Staplewick Towers. That was the name of the place, his own, that he had been on his way to see. He would soon get the answer to the riddle. As to his having been nearly drowned, it could not have been he. The last thing he remembered was drinking the drugged wine at theQuorn Arms. Surely he had not gone through an active existence between that and his waking up in the doctor's surgery. He argued the probabilities with himself as he hastened eagerly towards the Towers which loomed grey and real enough before him. Confident now of his position he walked through the lodge gates with an air of ownership, and made his way up the drive until he saw a little way in front of him several people. The sight checked his hurry. It suddenly occurred to him that it would be a good plan and amusing to lie low and just see what was really going on before declaring himself. One thing was certain. He was not the Lord Quorn who had been rewarded with a fortune for pretending to have saved a millionaire's life. That was too good to be true; he only wished it were. Then who was the other Lord Quorn, and what devil's game could they be playing?
So he turned off the drive and slunk along behind the shrubs which fringed it, lurking in the bushes until he could see his way clear to get up to the house. He was seen, as has been shown, but the observers were too intent on their own ends to take more than casual notice of him.
Presently, however, he got his chance, and was able to make his way unseen to the library windows. He peeped through, and the first person his eyes lighted on was Percy Peckover.
In an instant some idea of the real state of affairs flashed upon him; and his hazy guess was not far from being correct. Fired with indignation and a furious desire to put an instant stop to the nefarious game that was being played, he put forth his hand to open the window. Before he could do so a figure advanced from a side of the room which was hidden from him, and with a sickening shock he recognized his former flame, Miss Lalage Leo. Behind her loomed now the unmistakable form of the great bully whom he had never actually met, but had learned to regard with the enhanced terror which the unknown inspires, and from which the present glimpse detracted nothing. Happily the frightened face was not noticed by any of the party who were setting their faces resolutely towards the dining-room. So Quorn, as he recovered from the shock of the forgotten terror, was able to move back unobserved and slip away to a quiet spot where he could review his deplorable situation.
After luncheon and Peckover's interview with Gage, he and Sharnbrook had a somewhat uncomfortable half-hour together over a cigar. Lady Agatha had proved herself equal to what had seemed the impossible task of bundling the Leos out of the house. But then Carnaby was in a state of comparative helplessness, and Lalage, although she would have liked to stay and, perhaps, smoke a cigar with the object of her matrimonial intentions, was disarmed by the superior style and the strength of Lady Agatha's grand manner. It was something quite outside her experience, and, for the time at any rate, it paralysed any tendency to opposition and insistence on her part. So she went off with her clumsy, staggering brother, and with a promise, unacceptable, but not to be ignored, to return very soon and keep a business eye upon Lord Quorn and Mr. Gage.
"Whew! That's a good riddance," Peckover exclaimed, with a great puff of relief as he lighted a big cigar and dropped into an easy chair. "I've had some uncomfortable meals in my time, but that bangs the lot."
"Nice let-in for me," said Sharnbrook ruefully. "I'm back in their clutches again, just when I was congratulating myself you had got me out."
"Well, I couldn't foresee this volcanic eruption," replied Peckover apologetically.
"No," Sharnbrook admitted. "You did your best to draw them off. They are nailers, and their staying power is wonderful. But, I say, you are never going to marry that——?" He jerked his head backwards in the direction Miss Leo was last seen taking.
"Not if I know it," Peckover answered feelingly. "I'm going to compromise——"
"What?"
"I mean compromise any claim she may have on me; pay her off."
"I see. But how on earth did you ever get nuts on her?" Sharnbrook inquired wonderingly.
"How, indeed?" thought Peckover. "Well, you see," he answered, "out there the girls aren't enough to go round. You're lucky if you see one in a month, and somehow, when you do see her you don't care to lose sight of her. Where there's only one, that one's the best. Over here Lalage suffers by comparison."
"You bet she does," assented Sharnbrook with more warmth than gallantry.
"Out there," Peckover declared, "she was unique."
"So she is here," said Sharnbrook with conviction. "Well, if you are going to square matters with her otherwise than on a matrimonial basis, you might call the fisher-girls off me again before I'm quite landed."
"All right," assented Peckover who had now quite recovered his spirits. "I'll do anything to oblige, especially when there's a little fun attached to the job."
At that moment Miss Ethel's voice was heard singing in the corridor leading to the picture gallery.
"She's coming after me," Sharnbrook exclaimed in an agitated whisper.
"Slip out," said Peckover, "and leave me to do my best for you."
Sharnbrook gave him a nod of gratitude and ran off by the opposite door, just as Miss Ethel, keen on the scent, looked in.
"Do come in, Miss Ethel," Peckover besought her, with an earnestness not to be ignored.
"I was looking for Mr. Sharnbrook," she replied coldly.
"He has just gone out that way," said Peckover indicating the other door.
"Did he see Dagmar?" Miss Ethel inquired jealously, crossing the room with determined steps.
Peckover sprang to intercept her. "Don't run away from me, Miss Ethel. I know you must be annoyed by those vulgar people who intruded here just now——"
"I should think so," said Ethel haughtily, trying to pass.
"But," urged Peckover, "you won't be troubled by them again. I'm paying their fares back to Australia; so that will settle them—out there."
Ethel suddenly appeared to be somewhat less desirous of reaching the door. "Oh?" she said slowly. "And are you going with them?"
"Not if I know it. Old England's the place for my money."
"Not going to marry the—the lady?" she asked breathlessly.
"Do I look like it?" he replied insinuatingly. "Now, don't trouble about them, or about that silly old Sharnbrook, who prefers to go off and buy his fifty-ninth fox-terrier to waiting for you. Let's sit down and have a nice cosy chat."
The invitation was, under the circumstances, hardly to be resisted, whatever short work the young lady might, under others, have made of it. As they took their seats side by side, Peckover stretched out his arm behind the lady to arrange a cushion for her—and let it stay there.
For as many seconds as probability allowed Ethel affected to be unaware of the caressing attitude. Then suddenly she seemed to wake up to the fact that her companion's arm was round her shoulders, upon which she leant forward to allow him to withdraw it.
But Peckover was not keen on taking hints when they ran counter to his amusements. "Isn't it comfortable?" he asked.
"Your arm."
"My arm's all right," he assured her cheerfully. "Do lean back. Hope I'm not in the way. Of course if you'd rather I went and sat at the other end of the gallery I'll do so. Only it will be a bit slow."
"Mr. Gage, how absurd you are."
"Yes," he agreed, "the suggestion is rather far-fetched. We may as well keep within kissing distance, mayn't we?"
"Oh, but it is not proper," Ethel protested.
"Kissing?" he asked in surprise, "I think it is proper; if you are going in for a proper time. Why not?"
"It is," she answered demurely, "between some people."
"People who know how to make the time pass?" he suggested.
"People who are—engaged," she said, with as much indifference to the immediate and personal application as she could assume.
"Well," he rejoined flippantly, "you are engaged, and I may be."
"Mr. Gage!" She turned on him indignantly. "I am not engaged."
"Not to Sharnbrook?"
"Mr. Gage, how absurd you are."
"I hope so. Are you engaged?" he asked significantly.
"Whether I am engaged or free," she answered, "it is all the same to you."
"No," he returned, "if you were a little more free it would be quite different."
"Would it?" she asked, with a provocative glance at his face.
"Wouldn't it? Like this." He closed his arm round her and tried to draw her to him.
"Oh, Mr. Gage, you don't mean it," she protested, holding back.
"Come!" he said. "One kiss."
"Oh, no. It wouldn't be right," she still objected. Then she sighed. "Poor Jack!"
"Ah, poor fellow," Peckover said, with a hardly suppressed grin. "Poor old Sharnbrook."
"He is very fond of me," she said, regretfully. "But of course if I can't care for him as much as I ought to—I don't know what the poor fellow will do."
"Give me something handsome, I hope," was Peckover's thought. "Ethel," he whispered, and this time did get something like a kiss.
"Percy, it is wrong of you," she murmured.
"I know it is," he admitted, drawing in a breath as of pain. "Poor old Sharnbrook; and he thinks I'm his friend. He'll never give you up," he added with conviction.
For an instant Miss Ethel's look suggested that that matter might be safely left in her hands to bring to a satisfactory conclusion. But it swiftly passed away, and she said, "Jack Sharnbrook is a good fellow. He will not stand in the way of my happiness."
"That he won't, I'll go bail," said Peckover to himself. "Ethel!" he murmured caressingly.
"Oh, Mr. Gage," she returned, in half-yielding protest. "Percy, darling," he suggested, drawing her to him for another kiss.
"You must wait," she objected, "till we are engaged."
"We Gages never wait," he assured her softly. "It's a tradition in the family. No. We don't hang about for the mistletoe to grow."
Nevertheless the present representative of that impatient race had to postpone his endearments, for the door opened softly and Miss Dagmar's scandalized voice cried, "Oh, Ethel!" making the fond pair start aside with electric unanimity.
"Bother it," Peckover muttered, putting on the air of self-conscious indifference usual in such contretemps.
"All right, Miss Dagmar," said Ethel through her teeth.
"Hope we haven't disturbed you," exclaimed Sharnbrook who had followed Dagmar into the room.
Peckover jumped up and went to him. "Got a cigarette?" he asked in a loud voice, adding in a whisper, "Don't look so pleased, old man; or you'll spoil everything."
Sharnbrook took the hint at once. "Don't speak to me, Mr. Gage," he cried resentfully.
"You've not lost any time," Dagmar sarcastically remarked to her sister.
"No, dear," Ethel replied with feline sweetness.
"He belongs to that appalling woman from Australia," said Dagmar confidently. "She'll hold him. Don't you wish you may get him."
"I've got him," Ethel declared.
"She's ready to break it off," whispered Peckover to Sharnbrook. "Don't be too eager. Pretend to be broken-hearted."
The other nodded. "Mr. Gage," he said, with a fine show of dignified feeling, "I find I am mistaken in you."
"That you are," Peckover muttered aside through the corner of his mouth.
"How do you do the broken-hearted?" Sharnbrook enquired in a whisper, seeing the ladies were occupied in reciprocating sarcasms.
"Don't make too much noise," Peckover instructed him, in the same tone. "Think you are feeling sick; that it's your wedding-day with Ethel. Fancy you've missed a pheasant and shot your best dog."
"But I should make a noise," the pupil objected.
"Well, mug a bit," said Peckover, with a model grimace suggestive of the wrong horse winning.
"Oh, don't speak to me!" Sharnbrook shouted, as the ladies seemed to tire of their mutual repartees.
"That's it," murmured Peckover. "Don't let her go too easily."
"I—I have something to say to you, Ethel," Sharnbrook declared with a sob in his voice.
"Oh, Jack," she exclaimed, with a pretty imitation of remorseful distress.
"Come round the garden with me, if it be for the last time," said Sharnbrook, his tones quivering with emotion.
"Too loud," whispered Peckover critically as the jilted swain passed him.
"Oh, Jack," cried Ethel, the distress in her voice counterbalanced by the look of triumph she threw at her sister, "don't look so miserable. I couldn't help it."
Sharnbrook gave vent to an explosive, window-rattling sigh as, with a wicked half-grin at his deliverer, he held open the door. The fickle Ethel, as she prepared to pass out, put her shapely hand to her treacherous lips and contrived to waft a kiss to her latest lover. And she did this without detracting in any appreciable degree from the contrite expression with which she successfully veiled her sense of triumph. Which shewed that, up to a point, she was a clever girl, or at least a credit to her maternal up-bringing.
It was, however, unfortunate that Miss Ethel had to leave her lover and her sister together. Peckover, baulked of a kiss in one direction, was by no means above trying for one in another; and, while Ethel was getting off with the old love, thought he might as well utilize the opportunity in getting on with the new. And Miss Dagmar, save in the matter of temper, was quite as interesting an object for his attentions as her sister. What was considerably more to the point, her manner suggested that she was even more susceptible to his fascinations than Ethel.
"Well," he observed with a leer, "while they are settling their differences we've got to amuse ourselves, eh?"
A wild desire to cut her sister out on the spot took possession of Miss Dagmar. Lord Quorn was for the time out of the question, and even if he were available, she was certain that she would give herself a far better time by marrying the richer man.
"How shall we do that, Mr. Gage?" she asked, with an archly provocative glance at him.
"Well," responded Peckover, by no means at a loss, "suppose we try how much we can get to like one another in ten minutes."
"I'm afraid——" she began, when suddenly she became aware that his arm was round her waist.
"Don't be afraid, Dagmar," he entreated.
"I am," she returned, releasing herself. "I'm afraid you are a deceiver."
"Oh, no," he protested, far from displeased, however, at the accusation.
"You have just been making love to Ethel."
"Nothing to speak of," he assured her lightly. "You see," he added, more amorously, "I did not know you cared for me."
"Oh, Mr. Gage!"
"I didn't," he maintained, wilfully misunderstanding her protest. "I dare say I ought to have, but I didn't."
"And now"—she laughed meaningly—"you think you have discovered my secret?"
The last word nearly brought a whistle to Peckover's lips, but he suppressed it in time. "Yes," he urged, "if I am right, if I have discovered it——" he paused to get a look at her face, and something more.
"Yes?" she murmured.
"Let's make the most of it," he suggested. "Give me a kiss."
"Oh, no, it wouldn't be proper," she objected, holding back.
"Quite proper," he assured her. "There's nobody looking."
"I don't quite see," said Dagmar thoughtfully, "how the fact that nobody is looking makes it proper."
"Well," argued Peckover, "if nobody is looking I don't see how it matters whether it is proper or not."
"But it does," she maintained, holding off.
"So long as it's agreeable to both parties," he urged; "we've no one to please but ourselves. Of course," he added airily, "if you've any rooted objection to kissing——"
"It is," said Dagmar hastily, "a question of what is right and what is wrong."
Peckover began to think this was dry work. "You think kissing wrong, then?" he suggested.
"Unjustifiable kissing," Dagmar declared.
"Unjustifiable?" Peckover repeated, with the suspicion of a yawn. "Seems to me if both parties don't object the act is justified."
Dagmar glanced reflectively at the clock and calculated how many minutes more remained to bring him to the point. "Not necessarily," she rejoined with provocative archness. "There are certain people who may kiss each other, and the rest may not."
"That's no reason why they shouldn't try," argued Peckover, warming again under the influence of the fetching glance. "That's just where the fun comes in. You ought to kiss your mother and your grandmother or your sister, or your aunt, or your——"
"Or your fiancée," Dagmar supplied quietly yet promptly.
"Naturally," he agreed, "but that doesn't count."
"Doesn't it?" Dagmar enquired in a tone of surprise.
"You see, it's expected of you," he explained. "There's—much more of a catch, the poets tell us, in the unexpected."
Dagmar was beginning to grow desperate. Ethel's next (and nearly due) innings might hold the unexpected for her. "There are some things," she observed demurely, "which are made much more delightful by being looked forward to."
"That's right enough," he assented, catching an inviting gleam from her eyes. "But it's poor fun looking forward to a thing you aren't going to get. You know what I'm looking forward to?" He pointed the question with a leer.
"Oh, Mr. Gage," she protested artlessly, "how can I know?"
"By my teaching you," he answered promptly putting forth an endearing arm, which, however the lady deftly avoided.
"No, no," she declared, as bewitchingly as her limitations allowed. "It is not right, as we are."
It was a pretty broad hint, but the sands of opportunity were running low, and Miss Dagmar meant business.
"As we are?" the philanderer echoed, with a short laugh of discomfiture. "No, it's certainly not right or even possible when we are so far apart."
Dagmar fancied she caught the hateful sound of her sister's voice. "That's what I mean," she said, covering her desperation that a touch of demureness. "We might be close enough to——"
"Right!" Peckover exclaimed eagerly, making a spring towards her.
On this occasion she did not seek to elude his grasp, possibly considering that the time for that was past. She contented herself with keeping her inviting cheek at a tantalizingly safe distance from Peckover's lips till he wearied of the struggle.
For that spoilt child of Fortune was not used to opposition about trifles on the part of the fair sex. "This is dry work. What are you afraid of?" he protested impatiently.
"You really mustn't. We are not engaged," was the artificially agitated reply.
"That doesn't matter," he insisted. "Who'll be any the wiser?"
Matrimony, not wisdom, was Miss Dagmar's concern just then. "I couldn't let you," she declared, with a cunning suggestion of duty overriding inclination. "I couldn't—unless——"
To her disgust, she found herself suddenly released. "Oh, all right," said Peckover, settling his necktie. "You shan't, if you don't want to. There are other girls about who ain't so particular. Ethel's not coy." And he made for the door.
In an instant she was after him. "Ethel?" she cried, clutching his arm in desperation, as she saw the lady in question coming across the lawn. "You forget Ethel is engaged." Which speech was, to say the least of it, rather disloyal.
"What of it?" Peckover demanded off-handedly. "All the better. You allow engaged persons may kiss."
"Yes, each other. Ethel is engaged to Mr. Sharnbrook."
"Oh, Sharnbrook won't mind," he returned, with more truth than politeness.
Dagmar's clutch increased in force. "Mr. Gage," she exclaimed, in almost horrified protest, "you are never going to be so thoughtless as to wreck two people's happiness?"
"I wasn't aware of it," he replied, somewhat sarcastically.
"Oh, but you are," she urged vehemently. "Jack Sharnbrook is wrapped up in Ethel."
"Finds the wrap a bit too warm to be pleasant," Peckover observed.
"Sooner than see John Sharnbrook's happiness wrecked," the suddenly emotional and altruistic Miss Dagmar proceeded, "I would make any sacrifice. Mr. Gage," the moment was critical, and her grasp now intense, "you shan't make love to her. Promise me you won't, and—and you shall have a kiss, even before we are engaged."
Footsteps sounded on the gravel just outside the window.
"All right," Peckover responded cheerfully. "I promise to let her alone if she lets me alone. I'm not the man to stand in Sharnbrook's light."
His arm was round her and his lips three inches from hers, when a vigorous exclamation of disgust from the window made it expedient that even they should pretend to be engaged in quite another of the varied but limited number of occupations which necessitate the heads of two persons being close together. Nevertheless Dagmar found time, before the window opened to admit Gage, who had come down for an hour, and Ethel, to say hurriedly but with none the less fell intent, "Remember your promise. You will be true to me, now?"
Miss Ethel, rendered thoughtfully emulative by the evidences of her sister's progress, contented herself with tossing her head peremptorily and disdainfully at her treacherous sister. Further activity on the part of the young ladies was, however, postponed by the announcement of tea. Gage lingered behind to say a word to his friend.
"Beats me," he observed sourly, "what's the matter with this peerage. Always thought a lord had it all his own way. Instead of that, the girls talk about the weather and the flower-beds to me, and they drop into your arms one after the other."
"They're a bit calculating all the same," Peckover remarked with a sense of failure. "I don't know that we might not just as well have been talking about the weather."
But John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook came in whistling and radiant.
It was to appear that Mr. Carnaby Leo and his sister were not to be put off so easily as the confederates imagined. Encouraged by what they considered the other side's weakness, and led on by their ignorance of European ways, they—or rather the lady—grew determined to make out of their trip a much bigger coup than at first seemed likely to be forthcoming from what was really nothing but a huge piece of bluff. It is true that Lady Agatha, with her unassailable manner, was a serious obstacle in the path which this enterprising couple proposed to take, but she, after all, Lalage argued, was but an outside and detached factor in the affair, an outlying rampart, as it were, in the defence.
Nevertheless the influence of her repellent personality was so great that neither of the Leos cared to come face to face with her again if that situation could by any possibility be avoided, and in their councils of war (in which Lalage tried to teach her thick-witted brother how to back up her brain by his muscle) the temporary mistress of Staplewick was never regarded as a negligible quantity.
So it happened that when, in the evening, the Leos resolved to pay another visit of coercion to the Towers, they took care to enter unannounced, and to keep out of Lady Agatha's way. Confident in the reasonable cause of their presence, they made their way quietly from the hall along a corridor leading to the picture gallery which seemed to offer an inviting lurking-place. As luck would have it, the gallery, as being somewhat isolated, had been appointed the trysting-place of Peckover and Miss Ethel. And it was there that the arch-deceiver with a cynically expectant smile on his face was awaiting his lady-love.
The long room had struck chill as he entered it, and he had lighted a cigarette, if not with the idea of warmth, at least to keep his nerves in order. "Quiet," he remarked aloud to himself as he glanced with a little shiver along the line of effigied Quorns before whose canvases at intervals were arranged, like sentinels, stands of armour. "Not to say Madame Tussaudy. Rum things ancestors. What a lot some folks seem to think about 'em. Can't say I ever troubled about mine. That reminds me, I must get up a family history of these Quorn Johnnies, and impart it to poor old Gage. It need not," he gave a little knavish laugh, "be all strictly correct according to 'Ume and Smollett. Well, Percy, my boy," he kept talking to himself as though to keep the silence at bay, "you've dropped into a nice thing. It's a fine life to be a rich toff, or the imitation of one—which is quite sufficient for the general public. Ethel is a smart little thing; she has come on wonderfully since those Australian nuisances gave her a fright. Poor old Gage! Strikes me I'm having the fun he's paying for. Ah, here she comes."
Footsteps were heard by the door. He flung away his cigarette, and went forward as quickly as the semi-darkness would allow him. "Ethel!" he whispered.
The figure whom he addressed emerged into the stream of moonlight, and he saw, to his dismay, Lalage Leo.
"It's me, dear," was her greeting, pleasant, yet with a suggestion of business behind it. "Lalage."
"Eh, yes," he stammered, trying to mask his annoyance with a laugh. "Funny place to meet, isn't it?"
"You and Miss Ethel evidently don't think so," was the obvious retort. "So you were expecting her?"
"I thought the step was hers," he replied disingenuously.
"Poor girl! She must have a heavy tread if it is anything like Carnaby's," Lalage returned pleasantly.
On the hint Peckover looked beyond her and saw the looming figure of her brother with an irritating grin on his just discernible face. "Carnaby has got a heavy foot," his sister pursued significantly, "and he is going to put it down and keep it there. Eh, Carnaby?"
The objectionable figure lurched forward. "Point out the spot you want it planted, Lal," he said truculently, "and down it goes."
Peckover found himself wishing that the abominable extremity had been planted in the Antipodes and had taken root or, for preference, withered away there. "Where?" he asked wearily.
"Where," Miss Leo echoed. "Why, on your carrying on with these Hemyock girls. Carnaby, dear," she made the appeal with a vicious look, not at her brother but at his intended victim, "you won't see me fooled?"
"But I tell you——" Peckover began, when she snapped him up.
"If you are good enough for other people, you are good enough for me. So no nonsense."
"Nonsense?" Carnaby roared. "I'll——"
Lalage thoughtfully turned to shut the door. "That's it," she whispered. "Frighten him a bit." For it seemed to her that the effect of the snapped fire-irons was wearing off. "Tell Mr. Gage," she said aloud, holding Carnaby in the moonlight with a glittering eye, "what happened to those three mounted police who went after you."
Owing either to the suddenness of the demand or the spell of his sister's masterful glare, the small mind which dominated the mass of muscle seemed paralysed. "Ah, yes," he responded stupidly. "Didn't they!"
Miss Leo for the moment seemed to justify her name; she looked like a lioness ready to spring, but withheld by considerations of expediency. "Go on," she whispered through her clenched teeth. "Carnaby!" she said more mildly and aloud. "The three who looked after you in the Bush."
But either the hero's recollection was hazy or invention was not his strong point. "Eh?" he said confusedly. "Yes. They—they followed me into the Bush."
"Yes? Well?" enquired Peckover, curiously.
"And two of them are there now," continued Lalage with a world of uncomfortable meaning.
"I wish you two were," thought Peckover. "Tell us all about it," he said resignedly.
"Go on, Carnaby," his sister commanded.
Whether or not the man of thews and sinews had been keeping up his constitution injudiciously at theThree Pigeons, certain it was that his brain did not seem in glib working order. "Ah, yes," he said slowly, quailing under Lalage's eye, "three mounted constabulary——" after which thrilling statement he paused.
"Came after you in the Bush," the flippant Peckover ventured to supply. "Yes, we've heard that." For the little man saw no chance of ending the interview till the narrative was concluded.
Mr. Leo, failing to stimulate his imagination to the required point, fell back upon a more ready and less intellectual form of address. "I'll eat you in a minute, boots and all," he informed his impatient listener with an undue amount of emphasis. Then, as though the outburst had spurred his invention, he went on, "Three—three mounted police at me at once. Three to one——"
"Cowards," commented Peckover warmly.
"I was alone," shouted the son of Mars, now plunging recklessly into the recital; "no bush-armour; nothing but my fighting-jacket. They—they——" he stammered and stopped as the trickling stream of imagination ran dry. He, however, sought to make up for verbal shortcomings by fixing Peckover with a stare of the most appalling ferocity. Lalage saved the situation by prompting from the darkness behind him into which she had slipped. "They came on at the charge," he roared, never relaxing his truculent glare at his listener; "one in front, one on each flank——"
"That's right," whispered Lalage. "Keep it up."
"And one——" roared the encouraged swashbuckler.
"Thought you said there were only three," objected the irrepressible Peckover.
"I'll wring any man's neck who interrupts me and puts me off my stroke," was the savage response, and as the application of the remark could bear but one interpretation, its object decided that it would be better to curb his critical faculties before they brought on an interference with his personal appearance and comfort.
"On they came like a hurricane," roared Carnaby, as the promptings reached him, "one here in face: one on the right flank, one on—on——"
He stopped with some hazy notion that he had made a mistake. In his graphic action illustrating the narrative he had landed himself beyond ear-shot of his prompter.
"On the left," Peckover supplied sympathetically. "What's the matter?" For the reciter seemed confused.
"He has had so many fights that he forgets them," explained Lalage, emerging from the darkness to the rescue. "More than the other fellows do, though. Go on, you great fool!" she politely adjured the free-lance under her breath.
Thus incited, Carnaby put on a grimace which would have been nicely calculated to send an old lady into a fit or an infant into convulsions, albeit there lay beneath it an abject fear of his sister's displeasure. "I'll show you!" he bellowed, while Peckover, with an uneasy calculation of the means of exit, wondered whether the object lesson would involve his posing as the inadequate representative of the unfortunate mounted police. "First chap," the mighty one proceeded, with, it must be confessed, a certain tendency to reiteration, "first chap comes on full gallop in front." Peckover nodded his absorbed interest. "I pull off my boot and dash it in his face." For an instant Peckover looked dubious; then realizing his ignorance of fighting under antipodean conditions, he accepted the statement for what it was worth.
"Down he goes," the story continued, "tobogganning over the horse's tail." Peckover, having without prejudice admitted the premises, could not resist accepting the conclusion as highly probable.
Suddenly the warrior's hand shot out and grasped him by the shoulder. "You," he shouted, becoming intoxicated with excitement as the tale of his prowess grew, "are the second man. As you pass, I slip under your arm and catch you a smack on the point of the jaw which puts you to sleep."
Instantly Peckover covered with both hands the part of his anatomy referred to, and was understood to intimate that his own powers of imagination were quite equal to the task of realizing the particular form of assault which it was unnecessarily proposed to illustrate.
Postponing for the moment the exemplification of the knock-out blow, Mr. Leo proceeded in spluttering ferocity with his narrative. "In a moment I have got hold of the first man's cutlass——" here he caught up in his excitement a sword which unfortunately hung near, and flourished it in a fashion not hitherto adopted by any recognized school of arms. "I turn, and cry——" he bellowed, when, as luck had it, his energy led him to catch the weapon, in his terrific swing, against a suit of armour which was brought toppling over upon him and thence to the floor with a crash which sounded through the gallery with startling din.
The effect on the man of doughty deeds was, however, even more than startling. He fell forward under the shock of the cold metal, and with the helmet, thus jerked loose, striking him a smart blow on the head, his roaring was changed in a moment from truculence to terror. "Oh! Oh!" he cried, as he sprawled over a chair, "don't hurt me. I am only pretending!"
But his quicker-witted sister was already at hand to cover his confusion. "Carnaby will have his joke," she exclaimed laughing loudly. "You see?" she demanded suddenly of Peckover, effectually dispelling the amusement which was gathering on his face, "he is a man of action," she continued with grim significance. "Cares for nobody, except his sister. And he won't see her made a fool of." Then, having beaten Peckover into retreating from too close an inspection of her brother's real state of mind, she turned, caught the sprawling fighter by the collar, and pushed him to his feet. "Great goose!" she hissed at him. "I could strangle you!"
The striking of a clock told Peckover that the time appointed for his assignation had arrived. "We'll hear that bloodthirsty anecdote to-morrow," he said, half trembling at his own temerity. "It's too good to be wasted on an audience of one."
"All right, my little wallaby-rat," responded Carnaby in a tone unpleasantly threatening, and with a valiant attempt to cover his discomfiture.
"Don't wait," Peckover's apprehension of a coming complication forced him to say. "Not much fun in this dark, chilly place. I'll stop and pick the tin plates up."
But as he made for the scattered armour, Lalage seized him. "No, you don't," she said, with determination that filled her victim with despair. "You come with us. I don't trust you out of my sight."
"Going to meet a girl here?" cried Carnaby, with a quite surprising flash of intuition. "I'd like to see him."
"We will," said Lalage, with quiet insistence; "we will see him. Here!" She took up a breastplate and helmet. "Get inside this armour, Carnaby dear, and we'll just keep an eye on him."
Piece by piece she picked it up and buckled it on him, Carnaby during the somewhat irksome operation relieving his feelings by addressing various minatory remarks to the now discomfited Peckover. "You stir a foot, and I'll twist it off, my pigeon. You just mention we're here, and I'll pull your tongue out, my little magpie. So you'll play fast and loose—chrrr Lal, you're pinching me—fast and loose with my beautiful sister, will you? You just try it on, my chicken, and it will be the last article you ever do try on. I'll flatten you out, and then swab the floor with you."
With a running fire of such cheering announcements did Mr. Leo relieve the tedium of his process of adornment. At length the pieces of armour were fixed to him. There were absurd gaps in the covering; nevertheless, in the semi-darkness there was no manifest difference between him and the empty suits of mail.
"Now," directed Lalage, as she arranged him on a stand, "you stay there as still at you can. And you"—she turned to Peckover—"stir from the room if you dare. You just tell the young minx you won't have anything to do with her, and, if she poaches on other people's preserves there won't be much sport for her by this day week."
"Yes!" A husky voice filtered through the vizor of Carnaby's helmet, as he flourished the sword in his hand. "If you try fooling I'll cut your——"
"Hush!" Lalage commanded, as she drew back into the obscurity of a recess. "Some one coming."
"Nice evening this evening," muttered Peckover ruefully as the door softly opened.
"Mr. Gage—Percy—are you there?"
"Yes, I'm here," was the lugubrious response.
"Have you been waiting long?" Ethel asked, coming close to him.
"Hours," he declared feelingly, then quickly corrected the statement. "No, I mean, not long." Back in the darkness he fancied he could see the truculent eyes glaring through the bars of the helmet.
"I couldn't get away," Ethel said invitingly. "Had to dodge Dagmar."
"Ho! she wanted to come too, did she?" Peckover remarked in desperation. "The more the merrier."
Ethel drew back with rather a sour look on her expectant face. "Mr. Gage, what do you mean?" Then with characteristic tenacity, she sidled up to him again. "Percy, how cold you are," she observed reproachfully.
"Cold?" he returned miserably. "Yes, it is a bit chilly. Enough to give any fellow the shivers. Chamber of Horrors is a fool to it. I mean," he quickly added, as an ominous movement of Carnaby's sword caught his eye, "the armour strikes cold."
"Of course," said Ethel huffily, "if you would prefer Dagmar, I'll go and send her to you."
"Oh, no; please don't trouble. You'll do," he replied, with an indifference born of desperation.
The lady resolved to try another tack. "Oh, Mr. Gage," she said, with a tremor in her voice; "how unkind you are!"
Her face was so close to him that the trial was almost more than he could stand. "No, no, not unkind," he denied, looking wildly round for a way of escape.
"So changed," she insisted.
"No, not changed," he replied equivocally.
"So distant."
"Wish I was—a hundred miles distant," he groaned to himself. "Can't help it," he declared, goaded by the consciousness of those four eyes magnetizing him from the darkness. "Perhaps I've been too familiar." "Oh, no," she protested, growing desperate in turn, as the prize of a millionaire husband seemed slipping from her. "If I don't mind it Percy, dear——"
She put out her arms, but he fell back. "Don't," he exclaimed, the hateful words almost choking him. "It isn't proper, you know."
"I'm afraid," she urged forlornly. "I have been too absurdly proper."
"Oh, no—yes, I mean, no, no." In his state of mind Peckover found it impossible to differentiate between what he longed and what he was forced to say.
"You said to-day it was dry work," Ethel observed caressingly. "You may have a sip if you like."
The invitation, reminding him, with a difference, of his Crystal Palace and Welsh Harp days, was well nigh too much for the well-versed philander of the suburbs. "Oh, don't, don't!" he almost shrieked. "Please go away. You will drive me mad. This is awful," he groaned.
"Of course, if you'd rather not——" Ethel suggested with a toss of the head.
"It's never rather not with me," he protested under his breath. "Only——"
Accepting his lowered tone as one of endearment and invitation, Ethel, wondering at his unusual diffidence, drew closer to him. Mechanically and most unwillingly, he drew back. "Well, you need not run away," she pouted.
From what he could, in the semi-darkness, see of her eyes he fancied he detected there an intention to spring at him, or at any rate to fall into his arms. In tantalizing terror he hastily retreated still further, and in doing so stumbled against the stand of armour which just then contained the redoubtable Carnaby, receiving for his clumsiness a sound cuff from the mailed fist of that truculent spirit. Luckily, as the episode took place in the shadow, it was not noticed by the lady who had stopped her pursuit of matrimony and mammon in a not unjustifiable huff.
"I know," she declared resentfully. "It's all that horrid Colonial girl. How you can like her beats me."
"Oh, she's not bad," was Peckover's reluctant explanation.
"I think," returned Ethel with decision, "she is simply awful. If that is Colonial taste, I am sorry for you. You could never think of marrying her!"
"I'm afraid so," he blurted out in his woe and confusion. His guilty eyes perceived a disquieting movement on the part of the man in armour, and in turning, ready to flee from the probable onslaught, he saw in the gloom Lalage's eyes scintillating vengeance. "I—I mean I hope so," he corrected, almost in a shriek.
Induced by this strange and contradictory behaviour, Ethel suddenly made a dart and flung her designing arms round him. "Oh, Percy," she cried with an adequate imitation of a sob, "you are not going to throw me over for that creature?"
"I must," he replied, releasing himself firmly and with what dignity was possible under the circumstances, "obey the dictates of honour."
Miss Ethel drew back, looking very sold and desperate in the moonlight. "What a charming brother-in-law you will have!" she exclaimed, panting with scorn and her late exertion. "Great lout! Only fit to guzzle and smash furniture."
"And," Peckover added miserably to himself, "people who don't agree with him."
His silence gave rise to a wild hope in the besieging breast that the defence was wavering. In a trice, with an improvement upon her former tentative onslaught, she had thrown herself with greater deadliness of aim and more convulsive tenacity into his willing, yet unwilling, arms again.
"Oh, Percy," she howled in a judiciously modulated pitch, "I can't bear your coldness! I can't let you go!"
Peckover's situation with those four glaring eyes and those two matrimonially determined grips upon him was truly deplorable. "I'm a dead man," he gasped, as he saw, over Ethel's reckless shoulder, the awful mail-clad figure raise the sword with grim significance. "I say; stop!" he cried, struggling ungallantly to free himself. "Keep away! I can't marry you!"
"Mr. Gage! Do you mean it?" It was most undignified from both parties' point of view, but the fact must be chronicled that she shook—actually shook him. "Oh, I won't be swindled like this!" she cried, in the height of exasperation.
Finding that with the obvious intention of being as good as her word, she, instead of releasing him with scorn, was hugging him tighter in desperation, he was fain to cry, in a hoarse whisper, "Hush! Keep off! We are not alone. Somebody in the room."
Ethel started back and looked round with a half-indignant, half-distrustful eye and saw—Dagmar. That young lady having had her suspicions aroused by the prolonged absence of her sister and their eligible guest, who, by the way, was supposed to be cheering the sick bed of his friend, Lord Quorn, had started off on a search expedition, and had just then crept pryingly into the picture-gallery.
"Ethel?" she cried with a pounce. "All alone with Mr. Gage here, of all places, and in the dark! This is disgraceful."
"Mr. Gage," Ethel declared calmly, "is going to marry me."
She was quite ready for her sister to join issue on that statement, but to her surprise the contradiction came from another quarter.
"Mr. Gage is not going to do anything of the sort." It was Lalage Leo who, emerging from the obscurity which had shrouded her, uttered the flat denial.
"There!" said Peckover in uncomfortable justification of his backwardness, "you see we were not alone."
"No!" cried a loud voice as Carnaby clanked forward. "Not much."
"Oh, Mr. Gage, how dishonourable," Ethel exclaimed trying to look scandalized while she resolved how best she could turn the situation to account. "Why didn't you tell me sooner?"
"I did tell you not to hug me," Peckover replied bluntly.
"If," suggested Carnaby with a leer, having, after a struggle to a running accompaniment of murmured strong language, got his helmet off, "if you want anybody to hug——"
"Oh!" Ethel cried in manifest disgust, as though her demonstrativeness was regulated by any less material consideration than its object's bank balance.
"I'll take the armour off," Carnaby assured her, his tone suggesting that that might make all the difference.
"I will not be treated like this," Ethel exclaimed indignantly, aware of the necessity for having her position in the complication settled then and there. "Mr. Gage is engaged to me." She seized Peckover's arm and hung on to it grimly.
"No, to me," Dagmar objected as with a desperation born of an insecure tenure she clutched his other arm.
Lalage, with mischief in her dark eyes, swooped down upon the trio. The unhappy Peckover's arms being fast held, the only way that occurred to him of avoiding the coming assault was to endeavour to sit down on the floor, in which he succeeded, after a short and spirited attempt on the part of his captors to defeat the manoeuvre.
"I have a prior and a stronger claim on Mr. Gage," said Lalage with calm determination; "and I mean to enforce it, eh, Carnaby?"
"Just let me get out of this rotten armour," growled her brother, thus appealed to. "I'll——"
"But it's not my fault," urged Peckover plaintively, from his undignified position on the floor.
His weakness was not, however, shared by the ladies who, having him fast in their grips, knelt, under the exigences of the situation, beside him.
"He is engaged to me," Ethel maintained stoutly.
"You are engaged to Sharnbrook," objected Dagmar.
"I am not," she denied loudly and with decision.
"All right! That's settled," exclaimed a blithe voice from the gloom, from which next moment the said John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook emerged.