The Duke Decides Part 4

The butler retired, and the Duke smiled grimly.

"Ziegler has begun to put in some of his fine work," he muttered. "The initial blunder of his agents in mistaking a servant's limp for mine won't stop him long. I shall begin to like the excitement soon, I expect."

But as the day wore to evening, and the evening to night, the sensation of being _hunted_ vexed his nerves. He found himself prolonging his solitary dinner for the sake of the company of the butler and footman who waited upon him, and afterwards he abstained from the moonlit stroll on the terrace to which he felt tempted. It was not till the mansion had been barred and bolted for the night that he ceased to fumble frequently for the revolver which he had carried all day.

Before retiring he inquired of Manson if the constable had traced the maltreaters of Jennings, and he was not surprised to learn that there had been no discoveries. Mr. Clinton Ziegler was not the man to employ agents incapable of baffling a village policeman.

The room which Beaumanoir occupied was the great state bed-chamber that had been used by his predecessors from time immemorial-a gaunt apartment with a cavernous fireplace and heavily curtained mullioned windows. He did not like the room, but had consented to sleep there on seeing that the old retainers would be scandalized by his sleeping anywhere but in the "Duke's Room."

After locking the door and seeing to the window fastenings, he took the additional precaution of examining the chimney. Bending his head clear of the ma.s.sive mantelpiece, he looked up and saw that at the end of the broad shaft quite a large circle of star-lit sky was visible, while a cold blast struck downwards of sufficient volume to purify the air of the room.

He lay awake for some time, but he must have been slumbering fitfully for over an hour when he felt himself gradually awakening-not from any sudden start, but from a growing sense of strange oppression in his lungs. As his senses returned the choking sensation increased, and finally he lay wide awake, wondering what was the matter. Every minute it became harder to breathe the stifling air, and at last he flung the bedclothes off in the hope of relief, and in doing so saw something so unaccountable that his reeling senses were stricken with amazement rather than fear.

There was a fire in the grate. Glowing steadily in the recess of the ancient fireplace a great red ball burned, without flicker and without flame, but lurid with the unwavering light that comes from fuel fused to intense heat.

Even without the terrible oppression at his chest there would have been a weird horror in this mysterious fire introduced into his room at dead of night-into a room with locked door and fastened windows. But what did this ghastly struggle for breath portend?

"Charcoal! Ziegler!" were the two words that buzzed in response through his fast-clouding brain.

CHAPTER VI-_The General is Curious_

On the following afternoon at tea-time four ladies were seated in the pleasant drawing-room of 140 Grosvenor Gardens, the residence of General Sadgrove, late of the Indian Staff Corps. Mrs. Sadgrove, a fair, plump, elderly dame, needs no special description, and two of the other tea-drinkers-Mrs. Senator Sherman, as she preferred to be called, and her daughter Leonie-we have met before.

The fourth occupant of the room-a girl dressed in deep mourning-was Sybil Hanbury, who had come to discuss her engagement to Alec Forsyth with her motherly old friend, Alec's aunt by marriage, Mrs. Sadgrove.

Owing to the recent deaths in her family the engagement was not to be publicly announced at present; but Sybil had no secrets from the Sadgroves, who had known her from a baby, long before she had been taken up, on the death of her parents, by her grandfather, the late Duke of Beaumanoir.

Miss Hanbury owed her attractiveness to her essentially English type, not of beauty-she would have disdained to lay claim to that-but of fresh, healthy coloring, a suspicion of tomboyishness, and a lithe, supple figure that stood her in good stead in the hunting and hockey fields. A trifle slangy on occasion, she was a good hater and a staunch friend, with a temper-as she had warned Alec already-that would need a lot of humoring if they were not to have "ructions."

"I've got the makings of a termagant, my dear boy, but it will be all right if you rule me with a velvet glove," she had remarked within five minutes of their first kiss.

In fact, Miss Sybil Hanbury was a bit of a hoyden; but a very capable little hoyden for all that, and absolutely fearless.

The two girls had naturally paired off together, and the subject of their talk was, equally naturally, the new Duke-Alec's friend, Sybil's cousin, and Leonie's chance acquaintance on the _St. Paul_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _"A countrywoman of yours. I wonder if you know her?"_]

Sybil, after listening to Leonie's rather halting description of the fellow pa.s.senger whom she had known as "Mr. Hanbury," owned frankly that she had never heard any good of her cousin, but she hastened to add:

"He's given my prejudice a nasty knock, though, in behaving so well to my young man. Gave him a billet as private sec. that enabled Alec to-you know. A man can't be much of a wrong 'un who'll stick to old pals when they have no claim on him."

Leonie tried not to show surprise at the vernacular.

"He seemed very kind and considerate. I don't think he can ever have done anything dishonorable," she replied.

"n.o.body ever accused him of that," Sybil a.s.sented. "It was only that he was extravagant, and that my grandfather got tired of paying his debts.

You see, he wasn't the next heir, and-well, perhaps they were a little hard on him. I'm quite prepared to like him now."

The conversation was interrupted by the entrance of a servant, who announced:

"Mrs. Talmage Eglinton."

"A fellow countrywoman of yours. I wonder if you know her?" Sybil whispered, as a radiant vision in pale pink under a large "picture" hat sailed in, and was greeted with somewhat frigid politeness by Mrs.

Sadgrove.

"No; I am not acquainted with either the name or the lady," Leonie replied, struck with a strange antipathy to the bold eyes that seemed to be mastering every detail in the room, herself included. Indeed, Mrs.

Talmage Eglinton stared so markedly both at Leonie and her mother that Mrs. Sadgrove thought they must have met, and promptly introduced them as American friends staying in the house. The introduction was not a success, for the Shermans knew everyone worth knowing in American society, and the fact that they had never so much as heard of Mrs.

Talmage Eglinton argued her outside the pale.

The elegant vision received her snubbing with cool unconcern, and after a few generalities turned again to her hostess and engaged in the trifling chatter of a "duty" call, making one or two unsuccessful attempts to include Sybil, to whom she had not been introduced, in the conversation.

"That woman is a brute," Sybil said to Leonie under her breath. "I'll tell you about her when she's gone."

The door opened, and there entered an iron-gray man of sixty, whose coming might almost have been the cause of expediting the departure of Mrs. Talmage Eglinton, so quickly did she rise and begin her good-byes.

"No, really I can't stay, dear Mrs. Sadgrove, even to have the pleasure of a chat with the General," she prattled. "I have half a dozen other calls to pay, and you have beguiled me into staying too long already.

Good-bye. Good-bye, General. Pray don't trouble to come down." And with a half-impudent bow of exaggerated respect to the Shermans, she swept out, with the master of the house in attendance.

General Sadgrove returned at once to the drawing-room after escorting the visitor to her carriage. He was a man who bore his years easily; singularly slow and scant of speech, but alert of eye and almost jaunty in the erectness of his bearing. He had gained his C.B. for prominent services in the suppression of Thuggee and Dacoity, and his name is still held in wholesome dread by the criminals of India whose method is violence. It had once been said of him by a high official: "Jem Sadgrove doesn't have to worry about _finding_ clues. He makes them for himself, and they always yield a true scent. He's got the nose of a fox-terrier, and the patience and speed of a greyhound."

But that was long ago, and it might be supposed that in such pleasant duties of retirement as the ushering out of dainty visitors from his wife's tea-table his faculties had become blunted. Nor in the law-abiding precincts of Belgravia could there be scope for the old-time energy. Yet Mrs. Sadgrove, who knew the signs and portents of her husband's face, looked twice at him with just a shade of anxiety as she asked whether he would take some tea.

"Thanks," he said, and taking his cup he went and stood on the rug before the empty hearth. He stirred his tea slowly, with his eyes wandering from one to the other of the four women in the room.

"You good people seem singularly calm, considering that you must just have been listening to a very exciting story," he remarked.

"Indeed, no," replied Sybil, taking upon herself to answer. "The lady to whom you have just been doing the polite bored us intensely. Leonie says, for all the dash she's cutting in London, she's an _incognita_ so far as America is concerned."

The General continued to stir his tea impa.s.sively.

"Did she not inform you in the course of her small talk," he inquired presently, "that on her way here her carriage had knocked a man down and gone near to killing him?"

The question evoked a chorus of interested negatives.

"Neither did she say anything to me about it," said the General gravely.

"Then how did you become aware of the accident?" Mrs. Sadgrove ventured to ask.

"Saw it," returned the General. "It happened in Buckingham Palace Road.

I was pa.s.sing at the time, on my way home from the club. Her coachman drove right over the fellow as he was crossing the roadway at the corner. He was knocked down, and it was the merest shave that he wasn't trampled by the horses and crushed by the wheels. As it was, he escaped with a bit of a shaking and a dusty coat. At any rate, he got up and walked into the nearest barber's-for a wash and brush-up, I suppose."

Further questioned, the General in his jerky way informed his fair audience that he was sure that it was Mrs. Talmage Eglinton's jobbed landau that had wrought the mischief, and that she herself was in it at the time. It was the same vehicle which he had found at his own door on reaching home ten minutes ago, and to which he had just conducted her.

"Funny that she should be so secretive about it," said Mrs. Sadgrove, reflectively. "It's the sort of thing that most women, coming fresh from the scene, would have been full of-especially as it must have been the coachman's fault, and not her own."

"Exactly," was the General's curt comment.