“Do you know what oxygen’s for, Soolsby?” he asked quizzically.
“No, my lord, I’ve never heerd tell of it.”
“Well, if you brought the top of Ben Lomond to the bottom of a coal-mine—breath to the breathless—that’s it.
“You’ve been doing that to Mr. Claridge, my lord?”
“A little oxygen more or less makes all the difference to a man—it probably will to neighbour Claridge, Soolsby; and so I’ve done him a good turn.”
A grim look passed over Soolsby’s face. “It’s the first, I’m thinking, my lord, and none too soon; and it’ll be the last, I’m thinking, too. It’s many a year since this house was neighbourly to that.”
Eglington’s eyes almost closed, as he studied the other’s face; then he said: “I asked you a little while ago who was right and what was wrong when you came to see my father here fifteen years ago. Well?”
Suddenly a thought flashed into his eyes, and it seemed to course through his veins like some anaesthetic, for he grew very still, and a minute passed before he added quietly: “Was it a thing between my father and Luke Claridge? There was trouble—well, what was it?” All at once he seemed to rise above the vague anxiety that possessed him, and he fingered inquiringly a long tapering glass of acids on the bench beside him. “There’s been so much mystery, and I suppose it was nothing, after all. What was it all about? Or do you know—eh? Fifteen years ago you came to see my father, and now you have come to see me—all in the light o’ the moon, as it were; like a villain in a play. Ah, yes, you said it was to make an experiment—yet you didn’t know what oxygen was! It’s foolish making experiments, unless you know what you are playing with, Soolsby. See, here are two glasses.” He held them up. “If I poured one into the other, we’d have an experiment—and you and I would be picked up in fragments and carried away in a basket. And that wouldn’t be a successful experiment, Soolsby.”
“I’m not so sure of that, my lord. Some things would be put right then.”
“H’m, there would be a new Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and—”