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The Lion's Skin

by Rafael Sabatini · English · Gutenberg #2702 · 486,232 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Lion's Skin

Author: Rafael Sabatini


        
Release date: July 1, 2001 [eBook #2702]
                Most recently updated: March 10, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2702

Credits: Produced by An Anonymous Project Gutenberg Volunteer, and David Widger


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Produced by An Anonymous Project Gutenberg Volunteer





THE LION'S SKIN

By Rafael Sabatini




I. THE FANATIC

II. AT THE “ADAM AND EVE”

III. THE WITNESS

IV. Mr. GREEN

V. MOONSHINE

VI. HORTENSIA'S RETURN

VII. FATHER AND SON

VIII. TEMPTATION

IX. THE CHAMPION

X. SPURS TO THE RELUCTANT

XI. THE ASSAULT-AT-ARMS

XII. SUNSHINE AND SHADOW

XIII. THE FORLORN HOPE

XIV. LADY OSTERMORE

XV. LOVE AND RAGE

XVI. Mr. GREEN EXECUTES HIS WARRANT

XVII. AMID THE GRAVES

XVIII. THE GHOST OF THE PAST

XIX. THE END OF LORD OSTERMORE

XX. Mr. CARYLL'S IDENTITY

XXI. THE LION'S SKIN

XXII. THE HUNTERS

XXIII. THE LION




THE LION'S SKIN



CHAPTER I. THE FANATIC


Mr. Caryll, lately from Rome, stood by the window, looking out over the
rainswept, steaming quays to Notre Dame on the island yonder. Overhead
rolled and crackled the artillery of an April thunderstorm, and Mr.
Caryll, looking out upon Paris in her shroud of rain, under her pall of
thundercloud, felt himself at harmony with Nature. Over his heart,
too, the gloom of storm was lowering, just as in his heart it was still
little more than April time.

Behind him, in that chamber furnished in dark oak and leather of a reign
or two ago, sat Sir Richard Everard at a vast writing-table all a-litter
with books and papers; and Sir Richard watched his adoptive son with
fierce, melancholy eyes, watched him until he grew impatient of this
pause.

“Well?” demanded the old baronet harshly. “Will you undertake it,
Justin, now that the chance has come?” And he added: “You'll never
hesitate if you are the man I have sought to make you.”

Mr. Caryll turned slowly. “It is because I am the man that you--that God
and you--have made me that I do hesitate.”

His voice was quiet and pleasantly modulated, and he spoke English with
the faintest slur--perceptible, perhaps, only to the keenest ear--of
a French accent. To ears less keen it would merely seem that he
articulated with a precision so singular as to verge on pedantry.

The light falling full upon his profile revealed the rather singular
countenance that was his own. It was not in any remarkable beauty that
its distinction lay, for by the canons of beauty that prevail it was not
beautiful. The features were irregular and inclined to harshness,
the nose was too abruptly arched, the chin too long and square, the
complexion too pallid. Yet a certain dignity haunted that youthful
face, of such a quality as to stamp it upon the memory of the merest
passer-by. The mouth was difficult to read and full of contradictions;
the lips were full and red, and you would declare them the lips of a
sensualist but for the line of stern, almost grim, determination in
which they met; and yet, somewhere behind that grimness, there appeared
to lurk a haunting whimsicality; a smile seemed ever to impend, but
whether sweet or bitter none could have told until it broke. The eyes
were as remarkable; wide-set and slow-moving, as becomes the eyes of an
observant man, they were of an almost greenish color, and so level in
their ordinary glance as to seem imbued with an uncanny penetration.
His hair--he dared to wear his own, and clubbed it in a broad ribbon
of watered silk--was almost of the hue of bronze, with here and there a
glint of gold, and as luxuriant as any wig.

For the rest, he was scarcely above the middle height, of an almost
frail but very graceful slenderness, and very graceful, too, in all
his movements. In dress he was supremely elegant, with the elegance of
France, that in England would be accounted foppishness. He wore a suit
of dark blue cloth, with white satin linings that were revealed when he
moved; it was heavily laced with gold, and a ramiform pattern broidered
in gold thread ran up the sides of his silk stockings of a paler blue.
Jewels gleamed in the Brussels at his throat, and there were diamond
buckles on his lacquered, red-heeled shoes.

Sir Richard considered him with anxiety and some chagrin. “Justin!” he
cried, a world of reproach in his voice. “What can you need to ponder?”

“Whatever it may be,” said Mr. Caryll, “it will be better that I ponder
it now than after I have pledged myself.”

“But what is it? What?” demanded the baronet.

“I am marvelling, for one thing, that you should have waited thirty
years.”

Sir Richard's fingers stirred the papers before him in an idle, absent
manner. Into his brooding eyes there leapt the glitter to be seen in the
eyes of the fevered of body or of mind.

“Vengeance,” said he slowly, “is a dish best relished when 'tis eaten
cold.” He paused an instant; then continued: “I might have crossed to
England at the time, and slain him. Should that have satisfied me? What
is death but peace and rest?”

“There is a hell, we are told,” Mr. Caryll reminded him.

“Ay,” was the answer, “we are told. But I dursn't risk its being false
where Ostermore is concerned. So I preferred to wait until I could brew
him such a cup of bitterness as no man ever drank ere he was glad to
die.” In a quieter, retrospective voice he continued: “Had we prevailed
in the '15, I might have found a way to punish him that had been worthy
of the crime that calls for it. We did not prevail. Moreover, I was
taken, and transported.

“What think you, Justin, gave me courage to endure the rigors of the
plantations, cunning and energy to escape after five such years of it as
had assuredly killed a stronger man less strong of purpose? What but the
task that was awaiting me? It imported that I should live and be free
to call a reckoning in full with my Lord Ostermore before I go to my own
account.

“Opportunity has gone lame upon this journey. But it has arrived
at last. Unless--” He paused, his voice sank from the high note of
exaltation to which it had soared; it became charged with dread, as did
the fierce eyes with which he raked his companion's face. “Unless you
prove false to the duty that awaits you. And that I'll not believe! You
are your mother's son, Justin.”

“And my father's, too,” answered Justin in a thick voice; “and the Earl
of Ostermore is that same father.”

“The more sweetly shall your mother be avenged,” cried the other, and
again his eyes blazed with that unhealthy, fanatical light. “What
fitter than the hand of that poor lady's son to pull your father down in
ruins?” He laughed short and fiercely. “It seldom chances in this world
that justice is done so nicely.”

“You hate him very deeply,” said Mr. Caryll pensively, and the look in
his eyes betrayed the trend of his thoughts; they were of pity--but of
pity at the futility of such strong emotions.

“As deeply as I loved your mother, Justin.” The sharp, rugged features
of that seared old face seemed of a sudden transfigured and softened.
The wild eyes lost some of their glitter in a look of wistfulness, as he
pondered a moment the one sweet memory in a wasted life, a life wrecked
over thirty years ago--wrecked wantonly by that same Ostermore of whom
they spoke, who had been his friend.

A groan broke from his lips. He took his head in his hands, and, elbows
on the table, he sat very still a moment, reviewing as in a flash the
events of thirty and more years ago, when he and Viscount Rotherby--as
Ostermore was then--had been young men at the St. Germain's Court of
James II.

It was on an excursion into Normandy that they had met Mademoiselle
de Maligny, the daughter of an impoverished gentleman of the chetive
noblesse of that province. Both had loved her. She had preferred--as
women will--the outward handsomeness of Viscount Rotherby to the sounder
heart and brain that were Dick Everard's. As bold and dominant as any
ruffler of them all where men and perils were concerned, young Everard
was timid, bashful and without assertiveness with women. He had
withdrawn from the contest ere it was well lost, leaving an easy victory
to his friend.

And how had that friend used it? Most foully, as you shall learn.

Leaving Rotherby in Normandy, Everard had returned to Paris. The affairs
of his king gave him cause to cross at once to Ireland. For three years
he abode there, working secretly in his master's interest, to little
purpose be it confessed. At the end of that time he returned to Paris.
Rotherby was gone. It appeared that his father, Lord Ostermore, had
prevailed upon Bentinck to use his influence with William on the errant
youth's behalf. Rotherby had been pardoned his loyalty to the fallen
dynasty. A deserter in every sense, he had abandoned the fortunes of
King James--which in Everard's eyes was bad enough--and he had abandoned
the sweet lady he had fetched out of Normandy six months before his
going, of whom it seemed that in his lordly way he was grown tired.

From the beginning it would appear they were ill-matched. It was her
beauty had made appeal to him, even as his beauty had enamoured her.
Elementals had brought about their union; and when these elementals
shrank with habit, as elementals will, they found themselves without a
tie of sympathy or common interest to link them each to the other. She
was by nature blythe; a thing of sunshine, flowers and music, who craved
a very poet for her lover; and by “a poet” I mean not your mere rhymer.
He was downright stolid and stupid under his fine exterior; the worst
type of Briton, without the saving grace of a Briton's honor. And so she
had wearied him, who saw in her no more than a sweet loveliness that had
cloyed him presently. And when the chance was offered him by Bentinck
and his father, he took it and went his ways, and this sweet flower
that he had plucked from its Normandy garden to adorn him for a brief
summer's day was left to wilt, discarded.

The tale that greeted Everard on his return from Ireland was that,
broken-hearted, she had died--crushed neath her load of shame. For it
was said that there had been no marriage.

The rumor of her death had gone abroad, and it had been carried to
England and my Lord Rotherby by a cousin of hers--the last living
Maligny--who crossed the channel to demand of that stolid gentleman
satisfaction for the dishonor put upon his house. All the satisfaction
the poor fellow got was a foot or so of steel through the lungs, of
which he died; and there, may it have seemed to Rotherby, the matter
ended.

But Everard remained--Everard, who had loved her with a great and almost
sacred love; Everard, who swore black ruin for my Lord Rotherby--the
rumor of which may also have been carried to his lordship and stimulated
his activities in having Everard hunted down after the Braemar fiasco of
1715.

But before that came to pass Everard had discovered that the rumor
of her death was false--put about, no doubt, out of fear of that same
cousin who had made himself champion and avenger of her honor. Everard
sought her out, and found her perishing of want in an attic in the
Cour des Miracles some four months later--eight months after Rotherby's
desertion.

In that sordid, wind-swept chamber of Paris' most abandoned haunt, a son
had been born to Antoinette de Maligny two days before Everard had come
upon her. Both were dying; both had assuredly died within the week but
that he came so timely to her aid. And that aid he rendered like the
noble-hearted gentleman he was. He had contrived to save his fortune
from the wreck of James' kingship, and this was safely invested in
France, in Holland and elsewhere abroad. With a portion of it he
repurchased the chateau and estates of Maligny, which on the death of
Antoinette's father had been seized upon by creditors.

Thither he sent her and her child--Rotherby's child--making that noble
domain a christening-gift to the boy, for whom he had stood sponsor at
the font. And he did his work of love in the background. He was the god
in the machine; no more. No single opportunity of thanking him did he
afford her. He effaced himself that she might not see the sorrow she
occasioned him, lest it should increase her own.

For two years she dwelt at Maligny in such peace as the broken-hearted
may know, the little of life that was left her irradiated by Everard's
noble friendship. He wrote to her from time to time, now from Italy, now
from Holland. But he never came to visit her. A delicacy, which may
or may not have been false, restrained him. And she, respecting what
instinctively she knew to be his feelings, never bade him come to her.
In their letters they never spoke of Rotherby; not once did his name
pass between them; it was as if he had never lived or never crossed
their lives. Meanwhile she weakened and faded day by day, despite all
the care with which she was surrounded. That winter of cold and want in
the Cour des Miracles had sown its seeds, and Death was sharpening his
scythe against the harvest.

When the end was come she sent urgently for Everard. He came at once in
answer to her summons; but he came too late. She died the evening before
he arrived. But she had left a letter, written days before, against the
chance of his not reaching her before the end. That letter, in her fine
French hand, was before him now.

“I will not try to thank you, dearest friend,” she wrote. “For the thing
that you have done, what payment is there in poor thanks? Oh, Everard,
Everard! Had it but pleased God to have helped me to a wiser choice
when it was mine to choose!” she cried to him from that letter, and
poor Everard deemed that the thin ray of joy her words sent through his
anguished soul was payment more than enough for the little that he had
done. “God's will be done!” she continued. “It is His will. He knows why
it is best so, though we discern it not. But there is the boy; there
is Justin. I bequeath him to you who already have done so much for him.
Love him a little for my sake; cherish and rear him as your own, and
make of him such a gentleman as are you. His father does not so much as
know of his existence. That, too, is best so, for I would not have him
claim my boy. Never let him learn that Justin exists, unless it be to
punish him by the knowledge for his cruel desertion of me.”

Choking, the writing blurred by tears that he accounted no disgrace to
his young manhood, Everard had sworn in that hour that Justin should
be as a son to him. He would do her will, and he set upon it a more
definite meaning than she intended. Rotherby should remain in ignorance
of his son's existence until such season as should make the knowledge a
very anguish to him. He would rear Justin in bitter hatred of the foul
villain who had been his father; and with the boy's help, when the time
should be ripe, he would lay my Lord Rotherby in ruins. Thus should my
lord's sin come to find him out.

This Everard had sworn, and this he had done. He had told Justin the
story almost as soon as Justin was of an age to understand it. He had
repeated it at very frequent intervals, and as the lad grew, Everard
watched in him--fostering it by every means in his power--the growth of
his execration for the author of his days, and of his reverence for the
sweet, departed saint that had been his mother.

For the rest, he had lavished Justin nobly for his mother's sake. The
repurchased estates of Maligny, with their handsome rent roll, remained
Justin's own, administered by Sir Richard during the lad's minority and
vastly enriched by the care of that administration. He had sent the
lad to Oxford, and afterwards--the more thoroughly to complete his
education--on a two years' tour of Europe; and on his return, a grown
and cultured man, he had attached him to the court in Rome of the
Pretender, whose agent he was himself in Paris.

He had done his duty by the boy as he understood his duty, always with
that grim purpose of revenge for his horizon. And the result had been a
stranger compound than even Everard knew, for all that he knew the
lad exceedingly well. For he had scarcely reckoned sufficiently upon
Justin's mixed nationality and the circumstance that in soul and mind
he was entirely his mother's child, with nothing--or an imperceptible
little--of his father. As his mother's nature had been, so was
Justin's--joyous. But Everard's training of him had suppressed all
inborn vivacity. The mirth and diablerie that were his birthright had
been overlaid with British phlegm, until in their stead, and through
the blend, a certain sardonic humor had developed, an ironical attitude
toward all things whether sacred or profane. This had been helped on
by culture, and--in a still greater measure--by the odd training in
worldliness which he had from Everard. His illusions were shattered ere
he had cut his wisdom teeth, thanks to the tutelage of Sir Richard,
who in giving him the ugly story of his own existence, taught him the
misanthropical lesson that all men are knaves, all women fools. He
developed, as a consequence, that sardonic outlook upon the world. He
sought to take vos non vobis for his motto, affected to a spectator in
the theatre of Life, with the obvious result that he became the greatest
actor of them all.

So we find him even now, his main emotion pity for Sir Richard, who sat
silent for some moments, reviewing that thirty-year dead past, until
the tears scalded his old eyes. The baronet made a queer noise in
his throat, something between a snarl and a sob, and he flung himself
suddenly back in his chair.

Justin sat down, a becoming gravity in his countenance. “Tell me all,”
 he begged his adoptive father. “Tell me how matters stand precisely--how
you propose to act.”

“With all my heart,” the baronet assented. “Lord Ostermore, having
turned his coat once for profit, is ready now to turn it again for the
same end. From the information that reaches me from England, it would
appear that in the rage of speculation that has been toward in London,
his lordship has suffered heavily. How heavily I am not prepared to say.
But heavily enough, I dare swear, to have caused this offer to return to
his king; for he looks, no doubt, to sell his services at a price that
will help him mend the wreckage of his fortunes. A week ago a gentleman
who goes between his majesty's court at Rome and his friends here in
Paris brought me word from his majesty that Ostermore had signified to
him his willingness to rejoin the Stuart cause.

“Together with that information, this messenger brought me letters from
his majesty to several of his friends, which I was to send to England
by a safe hand at the first opportunity. Now, amongst these
letters--delivered to me unsealed--is one to my Lord Ostermore, making
him certain advantageous proposals which he is sure to accept if his
circumstances be as crippled as I am given to understand. Atterbury and
his friends, it seems, have already tampered with my lord's loyalty to
Dutch George to some purpose, and there is little doubt but that this
letter”--and he tapped a document before him--“will do what else is to
be done.

“But, since these letters were left with me, come you with his majesty's
fresh injunctions that I am to suppress them and cross to England at
once myself, to prevail upon Atterbury and his associates to abandon the
undertaking.”

Mr. Caryll nodded. “Because, as I have told you,” said he, “King James
in Rome has received positive information that in London the plot is
already suspected, little though Atterbury may dream it. But what has
this to do with my Lord Ostermore?”

“This,” said Everard slowly, leaning across toward Justin, and laying
a hand upon his sleeve. “I am to counsel the Bishop to stay his hand
against a more favorable opportunity. There is no reason why you should
not do the very opposite with Ostermore.”

Mr. Caryll knit his brows, his eyes intent upon the other's face; but he
said no word.

“It is,” urged Everard, “an opportunity such as there may never be
another. We destroy Ostermore. By a turn of the hand we bring him to the
gallows.” He chuckled over the word with a joy almost diabolical.

“But how--how do we destroy him?” quoth Justin, who suspected yet dared
not encourage his suspicions.

“How? Do you ask how? Is't not plain?” snapped Sir Richard, and what
he avoided putting into words, his eloquent glance made clear to his
companion.

Mr. Caryll rose a thought quickly, a faint flush stirring in his cheeks,
and he threw off Everard's grasp with a gesture that was almost of
repugnance. “You mean that I am to enmesh him....”

Sir Richard smiled grimly. “As his majesty's accredited agent,” he
explained. “I will equip you with papers. Word shall go ahead of you to
Ostermore by a safe hand to bid him look for the coming of a messenger
bearing his own family name. No more than that; nothing that can
betray us; yet enough to whet his lordship's appetite. You shall be
the ambassador to bear him the tempting offers from the king. You will
obtain his answers--accepting. Those you will deliver to me, and I shall
do the trifle that may still be needed to set the rope about his neck.”

A little while there was silence. Outside, the rain, driven by gusts,
smote the window as with a scourge. The thunder was grumbling in the
distance now. Mr. Caryll resumed his chair. He sat very thoughtful,
but with no emotion showing in his face. British stolidity was in the
ascendant with him then. He felt that he had the need of it.

“It is... ugly,” he said at last slowly.

“It is God's own will,” was the hot answer, and Sir Richard smote the
table.

“Has God taken you into His confidence?” wondered Mr. Caryll.

“I know that God is justice.”

“Yet is it not written that 'vengeance is His own'?”

“Aye, but He needs human instruments to execute it. Such instruments are
we. Can you--Oh, can you hesitate?”

Mr. Caryll clenched his hands hard. “Do it,” he answered through set
teeth. “Do it! I shall approve it when 'tis done. But find other hands
for the work, Sir Richard. He is my father.”

Sir Richard remained cool. “That is the argument I employ for insisting
upon the task being yours,” he replied. Then, in a blaze of
passion, he--who had schooled his adoptive son so ably in
self-control--marshalled once more his arguments. “It is your duty to
your mother to forget that he is your father. Think of him only as the
man who wronged your mother; the man to whom her ruined life, her early
death are due--her murderer and worse. Consider that. Your father, you
say!” He mocked almost. “Your father! In what is he your father? You
have never seen him; he does not know that you exist, that you ever
existed. Is that to be a father? Father, you say! A word, a name--no
more than that; a name that gives rise to a sentiment, and a sentiment
is to stand between you and your clear duty; a sentiment is to set a
protecting shield over the man who killed your mother!

“I think I shall despise you, Justin, if you fail me in this. I have
lived for it,” he ran on tempestuously. “I have reared you for it, and
you shall not fail me!”

Then his voice dropped again, and in quieter tones

“You hate the very name of John Caryll, Earl of Ostermore,” said he, “as
must every decent man who knows the truth of what the life of that satyr
holds. If I have suffered you to bear his name, it is to the end that it
should remind you daily that you have no right to it, that you have no
right to any name.”

When he said that he thrust his finger consciously into a raw wound. He
saw Justin wince, and with pitiless cunning he continued to prod that
tender place until he had aggravated the smart of it into a very agony.

“That is what you owe your father; that is the full extent of what lies
between you--that you are of those at whom the world is given to sneer
and point scorn's ready finger.”

“None has ever dared,” said Mr. Caryll.

“Because none has ever known. We have kept the secret well. You display
no coat of arms that no bar sinister may be displayed. But the time
may come when the secret must out. You might, for instance, think of
marrying a lady of quality, a lady of your own supposed station. What
shall you tell her of yourself? That you have no name to offer her; that
the name you bear is yours by assumption only? Ah! That brings home your
own wrongs to you, Justin! Consider them; have them ever present in your
mind, together with your mother's blighted life, that you may not shrink
when the hour strikes to punish the evildoer.”

He flung himself back in his chair again, and watched the younger man
with brooding eye. Mr. Caryll was plainly moved. He had paled a little,
and he sat now with brows contracted and set teeth.

Sir Richard pushed back his chair and rose, recapitulating. “He is your
mother's destroyer,” he said, with a sad sternness. “Is the ruin of that
fair life to go unpunished? Is it, Justin?”

Mr. Caryll's Gallic spirit burst abruptly through its British glaze.
He crushed fist into palm, and swore: “No, by God! It shall not, Sir
Richard!”

Sir Richard held out his hands, and there was a fierce joy in his gloomy
eyes at last. “You'll cross to England with me, Justin?”

But Mr. Caryll's soul fell once more into travail. “Wait!” he cried.
“Ah, wait!” His level glance met Sir Richard's in earnestness and
entreaty. “Answer me the truth upon your soul and conscience: Do you in
your heart believe that it is what my mother would have had me do?”

There was an instant's pause. Then Everard, the fanatic of vengeance,
the man whose mind upon that one subject was become unsound with excess
of brooding, answered with conviction: “As I have a soul to be saved,
Justin, I do believe it. More--I know it. Here!” Trembling hands took up
the old letter from the table and proffered it to Justin. “Here is her
own message to you. Read it again.”

And what time the young man's eyes rested upon that fine, pointed
writing, Sir Richard recited aloud the words he knew by heart, the words
that had been ringing in his ears since that day when he had seen her
lowered to rest: “'Never let him learn that Justin exists unless it be
to punish him by the knowledge for his cruel desertion of me.' It
is your mother's voice speaking to you from the grave,” the fanatic
pursued, and so infected Justin at last with something of his
fanaticism.

The green eyes flashed uncannily, the white young face grew cruelly
sardonic. “You believe it?” he asked, and the eagerness that now
invested his voice showed how it really was with him.

“As I have a soul to be saved,” Sir Richard repeated.

“Then gladly will I set my hand to it.” Fire stirred through Justin now,
a fire of righteous passion. “An idea--no more than an idea--daunted me.
You have shown me that. I cross to England with you, Sir Richard, and
let my Lord Ostermore look to himself, for my name--I who have no right
to any name--my name is judgment!”

The exaltation fell from him as suddenly as it had mounted. He dropped
into a chair, thoughtful again and slightly ashamed of his sudden
outburst.

Sir Richard Everard watched with an eye of gloomy joy the man whom he
had been at such pains to school in self-control.

Overhead there was a sudden crackle of thunder, sharp and staccato as a
peal of demoniac laughter.




CHAPTER II. AT THE “ADAM AND EVE”


Mr. Caryll, alighted from his traveling chaise in the yard of the “Adam
and Eve,” at Maidstone, on a sunny afternoon in May. Landed at Dover
the night before, he had parted company with Sir Richard Everard that
morning. His adoptive father had turned aside toward Rochester, to
discharge his king's business with plotting Bishop Atterbury, what time
Justin was to push on toward town as King James' ambassador to the Earl
of Ostermore, who, advised of his coming, was expecting him.

Here at Maidstone it was Mr. Caryll's intent to dine, resuming his
journey in the cool of the evening, when he hoped to get at least as far
as Farnborough ere he slept.

Landlady, chamberlain, ostler and a posse of underlings hastened to
give welcome to so fine a gentleman, and a private room above-stairs was
placed at his disposal. Before ascending, however, Mr. Caryll sauntered
into the bar for a whetting glass to give him an appetite, and further
for the purpose of bespeaking in detail his dinner with the hostess. It
was one of his traits that he gave the greatest attention to detail, and
held that the man who left the ordering of his edibles to his servants
was no better than an animal who saw no more than nourishment in food.
Nor was the matter one to be settled summarily; it asked thought and
time. So he sipped his Hock, listening to the landlady's proposals, and
amending them where necessary with suggestions of his own, and what time
he was so engaged, there ambled into the inn yard a sturdy cob bearing a
sturdy little man in snuff-colored clothes that had seen some wear.

The newcomer threw his reins to the stable-boy--a person of all the
importance necessary to receive so indifferent a guest. He got down
nimbly from his horse, produced an enormous handkerchief of many colors,
and removed his three-cornered hat that he might the better mop his
brow and youthful, almost cherubic face. What time he did so, a pair of
bright little blue eyes were very busy with Mr. Caryll's carriage,
from which Leduc, Mr. Caryll's valet, was in the act of removing a
portmantle. His mobile mouth fell into lines of satisfaction.

Still mopping himself, he entered the inn, and, guided by the drone of
voices, sauntered into the bar. At sight of Mr. Caryll leaning there,
his little eyes beamed an instant, as do the eyes of one who espies a
friend, or--apter figure--the eyes of the hunter when they sight the
quarry.

He advanced to the bar, bowing to Mr. Caryll with an air almost
apologetic, and to the landlady with an air scarcely less so, as he
asked for a nipperkin of ale to wash the dust of the road from his
throat. The hostess called a drawer to serve him, and departed herself
upon the momentous business of Mr. Caryll's dinner.

“A warm day, sir,” said the chubby man.

Mr. Caryll agreed with him politely, and finished his glass, the other
sipping meanwhile at his ale.

“A fine brew, sir,” said he. “A prodigious fine brew! With all respect,
sir, your honor should try a whet of our English ale.”

Mr. Caryll, setting down his glass, looked languidly at the man. “Why do
you exclude me, sir, from the nation of this beverage?” he inquired.

The chubby man's face expressed astonishment. “Ye're English, sir! Ecod!
I had thought ye French!”

“It is an honor, sir, that you should have thought me anything.”

The other abased himself. “'Twas an unwarrantable presumption, Codso!
which I hope your honor'll pardon.” Then he smiled again, his little
eyes twinkling humorously. “An ye would try the ale, I dare swear your
honor would forgive me. I know ale, ecod! I am a brewer myself. Green is
my name, sir--Tom Green--your very obedient servant, sir.” And he drank
as if pledging that same service he professed.

Mr. Caryll observed him calmly and a thought indifferently. “Ye're
determined to honor me,” said he. “I am your debtor for your reflections
upon whetting glasses; but ale, sir, is a beverage I don't affect, nor
shall while there are vines in France.”

“Ah!” sighed Mr. Green rapturously. “'Tis a great country, France; is it
not, sir?”

“'Tis not the general opinion here at present. But I make no doubt that
it deserves your praise.”

“And Paris, now,” persisted Mr. Green. “They tell me 'tis a great city;
a marvel o' th' ages. There be those, ecod! that say London's but a
kennel to't.”

“Be there so?” quoth Mr. Caryll indifferently.

“Ye don't agree with them, belike?” asked Mr. Green, with eagerness.

“Pooh! Men will say anything,” Mr. Caryll replied, and added pointedly:
“Men will talk, ye see.”

“Not always,” was the retort in a sly tone. “I've known men to be
prodigious short when they had aught to hide.”

“Have ye so? Ye seem to have had a wide experience.” And Mr. Caryll
sauntered out, humming a French air through closed lips.

Mr. Green looked after him with hardened eyes. He turned to the drawer
who stood by. “He's mighty close,” said he. “Mighty close!”

“Ye're not perhaps quite the company he cares for,” the drawer suggested
candidly.

Mr. Green looked at him. “Very like,” he snapped. “How long does he stay
here?”

“Ye lost a rare chance of finding out when ye let him go without
inquiring,” said the drawer.

Mr. Green's face lost some of its chubbiness. “When d'ye look to marry
the landlady?” was his next question.

The man stared. “Cod!” said he. “Marry the--Are ye daft?”

Mr. Green affected surprise. “I'm mistook, it seems. Ye misled me by
your pertness. Get me another nipperkin.”

Meanwhile Mr. Caryll had taken his way above stairs to the room set
apart for him. He dined to his satisfaction, and thereafter, his
shapely, silk-clad legs thrown over a second chair, his waistcoat
all unbuttoned, for the day was of an almost midsummer warmth--he sat
mightily at his ease, a decanter of sherry at his elbow, a pipe in one
hand and a book of Mr. Gay's poems in the other. But the ease went no
further than the body, as witnessed the circumstances that his pipe was
cold, the decanter tolerably full, and Mr. Gay's pleasant rhymes and
quaint conceits of fancy all unheeded. The light, mercurial spirit which
he had from nature and his unfortunate mother, and which he had retained
in spite of the stern training he had received at his adoptive father's
hands, was heavy-fettered now.

The mild fatigue of his journey through the heat of the day had led him
to look forward to a voluptuous hour of indolence following upon dinner,
with pipe and book and glass. The hour was come, the elements were
there, but since he could not abandon himself to their dominion the
voluptuousness was wanting. The task before him haunted him with
anticipatory remorse. It hung upon his spirit like a sick man's dream.
It obtruded itself upon his constant thought, and the more he pondered
it the more did he sicken at what lay before him.

Wrought upon by Everard's fanaticism that day in Paris some three weeks
ago, infected for the time being by something of his adoptive father's
fever, he had set his hands to the task in a glow of passionate
exaltation. But with the hour, the exaltation went, and reaction started
in his soul. And yet draw back he dared not; too long and sedulously had
Everard trained his spirit to look upon the avenging of his mother as
a duty. Believing that it was his duty, he thirsted on the one hand to
fulfill it, whilst, on the other, he recoiled in horror at the
thought that the man upon whom he was to wreak that vengeance was his
father--albeit a father whom he did not know, who had never seen him,
who was not so much as aware of his existence.

He sought forgetfulness in Mr. Gay. He had the delicate-minded man's
inherent taste for verse, a quick ear for the melody of words, the
aesthete's love of beauty in phrase as of beauty in all else; and
culture had quickened his perceptions, developed his capacity for
appreciation. For the tenth time he called Leduc to light his pipe;
and, that done, he set his eye to the page once more. But it was like
harnessing a bullock to a cart; unmindful of the way it went and over
what it travelled, his eye ambled heavily along the lines, and when he
came to turn the page he realized with a start that he had no impression
of what he had read upon it.

In sheer disgust he tossed the book aside, and kicking away the second
chair, rose lythely. He crossed to the window, and stood there gazing
out at nothing, nor conscious of the incense that came to him from
garden, from orchard, and from meadow.

It needed a clatter of hoofs and a cloud of dust approaching from the
north to draw his mind from its obsessing thoughts. He watched the
yellow body of the coach as it came furiously onward, its four horses
stretched to the gallop, postillion lusty of lungs and whip, and the
great trail of dust left behind it spreading to right and left over the
flowering hedge-rows to lose itself above the gold-flecked meadowland.
On it came, to draw up there, at the very entrance to Maidstone, at the
sign of the “Adam and Eve.”

Mr. Caryll, leaning on the sill of his window, looked down with interest
to see what manner of travellers were these that went at so red-hot a
pace. From the rumble a lackey swung himself to the rough cobbles of the
yard. From within the inn came again landlady and chamberlain, and from
the stable ostler and boy, obsequious all and of no interest to Mr.
Caryll.

Then the door of the coach was opened, the steps were let down, and
there emerged--his hand upon the shoulder of the servant--a very ferret
of a man in black, with a parson's bands and neckcloth, a coal-black
full-bottomed wig, and under this a white face, rather drawn and
haggard, and thin lips perpetually agrin to flaunt two rows of yellow
teeth disproportionately large. After him, and the more remarkable by
contrast, came a tall, black-faced fellow, very brave in buff-colored
cloth, with a fortune in lace at wrist and throat, and a heavily
powdered tie-wig.

Lackey, chamberlain and parson attended his alighting, and then he
joined their ranks to attend in his turn--hat under arm--the last of
these odd travellers.

The interest grew. Mr. Caryll felt that the climax was about to be
presented, and he leaned farther forward that he might obtain a better
view of the awaited personage. In the silence he caught a rustle of
silk. A flowered petticoat appeared--as much of it as may be seen from
the knee downwards--and from beneath this the daintiest foot conceivable
was seen to grope an instant for the step. Another second and the rest
of her emerged.

Mr. Caryll observed--and be it known that he had the very shrewdest eye
for a woman, as became one of the race from which on his mother's side
he sprang--that she was middling tall, chastely slender, having, as he
judged from her high waist, a fine, clean length of limb. All this he
observed and approved, and prayed for a glimpse of the face which her
silken hood obscured and screened from his desiring gaze. She raised
it at that moment--raised it in a timid, frightened fashion, as one who
looks fearfully about to see that she is not remarked--and Mr. Caryll
had a glimpse of an oval face, pale with a warm pallor--like the pallor
of the peach, he thought, and touched, like the peach, with a faint hint
of pink in either cheek. A pair of eyes, large, brown, and gentle as
a saint's, met his, and Mr. Caryll realized that she was beautiful and
that it might be good to look into those eyes at closer quarters.

Seeing him, a faint exclamation escaped her, and she turned away in
sudden haste to enter the inn. The fine gentleman looked up and scowled;
the parson looked up and trembled; the ostler and his boy looked up and
grinned. Then all swept forward and were screened by the porch from the
wondering eyes of Mr. Caryll.

He turned from the window with a sigh, and stepped back to the table for
the tinder-box, that for the eleventh time he might relight his pipe.
He sat down, blew a cloud of smoke to the ceiling, and considered. His
nature triumphed now over his recent preoccupation; the matter of the
moment, which concerned him not at all, engrossed him beyond any other
matter of his life. He was intrigued to know in what relation one to the
other stood the three so oddly assorted travellers he had seen arrive.
He bethought him that, after all, the odd assortment arose from the
presence of the parson; and he wondered what the plague should any
Christian--and seemingly a gentleman at that--be doing travelling with a
parson. Then there was the wild speed at which they had come.

The matter absorbed and vexed him. I fear he was inquisitive by nature.
There came a moment when he went so far as to consider making his way
below to pursue his investigations in situ. It would have been at great
cost to his dignity, and this he was destined to be spared.

A knock fell upon his door, and the landlady came in. She was genial,
buxom and apple-faced, as becomes a landlady.

“There is a gentleman below--” she was beginning, when Mr. Caryll
interrupted her.

“I would rather that you told me of the lady,” said

“La, sir!” she cried, displaying ivory teeth, her eyes cast upwards,
hands upraised in gentle, mirthful protest. “La, sir! But I come from
the lady, too.”

He looked at her. “A good ambassador,” said he, “should begin with the
best news; not add it as an afterthought. But proceed, I beg. You give
me hope, mistress.”

“They send their compliments, and would be prodigiously obliged if you
was to give yourself the trouble of stepping below.”

“Of stepping below?” he inquired, head on one side, solemn eyes upon
the hostess. “Would it be impertinent to inquire what they may want with
me?”

“I think they want you for a witness, sir.”

“For a witness? Am I to testify to the lady's perfection of face and
shape, to the heaven that sits in her eyes, to the miracle she calls
her ankle? Are these and other things besides of the same kind what I
am required to witness? If so, they could not have sent for one more
qualified. I am an expert, ma'am.”

“Oh, sir, nay!” she laughed. “'Tis a marriage they need you for.”

Mr. Caryll opened his queer eyes a little wider. “Soho!” said he. “The
parson is explained.” Then he fell thoughtful, his tone lost its note of
flippancy. “This gentleman who sends his compliments, does he send his
name?”

“He does not, sir; but I overheard it.”

“Confide in me,” Mr. Caryll invited her.

“He is a great gentleman,” she prepared him.

“No matter. I love great gentlemen.”

“They call him Lord Rotherby.”

At that sudden and utterly unexpected mention of his half-brother's
name--his unknown half-brother--Mr. Caryll came to his feet with an
alacrity which a more shrewd observer would have set down to some cause
other than mere respect for a viscount. The hostess was shrewd, but not
shrewd enough, and if Mr. Caryll's expression changed for an instant,
it resumed its habitual half-scornful calm so swiftly that it would have
needed eyes of an exceptional quickness to have read it.

“Enough!” he said. “Who could deny his lordship?”

“Shall I tell them you are coming?” she inquired, her hand already upon
the door.

“A moment,” he begged, detaining her. “'Tis a runaway marriage this,
eh?”

Her full-hearted smile beamed on him again; she was a very woman, with a
taste for the romantic, loving love. “What else, sir?” she laughed.

“And why, mistress,” he inquired, eying her, his fingers plucking at his
nether lip, “do they desire my testimony?”

“His lordship's own man will stand witness, for one; but they'll need
another,” she explained, her voice reflecting astonishment at his
question.

“True. But why do they need me?” he pressed her. “Heard you no reason
given why they should prefer me to your chamberlain, your ostler or your
drawer?”

She knit her brows and shrugged impatient shoulders. Here was a deal
of pother about a trifling affair. “His lordship saw you as he entered,
sir, and inquired of me who you might be.”

“His lordship flatters me by this interest. My looks pleased him, let us
hope. And you answered him--what?”

“That your honor is a gentleman newly crossed from France.”

“You are well-informed, mistress,” said Mr. Caryll, a thought tartly,
for if his speech was tainted with a French accent it was in so slight a
degree as surely to be imperceptible to the vulgar.

“Your clothes, sir,” the landlady explained, and he bethought him, then,
that the greater elegance and refinement of his French apparel must
indeed proclaim his origin to one who had so many occasions of seeing
travelers from Gaul. That might even account for Mr. Green's attempts
to talk to him of France. His mind returned to the matter of the bridal
pair below.

“You told him that, eh?” said he. “And what said his lordship then?”

“He turned to the parson. 'The very man for us, Jenkins,' says he.”

“And the parson--this Jenkins--what answer did he make?”

“'Excellently thought,' he says, grinning.”

“Hum! And you yourself, mistress, what inference did you draw?”

“Inference, sir?”

“Aye, inference, ma'am. Did you not gather that this was not only
a runaway match, but a clandestine one? My lord can depend upon the
discretion of his servant, no doubt; for other witness he would prefer
some passer-by, some stranger who will go his ways to-morrow, and not be
like to be heard of again.”

“Lard, sir!” cried the landlady, her eyes wide with astonishment.

Mr. Caryll smiled enigmatically. “'Tis so, I assure ye, ma'am. My Lord
Rotherby is of a family singularly cautious in the unions it contracts.
In entering matrimony he prefers, no doubt, to leave a back door open
for quiet retreat should he repent him later.”

“Your honor has his lordship's acquaintance, then?” quoth the landlady.

“It is a misfortune from which Heaven has hitherto preserved me, but
which the devil, it seems, now thrusts upon me. It will, nevertheless,
interest me to see him at close quarters. Come, ma'am.”

As they were going out, Mr. Caryll checked suddenly. “Why, what's
o'clock?” said he.

She stared, so abruptly came the question. “Past four, sir,” she
answered.

He uttered a short laugh. “Decidedly,” said he, “his lordship must be
viewed at closer quarters.” And he led the way downstairs.

In the passage he waited for her to come up with him. “You had best
announce me by name,” he suggested. “It is Caryll.”

She nodded, and, going forward, threw open a door, inviting him to
enter.

“Mr. Caryll,” she announced, obedient to his injunction, and as he went
in she closed the door behind him.

From the group of three that had been sitting about the polished walnut
table, the tall gentleman in buff and silver rose swiftly, and advanced
to the newcomer; what time Mr. Caryll made a rapid observation of this
brother whom he was meeting under circumstances so odd and by a chance
so peculiar.

He beheld a man of twenty-five, or perhaps a little more, tall and
well made, if already inclining to heaviness, with a swarthy face,
full-lipped, big-nosed, black-eyed, an obstinate chin, and a deplorable
brow. At sight, by instinct, he disliked his brother. He wondered
vaguely was Lord Rotherby in appearance at all like their common father;
but beyond that he gave little thought to the tie that bound them.
Indeed, he has placed it upon record that, saving in such moments
of high stress as followed in their later connection, he never could
remember that they were the sons of the same parent.

“I thought,” was Rotherby's greeting, a note almost of irritation in his
voice, “that the woman said you were from France.”

It was an odd welcome, but its oddness at the moment went unheeded. His
swift scrutiny of his brother over, Mr. Caryll's glance passed on
to become riveted upon the face of the lady at the table's head. In
addition to the beauties which from above he had descried, he now
perceived that her mouth was sensitive and kindly, her whole expression
one of gentle wistfulness, exceeding sweet to contemplate. What did she
in this galley, he wondered; and he has confessed that just as at sight
he had disliked his brother, so from that hour--from the very instant of
his eyes' alighting on her there--he loved the lady whom his brother was
to wed, felt a surpassing need of her, conceived that in the meeting of
their eyes their very souls had met, so that it was to him as if he
had known her since he had known anything. Meanwhile there was his
lordship's question to be answered. He answered it mechanically, his
eyes upon the lady, and she returning the gaze of those queer, greenish
eyes with a sweetness that gave place to no confusion.

“I am from France, sir.”

“But not French?” his lordship continued.

Mr. Caryll fetched his eyes from the lady's to meet Lord Rotherby's.
“More than half French,” he replied, the French taint in his accent
growing slightly more pronounced. “It was but an accident that my father
was an Englishman.”

Rotherby laughed softly, a thought contemptuously. Foreigners were
things which in his untraveled, unlettered ignorance he despised. The
difference between a Frenchman and a South Sea Islander was a thing
never quite appreciated by his lordship. Some subtle difference he
had no doubt existed; but for him it was enough to know that both were
foreigners; therefore, it logically followed, both were kin.

“Your words, sir, might be oddly interpreted. 'Pon honor, they might!”
 said he, and laughed softly again with singular insolence.

“If they have amused your lordship I am happy,” said Mr. Caryll in such
a tone that Rotherby looked to see whether he was being roasted. “You
wanted me, I think. I beg that you'll not thank me for having descended.
It was an honor.”

It occurred to Rotherby that this was a veiled reproof for the ill
manners of the omission. Again he looked sharply at this man who was
scanning him with such interest, but he detected in the calm, high-bred
face nothing to suggest that any mockery was intended. Belatedly he fell
to doing the very thing that Mr. Caryll had begged him to leave undone:
he fell to thanking him. As for Mr. Caryll himself, not even the
queer position into which he had been thrust could repress his
characteristics. What time his lordship thanked him, he looked about him
at the other occupants of the room, and found that, besides the parson,
sitting pale and wide-eyed at the table, there was present in the
background his lordship's man--a quiet fellow, quietly garbed in
gray, with a shrewd face and shrewd, shifty eyes. Mr. Caryll saw, and
registered, for future use, the reflection that eyes that are overshrewd
are seldom wont to look out of honest heads.

“You are desired,” his lordship informed him, “to be witness to a
marriage.”

“So much the landlady had made known to me.”

“It is not, I trust, a task that will occasion you any scruples.”

“None. On the contrary, it is the absence of the marriage might do
that.” The smooth, easy tone so masked the inner meaning of the answer
that his lordship scarce attended to the words.

“Then we had best get on. We are in haste.”

“'Tis the characteristic rashness of folk about to enter wedlock,” said
Mr. Caryll, as he approached the table with his lordship, his eyes as he
spoke turning full upon the bride.

My lord laughed, musically enough, but overloud for a man of brains or
breeding. “Marry in haste, eh?” quoth he.

“You are penetration itself,” Mr. Caryll praised him.

“'Twill take a shrewd rogue to better me,” his lordship agreed.

“Yet an honest man might worst you. One never knows. But the lady's
patience is being taxed.”

It was as well he added that, for his lordship had turned with intent to
ask him what he meant.

“Aye! Come, Jenkins. Get on with your patter. Gaskell,” he called to his
man, “stand forward here.” Then he took his place beside the lady, who
had risen, and stood pale, with eyes cast down and--as Mr. Caryll alone
saw--the faintest quiver at the corners of her lips. This served to
increase Mr. Caryll's already considerable cogitations.

The parson faced them, fumbling at his book, Mr. Caryll's eyes watching
him with that cold, level glance of theirs. The parson looked up, met
that uncanny gaze, displayed his teeth in a grin of terror, fell to
trembling, and dropped the book in his confusion. Mr. Caryll, smiling
sardonically, stooped to restore it him.

There followed a fresh pause. Mr. Jenkins, having lost his place, seemed
at some pains to find it again--amazing, indeed, in one whose profession
should have rendered him so familiar with its pages.

Mr. Caryll continued to watch him, in silence, and--as an observer might
have thought, as, indeed, Gaskell did think, though he said nothing at
the time--with wicked relish.




CHAPTER III. THE WITNESS


At last the page was found again by Mr. Jenkins. Having found it, he
hesitated still a moment, then cleared his throat, and in the manner of
one hurling himself forward upon a desperate venture, he began to read.

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here in the sight of God,” he read,
and on in a nasal, whining voice, which not only was the very voice you
would have expected from such a man, but in accordance, too, with sound
clerical convention. The bridal pair stood before him, the groom with a
slight flush on his cheeks and a bright glitter in his black eyes, which
were not nice to see; the bride with bowed head and bosom heaving as in
response to inward tumult.

The cleric came to the end of his exordium, paused a moment, and
whether because he gathered confidence, whether because he realized
the impressive character of the fresh matter upon which he entered, he
proceeded now in a firmer, more sonorous voice: “I require and charge
you both as ye will answer on the dreadful day of judgment.”

“Ye've forgot something,” Mr. Caryll interrupted blandly.

His lordship swung round with an impatient gesture and an impatient
snort; the lady, too, looked up suddenly, whilst Mr. Jenkins seemed to
fall into an utter panic.

“Wha--what?” he stammered. “What have I forgot?”

“To read the directions, I think.”

His lordship scowled darkly upon Mr. Caryll, who heeded him not at all,
but watched the lady sideways.

Mr. Jenkins turned first scarlet, then paler than he had been before,
and bent his eyes to the book to read in a slightly puzzled voice
the italicized words above the period he had embarked upon. “And also
speaking unto the persons that shall be married, he shall say:” he read,
and looked up inquiry, his faintly-colored, prominent eyes endeavoring
to sustain Mr. Caryll's steady glance, but failing miserably.

“'Tis farther back,” Mr. Caryll informed him in answer to that mute
question; and as the fellow moistened his thumb to turn back the pages,
Mr. Caryll saved him the trouble. “It says, I think, that the man
should be on your right hand and the woman on your left. Ye seem to have
reversed matters, Mr. Jenkins. But perhaps ye're left-handed.”

“Stab me!” was Mr. Jenkins' most uncanonical comment. “I vow I am
over-flustered. Your lordship is so impatient with me. This gentleman is
right. But that I was so flustered. Will you not change places with his
lordship, ma'am?”

They changed places, after the viscount had thanked Mr. Caryll shortly
and cursed the parson with circumstance and fervor. It was well done on
his lordship's part, but the lady did not seem convinced by it. Her face
looked whiter, and her eyes had an alarmed, half-suspicious expression.

“We must begin again,” said Mr. Jenkins. And he began again.

Mr. Caryll listened and watched, and he began to enjoy himself
exceedingly. He had not reckoned upon so rich an entertainment when he
had consented to come down to witness this odd ceremony. His sense of
humor conquered every other consideration, and the circumstance that
Lord Rotherby was his brother, if remembered at all, served but to add a
spice to the situation.

Out of sheer deviltry he waited until Mr. Jenkins had labored for a
second time through the opening periods. Again he allowed him to get
as far as “I charge and require you both-,” before again he interrupted
him.

“There is something else ye've forgot,” said he in that sweet, quiet
voice of his.

This was too much for Rotherby. “Damn you!” he swore, turning a livid
face upon Mr. Caryll, and failed to observe that at the sound of that
harsh oath and at the sight of his furious face, the lady recoiled from
him, the suspicion lately in her face turning first to conviction and
then to absolute horror.

“I do not think you are civil,” said Mr. Caryll critically. “It was in
your interests that I spoke.”

“Then I'll thank you, in my interests, to hold your tongue!” his
lordship stormed.

“In that case,” said Mr. Caryll, “I must still speak in the interests
of the lady. Since you've desired me to be a witness, I'll do my duty by
you both and see you properly wed.”

“Now, what the devil may you mean by that?” demanded his lordship,
betraying himself more and more at every word.

Mr. Jenkins, in a spasm of terror, sought to pour oil upon these waters.
“My lord,” he bleated, teeth and eyeballs protruding from his pallid
face. “My lord! Perhaps the gentleman is right. Perhaps--Perhaps--” He
gulped, and turned to Mr. Caryll. “What is't ye think we have forgot
now?” he asked.

“The time of day,” Mr. Caryll replied, and watched the puzzled look that
came into both their faces.

“Do ye deal in riddles with us?” quoth his lordship. “What have we to do
with the time of day?”

“Best ask the parson,” suggested Mr. Caryll.

Rotherby swung round again to Jenkins. Jenkins spread his hands in mute
bewilderment and distress. Mr. Caryll laughed silently.

“I'll not be married! I'll not be married!”

It was the lady who spoke, and those odd words were the first that Mr.
Caryll heard from her lips. They made an excellent impression upon
him, bearing witness to her good sense and judgment--although belatedly
aroused--and informing him, although the pitch was strained just now;
that the rich contralto of her voice was full of music. He was a judge
of voices, as of much else besides.

“Hoity-toity!” quoth his lordship, between petulance and simulated
amusement. “What's all the pother? Hortensia, dear--”

“I'll not be married!” she repeated firmly, her wide brown eyes meeting
his in absolute defiance, head thrown back, face pale but fearless.

“I don't believe,” ventured Mr. Caryll, “that you could be if you
desired it. Leastways not here and now and by this.” And he jerked a
contemptuous thumb sideways at Mr. Jenkins, toward whom he had turned
his shoulder. “Perhaps you have realized it for yourself.”

A shudder ran through her; color flooded into her face and out again,
leaving it paler than before; yet she maintained a brave front that
moved Mr. Caryll profoundly to an even greater admiration of her.

Rotherby, his great jaw set, his hands clenched and eyes blazing, stood
irresolute between her and Mr. Caryll. Jenkins, in sheer terror, now
sank limply to a chair, whilst Gaskell looked on--a perfect servant--as
immovable outwardly and unconcerned as if he had been a piece of
furniture. Then his lordship turned again to Caryll.

“You take a deal upon yourself, sir,” said he menacingly.

“A deal of what?” wondered Mr. Caryll blandly.

The question nonplussed Rotherby. He swore ferociously. “By God!” he
fumed, “I'll have you make good your insinuations. You shall disabuse
this lady's mind. You shall--damn you!--or I'll compel you!”

Mr. Caryll smiled very engagingly. The matter was speeding
excellently--a comedy the like of which he did not remember to have
played a part in since his student days at Oxford, ten years and more
ago.

“I had thought,” said he, “that the woman who summoned me to be
a witness of this--this--ah wedding”--there was a whole volume of
criticism in his utterance of the word--“was the landlady of the 'Adam
and Eve.' I begin to think that she was this lady's good angel; Fate,
clothed, for once, matronly and benign.” Then he dropped the easy,
bantering manner with a suddenness that was startling. Gallic fire
blazed up through British training. “Let us speak plainly, my Lord
Rotherby. This marriage is no marriage. It is a mockery and a villainy.
And that scoundrel--worthy servant of his master--is no parson; no, not
so much as a hedge-parson is he. Madame,” he proceeded, turning now to
the frightened lady, “you have been grossly abused by these villains.”

“Sir!” blazed Rotherby at last, breaking in upon his denunciation, hand
clapped to sword. “Do ye dare use such words to me?”

Mr. Jenkins got to his feet, in a slow, foolish fashion. He put out a
hand to stay his lordship. The lady, in the background, looked on with
wide eyes, very breathless, one hand to her bosom as if to control its
heave.

Mr. Caryll proceeded, undismayed, to make good his accusation. He had
dropped back into his slightly listless air of thinly veiled persiflage,
and he appeared to address the lady, to explain the situation to her,
rather than to justify the charge he had made.

“A blind man could have perceived, from the rustling of his prayer
book when he fumbled at it, that the contents were strange to him. And
observe the volume,” he continued, picking it up and flaunting it aloft.
“Fire-new; not a thumbmark anywhere; purchased expressly for this foul
venture. Is there aught else so clean and fresh about the scurvy thief?”

“You shall moderate your tones, sir--” began his lordship in a snarl.

“He sets you each on the wrong side of him,” continued Mr. Caryll, all
imperturbable, “lacking even the sense to read the directions which the
book contains, and he has no thought for the circumstance that the time
of day is uncanonical. Is more needed, madame?”

“So much was not needed,” said she, “though I am your debtor, sir.”

Her voice was marvelously steady, ice-cold with scorn, a royal anger
increasing the glory of her eyes.

Rotherby's hand fell away from his sword. He realized that bluster
was not the most convenient weapon here. He addressed Mr. Caryll very
haughtily. “You are from France, sir, and something may be excused you.
But not quite all. You have used expressions that are not to be offered
to a person of my quality. I fear you scarcely apprehend it.”

“As well, no doubt, as those who avoid you, sir,” answered Mr. Caryll,
with cool contempt, his dislike of the man and of the business in which
he had found him engaged mounting above every other consideration.

His lordship frowned inquiry. “And who may those be?”

“Most decent folk, I should conceive, if this be an example of your
ways.”

“By God, sir! You are a thought too pert. We'll mend that presently. I
will first convince you of your error, and you, Hortensia.”

“It will be interesting,” said Mr. Caryll, and meant it.

Rotherby turned from him, keeping a tight rein upon his anger; and so
much restraint in so tempestuous a man was little short of wonderful.
“Hortensia,” he said, “this is fool's talk. What object could I seek to
serve?” She drew back another step, contempt and loathing in her face.
“This man,” he continued, flinging a hand toward Jenkins, and checked
upon the word. He swung round upon the fellow. “Have you fooled me,
knave?” he bawled. “Is it true what this man says of you--that ye're no
parson at all?”

Jenkins quailed and shriveled. Here was a move for which he was all
unprepared, and knew not how to play to it. On the bridegroom's part it
was excellently acted; yet it came too late to be convincing.

“You'll have the license in your pocket, no doubt, my lord,” put in
Mr. Caryll. “It will help to convince the lady of the honesty of your
intentions. It will show her that ye were abused by this thief for the
sake of the guinea ye were to pay him.”

That was checkmate, and Lord Rotherby realized it. There remained him
nothing but violence, and in violence he was exceedingly at home--being
a member of the Hell Fire Club and having served in the Bold Bucks under
his Grace of Wharton.

“You damned, infernal marplot! You blasted meddler!” he swore, and
some other things besides, froth on his lips, the veins of his brow
congested. “What affair was this of yours?”

“I thought you desired me for a witness,” Mr. Caryll reminded him.

“I did, let me perish!” said Rotherby. “And I wish to the devil I had
bit my tongue out first.”

“The loss to eloquence had been irreparable,” sighed Mr. Caryll, his
eyes upon a beam of the ceiling.

Rotherby stared and choked. “Is there no sense in you, you gibbering
parrot?” he inquired. “What are you--an actor or a fool?”

“A gentleman, I hope,” said Mr. Caryll urbanely. “What are you?”

“I'll learn you,” said his lordship, and plucked at his sword.

“I see,” said Mr. Caryll in the same quiet voice that thinly veiled his
inward laughter--“a bully!”

With more oaths, my lord heaved himself forward. Mr. Caryll was without
weapons. He had left his sword above-stairs, not deeming that he would
be needing it at a wedding. He never moved hand or foot as Rotherby bore
down upon him, but his greenish eyes grew keen and very watchful.
He began to wonder had he indulged his amusement overlong, and
imperceptibly he adjusted his balance for a spring.

Rotherby stretched out to lunge, murder in his inflamed eyes. “I'll
silence you, you--”

There was a swift rustle behind him. His hand--drawn back to thrust--was
suddenly caught, and ere he realized it the sword was wrenched from
fingers that held it lightly, unprepared for this.

“You dog!” said the lady's voice, strident now with anger and disdain.
She had his sword.

He faced about with a horrible oath. Mr. Caryll conceived that he was
becoming a thought disgusting.

Hoofs and wheels ground on the cobbles of the yard and came to a halt
outside, but went unheeded in the excitement of the moment. Rotherby
stood facing her, she facing him, the sword in her hand and a look in
her eyes that promised she would use it upon him did he urge her.

A moment thus--of utter, breathless silence. Then, as if her passion
mounted and swept all aside, she raised the sword, and using it as a
whip, she lashed him with it until at the third blow it rebounded to the
table and was snapped. Instinctively his lordship had put up his hands
to save his face, and across one of them a red line grew and grew and
oozed forth blood which spread to envelop it.

Gaskell advanced with a sharp cry of concern. But Rotherby waved him
back, and the gesture shook blood from his hand like raindrops. His face
was livid; his eyes were upon the woman he had gone so near betraying
with a look that none might read. Jenkins swayed, sickly, against the
table, whilst Mr. Caryll observed all with a critical eye and came to
the conclusion that she must have loved this villain.

The hilt and stump of sword clattered in the fireplace, whither she
hurled it. A moment she caught her face in her hands, and a sob shook
her almost fiercely. Then she came past his lordship, across the room to
Mr. Caryll, Rotherby making no shift to detain her.

“Take me away, sir! Take me away,” she begged him.

Mr. Caryll's gloomy face lightened suddenly. “Your servant, ma'am,” said
he, and made her a bow. “I think you are very well advised,” he added
cheerfully and offered her his arm. She took it, and moved a step or two
toward the door. It opened at that moment, and a burly, elderly man came
in heavily.

The lady halted, a cry escaped her--a cry of pain almost--and she fell
to weeping there and then. Mr. Caryll was very mystified.

The newcomer paused at the sight that met him, considered it with a
dull blue eye, and, for all that he looked stupid, it seemed he had wit
enough to take in the situation.

“So!” said he, with heavy mockery. “I might have spared myself the
trouble of coming after you. For it seems that she has found you out in
time, you villain!”

Rotherby turned sharply at that voice. He fell back a step, his brow
seeming to grow blacker than it had been. “Father!” he exclaimed; but
there was little that was filial in the accent.

Mr. Caryll staggered and recovered himself. It had been indeed a
staggering shock; for here, of course, was his own father, too.




CHAPTER IV. Mr. GREEN


There was a quick patter of feet, the rustle of a hooped petticoat, and
the lady was in the arms of my Lord Ostermore.

“Forgive me, my lord!” she was crying. “Oh, forgive me! I was a little
fool, and I have been punished enough already!”

To Mr. Caryll this was a surprising development. The earl, whose arms
seemed to have opened readily enough to receive her, was patting her
soothingly upon the shoulder. “Pish! What's this? What's this?” he
grumbled; yet his voice, Mr. Caryll noticed, was if anything kindly; but
it must be confessed that it was a dull, gruff voice, seldom indicating
any shade of emotion, unless--as sometimes happened--it was raised in
anger. He was frowning now upon his son over the girl's head, his bushy,
grizzled brows contracted.

Mr. Caryll observed--and with what interest you should well
imagine--that Lord Ostermore was still in a general way a handsome man.
Of a good height, but slightly excessive bulk, he had a face that still
retained a fair shape. Short-necked, florid and plethoric, he had the
air of the man who seldom makes a long illness at the end. His eyes were
very blue, and the lids were puffed and heavy, whilst the mouth, Mr.
Caryll remarked in a critical, detached spirit, was stupid rather than
sensuous. He made his survey swiftly, and the result left him wondering.

Meanwhile the earl was addressing his son, whose hand was being bandaged
by Gaskell. There was little variety in his invective. “You villain!”
 he bawled at him. “You damned villain!” Then he patted the girl's head.
“You found the scoundrel out before you married him,” said he. “I am
glad on't; glad on't!”

“'Tis such a reversing of the usual order of things that it calls for
wonder,” said Mr. Caryll.

“Eh?” quoth his lordship. “Who the devil are you? One of his friends?”

“Your lordship overwhelms me,” said Mr. Caryll gravely, making a bow. He
observed the bewilderment in Ostermore's eyes, and began to realize at
that early stage of their acquaintance that to speak ironically to the
Earl of Ostermore was not to speak at all.

It was Hortensia--a very tearful Hortensia now who explained. “This
gentleman saved me, my lord,” she said.

“Saved you?” quoth he dully. “How did he come to save you?”

“He discovered the parson,” she explained.

The earl looked more and more bewildered. “Just so,” said Mr. Caryll.
“It was my privilege to discover that the parson is no parson.”

“The parson is no parson?” echoed his lordship, scowling more and more.
“Then what the devil is the parson?”

Hortensia freed herself from his protecting arms. “He is a villain,” she
said, “who was hired by my Lord Rotherby to come here and pretend to be
a parson.” Her eyes flamed, her cheeks were scarlet. “God help me for a
fool, my lord, to have put my faith in that man! Oh!” she choked. “The
shame--the burning shame of it! I would I had a brother to punish him!”

Lord Ostermore was crimson, too, with indignation. Mr. Caryll was
relieved to see that he was capable of so much emotion. “Did I not warn
you against him, Hortensia?” said he. “Could you not have trusted that
I knew him--I, his father, to my everlasting shame?” Then he swung
upon Rotherby. “You dog!” he began, and there--being a man of little
invention--words failed him, and wrath alone remained, very intense, but
entirely inarticulate.

Rotherby moved forward till he reached the table, then stood leaning
upon it, scowling at the company from under his black brows. “'Tis your
lordship alone is to blame for this,” he informed his father, with a
vain pretence at composure.

“I am to blame!” gurgled his lordship, veins swelling at his brow. “I
am to blame that you should have carried her off thus? And--by God!--had
you meant to marry her honestly and fittingly, I might find it in my
heart to forgive you. But to practice such villainy! To attempt to put
this foul trick upon the child!”

Mr. Caryll thought for an instant of another child whose child he was,
and a passion of angry mockery at the forgetfulness of age welled up
from the bitter soul of him. Outwardly he remained a very mirror for
placidity.

“Your lordship had threatened to disinherit me if I married her,” said
Rotherby.

“'Twas to save her from you,” Ostermore explained, entirely
unnecessarily. “And you thought to--to--By God! sir, I marvel you have
the courage to confront me. I marvel!”

“Take me away, my lord,” Hortensia begged him, touching his arm.

“Aye, we were best away,” said the earl, drawing her to him. Then he
flung a hand out at Rotherby in a gesture of repudiation, of anathema.
“But 'tis not the end on't for you, you knave! What I threatened, I will
perform. I'll disinherit you. Not a penny of mine shall come to you. Ye
shall starve for aught I care; starve, and--and--the world be well rid
of a villain. I--I disown you. Ye're no son of mine. I'll take oath
ye're no son of mine!”

Mr. Caryll thought that, on the contrary, Rotherby was very much his
father's son, and he added to his observations upon human nature the
reflection that sinners are oddly blessed with short memories. He was
entirely dispassionate again by now.

As for Rotherby, he received his father's anger with a scornful smile
and a curling lip. “You'll disinherit me?” quoth he in mockery. “And
of what, pray? If report speaks true, you'll be needing to inherit
something yourself to bear you through your present straitness.” He
shrugged and produced his snuff-box with an offensive simulation
of nonchalance. “Ye cannot cut the entail,” he reminded his almost
apoplectic sire, and took snuff delicately, sauntering windowwards.

“Cut the entail? The entail?” cried the earl, and laughed in a manner
that seemed to bode no good. “Have you ever troubled to ascertain what
it amounts to? You fool, it wouldn't keep you in--in--in snuff!”

Lord Rotherby halted in his stride, half-turned and looked at his father
over his shoulder. The sneering mask was wiped from his face, which
became blank. “My lord--” he began.

The earl waved a silencing hand, and turned with dignity to Hortensia.

“Come, child,” said he. Then he remembered something. “Gad!” he
exclaimed. “I had forgot the parson. I'll have him gaoled! I'll have him
hanged if the law will help me. Come forth, man!”

Ignoring the invitation, Mr. Jenkins scuttled, ratlike, across the
room, mounted the window-seat, and was gone in a flash through the open
window. He dropped plump upon Mr. Green, who was crouching underneath.
The pair rolled over together in the mould of a flowerbed; then Mr.
Green clutched Mr. Jenkins, and Mr. Jenkins squealed like a trapped
rabbit. Mr. Green thrust his fist carefully into the mockparson's mouth.

“Sh! You blubbering fool!” he snapped in his ear. “My business is not
with you. Lie still!”

Within the room all stood at gaze, following the sudden flight of Mr.
Jenkins. Then Lord Ostermore made as if to approach the winnow, but
Hortensia restrained him.

“Let the wretch go,” she said. “The blame is not his. What is he but my
lord's tool?” And her eyes scorched Rotherby with such a glance of
scorn as must have killed any but a shameless man. Then turning to the
demurely observant gentleman who had done her such good service, “Mr.
Caryll” she said, “I want to thank you. I want my lord, here, to thank
you.”

Mr. Caryll bowed to her. “I beg that you will not think of it,” said he.
“It is I who will remain in your debt.”

“Is your name Caryll, sir?” quoth the earl. He had a trick of fastening
upon the inconsequent, though that was scarcely the case now.

“That, my lord, is my name. I believe I have the honor of sharing it
with your lordship.”

“Ye'll belong to some younger branch of the family,” the earl supposed.

“Like enough--some outlying branch,” answered the imperturbable
Caryll--a jest which only himself could appreciate, and that bitterly.

“And how came you into this?”

Rotherby sneered audibly--in self-mockery, no doubt, as he came to
reflect that it was he, himself, had had him fetched.

“They needed another witness,” said Mr. Caryll, “and hearing there was
at the inn a gentleman newly crossed from France, his lordship no doubt
opined that a traveller, here to-day and gone for good tomorrow, would
be just the witness that he needed for the business he proposed. That
circumstance aroused my suspicions, and--”

But the earl, as usual, seemed to have fastened upon the minor point,
although again it was not so. “You are newly crossed from France?” said
he. “Ay, and your name is the same as mine. 'Twas what I was advised.”

Mr. Caryll flashed a sidelong glance at Rotherby, who had turned to
stare at his father, and in his heart he cursed the stupidity of my Lord
Ostermore. If this proposed to be a member of a conspiracy, Heaven help
that same conspiracy!

“Were you, by any chance, going to seek me in town, Mr. Caryll?”

Mr. Caryll suppressed a desire to laugh. Here was a way to deal with
State secrets. “I, my lord?” he inquired, with an assumed air of
surprise.

The earl looked at him, and from him to Rotherby, bethought himself, and
started so overtly that Rotherby's eyes grew narrow, the lines of his
mouth tightened. “Nay, of course not; of course not,” he blustered
clumsily.

But Rotherby laughed aloud. “Now what a plague is all this mystery?” he
inquired.

“Mystery?” quoth my lord. “What mystery should there be?”

“'Tis what I would fain be informed,” he answered in a voice that showed
he meant to gain the information. He sauntered forward towards Caryll,
his eye playing mockingly over this gentleman from France. “Now, sir,”
 said he, “whose messenger may you be, eh? What's all this--”

“Rotherby!” the earl interrupted in a voice intended to be compelling.
“Come away, Mr. Caryll,” he added quickly. “I'll not have any gentleman
who has shown himself a friend to my ward, here, affronted by that
rascal. Come away, sir!”

“Not so fast! Not so fast, ecod!”

It was another voice that broke in upon them. Rotherby started round.
Gaskell, in the shadows of the cowled fireplace jumped in sheer alarm.
All stared at the window whence the voice proceeded.

They beheld a plump, chubby-faced little man, astride the sill, a pistol
displayed with ostentation in his hand.

Mr. Caryll was the only one with the presence of mind to welcome him.
“Ha!” said he, smiling engagingly. “My little friend, the brewer of
ale.”

“Let no one leave this room,” said Mr. Green with a great dignity. Then,
with rather less dignity, he whistled shrilly through his fingers, and
got down lightly into the room.

“Sir,” blustered the earl, “this is an intrusion; an impertinence. What
do you want?”

“The papers this gentleman carries,” said Mr. Green, indicating Caryll
with the hand that held the pistol. The earl looked alarmed, which was
foolish in him, thought Mr. Caryll. Rotherby covered his mouth with his
hand, after the fashion of one who masks a smile.

“Ye're rightly served for meddling,” said he with relish.

“Out with them,” the chubby man demanded. “Ye'll gain nothing by
resistance. So don't be obstinate, now.”

“I could be nothing so discourteous,” said Mr. Caryll. “Would it be
prying on my part to inquire what may be your interest in my papers?”

His serenity lessened the earl's anxieties, but bewildered him; and it
took the edge off the malicious pleasure which Rotherby was beginning to
experience.

“I am obeying the orders of my Lord Carteret, the Secretary of State,”
 said Mr. Green. “I was to watch for a gentleman from France with letters
for my Lord Ostermore. He had a messenger a week ago to tell him to look
for such a visitor. He took the messenger, if you must know, and--well,
we induced him to tell us what was the message he had carried. There is
so much mystery in all this that my Lord Carteret desires more knowledge
on the subject. I think you are the gentleman I am looking for.”

Mr. Caryll looked him over with an amused eye, and laughed. “It
distresses me,” said he, “to see so much good thought wasted.”

Mr. Green was abashed a moment. But he recovered quickly; no doubt he
had met the cool type before. “Come, come!” said he. “No blustering. Out
with your papers, my fine fellow.”

The door opened, and a couple of men came in; over their shoulders, ere
the door closed again, Mr. Caryll had a glimpse of the landlady's rosy
face, alarm in her glance. The newcomers were dirty rogues; tipstaves,
recognizable at a glance. One of them wore a ragged bob-wig--the
cast-off, no doubt, of some gentleman's gentleman, fished out of the
sixpenny tub in Rosemary Lane; it was ill-fitting, and wisps of the
fellow's own unkempt hair hung out in places. The other wore no wig at
all; his yellow thatch fell in streaks from under his shabby hat, which
he had the ill-manners to retain until Lord Ostermore knocked it from
his head with a blow of his cane. Both were fierily bottle-nosed, and
neither appeared to have shaved for a week or so.

“Now,” quoth Mr. Green, “will you hand them over of your own accord, or
must I have you searched?” And a wave of the hand towards the advancing
myrmidons indicated the searchers.

“You go too far, sir,” blustered the earl.

“Ay, surely,” put in Mr. Caryll. “You are mad to think a gentleman is
to submit to being searched by any knave that comes to him with a
cock-and-bull tale about the Secretary of State.”

Mr. Green leered again, and produced a paper. “There,” said he, “is my
Lord Carteret's warrant, signed and sealed.”

Mr. Caryll glanced over it with a disdainful eye. “It is in blank,” said
he.

“Just so,” agreed Mr. Green. “Carte blanche, as you say over the water.
If you insist,” he offered obligingly, “I'll fill in your name before we
proceed.”

Mr. Caryll shrugged his shoulders. “It might be well,” said he, “if you
are to search me at all.”

Mr. Green advanced to the table. The writing implements provided for the
wedding were still there. He took up a pen, scrawled a name across the
blank, dusted it with sand, and presented it again to Mr. Caryll. The
latter nodded.

“I'll not trouble you to search me,” said he. “I would as soon not have
these noblemen of yours for my valets.” He thrust his hands into the
pockets of his fine coat, and brought forth several papers. These
he proffered to Mr. Green, who took them between satisfaction and
amazement. Ostermore stared, too stricken for words at this meek
surrender; and well was it for Mr. Caryll that he was so stricken, for
had he spoken he had assuredly betrayed himself.

Hortensia, Mr. Caryll observed, watched his cowardly yielding with an
eye of stern contempt. Rotherby looked on with a dark face that betrayed
nothing.

Meanwhile Mr. Green was running through the papers, and as fast as he
ran through them he permitted himself certain comments that passed for
humor with his followers. There could be no doubt that in his own social
stratum Mr. Green must have been accounted something of a wag.

“Ha! What's this? A bill! A bill for snuff! My Lord Carteret'll snuff
you, sir. He'll tobacco you, ecod! He'll smoke you first, and snuff you
afterwards.” He flung the bill aside. “Phew!” he whistled. “Verses! 'To
Theocritus upon sailing for Albion.' That's mighty choice! D'ye write
verses, sir?”

“Heyday! 'Tis an occupation to which I have succumbed in moments of
weakness. I crave your indulgence, Mr. Green.”

Mr. Green perceived that here was a weak attempt at irony, and went on
with his investigations. He came to the last of the papers Mr. Caryll
had handed him, glanced at it, swore coarsely, and dropped it.

“D'ye think ye can bubble me?'” he cried, red in the face.

Lord Ostermore heaved a sigh of relief; the hard look had faded from
Hortensia's eyes.

“What is't ye mean, giving me this rubbish?”

“I offer you my excuses for the contents of my pockets,” said Mr.
Caryll. “Ye see, I did not expect to be honored by your inquisition. Had
I but known--”

Mr. Green struck an attitude. “Now attend to me, sir! I am a servant of
His Majesty's Government.”

“His Majesty's Government cannot be sufficiently congratulated,” said
Mr. Caryll, the irrepressible.

Mr. Green banged the table. “Are ye rallying me, ecod!”

“You have upset the ink,” Mr. Caryll pointed out to him.

“Damn the ink!” swore the spy. “And damn you for a Tom o' Bedlam! I ask
you again--what d'ye mean, giving me this rubbish?”

“You asked me to turn out my pockets.”

“I asked you for the letter ye have brought Lord Ostermore.”

“I am sorry,” said Mr. Caryll, and eyed the other sympathetically. “I
am sorry to disappoint you. But, then, you assumed too much when you
assumed that I had such a letter. I have obliged you to the fullest
extent in my power. I do not think you show a becoming gratitude.”

Mr. Green eyed him blankly a moment; then exploded. “Ecod, sir! You are
cool.”

“It is a condition we do not appear to share.”

“D'ye say ye've brought his lordship no letter from France?” thundered
the spy. “What else ha' ye come to England for?”

“To study manners, sir,” said Mr. Caryll, bowing.

That was the last drop in the cup of Mr. Green's endurance. He waved his
men towards the gentleman from France. “Find it,” he bade them shortly.

Mr. Caryll drew himself up with a great dignity, and waved the bailiffs
back, his white face set, an unpleasant glimmer in his eyes. “A moment!”
 he cried. “You have no authority to go to such extremes. I make no
objection to being searched; but every objection to being soiled, and
I'll not have the fingers of these scavengers about my person.”

“And you are right, egad!” cried Lord Ostermore, advancing. “Harkee, you
dirty spy, this is no way to deal with gentlemen. Be off, now, and take
your carrion-crows with you, or I'll have my grooms in with their whips
to you.”

“To me?” roared Green. “I represent the Secretary of State.”

“Ye'll represent a side of raw venison if you tarry here,” the earl
promised him. “D'ye dare look me in the eye? D'ye dare, ye rogue? D'ye
know who I am? And don't wag that pistol, my fine fellow! Be off, now!
Away with you!”

Mr. Green looked his name. The rosiness was all departed from his
cheeks; he quivered with suppressed wrath. “If I go--giving way to
constraint--what shall you say to my Lord Carteret?” he asked.

“What concern may that be of yours, sirrah?''

“It will be some concern of yours, my lord.”

Mr. Caryll interposed. “The knave is right,” said he. “It were to
implicate your lordship. It were to give color to his silly suspicions.
Let him make his search. But be so good as to summon my valet. He shall
hand you my garments that you may do your will upon them. But unless you
justify yourself by finding the letter you are seeking, you shall have
to reckon with the consequences of discomposing a gentleman for nothing.
Now, sir! Is it a bargain?” Mr. Green looked him over, and if he
was shaken by the calm assurance of Mr. Caryll's tone and manner, he
concealed it very effectively. “We'll make no bargains,” said he.
“I have my duty to do.” He signed to one of the bailiffs. “Fetch the
gentleman's servant,” said he.

“So be it,” said Mr. Caryll. “But you take too much upon yourself, sir.
Your duty, I think, would have been to arrest me and carry me to
Lord Carteret's, there to be searched if his lordship considered it
necessary.”

“I have no cause to arrest you until I find it,” Mr. Green snapped
impatiently.

“Your logic is faultless.”

“I am following my Lord Carteret's orders to the letter. I am to effect
no arrest until I have positive evidence.”

“Yet you are detaining me. What does this amount to but an arrest?”

Mr. Green disdained to answer. Leduc entered, and Mr. Caryll turned to
Lord Ostermore.

“There is no reason why I should detain your lordship,” said he, “and
these operations--The lady--” He waved an expressive hand, bent an
expressive eye upon the earl.

Lord Ostermore seemed to waver. He was not--he had never been--a man to
think for others. But Hortensia cut in before he could reply.

“We will wait,” she said. “Since you are travelling to town, I am sure
his lordship will be glad of your company, sir.”

Mr. Caryll looked deep into those great brown eyes, and bowed his
thanks. “If it will not discompose your lordship--”

“No, no,” said Ostermore, gruff of voice and manner. “We will wait. I
shall be honored, sir, if you will journey with us afterwards.”

Mr. Caryll bowed again, and went to hold the door for them, Mr. Green's
eyes keenly alert for an attempt at evasion. But there was none. When
his lordship and his ward had departed, Mr. Caryll turned to Rotherby,
who had taken a chair, his man Gaskell behind him. He looked from the
viscount to Mr. Green.

“Do we require this gentleman?” he asked the spy.

A smile broke over Rotherby's swam face. “By your leave, sir, I'll
remain to see fair play. You may find me useful, Mr. Green. I have no
cause to wish this marplot well,” he explained.

Mr. Caryll turned his back upon him, took off his coat and waistcoat. He
sat down while Mr. Green spread the garments upon the table, emptied out
the pockets, turned down the cuffs, ripped up the satin linings. He did
it in a consummate fashion, very thoroughly. Yet, though he parted
the linings from the cloth, he did so in such a manner as to leave the
garments easily repairable.

Mr. Caryll watched him with interest and appreciation, and what time he
watched he was wondering might it not be better straightway to place
the spy in possession of the letter, and thus destroy himself and Lord
Ostermore, at the same time--and have done with the task on which he
was come to England. It seemed almost an easy way out of the affair. His
betrayal of the earl would be less ugly if he, himself, were to share
the consequences of that betrayal.

Then he checked his thoughts. What manner of mood was this? Besides,
his inclination was all to become better acquainted with this odd family
upon which he had stumbled in so extraordinary a manner. Down in his
heart of hearts he had a feeling that the thing he was come to do would
never be done--leastways, not by him. It was in vain that he might
attempt to steel himself to the task. It repelled him. It went not with
a nature such as his.

He thought of Everard, afire with the idea of vengence and to such an
extent that he had succeeded in infecting Justin himself with a spark
of it. He thought of him with pity almost; pity that a man should obsess
his life by such a phantasm as this same vengeance must have been to
him. Was it worth while? Was anything worth while, he wondered.

Lord Rotherby approached the table, and took up the garments upon which
Mr. Green had finished. He turned them over and supplemented Mr. Green's
search.

“Ye're welcome to all that ye can find,” sneered Mr. Green, and turned
to Mr. Caryll. “Let us have your shoes, sir.”

Mr. Caryll removed his shoes, in silence, and Mr. Green proceeded to
examine them in a manner that provoked Mr. Caryll's profound admiration.
He separated the lining from the Spanish leather, and probed slowly
and carefully in the space between. He examined the heels very closely,
going over to the window for the purpose. That done, he dropped them.

“Your breeches now,” said he laconically.

Meanwhile Leduc had taken up the coat, and with a needle and thread
wherewith he had equipped himself he was industriously restoring the
stitches that Mr. Green had taken out.

Mr. Caryll surrendered his breeches. His fine Holland shirt went next,
his stockings and what other trifles he wore, until he stood as naked as
Adam before the fall. Yet all in vain.

His garments were restored to him, one by one, and one by one, with
Leduc's aid, he resumed them. Mr. Green was looking crestfallen.

“Are you satisfied?” inquired Mr. Caryll pleasantly, his good temper
inexhaustible.

The spy looked at him with a moody eye, plucking thoughtfully at his lip
with thumb and forefinger. Then he brightened suddenly. “There's your
man,” said he, flashing a quick eye upon Leduc, who looked up with a
quiet smile.

“True,” said Mr. Caryll, “and there's my portmantle above-stairs, and
my saddle on my horse in the stables. It is even possible, for aught you
know, that there may be a hollow tooth or two in my head. Pray let your
search be thorough.”

Mr. Green considered him again. “If you had it, it would be upon your
person.”

“Yet consider,” Mr. Caryll begged him, holding out his foot that Leduc
might put on his shoe again, “I might have supposed that you would
suppose that, and disposed accordingly. You had better investigate to
the bitter end.”

Mr. Green's small eyes continued to scrutinize Leduc at intervals. The
valet was a silent, serious-faced fellow. “I'll search your servant,
leastways,” the spy announced.

“By all means. Leduc, I beg that you will place yourself at this
interesting gentleman's disposal.”

What time Mr. Caryll, unaided now, completed the resumption of his
garments, Leduc, silent and expressionless, submitted to being searched.

“You will observe, Leduc,” said Mr. Caryll, “that we have not come
to this country in vain. We are undergoing experiences that would be
interesting if they were not quite so dull, amusing if they entailed
less discomfort to ourselves. Assuredly, it was worth while to cross
to England to study manners. And there are sights for you that you
will never see in France. You would not, for instance, had you not come
hither, have had an opportunity of observing a member of the noblesse
seconding and assisting a tipstaff in the discharge of his duty. And
doing it just as a hog wallows in foulness--for the love of it.

“The gentlemen in your country, Leduc, are too fastidious to enjoy life
as it should be enjoyed; they are too prone to adhere to the amusements
of their class. You have here an opportunity of perceiving how deeply
they are mistaken, what relish may lie in setting one's rank on one
side, in forgetting at times that by an accident--a sheer, incredible
accident, I assure you, Leduc--one may have been born to a gentleman's
estate.”

Rotherby had drawn himself up, his dark face crimsoning.

“D'ye talk at me, sir?” he demanded. “D'ye dare discuss me with your
lackey?”

“But why not, since you search me with my tipstaff! If you can perceive
a difference, you are too subtle for me, sir.”

Rotherby advanced a step; then checked. He inherited mental sluggishness
from his father. “You are insolent!” he charged Caryll. “You insult me.”

“Indeed! Ha! I am working miracles.”

Rotherby governed his anger by an effort. “There was enough between us
without this,” said he.

“There could not be too much between us--too much space, I mean.”

The viscount looked at him furiously. “I shall discuss this further with
you,” said he. “The present is not the time nor place. But I shall know
where to look for you.”

“Leduc, I am sure, will always be pleased to see you. He, too, is
studying manners.”

Rotherby ignored the insult. “We shall see, then, whether you can do
anything more than talk.”

“I hope that your lordship, too, is master of other accomplishments. As
a talker, I do not find you very gifted. But perhaps Leduc will be less
exigent than I.”

“Bah!” his lordship flung at him, and went out, cursing him profusely,
Gaskell following at his master's heels.




CHAPTER V. MOONSHINE

My Lord Ostermore, though puzzled, entertained no tormenting anxiety
on the score of the search to which Mr. Caryll was to be submitted. He
assured himself from that gentleman's confident, easy manner--being a
man who always drew from things the inference that was obvious--that
either he carried no such letter as my lord expected, or else he had so
disposed of it as to baffle search.

So, for the moment, he dismissed the subject from his mind. With
Hortensia he entered the parlor across the stone-flagged passage, to
which the landlady ushered them, and turned whole-heartedly to the
matter of his ward's elopement with his son.

“Hortensia,” said he, when they were alone. “You have been foolish; very
foolish.” He had a trick of repeating himself, conceiving, no doubt,
that the commonplace achieves distinction by repetition.

Hortensia sat in an arm-chair by the window, and sighed, looking out
over the downs. “Do I not know it?” she cried, and the eyes which were
averted from his lordship were charred with tears--tears of hot anger,
shame and mortification. “God help all women!” she added bitterly, after
a moment, as many another woman under similar and worse circumstances
has cried before and since.

A more feeling man might have conceived that this was a moment in which
to leave her to herself and her own thoughts, and in that it is possible
that a more feeling man had been mistaken. Ostermore, stolid and
unimaginative, but not altogether without sympathy for his ward, of whom
he was reasonably fond--as fond, no doubt, as it was his capacity to be
for any other than himself--approached her and set a plump hand upon the
back of her chair.

“What was it drove you to this?”

She turned upon him almost fiercely. “My Lady Ostermore,” she answered
him.

His lordship frowned, and his eyes shifted uneasily from her face. In
his heart he disliked his wife excessively, disliked her because she was
the one person in the world who governed him, who rode rough-shod over
his feelings and desires; because, perhaps, she was the mother of his
unfeeling, detestable son. She may not have been the only person living
to despise Lord Ostermore; but she was certainly the only one with the
courage to manifest her contempt, and that in no circumscribed terms.
And yet, disliking her as he did, returning with interest her contempt
of him, he veiled it, and was loyal to his termagant, never suffering
himself to utter a complaint of her to others, never suffering others to
censure her within his hearing. This loyalty may have had its roots in
pride--indeed, no other soil can be assigned to them--a pride that would
allow no strangers to pry into the sore places of his being. He frowned
now to hear Hortensia's angry mention of her ladyship's name; and if his
blue eyes moved uneasily under his beetling brows, it was because the
situation irked him. How should he stand as judge between Mistress
Winthrop--towards whom, as we have seen, he had a kindness--and his
wife, whom he hated, yet towards whom he would not be disloyal?

He wished the subject dropped, since, did he ask the obvious
question--in what my Lady Ostermore could have been the cause of
Hortensia's flight--he would provoke, he knew, a storm of censure from
his wife. Therefore he fell silent.

Hortensia, however, felt that she had said too much not to say more.

“Her ladyship has never failed to make me feel my position--my--my
poverty,” she pursued. “There is no slight her ladyship has not put upon
me, until not even your servants use me with the respect that is due
to my father's daughter. And my father,” she added, with a reproachful
glance, “was your friend, my lord.”

He shifted uncomfortably on his feet, deploring now the question with
which he had fired the train of feminine complaint. “Pish, pish!” he
deprecated, “'tis fancy, child--pure fancy!”

“So her Ladyship would say, did you tax her with it. Yet your lordship
knows I am not fanciful in other things. Should I, then, be fanciful in
this?”

“But what has her ladyship ever done, child?” he demanded, thinking
thus to baffle her--since he was acquainted with the subtlety of her
ladyship's methods.

“A thousand things,” replied Hortensia hotly, “and yet not one upon
which I may fasten. 'Tis thus she works: by words, half-words, looks,
sneers, shrugs, and sometimes foul abuse entirely disproportionate to
the little cause I may unwittingly have given.”

“Her ladyship is a little hot,” the earl admitted, “but a good heart;
'tis an excellent heart, Hortensia.”

“For hating-ay, my lord.”

“Nay, plague on't! That's womanish in you. 'Pon honor it is! Womanish!”

“What else would you have a woman? Mannish and raffish, like my Lady
Ostermore?”

“I'll not listen to you,” he said. “Ye're not just, Hortensia. Ye're
heated; heated! I'll not listen to you. Besides, when all is said, what
reasons be these for the folly ye've committed?”

“Reasons?” she echoed scornfully. “Reasons and to spare! Her ladyship
has made my life so hard, has so shamed and crushed me, put such
indignities upon me, that existence grew unbearable under your roof. It
could not continue, my lord,” she pursued, rising under the sway of her
indignation. “It could not continue. I am not of the stuff that goes
to making martyrs. I am weak, and--and--as your lordship has
said--womanish.”

“Indeed, you talk a deal,” said his lordship peevishly. But she did not
heed the sarcasm.

“Lord Rotherby,” she continued, “offered me the means to escape. He
urged me to elope with him. His reason was that you would never consent
to our marriage; but that if we took the matter into our hands, and were
married first, we might depend upon your sanction afterwards; that you
had too great a kindness for me to withhold your pardon. I was weak, my
lord--womanish,” (she threw the word at him again) “and it happened--God
help me for a fool!--that I thought I loved Lord Rotherby. And so--and
so--”

She sat down again, weakly, miserably, averting her face that she might
hide her tears. He was touched, and he even went so far as to show
something of his sympathy. He approached her again, and laid a benign
hand lightly upon her shoulder.

“But--but--in that case--Oh, the damned villain!--why this mock-parson?”

“Does your lordship not perceive? Must I die of shame? Do you not see?”

“See? No!” He was thoughtful a second; then repeated, “No!”

“I understood,” she informed him, a smile--a cruelly bitter
smile--lifting and steadying the corner of her lately quivering lip,
“when he alluded to your lordship's straitened circumstances. He has no
disinheritance to fear because he has no inheritance to look for beyond
the entail, of which you cannot disinherit him. My Lord Rotherby sets a
high value upon himself. He may--I do not know--he may have been in
love with me--though not as I know love, which is all sacrifice, all
self-denial. But by his lights he may have cared for me; he must have
done, by his lights. Had I been a lady of fortune, not a doubt but he
would have made me his wife; as it was, he must aim at a more profitable
marriage, and meanwhile, to gratify his love for me--base as it was--he
would--he would--O God! I cannot say it. You understand, my lord.”

My lord swore strenuously. “There is a punishment for such a crime as
this.”

“Ay, my lord--and a way to avoid punishment for a gentleman in your
son's position, even did I flaunt my shame in some vain endeavor to have
justice--a thing he knew I never could have done.”

My lord swore again. “He shall be punished,” he declared emphatically.

“No doubt. God will see to that,” she said, a world of faith in her
quivering voice.

My lord's eyes expressed his doubt of divine intervention. He preferred
to speak for himself. “I'll disown the dog. He shall not enter my house
again. You shall not be reminded of what has happened here. Gad! You
were shrewd to have smoked his motives so!” he cried in a burst of
admiration for her insight. “Gad, child! Shouldst have been a lawyer! A
lawyer!”

“If it had not been for Mr. Caryll--” she began, but to what else she
said he lent no ear, being suddenly brought back to his fears at the
mention of that gentleman's name.

“Mr. Caryll! Save us! What is keeping him?” he cried. “Can they--can
they--”

The door opened, and Mr. Caryll walked in, ushered by the hostess. Both
turned to confront him, Hortensia's eyes swollen from her weeping.

“Well?” quoth his lordship. “Did they find nothing?”

Mr. Caryll advanced with the easy, graceful carriage that was one of his
main charms, his clothes so skilfully restored by Leduc that none could
have guessed the severity of the examination they had undergone.

“Since I am here, and alone, your lordship may conclude such to be the
case. Mr. Green is preparing for departure. He is very abject;
very chap-fallen. I am almost sorry for Mr. Green. I am by nature
sympathetic. I have promised to make my complaint to my Lord Carteret.
And so, I trust there is an end to a tiresome matter.”

“But then, sir?” quoth his lordship. “But then--are you the bearer of no
letter?”

Mr. Caryll shot a swift glance over his shoulder at the door. He
deliberately winked at the earl. “Did your lordship expect letters?”
 he inquired. “That was scarcely reason enough to suppose me a courier.
There is some mistake, I imagine.”

Between the wink and the words his lordship was bewildered.

Mr. Caryll turned to the lady, bowing. Then he waved a hand over the
downs. “A fine view,” said he airily, and she stared at him. “I shall
treasure sweet memories of Maidstone.” Her stare grew stonier. Did
he mean the landscape or some other matter? His tone was difficult to
read--a feature peculiar to his tone.

“Not so shall I, sir,” she made answer. “I shall never think of it other
than with burning cheeks--unless it be with gratitude to your shrewdness
which saved me.”

“No more, I beg. It is a matter painful to you to dwell on. Let me
exhort you to forget it. I have already done so.”

“That is a sweet courtesy in you.”

“I am compounded of sweet courtesy,” he informed her modestly.

His lordship spoke of departure, renewing his offer to carry Mr. Caryll
to town in his chaise. Meanwhile, Mr. Caryll was behaving curiously. He
was tiptoeing towards the door, along the wall, where he was out of line
with the keyhole. He reached it suddenly, and abruptly pulled it open.
There was a squeal, and Mr. Green rolled forward into the room. Mr.
Caryll kicked him out again before he could rise, and called Leduc
to throw him outside. And that was the last they saw of Mr. Green at
Maidstone.

They set out soon afterwards, Mr. Caryll travelling in his lordship's
chaise, and Leduc following in his master's.

It was an hour or so after candle-lighting time when they reached
Croydon, the country lying all white under a full moon that sailed in
a clear, calm sky. His lordship swore that he would go no farther that
night. The travelling fatigued him; indeed, for the last few miles
of the journey he had been dozing in his corner of the carriage,
conversation having long since been abandoned as too great an effort
on so bad a road, which shook and jolted them beyond endurance. His
lordship's chaise was of an old-fashioned pattern, and the springs
far from what might have been desired or expected in a nobleman's
conveyance.

They alighted at the “Bells.” His lordship bespoke supper, invited Mr.
Caryll to join them, and, what time the meal was preparing, went into a
noisy doze in the parlor's best chair.

Mistress Winthrop sauntered out into the garden. The calm and fragrance
of the night invited her. Alone with her thoughts, she paced the lawn a
while, until her solitude was disturbed by the advent of Mr. Caryll. He,
too, had need to think, and he had come out into the peace of the night
to indulge his need. Seeing her, he made as if to withdraw again; but
she perceived him, and called him to her side. He went most readily. Yet
when he stood before her in an attitude of courteous deference, she was
at a loss what she should say to him, or, rather, what words she should
employ. At last, with a half-laugh of nervousness, “I am by nature very
inquisitive, sir,” she prefaced.

“I had already judged you to be an exceptional woman,” Mr. Caryll
commented softly.

She mused an instant. “Are you never serious?” she asked him.

“Is it worth while?” he counter-questioned, and, whether intent or
accident, he let her see something of himself. “Is it even amusing--to
be serious?”

“Is there in life nothing but amusement?”

“Oh, yes--but nothing so vital. I speak with knowledge. The gift of
laughter has been my salvation.”

“From what, sir?”

“Ah--who shall say that? My history and my rearing have been such that
had I bowed before them, I had become the most gloomy, melancholy man
that steps this gloomy, melancholy world. By now I might have found
existence insupportable, and so--who knows? I might have set a term to
it. But I had the wisdom to prefer laughter. Humanity is a delectable
spectacle if we but have the gift to observe it in a dispassionate
spirit. Such a gift have I cultivated. The squirming of the human worm
is interesting to observe, and the practice of observing it has this
advantage, that while we observe it we forget to squirm ourselves.”

“The bitterness of your words belies their purport.”

He shrugged and smiled. “But proves my contention. That I might explain
myself, you made me for a moment serious, set me squirming in my turn.”

She moved a little, and he fell into step beside her. A little while
there was silence.

Presently--“You find me, no doubt, as amusing as any other of your human
worms,” said she.

“God forbid!” he answered soberly.

She laughed. “You make an exception in my case, then. That is a subtle
flattery!”

“Have I not said that I had judged you to be an exceptional woman?”

“Exceptionally foolish, not a doubt.”

“Exceptionally beautiful; exceptionally admirable,” he corrected.

“A clumsy compliment, devoid of wit!”

“When we grow truthful, it may be forgiven us if we fall short of wit.”

“That were an argument in favor of avoiding truth.”

“Were it necessary,” said he. “For truth is seldom so intrusive as to
need avoiding. But we are straying. There was a score upon which
you were inquisitive, you said; from which I take it that you sought
knowledge at my hands. Pray seek it; I am a well, of knowledge.”

“I desired to know--Nay, but I have asked you already. I desired to know
did you deem me a very pitiful little fool?”

They had reached the privet hedge, and turned. They paused now before
resuming their walk. He paused, also, before replying. Then:

“I should judge you wise in most things,” he answered slowly,
critically. “But in the matter to which I owe the blessing of having
served you, I do not think you wise. Did you--do you love Lord
Rotherby?”

“What if so?”

“After what you have learned, I should account you still less wise.”

“You are impertinent, sir,” she reproved him.

“Nay, most pertinent. Did you not ask me to sit in judgment upon this
matter? And unless you confess to me, how am I to absolve you?”

“I did not crave your absolution. You take too much upon yourself.”

“So said Lord Rotherby. You seem to have something in common when all is
said.”

She bit her lip in chagrin. They paced in silence to the lawn's end, and
turned again. Then: “You treat me like a fool,” she reproved him.

“How is that possible, when, already I think I love you.”

She started from him, and stared at him for a long moment. “You insult
me!” she cried angrily, conceiving that she understood his mind. “Do
you think that because I may have committed a folly I have forfeited all
claim to be respected--that I am a subject for insolent speeches?”

“You are illogical,” said Mr. Caryll, the imperturbable. “I have told
you that I love you. Should I insult the woman I have said I love?”

“You love me?” She looked at him, her face very white in the white
moonlight, her lips parted, a kindling anger in her eyes. “Are you mad?”

“I a'n't sure. There have been moments when I have almost feared it.
This is not one of them.”

“You wish me to think you serious?” She laughed a thought stridently in
her indignation. “I have known you just four hours,” said she.

“Precisely the time I think I have loved you.”

“You think?” she echoed scornfully. “Oh, you make that reservation! You
are not quite sure?”

“Can we be sure of anything?” he deprecated.

“Of some things,” she answered icily. “And I am sure of one--that I am
beginning to understand you.”

“I envy you. Since that is so, help me--of your charity!--to understand
myself.”

“Then understand yourself for an impudent, fleering coxcomb,” she flung
at him, and turned to leave him.

“That is not explanation,” said Mr. Caryll thoughtfully. “It is mere
abuse.”

“What else do you deserve?” she asked him over her shoulder. “That you
should have dared!” she withered him.

“To love you quite so suddenly?” he inquired, and misquoted: “'Whoever
loved at all, that loved not at first sight?' Hortensia!”

“You have not the right to my name, sir.”

“Yet I offer you the right to mine,” he answered, with humble reproach.

“You shall be punished,” she promised him, and in high dudgeon left him.

“Punished? Oh, cruel! Can you then be--

      “'Unsoft to him who's smooth to thee?
        Tigers and bears, I've heard some say,
        For proffered love will love repay.”'

But she was gone. He looked up at the moon, and took it into his
confidence to reproach it. “'Twas your white face beglamored me,”
 he told it aloud. “See, how execrable a beginning I've made, and,
therefore, how excellent!” And he laughed, but entirely without mirth.

He remained pacing in the moonlight, very thoughtful, and, for once,
it seemed, not at all amused. His life appeared to be tangling itself
beyond unravelling, and his vaunted habit of laughter scarce served at
present to show him the way out.




CHAPTER VI. HORTENSIA'S RETURN


Mr. Caryll needs explaining as he walks there in the moonlight; that
is, if we are at all to understand him--a matter by no means easy,
considering that he has confessed he did not understand himself. Did
ever man make a sincere declaration of sudden passion as flippantly as
he had done, or in terms-better calculated to alienate the regard he
sought to win? Did ever man choose his time with less discrimination,
or his words with less discretion? Assuredly not. To suppose that Mr.
Caryll was unaware of this, would be to suppose him a fool, and that he
most certainly was not.

His mood was extremely complex; its analysis, I fear, may baffle us.
It must have seemed to you--as it certainly seemed to Mistress
Winthrop--that he made a mock of her; that in truth he was the impudent,
fleering coxcomb she pronounced him, and nothing more. Not so. Mock he
most certainly did; but his mockery was all aimed to strike himself on
the recoil--himself and the sentiments which had sprung to being in his
soul, and to which--nameless as he was, pledged as he was to a task that
would most likely involve his ruin--he conceived that he had no right.
He gave expression to his feelings, yet chose for them the expression
best calculated to render them barren of all consequence where Mistress
Winthrop was concerned. Where another would have hidden those emotions,
Mr. Caryll elected to flaunt them half-derisively, that Hortensia might
trample them under foot in sheer disgust.

It was, perhaps, the knowledge that did he wait, and come to her as an
honest, devout lover, he must in honesty tell her all there was to know
of his odd history and of his bastardy, and thus set up between them a
barrier insurmountable. Better, he may have thought, to make from the
outset a mockery of a passion for which there could be no hope. And so,
under that mocking, impertinent exterior, I hope you catch some glimpse
of the real, suffering man--the man who boasted that he had the gift of
laughter.

He continued a while to pace the dewy lawn after she had left him, and
a deep despondency descended upon the spirit of this man who accounted
seriousness a folly. Hitherto his rancor against his father had been a
theoretical rancor, a thing educated into him by Everard, and accepted
by him as we accept a proposition in Euclid that is proved to us. In its
way it had been a make-believe rancor, a rancor on principle, for he had
been made to see that unless he was inflamed by it, he was not worthy
to be his mother's son. Tonight had changed all this. No longer was his
grievance sentimental, theoretical or abstract. It was suddenly become
real and very bitter. It was no longer a question of the wrong done his
mother thirty years ago; it became the question of a wrong done himself
in casting him nameless upon the world, a thing of scorn to cruel,
unjust humanity. Could Mistress Winthrop have guessed the bitter
self-derision with which he had, in apparent levity, offered her his
name, she might have felt some pity for him who had no pity for himself.

And so, to-night he felt--as once for a moment Everard had made him
feel--that he had a very real wrong of his own to avenge upon his
father; and the task before him lost much of the repugnance that it had
held for him hitherto.

All this because four hours ago he had looked into the brown depths of
Mistress Winthrop's eyes. He sighed, and declaimed a line of Congreve's:

“'Woman is a fair image in a pool; who leaps at it is sunk.'”

The landlord came to bid him in to supper. He excused himself. Sent his
lordship word that he was over-tired, and went off to bed.

They met at breakfast, at an early hour upon the morrow, Mistress
Winthrop cool and distant; his lordship grumpy and mute; Mr. Caryll
airy and talkative as was his habit. They set out soon afterwards. But
matters were nowise improved. His lordship dozed in a corner of the
carriage, while Mistress Winthrop found more interest in the flowering
hedgerows than in Mr. Caryll, ignored him when he talked, and did not
answer him when he set questions; till, in the end, he, too, lapsed into
silence, and as a solatium for his soreness assured himself by lengthy,
wordless arguments that matters were best so.

They entered the outlying parts of London some two hours later, and it
still wanted an hour or so to noon when the chaise brought up inside the
railings before the earl's house in Lincoln's Inn Fields.

There came a rush of footmen, a bustle of service, amid which they
alighted and entered the splendid residence that was part of the little
that remained Lord Ostermore from the wreck his fortunes had suffered on
the shoals of the South Sea.

Mr. Caryll paused a moment to dismiss Leduc to the address in Old Palace
Yard where he had hired a lodging. That done, he followed his lordship
and Hortensia within doors.

From the inner hall a footman ushered him across an ante-chamber to
a room on the right, which proved to be the library, and was his
lordship's habitual retreat. It was a spacious, pillared chamber, very
richly panelled in damask silk, and very richly furnished, having long
French windows that opened on a terrace above the garden.

As they entered there came a swift rustle of petticoats at their heels,
and Mr. Caryll stood aside, bowing, to give passage to a tall lady who
swept by with no more regard for him than had he been one of the
house's lackeys. She was, he observed, of middle-age, lean and
aquiline-featured, with an exaggerated chin, that ended squarely as
boot. Her sallow cheeks were raddled to a hectic color, a monstrous
head-dress--like that of some horse in a lord mayor's show--coiffed
her, and her dress was a mixture of extravagance and incongruity, the
petticoat absurdly hooped.

She swept into the room like a battleship into action, and let fly her
first broadside at Mistress Winthrop from the threshold.

“Codso!” she shrilled. “You have come back! And for what have you come
back? Am I to live in the same house with you, you shameless madam--that
have no more thought for your reputation than a slut in a smock-race?”

Hortensia raised indignant eyes from out of a face that was very pale.
Her lips were tightly pressed--in resolution, thought Mr. Caryll, who
was very observant of her--not to answer her ladyship; for Mr. Caryll
had little doubt as to the identity of this dragon.

“My love--my dear--” began his lordship, advancing a step, his tone a
very salve. Then, seeking to create a diversion, he waved a hand towards
Mr. Caryll. “Let me present--”

“Did I speak to you?” she turned to bombard him. “Have you not done harm
enough? Had you been aught but a fool--had you respected me as a husband
should--you had left well alone and let her go her ways.”

“There was my duty to her father, to say aught of--”

“And what of your duty to me?” she blazed, her eyes puckering most
malignantly. She reminded Mr. Caryll of nothing so much as a vulture.
“Had ye forgotten that? Have ye no thought for decency--no respect for
your wife?”

Her strident voice was echoing through the house and drawing a little
crowd of gaping servants to the hall. To spare Mistress Winthrop, Mr.
Caryll took it upon himself to close the door. The countess turned at
the sound.

“Who is this?” she asked, measuring the elegant figure with an evil eye.
And Mr. Caryll felt it in his bones that she had done him the honor to
dislike him at sight.

“It is a gentleman who--who--” His lordship thought it better,
apparently, not to explain the exact circumstances under which he had
met the gentleman. He shifted ground. “I was about to present him,
my love. It is Mr. Caryll--Mr. Justin Caryll. This, sir, is my Lady
Ostermore.”

Mr. Caryll made her a profound bow. Her ladyship retorted with a sniff.

“Is it a kinsman of yours, my lord?” and the contempt of the question
was laden with a suggestion that smote Mr. Caryll hard. What she implied
in wanton offensive mockery was no more than he alone present knew to be
the exact and hideous truth.

“Some remote kinsman, I make no doubt,” the earl explained. “Until
yesterday I had not the honor of his acquaintance. Mr. Caryll is from
France.”

“Ye'll be a Jacobite, no doubt, then,” were her first, uncompromising
words to the guest.

Mr. Caryll made her another bow. “If I were, I should make no secret
of it with your ladyship,” he answered with that irritating suavity in
which he clothed his most obvious sarcasms.

Her ladyship opened her eyes a little wider. Here was a tone she was
unused to. “And what may your business with his lordship be?”

“His lordship's business, I think,” answered Mr. Caryll in a tone of
such exquisite politeness and deference that the words seemed purged of
all their rudeness.

“Will you answer me so, sir?” she demanded, nevertheless, her voice
quivering.

“My love!” interpolated his lordship hurriedly, his florid face aflush.
“We are vastly indebted to Mr. Caryll, as you shall learn. It was he who
saved Hortensia.”

“Saved the drab, did he? And from what, pray?”

“Madam!” It was Hortensia who spoke. She had risen, pale with anger, and
she made appeal now to her guardian. “My lord, I'll not remain to be so
spoken of. Suffer me to go. That her ladyship should so speak of me to
my face--and to a stranger!”

“Stranger!” crowed her ladyship. “Lard! And what d'ye suppose will
happen? Are you so nice about a stranger hearing what I may have to say
of you--you that will be the talk of the whole lewd town for this fine
escapade? And what'll the town say of you?”

“My love!” his lordship sought again to soothe her. “Sylvia, let me
implore you! A little moderation! A little charity! Hortensia has been
foolish. She confesses so much, herself. Yet, when all is said, 'tis not
she is to blame.”

“Am I?”

“My love! Was it suggested?”

“I marvel it was not. Indeed, I marvel! Oh, Hortensia is not to blame,
the sweet, pure dove! What is she, then?”

“To be pitied, ma'am,” said his lordship, stirred to sudden anger, “that
she should have lent an ear to your disreputable son.”

“My son? My son?” cried her ladyship, her voice more and more strident,
her face flushing till the rouge upon it was put to shame, revealed in
all its unnatural hideousness. “And is he not your son, my lord?”

“There are moments,” he answered hardily, “when I find it difficult to
believe.”

It was much for him to say, and to her ladyship, of all people. It was
pure mutiny. She gasped for air; pumped her brain for words. Meantime,
his lordship continued with an eloquence entirely unusual in him and
prompted entirely by his strong feelings in the matter of his son. “He
is a disgrace to his name! He always has been. When a boy, he was a liar
and a thief, and had he had his deserts he had been lodged in Newgate
long ago--or worse. Now that he's a man, he's an abandoned profligate, a
brawler, a drunkard, a rakehell. So much I have long known him for; but
to-day he has shown himself for something even worse. I had thought that
my ward, at least, had been sacred from his villainy. That is the last
drop. I'll not condone it. Damn me! I can't condone it. I'll disown him.
He shall not set foot in house of mine again. Let him keep the company
of his Grace of Wharton and his other abandoned friends of the Hell Fire
Club; he keeps not mine. He keeps not mine, I say!”

Her ladyship swallowed hard. From red that she had been, she was now
ashen under her rouge. “And, is this wanton baggage to keep mine? Is she
to disgrace a household that has grown too nice to contain your son?”

“My lord! Oh, my lord, give me leave to go,” Hortensia entreated.

“Ay, go,” sneered her ladyship. “Go! You had best go--back to him. What
for did ye leave him? Did ye dream there could be aught to return to?”

Hortensia turned to her guardian again appealingly. But her ladyship
bore down upon her, incensed by this ignoring; she caught the girl's
wrist in her claw-like hand. “Answer me, you drab! What for did you
return? What is to be done with you now that y' are soiled goods? Where
shall we find a husband for you?”

“I do not want a husband, madam,” answered Hortensia.

“Will ye lead apes in hell, then? Bah! 'Tis not what ye want, my fine
madam; 'tis what we can get you; and where shall we find you a husband
now?”

Her eye fell upon Mr. Caryll, standing by one of the windows, a look
of profound disgust overplaying the usually immobile face. “Perhaps the
gentleman from France--the gentleman who saved you,” she sneered, “will
propose to take the office.”

“With all my heart, ma'am,” Mr. Caryll startled them and himself
by answering. Then, perceiving that he had spoken too much upon
impulse--given utterance to what was passing in his mind--“I but mention
it to show your ladyship how mistaken are your conclusions,” he added.

The countess loosed her hold of Hortensia's wrist in her amazement,
and looked the gentleman from France up and down in a mighty scornful
manner. “Codso!” she swore, “I may take it, then, that your saving
her--as ye call it--was no accident.”

“Indeed it was, ma'am--and a most fortunate accident for your son.”

“For my son? As how?”

“It saved him from hanging, ma'am,” Mr. Caryll informed her, and gave
her something other than the baiting of Hortensia to occupy her mind.

“Hang?” she gasped. “Are you speaking of Lord Rotherby?”

“Ay, of Lord Rotherby--and not a word more than is true,” put in the
earl. “Do you know--but you do not--the extent of your precious son's
villainy? At Maidstone, where I overtook them--at the Adam and Eve--he
had a make-believe parson, and he was luring this poor child into a
mock-marriage.”

Her ladyship stared. “Mock-marriage?” she echoed. “Marriage? La!” And
again she vented her unpleasant laugh. “Did she insist on that, the
prude? Y' amaze me!”

“Surely, my love, you do not apprehend. Had Lord Rotherby's parson not
been detected and unmasked by Mr. Caryll, here--”

“Would you ha' me believe she did not know the fellow was no parson?”

“Oh!” cried Hortensia. “Your ladyship has a very wicked soul. May God
forgive you!”

“And who is to forgive you?” snapped the countess.

“I need no forgiveness, for I have done no wrong. A folly, I confess to.
I was mad to have heeded such a villain.”

Her ladyship gathered forces for a fresh assault. But Mr. Caryll
anticipated it. It was no doubt a great impertinence in him; but he
saw Hortensia's urgent need, and he felt, moreover, that not even Lord
Ostermore would resent his crossing swords a moment with her ladyship.

“You would do well, ma'am, to remember,” said he, in his singularly
precise voice, “that Lord Rotherby even now--and as things have fallen
out--is by no means quit of all danger.”

She looked at this smooth gentleman, and his words burned themselves
into her brain. She quivered with mingling fear and anger.

“Wha'--what is't ye mean?” quoth she.

“That even at this hour, if the matter were put about, his lordship
might be brought to account for it, and it might fare very ill with
him. The law of England deals heavily with an offense such as Lord
Rotherby's, and the attempt at a mock-marriage, of which there is no
lack of evidence, would so aggravate the crime of abduction, if he were
informed against, that it might go very hard with him.”

Her jaw fell. She caught more than an admonition in his words. It almost
seemed to her that he was threatening.

“Who--who is to inform?” she asked point-blank, her tone a challenge;
and yet the odd change in it from its recent aggressiveness was almost
ludicrous.

“Ah--who?” said Mr. Caryll, raising his eyes and fetching a sigh. “It
would appear that a messenger from the Secretary of State--on another
matter--was at the Adam and Eve at the time with two of his catchpolls,
and he was a witness of the whole affair. Then again,” and he waved
a hand doorwards, “servants are servants. I make no doubt they are
listening, and your ladyship's voice has scarce been controlled. You can
never say when a servant may cease to be a servant, and become an active
enemy.”

“Damn the servants!” she swore, dismissing them from consideration. “Who
is this messenger of the secretary's? Who is he?”

“He was named Green. 'Tis all I know.”

“And where may he be found?”

“I cannot say.”

She turned to Lord Ostermore. “Where is Rotherby?” she inquired. She was
a thought breathless.

“I do not know,” said he, in a voice that signified how little he cared.

“He must be found. This fellow's silence must be bought. I'll not have
my son disgraced, and gaoled, perhaps. He must be found.”

Her alarm was very real now. She moved towards the door, then
paused, and turned again. “Meantime, let your lordship consider what
dispositions you are to make for this wretched girl who is the cause of
all this garboil.”

And she swept out, slamming the door violently after her.




CHAPTER VII. FATHER AND SON


Mr. Caryll stayed to dine at Stretton House. Although they had journeyed
but from Croydon that morning, he would have preferred to have gone
first to his lodging to have made--fastidious as he was--a suitable
change in his apparel. But the urgency that his task dictated caused him
to waive the point.

He had a half-hour or so to himself after the stormy scene with her
ladyship, in which he had played again--though in a lesser degree--the
part of savior to Mistress Winthrop, a matter for which the lady had
rewarded him, ere withdrawing, with a friendly smile, which caused him
to think her disposed to forgive him his yesternight's folly.

In that half-hour he gave himself again very seriously to the
contemplation of his position. He had no illusions on the score of Lord
Ostermore, and he rated his father no higher than he deserved. But he
was just and shrewd in his judgment, and he was forced to confess that
he had found this father of his vastly different from the man he had
been led to expect. He had looked to find a debauched old rake, a vile
creature steeped in vice and wickedness. Instead, he found a weak,
easy-natured, commonplace fellow, whose worst sin seemed to be
the selfishness that is usually inseparable from those other
characteristics. If Ostermore was not a man of the type that inspires
strong affection, neither was he of the type that provokes strong
dislike. His colorless nature left one indifferent to him.

Mr. Caryll, somewhat to his dismay, found himself inclined to extend
the man some sympathy; caught himself upon the verge of pitying him for
being burdened with so very unfilial a son and so very cursed a wife. It
was one of his cherished beliefs that the evil that men do has a trick
of finding them out in this life, and here, he believed, as shrew-ridden
husband and despised father, the Earl of Ostermore was being made to
expiate that sin of his early years.

Another of Mr. Caryll's philosophies was that, when all is said, man is
little of a free agent. His viciousness or sanctity is temperamental;
and not the man, but his nature--which is not self-imbued--must bear the
responsibility of a man's deeds, be they good or bad.

In the abstract such beliefs are well enough; they are excellent
standards by which to judge where other sufferers than ourselves are
concerned. But when we ourselves are touched, they are discounted by the
measure in which a man's deeds or misdeeds may affect us. And although
to an extent this might be the case now with Mr. Caryll, yet, in spite
of it, he found himself excusing his father on the score of the man's
weakness and stupidity, until he caught himself up with the reflection
that this was a disloyalty to Everard, to his training, and to his
mother. And yet--he reverted--in such a man as Ostermore, sheer
stupidity, a lack of imagination, of insight into things as they really
are, a lack of feeling that would disable him from appreciating the
extent of any wrong he did, seemed to Mr. Caryll to be extenuating
circumstances.

He conceived that he was amazingly dispassionate in his judgment, and
he wondered was he right or wrong so to be. Then the thought of his
task arose in his mind, and it bathed him in a sweat of horror. Over in
France he had allowed himself to be persuaded, and had pledged himself
to do this thing. Everard, the relentless, unforgiving fanatic of
vengeance, had--as we have seen--trained him to believe that the
avenging of his mother's wrongs was the only thing that could justify
his own existence. Besides, it had all seemed remote then, and easy as
remote things are apt to seem. But now--now that he had met in the flesh
this man who was his father--his hesitation was turned to very horror.
It was not that he did not conceive, in spite of his odd ideas upon
temperament and its responsibilities, that his mother's' wrongs cried
out for vengeance, and that the avenging of them would be a righteous,
fitting deed; but it was that he conceived that his own was not the hand
to do the work of the executioner upon one who--after all--was still his
own father. It was hideously unnatural.

He sat in the library, awaiting his lordship and the announcement of
dinner. There was a book before him; but his eyes were upon the window,
the smooth lawns beyond, all drenched in summer sunshine, and his
thoughts were introspective. He looked into his shuddering soul, and saw
that he could not--that he would not--do the thing which he was come to
do. He would await the coming of Everard, to tell him so. There would
be a storm to face, he knew. But sooner that than carry this vile thing
through. It was vile--most damnably vile--he now opined.

The decision taken, he rose and crossed to the window. His mind had been
in travail; his soul had known the pangs of labor. But now that this
strong resolve had been brought forth, an ease and peace were his that
seemed to prove to him how right he was, how wrong must aught else have
been.

Lord Ostermore came in. He announced that they would be dining alone
together. “Her ladyship,” he explained, “has gone forth in person to
seek Lord Rotherby. She believes that she knows where to find him--in
some disreputable haunt, no doubt, whither her ladyship would have
been better advised to have sent a servant. But women are wayward
cattle--wayward, headstrong cattle! Have you not found them so, Mr.
Caryll?”

“I have found that the opinion is common to most husbands,” said Mr.
Caryll, then added a question touching Mistress Winthrop, and wondered
would she not be joining them at table.

“The poor child keeps her chamber,” said the earl. “She is
overwrought--overwrought! I am afraid her ladyship--” He broke off
abruptly, and coughed. “She is overwrought,” he repeated in conclusion.
“So that we dine alone.”

And alone they dined. Ostermore, despite the havoc suffered by his
fortunes, kept an excellent table and a clever cook, and Mr. Caryll was
glad to discover in his sire this one commendable trait.

The conversation was desultory throughout the repast; but when the cloth
was raised and the table cleared of all but the dishes of fruit and
the decanters of Oporto, Canary and Madeira, there came a moment of
expansion.

Mr. Caryll was leaning back in his chair, fingering the stem of his
wine-glass, watching the play of sunlight through the ruddy amber of the
wine, and considering the extraordinarily odd position of a man sitting
at table, by the merest chance, almost, with a father who was not aware
that he had begotten him. A question from his lordship came to stir him
partially from the reverie into which he was beginning to lapse.

“Do you look to make a long sojourn in England, Mr. Caryll?”

“It will depend,” was the vague and half-unconscious answer, “upon the
success of the matter I am come to transact.”

There ensued a brief pause, during which Mr. Caryll fell again into his
abstraction.

“Where do you dwell when in France, sir?” inquired my lord, as if to
make polite conversation.

Mr. Caryll lulled by his musings into carelessness, answered truthfully,
“At Maligny, in Normandy.”

The next moment there was a tinkle of breaking glass, and Mr. Caryll
realized his indiscretion and turned cold.

Lord Ostermore, who had been in the act of raising his glass, fetched
it down again so suddenly that the stem broke in his fingers, and the
mahogany was flooded with the liquor. A servant hastened forward, and
set a fresh glass for his lordship. That done, Ostermore signed to the
man to withdraw. The fellow went, closing the door, and leaving those
two alone.

The pause had been sufficient to enable Mr. Caryll to recover, and for
all that his pulses throbbed more quickly than their habit, outwardly he
maintained his lazily indifferent pose, as if entirely unconscious that
what he had said had occasioned his father the least disturbance.

“You--you dwelt at Maligny?” said his lordship, the usual high color all
vanished from his face. And again: “You dwelt at Maligny, and--and--your
name is Caryll.”

Mr. Caryll looked up quickly, as if suddenly aware that his lordship was
expressing surprise. “Why, yes,” said he. “What is there odd in that?”

“How does it happen that you come to live there? Are you at all
connected with the family of Maligny? On your mother's side, perhaps?”

Mr. Caryll took up his wine-glass. “I take it,” said he easily, “that
there was some such family at some time. But it is clear it must have
fallen upon evil days.” He sipped at his wine. “There are none left
now,” he explained, as he set down his glass. “The last of them died,
I believe, in England.” His eyes turned full upon the earl, but their
glance seemed entirely idle. “It was in consequence of that that my
father was enabled to purchase the estate.”

Mr. Caryll accounted it no lie that he suppressed the fact that the
father to whom he referred was but his father by adoption.

Relief spread instantly upon Lord Ostermore's countenance. Clearly,
he saw, here was pure coincidence, and nothing more. Indeed, what else
should there have been? What was it that he had feared? He did not know.
Still he accounted it an odd matter, and said so.

“What is odd?” inquired Mr. Caryll. “Does it happen that your lordship
was acquainted at any time with that vanished family?”

“I was, sir--slightly acquainted--at one time with one or two of its
members. 'Tis that that is odd. You see, sir, my name, too, happens to
be Caryll.”

“True--yet I see nothing so oddly coincident in the matter, particularly
if your acquaintance with these Malignys was but slight.”

“Indeed, you are right. You are right. There is no such great
coincidence, when all is said. The name reminded me of a--a folly of my
youth. 'Twas that that made impression.”

“A folly?” quoth Mr. Caryll, his eyebrows raised.

“Ay, a folly--a folly that went near undoing me, for had it come to
my father's ears, he had broke me without mercy. He was a hard man, my
father; a puritan in his ideas.”

“A greater than your lordship?” inquired Mr. Caryll blandly, masking the
rage that seethed in him.

His lordship laughed. “Ye're a wag, Mr. Caryll--a damned wag!” Then
reverting to the matter that was uppermost in his mind. “'Tis a fact,
though--'pon honor. My father would ha' broke me. Luckily she died.”

“Who died?” asked Mr. Caryll, with a show of interest.

“The girl. Did I not tell you there was a girl? 'Twas she was the
folly--Antoinette de Maligny. But she died--most opportunely, egad!
'Twas a very damned mercy that she did. It--cut the--the--what d'ye call
it--knot?”

“The Gordian knot?” suggested Mr. Caryll.

“Ay--the Gordian knot. Had she lived and had my father smoked the
affair--Gad! he would ha' broke me; he would so!” he repeated, and
emptied his glass.

Mr. Caryll, white to the lips, sat very still a moment. Then he did a
curious thing; did it with a curious suddenness. He took a knife from
the table, and hacked off the lowest button from his coat. This he
pushed across the board to his father.

“To turn to other matters,” said he; “there is the letter you were
expecting from abroad.”

“Eh? What?” Lord Ostermore took up the button. It was of silk,
interwoven with gold thread. He turned it over in his fingers, looking
at it with a heavy eye, and then at his guest. “Eh? Letter?” he
muttered, puzzled.

“If your lordship will cut that open, you will see what his majesty has
to propose.” He mentioned the king in a voice charged with suggestion,
so that no doubt could linger on the score of the king he meant.

“Gad!” cried his lordship. “Gad! 'Twas thus ye bubbled Mr. Green?
Shrewd, on my soul. And you are the messenger, then?”

“I am the messenger,” answered Mr. Caryll coldly.

“And why did you not say so before?”

For the fraction of a second Mr. Caryll hesitated. Then: “Because I did
not judge that the time was come,” said he.




CHAPTER VIII. TEMPTATION


His lordship ripped away the silk covering of the button with a
penknife, and disembowelled it of a small packet, which consisted of a
sheet of fine and very closely-folded and tightly-compressed paper. This
he spread, cast an eye over, and then looked up at his companion, who
was watching him with simulated indolence.

His lordship had paled a little, and there was about the lines of his
mouth a look of preternatural gravity. He looked furtively towards the
door, his heavy eyebrows lowering.

“I think,” he said, “that we shall be more snug in the library. Will you
bear me company, Mr. Caryll?”

Mr. Caryll rose instantly. The earl folded the letter, and turned to
go. His companion paused to pick up the fragments of the button and slip
them into his pocket. He performed the office with a smile on his lips
that was half pity, half contempt. It did not seem to him that there
would be the least need to betray Lord Ostermore once his lordship
was wedded to the Stuart faction. He would not fail to betray himself
through some act of thoughtless stupidity such as this.

In the library--the door, and that of the ante-room beyond it, carefully
closed--his lordship unlocked a secretaire of walnut, very handsomely
inlaid, and, drawing up a chair, he sat down to the perusal of the
king's letter. When he had read it through, he remained lost in thought
a while. At length he looked up and across towards Mr. Caryll, who was
standing by one of the windows.

“You are no doubt a confidential agent, sir,” said he. “And you will be
fully aware of the contents of this letter that you have brought me.”

“Fully, my lord,” answered Mr. Caryll, “and I venture to hope that his
majesty's promises will overcome any hesitation that you may feel.”

“His majesty's promises?” said my lord thoughtfully. “His majesty may
never have a chance of fulfilling them.”

“Very true, sir. But who gambles must set a stake upon the board.
Your lordship has been something of a gamester already, and--or so I
gather--with little profit. Here is a chance to play another game that
may mend the evil fortunes of the last.”

The earl scanned him in surprise. “You are excellent well informed,”
 said he, between surprise and irony.

“My trade demands it. Knowledge is my buckler.”

His lordship nodded slowly, and fell very thoughtful, the letter before
him, his eyes wandering ever and anon to con again some portion of it.
“It is a game in which I stake my head,” he muttered presently.

“Has your lordship anything else to stake?” inquired Mr. Caryll.

The earl looked at him again with a gloomy eye, and sighed, but said
nothing. Mr. Caryll resumed. “It is for your lordship to declare,” he
said quite coolly, “whether his majesty has covered your stake. If you
think not, it is even possible that he may be induced to improve his
offer. Though if you think not, for my own part I consider that you set
too high a value on that same head of yours.”

Touched in his vanity, Ostermore looked up at him with a sudden frown.
“You take a bold tone, sir,” said he, “a very bold tone!”

“Boldness is the attribute next to knowledge most essential to my
calling,” Mr. Caryll reminded him.

His lordship's eye fell before the other's cold glance, and again he
lapsed into thoughtfulness, his cheek now upon his hand. Suddenly he
looked up again. “Tell me,” said he. “Who else is in this thing? Men say
that Atterbury is not above suspicion. Is it--”

Mr. Caryll bent forward to tap the king's letter with a rigid
forefinger. “When your lordship tells me that you are ready to concert
upon embarking your fortunes in this bottom, you shall find me disposed,
perhaps, to answer questions concerning others. Meanwhile, our concern
is with yourself.”

“Dons and the devil!” swore his lordship angrily. “Is this a way to
speak to me?” He scowled at the agent. “Tell me, my fine fellow, what
would happen if I were to lay this letter you have brought me before the
nearest justice?”

“I cannot say for sure,” answered Mr. Caryll quietly, “but it is very
probable it would help your lordship to the gallows. For if you will
give yourself the trouble of reading it again--and more carefully--you
will see that it makes acknowledgment of the offer of services you wrote
his majesty a month or so ago.”

His lordship's eyes dropped to the letter again. He caught his breath in
sudden fear.

“Were I your lordship, I should leave the nearest justice to enjoy his
dinner in peace,” said Mr. Caryll, smiling.

His lordship laughed in a sickly manner. He felt foolish--a rare
condition in him, as in most fools. “Well, well,” said he gruffly. “The
matter needs reflection. It needs reflection.”

Behind them the door opened noiselessly, and her ladyship appeared in
cloak and wimple. She paused there, unperceived by either, arrested by
the words she had caught, and waiting in the hope of hearing more.

“I must sleep on't, at least,” his lordship was continuing. “'Tis too
grave a matter to be determined thus in haste.”

A faint sound caught the keen ears of Mr. Caryll. He turned with
a leisureliness that bore witness to his miraculous self-control.
Perceiving the countess, he bowed, and casually put his lordship on his
guard.

“Ah!” said he. “Here is her ladyship returned.”

Lord Ostermore gasped audibly and swung round in an alarm than which
nothing could have betrayed him more effectively. “My--my love!” he
cried, stammering, and by his wild haste to conceal the letter that he
held, drew her attention to it.

Mr. Caryll stepped between them, his back to his lordship, that he might
act as a screen under cover of which to dispose safely of that dangerous
document. But he was too late. Her ladyship's quick eyes had flashed
to it, and if the distance precluded the possibility of her discovering
anything that might be written upon it, she, nevertheless, could see the
curious nature of the paper, which was of the flimsiest tissue of a sort
extremely uncommon.

“What is't ye hide?” said she, as she came forward. “Why, we are very
close, surely! What mischief is't ye hatch, my lord?”'

“Mis--mischief, my love?” He smiled propitiatingly--hating her more than
ever in that moment. He had stuffed the letter into an inner pocket
of his coat, and but that she had another matter to concern her at the
moment she would not have allowed the question she had asked to be so
put aside. But this other matter upon her mind touched her very closely.

“Devil take it, whatever it may be! Rotherby is here.”

“Rotherby?” His demeanor changed; from conciliating it was of a sudden
transformed to indignant. “What makes he here?” he demanded. “Did I not
forbid him my house?”

“I brought him,” she answered pregnantly.

But for once he was not to be put down. “Then you may take him hence
again,” said he. “I'll not have him under my roof--under the same roof
with that poor child he used so infamously. I'll not suffer it!”

The Gorgon cannot have looked more coldly wicked than her ladyship just
then. “Have a care, my lord!” she muttered threateningly. “Oh, have a
care, I do beseech you. I am not so to be crossed!”

“Nor am I, ma'am,” he rejoined, and then, before more could be said, Mr.
Caryll stepped forward to remind them of his presence--which they seemed
to stand in danger of forgetting.

“I fear that I intrude, my lord,” said he, and bowed in leave-taking. “I
shall wait upon your lordship later. Your most devoted. Ma'am, your very
humble servant.” And he bowed himself out.

In the ante-room he came upon Lord Rotherby, striding to and fro, his
brow all furrowed with care. At sight of Mr. Caryll, the viscount's
scowl grew blacker. “Oons and the devil!” he cried. “What make you
here?”

“That,” said Mr. Caryll pleasantly, “is the very question your father is
asking her ladyship concerning yourself. Your servant, sir.” And airy,
graceful, smiling that damnable close smile of his, he was gone, leaving
Rotherby very hot and angry.

Outside Mr. Caryll hailed a chair, and had himself carried to his
lodging in Old Palace Yard, where Leduc awaited him. As his bearers
swung briskly along, Mr. Caryll sat back and gave himself up to thought.

Lord Ostermore interested him vastly. For a moment that day the earl had
aroused his anger, as you may have judged from the sudden resolve upon
which he had acted when he delivered him that letter, thus embarking
at the eleventh hour upon a task which he had already determined to
abandon. He knew not now whether to rejoice or deplore that he had acted
upon that angry impulse. He knew not, indeed, whether to pity or despise
this man who was swayed by no such high motives as must have
affected most of those who were faithful to the exiled James. Those
motives--motives of chivalry and romanticism in most cases--Lord
Ostermore would have despised if he could have understood them; for he
was a man of the type that despises all things that are not essentially
practical, whose results are not immediately obvious. Being all but
ruined by his association with the South Sea Company, he was willing for
the sake of profit to turn traitor to the king de facto, even as thirty
years ago, actuated by similar motives, he had turned traitor to the
king de jure.

What was one to make of such a man, wondered Mr. Caryll. If he were
equipped with wit enough to apprehend the baseness of his conduct, he
would be easily understood and it would be easy to despise him. But Mr.
Caryll perceived that he was dealing with one who never probed into the
deeps of anything--himself and his own conduct least of all--and that
a deplorable lack of perception, of understanding almost, deprived his
lordship of the power to feel as most men feel, to judge as most men
judge. And hence was it that Mr. Caryll thought him a subject for pity
rather than contempt. Even in that other thirty-year-old matter that so
closely touched Mr. Caryll, the latter was sure that the same pitiful
shortcomings might be urged in the man's excuse.

Meanwhile, behind him at Stretton House, Mr. Caryll had left a scene of
strife between Lady Ostermore and her son on one side and Lord Ostermore
on the other. Weak and vacillating as he was in most things, it seemed
that the earl could be strong in his dislike of his son, and firm in his
determination not to condone the infamy of his behavior toward Hortensia
Winthrop.

“The fault is yours,” Rotherby sought to excuse himself again--employing
the old argument, and in an angry, contemptuous tone that was entirely
unfilial. “I'd ha' married the girl in earnest, but for your threats to
disinherit me.”

“You fool!” his father stormed at him, “did you suppose that if I should
disinherit you for marrying her, I should be likely to do less for your
luring her into a mock marriage? I've done with you! Go your ways for
a damned profligate--a scandal to the very name of gentleman. I've done
with you!”

And to that the earl adhered in spite of all that Rotherby and his
mother could urge. He stamped out of the library with a final command to
his son to quit his house and never disgrace it again by his presence.
Rotherby looked ruefully at his mother.

“He means it,”' said he. “He never loved me. He was never a father to
me.”

“Were you ever greatly a son to him?” asked her ladyship.

“As much as he would ha' me be,” he answered, his black face very
sullen. “Oh, 'sdeath! I am damnably used by him.” He paced the chamber,
storming. “All this garboil about nothing!”, he complained. “Was he
never young himself? And when all is said, there's no harm done. The
girl's been fetched home again.”

“Pshaw! Ye're a fool, Rotherby--a fool, and there's an end on't,” said
his mother. “I sometimes wonder which is the greater fool--you or your
father. And yet he can marvel that you are his son. What do ye think
would have happened if you had had your way with that bread-and-butter
miss? It had been matter enough to hang you.”

“Pooh!” said the viscount, dropping into a chair and staring sullenly at
the carpet. Then sullenly he added: “His lordship would have been glad
on't--so some one would have been pleased. As it is--”

“As it is, ye'd better find the man Green who was at Maidstone, and stop
his mouth with guineas. He is aware of what passed.”

“Bah! Green was there on other business.” And he told her of the
suspicions the messenger entertained against Mr. Caryll.

It set her ladyship thinking. “Why,” she said presently, “'twill be
that!”

“'Twill be what, ma'am?” asked Rotherby, looking up.

“Why, this fellow Caryll must ha' bubbled the messenger in spite of the
search he may have made. I found the popinjay here with your father, the
pair as thick as thieves--and your father with a paper in his hand as
fine as a cobweb. 'Sdeath! I'll be sworn he's a damned Jacobite.”

Rotherby was on his feet in an instant. He remembered suddenly all that
he had overheard at Maidstone. “Oho!” he crowed. “What cause have ye to
think that?”

“Cause? Why, what I have seen. Besides, I feel it in my bones. My every
instinct tells me 'tis so.”

“If you should prove right! Oh, if you should prove right! Death! I'd
find a way to settle the score of that pert fellow from France, and to
dictate terms to his lordship at the same time.”

Her ladyship stared at him. “Ye're an unnatural hound, Rotherby. Would
ye betray your own father?”

“Betray him? No! But I'll set a term to his plotting. Egad! Has he not
lost enough in the South Sea Bubble, without sinking the little that is
left in some wild-goose Jacobite plot?”

“How shall it matter to you, since he's sworn to disinherit you?”

“How, madam?” Rotherby laughed cunningly. “I'll prevent the one and the
other--and pay off Mr. Caryll at the same time. Three birds with one
stone, let me perish!” He reached for his hat. “I must find this fellow
Green.”

“What will you do?” she asked, a slight anxiety trembling in her voice.

“Stir up his suspicions of Caryll. He'll be ready enough to act after
his discomfiture at Maidstone. I'll warrant he's smarting under it.
If once we can find cause to lay Caryll by the heels, the fear of the
consequences should bring his lordship to his senses. 'Twill be my turn
then.”

“But you'll do nothing that--that will hurt your father?” she enjoined
him, her hand upon his shoulder.

“Trust me,” he laughed, and added cynically: “It would hardly sort with
my interests to involve him. It will serve me best to frighten him into
reason and a sense of his paternal duty.”




CHAPTER IX. THE CHAMPION


Mr. Caryll was well and handsomely housed, as became the man of fashion,
in the lodging he had taken in Old Palace Yard. Knowing him from abroad,
it was not impossible that the government--fearful of sedition since
the disturbance caused by the South Sea distress, and aware of an
undercurrent of Jacobitism--might for a time, at least, keep an eye upon
him. It behooved him, therefore, to appear neither more nor less than
a lounger, a gentleman of pleasure who had come to London in quest of
diversion. To support this appearance, Mr. Caryll had sought out some
friends of his in town. There were Stapleton and Collis, who had been
at Oxford with him, and with whom he had ever since maintained a
correspondence and a friendship. He sought them out on the very evening
of his arrival--after his interview with Lord Ostermore. He had the
satisfaction of being handsomely welcomed by them, and was plunged under
their guidance into the gaieties that the town afforded liberally for
people of quality.

Mr. Caryll was--as I hope you have gathered--an agreeable fellow, very
free, moreover, with the contents of his well-equipped purse; and so
you may conceive that the town showed him a very friendly, cordial
countenance. He fell into the habits of the men whose company he
frequented; his days were as idle as theirs, and spent at the parade,
the Ring, the play, the coffeehouse and the ordinary.

But under the gay exterior he affected he carried a spirit of most vile
unrest. The anger which had prompted his impulse to execute, after all,
the business on which he was come, and to deliver his father the letter
that was to work his ruin, was all spent. He had cooled, and cool it
was idle for him to tell himself that Lord Ostermore, by his heartless
allusion to the crime of his early years, had proved himself worthy of
nothing but the pit Mr. Caryll had been sent to dig for him. There were
moments when he sought to compel himself so to think, to steel himself
against all other considerations. But it was idle. The reflection that
the task before him was unnatural came ever to revolt him. To gain ease,
the most that he could do--and he had the faculty of it developed in
a preternatural degree--was to put the business from him for the time,
endeavor to forget it. And he had another matter to consider and to
plague him--the matter of Hortensia Winthrop. He thought of her a great
deal more than was good for his peace of mind, for all that he pretended
to a gladness that things were as they were. Each morning that he
lounged at the parade in St. James's Park, each evening that he visited
the Ring, it was in the hope of catching some glimpse of her among the
fashionable women that went abroad to see and to be seen. And on the
third morning after his arrival the thing he hoped for came to pass.

It had happened that my lady had ordered her carriage that morning,
dressed herself with the habitual splendor, which but set off the
shortcomings of her lean and angular person, egregiously coiffed,
pulvilled and topknotted, and she had sent a message amounting to a
command to Mistress Winthrop that she should drive in the park with her.

Poor Hortensia, whose one desire was to hide her face from the town's
uncharitable sight just then, fearing, indeed, that Rumor's unscrupulous
tongue would be as busy about her reputation as her ladyship had
represented, attempted to assert herself by refusing to obey the
command. It was in vain. Her ladyship dispensed with ambassadors,
and went in person to convey her orders to her husband's ward, and to
enforce them.

“What's this I am told?” quoth she, as she sailed into Hortensia's room.
“Do my wishes count for nothing, that you send me pert answers by my
woman?”

Hortensia rose. She had been sitting by the window, a book in her lap.
“Not so, indeed, madam. Not pert, I trust. I am none so well, and I fear
the sun.”

“'Tis little wonder,” laughed her ladyship; “and I'm glad on't, for it
shows ye have a conscience somewhere. But 'tis no matter for that. I
am tender for your reputation, mistress, and I'll not have you shunning
daylight like the guilty thing ye know yourself to be.”

“'Tis false, madam,” said Hortensia, with indignation. “Your ladyship
knows it to be false.”

“Harkee, ninny, if you'd have the town believe it false, you'll show
yourself--show that ye have no cause for shame, no cause to hide you
from the eyes of honest folk. Come, girl; bid your woman get your hood
and tippet. The carriage stays for us.”

To Hortensia her ladyship's seemed, after all, a good argument. Did she
hide, what must the town think but that it confirmed the talk that she
made no doubt was going round already. Better to go forth and brave it,
and surely it should disarm the backbiters if she showed herself in the
park with Lord Rotherby's own mother.

It never occurred to her that this seeming tenderness for her reputation
might be but wanton cruelty on her ladyship's part; a gratifying of her
spleen against the girl by setting her in the pillory of public sight
to the end that she should experience the insult of supercilious glances
and lips that smile with an ostentation of furtiveness; a desire to put
down her pride and break the spirit which my lady accounted insolent and
stubborn.

Suspecting naught of this, she consented, and drove out with her
ladyship as she was desired to do. But understanding of her ladyship's
cruel motives, and repentance of her own acquiescence, were not long in
following. Soon--very soon--she realized that anything would have been
better than the ordeal she was forced to undergo.

It was a warm, sunny morning, and the park was crowded with fashionable
loungers. Lady Ostermore left her carriage at the gates, and entered the
enclosure on foot, accompanied by Hortensia and followed at a respectful
distance by a footman. Her arrival proved something of a sensation. Hats
were swept off to her ladyship, sly glances flashed at her companion,
who went pale, but apparently serene, eyes looking straight before her;
and there was an obvious concealing of smiles at first, which later grew
to be all unconcealed, and, later still, became supplemented by remarks
that all might hear, remarks which did not escape--as they were meant
not to escape--her ladyship and Mistress Winthrop.

“Madam,” murmured the girl, in her agony of shame, “we were not
well-advised to come. Will not your ladyship turn back?”

Her ladyship displayed a vinegary smile, and looked at her companion
over the top of her slowly moving fan. “Why? Is't not pleasant here?”
 quoth she. “'Twill be more agreeable under the trees yonder. The sun
will not reach you there, child.”

“'Tis not the sun I mind, madam,” said Hortensia, but received no
answer. Perforce she must pace on beside her ladyship.

Lord Rotherby came by, arm in arm with his friend, the Duke of Wharton.
It was a one-sided friendship. Lord Rotherby was but one of the many
of his type who furnished a court, a valetaille, to the gay, dissolute,
handsome, witty duke, who might have been great had he not preferred his
vices to his worthier parts.

As they went by, Lord Rotherby bared his head and bowed, as did his
companion. Her ladyship smiled upon him, but Hortensia's eyes looked
rigidly ahead, her face a stone. She heard his grace's insolent laugh
as they passed on; she heard his voice--nowise subdued, for he was a man
who loved to let the world hear what he might have to say.

“Gad! Rotherby, the wind has changed! Your Dulcinea flies with you o'
Wednesday, and has ne'er a glance for you o' Saturday! I' faith! ye
deserve no better. Art a clumsy gallant to have been overtaken, and the
maid's in the right on't to resent your clumsiness.”

Rotherby's reply was lost in a splutter of laughter from a group of
sycophants who had overheard his grace's criticism and were but too
ready to laugh at aught his grace might deign to utter. Her cheeks
burned; it was by an effort that she suppressed the tears that anger was
forcing to her eyes.

The duke, 'twas plain, had set the fashion. Emulators were not wanting.
Stray words she caught; by instinct was she conscious of the oglings,
the fluttering of fans from the women, the flashing of quizzing-glasses
from the men. And everywhere was there a suppressed laugh, a stifled
exclamation of surprise at her appearance in public--yet not so stifled
but that it reached her, as it was intended that it should.

In the shadow of a great elm, around which there was a seat, a little
group had gathered, of which the centre was the sometime toast of the
town and queen of many Wells, the Lady Mary Deller, still beautiful and
still unwed--as is so often the way of reigning toasts--but already
past her pristine freshness, already leaning upon the support of art to
maintain the endowments she had had from nature. She was accounted witty
by the witless, and by some others.

Of the group that paid its court to her and her companions--two giggling
cousins in their first season were Mr. Caryll and his friends, Sir Harry
Collis and Mr. Edward Stapleton, the former of whom--he was the lady's
brother-in-law--had just presented him. Mr. Caryll was dressed with even
more than his ordinary magnificence. He was in dove-colored cloth, his
coat very richly laced with gold, his waistcoat--of white brocade
with jeweled buttons, the flower-pattern outlined in finest gold
thread--descended midway to his knees, whilst the ruffles at his wrists
and the Steinkirk at his throat were of the finest point. He cut a
figure of supremest elegance, as he stood there, his chestnut head
slightly bowed in deference as my Lady Mary spoke, his hat tucked under
his arm, his right hand outstretched beside him to rest upon the gold
head of his clouded-amber cane.

To the general he was a stranger still in town, and of the sort that
draws the eye and provokes inquiry. Lady Mary, the only goal of whose
shallow existence was the attention of the sterner sex, who loved to
break hearts as a child breaks toys, for the fun of seeing how they look
when broken--and who, because of that, had succeeded in breaking far
fewer than she fondly imagined--looked up into his face with the “most
perditiously alluring” eyes in England--so Mr. Craske, the poet, who
stood at her elbow now, had described them in the dedicatory sonnet of
his last book of poems. (Wherefore, in parenthesis be it observed, she
had rewarded him with twenty guineas, as he had calculated that she
would.)

There was a sudden stir in the group. Mr. Craske had caught sight of
Lady Ostermore and Mistress Winthrop, and he fell to giggling, a flimsy
handkerchief to his painted lips. “Oh, 'Sbud!” he bleated. “Let me die!
The audaciousness of the creature! And behold me the port and glance of
her! Cold as a vestal, let me perish!”

Lady Mary turned with the others to look in the direction he was
pointing--pointing openly, with no thought of dissembling.

Mr. Caryll's eyes fell upon Mistress Winthrop, and his glance was oddly
perceptive. He observed those matters of which Mr. Craske had seemed
to make sardonic comment: the erect stiffness of her carriage, the eyes
that looked neither to right nor left, and the pallor of her face.
He observed, too, the complacent air with which her ladyship advanced
beside her husband's ward, her fan moving languidly, her head nodding
to her acquaintance, as in supreme unconcern of the stir her coming had
effected.

Mr. Caryll had been dull indeed, knowing what he knew, had he not
understood to the full the humiliation to which Mistress Hortensia was
being of purpose set submitted.

And just then Rotherby, who had turned, with Wharton and another now,
came by them again. This time he halted, and his companions with him,
for just a moment, to address his mother. She turned; there was an
exchange of greetings, in which Mistress Hortensia standing rigid as
stone--took no part. A silence fell about; quizzing-glasses went up; all
eyes were focussed upon the group. Then Rotherby and his friends resumed
their way.

“The dog!” said Mr. Caryll, between his teeth, but went unheard by
any, for in that moment Dorothy Deller--the younger of the Lady Mary's
cousins--gave expression to the generous and as yet unsullied little
heart that was her own.

“Oh, 'tis shameful!” she cried. “Will you not go speak with her, Molly?”

The Lady Mary stiffened. She looked at the company about her with an
apologetic smile. “I beg that ye'll not heed the child,” said she.
“'Tis not that she is without morals--but without knowledge. An innocent
little fool; no worse.”

“'Tis bad enough, I vow,” laughed an old beau, who sought fame as a man
of a cynical turn of humor.

“But fortunately rare,” said Mr. Caryll dryly. “Like charity, almost
unknown in this Babylon.”

His tone was not quite nice, although perhaps the Lady Mary was the only
one to perceive the note of challenge in it. But Mr. Craske, the
poet, diverted attention to himself by a prolonged, malicious chuckle.
Rotherby was just moving away from his mother at that moment.

“They've never a word for each other to-day!” he cried. “Oh, 'Sbud! not
so much as the mercy of a glance will the lady afford him.” And he burst
into the ballad of King Francis:

                “Souvent femme varie,
                 Bien, fol est qui s'y fie!”

and laughed his prodigious delight at the aptness of his quotation.

Mr. Caryll put up his gold-rimmed quizzing-glass, and directed through
that powerful weapon of offence an eye of supreme displeasure upon the
singer. He could not contain his rage, yet from his languid tone none
would have suspected it. “Sir,” said he, “ye've a singular unpleasant
voice.”

Mr. Craske, thrown out of countenance by so much directness, could
only stare; the same did the others, though some few tittered, for
Mr. Craske, when all was said, was held in no great esteem by the
discriminant.

Mr. Caryll lowered his glass. “I've heard it said by the uncharitable
that ye were a lackey before ye became a plagiarist. 'Tis a rumor I
shall contradict in future; 'tis plainly a lie, for your voice betrays
you to have been a chairman.”

“Sir--sir--” spluttered the poetaster, crimson with anger and
mortification. “Is this--is this--seemly--between gentlemen?”

“Between gentlemen it would not be seemly,” Mr. Caryll agreed.

Mr. Craske, quivering, yet controlling himself, bowed stiffly. “I have
too much respect for myself--” he gasped.

“Ye'll be singular in that, no doubt,” said Mr. Caryll, and turned his
shoulder upon him.

Again Mr. Craske appeared to make an effort at self-control; again he
bowed. “I know--I hope--what is due to the Lady Mary Deller, to--to
answer you as--as befits. But you shall hear from me, sir. You shall
hear from me.”

He bowed a third time--a bow that took in the entire company--and
withdrew in high dudgeon and with a great show of dignity. A pause
ensued, and then the Lady Mary reproved Mr. Caryll.

“Oh, 'twas cruel in you, sir,” she cried. “Poor Mr. Craske! And to dub
him plagiarist! 'Twas the unkindest cut of all!”

“Truth, madam, is never kind.”

“Oh, fie! You make bad worse!” she cried.

“He'll put you in the pillory of his verse for this,” laughed Collis.
“Ye'll be most scurvily lampooned for't.”

“Poor Mr. Craske!” sighed the Lady Mary again.

“Poor, indeed; but not in the sense to deserve pity. An upstart impostor
such as that to soil a lady with his criticism!”

Lady Mary's brows went up. “You use a singular severity, sir,” she
opined, “and I think it unwise in you to grow so hot in the defence of a
reputation whose owner has so little care for it herself.”

Mr. Caryll looked at her out of his level gray-green eyes; a hot answer
quivered on his tongue, an answer that had crushed her venom for some
time and had probably left him with a quarrel on his hands. Yet his
smile, as he considered her, was very sweet, so sweet that her ladyship,
guessing nothing of the bitterness it was used to cover, went as near a
smirk as it was possible for one so elegant. He was, she judged, another
victim ripe for immolation on the altar of her goddessship. And Mr.
Caryll, who had taken her measure very thoroughly, seeing something of
how her thoughts were running, bethought him of a sweeter vengeance.

“Lady Mary,” he cried, a soft reproach in his voice, “I have been sore
mistook in you if you are one to be guided by the rabble.” And he waved
a hand toward the modish throng.

She knit her fine brows, bewildered.

“Ah!” he cried, interpreting her glance to suit his ends, “perish the
thought, indeed! I knew that I could not be wrong. I knew that one so
peerless in all else must be peerless, too, in her opinions; judging
for herself, and standing firm upon her judgment in disdain of meaner
souls--mere sheep to follow their bell-wether.”

She opened her mouth to speak, but said nothing, being too intrigued
by this sudden and most sweet flattery. Her mere beauty had oft been
praised, and in terms that glowed like fire. But what was that compared
with this fine appreciation of her less obvious mental parts--and that
from one who had seen the world?

Mr. Caryll was bending over her. “What a chance is here,” he was
murmuring, “to mark your lofty detachment--to show how utter is your
indifference to what the common herd may think.”

“As--as how?” she asked, blinking up at him.

The others stood at gaze, scarce yet suspecting the drift of so much
talk.

“There is a poor lady yonder, of whose fair name a bubble is being blown
and pricked. I dare swear there's not a woman here durst speak to her.
Yet what a chance for one that dared! How fine a triumph would be hers!”
 He sighed. “Heigho! I almost wish I were a woman, that I might make that
triumph mine and mark my superiority to these painted dolls that have
neither wit nor courage.”

The Lady Mary rose, a faint color in her cheeks, a sparkle in her fine
eyes. A great joy flashed into Mr. Caryll's in quick response; a joy in
her--she thought with ready vanity--and a heightening admiration.

“Will you make it yours, as it should be--as it must ever be--to lead
and not to follow?” he cried, flattering incredibility trembling in his
voice.

“And why not, sir?” she demanded, now thoroughly aroused.

“Why not, indeed--since you are you?” quoth he. “It is what I had hoped
in you, and yet--and yet what I had almost feared to hope.”

She frowned upon him now, so excellently had he done his work. “Why
should you have feared that?”

“Alas! I am a man of little faith--unworthy, indeed, your good opinion
since I entertained a doubt. It was a blasphemy.”

She smiled again. “You acknowledge your faults with such a grace,” said
she, “that we must needs forgive them. And now to show you how much
you need forgiveness. Come, children,” she bade her cousins--for whose
innocence she had made apology but a moment back. “Your arm, Harry,” she
begged her brother-in-law.

Sir Harry obeyed her readily, but without eagerness. In his heart he
cursed his friend Caryll for having set her on to this.

Mr. Caryll himself hung upon her other side, his eyes toward Lady
Ostermore and Hortensia, who, whilst being observed by all, were being
approached by few; and these few confined themselves to an exchange
of greetings with her ladyship, which constituted a worse offence to
Mistress Winthrop than had they stayed away.

Suddenly, as if drawn by his ardent gaze, Hortensia's eyes moved at
last from their forward fixity. Her glance met Mr. Caryll's across the
intervening space. Instantly he swept off his hat, and bowed profoundly.
The action drew attention to himself. All eyes were focussed upon him,
and between many a pair there was a frown for one who should dare thus
to run counter to the general attitude.

But there was more to follow. The Lady Mary accepted Mr. Caryll's
salutation of Hortensia as a signal. She led the way promptly, and the
little band swept forward, straight for its goal, raked by the volleys
from a thousand eyes, under which the Lady Mary already began to giggle
excitedly.

Thus they reached the countess, the countess standing very rigid in her
amazement, to receive them.

“I hope I see your ladyship well,” said Lady Mary.

“I hope your ladyship does,” answered the countess tartly.

Mistress Winthrop's eyes were lowered; her cheeks were scarlet. Her
distress was plain, born of her doubt of the Lady Mary's purpose, and
suspense as to what might follow.

“I have not the honor of your ward's acquaintance, Lady Ostermore,” said
Lady Mary, whilst the men were bowing, and her cousins curtseying to the
countess and her companion collectively.

The countess gasped, recovered, and eyed the speaker without any sign
of affection. “My husband's ward, ma'am,” she corrected, in a voice that
seemed to discourage further mention of Hortensia.

“'Tis but a distinction,” put in Mr. Caryll suggestively.

“Indeed, yes. Will not your ladyship present me?” The countess'
malevolent eyes turned a moment upon Mr. Caryll, smiling demurely at
Lady Mary's elbow. In his face--as well as in the four words he had
uttered--she saw that here was work of his, and he gained nothing in her
favor by it. Meanwhile there were no grounds--other than such as must
have been wantonly offensive to the Lady Mary, and so not to be dreamed
of--upon which to refuse her request. The countess braced herself, and
with an ill grace performed the brief ceremony of presentation.

Mistress Winthrop looked up an instant, then down again; it was a
piteous, almost a pleading glance.

Lady Mary, leaving the countess to Sir Harry Stapleton, Caryll and the
others, moved to Hortensia's side for a moment she was at loss what to
say, and took refuge in a commonplace.

“I have long desired the pleasure of your acquaintance,” said she.

“I am honored, madam,” replied Hortensia, with downcast eyes. Then
lifting them with almost disconcerting suddenness. “Your ladyship has
chosen an odd season in which to gratify this desire with which you
honor me.”

Lady Mary laughed, as much at the remark as for the benefit of those
whose eyes were upon her. She knew there would not be wanting many who
would condemn her; but these should be far outnumbered by those who
would be lost in admiration of her daring, that she could so fly in the
face of public opinion; and she was grateful to Mr. Caryll for having
suggested to her a course of such distinction.

“I could have chosen no better season,” she replied, “to mark my scorn
of evil tongues and backbiters.”

Color stained Hortensia's cheek again; gratitude glowed in her eyes.
“You are very noble, madam,” she answered with flattering earnestness.

“La!” said the Lady Mary. “Is nobility, then, so easily achieved?” And
thereafter they talked of inconsequent trifles, until Mr. Caryll moved
towards them, and Lady Mary turned aside to speak to the countess.

At Mr. Caryll's approach Hortensia's eyes had been lowered again, and
she made no offer to address him as he stood before her now, hat under
arm, leaning easily upon his amber cane.

“Oh, heart of stone!” said he at last. “Am I not yet forgiven?”

She misread his meaning--perhaps already the suspicion she now voiced
had been in her mind. She looked up at him sharply. “Was it--was it you
who fetched the Lady Mary to me?” she inquired.

“Lo!” said he. “You have a voice! Now Heaven be praised! I was fearing
it was lost for me--that you had made some awful vow never again to
rejoice my ears with the music of it.”

“You have not answered my question,” she reminded him.

“Nor you mine,” said he. “I asked you am I not yet forgiven.”

“Forgiven what?”

“For being born an impudent, fleering coxcomb--twas that you called me,
I think.”

She flushed deeply. “If you would win forgiveness, you should not remind
me of the offence,” she answered low.

“Nay,” he rejoined, “that is to confound forgiveness with forgetfulness.
I want you to forgive and yet to remember.”

“That were to condone.”

“What else? 'Tis nothing less will satisfy me.”

“You expect too much,” she answered, with a touch that was almost of
sternness.

He shrugged and smiled whimsically. “It is my way,” he said
apologetically. “Nature has made me expectant, and life, whilst showing
me the folly of it, has not yet cured me.”

She looked at him, and repeated her earlier question. “Was it at your
bidding that Lady Mary came to speak with me?”

“Fie!” he cried. “What insinuations do you make against her?”

“Insinuations?”

“What else? That she should do things at my bidding!”

She smiled understanding. “You have a talent, sir, for crooked answers.”

“'Tis to conceal the rectitude of my behavior.”

“It fails of its object, then,” said she, “for it deludes no one.”
 She paused and laughed at his look of assumed blankness. “I am deeply
beholden to you,” she whispered quickly, breathing at once gratitude and
confusion.

“Though I don't descry the cause,” said he, “'twill be something to
comfort me.”

More he might have added then, for the mad mood was upon him, awakened
by those soft brown eyes of hers. But in that moment the others of that
little party crowded upon them to take their leave of Mistress Winthrop.

Mr. Caryll felt satisfied that enough had been done to curb the slander
concerning Hortensia. But he was not long in learning how profound was
his mistake. On every side he continued to hear her discussed, and in
such terms as made his ears tingle and his hands itch to be at work in
her defence; for, with smirks and sneers and innuendoes, her escapade
with Lord Rotherby continued to furnish a topic for the town as her
ladyship had sworn it would. Yet by what right could he espouse her
cause with any one of her defamers without bringing her fair name into
still more odious notoriety?

And meanwhile he knew that he was under strict surveillance from Mr.
Green; knew that he was watched wherever he went; and nothing but his
confidence that no evidence could be produced against him allowed him to
remain, as he did, all unconcerned of this.

Leduc had more than once seen Mr. Green about Old Palace Yard, besides a
couple of his underlings, one or the other of whom was never absent
from the place, no doubt with intent to observe who came and went at Mr.
Caryll's. Once, indeed, during the absence of master and servant, Mr.
Caryll's lodging was broken into, and on Leduc's return he found a
confusion which told him how thoroughly the place had been ransacked.

If Mr. Caryll had had anything to hide, this would have given him the
hint to take his precautions; but as he had nothing that was in the
least degree in incriminating, he went his ways in supremest unconcern
of the vigilance exerted over him. He used, however, a greater
discretion in the resorts he frequented. And if upon occasion he visited
such Tory meeting-places as the Bell Tavern in King Street or the
Cocoa-Tree in Pall Mall, he was still more often to be found at White's,
that ultra-Whig resort.

It was at this latter house, one evening three or four days after his
meeting with Hortensia in the park, that the chance was afforded him
at last of vindicating her honor in a manner that need not add to the
scandal that was already abroad, nor serve to couple his name with
hers unduly. And it was Lord Rotherby himself who afforded him the
opportunity.

The thing fell out in this wise: Mr. Caryll was at cards with Harry
Collis and Stapleton and Major Gascoigne, in a room above-stairs. There
were at least a dozen others present, some also at play, others merely
lounging. Of the latter was his Grace of Wharton. He was a slender,
graceful gentleman, whose face, if slightly effeminate and markedly
dissipated, was nevertheless of considerable beauty. He was very
splendid in a suit of green camlett and silver lace, and he wore a
flaxen periwig without powder.

He was awaiting Rotherby, with whom--as he told the company--he was
for a frolic at Drury Lane, where a ridotto was following the play. He
spoke, as usual, in a loud voice that all might hear, and his talk was
loose and heavily salted as became the talk of a rake of his exalted
rank. It was chiefly concerned with airing his bitter grievance against
Mrs. Girdlebank, of the Theatre Royal, of whom he announced himself
“devilishly enamoured.”

He inveighed against her that she should have the gross vulgarity
to love her husband, and against her husband that he should have the
audacity to play the watchdog over her, and bark and growl at the duke's
approach.

“A plague on all husbands, say I,” ended the worthy president of the
Bold Bucks.

“Nay, now, but I'm a husband myself, gad!” protested Mr. Sidney, who was
quite the most delicate, mincing man of fashion about town, and one of
that valetaille that hovered about his Grace of Wharton's heels.

“'Tis no matter in your case,” said the duke, with that contempt he used
towards his followers. “Your wife's too ugly to be looked at.” And Mr.
Sidney's fresh protest was drowned in the roar of laughter that went
up to applaud that brutal frankness. Mr. Caryll turned to the fop, who
happened to be standing at his elbow.

“Never repine, man,” said he. “In the company you keep, such a wife
makes for peace of mind. To have that is to have much.”

Wharton resumed his railings at the Girdlebanks, and was still at them
when Rotherby came in.

“At last, Charles!” the duke hailed him, rising. “Another minute, and I
had gone without you.”

But Rotherby scarce looked at him, and answered with unwonted shortness.
His eyes had discovered Mr. Caryll. It was the first time he had run
against him since that day, over a week ago, at Stretton House, and at
sight of him now all Rotherby's spleen was moved. He stood and stared,
his dark eyes narrowing, his cheeks flushing slightly under their tan.
Wharton, who had approached him, observing his sudden halt, his sudden
look of concentration, asked him shortly what might ail him.

“I have seen someone I did not expect to find in a resort of gentlemen,”
 said Rotherby, his eyes ever on Mr. Caryll, who--engrossed in his
game--was all unconscious of his lordship's advent.

Wharton followed the direction of his companion's gaze, and giving
now attention himself to Mr. Caryll, he fell to appraising his genteel
appearance, negligent of the insinuation in what Rotherby had said.

“'Sdeath!” swore the duke. “'Tis a man of taste--a travelled gentleman
by his air. Behold me the grace of that shoulder-knot, Charles, and
the set of that most admirable coat. Fifty guineas wouldn't buy his
Steinkirk. Who is this beau?”

“I'll present him to your grace,” said Rotherby shortly. He had
pretentions at being a beau himself; but his grace--supreme arbiter in
such matters--had never yet remarked it.

They moved across the room, greetings passing as they went. At their
approach, Mr. Caryll looked up. Rotherby made him a leg with an
excessive show of deference, arguing irony. “'Tis an unlooked-for
pleasure to meet you here, sir,” said he in a tone that drew the
attention of all present.

“No pleasures are so sweet as the unexpected,” answered Mr. Caryll, with
casual amiability, and since he perceived at once the errand upon which
Lord Rotherby was come to him, he went half-way to meet him. “Has your
lordship been contracting any marriages of late?” he inquired.

The viscount smiled icily. “You have quick wits, sir,” said he, “which
is as it should be in one who lives by them.”

“Let your lordship be thankful that such is not your own case,” returned
Mr. Caryll, with imperturbable good humor, and sent a titter round the
room.

“A hit! A shrewd hit, 'pon honor!” cried Wharton, tapping his snuff-box.
“I vow to Gad, Ye're undone, Charles. Ye'd better play at repartee with
Gascoigne, there. Ye're more of a weight.”

“Your grace,” cried Rotherby, suppressing at great cost his passion,
“'tis not to be borne that a fellow of this condition should sit among
men of quality.” And with that he swung round and addressed the company
in general. “Gentlemen, do you know who this fellow is? He has the
effrontery to take my name, and call himself Caryll.”

Mr. Caryll looked a moment at his brother in the silence that followed.
Then, as in a flash, he saw his chance of vindicating Mistress Winthrop,
and he seized it.

“And do you know, gentlemen, who this fellow is?” he inquired, with an
air of sly amusement. “He is--Nay, you shall judge for yourselves. You
shall hear the story of how we met; it is the story of his abduction
of a lady whose name need not be mentioned; the story of his dastardly
attempt to cozen her into a mock-marriage.”

“Mock--mock-marriage?” cried the duke and a dozen others with him, some
in surprise, but most in an unbelief that was already faintly tinged
with horror--which argued ill for my Lord Rotherby when the story should
be told.

“You damned rogue--” began his lordship, and would have flung himself
upon Caryll, but that Collis and Stapleton, and Wharton himself, put
forth hands to stay him by main force.

Others, too, had risen. But Mr. Caryll sat quietly in his chair, idly
fingering the cards before him, and smiling gently, between amusement
and irony. He was much mistaken if he did not make Lord Rotherby
bitterly regret the initiative he had taken in their quarrel.

“Gently, my lord,” the duke admonished the viscount. “This--this
gentleman has said that which touches your honor. He shall say more.
He shall make good his words, or eat them. But the matter cannot rest
thus.”

“It shall not, by God!” swore Rotherby, purple now. “It shall not. I'll
kill him like a dog for what he has said.”

“But before I die, gentlemen,” said Mr. Caryll, “it were well that you
should have the full story of that sorry adventure from an eye-witness.”

“An eye-witness? Were ye present?” cried two or three in a breath.

“I desire to lay before you all the story of how we met my lord there
and I. It is so closely enmeshed with the story of that abduction
and mock-marriage that the one is scarce to be distinguished from the
other.”

Rotherby writhed to shake off those who held him.

“Will ye listen to this fellow?” he roared. “He's a spy, I tell you--a
Jacobite spy!” He was beside himself with anger and apprehension, and he
never paused to weigh the words he uttered. It was with him a question
of stopping his accuser's mouth with whatever mud came under his hands.
“He has no right here. It is not to be borne. I know not by what means
he has thrust himself among you, but--”

“That is a knowledge I can afford your lordship,” came Stapleton's
steady voice to interrupt the speaker. “Mr. Caryll is here by my
invitation.”

“And by mine and Gascoigne's here,” added Sir Harry Collis, “and I will
answer for his quality to any man who doubts it.”

Rotherby glared at Mr. Caryll's sponsors, struck dumb by this sudden and
unexpected refutation of the charge he had leveled.

Wharton, who had stepped aside, knit his brows and flashed his
quizzing-glass--through sheer force of habit--upon Lord Rotherby. Then:

“You'll pardon me, Harry,” said he, “but you'll see, I hope, that
the question is not impertinent; that I put it to the end that we may
clearly know with whom we have to deal and what consideration to
extend him, what credit to attach to the communication he is to make
us touching my lord here. Under what circumstances did you become
acquainted with Mr. Caryll?”

“I have known him these twelve years,” answered Collis promptly; “so has
Stapleton, so has Gascoigne, so have a dozen other gentlemen who could
be produced, and who, like ourselves, were at Oxford with him. For
myself and Stapleton, I can say that our acquaintance--indeed, I should
say our friendship--with Mr. Caryll has been continuous since then, and
that we have visited him on several occasions at his estate of Maligny
in Normandy. That he habitually inhabits the country of his birth is the
reason why Mr. Caryll has not hitherto had the advantage of your grace's
acquaintance. Need I say more to efface the false statement made by my
Lord Rotherby?”

“False? Do you dare give me the lie, sir?” roared Rotherby.

But the duke soothed him. Under his profligate exterior his Grace of
Wharton concealed--indeed, wasted--a deal of shrewdness, ability and
inherent strength. “One thing at a time, my lord,” said the president of
the Bold Bucks. “Let us attend to the matter of Mr. Caryll.”

“Dons and the devil! Does your grace take sides with him?”

“I take no sides. But I owe it to myself--we all owe it to
ourselves--that this matter should be cleared.”

Rotherby leered at him, his lip trembling with anger. “Does the
president of the Bold Bucks pretend to administrate a court of honor?”
 he sneered heavily.

“Your lordship will gain little by this,” Wharton admonished him, so
coldly that Rotherby belatedly came to some portion of his senses again.
The duke turned to Caryll. “Mr. Caryll,” said he, “Sir Harry has given
you very handsome credentials, which would seem to prove you worthy the
hospitality of White's. You have, however, permitted yourself certain
expressions concerning his lordship here, which we cannot allow to
remain where you have left them. You must retract, sir, or make them
good.” His gravity, and the preciseness of his diction now, sorted most
oddly with his foppish airs.

Mr. Caryll closed his snuff-box with a snap. A hush fell instantly upon
the company, which by now was all crowding about the little table at
which sat Mr. Caryll and his three friends. A footman who entered at
the moment to snuff the candles and see what the gentlemen might be
requiring, was dismissed the room. When the door had closed, Mr. Caryll
began to speak.

One more attempt was made by Rotherby to interfere, but this attempt was
disposed of by Wharton, who had constituted himself entirely master of
the proceedings.

“If you will not allow Mr. Caryll to speak, we shall infer that you fear
what he may have to say; you will compel us to hear him in your absence,
and I cannot think that you would prefer that, my lord.”

My lord fell silent. He was breathing heavily, and his face was pale,
his eyes angry beyond words, what time Mr. Caryll, in amiable, musical
voice, with its precise and at moments slightly foreign enunciation,
unfolded the shameful story of the affair at the “Adam and Eve,” at
Maidstone. He told a plain, straightforward tale, making little attempt
to reproduce any of its color, giving his audience purely and simply the
facts that had taken place. He told how he himself had been chosen as a
witness when my lord had heard that there was a traveller from France
in the house, and showed how that slight circumstance had first awakened
his suspicions of foul play. He provoked some amusement when he dealt
with his detection and exposure of the sham parson. But in the main he
was heard with a stern and ominous attention--ominous for Lord Rotherby.

Rakes these men admittedly were with but few exceptions. No ordinary
tale of gallantry could have shocked them, or provoked them to aught but
a contemptuous mirth at the expense of the victim, male or female. They
would have thought little the worse of a man for running off with the
wife, say, of one of his acquaintance; they would have thought nothing
of his running off with a sister or a daughter--so long as it was not
of their own. All these were fair game, and if the husband, father or
brother could not protect the wife, sister or daughter that was his, the
more shame to him. But though they might be fair game, the game had its
rules--anomalous as it may seem. These rules Lord Rotherby--if the tale
Mr. Caryll told was true--had violated. He had practiced a cheat, the
more dastardly because the poor lady who had so narrowly escaped being
his victim had nether father nor brother to avenge her. And in every eye
that was upon him Lord Rotherby might have read, had he had the wit to
do so, the very sternest condemnation.

“A pretty story, as I've a soul!” was his grace's comment, when Mr.
Caryll had done. “A pretty story, my Lord Rotherby. I have a stomach for
strong meat myself. But--odds my life!--this is too nauseous!”

Rotherby glared at him. “'Slife! your grace is grown very nice on a
sudden!” he sneered. “The president of the Bold Bucks, the master of the
Hell Fire Club, is most oddly squeamish where the diversions of another
are concerned.”

“Diversions?” said his grace, his eyebrows raised until they all but
vanished under the golden curls of his peruke. “Diversions? Ha! I
observe that you make no attempt to deny the story. You admit it, then?”

There was a stir in the group, a drawing back from his lordship. He
observed it, trembling between chagrin and rage. “What's here?” he
cried, and laughed contemptuously. “Oh, ah! You'll follow where his
grace leads you! Ye've followed him so long in lewdness that now yell
follow him in conversion! But as for you, sir,” and he swung fiercely
upon Caryll, “you and your precious story--will you maintain it sword in
hand?”

“I can do better,” answered Mr. Caryll, “if any doubts my word.”

“As how?”

“I can prove it categorically, by witnesses.”

“Well said, Caryll,” Stapleton approved him.

“And if I say that you lie--you and your witnesses?”

“'T is you will be liar,” said Mr. Caryll.

“Besides, it is a little late for that,” cut in the duke.

“Your grace,” cried Rotherby, “is this affair yours?”

“No, I thank Heaven!” said his grace, and sat down.

Rotherby scowled at the man who until ten minutes ago had been his
friend and boon companion, and there was more of contempt than anger
in his eyes. He turned again to Mr. Caryll, who was watching him with a
gleam of amusement--that infernally irritating amusement of his--in his
gray-green eyes.

“Well?” he demanded foolishly, “have you naught to say?”

“I had thought,” returned Mr. Caryll, “that I had said enough.” And the
duke laughed aloud.

Rotherby's lip was curled. “Ha! You don't think, now, that you may have
said too much?”

Mr. Caryll stifled a yawn. “Do you?” he inquired blandly.

“Ay, by God! Too much for a gentleman to leave unpunished.”

“Possibly. But what gentleman is concerned in this?”

“I am!” thundered Rotherby.

“I see. And how do you conceive that you answer the description?”

Rotherby swore at him with great choice and variety. “You shall learn,”
 he promised him. “My friends shall wait on you to-night.”

“I wonder who will carry his message?” ventured Collis to the ceiling.
Rotherby turned on him, fierce as a rat. “It is a matter you may
discover to your cost, Sir Harry,” he snarled.

“I think,” put in his grace very languidly, “that you are troubling the
harmony that is wont to reign here.”

His lordship stood still a moment. Then, quite suddenly, he snatched
up a candlestick to hurl at Mr. Caryll. But he had it wrenched from his
hands ere he could launch it.

He stood a moment, discomfited, glowering upon his brother. “My friends
shall wait on you to-night,” he repeated.

“You said so before,” Mr. Caryll replied wearily. “I shall endeavor to
make them welcome.”

His lordship nodded stupidly, and strode to the door. His departure
was observed in silence. On every face he read his sentence. These
men--rakes though they were, professedly--would own him no more for
their associate; and what these men thought to-night not a gentleman in
town but would be thinking the same tomorrow. He had the stupidity
to lay it all to the score of Mr. Caryll, not perceiving that he had
brought it upon himself by his own aggressiveness. He paused, his hand
upon the doorknob, and turned to loose a last shaft at them.

“As for you others, that follow your bell-wether there,” and he
indicated his grace, whose shoulder was towards him, “this matter ends
not here.”

And with that general threat he passed out, and that snug room at
White's knew him no more.

Major Gascoigne was gathering up the cards that had been flung down when
first the storm arose. Mr. Caryll bent to assist him. And the last voice
Lord Rotherby h

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