"Mr. Gage--Percy--are you there?"
"Yes, I'm here," was the lugubrious response.
"Have you been waiting long?" Ethel asked, coming close to him.
"Hours," he declared feelingly, then quickly corrected the statement.
"No, I mean, not long." Back in the darkness he fancied he could see
the truculent eyes glaring through the bars of the helmet.
"I couldn't get away," Ethel said invitingly. "Had to dodge Dagmar."
"Ho! she wanted to come too, did she?" Peckover remarked in
desperation. "The more the merrier."
Ethel drew back with rather a sour look on her expectant face. "Mr.
Gage, what do you mean?" Then with characteristic tenacity, she sidled
up to him again. "Percy, how cold you are," she observed reproachfully.
"Cold?" he returned miserably. "Yes, it is a bit chilly. Enough to
give any fellow the shivers. Chamber of Horrors is a fool to it. I
mean," he quickly added, as an ominous movement of Carnaby's sword
caught his eye, "the armour strikes cold."
"Of course," said Ethel huffily, "if you would prefer Dagmar, I'll go
and send her to you."
"Oh, no; please don't trouble. You'll do," he replied, with an
indifference born of desperation.
The lady resolved to try another tack. "Oh, Mr. Gage," she said, with
a tremor in her voice; "how unkind you are!"
Her face was so close to him that the trial was almost more than he
could stand. "No, no, not unkind," he denied, looking wildly round for
a way of escape.
"So changed," she insisted.
"No, not changed," he replied equivocally.
"So distant."
"Wish I was--a hundred miles distant," he groaned to himself. "Can't
help it," he declared, goaded by the consciousness of those four eyes
magnetizing him from the darkness. "Perhaps I've been too familiar."
"Oh, no," she protested, growing desperate in turn, as the prize of a
millionaire husband seemed slipping from her. "If I don't mind it
Percy, dear----"
She put out her arms, but he fell back. "Don't," he exclaimed, the
hateful words almost choking him. "It isn't proper, you know."
"I'm afraid," she urged forlornly. "I have been too absurdly proper."
"Oh, no--yes, I mean, no, no." In his state of mind Peckover found it
impossible to differentiate between what he longed and what he was
forced to say.
"You said to-day it was dry work," Ethel observed caressingly. "You
may have a sip if you like."
The invitation, reminding him, with a difference, of his Crystal Palace
and Welsh Harp days, was well nigh too much for the well-versed
philander of the suburbs. "Oh, don't, don't!" he almost shrieked.
"Please go away. You will drive me mad. This is awful," he groaned.
"Of course, if you'd rather not----" Ethel suggested with a toss of the
head.
"It's never rather not with me," he protested under his breath.
"Only----"
Accepting his lowered tone as one of endearment and invitation, Ethel,
wondering at his unusual diffidence, drew closer to him. Mechanically
and most unwillingly, he drew back. "Well, you need not run away," she
pouted.
From what he could, in the semi-darkness, see of her eyes he fancied he
detected there an intention to spring at him, or at any rate to fall
into his arms. In tantalizing terror he hastily retreated still
further, and in doing so stumbled against the stand of armour which
just then contained the redoubtable Carnaby, receiving for his
clumsiness a sound cuff from the mailed fist of that truculent spirit.
Luckily, as the episode took place in the shadow, it was not noticed by
the lady who had stopped her pursuit of matrimony and mammon in a not
unjustifiable huff.
"I know," she declared resentfully. "It's all that horrid Colonial
girl. How you can like her beats me."
"Oh, she's not bad," was Peckover's reluctant explanation.
"I think," returned Ethel with decision, "she is simply awful. If that
is Colonial taste, I am sorry for you. You could never think of
marrying her!"
"I'm afraid so," he blurted out in his woe and confusion. His guilty
eyes perceived a disquieting movement on the part of the man in armour,
and in turning, ready to flee from the probable onslaught, he saw in
the gloom Lalage's eyes scintillating vengeance. "I--I mean I hope
so," he corrected, almost in a shriek.
Induced by this strange and contradictory behaviour, Ethel suddenly
made a dart and flung her designing arms round him. "Oh, Percy," she
cried with an adequate imitation of a sob, "you are not going to throw
me over for that creature?"
"I must," he replied, releasing himself firmly and with what dignity
was possible under the circumstances, "obey the dictates of honour."
Miss Ethel drew back, looking very sold and desperate in the moonlight.
"What a charming brother-in-law you will have!" she exclaimed, panting
with scorn and her late exertion. "Great lout! Only fit to guzzle and
smash furniture."
"And," Peckover added miserably to himself, "people who don't agree
with him."
His silence gave rise to a wild hope in the besieging breast that the
defence was wavering. In a trice, with an improvement upon her former
tentative onslaught, she had thrown herself with greater deadliness of
aim and more convulsive tenacity into his willing, yet unwilling, arms
again.
"Oh, Percy," she howled in a judiciously modulated pitch, "I can't bear
your coldness! I can't let you go!"
Peckover's situation with those four glaring eyes and those two
matrimonially determined grips upon him was truly deplorable. "I'm a
dead man," he gasped, as he saw, over Ethel's reckless shoulder, the
awful mail-clad figure raise the sword with grim significance. "I say;
stop!" he cried, struggling ungallantly to free himself. "Keep away!
I can't marry you!"
"Mr. Gage! Do you mean it?" It was most undignified from both
parties' point of view, but the fact must be chronicled that she
shook--actually shook him. "Oh, I won't be swindled like this!" she
cried, in the height of exasperation.
Finding that with the obvious intention of being as good as her word,
she, instead of releasing him with scorn, was hugging him tighter in
desperation, he was fain to cry, in a hoarse whisper, "Hush! Keep off!
We are not alone. Somebody in the room."
Ethel started back and looked round with a half-indignant,
half-distrustful eye and saw--Dagmar. That young lady having had her
suspicions aroused by the prolonged absence of her sister and their
eligible guest, who, by the way, was supposed to be cheering the sick
bed of his friend, Lord Quorn, had started off on a search expedition,
and had just then crept pryingly into the picture-gallery.
"Ethel?" she cried with a pounce. "All alone with Mr. Gage here, of
all places, and in the dark! This is disgraceful."
"Mr. Gage," Ethel declared calmly, "is going to marry me."
She was quite ready for her sister to join issue on that statement, but
to her surprise the contradiction came from another quarter.
"Mr. Gage is not going to do anything of the sort." It was Lalage Leo
who, emerging from the obscurity which had shrouded her, uttered the
flat denial.
"There!" said Peckover in uncomfortable justification of his
backwardness, "you see we were not alone."
"No!" cried a loud voice as Carnaby clanked forward. "Not much."
"Oh, Mr. Gage, how dishonourable," Ethel exclaimed trying to look
scandalized while she resolved how best she could turn the situation to
account. "Why didn't you tell me sooner?"
"I did tell you not to hug me," Peckover replied bluntly.
"If," suggested Carnaby with a leer, having, after a struggle to a
running accompaniment of murmured strong language, got his helmet off,
"if you want anybody to hug----"
"Oh!" Ethel cried in manifest disgust, as though her demonstrativeness
was regulated by any less material consideration than its object's bank
balance.
"I'll take the armour off," Carnaby assured her, his tone suggesting
that that might make all the difference.
"I will not be treated like this," Ethel exclaimed indignantly, aware
of the necessity for having her position in the complication settled
then and there. "Mr. Gage is engaged to me." She seized Peckover's
arm and hung on to it grimly.
"No, to me," Dagmar objected as with a desperation born of an insecure
tenure she clutched his other arm.
Lalage, with mischief in her dark eyes, swooped down upon the trio.
The unhappy Peckover's arms being fast held, the only way that occurred
to him of avoiding the coming assault was to endeavour to sit down on
the floor, in which he succeeded, after a short and spirited attempt on
the part of his captors to defeat the manoeuvre.
"I have a prior and a stronger claim on Mr. Gage," said Lalage with
calm determination; "and I mean to enforce it, eh, Carnaby?"
"Just let me get out of this rotten armour," growled her brother, thus
appealed to. "I'll----"
"But it's not my fault," urged Peckover plaintively, from his
undignified position on the floor.
His weakness was not, however, shared by the ladies who, having him
fast in their grips, knelt, under the exigences of the situation,
beside him.
"He is engaged to me," Ethel maintained stoutly.
"You are engaged to Sharnbrook," objected Dagmar.
"I am not," she denied loudly and with decision.
"All right! That's settled," exclaimed a blithe voice from the gloom,
from which next moment the said John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook emerged.