In his eagerness to ensure the downfall of his surviving enemy, he had no hesitation in incriminating himself. Lord Ingoldsby listened as if stricken dumb and Carthew had hard work to contain himself as he heard, among other infamies, of the bargain the ex-Emir had driven with Captain Dove over Sallie. He would have thrown down his pen during M'Kissock's laboured, self-compassionate account of how Captain Dove had outwitted him, had not the man on the couch at the other side of the table been almost across death's threshold already. M'Kissock's rabid thirst for revenge, his obvious impenitence for all his own crimes and misdeeds, excited repugnance in place of the pity his plight might otherwise have inspired. Carthew was devoutly thankful when that most distasteful task was at length completed, and Farish M'Kissock's feeble, straggling signature attached to the document he had drawn up. Lord Ingoldsby and he both added their names as witnesses, and then he called the housekeeper in again. Her brother, having thus accomplished his final object in life, was evidently sinking fast.
In the corridor outside, Lord Ingoldsby called a halt as Carthew would have turned to leave him with a few hurried words of thanks for the jealous service he had just rendered.
"Half a mo'," interposed his lordship, very morosely. "We might just as well come to an understandin' now as later on. I want to tell you that, whoever Lady Josceline is or is not, I've asked her to marry me—and, if you're goin' to see her now—I don't know what your ideas are, but—we might just as well start fair."
Carthew contemplated him for a moment in surprised silence, and then nodded curtly. He was going to see Sallie at once, if he could, as his rival had divined.
"All right," he assented. "Come on."
He looked into the banquet-hall in passing. Herries was there, with the butler and all his assistants. The dinner-table had been cleared and draped with a great black mort-cloth. And on it lay, recumbent, with clasped hands, in the clear, mellow light of the tall, white tapers at its head and feet, the unheeding shape of Carthew's predecessor in the earldom of Jura, still dressed in its disreputable, greasy blue uniform and burst boots, with a red smudge, as of iron-rust, on its forehead.
The fires had both been raked out and their hearth-stones strewn with the ashes, not to be rekindled before that night on which the dead earl should be carried away by the water-gate from his catafalque to the great black burial-barge, with the pipes wailing a wild lament for the mountains to echo, and the waves or the still sea-surface, as might befall, crimson under the twinkling torches of those who would follow, with muffled oars.
Herries came forward to speak to Carthew. "I'm seeing to everything here now, my lord, and we'll soon have all as it should be," said he. "Captain Dove and his friends are fast, in the North Keep. And your other orders have all been observed."
"I'll see you again in a little, then," Carthew returned, and went on his way, by no means inspirited.
It was the Duchess of Dawn, her blue eyes still blurred and showing traces of tears, who came to the door of the boudoir in Sallie's suite in the distant West Wing, in response to Carthew's knock.