“Rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat!” on the door.
“McTart! McTart! Up with you from betwixt coverlets and into your
Persian quilt!”
“Out with ye, Sir Robin, or by Gad! Sir, we’ll in, the fifteen of us!
and rout you up from Morpheus’s arms.”
“Come, Sir Robin, dally no longer with sweet sleep; up, Sir, and bethink
you of Beauty spelled with a P-E-G-G-Y!” shouts Sir Wyatt, chorused by
the rest.
At first clap of voices Peggy stuck her hair back into the drawer,
jumped up, and stood, hand upon the dressing-table, her expression like
nothing else so much as that of a fawn caught in a thicket.
“’Sdeath! Gentlemen, I pray of you, a few moments grace!” cries she,
trembling from the knees down, for ’tis quite of the temper of the
manners of the day that in a second more the whole company should batter
down the mahogany and burst in.
“Three-and-thirty, an you like, Sir Robin!” says Escombe, who is soberer
than the rest.
“Give us the whereabouts of Lady Peggy Burgoyne,” shouts Mr. Chalmers,
“and we’ll trouble you no more ’til doomsday!”
“Lady Peggy Burgoyne!”
“Lady Peggy Burgoyne!”
“Where’s Lady Peggy Burgoyne?”
“Where’s Lady Peggy Burgoyne?”
“Where is the fair one for whom you and Sir Percy de Bohun have fought
with blades and tongues, twice now, since this day last week?”
“Lady Peggy Burgoyne!” cried they in hot concert, joined in most lustily
by the Beau from his bed across the corridor, and accompanied by the
pounding of fifteen rapier points on the parquet, and thirty fists on
the woodwork, as well as the demoniacal screams of the Beau’s little
negro and the parrot on his wrist.
“Tell us where she is!” came high staccato last from Sir Wyatt’s
exhausted lips.
“My Lords and Gentlemen!” answers Her Ladyship, standing close to the
door enveloped from top to toe in a sheet over her night-rail. “Would to
God I could!”
There was a ring of heartfelt truth in the reply, and its utterance was
succeeded by a second’s surprised pause.
The young bucks regarded each other with shrugs, pursed mouths, and
interrogation points bristling in their eyes.
Mr. Chalmers, recovered of his surprise sooner than the others, says:
“Do you mean to say, Sir Robin, that the whereabouts of the lady with
whose name the prints and the coffee-houses are ringing; for whose sake
you came near to fighting Sir Percy only last night, and did fight him
in Lark Lane o’ Thursday last, ain’t known to you?”
“Is she in London?” pipes the Beau, pinching the little black till he
squeaks again.
“That I can not tell,” responds Her Ladyship. “I do know she’s not in
Kent; and she’s not at Kennaston Castle. ’Slife! Sirs,” adds she, “I
pray your consideration. Guess what you will; this matter of Lady Peggy
sticks me closer than you dream, and I’d give my life to know her safe
at home with her mother.”
Silence ensues; the disappointed fifteen get them back to the Beau’s
bedside to talk over this latest development as to the mysterious Lady
Peggy.
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