkable combination of malevolence and imbecility.  He was what you call a remittance man.  He got so much a quarter—­a miserable sum it was—­to keep out of England.  He travelled about formerly.  But no amount of travel, no association with his betters, could pierce his stolid pachydermatous obliquity.  He was the worst kind of Englishman; he could not even cheat without being found out.  But for the wise counsels of his lady he would have been in the lock-up over and over again.  Such being the case, he took a justifiable pride in his Anglo-Saxon origin.  Whenever a project seemed too risky—­not worth while, he called it—­he would say: 

“It can’t be done.  That’s a job for a Dago.  I’m an Englishman, you know.”

He had knocked about the world a good bit, had Mr. Parker.  His last known domicile was Nicaragua.  There he invested in some land affair—­a most unfortunate speculation, as it turned out.  All his speculation had a way of turning badly.  That was because people, even people in Nicaragua, distrusted him for one reason or another; they said his whole existence was a tangle of shady and ignoble transactions—­that he looked like a fraud, and behaved like one.  He couldn’t help his face; but his face, they soon discovered, was not the only, or even the most, evasive and fugitive part of his personality.

At last Nicaragua, even Nicaragua, got too hot for him.

There was Don Pomponio di Vergara y Puyarola, Nicaraguan Minister of Finance; one might come to terms with a man of that kind.  It was arranged between them that His Excellency, who had a large family and many poor dependents, should take over Mr. Parker’s landed interests; being a native of the place he might succeed in squeezing a little something out of them.  In exchange for this concession an unobtrusive Government job was specially created for Mr. Parker.  He was appointed Financial Commissioner for South-Eastern Europe, to reside at Nepenthe or wherever else he pleased—­unpaid; the exalted social status conferred by such a post being deemed ample compensation.  His sole duty consisted of submitting a short annual report, a pure formality, to his Government.