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MY LORD DUKE
BY E. W. HORNUNG
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1897
COPYRIGHT, 1897, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
CONTENTS
I. THE HEAD OF THE FAMILY 1
II. "HAPPY JACK" 16
III. A CHANCE LOST 31
IV. NOT IN THE PROGRAMME 44
V. WITH THE ELECT 63
VI. A NEW LEAF 77
VII. THE DUKE'S PROGRESS 90
VIII. THE OLD ADAM 105
IX. AN ANONYMOUS LETTER 122
X. "DEAD NUTS" 137
XI. THE NIGHT OF THE TWENTIETH 151
XII. THE WRONG MAN 163
XIII. THE INTERREGNUM 180
XIV. JACK AND HIS MASTER 189
XV. END OF THE INTERREGNUM 199
XVI. "LOVE THE GIFT" 215
XVII. AN ANTI-TOXINE 223
XVIII. HECKLING A MINISTER 233
XIX. THE CAT AND THE MOUSE 244
XX. "LOVE THE DEBT" 257
XXI. THE BAR SINISTER 266
XXII. DE MORTUIS 282
MY LORD DUKE
CHAPTER I
THE HEAD OF THE FAMILY
The Home Secretary leant his golf-clubs against a chair. His was the
longest face of all.
"I am only sorry it should have come now," said Claude apologetically.
"Just as we were starting for the links! Our first day, too!" muttered
the Home Secretary.
"_I_ think of Claude," remarked his wife. "I can never tell you, Claude,
how much I feel for you! We shall miss you dreadfully, of course; but we
couldn't expect to enjoy ourselves after this; and I think, in the
circumstances, that you are quite right to go up to town at once."
"Why?" cried the Home Secretary warmly. "What good can he do in the
Easter holidays? Everybody will be away; he'd much better come with me
and fill his lungs with fresh air."
"I can never tell you how much I feel for you," repeated Lady Caroline
to Claude Lafont.
"Nor I," said Olivia. "It's too horrible! I don't believe it. To think
of their finding him after all! I don't believe they _have_ found him.
You've made some mistake, Claude. You've forgotten your code; the cable
really means that they've _not_ found him, and are giving up the
search!"
Claude Lafont shook his head.
"There may be something in what Olivia says," remarked the Home
Secretary. "The mistake may have been made at the other end. It would
bear talking over on the links."
Claude shook his head again.
"We have no reason to suppose there has been a mistake at all, Mr.
Sellwood. Cripps is not the kind of man to make mistakes; and I can
swear to my code. The word means, 'Duke found--I sail with him at
once.'"
"An Australian Duke!" exclaimed Olivia.
"A blackamoor, no doubt," said Lady Caroline with conviction.
"Your kinsman, in any case," said Claude Lafont, laughing; "and my
cousin; and the head of the family from this day forth."
"It was madness!" cried Lady Caroline softly. "Simple madness--but then
all you poets _are_ mad! Excuse me, Claude, but you remind me of the
Lafont blood in my own veins--you make it boil. I feel as if I never
could forgive you! To turn up your nose at one of the oldest titles in
the three kingdoms; to think twice about a purely hypothetical heir at
the antipodes; and actually to send out your solicitor to hunt him up!
If that was not Quixotic lunacy, I should like to know what is?"
The Right Honourable George Sellwood took a new golf-ball from his
pocket, and bowed his white head mournfully as he stripped off the
tissue paper.
"My dear Lady Caroline, _noblesse oblige_--and a man must do his obvious
duty," he heard Claude saying, in his slightly pedantic fashion.
"Besides, I should have cut a very sorry figure had I jumped at the
throne, as it were, and sat there until I was turned out. One knew there
_had_ been an heir in Australia; the only thing was to find out if he
was still alive; and Cripps has done so. I'm bound to say I had given
him up. Cripps has written quite hopelessly of late. He must have found
the scent and followed it up during the last six weeks; but in another
six he will be here to tell us all about it--and we shall see the Duke.
Meanwhile, pray don't waste your sympathies upon _me_. To be perfectly
frank, this is in many ways a relief to me--I am only sorry it has come
now. You know my tastes; but I have hitherto found it expedient to make
a little secret of my opinions. Now, however, there can be no harm in my
saying that they are not entirely in harmony with the hereditary
principle. You hold up your hands, dear Lady Caroline, but I assure you
that my seat in the Upper Chamber would have been a seat of
conscientious thorns. In fact I have been in a difficulty, ever since my
grandfather's death, which I am very thankful to have removed. On the
other hand, I love my--may I say my art? And luckily I have enough to
cultivate the muse on, at all events, the best of oatmeal; so I am not
to be pitied. A good quatrain, Olivia, is more to me than coronets; and
the society of my literary friends is dearer to my heart than that of
all the peers in Christendom."
Claude was a poet; when he forgot this fact he was also an excellent
fellow. His affectations ended with his talk. In appearance he was
distinctly desirable. He had long, clean limbs, a handsome, shaven,
mild-eyed face, and dark hair as short as another's. He would have made
an admirable Duke.
Mr. Sellwood looked up a little sharply from his dazzling new golf-ball.
"Why go to town at all?" said he.
"Well, the truth is, I have been in a false position all these months,"
replied Claude, forgetting his poetry and becoming natural at once. "I
want to get out of it without a day's unnecessary delay. This thing must
be made public."
The statesman considered.
"I suppose it must," said he, judicially.
"Undoubtedly," said Lady Caroline, looking from Olivia to Claude. "The
sooner the better."
"Not at all," said the Home Secretary. "It has kept nearly a year.
Surely it can keep another week? Look here, my good fellow. I come down
here expressly to play golf with you, and you want to bunker me in the
very house! I take it for the week for nothing else, and you want to
desert me the very first morning. You shan't do either, so that's all
about it."
"You're a perfect tyrant!" cried Lady Caroline. "I'm ashamed of you,
George; and I hope Claude will do exactly as he likes. _I_ shall be
sorry enough to lose him, goodness knows!"
"So shall I," said Olivia simply.
Lady Caroline shuddered.
"Look at the day!" cried Mr. Sellwood, jumping up with his pink face
glowing beneath his virile silver hair. "Look at the sea! Look at the
sand! Look at the sea-breeze lifting the very carpet under our feet! Was
there ever such a day for golf?"
Claude wavered visibly.
"Come on," said Mr. Sellwood, catching up his clubs. "I'm awfully sorry
for you, my boy. But come on!"
"You will have to give in, Claude," said Olivia, who loved her father.
Lady Caroline shrugged her shoulders.
"Of course," said she, "I hope he will; still I don't think our own
selfish considerations should detain him against his better judgment."
"I am eager to see Cripps's partners," said Claude vacillating. "They
may know more about it."
"And solicitors are such trying people," remarked Lady Caroline
sympathetically; "one always does want to see them personally, to know
what they really mean."
"That's what I feel," said Claude.
"But what on earth has he to consult them about?" demanded the Home
Secretary. "Everything will keep--except the golf. Besides, my dear
fellow, you are perfectly safe in the hands of Maitland, Hollis, Cripps
and Company. A fine steady firm, and yet pushing too. I recollect they
were the first solicitors in London--"
"Were!" said his wife significantly.
"To supply us with typewritten briefs, my love. Now there is little
else. In such hands, my dear Claude, your interests are quite
undramatically safe."
"Still," said Claude, "it's an important matter; and I am, after all,
for the moment, the head of--"
"I'll tell you what you are," cried the politician, with a burst of that
hot brutality which had formerly made him the wholesome terror of the
Junior Bar; "you're a confounded minor Cockney poet! If you want to go
back to your putrid midnight oil, go back to it; if you want to get out
of the golf, get out of it! I'm off. I shouldn't like to be rude to you,
Claude, my boy, and I may be if I remain. No doubt I shall be able to
pick up somebody down at the links."
Claude struck his flag.
A minute later, Olivia, from the broad bay window, watched the lank,
handsome poet and the sturdy, white-haired statesman hurrying along the
Marina arm-in-arm; both in knickerbockers and Norfolk jackets; and each
carrying a quiverful of golf-clubs in his outer hand.
The girl was lost in thought.
"Olivia," said a voice behind her, "your father behaved like a brute!"
"I didn't think so; it was all in good part. And it will do him so much
good!"
"Do whom?"
"Poor Claude! Of course he is dreadfully cut up."
"Then why did he pretend to be pleased?"
"That was his pluck. He took it splendidly. I never admired him so
much!"
Lady Caroline opened her mouth to speak, but shut it again without a
word. Her daughter's slight figure was silhouetted against the middle
window of the bow; the sun put a golden crown upon the fair young head;
yet the head was bent, and the girl's whole attitude one of pity and of
thought. Lady Caroline Sellwood rose quietly, and left the room.
That species of low cunning, which was one of her Ladyship's traits, had
placed her for the moment in a rather neat dilemma. Claude Lafont had
cast poet's eyes at Olivia for months and years; and for weeks and
months Olivia's mother had wished there were less poetry and more
passion in the composition of that aristocrat. He would not say what
nobody else, not even Lady Caroline, could say for him. He was content
to dangle and admire; he had called Olivia his "faery queen," with his
lips and with his pen, in private and in print; but he had betrayed no
immediate desire to call her his wife. Lady Caroline had recommended him
to marry, and he had denounced marriage as "the death of romance." Quite
sure in her own mind that she was dealing with none other than the Duke
of St. Osmund's, it was her Ladyship who had planned the present small
party (which her distinguished husband would call a "foursome") for the
Easter Recess. Flatly disbelieving in the existence of the alleged
Australian heir, she had seen the merit of engaging Olivia to Claude
before the latter assumed his title in the eyes of the world. That the
title was his to assume, when he liked, had been the opinion of all the
Lafonts, save Claude himself, from the very first; and, when it suited
her, Lady Caroline Sellwood was very well pleased to consider herself a
Lafont. In point of fact, her mother had borne that illustrious name
before her marriage with the impecunious Earl Clennell of Ballycawley;
and Lady Caroline was herself a great-granddaughter of the sixth Duke of
St. Osmund's.
The sixth Duke (who exerted himself to make the second half of the last
century rather wickeder than the first) had two sons, of whom her
present Ladyship's grandfather was the younger. The elder became the
seventh Duke, and begot the eighth (and most respectable) Duke of St.
Osmund's--the aged peer lately deceased. The eighth Duke, again, had but
two sons, who both predeceased him. These two sons were, respectively,
Claude's father and the unmentionable Marquis of Maske. The Marquis was
a man after the heart of his worst ancestor, a fascinating blackguard,
neither more nor less. At twenty-four he had raised the temperature of
his native air to a degree incompatible with his own safety; and had
fled the country never to return. Word of his death was received from
Australia in the year 1866. He had died horribly, from thirst in the
wilderness, and yet a proper compassion was impossible even after that.
For the news was accompanied by a letter from the dead man's
hand--scrawled at his last gasp, and pinned with his knife to the tree
under which the body was found--yet composed in a vein of revolting
cynicism, and containing further news of the most embarrassing
description. The Marquis was leaving behind him--somewhere in
Australia--at the moment he really could not say where--a small
Viscount Dillamore to inherit ultimately the title and estates. He gave
no dates, but said his wife was dead. To the best of his belief,
however, the lad was alive; and might be known by the French eagle of
the Lafonts, which the father had himself tattooed upon his little
chest.
This was all the clue which had been left to Claude, to follow on a bad
man's bare word, or to ignore at his own discretion. For reasons best
known to himself, the old Duke had taken no steps to discover the little
Marquis. Unluckily, however, his late Grace had not been entirely
himself for many years before his death; and those reasons had never
transpired. Claude, on the other hand, was a man of fastidious
temperament, a person of infinite scruples, with a morbid horror of the
incorrect. He would spend half the morning deciding between a semicolon
and a full stop; and he was consistently conscientious in matters of
real moment, as, for example, in that of his marriage. He had been
asking himself, for quite a twelve-month, whether he really loved
Olivia; he had no intention of asking _her_ until he was quite convinced
on the point. To such a man there was but one course possible on the old
Duke's death. And Claude had taken it with the worst results.
"He has no sympathy for _me_," said Lady Caroline bitterly, as she went
upstairs. "He has cut his own throat, and there's an end of it; except
that if he thinks he's going to marry any daughter of mine, after this,
he is very much mistaken."
It was extremely mortifying all the same; to have prepared the ground so
carefully, to have arranged every preliminary for a match which had now
to be abandoned altogether; and worse still, to have turned away half
the eligible young men in town for the sake of a Duke who was not a Duke
at all. Lady Caroline Sellwood had three daughters. The eldest had made
a good, solid, military marriage, and enjoyed in India a social position
that was not unworthy of her. The second daughter had not done quite so
well; still, her husband, the Rev. Francis Freke, was a divine whose
birth was better than his attainments, so that there was every chance of
seeing his little legs in gaiters before either foot was in his grave.
But Olivia was her youngest ("my ewe lamb," Lady Caroline used to call
her, although no other kind had graced her fold), and in her mother's
opinion she was fitted for a better fate than that which had befallen
either of her sisters. Olivia was the prettiest of the three. Her little
fair head, "sunning over with curls," as Claude never tired of saying,
was made by nature with a self-evident view to strawberry-leaves and
twinkling tiaras. And Lady Caroline meant it to wear them yet.
She had done her best to encourage Claude in his inclination to run up
to town at once. The situation at the seaside had become charged with
danger. Not only did it appear to Lady Caroline that the poet was at
last satisfied with the state of his own affections, but she had reason
to fear that Claude Lafont would have a better chance with Olivia than
would the Duke of St. Osmund's. The child was peculiar. She had read too
much, and there was a suspiciously sentimental strain in her. Her acute
mother did not imagine her "vulgarly in love" (as she called it) with
the aesthetic Claude; but she had heard him tell the girl that "pity from
her" was "more dear than that from another"; and it was precisely this
pity which Lady Caroline now dreaded as fervently as she would have
welcomed it the day before. Her stupid husband had outwitted her in the
matter of Claude's departure. Lady Caroline was hardly at the top of the
stairs before she had made up the masterly mind which she considered at
least a match for her stupid husband's. He would not allow her to get
rid of Claude? Very well; nothing simpler. She would get rid of Olivia
instead.
The means suggested itself almost as quickly as the end.
Lady Caroline took a little walk to the post-office, and said she had
been on the pier. In a couple of hours a telegram arrived from Mrs.
Freke, begging Olivia to go to her at once. Lady Caroline was apparently
overwhelmed with surprise. But she despatched her ewe lamb by the next
train.
"Olivia, I won both rounds!" called out the Home Secretary, when he
strutted in towards evening, pink and beaming. Claude also looked the
better and the brighter for his day; but Lady Caroline took the
brightness out of him in an instant; and the Home Secretary beamed no
more that night.
"It is no use your calling Olivia," said her Ladyship calmly; "by this
time she must be a hundred miles away. You needn't look so startled,
George. You know the state to which poor Francis reduces himself by the
end of Lent, and you know that dear Mary's baby is not thriving as it
ought. I shouldn't wonder if he makes _it_ fast, too! At all events
Mary telegraphed for Olivia this morning, and I let her go. Now it's no
use being angry with any of us! With a young baby and a half-starved
husband it was a very natural request. There's the telegram on the
mantelpiece for you to see for yourself what she says."