Mr. Doutfire came in close upon Bisgood's announcement, and threw a severely professional eye round the company. His manner, in fact, suggested, in a measure, that he was raiding a gambling den; but then the suspicious habit had become characteristic with him. And indeed, the attitudes of the party might be said to have justified mistrust, or at any rate an inquisitorial curiosity on his part. He bowed to Gage with a nicely adjusted balance between the homage due to a peer of the Realm and a due regard for the Law whose representative he was and which boasted itself no respecter of persons. It is, perhaps, scarcely necessary to state that Peckover viewed his advent with an uneasy eye.
"Beg pardon, my lord," Doutfire said in his consequential, witness-box manner, "sorry to intrude upon your lordship, but I considered it my duty to inform your lordship that a certain suspicious character has been noticed hanging about the grounds here, and I took it upon myself to just step up and warn your lordship."
The somewhat tense silence which followed was broken by the duke's staccato tones. "So this is milord Quorn, eh, policeman?"
Mr. Doutfire looked not merely scandalized, but ready at a moment's notice to take the representative of the lordly Saloljas into custody.
"Detective-Inspector is my rank and appellation, sir, begging your pardon," he said severely. "With regard to your question, sir, I have every reason to believe I am right in stating that this gentleman—I should say nobleman—is Lord Quorn."
"So? Thank you, detective," said the duke with a bow of acknowledgment for the information, and a smile for the futility of the police, once again preparing to focus his traditional aggressiveness upon the unhappy Gage.
But that gentleman did not propose to sit again. "It's all a mistake," he protested loudly. "I am not Lord Quorn. There he is, so far as I can make out."
He pointed to the real Quorn, who had retained his seat upon the floor, and whom, owing to his position behind the door, Doutfire's eagle glance had so far not taken in. That alert officer now, however, lost no time in wheeling round and fixing the lowly peer with a glare of more than suspicion. "This?" he exclaimed incredulously. "Why, this," he darted his head forward and sideways with the sure air of a master of the art of criminal indemnification, "this is the party I have just mentioned to your lordship. A suspicious character who has given us the slip as well as a lot of trouble. A party known to us as Peckover."
"There!" cried Lady Ormstork, turning from the sedentary nobleman with a face of contemptuous disgust. "I said it was impossible he could be Lord Quorn."
"I know him as Peckover," Mr. Doutfire maintained with authority. "A party against whom a charge of being in possession of and uttering counterfeit coin was lately preferred, but which charge the Treasury has now seen fit to withdraw."
"Oh!" Peckover's face brightened at the news. "But he is Lord Quorn," he insisted.
Mr. Doutfire, who had been keeping that nobleman under observation with a wary and scornful eye, looked as though quite unable to reconcile the statement with its object's position on the floor. "Do I understand that he states he is Lord Quorn?" he asked severely, taking out a large note book with bodily contortions and ominous play with its broad elastic band.
"On the contrary, I've said nothing of the sort," objected Quorn. "Did I?" he added appealing to the company above him.
Mr. Doutfire's look suggested that to his mind that assertion, even if correct, did not fully account for the suspect's position on the carpet. "Well, bring yourself up," he commanded roughly. "And let us get at the rights of the question."
Thus bidden, Quorn rose, and faced the officer of the law, defiantly reticent.
"You shall find out at once which of these gentlemen is Lord Quorn," ordered the Duke of Salolja, folding his arms.
"By your leave, sir——" began Doutfire in a tone of trenchant reproof.
"Sir?" cried the duke, speaking very fast and staccato. "My rank and appellation are the Duke of Salolja, I am, moreover, a Grandee of Spain."
Mr. Doutfire covered the hit by a business-like action of putting the point of a stubby lead pencil in his mouth. "I'll make a note of that," he said, to all appearances unmoved by the momentous announcement. And he proceeded to do so, taking a subtle revenge by making the haughty Castilian spell his title, and furthermore suggesting that his pronounciation of the alphabet was suspiciously misleading.
"Your grace," he observed sternly, when the elaborate entry had been made and deliberately revised, "may trust me to take the steps, if any, necessary to clear up this matter." He turned from the fuming Spaniard, and addressed himself pointedly to the rest of the company. "Do I understand," he asked approaching the extraordinary complication with an absence of emotion which suggested that the tackling of such questions was with him an every-day occurrence, "do I understand that there is some doubt as to the identity of Lord Quorn?"
"Precisely," replied the duke.
Mr. Doutfire by an authoritative wave of his notebook enjoined the Castilian despot to silence. "I ask you, sir," he said, pointedly to Gage, "whether you are or are not Lord Quorn?"
"Not I," was the prompt and comparatively cheerful answer.
Mr. Doutfire accepted it with a suggestion of reserving all comment on the surprising statement till a later stage. "Perhaps, then, you will be good enough to tell me who is," he said.
Gage pointed with his thumb to Peckover. "If it's not this gentleman, I don't know who it is," he replied indifferently.
"Nothing of the nobility about me," Peckover declared in answer to Doutfire's interrogative glance. "I tell you that is the individual, over there," indicating Quorn, who was now sufficiently recovered from the ducal onslaught to laugh jeeringly.
"I like that!" he exclaimed. "Making me Lord Quorn when it comes useful."
"You are Peckover?" demanded Mr. Doutfire confidently.
"If you say so," was the reply.
"I do say so," said Doutfire, whose reputation clearly hinged on the correctness of the statement.
"I knew he was not Lord Quorn," put in Lady Ormstork.
"He told me he was," observed Miss Buffkin.
Mr. Doutfire turned a threateningly suspicious glance on the stolid Quorn, then pursed his mouth with a pitying smile of non-acceptance as he shook his head emphatically at the young lady. "He's Peckover all right, miss," he assured her. Then glared at Quorn as though challenging him to deny it.
And Quorn, although not overburdened with intellect, had sense enough to recognize that his game just then was to lie low and admit nothing if he could help it.
"My dear Ulrica," said Lady Ormstork in her superior fashion, "how could you allow yourself to be taken in by such a transparent pretence? Does the person look in the least like Lord Quorn?"
"Or any other nobleman?" supplemented Doutfire, with menacing sarcasm. "Of course," he added, in a more uncompromisingly professional tone, "if he has been defrauding any of you ladies and gentlemen, under the false pretence that he is Lord Quorn, I'll take him now to Bunbury against your preferring a charge against him."
His enquiring look round meeting with no response, save a scornful smile from Quorn, Doutfire proceeded, eyeing the suspect malevolently, "I don't know how he comes to be here, in this house, but——"
"He stopped my horse that was running away with me," Gage explained chivalrously.
"Oh!" Mr. Doutfire's face hardened, as though that in itself were a questionable circumstance, and made the doubtful record worse. "Well, of course," he continued, not seeing his way to any active measures under the reprobative circumstances, "if you are satisfied, it is no business of mine. I've merely done my duty."
The Duke of Salolja who had endured this discussion with ill concealed impatience, now spoke again.
"Then it is one of these gentlemen who is really Lord Quorn, eh, constable?"
"Detective-Inspector, if your grace has no objection," was the withering correction. After giving the same time to take effect, he addressed himself to deal with the question. "As to which of these gentlemen is his lordship, I do not, in the absence of any stated charge or legal reason feel myself called upon to decide. Speaking unofficially and without prejudice, I should, if interrogated, incline to the opinion that this gentleman," he indicated Gage with a passing and casual wave of his pocket-book on the way to its resting-place in his coat-tail, "would answer to the description. But I have nolocus standiin the dispute, and therefore merely express an opinion, as a matter of courtesy, that if the question of identity should be gone into, the gentleman by the palm-stand may possibly be found to be Lord Quorn." After which impressive and useful dictum he bid the party "Good evening," and took a somewhat abrupt departure, fearful, perhaps, of being led into giving an opinion which might at some future time be inconveniently used against him.
As the door closed on him Lady Ormstork said, in a tone of repressed and compromising exasperation, "This is altogether a most extraordinary, unheard-of proceeding. Perhaps by to-morrow more sensible counsels will have prevailed, and we shall know who is and who is not Lord Quorn. But," she added significantly, "I do not overlook the fact that each one of you gentlemen, and consequently whichever of you bears the title, has proposed an alliance between himself and Miss Buffkin. Is that not so, Ulrica, dear?"
"Yes; they've all said as much," replied that young lady casually.
"So?" The Salolja growl reverberated through the room like the first muttering of thunder.
"And," concluded Lady Ormstork, ignoring the minatory rumble, "Miss Buffkin will marry whichever of you turns out, when this absurd mystery is solved, to be Lord Quorn."
"Will she?" observed the duke from the depths of his thickset throat.
"Undoubtedly," was the determined and conclusive reply. "Come, dear. We must be getting home."
"I shall," said the duke, suddenly galvanizing himself into his native politeness, "do myself the distinguished honour of constituting myself your graces' escort. Have I the much prized permission?"
"We will give you a lift—without prejudice," replied Lady Ormstork, with the laudable object of drawing him off from further exercise of his powers of intimidation upon whichever might be the prospective bridegroom.
The duke bowed himself into a right angle. "Your illustrious kindness transcends my poor deserts. I am overwhelmed by this distinguished mark of your favour." He straightened himself, pivoted on his heels till he faced the three men, and bowed to them, this time stopping at an angle of 45°. "Your excellencies, I shall further do myself the supreme honour of returning to pursue my enquiry as to which of you I may have the inestimable privilege of addressing without fear of contradiction as milord Quorn."
He pivoted again till he faced the door, took a phenomenally long stride to it, recovered himself, flung it open, and with a ceremonial which had quite a mediæval flavour about it, and, indeed, had been probably handed down from one generation of the amiable house of Salolja to another, conducted the ladies to the hall, leaving the three men inert with gloomy anticipations.
So paralysed were they that it was not till the crunching of the carriage wheels on the gravel roused them from their lugubrious stupor that they found tongue to discuss their situation.
"Nice let-in for my money and trouble," said Gage writhing in the Nessus shirt of that fatal peerage.
"At any rate you can't blame me for this pleasing little episode," returned Peckover dispiritedly.
"I like your swearing you are not the rightful Quorn," said Gage huffily.
"I'm not, whoever else may be," maintained his late confederate with a glance at the real man, who met it by an irresponsive glare.
"I only took it for as long as I fancied," urged Gage.
"A bargain's a bargain," observed Peckover. "You can't take on a title and give it up as though it were a furnished house."
"Can't I?" his friend rejoined vehemently. "Anyhow, I mean to. I've had too much of it. I didn't suppose it included Spanish bullies and Australian bush-rangers."
"You can do as you like about giving it up," retorted Peckover. "Only it don't come back to me I promise you. I didn't sell it on appro."
Quorn, who had been ruminating on the events just past in glowering silence, looked up quickly.
"Sell?" he demanded suspiciously. "What do you mean by sell?"
"Mind your own business," returned Gage snappishly. "That's the worst of men like you. You do a fellow a service and then there's no end to the advantage you take of it. Thrusting yourself in and talking absurd rot to the girl. If you don't keep in your place I shall have to put you there."
"That's what I'm going to trouble you to do before you're much older," retorted Quorn darkly.
Gage looked puzzled. "What was your reason," he demanded, turning to Peckover, "for sticking out that he was Lord Quorn? Were you pulling that infernal little fire-brand's short leg, or did you mean it?"
Peckover considered a moment, then replied with a nod at Quorn, "You'd better ask him."
Gage did accordingly ask him.
"Mind your own business," was the unsatisfactory answer. "If you are Lord Quorn nobody else can be. But it would be interesting to know how you came into the title."
"What the deuce does it matter," Peckover protested. "That conundrum will keep. That little devil will be back here directly. What we've got to talk about is how we are going to tackle him."
The suggestion was so profoundly to the point that a depressing silence fell on the trio. They all three jumped when Bisgood came in softly to announce that dinner had been ready half-an-hour.
"Dinner?" cried Gage. "No dinner for me. I'm off."
"Don't be silly," Peckover remonstrated. "We'll have our dinner first. A bottle of champagne is the stuff to bring us into condition. Come on, Jenkins, old man. You're dining with us to-night."
An exacting afternoon had left the trio in a state so low that sustenance was imperative, wherefore they went gloomily in to dinner. The meal was taken hurriedly, and, with regard to the wine, copiously. So by degrees they began to feel in a less abject state of panic.
"Why did we let that fool of a detective talk himself off the premises?" said Peckover regretfully. "Anyhow, we had better have the local man up here in case that nuisance of a duke tries his 'Come into the garden, Maud,' again with us."
"What good will that chaw in uniform be against that little devil?" objected Gage drearily.
"He's somebody," urged Peckover. "And he's got the law behind him."
"And the traditions of the Saloljas in front of him," rejoined Gage.
Nevertheless, to strengthen the garrison, the local constable was sent for, and the three resumed their repast with a slightly enhanced appetite. They had arrived at the sweets stage, and Peckover was wondering whether it was the last apple-tart he was destined to taste, when a clangorous peal at the bell followed by a thundering knock at the door sent the diners' hearts into their mouths.
"If—if that is the Duke of Salolja," said Gage, sick with fear, to Bisgood, "show him into the library. Don't let him—that is, his grace, come in here."
"Very good, my lord," responded Bisgood, whose imperturbability—and immunity—he would have given a fortune to possess.
None of the three men could sit quiet. Gage, after a restless turn round the table, went to the door and listened. As he did so a shade of relief came over his face. "That's not the little brute's voice," he declared hopefully.
"Isn't it? He has got so many," Peckover said dubiously. They scuttled back to their places as the men returned.
"Mr. Carnaby Leo, my lord," Bisgood announced in a tone which suggested a month's notice on his part.
"Has he gone?"
"No, my lord. He said he must see your lordship, so I showed him into the library."
"Miss Leo is not with him?" Quorn asked anxiously.
"No, sir," answered the footman, the great Bisgood declining to notice the question.
"Better turn the key on him," suggested Peckover.
This unheard-of order Bisgood took upon himself to ignore likewise. In the abnormal state of affairs the strain on his dignity was nearly at breaking point.
A footman who looked like going to put the suggestion into practice was loftily, butsotto voce, rebuked by his superior, and abandoned his intention.
"I'll go and do it, by Jove," exclaimed Quorn, jumping up and leaving the room, at which action the scandalized Bisgood made no effort to hide his disgust.
Quorn returned. "Got him safe," he said.
"Is the library safe, though?" Peckover suggested shrewdly.
"As if," remarked Gage bitterly, "we hadn't got our hands full without that great nuisance turning up to complicate matters. Let's get on with the wine while we've got any taste left in us," he added, filling his own glass and sending round the decanters.
As Bisgood and his satellites withdrew, eager to find vent for their disgust in the servants'-hall, Peckover jumped up. "An idea!" he cried, brightening. "What do you say having this beast, Leo, in, and passing him off to the duke as Lord Quorn?"
"Not a bad idea," responded Gage, thinking it out.
"Dashed good one," Peckover insisted.
"How can you pass him off," objected Quorn. "He'll say he is not Quorn."
"We've all said that," rejoined Peckover shrewdly. "All the same, one of us is that noble lord. We'll tell the duke that he is incog. for certain private reasons, and let 'em fight it out between themselves."
"If any one can tackle that little spit-fire it's Carnaby," said Gage.
"And if any one can hustle Carnaby it's the duke," added Quorn.
"Whichever way it goes we shall be gainers," observed Gage. "But how about Ulrica?"
"Oh, we'll work her into it all right," Peckover replied confidently. "Let's have the ruffian in and give him some pop."
"Hark!" cried Quorn, holding up his hand. As Gage opened the door there came across the hall from the library sounds suggestive of a domestic tornado. Their obvious message was that Mr. Carnaby Leo had discovered, and was resenting, the fact that he was more or less in durance, and was communicating his state of feelings through the medium of double-soled boots to the furniture in general and to the mahogany door in particular.
"Let's buck up, and release the brute before he wrecks the place," said Peckover; "or he'll have no kick left in him for that Spanish beauty."
He walked boldly to the door, and threw it open. "Anything wrong?" he inquired, with what was, under the circumstances, an irritating blandness.
"Anything wrong?" roared Mr. Leo, lashing out backwards and kicking a chair, quite futilely, to a remote corner of the room. "No. But there's going to be. Lock me up, will you, you pair of skunks?" For Quorn had withdrawn to a somewhat obscure position. "I'll teach you——!"
"The lock's out of order," Peckover explained with admirable plausibility. "Slips forward when the door's banged. See? We were just coming to ask you to join us over a bottle of champagne."
The proposal had an immediately mollifying effect on the rampageous visitor. "Lead the way, then," he responded thirstily. "I've got a word or two to say to you from my sister Lalage, and I can talk better when the hinges of my voice-box are oiled."
They returned to the dining-room, and Mr. Leo began to pay an unremitting attention to the lubricant which, according to his statement, should have conduced to unusual eloquence. Anyhow, he spoke, when at last he found time, if not rhetorically, at least to the point.
"What I've come to say to you scallywags," he began politely, in a tone which made his hearers look round to be sure the doors were fast shut, "is that we, me and my sister, splendid girl, have just about had enough of this shilly-shally nonsense. We want Lord Quorn, dead or alive, and, what's more, we mean to have him."
He banged his great fist down on the table and glanced at the three men. Gage and Peckover looked politely tolerant, while Quorn regarded his bugbear now for the first time at close quarters, with an attention bordering on fright.
"As," proceeded the gentle Carnaby, "I have said before, and say now for the last time you'll have ears to hear it, I and my beloved sister have not come ten thousand miles to be made fools of."
Gage and Peckover made sympathetic responses, and Quorn exhibited signs of marked uneasiness.
"The man," their amiable guest resumed, "who tries to make a fool of us is a goner." He caught up a large apple from a dish. "I take the skunk in hand like this. See?" He twisted the fruit in halves which he casually threw over his shoulders. They reached the sideboard, where one accounted for a tray of liqueur-glasses, while the other took effect upon the globe and chimney of a tall lamp.
"See?" he repeated, with a certain pride in the rather extravagant object lesson. "See?" He turned suddenly upon the much-impressed Quorn and thundered the somewhat superfluous question at him.
"Ye-es, I see," he answered, jumping half out of his chair and trying to look amused.
"Then why the blazes don't you say so?" Carnaby demanded, ignoring the fact that the comment he looked for was clearly unnecessary. "Who is this silly mug?" he added, with evidence of a natural antipathy to persons who received his feats in presumably unappreciative silence.
"Jenkins," answered Quorn hastily, rattling his wits together.
"Jenkins?" echoed Carnaby in loud scorn. "He looks it. Well, now, see here, Jenkins Esquire, my beauty. Just fancy yourself for the moment, if Jenkins is equal to the strain, fancy yourself Lord Quorn. He's a skunk, so perhaps it'll come easy to you, Jenkins."
Quorn could but smile uneasily at the pleasantry.
"Now, I should say to you," proceeded his urbane neighbour, making the most of a happy stroke of innuent personification, "Look here, Quorn, my dasher, the man, lord or lout, or both, who makes love to my sister, my lovely Lalage, and engages her affections has got to marry her. See?"
The uncomfortable personator of himself signified promptly his entire comprehension.
"If you jib," continued the Antipodean Chesterfield, "if you kick, if you try to slip out,—well—you've got to settle with the strongest man for his weight in the continent of Australia; a man, mark you, whose trade is fighting, against odds for preference, and who means business. See?"
The fascinated Quorn signed his complete grasp of the speaker's meaning.
"A man, I repeat," Carnaby went on, after seeking fresh ideas in a further libation, "who sticks at nothing where his honour and the honour of his family are concerned. Law? What's the law to me? Nothing. They know that out there. The law where I came from gives me a wide berth. It knows me. When a slink calls himself a nobleman, he's got to act as a nobleman, or I'll make him act as a swab and scrub the place down with him. See?"
He glared round at his three auditors who were listening to his edifying account of himself and his proposals with rapt attention.
"I've not seen the man I'm after, unless I see him before me now," Mr. Leo proceeded, waxing truculent. "But I presume he has a nose." This supposition remaining unchallenged, he took up a banana, and proceeded, "There it is." He wrenched off the end of the fruit and tossed it in the air whence it came down plump into Quorn's forgotten glass of wine. Ignoring the episode, the pretty fellow continued, "He has, or as a nobleman, should have, two eyes."
No one had a word to say against the computation.
"Here goes," said Carnaby, accompanying the words by a graphic illustration (using the remaining portion of the banana for the purpose) of the latest and most approved method of removing the human eye without having recourse to a surgical operation. Then, the experiment having been brought to an eminently impressive conclusion, the performer playfully took aim with the residue at a portrait of Everard, ninth Baron Quorn, and was successful in hitting that nobleman in the middle of his somewhat vacuous face, and rendering the likeness, if any, for the time unrecognizable.
Emboldened by the effect produced not only on the face of the family portrait but on those of his living hearers, Mr. Leo became even more ruthlessly virulent.
"Lord Quorn!" he cried in thick accents of withering scorn, "If Lord Quorn or any other man, noble or otherwise, plays fast and loose with my glorious sister, I'll just take him and twist his head off his shoulders. Won't I?"
He glared round as though some one had had the temerity to contradict him, which, however, was not the case. His question meeting with no material response, he next, in pursuance of his pomological method of illustration, snatched up a pineapple. "Twist his head off his shoulders," he repeated somewhat unnecessarily, "like this." With a frantic effort he tugged and twisted the cactus-like plume till it came away from the fruit.
"That's the style," he roared exultingly, "I'll treat any man who gets in my light or annoys my sister. See? I'll scatter his carcass to the four winds of heaven. See?"
Suiting the action more or less to the words he flung the fragments viciously into various corners of the room, where they did more or less damage, coming in their flight unpleasantly near his interested audience. Then turning round with a ferocious action, he heaved the body of the pine in another direction. This happened to be towards the door, which had just opened to admit an addition to the cheerful party. Next instant a cry of rage made it apparent that the heavy fruit had struck in the middle of his waistcoat no less a personage than his Grace the Duke of Salolja.
The hit was greeted by an offensive laugh of exultation by the thrower, with a gasp of subdued rage by the receiver of the spinous missile, and by the rest of the company with various indications of apprehensive curiosity.
"Now," murmured Peckover through his teeth, "we're going to see something."
An Englishman, under the same circumstances, would probably have picked up the weighty fruit and returned the shot. Not so the little Castilian, whose dignity was in no direct ratio to his inches. Quickly recovering from the discomposing impact, and forcing his sinister features as far into a smile as his mental attitude would allow, he bowed ceremoniously, although the full effect of the salutation was somewhat marred by the fact that, following close on the shot, it had rather the appearance of a doubling-up caused by physical derangement. However, he presently straightened himself and regarded the party with comparative, if delusive, serenity.
"Your excellencies are pleased to be merry to-night," he observed, in a tone which seemed to promise a speedy end to the merriment.
The duke now addressed himself to Mr. Leo. "Your grace is an admirable shot," he observed pleasantly. "If, that is, my poor person was chosen as the mark for your grace's aim." Then suddenly changing his manner from the courteous to the terrific, till he became five feet three of incarnate bristling, scintillating ferocity, he added, "I too, as I shall hope soon to convince your grace, am a tolerable shot, although not with articles of dessert."
The pug-dogged look of aggressive impudence faded from Carnaby's face, giving way to an expression of foolish discomfiture. Nevertheless he replied, with a not too convincing nod of assurance. "All right, my prime bantam, I'll show you something."
But for the moment all he showed his challenger was his back as he turned and walked to the other end of the table, where he grabbed up a fistful of cigars.
"Who," asked the duke, suddenly polite again, "may I inquire, is this distinguished gentleman?"
For reasons best known to himself the distinguished gentleman seemed inclined to let the question of his identity remain in suspense rather than hold further communication with the questioner. Apparently he was too deeply engrossed in lighting one of his raided cigars to notice the query.
But here the ever-alert Peckover saw and seized his opportunity. With a pantomime of mystery he called the duke aside.
"That's him; Lord Quorn. The real man and no mistake," he said rapidly under his breath, "Calls himself Leo, for private reasons, you understand. Threatens to kill us if we give him away."
"Oho! So?" The duke turned an ominously interested eye on the latest idea of the interloping nobleman, his mind, meanwhile, rapidly running over the probabilities of the case. Mr. Leo, having recovered from his late upset by the aid of a bumper of old port wine, was now lounging against the mantel-piece with that easy air of proprietorship which stature and muscle coupled with low brain power are apt to give. He might, indeed, have fitted in very well just then with a foreigner's idea of a bucolic English milord, and as such his appearance commended him to the ferocious Spaniard's purpose. The Duke glanced searchingly at his informant, however, as though determined to make certain before turning his polite attentions to the new candidate for a thrill.
"Why did your excellencies one after another call yourselves milord Quorn?" he demanded pertinently.
"We had to. He made us," was the ready answer. "Says he'll twist the neck of any man who calls him Lord Quorn."
The duke received the information with a grim elevation of his thick eyebrows. "So? We shall see. But Miss Buffkin?" he asked sharply. "There is nothing between them?"
Peckover made a grimace which might be understood to signify amusement at the suggestion. "Isn't there?" he replied, "when she is brought up here every day to see him. That's why he's keeping himself dark," he added slyly. "There's another lady in the question; see? And he's all for Buffkin."
A roar came from the fireplace. "What are you mumping about there, you little rats? Speak up, and let's hear all about it before I shake it out of you. I've got my say to finish when you've done croaking."
The muttered conference therefore ceased. Peckover resumed his seat, and the duke turned and regarded Carnaby with an attention which was doubtless somewhat irritating to that sensitive gentleman.
"What are you staring at, smallbones?" he demanded fiercely as though lashing himself into a fury to counteract the effect of the Salolja eye. "When fools stare at me I scoop their eyes out to teach 'em better manners."
The duke accepted the interesting statement with a bow. "Yes?" he responded appreciatively.
"Yes, I do," maintained Mr. Leo savagely. "I'm a man, as I've been telling these scallywags, who stands no nonsense."
Again the duke bowed. "I applaud your grace," he said.
A horrible suspicion that he was being laughed at seemed to take hold of the doughty Mr. Leo. "You applaud my grace, do you?" he cried, forcing his voice into a sneering squeak. "Who asked for your halfpenny opinion? You keep your sauce to stew that over-grown nose in when I've pulled it off."
For an instant, at the dire insult, there was a flash of murder in the duke's eyes. Then, with an air of storing up what he had received for cumulative repayment he inquired softly, with his eternal bow, "I have the distinguished honour of addressing milord Quorn?"
"You're an undersized liar," was the somewhat pointed reply.
"I think not," rejoined the duke confidently, "although it will be my duty to remember that your grace has called me one. Lord Quorn——"
"My name's Leo!" came with a roar.
"I believe not," insisted the duke.
"Lord Quorn! I'd like to catch him!" cried Carnaby.
The duke smiled indulgently, yet with a homicidal preoccupation. "I believe," he said coolly, "I have had the good fortune to catch him."
"Where is the skunk?" demanded Mr. Leo, with a noticeable falling off in the volume of his tone. It was clear that his opponent's steadfastness was beginning to tell.
"May I ask," observed the duke, "as a favour, that your grace will not make so much noise, but will accord your most humble servant the supreme privilege of saying a few words to you?" His voice had begun to come out in bursts, in the fashion which had created such a disagreeable effect on Gage and Peckover at the first interview.
Mr. Leo, inclined to wilt, made yet a gallant effort to pull himself together. "If you want to jaw," he replied with scarcely equal courtesy, "go into the next room and jaw your jaw off. You won't spoil your beauty, for plain reasons. I'm getting sick of you. You spoil the flavour of this cigar."
"I intend to," was the hardly expected retort. "Although it is a pity, as it is possibly the last your grace will ever smoke."
The dark eyes were now fixed on his grace with all their scorching ferocity. Mr. Leo looked as though the cigar or something else had indeed disagreed with him. The three spectators of the duel wanted only the sense of complete personal immunity to enjoy it hugely.
"I have not the honour of knowing," proceeded the little Spaniard, holding the big bully in his best rattlesnake fashion, "whether your grace is aware that I am the Duke of Salolja, and a Grandee of Spain, the present and, alas, unworthy representative of the noble house of Salolja, a family which has preserved its traditions and its honour intact from time immemorial."
The effect of the announcement on Mr. Carnaby Leo was not quite apparent, except that he seemed in two minds whether to crunch up his diminutive opponent or to give way to abject terror. "What's all that to me?" he returned, in a voice that seemed to be getting rather out of control.
The duke shrugged. "It is customary," he explained, "in my country, that in affairs of honour strict punctilio should be maintained. Further, I wish to do myself the honour of informing your grace that my family, the Saloljas, have never permitted an injury or an insult to pass unavenged."
"Same with me," responded Mr. Leo, addressing himself, however, possibly for convenience' sake, to the men at the table.
"It is," pursued the duke, intensifying his steady glare, "a matter of felicitation that our sentiments agree upon the point. But enough. I come, as you British say, to business. I have the honour to be the aggrieved party. Your grace is probably aware that I purpose to ally myself matrimonially with Miss Ulrica Buffkin?"
The apparent irrelevance of the observation prompted Mr. Leo to pluck up a little courage. "No," he answered with a touch of his old manner, "I don't know, and I don't care."
"So?" The little man steadied his rage by tugging at his portentous moustache. "Your grace refuses then to recognize my pretensions?" he demanded menacingly.
Mr. Leo gave a stupid laugh. "You don't," he retorted with clumsy humour, "expect me to take off my hat to them, do you?"
The duke accepted the defiance with a bow. "Perhaps not," he returned viciously. "So we will leave that affair for the present. It may be we shall never arrive so far together. There are, happily, other matters which have the precedence."
"What are you mumbling about?" Mr. Leo inquired with characteristic politeness.
"As I entered the room," continued the duke, ignoring the interruption, "I was struck on the—breast by a pine-apple thrown by your grace. Is it not so?"
Mr. Leo forced a laugh. "Didn't see you coming," he explained weakly.
The duke drew back a pace with every indication of astonishment. "Is it possible then," he demanded severely, "that your grace asks me to believe that you scatter fruit about your room for amusement?"
"Sometimes," Carnaby replied uncomfortably.
His tormentor waved aside the answer as frivolous.
"Subsequently to that blow which only blood can efface," he resumed impressively, laying his hand on the spot where the shot took effect, "your grace was pleased to distinguish my poor self by certain opprobrious remarks and designations, in the hearing of these honourable gentlemen. Your grace permitted yourself to allude disrespectfully to my stature. Your grace will understand that the character and deeds of the Saloljas are not measured by inches," he added proudly.
"Glad to hear it," Mr. Leo growled rashly.
"Your grace was further led," proceeded the duke, raising his voice ominously, "to speak in unbecoming terms of my opinion and of my nose. It is a matter of regret that my judgment and my features do not meet with your grace's approval, but it is the judgment and it is the nose with which Heaven has been pleased to endow my poor self, and up to the present the noble house of Salolja has had no serious cause of complaint against Heaven in respect to its gifts."
Mr. Leo tried to give sign of amusement, but the laugh stuck somewhere, and did not reach the surface.
"Your grace," the little demon went on, "also took upon yourself to cast an aspersion on my veracity. A Salolja," he continued with pompous dignity, "does not lie. No Salolja has cause to lie. Pride is truth. Lying is for slaves and shopkeepers. Now when a man insults me it is something to pay for, when in my person he insults the most noble family of Salolja it is everything. He shall pay with the last drop of his blood."
The somewhat one-sided conversation was evidently making for a climax. The interest of the three men had become breathless. Mr. Leo, literally and metaphorically with his back to the wall, realized that his reputation was about to be put to the touch; also that he was, all things considered, in a somewhat parlous situation. His dull brain became obsessed by a lively regret that he had addressed his diminutive adversary in terms which were conspicuous by their disregard for the noble duke's personal dignity. Still something had now to be done. He must assert himself and at once. The instinct of the coward and the bully wrestled sharply within him. But the promptings of fear were not to be followed, since retreat dignified or otherwise, was out of the question The tricks of his old trade were the only resource left him, and so he was forced blindly to fall back on them.
With a prodigious effort Mr. Leo pulled himself together. "We've had enough of your lip," he declared in a loud voice. "I don't jaw, I fight. Look here." He caught up the fire-irons one after another and went through the rather too familiar business of twisting and snapping them. The duke watched the performance with folded arms and a sarcastic smile. Mr. Leo, lashing himself into as much of a fine fury as he could attain, and losing his head in the process, took a silver goblet from a niche in the overmantel and with a mighty play of muscle squeezed it out of shape, not altogether to the silent Lord Quorn's satisfaction. "That's the way I talk," he cried, with gathering confidence, as he tossed the shapeless cup on the floor. "Any man who argues with me knows what to expect. It's too late to apologize when I've snapped your legs and arms for you and dislocated your neck."
The duke intimated politely to his fuming opponent his entire agreement with the remark. "I am sorry," he went on suavely, "if I have spoken in a language which has not appealed to your grace. Perhaps I may yet be so fortunate as to be able to make myself better understood."
As he spoke he took a candle from the table, and, flicking off the shade, set it on the side-board. Then he pivoted round and stepped ten paces across the room, turned, whipped out his revolver, took instant aim and fired. The candle stood as before, but extinguished. The duke advanced and bowed with something, it must be confessed, of the air of a music-hall performer. "That," he said quietly, "is how I reply to your grace's remarks. I trust I have the good fortune to make myself understood. No?"
Quite gratuitously imagining a negative on Mr. Leo's part, which that redoubtable fighter was far from expressing, the duke made a swift movement and tore down a rapier which hung as an ornament on the wall. After making a few passes, which seemed to have Mr. Leo's person for their ultimate destination, he spitted the shade of another candle, flung it aside, and drawing back, put himself in fencing attitude, and lunging furiously, after a grand flourish, just hit the wick and extinguished it likewise. Then he favoured his impressed audience with a deprecating gesture intimating that his exhibition of skill was a matter of small account, after which, without waiting for comments or applause, he turned with startling ferocity upon Mr. Leo and in an unpleasantly resonant tone commanded him to take down the fellow weapon and defend himself.
Mr. Leo showed no sign of falling in with his desire, but made a ghastly attempt to laugh the order to scorn and then to treat it with the contempt due to such an out-of-date proposal. But as it is difficult to preserve an attitude of dignified opposition in the neighbourhood of an aggressive and business-like hornet, so the Antipodean giant found it impossible to treat the duke with the passive scorn which prudence dictated. For the little Castilian had now arrived at a stage when he considered he might fairly let himself go, and let himself go he did.
He simply danced like a blood-thirsty Rumpelstilzchen before the anxious man of muscle, making his sword cut the air as though it were a riding whip, and describing inconvenient circles and passes with it in close proximity to the more cherished portions of his unwilling opponent's anatomy.
Mr. Leo looked very unhappy, and in the deplorable condition of a man who is consumed by the knowledge that he ought to be very angry and retaliative, and yet dares not. As he continued to hang back with a suggestion in his stupid face of how much he would give to be safe atThe Pigeons, the duke's aggressiveness increased to the extent of prodding the massive frame before him with playful sword thrusts. This was more even than the abject Mr. Leo could stand.
For an instant he looked dangerous; then with a roar, of rage or pain according to the fancy of the audience, he made a snatch at a decanter with the object of hurling it at his tormentor. But before he could raise it for the fling the little rapier came down with a smart flash upon his wrist and the decanter fell shattered to the floor.
"That your grace's idea of fighting a Grandee of Spain, you abominable great hulks?" cried the duke viciously. "You want a lesson, milord, you foolish breaker of tongs. When shall you begin to snap my legs and arms and to screw my neck, you quaint elephant? You shall go down on your knees and apologize to me or I will run you through your absurd body and let the saw-dust run out. Shall I not, eh? eh? eh?" He accompanied each note of interrogation by a stinging slash of the flexible steel, and Mr. Leo began to look very weary and unwell.
But Lord Quorn's face was beaming as though a load had been taken off his mind.
For an instant Mr. Leo seemed to be gathering himself together for a bull-like rush, then the intention died away in helplessness. "It's all a mistake, I tell you," he blurted out in a quavering roar. "The pine was not intended for you."
"Indeed? So?" cried the duke incredulously, making the point of his sword whirl within two inches of the herculean thorax. "And the allusions to my nose, the Salolja nose, which is historical, and to my stature and to my veracity—they were not intended for me? Eh?"
"If you touch me again with that beastly sword I'll have the police on to you, duke or no duke," Mr. Leo declared, falling back somewhat feebly behind the shelter of the law.
It was with some consternation that he noticed that not only the duke, but the whole party seemed to derive genuine amusement from his threat.
"Ho! ho! ho!" laughed the little terrorist in his window-rattling tones. "The police! How rich! How exquisite! When a man insults a Salolja he does not call in the police, but the undertaker."
Mr. Leo's bronzed face had now that greenish tinge so much the fashion in modern sculpture.
"How are you going to send for your police?" laughed the duke, emphasizing his question by a playful prick in Mr. Leo's biceps. "Before you touch the bell or the door-handle you are a dead man."
Mr. Leo looked as though he reluctantly accepted the probability.
"Now, your grace will go down on your knees, won't you, you absurd hippopotamus, and make your humble confession and apology for having treated disrespectfully a Grandee of Spain and a Salolja, before you pay the penalty of your mistake."
There was a painful flourish of the rapier, and a gentle stab on the lobe of Mr. Leo's large right ear. With a howl he went down on his knees, with another he begged for mercy, and it was a third howl of a very different character which made the duke and the other men turn to the window, at which some one stood rattling.