I was so evidently exasperated that Beddoes, all of a tremble, besought Carew to explain the situation.
“He’ll do himself a mischief,” he cried pathetically; “do you tell him, Carew,—you know what a fool I am!”
Carew was nothing loath to set about what was indeed the chief pleasure of his life, the retailing of scandal; and it seems that the Jennico duel was a very pretty scandal indeed.
“I will take your last question first,” said he, settling himself to his task with gusto. “Why the Chevalier should hang? Who he really is, where he comes from, why he hates you with such deadly hatred, Jennico, are all mysteries which I confess myself unable to fathom—doubtless you can furnish us with the clue by-and-by.”
As he spoke his pale eye kindled with a most devouring curiosity. Nevertheless as I showed no desire to interrupt him by any little confidence, he proceeded glibly:
“But why the Chevalier should hang is another matter. Gadzooks, I’d run him down myself were it but for his impudence in getting gentlemen like myself to come and see foul play. Why, Jennico, man, don’t you know that after charging you like a bull, and running you once through the body, the scoundrel stabbed you again as you were sinking down and the sword had dropped from your hand. I doubt me he would have spitted you a third time to make quite sure, had not Beddoes and I fallen upon him.”
“I’d have run him through,” here interposed Sir John excitedly; “I had drawn for it, had I not, Dick?—and I’d have run him through, but that the surgeon called out that you were dead; and dash me, between the turn I got and the way those queer seconds of his hustled him away, I lost the chance! And the three of them ran, they ran like rats, to the river. Gad, I’d have left my mark on them even then, but Carew, be hanged to him, held on by my coat-tails.”
“‘Tis just as Jack told you,” said Carew. “No sooner had they heard you were dead, my friend, than they ran for it, and it is quite true that I restrained Jack here from sticking them in the back as they skedaddled. A pretty affair of honour, indeed!”
I lay back on my pillows awhile, musing. I had had time to reflect on many things these days, and—God knows—there were enigmas enough in my life to give me food for reflection. What I had just heard caused me no surprise, tallying as it did with conclusions I had previously reached.
After a moment Carew cleared his throat, edged his chair a foot nearer, and queried confidentially: “Did it never strike you that the Chevalier must have been part and parcel, if not the moving spirit, of those attacks upon your life which you told us of that night at the club? You did not appear to have a notion of it then. Yet there was not a man of us there who did not see but the quarrel was deliberately got up.”