VIII.Wager of BattelGilbert Maryvale!“Oh, you!” exclaimed Pendleton, and appeared completely contented at once.“Isn’t it awful?” asked Maryvale. “Isn’t it awful?”Pendleton and I stared speechless at him; in me, at least, the old surprise had given place to new astonishment twice as strong. What was the matter with this man? The only light in the long windowless corridor came from a translucent electric globe far at the foot of the stairs, but even in the vaguely illuminated passage I realized that something had happened to Maryvale.“I saw the boy coming by the drive, and I thought he might—there might be some news of Sir Brooke at last. The doctor is telling some powerful things. I’ve been in and out of there twice. I always—I thought I’d better get away . . . came to see if the boy had . . .”“One question, Mr. Maryvale,” I said quickly. “Were you in the corridor a while ago tapping the wall with something?”“Why, yes, with my friend Crofts’ cane.” He turned to our host. “But I assure you I did not harm the cane.”“The cane be hanged,” responded Crofts. “But why in thunder did you do it?”An expression vanished from Maryvale’s eyes almost before it deepened there, a softness, a look of meekness, a chastened look; I thought it a revelation of painful things kept subdued.“Something suggested to me that there might be a secret passage in one of the walls of the corridor. I was trying, high up—”Our host made a disgusted sound. “One thing you may depend upon, Gilbert, no matter what happens. In this extant portion of the castle there are no secret passages. There’s not so much as a priest’s hole or a trap-door or a double wall to a cupboard. There’s one bogie laid, anyhow. You may as well know that you made fools of us in there. Where the devil did you go afterward?”“I’m sorry if I annoyed you. I just went back into the Hall of the Moth. But Doctor Aire—I didn’t care for the hobby of Doctor Aire. So I returned again to hear if there was anything about Sir Brooke.”The servants, of course, had clustered around the door with quite natural and honourable inquisitiveness. Pendleton turned on them.“You may go—and mind, don’t talk about this all afternoon. The subject is closed.” Ah, trustful Crofts!So out of the dining-hall they filed to their aloof world of below-stairs: Ruth and Rosa Clay of lustrous person, Ardelia Lacy (giving the Welsh stableman a look in passing that was obviously a piece of her mind, though its crushing significance was hardly clear from the evidence), the maids, Jael, Em, and Harmony. Morgan and his fellow stablemen, Tenney and Wheeler, got out next, and the tall keeper gravely followed them behind the screen. Soames and Blenkinson both had hard work getting rid of old Finlay, who seemed to think that the occasion demanded more of his japes, and who finally thrust his head out from behind the screen for one last comprehensive wink at me.Pendleton turned to the boy, who had set about his somewhat unorthodox task of clearing the dessert dishes.“Did you inquire about Sir Brooke, Toby?”“Yes, sir, I did,” answered the lad, looking white over a load of china and glass ware on a tray.“No news, I dare say.”“Oh, yes, sir, as a fact there was, sir.”“Eh? Who told you?”“It was the station-master at New Aidenn, sir. He was very angry, sir, when I told him that you didn’t believe he had seen Sir Brooke. He said to tell you, sir, that he was certain-sure. Those were the words I was to tell you, sir.”“Did he take a ticket from him?”“He can’t exactly remember, sir, but he’s sure he saw him somewhere in the crowd. He must have taken his ticket, sir.”“Bosh!” exclaimed Pendleton. “Why, I have a letter from Sir—”Toby continued in his unruffled style. “And he said he remembered Sir Brooke very well from other times he was here, sir. A thinnish, middle-sized gentleman, with a bang of mouse-coloured hair over his eye, and double glasses, and his silk bow tie tilted toward his ear. He remembered him quite well, you see, sir.”“It seems,” said I, putting in my oar for the first time, “thatyouremember remarkably well, Toby.”The boy gazed at me as if I were a sport of nature, a phenomenon of dubiety amazing. “Why, he made me repeat what he said until I had it by heart, sir. He was very angry, Mr. Pendleton.”Pendleton was in a brown study, until I plucked his sleeve and whispered. “Thinking won’t help. Let’s get out of here, or the boy will have something to regale the servants with.”But Toby now proffered a request. “Please, sir, will it be all right if I take a picture of the servants to-night? Miss Lebetwood gave me her old flash-light camera when she came down this time, sir, and I want to use it.”(Photography—not topography!)“Why, hm, yes, I suppose so. Are the servants for it?”“Some are afraid of the flash, sir, but I’ll show ’em how it works.”“Go ahead, then, after dinner. Don’t blow up the place.”“Thank you, sir. I won’t, sir. Miss Lebetwood will help me, sir.”Maryvale was still standing in the corridor when we came out.Crofts relieved his pent-up bitterness. “What a man! He sends me a letter, very explanatory, containing three words: ‘Wait for me.’ He arrives at New Aidenn station last evening, but doesn’t deign to make use of the car I sent to meet the train; he even avoids speaking to the chauffeur, to mention that he intends to walk. He then strolls off somewhere, apparently to lie low until it pleases him to disclose himself. He’ll be lucky if he finds the house occupied when he makes his appearance.”“But he may have got lost, of course.”“I had men out searching. Every foot of the Vale was beaten last night.”“Still, your men may have missed him.”“Well, then,” Crofts declared with fine sarcasm, “suppose the gentleman did get lost and have to sleep in the nasty, damp Vale and get sniffles. Where’s he been all to-day? Climbing about up there where you were yesterday?”“Ah, now you are asking reasonably. I can’t imagine. What is it, Mr. Maryvale?”For Maryvale had suddenly grasped my arm. Now he released it, and ignored my question.I could not gauge the look on the face of the “man of business”; it appeared to have volcanic possibilities, yet subterranean still. To regain the trivial and commonplace, I sounded Crofts on the matter that had irritated me ever since I had seen the unstartling words in the letter of dispute last night.“By the way, Crofts, I may have to be sending out a message or two if I remain here long—”“Of course you’ll remain—”“Where’s the mail for posting?”“Why, just hand whatever you have to one of the servants. If you need stationery—”“But isn’t there a particular place—”“Oh, yes, if it’s more convenient—there’s a rack for outgoing mail under the staircase. It hangs above the end of the settle.”“Thank you.”Maryvale was busy fingering the lower part of the wide gilt frame of one of the portraits, a full length representation of a man in cuirass and metal thigh-plates, holding his helmet in one hand, leaning with the other arm upon a convenient pedestal; his narrow face looked like that of a newly-elected thane of Hell.“That’sSir Pharamond Kay,” Pendleton remarked, “first builder of the castle this House is remnant of.”“Yes . . . yes,” Maryvale murmured to himself, concluding his investigation of the frame. “The gilding is valuable at any rate.”Pendleton and I reciprocated glances of bewilderment, but Maryvale seemed disinclined to explain himself further. He was even unwilling to precede us back into the Hall of the Moth, which he had deserted a little while before, and wherein the entire rest of the company were still listening to Doctor Aire. Alberta Pendleton received us with her charming smile, and we took places beside her at the foot of the room, and that other, smaller, bewitched or accursed portrait of Sir Pharamond glared down on me from the wall.The rain having ceased long before, and the clouds being a little broken, the sun was, so to speak, red in the face from trying to dry the lawn. The french windows were opened, through the northern one we caught glimpses of the glassman from New Aidenn making whole the damaged conservatory window. But there was no tendency toward seeking the out-of-doors. Most of the party were quite sated with the open-air sports afforded in Aidenn Vale.Doctor Aire, moreover, would have demanded attention under any circumstances. Apart from the fascination of his subject, there was authority in the clipped, methodical manner of his speech. Just now he was telling of the last case of Appeal of Murder, that relic of early ages whereby one acquitted of a death-crime could be compelled to defend himself anew by the might of his body. As late as 1819, it appeared, one Thornton, when acquitted, and when the dead girl’s brother had made Appeal of Murder against him, had thrown down in challenge to “wager of battel”—this we were in time to hear—a gauntlet as strange as the occasion, without either fingers or thumbs, made of white tanned skin, ornamented with sewn tracery and silk fringes, crossed by a narrow band of red leather with leather tags and thongs for fastening.Cosgrove was listening. But of a sudden it seemed to me that his attention was curiously directed beyond Doctor Aire, beyond the vicissitudes of the accused and acquitted Thornton, who had needed to go on trial again with only the prowess of his body to defend himself.“Listening, surely,” I told myself, and asked myself, “For what?” . . .Doctor Aire’s recital went on, encyclopedically.“Lord Ellenborough had to admit that the procedure was competent, although there had not been a whisper of the Appeal throughout the kingdom for forty years. But the curious crowd was disappointed when the appellant withdrew; so there was no gladiatorial exhibition for the chief justice to preside over. It is extremely unlikely that Mary Ashford’s brother had ever intended to carry his Appeal into force, he being a slighter man of body than the appellee—and for that reason Thornton had probably been emboldened to make the brave show he did with his extraordinary gauntlet of white tanned leather.”In the half-darkness underneath the musicians’ gallery were a pair of listeners who had been within neither the range of my vision nor the scope of my thought. Now one of them, the young American, Bob Cullen, became in an instant the cynosure of the company.For the youth, scarcely more than a lad, rose from his seat beside Lib Dale, and the exclamation that came from his lips twisted every neck in the Hall.“Sothatwas it!” The expression of ire on those young, unformed features was almost comical.Despite a hurried, “Bob, don’t be sil,” from Lib, the youth advanced a couple of steps toward Cosgrove, leaving no doubt against whom his wrath was directed. He raised his shaking arm and pointed at the Irishman, he opened his mouth and was attempting articulate words, but only one word issued, a smothered one:“You—you—”Cosgrove’s face was a thing to watch, while the parade of emotions passed across it. Mere surprise vanished with the first turn of his head along with the rest of the heads. His eyes widened, but for a few seconds were blank with absolute stupefaction, and when enlightenment finally appeared to come within him, the resentment expressed in his lowering brows and glowing eyes seemed to be mingled with a sense of shame, or else there was no meaning in the sidewise shift of those eyes and in those irresolute lips. He swallowed, and his head made a small, sharp jerk in the act. A muscle twitched in his cheek. Bob Cullen was still saying, “You—you—” and Lib Dale was whispering dire things to him.That other, admirable, American tried to deal with the frenzied youth. Paula Lebetwood said, “Bob, you’re making a child of yourself. Remember where you are.”“What’s the trouble?” asked Ludlow in a matter-of-fact tone.“Ask him—ask him, that’s all!” cried Bob Cullen bitterly, and then, as is the wont of youths who believe themselves wronged, commenced himself to explain. “He thought—you thought, Mr. Cosgrove”—(“Mr.” Cosgrove; much revealed by that “Mr.”)—“you thought that because you were bigger and stronger than I was, that you could get away with talking the way you did. Well, you needn’t think that it was because I was afraid of you—”I noticed that Lib Dale was actually twisting her young compatriot’s arm in an endeavour to gain his attention, but he held on through pain, white and red by turns.“I’m ready any time you are, Mr. Cosgrove, and don’t you forget it. I’ll show you, Mr. Cosgrove. I’ll fight you a duel or a wager of battle or anything—”“My dear boy,” slipped in Doctor Aire, who took the interruption of his narrative in very good humour, “the wager of battle is null and void. That was the whole upshot of my story, if you had only the patience—”“I don’t care if it’s null and void or not. Mr. Cosgrove, if you’re a man—”Paula Lebetwood had taken hold of the half-hysterical youth’s other arm; she placed a firm hand across his mouth, effectually stifling what further wild challenge he might have uttered on the spot. Lib sank down flushed and pouting, her blue eyes flinging defiance to all of us. Cosgrove, who had not uttered a word, had a face like a man’s in an apoplexy, and his head was lower between his shoulders than it was accustomed to be.The youngster Bob Cullen was still standing there like a bulldog in the centre of the ring, anger adding a degree of dignity to his stature. Ten, twenty, seconds may have gone by, and still he confronted the Irishman, whose only recognition of his challenge had been a turn of his head and that slow dark flame in his face.“Well?” demanded Bob Cullen.Still the Irishman preserved a silence of stone.“Oh, Bob, you sorehead,” cried Lib Dale, grinding her heel into the carpet. “Of all the id—”“But Bob, dear,” pleaded Miss Lebetwood, “what Sean said to Lib was long, long ago in the spring, and she’s forgotten all about it, and so should you, you silly kid.”The voice of Cosgrove came thundering, overwhelming. “Woman,” he said, and a quite perceptible thrill passed over us, for he spoke to his intended wife, and “woman” as he said it then sounded the most brutal word he could use—“woman, no need for you to defend me. The code of this young upstart is not my code, by the heavens—nor is yours my code. Stand aside.”“Sean!”“Stand aside—did you hear?”“But Sean—”“While the light is in me, I shall offer it to you, woman, and to all others I find in need of grace—even if it gall your young upstart there.”Paula Lebetwood had tottered a step backward, with an expression of the utmost pain and loss upon her face. Suddenly her face was hidden in her hands, and her shoulders heaved with swift gusts of feeling. Then she lifted her face tearless and hot-eyed and defiant beneath golden hair turning to riot.“Sean, how unmanly, how cowardly! Oh, if you knew how I despise you now. Oh, I need air—air!”She turned from us abruptly, then paused. Her bosom moved in a long, slow breathing, and she turned her head to look at her lover, whose gaze did not meet hers. A veil of anger seemed to fall from her features, and the fire softened in her eyes. But this was no melting mood. Instead, a serene aloofness reigned in her face, and she seemed like one who studied Cosgrove from some region above, studied him with sympathy and compassion. For a space of time—perhaps a minute—there was this silence. Then, as if she had shown enough that she was not embittered by passion, she departed swiftly.Through the passage of the french windows she strode, out to the lawn, and across, to be lost to sight in shrubs alongside the gate-house.So, splitting into new faction and fresh enmity at every hour, the Bidding Feast at last witnessed the discord of the lovers themselves.Cosgrove’s rebuke of his betrothed had stunned us, and her answering rebuke had left us wild and speechless. None stirred to follow Miss Lebetwood. In me, at least, the strife of feeling was comparable to the mad stress of the night before, when the first message of Parson Lolly had been found. I knew a delirium of bewilderment, a very horror, in the instants following those outbursts.Cosgrove’s face, now so blotted with blood, took fantastic dimensions, seemed twice its size. The room appeared an enormous room, and the people pigmy people. Sir Pharamond’s portrait leered and sneered. Every proportion was indecently distorted, and time, like space, was bereft of its comfortable conventions. The seconds seemed to stagger past.Then Pendleton, no longer held by Alberta, rose so hastily that his chair banged backward against the stair-post of the little gallery. “Yes, by gad! Let’s all get some air. This room is stuffy as blazes. That’s what puts us all at sixes and sevens.”“I really think,” observed Eve Bartholomew, “that it’s the absence of Sir Brooke that gets so on our nerves.”“Let’s declare a truce—no, let’s make peace,” smiled Alberta Pendleton. “Sean, you and Bob haven’t any ill-will, have you?”Since his betrothed’s condemnation of him, no petty enmity could very well find hold in Cosgrove’s soul. His defeat told in his dejected head and drooped lids. He didn’t answer Alberta.But Bob Cullen, whose excitement had flagged, was suddenly overwhelmed by his former audacity. “I—I suppose you folks must think—you must think—”“That’s all right, Bob,” soothed Alberta; “you just lost your temper for a minute, that was all. Anybody is likely to do that.”“He let Mr. Cosgrove get his goat,” put in Lib Dale in asotto voce obbligato; she was still much displeased with her compatriot.“I’m—I’m sorry—I apologize,” said Bob.“As for me,” said Cosgrove suddenly, “I do more than apologize; I make anew.”“Why, Sean, how—what can you mean?” gasped Alberta, for the Irishman now stood on his feet looking around the Hall without explaining his remark.“Yes, it will do,” muttered Cosgrove. “God can come from there”; and he gestured toward the musicians’ gallery.“G-g-god?” stammered Pendleton.“God the Creator,” responded Sean Cosgrove, and he appended a few words as inconsequential as any Crofts himself could have used: “I’ve seen the book in your library.”“But what do you mean, man?” cried Pendleton. “I never heard—”“To-night,” said Cosgrove, “in this Hall we shall rehearse the play of ‘Noah’s Flood.’ ”“ ‘Noah’s Flood!’ ” came a gasp from most of us.“Animal crackers,” mumbled Bob Cullen obscurely.“What’s ‘Noah’s Flood?’ ” asked Pendleton. “I’ve never seen any book of that name—”“It is inside a book of another name,” answered Cosgrove; “one you have never opened, I dare say. Here, at five o’clock, we shall have tea; is it not so? Then I shall unfold—”“It’s an old mystery-play,” said Alberta. “Crofts, I’m surprised.”“But won’t there be, er, costumes, and so forth?”“For me, at least, no costume,” declared Cosgrove. “Man, made in the image of God, shall need no gaudery. I should scorn to deck and disguise myself to play my God.”“You don’t mean that you’re to appear in the, er, in the—”“In the altogether?” finished Eve Bartholomew in a thin quasi-hysterical tone. “Oh, Mr. Cosgrove—”“No doubt,” Doctor Aire put in sardonically, “Sean is thinking of the mediaeval way of playing Adam and Eve with a screen up to their necks.”“Leave it to me,” said Cosgrove.“But won’t all this furniture have to be shifted?” inquired Pendleton nervously.“Leave it to me.”“Alone—how will you do it?”“With my God-given arms.”“But shouldn’t the servants—”“I will do everything that must be done. But first,” and here I thought Cosgrove became a little wistful, “let us go outside and breathe the God-given air. Leave all to me; assemble here at five o’clock.”He marched out, his face, with a look of grim regret and determination, turned toward the place in the shrubbery where Paula Lebetwood had disappeared. The last we saw of him, he had followed her out of sight.The company began to disband.
Gilbert Maryvale!
“Oh, you!” exclaimed Pendleton, and appeared completely contented at once.
“Isn’t it awful?” asked Maryvale. “Isn’t it awful?”
Pendleton and I stared speechless at him; in me, at least, the old surprise had given place to new astonishment twice as strong. What was the matter with this man? The only light in the long windowless corridor came from a translucent electric globe far at the foot of the stairs, but even in the vaguely illuminated passage I realized that something had happened to Maryvale.
“I saw the boy coming by the drive, and I thought he might—there might be some news of Sir Brooke at last. The doctor is telling some powerful things. I’ve been in and out of there twice. I always—I thought I’d better get away . . . came to see if the boy had . . .”
“One question, Mr. Maryvale,” I said quickly. “Were you in the corridor a while ago tapping the wall with something?”
“Why, yes, with my friend Crofts’ cane.” He turned to our host. “But I assure you I did not harm the cane.”
“The cane be hanged,” responded Crofts. “But why in thunder did you do it?”
An expression vanished from Maryvale’s eyes almost before it deepened there, a softness, a look of meekness, a chastened look; I thought it a revelation of painful things kept subdued.
“Something suggested to me that there might be a secret passage in one of the walls of the corridor. I was trying, high up—”
Our host made a disgusted sound. “One thing you may depend upon, Gilbert, no matter what happens. In this extant portion of the castle there are no secret passages. There’s not so much as a priest’s hole or a trap-door or a double wall to a cupboard. There’s one bogie laid, anyhow. You may as well know that you made fools of us in there. Where the devil did you go afterward?”
“I’m sorry if I annoyed you. I just went back into the Hall of the Moth. But Doctor Aire—I didn’t care for the hobby of Doctor Aire. So I returned again to hear if there was anything about Sir Brooke.”
The servants, of course, had clustered around the door with quite natural and honourable inquisitiveness. Pendleton turned on them.
“You may go—and mind, don’t talk about this all afternoon. The subject is closed.” Ah, trustful Crofts!
So out of the dining-hall they filed to their aloof world of below-stairs: Ruth and Rosa Clay of lustrous person, Ardelia Lacy (giving the Welsh stableman a look in passing that was obviously a piece of her mind, though its crushing significance was hardly clear from the evidence), the maids, Jael, Em, and Harmony. Morgan and his fellow stablemen, Tenney and Wheeler, got out next, and the tall keeper gravely followed them behind the screen. Soames and Blenkinson both had hard work getting rid of old Finlay, who seemed to think that the occasion demanded more of his japes, and who finally thrust his head out from behind the screen for one last comprehensive wink at me.
Pendleton turned to the boy, who had set about his somewhat unorthodox task of clearing the dessert dishes.
“Did you inquire about Sir Brooke, Toby?”
“Yes, sir, I did,” answered the lad, looking white over a load of china and glass ware on a tray.
“No news, I dare say.”
“Oh, yes, sir, as a fact there was, sir.”
“Eh? Who told you?”
“It was the station-master at New Aidenn, sir. He was very angry, sir, when I told him that you didn’t believe he had seen Sir Brooke. He said to tell you, sir, that he was certain-sure. Those were the words I was to tell you, sir.”
“Did he take a ticket from him?”
“He can’t exactly remember, sir, but he’s sure he saw him somewhere in the crowd. He must have taken his ticket, sir.”
“Bosh!” exclaimed Pendleton. “Why, I have a letter from Sir—”
Toby continued in his unruffled style. “And he said he remembered Sir Brooke very well from other times he was here, sir. A thinnish, middle-sized gentleman, with a bang of mouse-coloured hair over his eye, and double glasses, and his silk bow tie tilted toward his ear. He remembered him quite well, you see, sir.”
“It seems,” said I, putting in my oar for the first time, “thatyouremember remarkably well, Toby.”
The boy gazed at me as if I were a sport of nature, a phenomenon of dubiety amazing. “Why, he made me repeat what he said until I had it by heart, sir. He was very angry, Mr. Pendleton.”
Pendleton was in a brown study, until I plucked his sleeve and whispered. “Thinking won’t help. Let’s get out of here, or the boy will have something to regale the servants with.”
But Toby now proffered a request. “Please, sir, will it be all right if I take a picture of the servants to-night? Miss Lebetwood gave me her old flash-light camera when she came down this time, sir, and I want to use it.”
(Photography—not topography!)
“Why, hm, yes, I suppose so. Are the servants for it?”
“Some are afraid of the flash, sir, but I’ll show ’em how it works.”
“Go ahead, then, after dinner. Don’t blow up the place.”
“Thank you, sir. I won’t, sir. Miss Lebetwood will help me, sir.”
Maryvale was still standing in the corridor when we came out.
Crofts relieved his pent-up bitterness. “What a man! He sends me a letter, very explanatory, containing three words: ‘Wait for me.’ He arrives at New Aidenn station last evening, but doesn’t deign to make use of the car I sent to meet the train; he even avoids speaking to the chauffeur, to mention that he intends to walk. He then strolls off somewhere, apparently to lie low until it pleases him to disclose himself. He’ll be lucky if he finds the house occupied when he makes his appearance.”
“But he may have got lost, of course.”
“I had men out searching. Every foot of the Vale was beaten last night.”
“Still, your men may have missed him.”
“Well, then,” Crofts declared with fine sarcasm, “suppose the gentleman did get lost and have to sleep in the nasty, damp Vale and get sniffles. Where’s he been all to-day? Climbing about up there where you were yesterday?”
“Ah, now you are asking reasonably. I can’t imagine. What is it, Mr. Maryvale?”
For Maryvale had suddenly grasped my arm. Now he released it, and ignored my question.
I could not gauge the look on the face of the “man of business”; it appeared to have volcanic possibilities, yet subterranean still. To regain the trivial and commonplace, I sounded Crofts on the matter that had irritated me ever since I had seen the unstartling words in the letter of dispute last night.
“By the way, Crofts, I may have to be sending out a message or two if I remain here long—”
“Of course you’ll remain—”
“Where’s the mail for posting?”
“Why, just hand whatever you have to one of the servants. If you need stationery—”
“But isn’t there a particular place—”
“Oh, yes, if it’s more convenient—there’s a rack for outgoing mail under the staircase. It hangs above the end of the settle.”
“Thank you.”
Maryvale was busy fingering the lower part of the wide gilt frame of one of the portraits, a full length representation of a man in cuirass and metal thigh-plates, holding his helmet in one hand, leaning with the other arm upon a convenient pedestal; his narrow face looked like that of a newly-elected thane of Hell.
“That’sSir Pharamond Kay,” Pendleton remarked, “first builder of the castle this House is remnant of.”
“Yes . . . yes,” Maryvale murmured to himself, concluding his investigation of the frame. “The gilding is valuable at any rate.”
Pendleton and I reciprocated glances of bewilderment, but Maryvale seemed disinclined to explain himself further. He was even unwilling to precede us back into the Hall of the Moth, which he had deserted a little while before, and wherein the entire rest of the company were still listening to Doctor Aire. Alberta Pendleton received us with her charming smile, and we took places beside her at the foot of the room, and that other, smaller, bewitched or accursed portrait of Sir Pharamond glared down on me from the wall.
The rain having ceased long before, and the clouds being a little broken, the sun was, so to speak, red in the face from trying to dry the lawn. The french windows were opened, through the northern one we caught glimpses of the glassman from New Aidenn making whole the damaged conservatory window. But there was no tendency toward seeking the out-of-doors. Most of the party were quite sated with the open-air sports afforded in Aidenn Vale.
Doctor Aire, moreover, would have demanded attention under any circumstances. Apart from the fascination of his subject, there was authority in the clipped, methodical manner of his speech. Just now he was telling of the last case of Appeal of Murder, that relic of early ages whereby one acquitted of a death-crime could be compelled to defend himself anew by the might of his body. As late as 1819, it appeared, one Thornton, when acquitted, and when the dead girl’s brother had made Appeal of Murder against him, had thrown down in challenge to “wager of battel”—this we were in time to hear—a gauntlet as strange as the occasion, without either fingers or thumbs, made of white tanned skin, ornamented with sewn tracery and silk fringes, crossed by a narrow band of red leather with leather tags and thongs for fastening.
Cosgrove was listening. But of a sudden it seemed to me that his attention was curiously directed beyond Doctor Aire, beyond the vicissitudes of the accused and acquitted Thornton, who had needed to go on trial again with only the prowess of his body to defend himself.
“Listening, surely,” I told myself, and asked myself, “For what?” . . .
Doctor Aire’s recital went on, encyclopedically.
“Lord Ellenborough had to admit that the procedure was competent, although there had not been a whisper of the Appeal throughout the kingdom for forty years. But the curious crowd was disappointed when the appellant withdrew; so there was no gladiatorial exhibition for the chief justice to preside over. It is extremely unlikely that Mary Ashford’s brother had ever intended to carry his Appeal into force, he being a slighter man of body than the appellee—and for that reason Thornton had probably been emboldened to make the brave show he did with his extraordinary gauntlet of white tanned leather.”
In the half-darkness underneath the musicians’ gallery were a pair of listeners who had been within neither the range of my vision nor the scope of my thought. Now one of them, the young American, Bob Cullen, became in an instant the cynosure of the company.
For the youth, scarcely more than a lad, rose from his seat beside Lib Dale, and the exclamation that came from his lips twisted every neck in the Hall.
“Sothatwas it!” The expression of ire on those young, unformed features was almost comical.
Despite a hurried, “Bob, don’t be sil,” from Lib, the youth advanced a couple of steps toward Cosgrove, leaving no doubt against whom his wrath was directed. He raised his shaking arm and pointed at the Irishman, he opened his mouth and was attempting articulate words, but only one word issued, a smothered one:
“You—you—”
Cosgrove’s face was a thing to watch, while the parade of emotions passed across it. Mere surprise vanished with the first turn of his head along with the rest of the heads. His eyes widened, but for a few seconds were blank with absolute stupefaction, and when enlightenment finally appeared to come within him, the resentment expressed in his lowering brows and glowing eyes seemed to be mingled with a sense of shame, or else there was no meaning in the sidewise shift of those eyes and in those irresolute lips. He swallowed, and his head made a small, sharp jerk in the act. A muscle twitched in his cheek. Bob Cullen was still saying, “You—you—” and Lib Dale was whispering dire things to him.
That other, admirable, American tried to deal with the frenzied youth. Paula Lebetwood said, “Bob, you’re making a child of yourself. Remember where you are.”
“What’s the trouble?” asked Ludlow in a matter-of-fact tone.
“Ask him—ask him, that’s all!” cried Bob Cullen bitterly, and then, as is the wont of youths who believe themselves wronged, commenced himself to explain. “He thought—you thought, Mr. Cosgrove”—(“Mr.” Cosgrove; much revealed by that “Mr.”)—“you thought that because you were bigger and stronger than I was, that you could get away with talking the way you did. Well, you needn’t think that it was because I was afraid of you—”
I noticed that Lib Dale was actually twisting her young compatriot’s arm in an endeavour to gain his attention, but he held on through pain, white and red by turns.
“I’m ready any time you are, Mr. Cosgrove, and don’t you forget it. I’ll show you, Mr. Cosgrove. I’ll fight you a duel or a wager of battle or anything—”
“My dear boy,” slipped in Doctor Aire, who took the interruption of his narrative in very good humour, “the wager of battle is null and void. That was the whole upshot of my story, if you had only the patience—”
“I don’t care if it’s null and void or not. Mr. Cosgrove, if you’re a man—”
Paula Lebetwood had taken hold of the half-hysterical youth’s other arm; she placed a firm hand across his mouth, effectually stifling what further wild challenge he might have uttered on the spot. Lib sank down flushed and pouting, her blue eyes flinging defiance to all of us. Cosgrove, who had not uttered a word, had a face like a man’s in an apoplexy, and his head was lower between his shoulders than it was accustomed to be.
The youngster Bob Cullen was still standing there like a bulldog in the centre of the ring, anger adding a degree of dignity to his stature. Ten, twenty, seconds may have gone by, and still he confronted the Irishman, whose only recognition of his challenge had been a turn of his head and that slow dark flame in his face.
“Well?” demanded Bob Cullen.
Still the Irishman preserved a silence of stone.
“Oh, Bob, you sorehead,” cried Lib Dale, grinding her heel into the carpet. “Of all the id—”
“But Bob, dear,” pleaded Miss Lebetwood, “what Sean said to Lib was long, long ago in the spring, and she’s forgotten all about it, and so should you, you silly kid.”
The voice of Cosgrove came thundering, overwhelming. “Woman,” he said, and a quite perceptible thrill passed over us, for he spoke to his intended wife, and “woman” as he said it then sounded the most brutal word he could use—“woman, no need for you to defend me. The code of this young upstart is not my code, by the heavens—nor is yours my code. Stand aside.”
“Sean!”
“Stand aside—did you hear?”
“But Sean—”
“While the light is in me, I shall offer it to you, woman, and to all others I find in need of grace—even if it gall your young upstart there.”
Paula Lebetwood had tottered a step backward, with an expression of the utmost pain and loss upon her face. Suddenly her face was hidden in her hands, and her shoulders heaved with swift gusts of feeling. Then she lifted her face tearless and hot-eyed and defiant beneath golden hair turning to riot.
“Sean, how unmanly, how cowardly! Oh, if you knew how I despise you now. Oh, I need air—air!”
She turned from us abruptly, then paused. Her bosom moved in a long, slow breathing, and she turned her head to look at her lover, whose gaze did not meet hers. A veil of anger seemed to fall from her features, and the fire softened in her eyes. But this was no melting mood. Instead, a serene aloofness reigned in her face, and she seemed like one who studied Cosgrove from some region above, studied him with sympathy and compassion. For a space of time—perhaps a minute—there was this silence. Then, as if she had shown enough that she was not embittered by passion, she departed swiftly.
Through the passage of the french windows she strode, out to the lawn, and across, to be lost to sight in shrubs alongside the gate-house.
So, splitting into new faction and fresh enmity at every hour, the Bidding Feast at last witnessed the discord of the lovers themselves.
Cosgrove’s rebuke of his betrothed had stunned us, and her answering rebuke had left us wild and speechless. None stirred to follow Miss Lebetwood. In me, at least, the strife of feeling was comparable to the mad stress of the night before, when the first message of Parson Lolly had been found. I knew a delirium of bewilderment, a very horror, in the instants following those outbursts.
Cosgrove’s face, now so blotted with blood, took fantastic dimensions, seemed twice its size. The room appeared an enormous room, and the people pigmy people. Sir Pharamond’s portrait leered and sneered. Every proportion was indecently distorted, and time, like space, was bereft of its comfortable conventions. The seconds seemed to stagger past.
Then Pendleton, no longer held by Alberta, rose so hastily that his chair banged backward against the stair-post of the little gallery. “Yes, by gad! Let’s all get some air. This room is stuffy as blazes. That’s what puts us all at sixes and sevens.”
“I really think,” observed Eve Bartholomew, “that it’s the absence of Sir Brooke that gets so on our nerves.”
“Let’s declare a truce—no, let’s make peace,” smiled Alberta Pendleton. “Sean, you and Bob haven’t any ill-will, have you?”
Since his betrothed’s condemnation of him, no petty enmity could very well find hold in Cosgrove’s soul. His defeat told in his dejected head and drooped lids. He didn’t answer Alberta.
But Bob Cullen, whose excitement had flagged, was suddenly overwhelmed by his former audacity. “I—I suppose you folks must think—you must think—”
“That’s all right, Bob,” soothed Alberta; “you just lost your temper for a minute, that was all. Anybody is likely to do that.”
“He let Mr. Cosgrove get his goat,” put in Lib Dale in asotto voce obbligato; she was still much displeased with her compatriot.
“I’m—I’m sorry—I apologize,” said Bob.
“As for me,” said Cosgrove suddenly, “I do more than apologize; I make anew.”
“Why, Sean, how—what can you mean?” gasped Alberta, for the Irishman now stood on his feet looking around the Hall without explaining his remark.
“Yes, it will do,” muttered Cosgrove. “God can come from there”; and he gestured toward the musicians’ gallery.
“G-g-god?” stammered Pendleton.
“God the Creator,” responded Sean Cosgrove, and he appended a few words as inconsequential as any Crofts himself could have used: “I’ve seen the book in your library.”
“But what do you mean, man?” cried Pendleton. “I never heard—”
“To-night,” said Cosgrove, “in this Hall we shall rehearse the play of ‘Noah’s Flood.’ ”
“ ‘Noah’s Flood!’ ” came a gasp from most of us.
“Animal crackers,” mumbled Bob Cullen obscurely.
“What’s ‘Noah’s Flood?’ ” asked Pendleton. “I’ve never seen any book of that name—”
“It is inside a book of another name,” answered Cosgrove; “one you have never opened, I dare say. Here, at five o’clock, we shall have tea; is it not so? Then I shall unfold—”
“It’s an old mystery-play,” said Alberta. “Crofts, I’m surprised.”
“But won’t there be, er, costumes, and so forth?”
“For me, at least, no costume,” declared Cosgrove. “Man, made in the image of God, shall need no gaudery. I should scorn to deck and disguise myself to play my God.”
“You don’t mean that you’re to appear in the, er, in the—”
“In the altogether?” finished Eve Bartholomew in a thin quasi-hysterical tone. “Oh, Mr. Cosgrove—”
“No doubt,” Doctor Aire put in sardonically, “Sean is thinking of the mediaeval way of playing Adam and Eve with a screen up to their necks.”
“Leave it to me,” said Cosgrove.
“But won’t all this furniture have to be shifted?” inquired Pendleton nervously.
“Leave it to me.”
“Alone—how will you do it?”
“With my God-given arms.”
“But shouldn’t the servants—”
“I will do everything that must be done. But first,” and here I thought Cosgrove became a little wistful, “let us go outside and breathe the God-given air. Leave all to me; assemble here at five o’clock.”
He marched out, his face, with a look of grim regret and determination, turned toward the place in the shrubbery where Paula Lebetwood had disappeared. The last we saw of him, he had followed her out of sight.
The company began to disband.