“Well, my Lord,” said Darcy, turning to Forester, “you certainly have shown evidence of a most enviable good temper. Had your Lordship—”
“His Lordship!” exclaimed Paul, in amazement. “Is n't that your son,—Captain Darcy?”
“No, indeed, Mr. Dempsey,” said the Knight; “I thought, as I came into the drawing-room, that you were acquainted, or I should have presented you to the Earl of Wallincourt.”
“Oh, ain't I in for it now!” cried Paul, in an accent of grief most ludicrously natural. “Oh! by the powers, I 'm up to the knees in trouble! And that was your mother! oh dear! oh dear!”
“You see, my worthy friend,” said Darcy, smiling, “how easy a thing deception is. Is it not possible that your misconceptions do not end here?”
“I 'll never get over it, I know I'll not!” exclaimed Paul, wringing his hands as he arose from the table. “Bad luck to it for grandeur!” muttered he between his teeth; “I never had a minute's happiness since I got the taste for it.” And with this honest avowal he rushed out of the room.
It was some time before the party in the dining-room adjourned upstairs; but when they did, they found Mr. Dempsey seated at the fire, recounting to the ladies his late unhappy discomfiture,—a narrative which even Lady Eleanor's gravity was not enabled to withstand. A kind audience was always a boon of the first water to honest Paul; and very little pressing was needed to induce him to continue his revelations, for the Knight wisely felt that such pretensions as his could not be buried so satisfactorily as beneath the load of ridicule.
Mr. Dempsey's scruples soon vanished and thawed under the warmth of encouraging voices and smiles, and he began the narrative of his night at “The Corvy,” his painful durance in the canoe, his escape, the burning of the law papers, and each step of his progress to the very moment that he stood a listener at Lady Eleanor's door. Then he halted abruptly and said, “Now I'm dumb! racks and thumbscrews wouldn't get more out of me.”
“You cannot mean, sir,” said Lady Eleanor, calmly but haughtily, “that you overheard the conversation that passed between my daughter and myself?”
“Every word of it!” replied Paul, bluntly.