A Poached Peerage Part 46

Whether the duke realized that the refusal contained a certain admixture of defiance is uncertain. Anyhow, he took two strides with his short legs, and, at uncomfortably close quarters, repeated the invitation.

But Peckover sat tight. "I'm not Lord Quorn," he maintained doggedly, "and I've had as much fresh air as I want for one day." His complexion was green with fear. With the searching fire of those eyes upon him he felt it was as much as he could do to keep from shrivelling up; still, what mind panic had left him was dominated by the a.s.surance that once in the garden it would be all over with his somewhat luridly chequered career. The Salolja eyes held him. He tried to glance round for encouragement, for a touch of companions.h.i.+p even, at the others in the room who, however, watched the scene in grim and more or less embarra.s.sed silence. But though for a moment his eyes sought them, he saw nothing, and next instant they were riveted again on the demon duke, now so near that he could feel his fiery breath. But he kept his seat with a drowning man's desperation.

"Will your grace come?" rang out the sharp, staccato tones. "Or will it be necessary for me to drag your excellency out by the nose?"

The alternative was not attractive, and its proposer looked quite capable of putting it into execution.

"I tell you I am not Lord Quorn, and never was," yelled the wretched Peckover, now simply beside himself. "If you want him, there he is."

He pointed to the corner where stood the real peer, looking, however, particularly unlike one, and in a high state of doubt as to the line he should take. He compromised with the question by giving, in the first instance, a loud, derisive laugh.

"Very pretty, Mr. Gage, or whatever your alias is. So I'm Lord Quorn, am I, when it suits your book? That's a rich idea. Ho! ho! ho!" And he laughed again with offensive resonance.

"Who," demanded Lady Ormstork in a tone of disgust, "is this noisy person?"

"Lord Quorn," was Peckover's prompt reply.

"What?" cried Gage in bewilderment.

"Milord Quorn, eh?" said the duke, transferring his bristling attention to the latest partic.i.p.ant in that questionable distinction.

"Impossible!" exclaimed Lady Ormstork, obviously judging by appearance, which certainly did not go far to suggest a member of the peerage.

Quorn laughed again, less comfortably this time under the observation of the duke. "Of course I'm not," he said, in a tone which lost in the utterance its original intention of irony. "How can I be, except in these gentlemen's imagination?" For he had a shrewd idea, as things were going, that, at the moment, the t.i.tle carried certain unpleasant contingent liabilities with it.

The duke pursed his face into a quizzical sneer. "No, I do not think you are milord Quorn, my good fellow," he concluded, taking Lady Ormstork's view of the badly groomed object of his scrutiny.

"He is Lord Quorn," Peckover insisted vehemently, "if anybody is."

"Of course," retorted Quorn with withering point, "I am Lord Quorn when it is necessary."

The duke, manifestly tiring of the question of ident.i.ty and resolving (possibly Castilian fas.h.i.+on) to settle the point for himself, was about to resume his somewhat drastic argument with Peckover when Ulrica interrupted the genial intention.

"I believe this person is Lord Quorn," she said, with pointed reference to the real man. "He told me so himself just now in the garden. He said the other was an imposter and advised me to have nothing to do with him."

"My dear Ulrica!" cried Lady Ormstork, half doubtingly; then turned to Quorn with a face prepared to beam on the shortest notice.

"What did I tell you?" exclaimed Peckover realizing it was a case of _sauve qui peut_.

The duke, almost forgetting punctilio in his c.u.mulative exasperation, turned again to Quorn, resolved to be at definite issue with somebody, while his jealousy was spurred by Lady Ormstork's evident readiness to establish as Miss Buffkin's suitor the right Quorn, if only she could get hold of him.

"So you are Lord Quorn, my fine fellow," he exclaimed with a mock bow (for, as we know, Quorn was shabby). "You are eager to pay your addresses to this adorable lady, and are doubtless prepared to accept the consequences?"

Quorn, at a loss for a reply, stared stupidly at his fierce interrogator, while Peckover judged himself sufficiently reprieved to venture to wink at Gage.

"I don't do anything of the sort," Quorn at length said weakly.

"Oh, Lord Quorn," protested Ulrica mischievously. "You know you said I was to marry the right Lord Quorn, and you were the man."

"So?" cried the duke, with fell conviction that he had at last got his man. "It is well. You are Lord Quorn. _Je l'accepte_. May I request the honour of a private word with your ill.u.s.trious lords.h.i.+p in the garden?"

"Not exactly," was that ill.u.s.trious n.o.ble's pithy reply to the invitation.

Of the duke's Castilian stock of patience very little was left. "It is necessary," he insisted with a ferocious grin. "I am not to be denied.

Your grace shall come--now."

"You will not be so absurd as to go, Lord Quorn," put in Lady Ormstork with time-serving sympathy.

Quorn did not look in the least like committing the absurdity. He set his teeth and glared round at the other men in a sort of forlorn hope of a.s.sistance. But they, though naturally deeply interested, made no sign. The conditions were, at the moment, too complex for a clear line of altruism.

"Your excellency shall come," said the duke through his teeth. "I am the Duke of Salolja, and a Grandee of Spain. I will not be balked."

But the representative of the British aristocracy still hung back. "I insist," maintained the Spaniard, darting forward and seizing a reluctant arm. The Englishman's counter move was to sit down on a chair which stood beside him. Antic.i.p.ating the move, the duke pulled him sharply away. The consequence was that Quorn sat down on the floor. Not quite seeing his way to conduct his adversary from that posture into the garden, the duke was fain, while seeking a feasible plan, to spurn the lowly n.o.bleman with his foot.

"For shame!" cried Lady Ormstork.

"If you kick me I'll hand you over to the police," said Quorn unhappily and speaking at a certain disadvantage.

The duke gave a crowing laugh of scorn, a favourite trick of his when "the force" was mentioned. "The police! Hah! hah! Where are they, your police?"

The question was answered by Bisgood, who at that juncture opened the door, and, subduing with difficulty all outward signs of a pardonable astonishment, announced--

"Detective-Inspector Doutfire from Great Bunbury wishes to speak to your lords.h.i.+p."

CHAPTER x.x.xVI

Mr. Doutfire came in close upon Bisgood's announcement, and threw a severely professional eye round the company. His manner, in fact, suggested, in a measure, that he was raiding a gambling den; but then the suspicious habit had become characteristic with him. And indeed, the att.i.tudes of the party might be said to have justified mistrust, or at any rate an inquisitorial curiosity on his part. He bowed to Gage with a nicely adjusted balance between the homage due to a peer of the Realm and a due regard for the Law whose representative he was and which boasted itself no respecter of persons. It is, perhaps, scarcely necessary to state that Peckover viewed his advent with an uneasy eye.

"Beg pardon, my lord," Doutfire said in his consequential, witness-box manner, "sorry to intrude upon your lords.h.i.+p, but I considered it my duty to inform your lords.h.i.+p that a certain suspicious character has been noticed hanging about the grounds here, and I took it upon myself to just step up and warn your lords.h.i.+p."

The somewhat tense silence which followed was broken by the duke's staccato tones. "So this is milord Quorn, eh, policeman?"

Mr. Doutfire looked not merely scandalized, but ready at a moment's notice to take the representative of the lordly Saloljas into custody.

"Detective-Inspector is my rank and appellation, sir, begging your pardon," he said severely. "With regard to your question, sir, I have every reason to believe I am right in stating that this gentleman--I should say n.o.bleman--is Lord Quorn."

"So? Thank you, detective," said the duke with a bow of acknowledgment for the information, and a smile for the futility of the police, once again preparing to focus his traditional aggressiveness upon the unhappy Gage.

But that gentleman did not propose to sit again. "It's all a mistake,"

he protested loudly. "I am not Lord Quorn. There he is, so far as I can make out."

He pointed to the real Quorn, who had retained his seat upon the floor, and whom, owing to his position behind the door, Doutfire's eagle glance had so far not taken in. That alert officer now, however, lost no time in wheeling round and fixing the lowly peer with a glare of more than suspicion. "This?" he exclaimed incredulously. "Why, this,"

he darted his head forward and sideways with the sure air of a master of the art of criminal indemnification, "this is the party I have just mentioned to your lords.h.i.+p. A suspicious character who has given us the slip as well as a lot of trouble. A party known to us as Peckover."

"There!" cried Lady Ormstork, turning from the sedentary n.o.bleman with a face of contemptuous disgust. "I said it was impossible he could be Lord Quorn."

"I know him as Peckover," Mr. Doutfire maintained with authority. "A party against whom a charge of being in possession of and uttering counterfeit coin was lately preferred, but which charge the Treasury has now seen fit to withdraw."