The Duke Decides/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
Ziegler Begins to Move
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On the following Sunday morning the Duke of Beaumanoir stood at one of the windows of the long library at Prior’s Tarrant, idly beating a tattoo on the glass. The June sunshine flooded the bosky leafage of the glorious expanse of park, and nearer still the parterres of the old Dutch garden were gay with summer bloom; but the beauties of the landscape were lost upon the watcher at the window.
Nearly four and twenty hours had elapsed since he had failed to keep his appointment with Mr. Ziegler, and he was wondering how and when that autocrat of high-grade crime would signalize his displeasure at the mutiny. That sooner or later an edict would issue against him from the invalid chair in the first-floor suite he had not the slightest doubt. He knew that he had to deal with men playing a great game for a great stake in deadly earnest.
The Dukes of Beaumanoir had never been famous for their virtues, any more than they had been cowards, and it was rather a dawning sense of responsibility than fear, either for his reputation or his person, that filled him with apprehension. If “anything happened” to him, such a lot would happen to so many other people. For instance, it had only occurred to him since he came down to the country that if Ziegler killed him his death would mean ruin to Alec Forsyth, who had thrown up a sure position to serve him. The next heir was an elderly cousin with a large family to provide for, and he would certainly not retain Forsyth in his employment.
Then, again, Beaumanoir reflected with a sigh, his new and sweet friendship with Leonie Sherman—a friendship to which no blot on his escutcheon need now put limits—would be rudely snapped. The King of Terrors would take away what his saved honor had restored, and perhaps it was the bitterest drop in his cup to feel that he might be giving his life to lose what in another sense he would have given his life to win. To ask Leonie to link her fate to his, with that dark shadow hanging over him, was out of the question.
Once he had taken up his pen to denounce Ziegler to the police authorities anonymously, but he had despondingly laid it down again. That crafty practitioner had doubtless safeguarded himself against such an obvious course by being prepared with an unimpeachable record which it would be impossible to shake unless he came forward and avowed complicity. There, again, dishonor waited for him, and he had already made his choice that a short shrift was preferable to that.
The gloom of his mood was enhanced by his intense loneliness in the huge feudal monastery that now called him master, for Forsyth had been unable to join him, owing to difficulties in obtaining release from his present duties.
Beaumanoir took out and read for the fifth time a letter which had arrived that morning from his friend and secretary:
“My dear Duke (I mustn’t use the irreverent ‘Charley’ any more),—I am still having trouble with the F.O. people about my departure, but I think I may safely promise to get away to you on Tuesday. In fact, I shall make a point of doing so, even if I have to leave the public service in disgrace, for you must forgive my saying that I am rather uneasy about you. The other day you seemed like a man with a millstone round his neck, and I take it that one of the duties of a private secretary is to remove millstones from the person of his employer. I only wish you would confide fully in me, and command me in any way—but that is, of course, your affair.
“I dined with my uncle, General Sadgrove, last night, and had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. and Miss Sherman there. The latter is indeed a charming girl. She was rather shy in talking about you, having heard from my uncle that the Mr. Hanbury she met on shipboard was probably the Duke of Beaumanoir on his way to enter into his kingdom. Mrs. Sherman waxed enthusiastic on your ‘old-world courtesy,’ and the General, who chaffs the old lady, remarked that she had been equally laudatory before she discovered your rank.
“They were all very kind and congratulatory on my announcing my engagement to Sybil, which, as I wrote you yesterday, was ratified within ten minutes of your leaving me at the door of Beaumanoir House.
“You may be interested to hear that I did not go to tea with Mrs. Talmage Eglinton to-day.—Yours, Alec Forsyth.”
The Duke crushed the letter back into his pocket, and came to a resolution.
“I’ll run up to town to-morrow and call on the Shermans,” he said to himself. “And now I’ll do the proper thing, and go to church. I’m not going to crouch in corners because of that patriarchal old fiend at the Cecil.”
The church at which generations of Hanburys had worshiped was in the center of Tarrant village, a mile from the lodge gates, but there was a short cut to it across the park. This was the route taken by the Duke, who first crossed the greensward and then passed out by a private wicket into the road after traversing the belt of copse that fringed the demesne. The villagers, who had waited for his coming, standing bare-headed in the churchyard, were a little disappointed that he had not driven up in full state. But the solitary gentleman limping up the path atoned for the lack of ceremony and won their hearts by his friendly smile; and a handshake to one or two of the older inhabitants, whom he reremembered as a boy, clinched the matter. The verdict went round that the new Duke would “do.”
The service that morning was, it is to be feared, more ducal than devotional. From the white-robed choir, ranged among the tombs of dead-and-gone Hanburys in the chancel, to the hard-breathing rustics on the back benches every eye was turned and steadily kept on the lonely figure in the family pew. While grateful for the homage paid him, the Duke was not sorry when the ordeal was over and he was free to make his way homeward.
But he was not to get off so easily. As he was about to let himself through the private gate into the park, intending to go back, as he had come, through the copse, footsteps sounded behind him, and Mr. Bristow, the vicar, overtook him. They had already met on the previous day.
“Your Grace is alone still?” panted the clergyman. “Ah, I thought your secretary wouldn’t find it so easy to cast his shackles. I am commissioned by Mrs. Bristow to say—I hope you won’t think us presuming—that we shall be delighted if you will give us your company at our homely lunch.”
A sudden impulse prompted Beaumanoir to accept the invitation. He had taken a liking for the hale, vigorous old vicar, who had the archives of his family by rote, and an hour or two in his society would take him out of himself. So he turned back and accompanied his host to the vicarage, where he made a good impression on Mrs. Bristow by his cordial praise of her training of the choir and by appreciation of her strawberries and cream.
It was past four when he returned to Prior’s Tarrant, to be met in the entrance-hall by the butler with a face eloquent of “something wrong.”
“What is it, Manson?” he asked. “Mr. Bristow sent a boy, did he not, to say that I was lunching at the vicarage?”
“Yes, your Grace. It isn’t that,” was the agitated reply. “I have to report an outrage that’s been committed on one of the underservants. Jennings, the third gardener, was coming back from church through the copse in the park, when he was lassoed, your Grace, same as they do buffalo, I’ve been told, in foreign parts. A rope shot out of the bushes over his shoulders, and then a man ran up as he was struggling on the ground; but let him go, saying it was a joke. Jennings hasn’t got any enemies that he knows of, and it was a wicked thing to do, because he’s a bit of a cripple and walks lame. It’s shook him a good deal.”
“I am not surprised at that,” said the Duke. “Possibly it was only intended as a practical joke, but you had better inform the constable in the village, and instruct him to inquire into the matter.”
The butler retired, and the Duke smiled grimly.
“Ziegler has begun to put in some of his fine work,” he muttered. “The initial blunder of his agents in mistaking a servant’s limp for mine won’t stop him long. I shall begin to like the excitement soon, I expect.”
But as the day wore to evening, and the evening to night, the sensation of being hunted vexed his nerves. He found himself prolonging his solitary dinner for the sake of the company of the butler and footman who waited upon him, and afterwards he abstained from the moonlit stroll on the terrace to which he felt tempted. It was not till the mansion had been barred and bolted for the night that he ceased to fumble frequently for the revolver which he had carried all day.
Before retiring he inquired of Manson if the constable had traced the maltreaters of Jennings, and he was not surprised to learn that there had been no discoveries. Mr. Clinton Ziegler was not the man to employ agents incapable of baffling a village policeman.
The room which Beaumanoir occupied was the great state bed-chamber that had been used by his predecessors from time immemorial—a gaunt apartment with a cavernous fireplace and heavily curtained mullioned windows. He did not like the room, but had consented to sleep there on seeing that the old retainers would be scandalized by his sleeping anywhere but in the “Duke’s Room.”
After locking the door and seeing to the window fastenings, he took the additional precaution of examining the chimney. Bending his head clear of the massive mantelpiece, he looked up and saw that at the end of the broad shaft quite a large circle of star-lit sky was visible, while a cold blast struck downwards of sufficient volume to purify the air of the room.
He lay awake for some time, but he must have been slumbering fitfully for over an hour when he felt himself gradually awakening—not from any sudden start, but from a growing sense of strange oppression in his lungs. As his senses returned the choking sensation increased, and finally he lay wide awake, wondering what was the matter. Every minute it became harder to breathe the stifling air, and at last he flung the bedclothes off in the hope of relief, and in doing so saw something so unaccountable that his reeling senses were stricken with amazement rather than fear.
There was a fire in the grate. Glowing steadily in the recess of the ancient fireplace a great red ball burned, without flicker and without flame, but lurid with the unwavering light that comes from fuel fused to intense heat.
Even without the terrible oppression at his chest there would have been a weird horror in this mysterious fire introduced into his room at dead of night—into a room with locked door and fastened windows. But what did this ghastly struggle for breath portend?
“Charcoal! Ziegler!” were the two words that buzzed in response through his fast-clouding brain.