And the Duke sat down in a corner, with his knife, his tobacco, and his cutty-pipe, as shy as a great boy in a roomful of girls. Yet this wore off, for the conversation of the elect did not, after all, rarefy the atmosphere to oppression; indeed, that of the sensitised soul contained more oaths than Jack had heard from one mouth since he left the bush, and this alone was enough to put him at his ease. At the same time he was repelled, for it appeared to be a characteristic of the great Stubbs to turn up his nose at all men; and as that organ was retroussé to begin with, Jack was forcibly reminded of some ill-bred, snarling bulldog, and he marvelled at the hound’s reputation. He put in no word, however, until the conversation turned on Claude’s poems, and a particularly cool, coarse thing was said of one of them, and Claude only laughed. Then he did speak up.
“See here, mister,” he blurted out from his corner. “Could you do as good?”
Stubbs stared at the Duke, and drained his glass.
“I shouldn’t try,” was his reply.
“I wouldn’t,” retorted Jack. “I just wouldn’t, if I were you.”
Stubbs could better have parried a less indelicate, a less childish thrust; as it was, he reached for his hat. Claude interfered at once.
“My dear old fellow,” said he to Jack, “you mustn’t mind what my friend Edmund says of my stuff. I like it. He is always right, for one thing; and then, only think of the privilege of having such a critic to tell one exactly what he thinks.”
Jack looked from one man to the other. The sincerity of the last speech was not absolutely convincing, but that of Claude’s feeling for his friend was obvious enough; and, with a laugh, the Duke put his back against the door. The apology which he delivered in that position was in all respects characteristic. It was unnecessarily full; it was informed alike by an extravagant good-will towards mankind, and an irritating personal humility; and it ended, somewhat to Claude’s dismay, with a direct invitation to both his friends to spend a month at Maske Towers.
Perhaps these young men realised then, for the first time, who the rough fellow was, after all, with whom they had been thrown in contact. At all events the double invitation was accepted with alacrity; and no more hard things were said of Claude’s lyrics. The flow of soul was henceforth as uninterrupted as that of the whisky down the visitors’ throats. And no further hitch would have occurred had the Impressionist not made that surreptitious sketch of the Duke, which so delighted his friends.
“Oh, admirable!” cried Claude. “A most suggestive humouresque!”
“It’ll do,” said Stubbs, the oracle. “It mightn’t appeal to the suburbs, damn them, but it does to us.”
“Grant the convention, and the art is perfect,” continued Claude, with the tail of his eye on Jack.
“It is the caricature that is more like than life,” pursued Stubbs, with a sidelong glance in the same direction.
Jack saw these looks; but from his corner he could not see the sketch, nor had he any suspicion of its subject. All else that he noted was the flush of triumph, or it may have been whisky, or just possibly both, on the pale, fringed face of Impressionism. He held out his hand for the half-sheet of paper on which the sketch had been made.
“I hope it won’t offend you,” exclaimed the artist, hesitating.
“Offend me! Why should it? Let’s have a look!”
And he looked for more than a minute at the five curves and a beard which had expressed to quicker eyes the quintessence of his own outward and visible personality. At first he could make nothing of them; even when an interpretation dawned upon him, his face was puzzled as he raised it to the trio hanging on his words.
“It won’t do, mister,” said the Duke reluctantly. “You’ll never get saplings like them,” tapping the five curves with his forefinger, “to hold a nest like that,” putting his thumb on the beard, “and don’t you believe it.”
There was a moment’s silence. Then the Impressionist said thickly:
“Give me that sketch.”
Jack handed it back. In another moment it was littering the ground in four pieces, and the door had banged behind the indignant draftsman.
“What on earth have I done?” cried the Duke, aghast.
“You have offended Llewellyn,” replied Claude shortly.
“How? By what I said? I’ll run after him this minute and apologise. I never meant to hurt his feelings. Where’s that stove-pipe hat?”
“Let me go,” said Stubbs, getting up. “I understand the creative animal; it is thin-skinned; but I’ll tell our friend what you say.”
“I wish you would. Tell him I meant no harm. And fetch him down with you just whenever you can come.”
“Thanks — that will be very pleasing. I daresay August will be our best time, but we shall let you know. I’ll put it all right with Ivor; but these creative asses (saving your presence, Lafont) never can see a joke.”
“A joke!” cried Jack, when he and Claude were alone.
“Stubbs is ironical,” said Claude severely.
“Look here,” said the Duke, “what are you givin’ us, old boy? Seems to me you clever touchers have been getting at a cove between you. Where does this joke come in, eh?”
And his good faith was so obvious that Claude picked up the four quarters of torn paper, fitted them together, and entered upon yet another explanation. This one, however, was somewhat impatiently given and received. The Duke professed to think his likeness exceedingly unlike — when, indeed, he could be got to see his own outlines at all — and Claude disagreeing, a silence fell between the pair. Jack sought to break it by taking off his collar (which had made him miserable) and putting it in his pocket with a significant look; but the act provoked no comment. So the two men sat, the one smoking cigarettes, the other his cutty, but neither speaking, nor yet reading a line. And the endless roar of Piccadilly, reaching them through the open windows, emphasised their silence, until suddenly it sank beneath the midnight chimes of the city clocks. In another minute a tiny, tinkling echo came from Claude’s chimney-piece, and the Duke put down his pipe and spoke.
“My first whole day in London — a goner,” he said; “and a pretty full day it’s been. Listen to this for one day’s work,” and as he rehearsed them, he ticked off the events on his great brown fingers. “Got run in — that’s number one. Turned up among a lot of swells in my old duds — number two. Riled the cleverest man you know — number three — so that he nearly cleared out of your rooms; and, not content with that, hurt the feelings of the second cleverest (present company excepted) so that he did clear — which is number four. Worst of all, riled you, old man, and hurt your feelings too. That’s the finisher. And see here, Claude, it isn’t good enough and it won’t do. I won’t wash in London, and I’m full up of the hole; as for my own house, it gave me the fair hump the moment I put my nose inside; and I’d be on to make tracks up the bush any day you like — if it weren’t for one thing.”
“What’s that,” said Claude, “if it’s a fair question?”
The other concealed his heightened colour by relighting his pipe and puffing vigorously.
“I’ll tell you,” said he; “it’s that old girl and — what’s the daughter’s name again?”
“Olivia.”
“Olivia. A beautiful name for a beautiful girl! She’s all that and more.”
“And much more.”
“You see, she’s as good inside as out; she has a kind heart.”
“I have always found it so,” said Claude, “and I’ve known her since she was a child.”
The two kinsmen, who had been so wide apart a few minutes since, were now more than ever mutually akin. They drew their chairs together; but the touchstone was deep down in either heart.
“You knew her when she was a child!” repeated the Duke in a kind of awe. “Yes; and I daresay, now, you used to play with her, and perhaps take her on your knee, and even pull her hair and kiss her in them old days. Yet there you sit smoking cigarettes!”
His own pipe was out. He was in a reverie. Claude also had his own thoughts.
“The one thing was this,” said the Duke at length: “would the old woman and her daughter come to see us up the country?”
Claude was torn two ways. The Towers scheme was no longer his first anxiety. He returned to it by an effort.
“They would,” he said. “Lady Caroline told me so. They would come like a shot in August. She said so herself.”
“Would you put me up to things in the meantime? Would you be showing me the ropes?”
“The very thing I should like to do, so far as I am able.”
“Then we’ll start to-morrow — I mean to-day. That settles it. And yet — —”
“Out with it,” said Claude, smiling.
“Well, I will. I mean no harm, you understand. Who am I to dare to look at her? Only I do feel as if that girl would do me a deal of good down there — you know, in making me more the sort of chap for my billet. But if she’s gone and got a sweetheart, he might very easily object; so I just thought I’d like to know.”
“She hasn’t one, to my knowledge,” said Claude at length.
“Is that a fact?” cried the Duke. “Well, I don’t know what all you fellows are thinking of, but I do know that I am jolly glad. Not from any designs of my own, mind you — I haven’t as much cheek as all that — but to save trouble. Do you know, Claudy, I’ve had a beast of a thought off and on all the night?”
“No; what was that?”
“Why, I half suspected she was your own girl.”
CHAPTER VI
A NEW LEAF
“The Duke of St. Osmund’s and Mr. Claude Lafont left town yesterday for Maske Towers, the family seat near Devenholme.” So ran the announcement in the morning papers of the next day but one. And the Duke was actually exploring his inheritance when it appeared.
Overnight the pair had arrived too late to see much more than the lofty, antique hall and the respective rooms in which they were to sup and sleep; but the birds awoke Jack in the early morning, and he was up and out before seven o’clock.
As yet he had seen little that attracted him within, and at this hour he felt a childish horror of the dark colossal canvases overhanging the grand staircase and the hall; like the sightless suits of armour standing blind sentinel below, they froze him with the look of lifeless life about the grim, gigantic figures. He was thankful to see one of the great double doors standing open to the sun; it let him out into a portico loftier than the hall; and folding his arms across a stone balustrade, the whilom bushman looked forth between Corinthian columns like the masts of a ship, and was monarch of all he beheld.
A broad and stately terrace ran right and left below; beyond and below this, acres of the smoothest, greenest sward were relieved by a few fine elms, with the deer still in clusters about their trunks. The lawn sloped quietly to the verdant shores of a noble lake; sun and dew had dusted the grass with silver; sun and wind were rippling the lake with flakes of flame like leaping gold-fish; and across the water, on the rising ground, a plantation of young pines ran their points into the radiant sky. These trees appealed to the Duke more than anything he had seen yet. His last bush hut had been built among pines; and such is the sentimental attraction of the human heart towards a former condition — better or worse, if it be but beyond recall — that the Duke of St. Osmund’s had to inspect that plantation before anything else. Leaving the Towers behind him, unnoticed and indeed forgotten, he crossed the lawn, skirted the lake, and plunged amid the pine-trees as his impulse spurred him. But on his way back, a little later, the mellow grandeur of that ancient pile broke in upon him at last, and he stood astounded in the wet grass, the blood of possession running hot in his veins.
The historic building stretched on this side for something like a quarter of a mile from end to end. Here the blue sky sank deep between turret and spire, and there it picked out a line of crumbling battlements, or backed the upper branches of an elm that (from this point) cut the expanse of stone in two. It had grown out of many attempts in as many ages; thus, besides architectural discrepancies for the eyes of the few, the shading of the walls was as finely graduated as that of an aging beard, but the prevailing tint was a pearly gray, now washed with purple, and exquisitely softened by the tender haze still lingering in the dewy air. And from every window that Jack could see, flashed a morning sun; for as he stood and looked, his shadow lay in front of him along the milky grass.
To one extremity of the building clung an enormous conservatory, likewise ablaze from dome to masonry; at the other, the dark hues of a shrubbery rested the eye; but that of the Duke was used to the sunlit desert, and not readily dazzled. His quick glance went like a bullet through the trees to a red gable and the gilt hands of a clock just visible beyond. On the instant he recovered from his enchantment, and set off for the shrubbery at a brisk walk; for he had heard much of the Maske stables, and evidently there they were.
As he was in the shrubbery, the stable clock struck eight after a melodious chime sadly spoilt by the incessant barking of some small dog; the last stroke reverberated as he emerged, and the dog had the morning air to itself, to murder with its hideous clamour. But the Duke now saw the exciting cause, and it excited him; for he had come out opposite the stable-yard gates, which were shut, but from the top of which, with its lame paw lifted, a vertical tail, and a back like a hedgehog asleep, his own yellow cat spat defiance at an unseen foe. And between the barks came the voice of a man inciting the dog with a filthy relish.
“Set him off, Pickle! Now’s your time. Try again. Oh, blow me, if you can’t you can’t, and I’ll have to lend you a hand.”
And one showed over the gate with the word, but the fingers grabbed the air, for Jack had snatched his pet in the nick of time. He was now busy with the ring of the latch, fumbling it in his fury. The breath came in gusts through his set teeth and bristling beard. One hand clasped the yellow cat in a fierce caress; the other knotted into a fist as the gate flew open.
In the yard a hulking, smooth-faced fellow, whose pendulous under-lip had dropped in dismay, changed his stare for a grin when he saw the Duke, who was the smaller as well as the rougher-looking man of the two; for he had not only come out without his collar, which he discarded whenever he could; but he had clapped on the old bush wideawake because Claude was not up to stop him.
“Well, and who are you?” began the other cheerfully.
“You take off your coat and I’ll show you,” replied Jack, with a blood-thirsty indistinctness. “I’m a better man than you are, whoever I am; at least we’ll have a see!”
“Oh, will we?” said the fellow. “And you’re the better man, are you? What do you think?” he added, turning to a stable-boy who stood handy with thin brown arms akimbo, and thumbs in his belt.
“I wonder ‘oo ‘e thinks ‘e is w’en ‘e’s at ‘ome?” said the lad.
Jack never heard him. He had spied the saddle-room door standing open. In an instant he was there, with the small dog yelping at his heels; in another, he had locked the door between cat and dog, pocketed the key, and returned to his man, stripping off his own coat and waistcoat as he came. He flung them into a corner, and after them his bush hat.
“Now let’s see you take off yours! If you don’t,” added Jack, with a big bush oath, “I’ll have to hide you with it on!”
But man and boy had been consulting while his back was turned, and Jack now found himself between the two of them; not that he gave the lad a thought.
“Look you here; I’ll tell you who I am,” said the man. “My name’s Matt Hunt, and Matt can fight, as you wouldn’t need telling if you belonged to these parts. But he don’t take on stray tramps like you; so, unless you hook it slippy, we’re just going to run you out o’ this yard quicker than you come in.”
“Not till I’ve shown you how to treat dumb animals — —”
“Then here goes!”
And with that the man Hunt seized one of Jack’s arms, while the sta
ble-boy nipped the other from behind, and made a dive at Jack’s pocket for the saddle-room key. But a flat-footed kick sent the lad sprawling without harming him; and the man was driven so hard under the nose that he too fell back, bearded with blood.
“Come on!” roared Jack. “And you, my boy, keep out of the light unless you want a whipping yourself!”
He was rolling up the sleeves from his tanned and furry arms. Hunt followed suit, a cascade of curses flowing with his blood; he had torn off his coat, and a wrist-button tinkled on the cement as he caught up Jack in his preparations. His arms were thicker than the bushman’s, though white and fleshy. Hunt was also the heavier weight, besides standing fully six feet, as against the Duke’s five-feet-nine when he held himself up. Nor was there any lack of confidence in the dripping, hairless, sinister face, when the two men finally squared up.
They fell to work without niggling, for Jack rushed in like a bull, leading most violently with his left. It was an inartistic start; the big man was not touched; but neither did he touch Jack, who displayed, at all events, a quick pair of legs. Yet it was this start that steadied the Duke. It showed him that Hunt was by no means unskilled in the use of his hands; and it put out of his head everything but the fight itself, so that he heard no more the small tike barking outside the saddle-room door, hitherto his angriest goad. Some cool sparring ensued. Then Hunt let out from the shoulder, but the blow was avoided with great agility; then Jack led off again, but with a lighter touch, and this time he drew his man. The blows of the next minute it was impossible to follow. They were given and returned with enormous virulence. And there was no end to them until the big man tripped and fell.
“See here,” said Jack, standing over him; “that was my cat, and I’d got to go for you. But if you’ve had enough of this game, so have I, and we’ll cry quits.”
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 114
