"Pas de tout!" my lord answered, and smiling, shrugged his shoulders. "Rien!"
[CHAPTER XXXII]
With the least inclination towards merriment I must have laughed at the face of horror with which Mr. Martin, when he went a few minutes later, to expel the last stragglers, came on me where I stood, trying to efface myself behind the door. He dared not speak, for the Duke was standing at the table a few paces from him; and I would not budge. Fortunately I remembered that a still tongue was all he need wish; and I laid my finger on my lips and nodded to him. This a little encouraged him, but not much; and in his fear of what I might, in spite of my promise, let out, if I were left alone with his master, he was still in two minds whether he should eject me or not, when the Duke spoke.
"Is Price there?" he said with his face averted, and his hands still busy with the papers. "The man I sent for."
"Yes, your Grace," Martin answered, making hideous faces at me.
"Then leave us. Shut the door."
If my lord had spoken the moment that was done and we were alone, I think it would have relieved me. But he continued to search among the papers on the table, and left me to sink under the weight of the stately room with its ordered rows of books, its ticking dial, and the mute busts of the great dead. The Duke's cloak lay across a chair, his embroidered star glittering on the breast; his sword and despatch-box were on another chair; and a thing that I took to be the signet gleamed among the papers on the table. From the lofty mantel-piece of veined marble that, supported by huge rampant dogs, towered high above me (the work as I learned afterwards of the great Inigo Jones), the portrait of a man in armour, with a warden in his mailed hand, frowned down on me, and the stillness continuing unbroken, and all the things I saw speaking to me gravely and weightily, of a world hitherto unknown to me--a world wherein the foot exchanged the thick pile of carpets for the sounding tread of Parian, and orders were obeyed unspoken, and sable-vested servants went to and fro at a sign--a world of old traditions, old observances, and old customs revolving round this man still young, I felt my spirits sink--the distance was so great from the sphere I had known hitherto. Every moment the silence grew more oppressive, the ticking of the clock more monotonous; it was an immense relief when the Duke suddenly spoke, and addressing me in his ordinary tone, "You can write?" said he.
"Yes, your Grace."
"Then sit here," he replied, indicating a seat at the end of the table, "and write what I shall tell you."
And before I could marvel at the ease of the transition, I was seated, quietly writing; what I can no longer remember, for it was the first only of many hundred papers, of private and public importance, which I was privileged to write for his signature. My hand shook, and it is unlikely that I exhibited much of the natural capacity for such work which it has been my lot to manifest since; nevertheless, his Grace after glancing over it, was pleased to express his satisfaction. "You learned to do this with Brome?" said he.