It was rather a shabby card, and dog’s-eared as though it had been carried long in somebody’s pocket; but it was large and feminine, and adorned with a ducal coronet and the Duchess’s own cipher, and scribbled upon it in pencil, in the Duchess’s own handwriting, were two or three words, simple enough, apparently, and yet sufficiently fraught with meaning to make their fair reader turn very pale. She did not replace this card upon the salver, but kept it as she said:
“Bring the person to me at once.”
And when the softly stepping servant had left the room—one of her Grace’s private suite, charmingly furnished as a study—she made haste to tear the card up, dropping the fragments into the hottest part of the wood-fire, and thrusting at them with the poker until the last tremulous fragment of gray ash had disappeared. Rising from this exercise with a radiant glow upon her usually colorless cheeks the Duchess became aware that she was not alone. A person of vulgar appearance, outrageously attired in a travesty of the ordinary afternoon costume of an English gentleman, stood three or four feet off, regarding her with an observant and rather wily smile. Not at all discomposed, he was the first to speak.
“Before burnin’ that,” he remarked, in the thick, snuffling accents of the low-bred, “your Grace ought to have asked yourself whether it was any use. Because—I put it to your Grace, as a poker-player, being told the game’s fashionable in your Grace’s set—a man who holds four aces can afford to throw away the fifth card, even if it’s a king. And people of my profession don’t go in for bluff. It ain’t their fancy.”
“What is your profession?” asked the Duchess, regarding with contempt the dark, full-fed, red-lipped, hook-beaked countenance before her.
“Money!” returned Mr. Moss Rubelius. He rattled coin in his trousers-pockets as he spoke, and the superfluity of gold manifested in large, coarse rings upon his thick fingers, the massy chain festooned across his broad chest, the enormous links fastening his cuffs, and the huge diamond pin in his cravat, seemed to echo “Money.”
The Duchess lost no time in coming to the point. She was not guided by previous experience, having hitherto, by grace as well as luck, steered clear of scandal. But, girl of twenty as she was, she asked, as coolly as an intrigante of forty, though her young heart was fluttering wildly against the walls of its beautiful prison, “How did you get that card?”
“I will be quite plain with your Grace,” returned the money-lender. “When the second lot of cavalry drafts sailed for South Africa early in the year of 1900, our firm, ’aving a writ of ’abeas out against Captain Sir Hugh Delaving of the Royal Red Dragoon Guards—I have reason to believe your Grace knew something of the Captain?”
“Yes,” said the Duchess, turning her cold blue eyes upon the twinkling orbs of Mr. Moss Rubelius, “I knew something of the Captain. You do not need to ask the question. Please go on!”
“The Captain was,” resumed Mr. Rubelius, “for a born aristocrat, the downiest I ever see—saw, I mean. He gave our clerks and the men with the warrant the slip by being ’eaded up in a wooden packin’ case, labeled ‘Officers’ Stores,’ and got away to the Cape, where he was killed in his first engagement.”