A Fool and His Money Part 51

I looked at Jasper, Jr. He was staring at me in utter bewilderment.

"Good Lord! You--you've knocked him down!"

"I didn't think I could do it," said I hazily.

He sprang to his brother's side, and a.s.sisted him to a sitting posture.

"Right to the jaw," shouted Jasper, with a strange enthusiasm.

"Left," I corrected him.

Colingraft gazed about him in a stupid, vacant fashion for a moment, and then allowed his glazed eyes to rest upon me. He sat rather limply, I thought.

"Are you hurt, Colly?" cried Jasper, Jr.

A sickly grin, more of surprise than shame, stole over Colingraft's face. He put his hand to his jaw; then to the back of his head.

"By Jove!" he murmured. "I--I didn't think he had it in him. Let me get up!"

Jasper, Jr. was discreet. "Better let well enough alone, old--"

"I intend to," said Colingraft, as he struggled to his feet.

For a moment he faced me, uncertainly.

"I'm sorry, Mr. t.i.tus," said I calmly.

"You--you are a wonder!" fell from his lips. "I'm not a coward, Mr.

Smart. I've boxed a good deal in my time, but--by Jove, I never had a jolt like that."

He turned abruptly and left us. We followed him slowly toward the steps. At the bottom he stopped and faced me again.

"You're a better man than I thought," he said. "If you'll bury the hatchet, so will I. I take back what I said to you, not because I'm afraid of you, but because I respect you. What say? Will you shake hands?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: Up to that moment I had wondered whether I could do it with my left hand.]

The surly, arrogant expression was gone from his face. In its place was a puzzled, somewhat inquiring look.

"No hard feeling on my part," I cried gladly. We shook hands. Jasper, Jr. slapped me on the back. "It's a most distressing, atavistic habit I'm getting into, knocking people down without rhyme or reason."

"I daresay you had reason," muttered Colingraft. "I got what was coming to me." An eager light crept into his handsome eyes. "By Jove, we can get in some corking work with the gloves while I'm here. I box quite a bit at home, and I miss it travelling about like this. What say to a half-hour or so every day? I have the gloves in one of my trunks.

I'm getting horribly seedy. I need stirring up."

"Charmed, I'm sure," I said, a.s.suming an enthusiasm I did not feel.

Put on the gloves with this strapping, skillful boxer? Not I! I was firmly resolved to stop while my record was good. In a scientific clash with the gloves he would soon find out what a miserable duffer I was.

"And j.a.ppy, here, is no slouch. He's as shifty as the d.i.c.kens."

"The shiftier the better," said I, with great aplomb. Jasper, Jr., stuck out his chest modestly, and said: "Oh, piffle, Colly." But just the same I hadn't the least doubt in my mind that Jasper could "put it all over me." It was a rather sickening admission, though strictly private.

We made our way to my study, where I mildly suggested that we refrain from mentioning our little encounter to Mrs. t.i.tus or the Countess.

I thought Colingraft was especially pleased with the idea. We swore secrecy.

"I've always been regarded as a peaceful, harmless grub," I explained, still somewhat bewildered by the feat I had performed, and considerably shaken by the fear that I was degenerating into a positive ruffian.

"You will believe me, I hope, when I declare that I was merely acting in self-defence when I--"

He actually laughed. "Don't apologise." He could not resist the impulse to blurt out once more: "By Jove, I didn't think you could do it."

"With my left hand, too," I said wonderingly. Catching myself up, I hastily changed the subject.

A little later on, as Colingraft left the room, slyly feeling of his jaw, Jasper, Jr. whispered to me excitedly: "You've got him eating out of your hand, old top."

Things were coming to a pretty pa.s.s, said I to myself when I was all alone. It certainly is a pretty pa.s.s when one knocks down the ex-husband and the brother of the woman he loves, and quite without the least suspicion of an inherited pugnacity.

I had a little note from the Countess that afternoon, ceremoniously delivered by Helene Marie Louise Antoinette. It read as follows:

"You did Colingraft a very good turn when you laid him low this morning.

He is tiresomely interested in his prowess as a box-maker, or a boxster, or whatever it is in athletic parlance. He has been like a lamb all afternoon and he really can't get over the way you whacked him. (Is whack the word?) At first he was as mum as could be about it, but I think he really felt relieved when I told him I had seen the whole affair from a window in my hall. You see it gave him a chance to explain how you got in the whack, and I have been obliged to listen to intermittent lectures on the manly art of self-defence all afternoon, first from him, then from j.a.ppy. I have a headache, and no means of defence. He admits that he deserved it, but I am not surprised. Colly is a sporting chap. He hasn't a mean drop of blood in his body. You have made a friend of him. So please don't feel that I hold a grudge against you for what you did. The funny part of it all is that mamma quite agrees with him. She says he deserved it! Mamma is wonderful, really, when it comes to a pinch. She has given up all thought of 'putting a foot outside the castle.' Can you have luncheon with us to-morrow? Would it be too much trouble if we were to have it in the loggia? I am just mad to get out-of-doors if only for an hour or two in that walled-in spot. Mr. p.o.o.pend.y.k.e has been perfectly lovely. He came up this morning to tell me that you haven't sneezed at all and there isn't the remotest chance now that you will have a cold. It seems he was afraid you might. You must have a very rugged const.i.tution.

Britton told Blake that most men would have died from exposure if they had been put in your place. How good you are to me.

"ALINE T."

"P. S.--I may come down to see you this evening."

I shall skip over the rather uninteresting events of the next two or three days. Nothing of consequence happened, unless you are willing to consider important two perfectly blissful nights of sleep on my part. Also, I had the pleasure of taking the Countess "out walking"

in my courtyard, to use a colloquialism: once in the warm, sweet sunshine, again 'neath the glow of a radiant moon. She had not been outside the castle walls, literally, in more than five weeks, and the colour leaped back into her cheeks with a rush that delighted me. I may mention in pa.s.sing that I paid particular attention to her suggestion concerning my dilapidated, gone-to-seed garden, although I had been bored to extinction by Jasper, Jr. when he undertook to enlighten me horticulturally. She agreed to come forth every day and a.s.sist me in building the poor thing up; propping it, so to speak.

As for Mrs. t.i.tus, that really engaging lady made life so easy for me that I wondered why I had ever been apprehensive. She was quite wonderful when "it came to a pinch." I began to understand a good many things about her, chief among them being her unvoiced theories on matrimony. While she did not actually commit herself, I had no difficulty in ascertaining that, from her point of view, marriages are not made in heaven, and that a properly arranged divorce is a great deal less terrestrial than it is commonly supposed to be. She believed in matrimony as a trial and divorce as a reward, or something to that effect.

My opinion seemed to carry considerable weight with her. For a day or two after our somewhat sanguinary encounter, she was p.r.o.ne to start--even to jump slightly--when I addressed myself to her with unintentional directness. She soon got over that, however.

We were discussing Aline's unfortunate venture into the state of matrimony and I, feeling temporarily august and superior, managed to say the wrong thing and in doing so put myself in a position from which I could not recede without loss of dignity. If my memory serves me correctly I remarked, with some asperity, that marriages of that kind never turned out well for any one except the bridegroom.

She looked at me coldly. "I am afraid, Mr. Smart, that you have been putting some very bad notions into my daughter's head," she said.

"Bad notions?" I murmured.

"She has developed certain p.r.o.nounced and rather extraordinary views concerning the n.o.bility as the result of your--ah--argument, I may say."

"I'm very sorry. I know one or two exceedingly nice n.o.blemen, and I've no doubt there are a great many more. She must have misunderstood me.

I wasn't running down the n.o.bility, Mrs. t.i.tus. I was merely questioning the advisability of elevating it in the way we Americans sometimes do."

"You did not put it so adroitly in discussing the practice with Aline,"

she said quickly. "Granted that her own marriage was a mistake,--a dreadful mistake,--it does not follow that all international matches are failures. I would just as soon be unhappily married to a duke as to a dry-goods merchant, Mr. Smart."

"But not at the same price, Mrs. t.i.tus," I remarked.