Certainly he had never met a duke like his Grace of Fenwick; but then he had met only his own father and two others. The two strange dukes he had met were like the farmers who came to pay his father rent. But then his father was very like a groom or jockey, and yet was not particularly fond of riding or of horses; so that it was, perhaps, not the nature of dukes to look like what they were. His namesake had no thought of drawing any member of the Shropshire family, for his duke was represented as being tall, well-made, and handsome. None of the Shropshire family had been tall, well-made, and handsome. They had all been short and bandy-legged until he had come. He was tall, it was true, and not bandy-legged; but then he was not handsome or well-made.
Stop, there had been his uncle, Lord George Temple Cheyne, who had been tall, well-made, and handsome; but he had died upwards of thirty years ago.
What a strange thing that the two last representatives of the race should have escaped the hereditary bow-legs! What a pity his uncle had not lived! He would have married, no doubt, and then his sons would have come into the title, and the property and the old name might have been carried down generations by men of wholesome make.
"What a ridiculous way that story ended! A violoncello-player turned out to be the real Duke of Fenwick. I wish to goodness he could turn me from being Marquis of Southwold into a man who had only warts on his fingers from the strings of the big fiddle. He wouldn't catch me going back again to the Marquis or Duke of Anything or Anywhere. Not I. I'd very soon pay off that landlord. But stop! How could I pay him off if I had no money? If I was the poor violoncello-player, I shouldn't have any money. But I am always wanting not to have any money; and if I had none when he came, I'd tell him I couldn't pay him then, but that I would the moment I got my next quarter's allowance from the Duke----. But I should be the Duke of Fenwick then, and there would be, as far as I was concerned, no Duke of Shropshire. Who really should I be then? It is the most puzzling thing I ever thought of. What's the good of writing a story that twists a man's head round and round like that, until he doesn't know which is front or which is back--I mean, which is his face or which is his poll? Before I had got rid of tutors they had so twisted my head round and round that, although I have been trying ever since, I have not been able to twist it back again.
"I know why this fellow wrote this book. I know it all now. Cheyne is an assumed name. He knows our name is Cheyne, and that the race dies with me. He knows I am an invalid. He knows--someone told him--I get all the novels which are published; and he has written this one to spite me, and offend my father. Low cad! But I will take good care my father does not see the filthy rubbish. Boy, bring me a marline-spike and a piece of spun-yarn."
The Marquis of Southwold bound up the three volumes of Charles Augustus Cheyne's "The Duke of Fenwick," and having looped to them the marline-spike by way of a sinker, dropped them slowly over the side of the Seabird into the still blue waters of Silver Bay, under the Duke of Shropshire's stately castle.
CHAPTER IX.
[THE MARQUIS OF SOUTHWOLD'S LETTER.]
"Oh, what a way it is up! My wind isn't now what it used to be, when first I met you warm and young, Cheyne, is it? Such confounded stairs!" said Mr. John Wilkinson, a very stout puffy-looking man for thirty-six years of age, and editor and staff of The Coal-Vase Reporter, one of the most prosperous of the minor trade papers in London.
"My wind is as sound as ever," said the Duke of Long Acre, rising; for Wilkinson was not alone.