“No, sir,” replied Wragby, who had been feeling for Mr. Liversedge’s heart. “He’s alive, but pretty well burnt to the socket.” He considered Mr. Liversedge’s mangled cravat, and shook his head. “Well, I thought you’d given him a leveller, sir, but I see as how you’ve been a-strangling of him.” He loosened the cravat, straightened the sufferer’s limbs, and raised his head. Gideon dropped on his knee, and put the glass he held to Mr. Liversedge’s slack mouth. “Easy, now, easy, sir!” Wragby warned him. “You don’t want to choke him again, and nor you don’t want that good ball-of-fire to be running down his shirt! Better let me give it to him. I’ll have him round in a brace of snaps.”
Gideon relinquished the glass, and rose. “Wragby, his Grace is in trouble!”
Wragby paused in his ministrations to look up. “What, not on account of this fat flawn, sir? What’s happened to his Grace?”
“I don’t know. I think that fellow has him imprisoned somewhere. I ought to have discovered more before I choked him, but—Here, give him some more brandy!”
“You leave him be, sir; he’s coming to himself nice and gentle. He never come here to tell you a thing like that!”
“Oh, yes, he did! He came to sell him to me! For the trifling sum of fifty thousand pounds, he’ll engage for it that his Grace is never seen again. He might even contrive to murder my father too. Obliging, isn’t he? He brought me that to look at!”
Wragby stared at the Duke’s handkerchief. “My God, sir, what has he done to his Grace? That’s blood, or I never saw blood!”
“I tell you I don’t know. Trust me, I shall know soon enough! He can’t be dead. No, he can’t be dead!”
“Lor’ no, sir, of course he ain’t dead!” Wragby made haste to say. “Likely there was a bit of a mill, and his Grace had his cork drawn. Now, don’t you go fuming and fretting before there’s any need, sir! Not but what we might have known something like this would happen, if his Grace loped, off the way he did!”
“God damn you, do you think I would have let him go if I’d thought he’d run into danger?” Gideon shot at him fiercely.