CHAPTER XXXV
At the startling declaration the duke swung round and eyed Gage with a glance that seemed capable of penetrating an inch board. Lady Ormstork, surprised for a moment out of her transcendent self-possession, stared aghast at the object of her designs; Ulrica looked half astonished and half relieved; Peckover's mien was one of abject discomfiture; while Quorn's showed grim expectation.
"Not Lord Quorn?" screamed Lady Ormstork incredulously.
"So? Not Lord Quorn?" repeated the duke, prepared to resume the aggressive.
"No, I'm not," Gage declared stoutly. "If I ever was, I've had enough of it. But I never was by rights."
"Not Lord Quorn by rights?" gasped Lady Ormstork.
"Never. At least never no more. So you'll please to consider me out of this little complication."
"This," observed the duke, truculently thoughtful, "is very singular."
"Very," Lady Ormstork agreed. "One would like to have some explanation of such an extraordinary statement."
"We must know how we stand," said the duke, who had assumed the attitude of a stunted bravo.
"I tell you," Gage maintained, "I am no more Lord Quorn than you are."
There was a short silence. Then Lady Ormstork demanded pointedly, "Then who, may I ask, is Lord Quorn?"
Gage indicated the unwilling Peckover. "This is Lord Quorn. I am plain Peter Gage."
Quorn, the real Quorn, laughed scornfully, and seemed to see light.
Miss Buffkin clapped her hands. "You Lord Quorn? How lovely!" she exclaimed, beaming at Peckover.
"Aha! So you are Lord Quorn?" cried the duke transferring to that person his highly undesirable attention.
"No, I'll be hanged if I am," protested the abnegating Peckover.
"You'll be shot if you are," observed Gage half aloud, with a glance at the highly-stoked little Spaniard, who stood pulling his quill-like moustaches, and whose unswerving glance confirmed the forecast.
Ulrica had jumped up. "There, we've settled it already, dear Lady Ormstork," she cried. "Isn't it lucky!"
"Lucky?" echoed Lady Ormstork, rather non-plussed.
"Yes," Ulrica assured her. "We've settled it between ourselves. I like him. He's my sort."
From the duke came a deep, rumbling "Oom!" as a grim commentary on the reshuffle of the position.
"But I'm not Lord Quorn," Peckover urged vehemently, beginning to be seriously alarmed.
"You are!" maintained Gage.
"One of you must be," said the duke, as though merely anxious not to make a mistake in the selection of his victim.
"Not me!" To such a state of poverty was Peckover's vocabulary reduced.
"Oh, Percival!" Ulrica exclaimed reproachfully. "Don't deny it."
"He can't," declared Gage, under the influence of the baleful Salolja eyes and moustaches which dominated the scene.
"May I ask," said Lady Ormstork with dignified severity, "how you came to call yourself Lord Quorn?"
"Well," replied Gage frankly, "I thought I'd like to see how it felt to be a lord. And," he added pointedly, "I don't care much for the feeling."
"And may I ask," continued the dowager, addressing herself to the bothered and daunted Peckover, "how it was you came to renounce your title?"
"I made it worth his while," Gage explained shortly, determined to be off with the galling honour.
The real Lord Quorn in his corner gave a long whistle of semi-enlightenment.
"I never had it," protested the unhappy Peckover.
The duke, bristling, took a step forward. "Lord Quorn!" he snapped his fingers loudly and contemptuously. "It is no matter. You are at least a suitor of this lady?"
Happily Lady Ormstock saved Peckover from replying to the delicate suggestion. "Not unless he is Lord Quorn," she declared resolutely.
"I tell you," cried Peckover desperately, "I am not Lord Quorn."
"Then you are a fraud," Gage asserted roughly.
"I never said I was Lord Quorn," urged Peckover.
"You never said you weren't," rejoined Gage.
The fiery blood of the Saloljas was beginning to weary of these polemics and to be impatient for its cue. "It is no matter," he said with loud, painfully loud, authority. "I take it"—to Peckover—"that you are Lord Quorn, and you have, for reasons inexplicable to a Spanish nobleman been pleased to divest yourself temporarily of your rank. You have addressed yourself to this lady—as Lord Quorn or by a humbler name, it matters not. I have the honour to request a few words with your excellency in the garden."
His excellency's countenance expressed a strong disinclination to any such al fresco conference. Indeed, so far was he from complying with the duke's haughty and peremptory invitation that he sat down on a chair which stood handy. "Not much," he said vernacularly. "I'm not taking any just at present, thanks all the same." He felt himself comparatively safe where he was. Even a Spanish duke of vindictive and homicidal idiosyncrasies could scarcely have the face to murder him coolly in a room before four non-accessory witnesses.
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 assurance 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 companionship even, at the others in the room who, however, watched the scene in grim and more or less embarrassed 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 participant 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 title 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 identity and resolving (possibly Castilian fashion) 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 cumulative 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 illustrious lordship in the garden?"
"Not exactly," was that illustrious noble'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 assistance. 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. Anticipating 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 nobleman 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 lordship."