The Lord Chancellor made no answer. What he thought was “Great Silly Idiot! How should I know?”
“I think it must be the one,—the one who had to leave Portsmouth in disgrace because of the ragging scandal. He did nothing there, they say, but organize practical jokes. Some of them were quite subtle practical jokes. He’s a cousin of our hostess; that perhaps accounts for his presence....”
The Lord Chancellor’s comment betrayed the drift of his thoughts. “He’d better not try that sort of thing on here,” he said. “I abominate—clowning.”
Drawing-room did not last very long. Even Lady Laxton could not miss the manifest gloom of her principal guest, and after the good-nights and barley water and lemonade on the great landing Sir Peter led Lord Moggeridge by the arm—he hated being led by the arm—into the small but still spacious apartment that was called the study. The Lord Chancellor was now very thirsty; he was not used to abstinence of any sort; but Sir Peter’s way of suggesting a drink roused such a fury of resentment in him that he refused tersely and conclusively. There was nobody else in the study but Captain Douglas, who seemed to hesitate upon the verge of some familiar address, and Lord Woodenhouse, who was thirsty, too, and held a vast tumbler of whisky and soda, with a tinkle of ice in it, on his knee in a way annoying to a parched man. The Lord Chancellor helped himself to a cigar and assumed the middle of the fireplace with an air of contentment, but he could feel the self-control running out of the heels of his boots.
Sir Peter, after a quite unsuccessful invasion of his own hearthrug—the Lord Chancellor stood like a rock—secured the big arm-chair, stuck his feet out towards his distinguished guest and resumed a talk that he had been holding with Lord Woodenhouse about firearms. Mergleson had as usual been too attentive to his master’s glass, and the fine edge was off Sir Peter’s deference. “I always have carried firearms,” he said, “and I always shall. Used properly they are a great protection. Even in the country how are you to know who you’re going to run up against—anywhen?”
“But you might shoot and hit something,” said Douglas.
“Properly used, I said—properly used. Whipping out a revolver and shooting at a man, that’s not properly used. Almost as bad as pointing it at him—which is pretty certain to make him fly straight at you. If he’s got an ounce of pluck. But I said properly used and I mean properly used.”
The Lord Chancellor tried to think about that article on Infinities, while appearing to listen to this fool’s talk. He despised revolvers. Armed with such eyebrows as his it was natural for him to despise revolvers.
“Now, I’ve got some nice little barkers upstairs,” said Sir Peter. “I’d almost welcome a burglar, just to try them.”
“If you shoot a burglar,” said Lord Woodenhouse abruptly, with a gust of that ill-temper that was frequent at Shonts towards bedtime, “when he’s not attacking you, it’s murder.”