CHAPTER XLI
The hour of 10.30 next morning saw the depository of the Salolja traditions, a defiant and fretful Castilian porcupine with quills erect, standing in the dock of an occasional court, composed of one alderman of Great Bunbury (incidentally a family grocer), one public-spirited local doctor, and a couple of fussy half-pay colonels, to answer the serious charges of threatening to murder divers of His Majesty's subjects, and also with feloniously stabbing and wounding another, to wit, one Carnaby Leo, described somewhat vaguely as of Australia.
Mr. Doutfire here saw an opportunity for more than regaining some loss of prestige which he had lately incurred, of course through no fault of his, but of a cheese-paring Treasury; and moreover for handing his name down with undying fame in the criminal annals of Great Bunbury.
The Duke of Salolja insisted upon regarding the whole business as beneath his serious notice. His line of defence was to maintain a haughty and contemptuous silence, at the same time to shrivel up his very common-place judges by focussing upon them in turn his most ferociously fascinating glare. Alas! He misjudged the stuff of which British parochial authority is composed. Even if he had succeeded in terrifying the retired colonels, there was still the florid general practitioner to reduce to a quite improbable state of collapse, and it is well known that a family grocer fears nothing in this world—except another family grocer.
Evidence sufficient to justify a remand was taken, and the prisoner, who seemed to emit sparks of indignation was told that he would eventually be sent to Quarter Sessions. Then in pursuance of a plan which Peckover had concocted overnight, Gage and Lord Quorn offered themselves as bail for the duke. This was, after some demur and difference of opinion, accepted, the two colonels being dead against allowing a foreigner of homicidal tendencies to be at large, while the doctor and the grocer took a higher position and declared themselves in favour of doing no act that should endanger the entente cordiale between Great Britain and Spain. So finally, bail was accepted for the duke's appearance on the following Saturday.
Upon his release from durance his sureties and Peckover sought an interview with the irate nobleman, and, ignoring certain dark and direful threats, gently but convincingly hinted to him that the only way to avoid a considerable term of imprisonment with its incidental tarnish on the scutcheon of the Saloljas was to lose no time in putting the English Channel and the republic of France, to say nothing of the Pyrenees, between himself and the Great Bunbury Bench. At first the duke, pulsating with a sense of injury, declared that sooner than run away from a handful of English shopkeepers, he would put the whole of the inhabitants of Great Bunbury, as given in the last census return, to the edge of the sword. On its being pointed out to him, however, that his plan, attractive in itself, was deficient in certain elements of feasibility, he consented to meet the objection by reducing the number of his intended victims, and intimated that his thirst for blood might be satisfied by the immolation of the mayor and corporation, the heads of the fire brigade and the police force, the town clerk, town crier, the station master and a picked half-dozen of the principal tradesmen on the altar of his vengeance.
When he was made aware of certain practical objections which stood in the way of the town of Great Bunbury falling in with this modified suggestion, the noble Castilian proposed as a last alternative that he should meet a selected dozen men of the township's best blood in a suitable arena, and should engage these representatives one after the other in a duel à outrance. On this proposal being ruled out of order owing to the deplorably faulty state of the English law, the duke, glaring and bristling with suppressed vindictiveness, declared that he must do something to remove the stain that had been cast upon him and his house; whereupon Peckover suggested that the best thing he could do to prevent the said stain from spreading would be to disguise himself as the representative of a firm of Spanish claret merchants, and take the 1.15 train on the way to Dover.
This plan did not, however, commend itself to the representative of a Spanish house, whose trade appeared to be, not the bottling, but the spilling, of claret of a very different type. "It is very amusing, very clever of you, gentlemen," he objected in withering scorn. "You wish to get me out of the way that you may pay court to Miss Buffkin. I am not an idiot."
"You'll be a convict this day fortnight if you don't clear out," remarked Peckover. "Great Bunbury is not to be trifled with."