“Do you mean to tell me that your own brother beat you night after night and no one lifted a hand to stop him?”
“Oh, well, come, who do you think was going to stop him?” inquired the Honourable Tony with indulgent amusement. “After all, the noble Duke had a fairly good right to see that a cheeky brat learned all of the sacred traditions of the family from the sacred head of the family, hadn’t he? Well, rather! All the more to his credit that the little jackanapes wasn’t his own brother.”
“Wasn’t?” echoed Ledyard blankly.
“Oh, come, come—you don’t mean to say that no one’s told you the true history of the little black sheep rampant on the Bolingham arms? No? Oh, I say, I am let down—— I thought all you chaps used to jaw about it for hours between flights! No one even said a word about it down the river? Well, there’s glory for you; it begins to look as though I’d won your kind attentions under entirely false pretences, my dear kid. All the time that you’ve been thinking me a purely blue specimen of the British aristocracy I’ve been a black skeleton and a dancing sheep and a mere paltry half brother to His Grace the Duke of Bolingham—and it begins to look as though I were an impostor to boot. I say, I am sick.”
He looked far from sick; leaning back in the long chair with his brown hands clasped behind his bright head, he looked radiantly and outrageously amused.
Ledyard gave a vicious kick to an innocuous rattan stool.
“I don’t know what you’re driving at, but if you’re implying that the reason that I was misguided enough to choose you for a friend, was that you happened to have a duke for your father, you can shut your mouth and eat your words. I’d always understood that you were Bolingham’s son, but I don’t give a curse if he picked you out of an ash-can, and you know it. Dukes mean nothing in my young life, let me tell you. If you aren’t Bolingham’s son, who are you?”
“Oh, I’m Bolingham’s son, all right enough, only unlike Noll and Cyril and Roddie, I don’t happen to be able to claim the Lady Alicia Honoria Fortescue as my mother. No, no, nothing to bring the blush of shame to that ingenuous brow, William. The lady died some eighteen years before I arrived on the scene, so neither of us can be blamed, you’ll admit. My mother’s name happened to be Biddy O’Rourke, and I’d be willing to take an oath that she was prouder of that and being able to dance longer on her toes than any one else in the London music halls, than of the minor matter of bearing the title of Duchess of Bolingham and having forty-two servants call her ‘Your Grace.’ Your Grace! I shouldn’t be surprised if it fitted her better than the Lady Alicia Honoria.”
“You mean he was married to her?”
“Rather—rather, my young sleuth! There was all too little doubt on that score to make it pleasant for any one but the unregenerate Duke and his Duchess. It seemed to afford them considerable amusement.”