A Poached Peerage Part 28

"Yes, I'm here," was the lugubrious response.

"Have you been waiting long?" Ethel asked, coming close to him.

"Hours," he declared feelingly, then quickly corrected the statement.

"No, I mean, not long." Back in the darkness he fancied he could see the truculent eyes glaring through the bars of the helmet.

"I couldn't get away," Ethel said invitingly. "Had to dodge Dagmar."

"Ho! she wanted to come too, did she?" Peckover remarked in desperation. "The more the merrier."

Ethel drew back with rather a sour look on her expectant face. "Mr.

Gage, what do you mean?" Then with characteristic tenacity, she sidled up to him again. "Percy, how cold you are," she observed reproachfully.

"Cold?" he returned miserably. "Yes, it is a bit chilly. Enough to give any fellow the shivers. Chamber of Horrors is a fool to it. I mean," he quickly added, as an ominous movement of Carnaby's sword caught his eye, "the armour strikes cold."

"Of course," said Ethel huffily, "if you would prefer Dagmar, I'll go and send her to you."

"Oh, no; please don't trouble. You'll do," he replied, with an indifference born of desperation.

The lady resolved to try another tack. "Oh, Mr. Gage," she said, with a tremor in her voice; "how unkind you are!"

Her face was so close to him that the trial was almost more than he could stand. "No, no, not unkind," he denied, looking wildly round for a way of escape.

"So changed," she insisted.

"No, not changed," he replied equivocally.

"So distant."

"Wish I was--a hundred miles distant," he groaned to himself. "Can't help it," he declared, goaded by the consciousness of those four eyes magnetizing him from the darkness. "Perhaps I've been too familiar."

"Oh, no," she protested, growing desperate in turn, as the prize of a millionaire husband seemed slipping from her. "If I don't mind it Percy, dear----"

She put out her arms, but he fell back. "Don't," he exclaimed, the hateful words almost choking him. "It isn't proper, you know."

"I'm afraid," she urged forlornly. "I have been too absurdly proper."

"Oh, no--yes, I mean, no, no." In his state of mind Peckover found it impossible to differentiate between what he longed and what he was forced to say.

"You said to-day it was dry work," Ethel observed caressingly. "You may have a sip if you like."

The invitation, reminding him, with a difference, of his Crystal Palace and Welsh Harp days, was well nigh too much for the well-versed philander of the suburbs. "Oh, don't, don't!" he almost shrieked.

"Please go away. You will drive me mad. This is awful," he groaned.

"Of course, if you'd rather not----" Ethel suggested with a toss of the head.

"It's never rather not with me," he protested under his breath.

"Only----"

Accepting his lowered tone as one of endearment and invitation, Ethel, wondering at his unusual diffidence, drew closer to him. Mechanically and most unwillingly, he drew back. "Well, you need not run away," she pouted.

From what he could, in the semi-darkness, see of her eyes he fancied he detected there an intention to spring at him, or at any rate to fall into his arms. In tantalizing terror he hastily retreated still further, and in doing so stumbled against the stand of armour which just then contained the redoubtable Carnaby, receiving for his clumsiness a sound cuff from the mailed fist of that truculent spirit.

Luckily, as the episode took place in the shadow, it was not noticed by the lady who had stopped her pursuit of matrimony and mammon in a not unjustifiable huff.

"I know," she declared resentfully. "It's all that horrid Colonial girl. How you can like her beats me."

"Oh, she's not bad," was Peckover's reluctant explanation.

"I think," returned Ethel with decision, "she is simply awful. If that is Colonial taste, I am sorry for you. You could never think of marrying her!"

"I'm afraid so," he blurted out in his woe and confusion. His guilty eyes perceived a disquieting movement on the part of the man in armour, and in turning, ready to flee from the probable onslaught, he saw in the gloom Lalage's eyes scintillating vengeance. "I--I mean I hope so," he corrected, almost in a shriek.

Induced by this strange and contradictory behaviour, Ethel suddenly made a dart and flung her designing arms round him. "Oh, Percy," she cried with an adequate imitation of a sob, "you are not going to throw me over for that creature?"

"I must," he replied, releasing himself firmly and with what dignity was possible under the circ.u.mstances, "obey the dictates of honour."

Miss Ethel drew back, looking very sold and desperate in the moonlight.

"What a charming brother-in-law you will have!" she exclaimed, panting with scorn and her late exertion. "Great lout! Only fit to guzzle and smash furniture."

"And," Peckover added miserably to himself, "people who don't agree with him."

His silence gave rise to a wild hope in the besieging breast that the defence was wavering. In a trice, with an improvement upon her former tentative onslaught, she had thrown herself with greater deadliness of aim and more convulsive tenacity into his willing, yet unwilling, arms again.

"Oh, Percy," she howled in a judiciously modulated pitch, "I can't bear your coldness! I can't let you go!"

Peckover's situation with those four glaring eyes and those two matrimonially determined grips upon him was truly deplorable. "I'm a dead man," he gasped, as he saw, over Ethel's reckless shoulder, the awful mail-clad figure raise the sword with grim significance. "I say; stop!" he cried, struggling ungallantly to free himself. "Keep away!

I can't marry you!"

"Mr. Gage! Do you mean it?" It was most undignified from both parties' point of view, but the fact must be chronicled that she shook--actually shook him. "Oh, I won't be swindled like this!" she cried, in the height of exasperation.

Finding that with the obvious intention of being as good as her word, she, instead of releasing him with scorn, was hugging him tighter in desperation, he was fain to cry, in a hoa.r.s.e whisper, "Hush! Keep off!

We are not alone. Somebody in the room."

Ethel started back and looked round with a half-indignant, half-distrustful eye and saw--Dagmar. That young lady having had her suspicions aroused by the prolonged absence of her sister and their eligible guest, who, by the way, was supposed to be cheering the sick bed of his friend, Lord Quorn, had started off on a search expedition, and had just then crept pryingly into the picture-gallery.

"Ethel?" she cried with a pounce. "All alone with Mr. Gage here, of all places, and in the dark! This is disgraceful."

"Mr. Gage," Ethel declared calmly, "is going to marry me."

She was quite ready for her sister to join issue on that statement, but to her surprise the contradiction came from another quarter.

"Mr. Gage is not going to do anything of the sort." It was Lalage Leo who, emerging from the obscurity which had shrouded her, uttered the flat denial.

"There!" said Peckover in uncomfortable justification of his backwardness, "you see we were not alone."

"No!" cried a loud voice as Carnaby clanked forward. "Not much."

"Oh, Mr. Gage, how dishonourable," Ethel exclaimed trying to look scandalized while she resolved how best she could turn the situation to account. "Why didn't you tell me sooner?"

"I did tell you not to hug me," Peckover replied bluntly.