“Then there’s been no duel at all,” said Diva, scraping the shell of the crab.
“I feel sure of it. There wouldn’t have been time for a duel and a round of golf, in addition to the impossibility of playing golf immediately after a duel. No nerves could stand it. Besides, I asked one of their caddies. They had come straight from the tram to the club-house, and from the club-house to the first tee. They had not been alone for a moment.”
“Wash-out,” said Diva, wondering whether this had been worth four shillings, so tame was the conclusion.
Mrs. Bartlett gave a little squeak which was her preliminary to speech.
“But I do not see why there may not be a duel yet, Kenneth,” she said. “Because they did not fight this morning—excellent crab, dear Diva, so good of you to ask us—there’s no reason why there shouldn’t be a duel this afternoon. O dear me, and cold beef as well: I shall be quite stuffed. Depend upon it a man doesn’t take the trouble to write a challenge and all that, unless he means business.”
The Padre held up his hand. He felt that he was gradually growing to be the hero of the whole affair. He had certainly looked over the edge of numberless hollows in the sand-dunes with vivid anticipations of having a bullet whizz by him on each separate occasion. It behoved him to take a sublime line.
“My dear,” he said, “business is hardly a word to apply to murder. That within the last twenty-four hours there was the intention of fighting a duel, I don’t deny. But something has decidedly happened which has averted that deplorable calamity. Peace and reconciliation is the result of it, and I have never seen two men so unaffectedly friendly.”
Diva got up and whirled round the table to get the port for the Padre, so pleased was she at a fresh idea coming to her while still dear Elizabeth was resting. She attributed it to the crab.
“We’ve all been on a false scent,” she said. “Peace and reconciliation happened before they went out to the sand-dunes at all. It happened at the station. They met at the station, you know. It is proved that Major Flint went there. Major wouldn’t send portmanteau off alone. And it’s proved that Captain Puffin went there too, because the note which his housemaid found on the table before she saw the challenge from the Major, which was on the chimney-piece, said that he had been called away very suddenly. No: they both went to catch the early train in order to go away before they could be stopped, and kill each other. But why didn’t they go? What happened? Don’t suppose the outside porter showed them how wicked they were, confirmation-class or no confirmation-class. Stumps me. Almost wish Elizabeth was here. She’s good at guessing.”
The Padre’s eye brightened. Reaction after the perils of the morning, crab and port combined to make a man of him.