"What's that?" said Mrs. Verulam. "Oh! is it a ghost?"
"It sounds like something horrible! Oh, and there's a light flickering! Daisy—Daisy, let us run!"
And they ran, just as the Duchess, with bristling curl-papers and a night-light shrouded in a fragment of the Times newspaper, appeared cautiously at the head of the stairs, the early Victorian dressing-gown streaming out behind her in a majestic and terror-striking manner. Her Grace had heard the impact of Chloe's kiss, followed by the sound of excited whisperings, which she had finally located as emanating from the baronial hall. Listening with a strained attention, and eyes becoming far more prominent than those of the average lobster, she had presently arrived at the awful certainty that the whispering voices belonged to her hostess and the orange-grower. She therefore fell into a paroxysm of respectable fury, and, catching up the night-light, proceeded forth to confront wickedness in its very lair, and force it to acknowledge itself and to receive a terrible castigation. Unluckily, the premature snores of the paragon had served as a warning of her approach by distracting the attention of Mrs. Verulam and Chloe from their own engrossing concerns; and consequently, before the Duchess had time to miss her footing, and, stumbling in the labyrinth of the early Victorian dressing-gown, to fall, and, bounding from step to step of the Emperor's expensive staircase, to roll, night-light in hand, into the baronial hall, they were well away among the winter gardens, out of hearing and almost beyond the reach of pursuit.
The noise of her Grace's close intercourse with the Emperor's oak and Parian marble not only disturbed the rest of the paragon—which was perfectly genuine, despite the suspicions of the Duke—but attracted the painful attention of the owner of Mitching Dean in the green, and of his Grace in the chocolate, bedroom. Mr. Rodney trembled in a nervous paroxysm, and the perspiration, as was its custom, stood in beads upon his narrow brow. The Duke, who had been napping, sprang up, lit a candle after about eight-and-twenty attempts, seized the nearest weapon at hand—a cat's-eye breast-pin, with diamond strawberry leaves, and the Southborough crest, a sheep's head rouge in the cup of a tulip noir—and made forth upon the landing like one distraught, exactly as his Duchess rolled to the very feet of the paragon, covered with bruises and abrasions, the night-light extinguished in her fist. Feeling in agony for something to stay her barrel-like progress, her Grace grasped Mr. Bush in the dark, and he, suddenly waked from sleep, and perhaps under some such impression as that he was beset by stranglers or attended by phantoms, grappled her in return, greatly to her terror. She screamed; he grappled all the more. And the Duke, staring wildly over the balustrade, beheld a picture that might well shake the faith of the most trusting husband in Christendom—at any rate, it shook his to its foundations. He protruded the candle over the balustrade, and roared in a voice of thunder:
"I've caught you at last, have I?"
The question rang through the hall. The paragon heard it, and perceived the fierce and frenzied countenance of his Grace, then, gazing downwards, beheld the Duchess in a dressing-gown kneeling at his feet. This was enough. Under the notion that he must have made an impression on her Grace, and that the Duke was about to take vengeance on the guiltless as well as on the guilty party, he cast the Duchess off and fled he knew not whither.
"You shall not escape me!" shrieked the Duke. "Your blood—I'll have it!"
And leaping down the remaining stairs, he jumped the Duchess cleverly, and tore after the paragon with the fixed intention of taking it there and then. The Duchess fled in an opposite direction just as Miss Bindler, who had been waked by all this noise and movement, opened her bedroom door and, suspecting cracksmen, emptied six chambers of her pocket-revolver over the landing into the hall, at the same time remarking:
"This sort of thing won't do; it's time someone taught these fellows a lesson."