There were alarums and excursions, there was a pretty todo. But Muriel had grown so Broad that she treated the matter very lightly. The ruthless Sir Dugald had tied her to the wheel of his car; he was now determined to lead her to the altar with or without the sanction of his Grace.
III
All too soon for the Duke’s liking in this hour of fate, Sir Dugald arrived for his interview. At any time he was a bitter pill for his Grace to swallow; just now, in the light of present circumstances, it called for the virtue of a stoic to receive him at all.
Now these adversaries met again certain ugly memories were in their minds. But the advantage was with the younger man who could afford to be secretly amused by the business in hand. A semblance of respect, to be sure, was in his bearing, but that was no more than homage paid by worldly wisdom to the spirit of place. Right at the back lay the mind of the cool calculator, which in certain aspects had an insight almost devilish into the heart of material man. Well he knew the hostility of this peevish, brooding invalid. He was in a position to flout it; yet, after all, the man who now received him would have been rather more than human had he not hated him like poison.
Sir Dugald could afford to smile at this figure of impotence; yet the Duke, in his way, was no mean adversary. Up to a point his mind was extremely vigorous. The will to prevail against encroachment on the privileges of his class was still strong. Besides physical suffering had not yet bereft him of a maliciously nice appreciation of the human comedy. It may even have been that which now enabled him to receive “the thruster.”
As Sir Dugald entered the room he was keenly aware that the eyes of a satyr were fixed upon him. And the picture of a rather fantastic helplessness, propped in its chair, was not without its pathos. The old lion, stricken sore, would have given much to rend the intruder, but he was in the grip of Fate.
The success of Sir Dugald had been magical, but luck had played no part in it, beyond the period of the world’s history and the particular corner of the globe in which he happened to be born. He had got as far as he had in a time comparatively short for the simple reason that he was a man of quite unusual powers.
No man could have had a truer perception of the conditions among which he had been cast than Dugald Maclean, no man could have had a stronger grasp of certain forces, or of the alchemy transmuting them into things undreamt of; no man could have had a bolder outlook upon the whole amazing phantasmagoria evolved by the cosmic dust out of the wonders within itself. The Duke had the cynicism of the materialist; the man who faced him now had the vision of him who sees too much.
The Duke, with a great air and a courtesy which was second nature, begged his visitor to forgive his being as he was.
Sir Dugald, with a mechanical formula and a mechanical smile, responded with a ready sympathy. But while their conventional phrases flowed, each marked the other narrowly, like a pair of strange brigands colloguing for the first time on the side of a mountain. It was as if each knew the other for a devil of a fellow, yet not quite such a devil of a fellow as he judges himself to be.