My Lord Duke

by E. W. Hornung

"Think of yours. Two hundred on condition you kept a single secret! That was the condition, wasn't it?"

"Well?"

"You've let the secret out, you cur!" cried Jack, jumping to his feet. "And you've lost your income by it for good and all. Two thousand! You'll never see another two hundred. What, did you take me for a dirty skunk like yourself? Do you think I got in this position through my own fault or of my own accord? Do you think I'm so sweet on it as to sit tight at the mercy of a thing like you? Not me! What you've told me to-night the real Duke and his lawyers shall hear to-morrow; and think yourself lucky if you aren't run in for your shot at a damnable conspiracy! Did you really suppose I cared as much as all that? Do you think—oh! for God's sake, clear out, man, before I do you any more damage!"

"Oh, you're good at that," said Hunt through his broken tooth. He had risen, and now he retreated a few paces. "You're not bad with your fists, you fool, but I've come prepared for you this time!" and he drew a knife; but the revolver covered him next instant.

"And I for you," retorted Jack. "I give you five seconds to clear out in. One—two——"

"My God, are there such fools——"

"Three—four——"

The man was gone. At a safer range he stopped again to threaten and gloat, to curse and to coax alternately. But Jack took no more notice; he turned into the hut, flung the pistol on the table, and stood motionless until the railing died away. Yet he had heeded never a word of it, but was rather reminded that it had been by its very cessation, as one notes the stopping of a clock. It made him look out once more, however; and, looking, he saw the last of Matthew Hunt in the moonlit spaces among the pines. His retreating steps died slowly away. The snapping of a twig was just audible a little after. And then in the mellow distance the stable clock chimed and struck one; and again Jack found himself keeping an imaginary count of the reverberations until all was still.

He stood at the door a moment longer. The feathered barbs of the pine-trees were drawn in ink upon a starry slate. The night was as mild and clear and silent as many a one in the Riverina itself; and Jack tried to think himself there; to regard this English summer as the bushman's dream that he had so often imagined it here in his model bush hut. But his imagination was very stubborn to-night. The stately home which was not his rose in his mind's eye between him and the stars; once more he saw it illumined in a flash from spire to terrace; once more the portico columns marched forward as one man, while the six eagles flew out in the tympanum above; and though a purring arose from his feet, and something soft and warm rubbed kindly against his shins, he could no longer forget where he was and who he was not. He was not the Duke. He was the wrong man after all. And the hut that he had built and inhabited, as a protest against all this grandeur, was a monument of irony such as the hand of man had never reared in all the world before.

The wrong man! He flung himself upon the elaborately rude bed to grapple with those three words until he might grasp what they meant to himself. And as he lay, his little cat leapt softly up and purred upon his heart, as if it knew the aching need there of a sympathy beyond the reach of words.