Suddenly the thought rushed into me, as if a plug had been taken out of my brain: “Gaskett! Was it, perhaps, after all, my mother’s maiden name, and my dishonoured grandfather a publican?”
Here, indeed, would be discovery, though not the most flattering possible to myself. I came out of my trance with a little gasp and giggle. “Noblesse oblige,” I thought again. “Very likely I am suited above all things to be a potman. But in any case I must set this at rest.”
I drove open the door of the private bar and entered. There was no one there but, behind the counter, a plump short man of the conventional Boniface type. He was a bleary, rather unctuous-looking fellow, with a mole near his mouth like a faded patch, an obvious wig (both suggesting anachronisms on an earlier date), and a snow-white apron bent about his portly form. He, also, it appeared, was in right succession from the Regency, though he might not have been more than sixty or so. I looked at him with a fearful speculation, as he lifted a pot or two to wipe the counter underneath. Was there a family likeness here? Who could say? Lady Skene was a teetotaller.
“Richard Gaskett,” I murmured, hardly articulate.
“That’s me,” he said, going on with his work.
“That’s me, too,” I said, snatching at resolution.
He glanced up a moment.
“O!” he said. “Then that makes three of us.”
“Three?”
“My name, your name—and the other chap’s,” said he. “I shouldn’t a’ thought it in reason, and all to happen here. But it seems it is. Now, sir?”