Caroline Crewkerne was far better endowed with the goods of this world than many people think a private citizen has a right to be. She was a rich old woman, and, like so many rich old women, she was grasping. Cheriton was rich also, but, for all his cynical airs, his culture was liberal enough to forbid his making a god of his money. However, he was never averse from a battle of wits. If it was freely spiced with a frank contempt for the polite conventional glosses which he delighted to mock, so much the better.
Cheriton’s chief desire, apart from the state of his emotions, was to read his old friend a lesson. He knew that she had tried her hardest to overreach him. Not, of course, on her own behalf, but for the amateur’s sheer love of performing that action. He had had the wit to defend himself successfully, and now he must see if he could not make her pay for her devices. He was perfectly willing to marry Miss Perry, and, prior to so doing, he was prepared to settle a certain sum upon her. But at the same time, he made it a point that something fixed and definite must be forthcoming from the other side.
It was that rock which sundered them finally at two o’clock in the morning. When this condition was first laid down, Caroline Crewkerne laughed to scorn “the insolent proposal,” as she called it. In the presence, however, of Cheriton’s extreme imperturbability, which none knew better how to assume when he chose, she grew gradually cooler, until at two o’clock she brought herself to say that, “without pledging herself to anything, she would consider it more fully, and, if necessary, she would take the advice of those who had had more experience in these matters.”
They parted amicably, and, it is to be feared, with a renewed respect for one another. They had fought many shrewd battles of one kind or another—over cards, over politics, over a flagrant job, over a third person’s reputation, over a sale of shares; in fact, over everything except religion. It was their cheerful custom to expect no quarter and to give none. But at the same time, they bore no malice.
As Cheriton bore his candle up the ghostly stone-flagged staircase, with suits of armor grinning at him and mediæval weapons menacing him from the walls, and the young moon peering at him through the oriel windows, he knew that his old adversary would make a last final and consummate effort to entangle George Betterton. And if she succeeded, the United Kingdom would not contain a happier old woman than she.
Outside the first door in the corridor was a pair of shoes. They were rather large. Outside the next door was another pair, far less fashionable in design, yet in size precisely similar. Cheriton stood a moment to gaze reflectively from one pair to the other.
“I shall risk it,” he mused. “George won’t rise now. But it is rather a pity both of ’em are so dooced handy with a rod and tackle.”
“Cheriton,” said a grim voice behind him, “do you know of what you remind me?”
“Paris on Mount Ida?”
“No,” said Caroline Crewkerne. “You remind me of a fox outside a poultry-yard, looking for a hole in the fence.”