CHAPTER X
From this flaccid condition he was roused by a somewhat obstreperous knocking and whistling in the passage dividing the coffee-room from the bar. In a moment he had sprung up and run to the window, which he threw open, and stood there ready to bolt through it if necessary.
"What ho! Anybody alive here?" a voice called out. "Hi, yi! Where do I come in?"
As the invocation and inquiry seemed reassuring. Peckover turned back into the room as the door opened and a man in a dripping mackintosh appeared looking in.
"Hullo!" he exclaimed. "I can't find anybody worth mentioning. Bar empty as a mortuary chapel. Young lady in the cellar hiding from the thunderstorm, eh? You don't happen to be the proprietor of the establishment?"
"Not exactly," Peckover answered, wondering what kind of customer he had come across now.
"That's near enough," said the man in the mackintosh. "You're alive at any rate. Well, somebody has looked after you all right," he remarked, eyeing the remains of Peckover's last dinner.
"Oh, yes, I've dined," Peckover replied loftily.
"You bet. Like a lord," assented the stranger cheerfully. "By the way"—he scrutinized him curiously, much to that gentleman's uneasiness—"by the way, you don't by any chance happen to be a lord?"
Something in the man's manner suggested a reason for the inquiry other than mere chaff. "Suppose I am?" returned Peckover, with his best attempt at an enigmatical smile. The newcomer stared at him as though unable to make up his mind to risk a question, and as he hesitated, the dripping mackintosh made a circle of water round him. "Well, if you are——" he stopped, and abruptly changed the subject. "Staying here?" he asked; "or just waiting till the rain stops?"
"That's it," Peckover answered, scarcely knowing how to take the fellow.
"Far to go?"
"Few miles, I'm waiting for the carriage," said Peckover casually, remembering what Quorn had told him.
"H'm!" The man looked at him as though stoked to blowing-off point with curiosity. "Not going Staplewick Towers way?"
The problem as to whether it were better to say yes or no was too complex for Peckover's present state of mind.
"That's my way," he declared, and chanced it.
The stranger's face brightened with anticipation. "Going to the Towers, perhaps?" he asked with hopeful persistence. Peckover nodded in as non-committal a fashion as he could command. "Why," cried the other, "I do believe I'm in luck after all. You hinted just now you might be a lord. You don't tell me you are Lord Quorn?"
"You've guessed it."
With another word the stranger turned and walked energetically to some pegs at the end of the room, unbuttoned the humid mackintosh and hung it up; also his hat. Then, with business-like action, he came back and favoured the astonished Peckover with a long stare of gratified curiosity. "Excuse me," he said, "but it's more than curious that the man I have been hunting all the week should run across me like this."
Instantly Peckover remembered Quorn's amateur bush-ranger.
"You're from New South Wales?" he faltered.
"Wrong," the other declared cheerfully. "You're not quite as good at guessing as yours truly. I'm from Tasmania, I'm proud and happy to say."
It struck Peckover that the dapper, well-knit man with the keen hustler's face set in straight black hair could hardly be Quorn's bully. He could not quite imagine the man before him spending even his leisure time in trying feats of strength on his long-suffering neighbours who chanced to displease him, to say nothing of cattle and fire-irons.
Just then Mr. Popkiss appeared, and approached Peckover with a mien of deferential apology. "Beg pardon, my lord," he said confidentially, "but I'm glad to say that Dr. Barton has had that unfortunate mishap removed to his surgery, which is a great relief to me, and I must apologize to your lordship for the unpleasantness occurring on my respectable premises. We've never had anything of the kind occur before."
"Oh, you couldn't help it," Peckover replied graciously, his wits more keenly about him. "He ought to have known better, but people, I believe, are very careless about these matters. I didn't see what the poor fellow was up to."
"No, my lord; naturally, my lord."
"Now, landlord, since you've seen fit to come to light, bring us a bottle of your best champagne," directed the stranger.
Mr. Popkiss, who had been inclined to disregard the new customer, at once became exceedingly attentive and bustled off on his errand, since a hungry guest is worth twenty full ones.
No sooner was he gone than the man drew his chair up to Peckover's and said quietly: "Now that I know I'm really right and you are Lord Quorn, I've got a proposal, a genuine business proposition to make to you."
"Have you?" replied Peckover, wondering what in the world was coming, and cursing Popkiss who came in just then with the wine and so delayed the explanation of the mystery.
The stranger's quick eye had caught the similarity of the labels on the bottles. "Why you've been having one of the best too," he remarked. Then added in an undertone as the fussy Popkiss left them, "I thought in your case the title didn't carry exactly a million with it."
"No, not exactly," Peckover replied equivocally. "But I don't see what business that is of yours," he added by an afterthought, to maintain his dignity.
"You will directly, though," the other retorted. "Till then I beg to apologize. Now look here," he touched glasses with his companion, "luck; and may we both get what we want, which is assured if we come to terms." They emptied their glasses, and the stranger, refilling them, leant forward to whispering distance.
"No time to lose, if this matter is to go through," he said in a business-like undertone. "So I won't beat about the bush. This fat publican"—he jerked his head backwards towards the bar—"knows you are Lord Quorn. Does any one else know it in these parts?"
The question was put so purposefully that Peckover had no hesitation in answering it frankly. "No one but the barmaid. I've not been here more than two hours."
"That's all right. Now for my proposition." He drew up yet an inch or two closer to Peckover. "First of all it is necessary for me to state I am a rich man; well, practically a millionaire."
Peckover pushed back his own chair. "I say; no room for the confidence trick here, old man," he exclaimed suspiciously. "Try next door."
"Pouf!" the stranger contemptuously blew away the suggestion. "'Confidence trick?' It's the other way on. It is I who am going to place the confidence in your lordship. Now, look. Here is my proposal in a word. You're a poor man, or at least a poor peer; I'm a rich man. We are both of us practically unknown over here. I want you to sell me your title."
"What?" cried Peckover in amazement.
"Don't make a noise," said the other quietly. "If this transaction is to go through, as, if you are not a fool, it will, the less attention we call to ourselves for the moment the better. Just hear what I've got to say. My name is Gage. Come into property down under from my father. Now I'm, as I say, a millionaire. But the devil of being a millionaire is, when you are nobody in particular but a millionaire, that you don't and can't get value for your money."
"Ah!" Peckover nodded sagaciously as he began to comprehend.
"Now," pursued Mr. Gage, "an ordinary person would imagine that a man with an income nearer forty than thirty thousand could have for the asking—and the paying for—the best of everything this world has to offer. All rot. An outsider like myself with the income I have mentioned doesn't have nearly such a good time as a smart young sprig of good family, who's been born and bred in the swim, can get with a beggarly fifteen hundred a year."
"That's right enough," Peckover assented with an air of endorsing from experience that profound truth.
Mr. Gage took out a coin and laid it on the table. "There's a sovereign," he said, tapping it impressively, while his companion eyed it covetously. "There it is. Coin of the realm. Value fixed and accepted all the world over, you'd say. Yet it's a strange thing, as society is constituted, that, according to the value to be got out of it, to one man it will be worth, say, five and thirty shillings, and to another about six and sixpence. You follow me?"
Mr. Peckover intimated by a knowing nod that not only did he follow the argument, but that, as a member of the aristocracy, he was prepared to back it by getting the enhanced value from the coin in question.
"The reason is," continued Mr. Gage, "that when you are what what's called an outsider you have to pay, and pay double and treble for everything. And when you've paid, and paid till you're sick of shelling out, you find you haven't got half what, if you'd only been 'class,' you'd have got gratis for nothing."
"That's so," Peckover assented dogmatically.
"The millionaire business has been overdone," Gage proceeded, warming feelingly as he got into the swing of his grievance. "Men like myself have been in too much of a hurry to buy up all the cake in the universe, consequently the price has gone up for it, and now, instead of a good substantial slice for a reasonable sum, we get only a few crumbs at famine prices."
"No doubt," Peckover agreed, getting impatient of the preamble and anxious to come to the gist of the offer.
"The fact is," Gage went on, hammering one fist on the other emphatically, "money by itself is a delusion and a daily eye-opener. Money with a title like yours is quite another pair of shoes. If you reckon its purchasing power, and that's what justifies its existence, the golden sovereign in a millionaire's pocket dwindles to the size of a threepenny bit, and in a peer's it expands to the size of this." He held up a dinner plate.
"Inconveniently bulky," observed Peckover with a grin.
"That's merely my illustration of the fact," said Gage severely, as deprecating cheap witticism in business discussions. "Anyhow, I am content to put up with the inconvenience. I want to have a good time. Fate has given me money with one hand and with the other prevents my getting value for it. I don't want to waste time in building up a social position for myself; I want one ready-made, now; when I can enjoy it. You want to have a good time, a better time than you'll get living on an empty title which means starving at Staplewick Towers. You're just the man I have been looking out for. When I heard of your being found in Australia, I determined to do business with you if I could catch you soon enough, before you got known."
"Well, what do you propose?" Peckover asked, a vista of escape and the enjoyment of a snatched opulence opening before him.
"I propose," Gage replied impressively, "that you should allow me to assume the title, the identity and privileges of Lord Quorn. After all, you did not expect to come into it; you are a backblocksman, like myself; only my father made it pay, and you hadn't begun to when you were sent for to join the House of Lords. So far as any one outside our two skins is concerned it doesn't matter a rush whether you are Lord Quorn, or I. So far as the British constitution goes there's no divine right about you, visible at least to the naked eye, that I don't possess. You don't feel anything like it inside, do you?"
"Can't say I do," answered Peckover, with more instant conviction than the other could possibly give him credit for.
"No," resumed Gage; "we are of the same make, I guess; and if it suits us to make a fair exchange, why nobody's hurt."
"Just so," assented Peckover. "Well, what's your offer?"
"Four thousand a year, paid monthly, as long as you let me hold the title undisputed."
Four thousand a year! It was as much as the thirty-five-shillings-a-week clerk could do to refrain from an astounded whistle at his luck. But he did repress it, and, shrewdly grappling with the overwhelming proposition, replied, after what seemed a calculating pause, "Make it five thou., and it's a bargain."
Five thousand had been the figure of Mr. Gage's willingness; only, in accordance with a well-established business method, he had offered less than he was ready to give.
"All right," he replied. "Five thousand while I'm Lord Quorn. We shan't need a written contract. It will be as much to your interest to keep quiet as it will be mine to write you a cheque on the—let's see—the ninth of every month. So that's settled, eh?" He refilled the glasses.
"Yes, my lord, that's settled," responded Peckover with a grin, and feeling happier than at any time during the past twenty-four hours. "Here's health and the best of luck to your lordship."