His face brightened at some wandering thought. “Why, man, I have a birthday in six days’ time! That’s it, the 24th. I knew there was the difference of a year lacking a week between us. She read it to me this morning out of the peerage—August 24th. Very well, then, I will celebrate the anniversary as it has never been celebrated before. I will provide an entertainment for my immediate friends upon a scale befitting my position and the importance of the event commemorated. What do you think of a special saloon-carriage to Portsmouth, and a dinner on my yacht, eh? One could be hired and manned for the occasion, and a staff of cooks and servants sent down from an hotel here. Or could you get them in Portsmouth? Does anything more appropriate occur to you?”
“Go on with your jest,” replied the other, sullenly. “All I can say is, it’s in damned bad taste, though. Here I am in this predicament, and you pour vinegar into my wounds instead of oil.”
“Standard Oil, I assume that you refer to. No, you shall have the oil, Archie. You shall be my guest on the occasion, and you shall meet Mr. and Miss Skinner. We four will constitute the party; and I will provide such an engaging spectacle of the nobleman, the bearer of hereditary dignities and titles, seen close at hand among his intimate friends, that the lady will be moved to admiration. She will say, ‘Ah, I never guessed before how delightful an Earl could be, how perfect in manners, how admirable in tact, how superb in his capacity as host.’ I will reconcile her to the aristocracy en bloc.”
“Say, you know,” interposed Drumpipes, “I’m not sure there isn’t something in that.”
“Something in it? My dear sir, it’s rammed with fructifying probabilities. I give this party, and I do it as an Earl should do things. I exert myself to fascinate this transatlantic twain. I lead their imaginations captive to my hereditary seductiveness. I make them feel that to be the guests of an Earl is more than beauty and fine raiment and Standard Oil. I excite them to a warm glow of tenderness toward feudalism, a mood that melts at mere thought of the mediaeval. At that psychological moment you jump in and intimate that you’re something of an Earl yourself—and there you are!”
Drumpipes nodded approving comprehension, while he pondered the project thus outlined. “I’m not sure I don’t like the scheme,” he repeated. “It’s risky, though. She’s fearfully keen of scent, that girl is. If you didn’t play it for all you were worth, every minute, she’d twig the thing like a shot. You’d leave her with me a good deal, wouldn’t you, and devote yourself to the old man? That would be the safest, you know.”
“That would hardly do. It wouldn’t be in character. When an Earl is giving a party, and there is a beautiful young woman about, he doesn’t go and talk with windy old fossils in frock-coats. It would look unnatural. It might as like as not excite suspicion. And now you’d better clear out. I want to go to bed.”
The Earl rose, stood irresolute for a moment, and then put a hand on Mosscrop’s shoulder. “Davie,” he said gravely, “there’s one thing you must remember. You’re not a good man to handle money—if I didn’t know your forbears, I’d never credit your being a Scot at all—remember, laddie, that those lawyers have run up terrible bills against me, and farm values have all dropped in the most fearful fashion, and I’ve not kept so tight a hand on the purse-strings of late, myself, as usual, and so do this thing as moderately——”
“Oh, you be damned!” laughed Mosscrop, and pushed him from the room.
When he was alone, the notion of going to bed seemed to have lost its urgency. He lighted his pipe, and sat down to read Vesta-lia’s letter once again.