The Duke Decides/Chapter 6

by Headon Hill

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CHAPTER VI

The General is Curious

On the following afternoon at tea-time four ladies were seated in the pleasant drawing-room of 140 Grosvenor Gardens, the residence of General Sadgrove, late of the Indian Staff Corps. Mrs. Sadgrove, a fair, plump, elderly dame, needs no special description, and two of the other tea-drinkers—Mrs. Senator Sherman, as she preferred to be called, and her daughter Leonie—we have met before.

The fourth occupant of the room—a girl dressed in deep mourning—was Sybil Hanbury, who had come to discuss her engagement to Alec Forsyth with her motherly old friend, Alec’s aunt by marriage, Mrs. Sadgrove. Owing to the recent deaths in her family the engagement was not to be publicly announced at present; but Sybil had no secrets from the Sadgroves, who had known her from a baby, long before she had been taken up, on the death of her parents, by her grandfather, the late Duke of Beaumanoir.

Miss Hanbury owed her attractiveness to her essentially English type, not of beauty—she would have disdained to lay claim to that—but of fresh, healthy coloring, a suspicion of tomboyishness, and a lithe, supple figure that stood her in good stead in the hunting and hockey fields. A trifle slangy on occasion, she was a good hater and a staunch friend, with a temper—as she had warned Alec already—that would need a lot of humoring if they were not to have “ructions.”

“I’ve got the makings of a termagant, my dear boy, but it will be all right if you rule me with a velvet glove,” she had remarked within five minutes of their first kiss.

In fact, Miss Sybil Hanbury was a bit of a hoyden; but a very capable little hoyden for all that, and absolutely fearless.

The two girls had naturally paired off together, and the subject of their talk was, equally naturally, the new Duke—Alec’s friend, Sybil’s cousin, and Leonie’s chance acquaintance on the St. Paul.

Sybil, after listening to Leonie’s rather halting description of the fellow passenger whom she had known as “Mr. Hanbury,” owned

“A countrywoman of yours, I wonder if you know her?’’ p. 63

frankly that she had never heard any good of her cousin, but she hastened to add:

“He’s given my prejudice a nasty knock, though, in behaving so well to my young man. Gave him a billet as private sec. that enabled Alec to—you know. A man can’t be much of a wrong ’un who’ll stick to old pals when they have no claim on him.”

Leonie tried not to show surprise at the vernacular.

“He seemed very kind and considerate. I don’t think he can ever have done anything dishonorable,” she replied.

“Nobody ever accused him of that,” Sybil assented. “It was only that he was extravagant, and that my grandfather got tired of paying his debts. You see, he wasn’t the next heir, and—well, perhaps they were a little hard on him. I’m quite prepared to like him now.”

The conversation was interrupted by the entrance of a servant, who announced:

“Mrs. Talmage Eglinton.”

“A fellow countrywoman of yours. I wonder if you know her?” Sybil whispered, as a radiant vision in pale pink under a large “picture” hat sailed in, and was greeted with somewhat frigid politeness by Mrs. Sadgrove.

“No; I am not acquainted with either the name or the lady,” Leonie replied, struck with a strange antipathy to the bold eyes that seemed to be mastering every detail in the room, herself included. Indeed, Mrs. Talmage Eglinton stared so markedly both at Leonie and her mother that Mrs. Sadgrove thought they must have met, and promptly introduced them as American friends staying in the house. The introduction was not a success, for the Shermans knew everyone worth knowing in American society, and the fact that they had never so much as heard of Mrs. Talmage Eglinton argued her outside the pale.

The elegant vision received her snubbing with cool unconcern, and after a few generalities turned again to her hostess and engaged in the trifling chatter of a “duty” call, making one or two unsuccessful attempts to include Sybil, to whom she had not been introduced, in the conversation.

“That woman is a brute,” Sybil said to Leonie under her breath. “I’ll tell you about her when she’s gone.”

The door opened, and there entered an iron-gray man of sixty, whose coming might almost have been the cause of expediting the departure of Mrs. Talmage Eglinton, so quickly did she rise and begin her good-byes.

“No, really I can’t stay, dear Mrs. Sadgrove, even to have the pleasure of a chat with the General,” she prattled. “I have half a dozen other calls to pay, and you have beguiled me into staying too long already. Good-bye. Good-bye, General. Pray don’t trouble to come down.” And with a half-impudent bow of exaggerated respect to the Shermans, she swept out, with the master of the house in attendance.

General Sadgrove returned at once to the drawing-room after escorting the visitor to her carriage. He was a man who bore his years easily; singularly slow and scant of speech, but alert of eye and almost jaunty in the erectness of his bearing. He had gained his C.B. for prominent services in the suppression of Thuggee and Dacoity, and his name is still held in wholesome dread by the criminals of India whose method is violence. It had once been said of him by a high official: “Jem Sadgrove doesn’t have to worry about finding clues. He makes them for himself, and they always yield a true scent. He’s got the nose of a fox-terrier, and the patience and speed of a greyhound.”

But that was long ago, and it might be supposed that in such pleasant duties of retirement as the ushering out of dainty visitors from his wife’s tea-table his faculties had become blunted. Nor in the law-abiding precincts of Belgravia could there be scope for the old-time energy. Yet Mrs. Sadgrove, who knew the signs and portents of her husband’s face, looked twice at him with just a shade of anxiety as she asked whether he would take some tea.

“Thanks,” he said, and taking his cup he went and stood on the rug before the empty hearth. He stirred his tea slowly, with his eyes wandering from one to the other of the four women in the room.

“You good people seem singularly calm, considering that you must just have been listening to a very exciting story,” he remarked.

“Indeed, no,” replied Sybil, taking upon herself to answer. “The lady to whom you have just been doing the polite bored us intensely. Leonie says, for all the dash she’s cutting in London, she’s an incognita so far as America is concerned.”

The General continued to stir his tea impassively.

“Did she not inform you in the course of her small talk,” he inquired presently, “that on her way here her carriage had knocked a man down and gone near to killing him?”

The question evoked a chorus of interested negatives.

“Neither did she say anything to me about it,” said the General gravely.

“Then how did you become aware of the accident?” Mrs. Sadgrove ventured to ask.

“Saw it,” returned the General. “It happened in Buckingham Palace Road. I was passing at the time, on my way home from the club. Her coachman drove right over the fellow as he was crossing the roadway at the corner. He was knocked down, and it was the merest shave that he wasn’t trampled by the horses and crushed by the wheels. As it was, he escaped with a bit of a shaking and a dusty coat. At any rate, he got up and walked into the nearest barber’s—for a wash and brush-up, I suppose.”

Further questioned, the General in his jerky way informed his fair audience that he was sure that it was Mrs. Talmage Eglinton’s jobbed landau that had wrought the mischief, and that she herself was in it at the time. It was the same vehicle which he had found at his own door on reaching home ten minutes ago, and to which he had just conducted her.

“Funny that she should be so secretive about it,” said Mrs. Sadgrove, reflectively. “It’s the sort of thing that most women, coming fresh from the scene, would have been full of—especially as it must have been the coachman’s fault, and not her own.”

“Exactly,” was the General’s curt comment.

“She’s a—a creature,’ Sybil Hanbury exclaimed, viciously. “Thank goodness, I don’t know her; but I’ve heard all about her from Alec. The poor boy can’t abide her; she makes eyes at him so unblushingly.”

“Then we can appreciate your sentiments about her,” remarked the General with the flicker of a smile. “How did we come to know this lady?” he added to his wife.

Mrs. Sadgrove explained that she had been asked as a favor to call on Mrs. Talmage Eglinton by a mutual acquaintance, a certain Lady Roseville, but had regretted it ever since. Their intercourse had, however, been of the slightest, being confined to the interchange of a couple of formal visits, and to an invitation by Mrs. Sadgrove to a musical “at home,” at which Mrs. Talmage Eglinton had endeavored to embark on a flirtation with Alec Forsyth.

“She’s a rich widow, I believe; and I don’t think she would ever have been heard of if the Roseville’s hadn’t taken her up,” Mrs. Sadgrove concluded.

The series of grunts with which the General received this information had hardly ceased when again the footman appeared in the doorway and announced, with all due importance:

“His Grace the Duke of Beaumanoir.”

The occupants of the drawing-room were all accustomed to the “usages of polite society,” either in Britannic or Transatlantic form; but it was impossible for them to repress a flutter of excitement as the visitor entered, his original “cavalry swing” marred but not wholly obliterated by his limp. Leonie tried hard not to blush, and failed. Mrs. Sherman interlaced her fingers nervously. Sybil Hanbury stared hard at the cousin whose stately town house she was occupying, and who had waved a magic wand over her lover’s prospects. Mrs. Sadgrove was the graceful and interested hostess, and the General—well, the General was surprised for once into a start which was only invisible because nobody was looking at him.

Beaumanoir’s manner was perfectly easy and self-possessed, but there was a harassed look in his eyes which did not entirely fade as he responded to his welcome. But it was not that which had caused the General to start.

The Duke was the man whom he had seen knocked down by Mrs. Talmage Eglinton’s carriage, to the imminent peril of his life.

The “wash and brush-up” had been effectual as regards the ducal garments, but they could not hide the black silk sling in which he carried his left arm. It was General Sadgrove’s way to allow events to shape themselves, and saying nothing of the scene he had witnessed as he welcomed the distinguished visitor, he waited for the Duke to refer to his mishap himself.

But no. The victim of the accident was apparently as much inclined to reticence as had been the fair cause of it. It was Mrs. Sherman who unconsciously provoked the mendacious statement which stimulated the General’s curiosity.

“I’m afraid that your Grace has hurt your hand,” said the Senator’s wife, pointing to a broad strip of diachylon plaster that ran from the Duke’s wrist to the ball of his thumb.

“Yes, I—I grazed it rather badly against the wheel in getting out of a cab,” Beaumanoir replied with a momentary loss of his self-possession. The discomposure passed at once, and only the observer on the hearth-rug noticed it. The same shrewd observer presently perceived that the visitor was definitely leading the conversation to the subject of the arrival in England of Senator Sherman; and, more than that, that he was waxing a shade more inquisitive than good-breeding allowed as to the nature of the senatorial journey.

“Ah! he’s coming on political business, I think you told me?” the Duke remarked in a half-tone of interrogation on Leonie saying that her father, according to advices received that morning, was to sail in two days’ time on the Campania, and would be due at Liverpool early in the following week.

“Well, it’s political business in a way,” Mrs. Sherman struck in. “My husband is coming over in charge of a large amount of Government securities, which are to be deposited at the Bank of England against a shipment of English gold to the United States.”

“He’s got the opening he wanted. Now, what on earth is he going to do with it?” said the General to himself as he watched keenly.

“Rather a dangerous mission, I should say,” was the Duke’s comment on the information imparted to him.

“Dangerous! How can that be?’ Leonie exclaimed, wondering. “United States Treasury bonds are not explosive.”

“No, but the world is full of sharps, Miss Sherman, and some of them might fancy having a shy for such a haul,” said Beaumanoir with a trace more of earnestness than the occasion seemed to require. “If I had a relative starting on such an errand, I should be inclined to cable him to—ah—to look out for himself,” he added in direct appeal to Mrs. Sherman.

But the good lady laughed the suggestion to scorn, alleging playfully that “it would be as much as her place was worth” to tackle the Senator that way. It would be a hint that he wasn’t able to take care of himself or of his charge, and would be resented accordingly.

The Duke abandoned the subject, but the General noted the disappointment in the tired eyes.

“His Grace knows something. Let’s see—he was on his beam-ends when he was unearthed in New York,” the old hunter of Thugs and Dacoits muttered under his gray mustache.

Beaumanoir made no long stay after his ineffectual effort to sound a warning note. There had been no opportunity for individual talk; but in saying his adieus he had two words with Sybil, who had been observing her cousin quite as intently as, and a good deal more openly than, the General.

“I’m going to look Alec up now, at his diggings in John Street,” he said. “Probably I shall ask him to put me up to-night.”

“It’s a shame that you should have to do so,” Sybil blurted in her boyish fashion. “You’ve been awfully good to us. I ought to have cleared out of Beaumanoir House at once, and I’ll ‘git’ as soon as ever I can make other arrangements.”

“I beg you’ll do nothing of the kind,” Beaumanoir made genial answer. “Alec is about the only friend I have, and—and I need a friend, Cousin Sybil. It has been a pleasure to serve him and you—if it can be called serving you,” he added with a thoughtful gravity that puzzled the girl.

She shook hands with a warmth that bespoke the death of old prejudices, and General Sadgrove, who had hardly exchanged two words with his visitor, accompanied him to the halldoor.

“Are you walking, Duke? Or shall I whistle a cab?” he asked.

Beaumanoir looked up the street and down the street, and gave a queer little shrug.

“It won’t make any difference whether I walk or drive,” he said. “Good-bye, General.”

Having gazed the limping figure out of sight, the General went back into the house and made for his private den—a cozy apartment crammed with Eastern spoils. There he leisurely selected a cigar and seated himself in a big saddle-bag chair.

“There is something brewing,” he growled gently. “I perceive a vibration in the moral atmosphere which quite recalls old days. I wonder what it means?”