The old man began his tale. The wording of it was perfect, and if here and there a foreign idiom crept into his terse and carefully chosen phrases, Mr. Bailey would murmur a correction. To such impertinences the Duke paid no attention. He told the story of a man who had left home that morning; he gave the precise hour at which he left home, the manner of his dress, and the very lace upon his boots. He told the whole shameful story of the Tube, of the Hop Garden—
"Hop and Garters," said Mr. Bailey quietly.
"So—well then," cried the Duke of Battersea, for one moment visibly angered, "laugh at last and you laugh best." Then he sank back into his own sense of power, recovered English idiom and continued. As he went on to the story of the Heath, and of the luncheon, Mr. Bailey rose and began pacing up and down the room. When the Duke came to the final visit to the public-house, to the name "Zachary Hemming," which he scanned slowly, hardening the gutturals in "Zachary" and filling that word with sting, Mr. Bailey sat down again, and before the Duke had concluded he had covered his face with his hands. But the old man was pitiless. He told the story of the excesses at Chalk Farm, of further excesses at the Horseshoe; he gave the very description of the mysterious stranger, of the taximeter—of all. Then he ceased.
There is always something of the Cad in the Fanatic. A gentleman would have warned the aged Philanthropist of the error under which he laboured. Not so Mr. Bailey.
Mr. Bailey's face was still hidden. A slight movement of the shoulders did not betray his emotion. There was a long interval of silence. Then the Duke said:
"Well, Mr. Bailey, now who laughs at last?"
Mr. Bailey answered never a word.
"Mr. Bailey," continued the Duke, "I will do nothing, but so also you will nothing. No-thing," he added, pronouncing the word quite slowly, "no-thing at all." He wagged his head gently, and permitted the slightest of smiles to greet Mr. Bailey's face as it rose from between his hands. "No-thing at all. That is all is there," he ended.
Mr. Bailey, with bowed head and with an inaudible sigh repeated, but in a lower tone, stunned as it were into repeating the very phrases and accent of his host, "No-thing at all—that is all is there."
And he went out without another word.