"Tell you what it is, Percival, my boy," said Gage at breakfast next morning; "I've had about enough of nobility. Grandeur and aristocracy have too many inconveniences to suit me. I've a mind to clear out, and hand you back this precious title of yours."
Peckover laughed awkwardly. "Don't do that yet awhile, old man," he urged. "You haven't given it a fair trial."
"It has given me one," was the prompt and pointed retort. "And it strikes me if I don't look sharp and get out of the peacock's feathers I shall soon be pecked to death. That Salolja chap last night was an eye-opener."
"Unpleasant customer," his friend agreed.
"Unpleasant? Noisy little devil!"
"Barking dogs don't bite," observed Peckover, but without conviction.
"I wouldn't trust him," returned Gage with the firmness the other's remark lacked. "These Spaniards are the very deuce when they're jealous. They get simply mad. And nobody on this earth is safe from a loose madman if he takes it into his head to go for you. Our friend, the duke, meant business."
"Only so long as you interfere between him and Miss Buffkin," Peckover agreed.
"How was I to know what I was being let in for?" Gage exclaimed in an aggrieved tone. "When the old lady mentioned a foreign chap who'd been dancing after Ulrica I naturally thought it was some monkeyish fellow who'd squirm if you shook hands too hard, and would cry if you spoke to him unkindly. She never gave us a hint she'd got a bald Beelzebub with a voice that sends you the jumps and a homicidal history that gives you the shivers—to say nothing of that sickening revolver. Ugh! I can see the gleam of it now, as I've seen it all night. I was on the point of trying to get in first shot with a champagne bottle."
"Yes," Peckover admitted; "I've spent a pleasanter five minutes than when he was playing with the highly polished popper."
"Well, much more of this and I go back to plain Mr. Gage," that gentleman declared in a disgusted tone. "They talk of the fierce light that beats on royalty, but I didn't know the nobility lived in a set-piece of fire-works with occasional red-fire."
"They can't all of them do it," argued Peckover.
"They are all of 'em liable to it," Gage returned. "The squibs are there, only waiting for some little complication to come along and touch 'em off. It is getting on my nerves, and I'm wondering where the next little disturbance is coming from."
It seemed almost in answer to his thought that, just as he had voiced it, Bisgood announced that Lady Agatha Hemyock was in the drawing-room. Theirs was a late breakfast; still the call was early.
"That's where it's coming from," Peckover observed with an uneasy grin.
Lady Agatha was sympathetically troubled as she shook hands with them. Her preliminary business was to ask them down to the Moat to tea that afternoon; but as the men, exchanging significant glances, gladly accepted the invitation as affording an asylum from any immediate complications connected with the Duke of Salolja, they both felt that something more was coming, and of greater moment than a message which a note would have adequately conveyed. They were not long left in doubt.
"I had another object," said Lady Agatha, pursing her lips and looking unutterably important, "in paying you this unconventional visit. One has heard from various sources of the advent of Lady Ormstork to this neighbourhood. I have even been informed that the lady in question has gone so far as to call upon you, which is the reason why the Colonel thought it would be only neighbourly and friendly to give you a word of warning."
"Anything wrong," Peckover asked apprehensively. His nerves had not recovered from the previous night's disturbance.
Lady Agatha took a letter from her pocket with business-like deliberation. "Very wrong—or likely to be," she replied as she slowly unfolded it, "from what my friend, Lady Bosham tells me. I happened in writing to mention Lady Ormstork's name as having taken a furnished house near here, and my friend writes by return imploring me to have nothing to do with her. A most dangerous woman," she added, presumably quoting from the closely written letter.
Gage and Peckover caught each other's guilty and apprehensive eyes.
"She has," continued their visitor, confident in the effect she had produced, "I believe, a young person—a young lady nowadays she would be called—with her. A Miss Buffkin. A mysterious Miss Buffkin, given out as an heiress."
"Isn't she an heiress?" Peckover inquired rather foolishly.
Lady Agatha shrugged. "Possibly. That is a matter known only to Lady Ormstork and Miss Buffkin. But the more vital question is what are Lady Ormstork's character and intentions."
It was somewhat a relief to both men to find someone else's intentions called in question.
"Lady Bosham says," proceeded their visitor, "and indeed one has heard something of the kind vaguely oneself, that Lady Ormstork is notorious for getting hold of good-looking girls, often of very doubtful origin, and finding husbands for them—for a consideration."
Both men expressed a surprise which they could scarcely be said to feel.
"According to Lady Bosham, she is a determined and most unscrupulous woman," continued Lady Agatha, apparently quoting from the report. "Once she gets people into her toils they find it no easy matter to extricate themselves."
It occurred to her hearers that there were other titled spreaders of nets besides the histrionic Lady Ormstork, but they did not say so.
"Of course," said Lady Agatha, with apologetic plausibility, "it is perhaps a great liberty which I take in venturing to warn you. But being such close neighbours and friends, and knowing you to be, comparatively speaking, strangers to this country and some of its less desirable features, we thought it only right to do so."
"Much obliged to you, I'm sure," responded Gage.
"Quite so," added Peckover.
"Of course," Lady Agatha pursued tentatively, "I am unaware how far this Lady Ormstork," she spoke the name with withering emphasis, "may have forced her intimacy upon you. Still, it is better to be forewarned, even if yours is as yet nothing beyond a formal acquaintance."
"Just so," Gage agreed with balking irresponsiveness.
"Lady Bosham is very strong on the undesirability of these people's acquaintance," said Lady Agatha rising. "She, that is, Lady Ormstork, is a terrible old woman when once she gets her tentacles fixed on the victim she has marked down. But there, I trust I have said enough to sensible men like yourselves to put you on your guard."
"Quite," replied Gage, wondering where, in it all, the Duke of Salolja came in.
Lady Agatha took her leave, having made them promise to come early to the Moat that afternoon.
The promise was faithfully kept, since it seemed expedient to both men to avoid their friends from The Cracknels, at any rate till they saw how their Castilian rival was going to be disposed of.
"They are bound to come up this afternoon as usual," Gage observed to his friend.
"With that Spanish terror after them, shouldn't wonder," said Peckover. "We're best out of the way."
"Ethel and Dagmar will be poor fun after Ulrica," Gage remarked gloomily.
"Tell you what it is, my friend," said Peckover. "The sooner you bring yourself to consider Ulrica a thing of the past the better chance you'll have of making old bones. Ethel and Dagmar may not be all our fancy painted, but at least they haven't got a blood-thirsty Spanish nob hanging about them with traditions and a nasty way of talking polite flummery with a revolver playfully pointed at the vital parts of your anatomy all the time. You won't have a ducal freak poking his long nose in there."
"Well, we had better go down, have a fling with the second quality beauties and then clear out of the place till things cool down," said Gage with the air of a man who has made up his mind.
Accordingly, after an early luncheon, they went down to the Moat, and flirted so recklessly with the not unduly obdurate young ladies, that Lady Agatha was induced to dismiss from her mind a grand plan she had been formulating for the recapture of John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook, and even went so far as to canvass the respective claims of pink and apple-green in connexion with the general scheme of colour for a double bevy of bridesmaids.
It was late, as late for safety as they could make it, when Gage and Peckover returned home, discussing plans for a sudden flight next morning.
"Lady Ormstork called?" Gage asked Bisgood carelessly, as he turned into the smoking-room for a cigarette before going up to dress.
"Yes, my lord. And Miss Buffkin."
"You gave her ladyship my message?"
"Yes, m'lord."
"Did she say anything?"
"Her ladyship said she would wait, my lord, as she had something very important to tell your lordship."
"Ah," Gage said knowingly. "Did she wait long?"
"Her ladyship and Miss Buffkin are in the drawing-room, my lord."
The cigarette fell from Gage's parted lips, thrust out by a profane charge which exploded behind it.
"In the——" he turned helplessly to Peckover.
"Percival, old man, they're waiting for us," he gasped.
"Anybody else?" Peckover inquired of Bisgood, with a vision of a pair of terrific eyes backed by a bald head and set off in front by a long nose and a gleaming revolver barrel.
"No one else, sir," Bisgood answered with as much surprise as that functionary ever permitted himself.
"Better scoot, eh?" suggested Peckover in a panic-stricken whisper, as the butler left them.
"No. Let's go and hear what the old bird has to say," Gage replied, after a few moment's hesitation. "If any one is equal to tackling that Spanish nuisance she's the person. Let's go and hear how she takes it."
Lady Ormstork received them with pleasure tinged with just a shade of vexation. "We were so disappointed at not finding you at home to-day of all days," she exclaimed. "We heard this morning of an absurd misunderstanding which we were anxious to set right without delay. And we have been waiting nearly four hours."
"You've had tea?" Gage suggested, somewhat beside the point.
"Oh, yes, thank you," Miss Buffkin assured him.
"We heard casually," pursued Lady Ormstork, "that you had gone to call at the Moat, and naturally expected you would be back soon. But no doubt,"—this with a world of spiteful significance—"Lady Agatha Hemyock made a point of keeping you there as long as she could. I know her."
"Of course," said Gage gallantly, ignoring the suggestion, "if we had known you were waiting we should have been back long ago."
"Not if Lady Agatha knew it," was the tart reply. "But never mind about that hateful woman. I have waited to see you on a more important subject."
She glanced at Miss Buffkin, who rose with an amused face and sauntered to the window. "I'll take a turn among the flowers while you are telling the tale, Lady Ormstork," she said casually. "I'm getting a little tired of it."
Both men looked longingly after her as she strolled across the lawn, but a consuming anxiety to hear the latest news of the duke curbed the desire to invent an excuse for making after her.
"The Duke of Salolja, tiresome person," Lady Ormstork began, "called at The Cracknels this morning, and upset us very much by telling us of a visit he had the impudence to pay you last evening."
"Yes; we had a pleasant hour of him here," said Gage, grimly reminiscent.
"He tells me," proceeded the lady in a tone of righteous anger, "that he has, in the most unwarrantable manner, suggested the existence of an engagement between himself and dear Ulrica. Is that so?"
"He suggested that he wasn't going to allow anybody else to be engaged to her," Peckover replied.
"Most improper!" commented Lady Ormstork. "And most unwarranted. Dear Ulrica detests him. But he is most absurdly persistent."
"Yes, he's a bit of a nailer," Peckover agreed feelingly.
"Was he very rude?" the lady inquired.
"No, he was polite; the most confoundedly polite cuss I ever encountered," answered Gage.
"I'm glad to hear that," said Lady Ormstork. "And so your interview, preposterous as it was on his part, was quite amicable?"
For a moment neither man felt equal to answering the question. Then Peckover said, "Quite amicable, only a touch one-sided. You see, it don't exactly pay to be nasty when a fellow's sitting over you with a revolver."
Lady Ormstork threw up her hands. "A revolver? Ridiculous person! Really—I hope you told the foolish man that that sort of thing was quite out of date."
"The revolver wasn't though," objected Peckover with a reminiscent shiver. "It looked quite new, with all the latest improvements and in first-class working order."
"Really?" cried the lady incredulously.
"As far as we could judge. Didn't want any closer inspection. I'm content to take a revolver's business capacity for granted."
"But surely," remarked Lady Ormstork with an amused curl of the lip, "you don't mean to say that you allowed this droll Salolja to alarm you?"
The men glanced at each other with long faces.
"We weren't exactly sorry when he said good-bye," was Gage's evasive answer.
"Oh, but this is too absurd," protested the lady.
"The funny side wasn't exactly turned to us last night," said Peckover.
"I have," proceeded Lady Ormstork coolly, "told the duke he is making himself ridiculous."
"And how did he take it?" Gage inquired with considerable curiosity.
The lady shrugged. "It is hopeless to argue with that sort of person. And naturally dear Ulrica is, from every point of view, a girl whom even a duke would find it difficult to give up hopes of. But her father, a man of great discernment and determination would never hear of such an alliance. A foreign title does not appeal to him. So, my dear Lord Quorn, you need have no fears that Ulrica is in any danger of becoming Duchesse de Salolja."
This was pretty direct speaking. "It would be a pity," Gage agreed warily, "if Miss Buffkin should be coerced into a distasteful marriage."
"There is," replied Lady Ormstork resolutely, "no chance of that. I have told the duke so in unmistakable language. And I also gave him a piece of my mind with regard to his uncalled-for interference between Ulrica and yourself. He had the impudence to suggest that you were at his bidding ready to break off your understanding with Ulrica and relinquish her to him. To him! To a man whom she detests, I simply laughed at him, as I hoped you had laughed too."
Gage started up. "You didn't tell him I was engaged to Ul—to Miss Buffkin?" he gasped.
"Naturally I did," was the composed answer.
"But—but I'm not," he protested.
Lady Ormstork gave a smile of pitying encouragement. "My dear Lord Quorn, you are not going to allow yourself to be frightened out of your engagement by the bluster of that grotesque little Spaniard?"
"But," he urged wildly. "Spaniard or no Spaniard, I am not engaged."
Lady Ormstork shrugged. "Anyhow, Ulrica is under the impression she is betrothed to you. I have even gone so far as to inform Mr. Buffkin of the engagement, being, as you will understand, responsible to him for Ulrica's well-being. You cannot in honour even pretend to be induced by threats to repudiate it. You have your own reputation as well as Ulrica's to consider. That is why I spoke so straight to the duke this morning."
Her tone was resolute and conclusive. Gage knew not whether to look upon it as a well-arranged piece of bluff or as his dying knell.
"It's all very well," he replied wildly. "I'm very fond of Ulrica and all that. But the traditions of the Salolja family have, from time immemorial, pointed to killing their rivals on sight. There's not much use to either of us in my being engaged to Ulrica if I'm to be shot next minute."
"Even if you anticipated such a contingency," Lady Ormstork replied coolly, "it would not justify you as an English nobleman in jilting Ulrica. It is a point of honour. You see that, don't you, Mr. Gage?" she demanded, suddenly turning to the deeply interested Peckover.
"Just so," he answered with a start. "Only it's poor fun having your wedding and your funeral on the same day."
"I do not," Lady Ormstork declared, "understand such pusillanimity. After all," she urged, "you are man to man. Why should you be more afraid of the duke than he of you?"
"I've no homicidal traditions in my family," Gage explained.
"A jealous Spaniard is the very devil," supplemented Peckover, whose experience of foreign temperament was derived from penny serials and half-crown melodrama.
"Fact is," added Gage, "what I want is a good time, without any fuss or bother from Spanish dukes or anybody else. I'm willing to do the right thing, so far as it can be done without friction."
"A somewhat shallow, not to say unromantic, view of life," was Lady Ormstork's sarcastic comment. "I must confess it never struck me that the Duc de Salolja carried such terror in his absurd person.
"He carries a revolver on his absurd person," was Peckover's pointed rejoinder.
"Ulrica will under no circumstances be allowed to marry him, even if she wants to," the lady declared, changing her tone. "I have announced to her father that she is going to be Lady Quorn, and am certainly not going to take upon myself the odium of suggesting that Lord Quorn has been frightened out of the match by the first ridiculous little Spaniard who chooses to flourish in his face his family traditions and a—possibly unloaded—revolver."
"We didn't go into that question," Peckover remarked with a reminiscent shiver.
"The whole business is too droll," said Lady Ormstork with an amused smile. "But of course we cannot submit to the duke's impudent coercion. It is, however, easily obviated. I will take the matter in hand, since you seem reluctant to do so. I am responsible for dear Ulrica's welfare and happiness. It is my business to see the sweet girl does not fall a prey to a foreign fortune-hunter. Yes, dear Lord Quorn, you may leave the matter with absolute confidence in my hands. You may depute me, as Mr. Buffkin has already done, to deal with the Duc de Salolja."
Gage did not receive the assurance in the spirit in which it was so confidently given. On the contrary he looked more uncomfortable than ever.
"All very well," he said, after an embarrassed pause, "but the more you insist on sticking me up the more he'll feel called on to knock me down. Eh, Percival?"
"Right you are," was Peckover's gloomy response.
"I'll take care of that," Lady Ormstork assured him.
"He won't go for you; he'll go for me," urged Gage.
"Not he. I'll draw him off," said the lady.
"Suppose he won't be drawn off?" suggested Peckover.
"Trust me," replied Lady Ormstork, grandly confident of her powers. "Diplomacy counts for much."
"Strikes me it will count revolver shots if we aren't careful," said Gage dryly.
Lady Ormstork drew back her mouth in a pitying smile.
"My dear Lord Quorn! This is unworthy of you," she declared. "Do think of Ulrica. Have you so little regard for her? Is not she—superb creature!—worth a little daring?"
"Certainly," Gage assented doubtfully.
"All you want to do," continued the lady, following up her successful appeal, "is to show a bold front, and the terrible Duke of Salolja will run away."
"Think so?" asked Peckover, his secret hopes reviving.
"I am sure of it," said their visitor, rising. "There, I am certain you never meant, dear Lord Quorn, to repudiate in earnest your understanding with the dear girl. Ulrica will be the loveliest and most queenly peeress in the kingdom. And with her immense wealth, the alliance is most desirable in every way. Don't give the wretched, preposterous duke another thought. Do, like a sensible man, dismiss him from your mind. And if he should have the impudence to intrude here again show him the door and tell him to go back to his own——"
"Perhaps you'll do that for us, Lady Ormstork," said Peckover, whose restless eyes had been kept on the window. "There he is."
The others looked round with a start. There sure enough was the Duke of Salolja, stalking, with as long strides as his short legs would allow, across the lawn, obviously in pursuit of the fair Miss Buffkin.
The sight of yesterday's visitor seemed to paralyse both men, and the grim fascination that had held them before now clutched them again. Gage, who had, under the influence of Lady Ormstork's bitterly persuasive tongue, began to pluck up courage, and to view the magnificent Miss Buffkin once more in a proprietary right, now visibly wilted. He even glanced round at the door, as though meditating flight. Peckover whistled uncomfortably and tunelessly through his clenched teeth; a more elaborate expression of feeling he did not feel equal to. Then they both glanced somewhat helplessly at Lady Ormstork in search of some indication of a plan of campaign.
"Actually intruding here again," the lady exclaimed indignantly, as the duke's purposeful strides took him out of sight behind a hedge of laurels. "If I were you, Lord Quorn, I would not hesitate in ordering him out of your grounds."
Gage did not look the least inclined to act upon the suggestion. "Oh, let him walk about there, if he likes," he replied with a weak laugh.
"Walk about?" repeated the lady warmly. "But he's walking after Ulrica. It is not to be tolerated. I was under the impression that I had given him hiscongé. Lord Quorn—Mr. Gage," she turned fiercely upon Peckover, "as Lord Quorn seems content to endure this intolerable conduct rather than be man enough to protect his future wife from this tiresome person, perhaps you will go and intimate to the duke that his presence is undesirable."
Peckover's reception of the order did not suggest alacrity. "No affair of mine," he protested with a resolution born of care for his own skin. "Don't believe in interfering in other people's business. My motto is——"
"Motto!" cried Lady Ormstork scornfully. "Is chivalry quite dead, that a lovely girl like dear Ulrica must be persecuted and victimized by an under-sized desperado, and two Englishmen stand by tamely and allow it?"
Notwithstanding this somewhat pointed appeal, the two Englishmen seemed still disinclined to sally out and try conclusions with the Spanish terrorist. Luckily, however, the argument was diverted by the appearance on the lawn of three persons, the duke, Miss Buffkin, and Lord Quorn, all with looks of stress on their faces.
"Ah, here they come," said Lady Ormstork with her teeth set ready for battle. "Who, may I ask, is that person with them?" she asked, lowering her eye-glasses and turning to the men who were for the moment preoccupied in weighing the merits of the respective courses of standing their ground or seeking a sanctuary in the wine cellars.
"That? Oh, that's Jenkins," answered Gage, wondering what he was doing in thegalère.
"Jenkins?" Lady Ormstork echoed the name, as though it did not convey very much to her.
"One of my people," Gage explained, in an agony of indecision as to the propriety of flight.
By this time the approaching trio had reached the window, inside which Lady Ormstork stood grimly waiting for them. Next instant the duke had thrown it open and was with a flourish and a bow inviting Ulrica to enter. A similar though modified pantomime having been gone through in the case of Lord Quorn the three at length stood inside the room, with the irate Lady Ormstork facing them, and with Gage and Peckover within jumping distance of the door.
"Duke," Lady Ormstork's sharp tone rang through the room like a defiant bugle-call, "this is most extraordinary, not to say unseemly, conduct on your part."
The representative of the Saloljas was, however, far too busy in distributing elaborate bows and extravagant greetings all round to be in a position to give heed at once to the lady's challenge. In Spain punctilio gives way to nothing, not even to an angry old lady's impatience.
Presently when Messrs. Gage and Peckover had been favoured with bows and compliments into which they were inclined to read their death warrants, the duke raised the top of his coercive head the whole of his five feet three inches from the floor and observed blandly—
"Ten million apologies, most noble lady. I am ashamed to confess I did not hear the remark you did me the undeserved honour to make."
In no wise disconcerted, the most noble lady repeated the remark, slightly strengthening the language in which it had originally been couched.
"Ah—h!" The duke's grimace and pantomime expressed deprecation with a more elaborately hideous vim than that feeling had probably ever been clothed with before. "Most illustrious lady," he protested, "what would you have? The state of my unworthy heart is well known to you. And the heart excuses everything—everything."
The repetition of the last word had a sinister sound in the ears of Gage and Peckover. With its dire comprehensiveness it seemed to include their lives in its sweeping embrace.
But Lady Ormstork, with sundry material reasons to influence her judgment, was far from accepting the proposition. "It does not," she objected stoutly. "To force your attentions where they are distasteful is inexcusable."
"It is," rejoined the duke, with the light of battle in his eyes, "clearly my duty to render acceptable the homage of my affection."
"It is quite hopeless," declared Lady Ormstork curtly.
"I believe not," insisted the duke with, under the circumstances, an admirable display of assurance.
Lady Ormstork glanced with equal confidence at herprotégée. "Miss Buffkin will bear me out."
"Yes. It's no good, duke," said the young lady with discomfiting promptness. "You are not my sort."
The duke accepted the verdict with a shrug, and at once proceeded to misread it. "The Dukes of Salolja," he said with a touch of defiant pomposity, "have never permitted inequality of birth to be a bar in affairs of the heart."
Lady Ormstork had also her personal rules of life. And one was never to allow herself to be bluffed out of a possible advantage. "You mistake, duke," she said suavely. "Miss Buffkin wishes delicately to suggest that she does not return your affection, and therefore, the alliance you propose is out of the question."
"I can," replied the duke, in no way abashed, "afford to wait for the return of my affection."
As he glanced significantly round at the three silent men he seemed a very monument of determination.
"But," Lady Ormstork maintained, "we do not wish you to wait. There would be no point in your waiting. Miss Buffkin has made up her mind to contract a quite different alliance."
"Ah?" The duke opened his mouth wide and emitted an exclamation in tone and mode of utterance worthy of a surprised hyæna. Then shutting his mouth and opening his eyes whose light the facial contortion had absorbed, he added with, to certain of the party at least, disquieting significance, "Our Spanish proverb says, 'He who buys ground may rest under it before he can repose above it.' May I, without offence, ask the ever gracious Miss Buffkin whether you correctly interpret her sentiments and intentions?"
The ever gracious Miss Buffkin looked as defiant as her questioner—and much less polite, as she answered, "That's right enough. I'm going to marry an Englishman, for one thing."
"Ah?" Again the zoological grimace. "Has the radiant Miss Buffkin honoured any particular Englishman with her much-to-be coveted preference?"
The question, accompanied as it was, by a sweeping and minatory glance, had the immediate effect of making two Englishmen in the room try to look severely recusant and anti-matrimonial.
And under the influence of that fell glance Gage took a desperate resolve.
Lady Ormstork, who believed in coming to the point where her own interests were concerned, answered with bold preciseness, "Certainly. Miss Buffkin is going to marry Lord Quorn."
At the declaration the duke made a face which raised his bristling moustache till his eyes glared through a fan-like screen of hair, the real Lord Quorn uttered an exclamation which conveyed no definite sentiment, Gage turned the colour of the fruit associated with his name, and Peckover, trying to persuade himself that the discussion did not touch him, whistled softly through his teeth.
"Lord Quorn!" repeated the duke in a tone of bland surprise. "No. That may have been. But I fancy, most illustrious lady, you are mistaken. Milord Quorn has renounced all pretentions to the lady's hand."
"Lord Quorn has done nothing of the kind," Lady Ormstork denied stoutly.
The duke turned to Gage, polite yet threatening. "Doubtless milord Quorn will do me the honour to confirm what I have stated."
"Lord Quorn," interrupted the old lady, "will do nothing of the sort."
The duke raised himself on tip-toe and fixed the apprehensive Gage with his fiercest glare. "Milord Quorn will do so—or lay himself open to the consequences," he insisted, with a truculent nod of command.
"I—er—of course I—I have no wish to stand in the lady's light," Gage stammered weakly.
"Light?" echoed Lady Ormstork in a high-pitched voice. "I fancy, my dear Lord Quorn, we are the best judges of the quarter the light shines from."
"It shines," observed the duke with grim imperturbability, "from Spain."
"It shines," retorted the dowager with haughty insistence, "from Staplewick Towers."
"I am deeply grieved," said the duke, "to sound a discordant note in the symphony of your distinguished plans. But I declare that the adorable Miss Ulrica shall never marry Lord Quorn."
"I say she shall," retorted Lady Ormstork defiantly.
"She shall not—even if a regrettable necessity should dictate that there be no Lord Quorn for her to marry."
Thus the duel proceeded; the passes growing hotter and keener every moment. Miss Buffkin had subsided on a sofa and from her attitude might have been an uninterested and slightly bored spectator. And all the while the three men who looked on said nothing, wisely, perhaps. But their interest in the encounter was not to be judged by their silence, as they watched their champion's efforts with mixed feelings. They were, all three, in love with the beautiful Miss Buffkin, but each was likewise consumed by an intense regard for his own safety.
"It is not," said Lady Ormstork with dignity—and that aristocratic matrimonial agent could be very dignified when she chose—"the fashion among English gentlemen to indulge in absurd threats when their pretensions are rejected. In this country we took leave of the Dark Ages long ago."
"Absurd threats, eh?" the little duke repeated, with a laugh which fell chill and jarring on, at any rate, Gage's ear. "We shall see. Yes, we shall see—those of us"—he glanced fiercely round the room—"who are alive next week—how far my threats are vain."
"Ridiculous nonsense!" Lady Ormstork exclaimed with a scornful and somewhat stagey laugh.
The duke bowed. "I have the honour, most illustrious lady, to receive your ultimatum, and to accept it. It is horribly unfortunate that we find ourselves diametrically opposed. But so it is; and I have no more to say—to you, except to bid youau revoir, with my most distinguished compliments."
He bowed very low to her, then to Ulrica, after which with a kind of fiendish politeness to each of the three men, taking Gage with marked intention last. "Milord Quorn," he said, drawing back his lips till his moustache stood up like two wings against his cheeks, "I regret that my friendly hint has not been taken. You have called the game. I shall have the honour of playing it—as," he raised his voice, "as my honoured and distinguished ancestors have always played it."
"Don't talk nonsense, duke," said Lady Ormstork sharply.
The representative of the distinguished and bloodthirsty Saloljas raised himself abruptly from a bow he was elaborating, and faced the lady. "A Salolja," he said, with as much dignity as a short stature coupled with a long nose is capable of, "never talks nonsense."
"If you presume," she continued threateningly, "to annoy Lord Quorn——"
"A Salolja," he interrupted, with a significant smile, "never annoys."
"Or threaten—' pursued Lady Ormstork.
"A Salolja," he returned, with a Castilian gesture of deprecation, "never threatens. It is only within the last hundred and fifty years that he has condescended to warn."
"We can warn too," retorted the lady doggedly. "Warn the police."
The duke looked quite tickled. "Most gracious lady," he replied, showing his teeth in a grin from which none of his male listeners derived any mirth, "you make me smile. I think the question of your police we have already analysed, I and the excellent Lord Quorn. If your graces have no more notable argument to put forth to arrest the traditions of the Saloljas I will ask your gracious permission to take my leave—for the present."
He accompanied the last three words with a glance which boded battle, murder and sudden death to at least one of his hearers. Then, with a sweeping bow, he turned to the door.
"Stop!" cried Gage in a voice resonant with fear. "You are all making a mistake. I am not Lord Quorn!"
At the startling declaration the duke swung round and eyed Gage with a glance that seemed capable of penetrating an inch board. Lady Ormstork, surprised for a moment out of her transcendent self-possession, stared aghast at the object of her designs; Ulrica looked half astonished and half relieved; Peckover's mien was one of abject discomfiture; while Quorn's showed grim expectation.
"Not Lord Quorn?" screamed Lady Ormstork incredulously.
"So? Not Lord Quorn?" repeated the duke, prepared to resume the aggressive.
"No, I'm not," Gage declared stoutly. "If I ever was, I've had enough of it. But I never was by rights."
"Not Lord Quorn by rights?" gasped Lady Ormstork.
"Never. At least never no more. So you'll please to consider me out of this little complication."
"This," observed the duke, truculently thoughtful, "is very singular."
"Very," Lady Ormstork agreed. "One would like to have some explanation of such an extraordinary statement."
"We must know how we stand," said the duke, who had assumed the attitude of a stunted bravo.
"I tell you," Gage maintained, "I am no more Lord Quorn than you are."
There was a short silence. Then Lady Ormstork demanded pointedly, "Then who, may I ask, is Lord Quorn?"
Gage indicated the unwilling Peckover. "This is Lord Quorn. I am plain Peter Gage."
Quorn, the real Quorn, laughed scornfully, and seemed to see light.
Miss Buffkin clapped her hands. "You Lord Quorn? How lovely!" she exclaimed, beaming at Peckover.
"Aha! So you are Lord Quorn?" cried the duke transferring to that person his highly undesirable attention.
"No, I'll be hanged if I am," protested the abnegating Peckover.
"You'll be shot if you are," observed Gage half aloud, with a glance at the highly-stoked little Spaniard, who stood pulling his quill-like moustaches, and whose unswerving glance confirmed the forecast.
Ulrica had jumped up. "There, we've settled it already, dear Lady Ormstork," she cried. "Isn't it lucky!"
"Lucky?" echoed Lady Ormstork, rather non-plussed.
"Yes," Ulrica assured her. "We've settled it between ourselves. I like him. He's my sort."
From the duke came a deep, rumbling "Oom!" as a grim commentary on the reshuffle of the position.
"But I'm not Lord Quorn," Peckover urged vehemently, beginning to be seriously alarmed.
"You are!" maintained Gage.
"One of you must be," said the duke, as though merely anxious not to make a mistake in the selection of his victim.
"Not me!" To such a state of poverty was Peckover's vocabulary reduced.
"Oh, Percival!" Ulrica exclaimed reproachfully. "Don't deny it."
"He can't," declared Gage, under the influence of the baleful Salolja eyes and moustaches which dominated the scene.
"May I ask," said Lady Ormstork with dignified severity, "how you came to call yourself Lord Quorn?"
"Well," replied Gage frankly, "I thought I'd like to see how it felt to be a lord. And," he added pointedly, "I don't care much for the feeling."
"And may I ask," continued the dowager, addressing herself to the bothered and daunted Peckover, "how it was you came to renounce your title?"
"I made it worth his while," Gage explained shortly, determined to be off with the galling honour.
The real Lord Quorn in his corner gave a long whistle of semi-enlightenment.
"I never had it," protested the unhappy Peckover.
The duke, bristling, took a step forward. "Lord Quorn!" he snapped his fingers loudly and contemptuously. "It is no matter. You are at least a suitor of this lady?"
Happily Lady Ormstock saved Peckover from replying to the delicate suggestion. "Not unless he is Lord Quorn," she declared resolutely.
"I tell you," cried Peckover desperately, "I am not Lord Quorn."
"Then you are a fraud," Gage asserted roughly.
"I never said I was Lord Quorn," urged Peckover.
"You never said you weren't," rejoined Gage.
The fiery blood of the Saloljas was beginning to weary of these polemics and to be impatient for its cue. "It is no matter," he said with loud, painfully loud, authority. "I take it"—to Peckover—"that you are Lord Quorn, and you have, for reasons inexplicable to a Spanish nobleman been pleased to divest yourself temporarily of your rank. You have addressed yourself to this lady—as Lord Quorn or by a humbler name, it matters not. I have the honour to request a few words with your excellency in the garden."
His excellency's countenance expressed a strong disinclination to any suchal frescoconference. Indeed, so far was he from complying with the duke's haughty and peremptory invitation that he sat down on a chair which stood handy. "Not much," he said vernacularly. "I'm not taking any just at present, thanks all the same." He felt himself comparatively safe where he was. Even a Spanish duke of vindictive and homicidal idiosyncrasies could scarcely have the face to murder him coolly in a room before four non-accessory witnesses.
Whether the duke realized that the refusal contained a certain admixture of defiance is uncertain. Anyhow, he took two strides with his short legs, and, at uncomfortably close quarters, repeated the invitation.
But Peckover sat tight. "I'm not Lord Quorn," he maintained doggedly, "and I've had as much fresh air as I want for one day." His complexion was green with fear. With the searching fire of those eyes upon him he felt it was as much as he could do to keep from shrivelling up; still, what mind panic had left him was dominated by the assurance that once in the garden it would be all over with his somewhat luridly chequered career. The Salolja eyes held him. He tried to glance round for encouragement, for a touch of companionship even, at the others in the room who, however, watched the scene in grim and more or less embarrassed silence. But though for a moment his eyes sought them, he saw nothing, and next instant they were riveted again on the demon duke, now so near that he could feel his fiery breath. But he kept his seat with a drowning man's desperation.
"Will your grace come?" rang out the sharp, staccato tones. "Or will it be necessary for me to drag your excellency out by the nose?"
The alternative was not attractive, and its proposer looked quite capable of putting it into execution.
"I tell you I am not Lord Quorn, and never was," yelled the wretched Peckover, now simply beside himself. "If you want him, there he is." He pointed to the corner where stood the real peer, looking, however, particularly unlike one, and in a high state of doubt as to the line he should take. He compromised with the question by giving, in the first instance, a loud, derisive laugh.
"Very pretty, Mr. Gage, or whatever your alias is. So I'm Lord Quorn, am I, when it suits your book? That's a rich idea. Ho! ho! ho!" And he laughed again with offensive resonance.
"Who," demanded Lady Ormstork in a tone of disgust, "is this noisy person?"
"Lord Quorn," was Peckover's prompt reply.
"What?" cried Gage in bewilderment.
"Milord Quorn, eh?" said the duke, transferring his bristling attention to the latest participant in that questionable distinction.
"Impossible!" exclaimed Lady Ormstork, obviously judging by appearance, which certainly did not go far to suggest a member of the peerage.
Quorn laughed again, less comfortably this time under the observation of the duke. "Of course I'm not," he said, in a tone which lost in the utterance its original intention of irony. "How can I be, except in these gentlemen's imagination?" For he had a shrewd idea, as things were going, that, at the moment, the title carried certain unpleasant contingent liabilities with it.
The duke pursed his face into a quizzical sneer. "No, I do not think you are milord Quorn, my good fellow," he concluded, taking Lady Ormstork's view of the badly groomed object of his scrutiny.
"He is Lord Quorn," Peckover insisted vehemently, "if anybody is."
"Of course," retorted Quorn with withering point, "I am Lord Quorn when it is necessary."
The duke, manifestly tiring of the question of identity and resolving (possibly Castilian fashion) to settle the point for himself, was about to resume his somewhat drastic argument with Peckover when Ulrica interrupted the genial intention.
"I believe this person is Lord Quorn," she said, with pointed reference to the real man. "He told me so himself just now in the garden. He said the other was an imposter and advised me to have nothing to do with him."
"My dear Ulrica!" cried Lady Ormstork, half doubtingly; then turned to Quorn with a face prepared to beam on the shortest notice.
"What did I tell you?" exclaimed Peckover realizing it was a case ofsauve qui peut.
The duke, almost forgetting punctilio in his cumulative exasperation, turned again to Quorn, resolved to be at definite issue with somebody, while his jealousy was spurred by Lady Ormstork's evident readiness to establish as Miss Buffkin's suitor the right Quorn, if only she could get hold of him.
"So you are Lord Quorn, my fine fellow," he exclaimed with a mock bow (for, as we know, Quorn was shabby). "You are eager to pay your addresses to this adorable lady, and are doubtless prepared to accept the consequences?"
Quorn, at a loss for a reply, stared stupidly at his fierce interrogator, while Peckover judged himself sufficiently reprieved to venture to wink at Gage.
"I don't do anything of the sort," Quorn at length said weakly.
"Oh, Lord Quorn," protested Ulrica mischievously. "You know you said I was to marry the right Lord Quorn, and you were the man."
"So?" cried the duke, with fell conviction that he had at last got his man. "It is well. You are Lord Quorn.Je l'accepte. May I request the honour of a private word with your illustrious lordship in the garden?"
"Not exactly," was that illustrious noble's pithy reply to the invitation.
Of the duke's Castilian stock of patience very little was left. "It is necessary," he insisted with a ferocious grin. "I am not to be denied. Your grace shall come—now."
"You will not be so absurd as to go, Lord Quorn," put in Lady Ormstork with time-serving sympathy.
Quorn did not look in the least like committing the absurdity. He set his teeth and glared round at the other men in a sort of forlorn hope of assistance. But they, though naturally deeply interested, made no sign. The conditions were, at the moment, too complex for a clear line of altruism.
"Your excellency shall come," said the duke through his teeth. "I am the Duke of Salolja, and a Grandee of Spain. I will not be balked."
But the representative of the British aristocracy still hung back. "I insist," maintained the Spaniard, darting forward and seizing a reluctant arm. The Englishman's counter move was to sit down on a chair which stood beside him. Anticipating the move, the duke pulled him sharply away. The consequence was that Quorn sat down on the floor. Not quite seeing his way to conduct his adversary from that posture into the garden, the duke was fain, while seeking a feasible plan, to spurn the lowly nobleman with his foot.
"For shame!" cried Lady Ormstork.
"If you kick me I'll hand you over to the police," said Quorn unhappily and speaking at a certain disadvantage.
The duke gave a crowing laugh of scorn, a favourite trick of his when "the force" was mentioned. "The police! Hah! hah! Where are they, your police?"
The question was answered by Bisgood, who at that juncture opened the door, and, subduing with difficulty all outward signs of a pardonable astonishment, announced—
"Detective-Inspector Doutfire from Great Bunbury wishes to speak to your lordship."