Claude groaned inwardly.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I’ll tell you straight. I’m not going to do the Dook in this hotel. I’m plain Jack Dillamore, or I don’t go in.”
The delight of this deliverance nearly overcame the poet.
“I think you’re wise,” was all he trusted himself to say. “I should be inclined to take the same course were I in your place. You will escape a great deal of the sort of adulation which turneth the soul sick. And for one night, at all events, you will be able, as an alien outsider, to form an unprejudiced opinion of our unlovely metropolis.”
In the bright light of his ineffable relief, Claude’s little mannerisms stood out once more, like shadows when the sun shines fitfully; but it was a transient gleam. The arrival at the hotel was still embarrassing enough. The wideawake attracted attention. The attention was neither of a flattering character in itself nor otherwise desirable from any point of view. It made Claude miserable. There was also trouble about the cats.
Jack insisted on having them with him in his room. The management demurred. Jack threatened to go elsewhere. The management raised no objection; but Claude did. He handed them his card, and this settled the matter. There is but one race of Lafonts in England. So Jack had his way. A room was taken; the cats were put into it; milk was set before them; and Jack left the hotel in Claude’s company, with the key of that room in his pocket.
Claude would have taken him to his club, but for both their sakes he did not dare. Yet he was as anxious as ever to show every hospitality to the Duke. Accordingly he had refused Jack’s invitation to dine with him in the hotel, and was taking him across to the Holborn instead.
The dinner went wonderfully. Jack was delighted with the music, with the electric lights, with the marble pillars, with the gilded balconies, with the dinner itself, in fact with everything. There was but one item which did not appeal to him: he stoutly refused to drink a drop of wine.
“A promise is a promise,” said he. “I gave you my colonial in the train, and I mean to keep it; for a bit, at all events.”
Claude protested and tempted him in vain. Jack called for a lemon-squash, and turned his wine-glasses upside down. He revenged himself, however, upon the viands.
“Which entrée, please, sir?” said the waiter.
“Both!” cried Jack. “You may go on, mister, till I tell you to stop!”
After dinner the cousins went aloft, and Claude took out his cigarette case and ordered cigars for the Duke. He could not smoke them himself, but neither, it appeared, could Jack. He produced a cutty-pipe, black and foul with age, and a cake of tobacco like a piece of shoe-leather, which he began paring with his knife. Claude had soon to sit farther away from him.
Jack did not fancy a theatre; he was strongly in favour of a quiet evening and a long talk; and it was he who proposed that they should return, for this purpose, to the First Avenue. No sooner were they comfortably settled in the hotel smoking-room, however, than the Duke announced that he must run upstairs and see to his cats. And he came down no more that night.
Claude waited patiently for twenty minutes. Then he began a note to Lady Caroline Sellwood. Then he remembered that he could, if he liked, see Lady Caroline that night. It was merely a question of driving over to his rooms in St. James’s and putting himself into evening dress. On the whole, this seemed worth doing. Claude therefore followed Jack upstairs after an interval of half-an-hour.
The Duke’s rooms were on the first floor. Claude surprised a group of first-floor servants laughing and whispering in the corridor. The little that he heard as he passed made him hot all over. The exact words were:
“Never see such a man in my life.” “Nor me, my dear!” “And yet they call this ‘ere a decent ‘otel!”
Claude had no doubt in his own mind as to whom they were talking about. Already the Duke inspired him with a sort of second-self-consciousness. Prepared for anything, he hastened to the room and nervously knocked at the door.
“Come in!” cried Jack’s voice.
The door was unlocked; as Claude opened it the heat of the room fairly staggered him. It was a sufficiently warm summer night, yet an enormous fire was burning in the grate.
“My dear fellow!” panted Claude.
Jack was in his trousers and shirt; the sleeves were rolled up over his brawny arms; the open front revealed an estuary of hairy chest; and it was plain at a glance that the Duke was perspiring at every pore.
“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s for the cats.”
“The cats!” said Claude. They were lying round about the fire.
“Yes, poor devils! They had a fire every day in the hut, summer and winter. They never had a single one at sea. They like to sleep by it — they always did — all but Livingstone. He sleeps with me when he isn’t on the loose.”
“But you’ll never be able to sleep in an atmosphere like this!”
Jack was cutting up a pipeful of his black tobacco.
“Well, it is warm,” he admitted. “And now you mention it, I may find it a job to get asleep; but the cats like it, anyhow!” And he swore at them affectionately as he lit his pipe.
“Did you forget you’d left me downstairs?” asked Claude.
“Clean! I apologise. I took this idea into my head, and I could think of nothing else.”
“May we have another window open? Thank you. I’ll smoke one cigarette; then I must be off.”
“Where to?”
“My chambers — to dress.”
“To undress, you mean!”
“No, to dress. I’ve got to go out to a — to a party. I had almost forgotten about it. The truth is, I want to see Lady Caroline Sellwood, who, although not a near relation, is about the only woman in London with our blood in her veins. She will want to see you. What’s the matter?”
Jack’s pipe had gone out in his hand; and there he stood, a pillar of perspiring bewilderment.
“A party!” he murmured. “At this time o’ night!”
Claude laughed.
“It’s not ten o’clock yet; if I’m there before half-past eleven I shall be too early.”
“I give you best,” said Jack, shaking his head, and putting another light to his pipe. “It licks me! Who’s the madman who gives parties in the middle of the night?”
“My dear fellow, everybody does! In this case it’s a woman: the Countess of Darlingford.”
“A live Countess!”
“Well, but you’re a live Duke.”
“But — I’m — a live — Dook!”
Jack repeated the words as though the fact had momentarily escaped him. His pipe went out again. This time he made no attempt to relight it, but stood staring at Claude with his bare brown arms akimbo, and much trouble in his rugged, honest face.
“You can’t get out of it,” laughed Claude.
“I can!” he cried. “I mean to get out of it! I’m not the man for the billet. I wasn’t dragged up to it. And I don’t want it! I shall only make a darned ass of myself and everybody else mixed up with me. I may be the man by birth, but I’m not the man by anything else; and look here, I want to back out of it while there’s time; and you’re the very man to help me. I wasn’t dragged up to it — but you were. I’m not the man for the billet — but you are. The very man! You go to parties in the middle of the night, and you think nothing of ‘em. They’d be the death of Happy Jack! The whole thing turns me sick with funk — the life, the money, the responsibility. I never got a sight of it till to-day; and now I don’t want it at any price. You’d have got it if it hadn’t been for me; so take it now — for God’s sake, take it now! If it’s mine, it’s mine to give. I give it to you! Claude, old toucher, be the Dook yourself. Let me and the cats clear back to the bush!”
The poet had listened with amazement, with amusement, with compassion and concern. He now shook his head.
“You ask an impossibility. Without going into the thing, take my word for it that what you propose
is utterly and hopelessly out of the question.”
“Couldn’t I disappear?” said Jack eagerly. “Couldn’t I do a bolt in the night? It’s a big chance for you; surely you won’t lose it by refusing to help me clear out?”
Claude again shook his head.
“In a week’s time you will be laughing at what you are saying now. You are one of the richest men in England; everything that money can buy you can have. You own some of the loveliest seats in the whole country; wait till I have shown you Maske Towers! You won’t want to clear out then. You won’t ask me to be the Duke again!”
He had purposely dwelt upon those material allurements which the bushman’s mind would most readily grasp. And it was obvious that his arguments had hit the target, although not, perhaps, the bull’s-eye.
“Anyhow,” said Jack doggedly, “it’s an offer! And I repeat it. What’s more, I mean it too!”
“Then I decline it,” returned Claude, to humour him; “and there’s an end of the matter. Look here, though. One thing I promise. If you like, I’ll see you through!”
“You will?”
“I will with all my heart.”
“And you’re quite sure you won’t take on the whole show yourself?”
“Quite sure,” said Claude, smiling.
“Still, you’ll tell me what to do? You’ll tell me what not to do? You’ll show me the ropes? You’ll have hold of my sleeve?”
“I’ll do all that; at least, I’ll do all I can. It may not be much. Still I’ll do it.”
Jack held out a hot, damp hand; yet, just then, he seemed to be perspiring most freely under the eyes.
“You’re a good sort, Claudy!” said he hoarsely.
“Good-night, old fellow,” said Claude Lafont.
CHAPTER IV
NOT IN THE PROGRAMME
Lady Caroline Sellwood’s incomparable Wednesdays were so salient a feature of those seasons during which her husband was in office, and her town house in St. James’s Square, that their standard is still quoted as the ideal of its kind. These afternoons were never dull. Lady Caroline cast a broad net, and her average draught included representatives of every decent section of the community. But she also possessed some secret recipe, the envy and the despair of other professional hostesses, and in her rooms there was never an undue preponderance of any one social ingredient. Every class — above a certain line, not drawn too high — was represented; none was over done; nor was the mistake made of “packing” the assembly with interesting people. The very necessary complement of the merely interested was never wanting. One met beauty as well as brains; wealth as well as wit; and quite as many colourless nonentities as notorieties of every hue. The proportion was always perfect, but not more so than the general good-temper of the guests. They foregathered like long-lost brothers and sisters: the demagogue and the divine; the judge and the junior; the oldest lady and the newest woman; the amateur playwright and the actor-manager who had lost his play; the minor novelist and the young lady who had never heard of him; and my Lords and Ladies (whose carriages half-filled the Square) with the very least of these. It was wonderful to see them together; it was a solemn thought, but yet a fact, that their heavenly behaviour was due simply and entirely to the administrative genius of Lady Caroline Sellwood.
The Home Secretary hated the Wednesdays; he was the one person who did; and he only hated them because they were Wednesdays — and from the period of his elderly infatuation for golf. It was his great day for a round; and Lady Caroline had to make his excuses every week when it was fine. This was another thing which her Ladyship did beautifully. She would say, with a voice full of sympathy, equally divided between those mutual losers, her guest and her husband, that poor dear George had to address such and such a tiresome deputation; when, as a matter of fact, he was “addressing” his golf-hall on Wimbledon Common, and enjoying himself exceedingly. Now, among other Wednesdays, the Home Secretary was down at Wimbledon (with a prominent member of the Opposition) on the afternoon following the arrival in London of the ninth Duke of St. Osmund’s; and Mr. Sellwood never knew whether to pity his wife, or to congratulate himself, on his absence from her side on that occasion.
One of their constant ornaments, Claude Lafont, had been forced to eschew these Wednesdays of late weeks. Lady Caroline Sellwood had never been quite the same to him since the Easter Recess. She had treated him from that time with a studied coolness quite inexplicable to his simple mind; and finally, at Lady Darlingford’s, she had been positively rude. Claude, of course, had gone there expressly to prepare Lady Caroline for the new Duke. This he conceived to be his immediate duty, and he attempted to perform it, in the kindliest spirit imaginable, with all the tact at his command. Lady Caroline declined to hear him out. She chose to put a sinister construction upon his well-meant words, and to interrupt them with the announcement that she intended, with Claude’s permission, to judge the Duke for herself. Was he married? Ha! then where was he to be found? Claude told her, was coldly thanked, and went home to writhe all that Tuesday night under the mortification of his kinswoman’s snub.
Yet, on the Wednesday afternoon, Claude Lafont not only went to the Sellwoods’ as though nothing had happened, but he was there before the time. And Lady Caroline was not only amazed, but (for the first time since Easter) really pleased to see him: for already she had been given cause to regret her insolent disregard of him overnight at Lady Darlingford’s. She was even composing an apology when the whiteness of Claude’s face brought her thoughts to a standstill.
“Have you seen him?” he cried, as they met.
“The Duke?”
“Yes — haven’t you seen him this morning?”
“No, indeed! Haven’t you?”
Claude sat down with a groan, shaking his head, and never seeing the glittering, plump, outstretched hand.
“Haven’t you?” repeated Lady Caroline, sitting down herself.
“Not this morning. I made sure he would come here!”
“So he ought to have done. I asked him to lunch. The note was written and posted the instant we came in from the Darlingfords’. Claude, I wasn’t nice to you there! Can you forgive me? I thought you were prejudiced. My dreadful temper rose in arms on the side of the absent man; it always was my great weakness rightly or wrongly to take the part of those who aren’t there to stick up for themselves!”
Her great weakness was of quite another character, but Claude bowed. He was barely listening.
“I’ve lost him,” he said, looking at Lady Caroline, with a rolling eye. “He’s disappeared.”
“Never!”
“This morning,” said Claude. “I did so hope he was here!”
“He sent no answer, not one word, and he never came. Who saw him last?”
“The hotel people, early this morning. It seems he ordered a horse for seven o’clock, shortly after I left him last night. So they got him one, and off he went before breakfast in the flannel collar and the outrageous bush wideawake in which he landed. And he’s never come back.”
A change came over Lady Caroline Sellwood. She drew her chair a little nearer, and she favoured Claude Lafont with a kindlier glance than he had had from her since Easter.
“Something may have happened,” whispered Lady Caroline hopefully.
“That’s just it. Something must have happened.”
“But something dreadful! Only last season there was a man killed in the Row! Was he — a very rough diamond, Claude?”
“Very.”
Lady Caroline sighed complacently.
“But you can’t help liking him,” hastily added Claude, “and I hope to goodness nothing serious is the matter!”
“Of course, so do I. That goes without saying.”
“Nor is he at all a likely man to be thrown. He has lived his life in the saddle. By the way, he brought his own old bush-saddle with him, and it appears that he insisted on riding out in that too.”
“You see, Claude, it’s a pity you didn’t leave
him in the bush; he’s evidently devoted to it still.”
“He is — that’s the trouble; he has already spoken of bolting back there. My fear is that he may even now be suiting the action to the word.”
“Don’t tell me that,” said Lady Caroline, whose head was still full of her first theory.
“It’s what I fear; he’s just the sort of fellow to go back by the first boat, if the panic took him. He showed signs of a panic last night. You see, he’s only just beginning to realise what his position here will mean. And it frightens him; it may have frightened him out of our sight once and for all.”
Lady Caroline shook her head.
“My fear is that he has broken his neck! And if he has, depend upon it, sad as it would be, it would still be for the best. That’s what I always say: everything is for the best,” repeated Lady Caroline, pensively gazing at Claude’s handsome head. “However,” she added, as the door opened, “here’s Olivia; go and ask her what she thinks. I am prepared for the worst. And pray stop, dear Claude, and let us talk the matter over after the others have gone. We may know the worst by that time. And we have seen nothing of you this season!”
Olivia looked charming. She was also kind to Claude. But she entirely declined to embrace her mother’s dark view of the Duke’s disappearance. On the other hand, she was inconveniently inquisitive about his looks and personality, and Claude had to say many words for his cousin before he could get in one for himself. However, he did at length contrive to speak of his new volume of poems. It was just out. He was having a copy of the exceedingly limited large-paper edition specially bound in vellum for Olivia’s acceptance. Olivia seemed pleased, and apart from his anxiety Claude had not felt so happy for weeks. They were allowed to talk to each other until the rooms began to fill.
It was a very good Wednesday; but then the season was at its height. The gathering comprised the usual measure of interesting and interested persons, and the former had made their names upon as many different fields as ever. Claude had a chat with his friend, Edmund Stubbs, a young man with an unhealthy skin and a vague reputation for immense cleverness. They spoke of the poems. Stubbs expressed a wish to see the large-paper edition, which was not yet for sale, as did Ivor Llewellyn, the impressionist artist, who was responsible for the “decorations” in most volumes of contemporary minor verse, Claude’s included. Claude was injudicious enough to invite both men to his rooms that night. The Impressionist was the most remarkable-looking of all Lady Caroline’s guests. He wore a curled fringe and a flowing tie, and pince-nez attached to his person by a broad black ribbon. His pale face was prematurely drawn, and he showed his gums in a deathly grin at the many hard things which Stubbs muttered at the expense of all present whom he knew by sight. Claude had a high opinion of both these men, but for once he was scarcely in tune for their talk, which was ever at a sort of artistic-intellectual concert-pitch. The Duke was to be forgotten in the society of Olivia only. Claude therefore edged away, trod on the skirts of a titled divorcée, got jammed between an Irish member and a composer of comic songs, and was finally engaged in conversation by the aged police magistrate, Sir Joseph Todd.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 112
