"It is impossible," said Gatepath, and his air was that of Sir Henry Irving in Macbeth. "I have seen the Twenty-Eighth Baron of Topsham with my own eyes."
"That was very sporting of you," cried Madame in admiration. "Did you go out all alone to the Torres Straits and beard the lion in his den?"
"I went, and I went alone. It was a fearful journey. The war was still raging, and it strained all the influence of Gatepaths to secure me a passage to America in a returning troopship. Thence I travelled to San Francisco, got a Japanese steamer to Yokohama, another Japanese steamer to Singapore, and yet another—a small one which rolled abominably—to Thursday Island. I cannot tell you, without reference to my diary, how many weeks and months I was tossed about the loathsome deep. The schooner from Thursday Island to the haunt of the late Hon. William Toppys was the worst of my tortures. It was crammed with nude men and women of all colours from pale olive to dark walnut, and it smelt—like a hogshead of rancid fat. The South Sea Islands are a romantic fraud, Madame. They reek to Heaven, and brew so many different brands of stinks that one can never get acclimated. Can you wonder that I, who once was well favoured in person, am now an old man, shrunken, wizened into premature senility before my time? I arrived at my journey's end, and there, Madame, I saw the young man whom you so very kindly propose to take in hand and make a cavalier almost worthy of the House of Toppys. I saw his lordship with my own eyes."
"And was he so very impossible?" asked Madame, for the solicitor of the Toppyses had stopped, struck dumb by his emotion.
"Impossible!" he shrieked. "His lordship, the Twenty-Eighth Baron of Topsham, is a naked Cannibal running about the beach with a spear."
CHAPTER II MADAME TAKES CHARGE
It is fortunate that Madame Gilbert had already indulged her indecent sense of humour. Had she exploded at this tragic moment I should have been robbed of my story. I am sure from what I know of Roger Gatepath that he would have thrust her shrieking from his room, and written her off for ever as unworthy to be associated with the ancient and still exalted House of Toppys. She shook, gurgled desperately for an instant, and then composed her features to a becoming gravity. It was a masterly effort for one with her vivid imagination. She has told me that before her, plain to see, she visualised the heir of the Barony of Topsham, a broad, grinning, coffee-coloured face rising above the crimson and ermine robes of a peer of England. In one hand he held the patent of his barony, in the other a stabbing spear. It was a vision gorgeous.... Yet with this figure of fun before her inward eyes she choked down her laughter. It was an heroic effort.
Roger Gatepath lay back in his chair, rent and exhausted by professional suffering. Madame whipped out her case and offered one of those favourite Russian cigarettes from which even the Bolshevists could not bereave her. Gatepath grabbed and smoked. He would have grabbed and smoked opium, hashish, anything which could for an instant unravel the tangled skein of care.