The silence was unnerving the young private secretary; and he was
trying, with the utmost care, to peel a nut before he realised that one
does not and cannot peel a nut. The second butler was vulgar enough to
wink at him again. The second butler was a low fellow who had been at
Eton with Mr. Dunn and despised Mr. Dunn for not having gone up in the
world.
At last Lady Vest made to rise from the table, and spoke for the first
time since she had sat down.
“I will leave you,” said she, “to your coffee.”
“You will stay,” said my lord, “exactly where you are.” And he smiled in
an unpleasant way all his own which showed his false teeth, and at sight
of which the menials at once left the room. Another long and heavy
silence fell, so that Mr. Dunn cursed the day he was born. Outside,
night had fallen.
“I am to gather,” said Lord Vest, with a smile, to his wife, “that this
Dunn person is your lover?”
The young private secretary put down his unpeeled nut. He was afraid,
but was he not a gentleman? Mr. Dunn was a cadet of a noble but
impoverished house, and it was not in vain that he had spent nine years
at Eton and Oxford to no other end than to know the difference between a
cad and a gentleman.
“Look here, sir,” said Mr. Dunn, “that’s a bit much. I mean, it’s going
too far. I’ll stand a good deal and all that, but I will not stand for a
lady being insulted before my face. You will receive my resignation in
the morning, Lord Vest. In the meanwhile, I’m off.”
Mr. Dunn was undeniably furious. The Napoleon of the Press was not,
however, without a sense of humour: so, at least, his papers would now
and then confess rather shyly, hinting that the manly laughter of Lord
Vest must come as a solace to God for the press of His business
elsewhere that compelled Him to give Lord Vest the vice-royalty of this
earth. He laughed now. He laughed alone.
“Gently, Mr. Dunn, gently!” he laughed, and his voice was of a courteous
balance surprising in one of his rugged appearance: nor had he any trace
of that accent which by ordinary adorns the speech of our Australian
cousins. “That you will be leaving my employment more or less at once,”
he continued playfully, “is, I am afraid, self-evident. And that you
will find any other employment in England in the course of, I hope, a
long life, is exceedingly improbable, for I shall make it my business,
Mr. Dunn, to have you hounded out of the country; and I have, I need
scarcely remind you, more experience of hounding people out of countries
than perhaps any other man in England. But I don’t think, Mr. Dunn, that
I can allow you to leave this house for another half-an-hour or so. For
I have something to say to you.” And Lord Vest smiled at Mr. Dunn. He
was a much bigger man than Mr. Dunn, and he was between Mr. Dunn and the
door.
It was at that moment that my lady raised her voice. She wore always a
sad, brave dignity, always she was a quiet lady; but in her voice now,
as her eyes rested very calmly on the sneering face of her husband, the
very landscape of England might have been quivering. She did not conceal
from his lordship that the reason for this quivering was a profound
distaste for his person, manners and conversation.
“I did not think,” said she, “that any man could say so base a thing on
such flimsy provocation. The fact that in spite of your childish
prejudice against dancing (which I sincerely hope is not shared by all
the natives of Australia) Mr. Dunn has been kind enough to dance with
me----”
“You call that dancing?” smiled my lord. “Oh, do you! I may seem very
uncivilised, Pamela, but to me it seemed more like making love. Am I
right, Mr. Dunn?”
“You are not,” said Mr. Dunn with a dignity which would have surprised
his mother. “Any man who sneers as you are sneering at the moment, Lord
Vest, must be in the wrong about everything. You cannot be in the right,
sir, with a poisonous voice like that. I am Lady Vest’s very humble
admirer and, I hope, friend----”
“Friendship, Mr. Dunn, can wear strange shapes. Friendship, my dear Mr.
Dunn, can be the outward label of infidelity. Am I right, Pamela?”
“Mr. Dunn,” said Lady Vest with flushed cheeks, “you will be doing me a
very great favour by overlooking my husband’s behaviour this evening.
Justinian,” she turned to her husband with a high look, “I knew I was
married to a megalomaniac. But I did not realise I was married to a
madman. I insist on retiring now; and would advise Mr. Dunn to do the
same.”
“And I,” shouted Lord Vest, “insist on your staying where you are; and
would advise Mr. Dunn to do the same. Do you understand? And you, my
good young man?”
Mr. Dunn could not help but pretend to understand, while awaiting
developments. He was dismayed by the violence of dislike on the
nobleman’s colonial face as he turned it to his wife, the gentle lady, a
picture of outraged innocence, of appalled decorum, her great blue eyes
swept with astonished distaste, her sweet sad face white with sudden
fear. For my Lord Vest was not smiling now.
Mr. Dunn revealed at the enquiry which later sat on these affairs that
it was at that moment he first realised that his lordship was mad. But
his madness, said Mr. Dunn, wore so sane, so coherent a habit, that a
chap couldn’t but mistrust his fleeting, if well-grounded, suspicion;
and even in the very second of his dashing frantically past Lord Vest to
the door, which the second butler, being conveniently situated nearby in
a curved position, held closed for him on the outside while he made his
escape from the house, you couldn’t be certain, said Mr. Dunn, whether
the nobleman’s roar of baffled rage was not more than that of one
cheated of the entertainment of a repulsive jest than that of a chap
mortified to the point of lunacy. For his employer, said Mr. Dunn
warmly, was ever a gentleman with a partiality for making jests of a
kind which, Mr. Dunn indignantly supposed, might be considered
laughter-provoking on the Australian veldt, bush, or prairie, but were
certainly not the thing in England.
The plain truth of the matter is, as you can see when shorn of Mr.
Dunn’s naïve observations, that Mr. Dunn turned tail and fled. In the
graphic words of Lord Tarlyon, who was among the Commission of Peers who
sat to enquire into the Vest affair, Mr. Dunn, awaiting his opportunity
with an eagerness worthy of a braver purpose, jumped up from his chair
like a scalded cat and, muttering something about a dog, ran out of that
house like a bat out of hell.