A Poached Peerage Part 2

suggested Mr. Popkiss, with true trade waggishness, and becoming purple with enjoyment of his own joke.

Mr. Doutfire permitted himself no more than a faint smile. "Treasury won't see you out of pocket, Mr. Popkiss," he declared with importance, as one fully competent to answer for the liberality of that notoriously n.i.g.g.ardly office. Then, as having settled the point, he thrust his hand into his trouser pockets and strutted complacently to the window.

"I hope to make a neat job of it this time," he announced.

"Ah, you're a cute one, you are, Mr. D.," said Popkiss knowingly.

"Well," a.s.sented Doutfire, still looking out of the window and rattling the money in his pockets, "I flatter myself I have done a few pretty things in my time. Yes," he continued introspectively, "I've got a good bit of the fox in me--natural and acquired in the profession"--he turned suddenly on his heel, confronting Mr. Popkiss--"only in the way of business, mind you."

The sudden _volte face_ so startled the worthy host that all he could put forward by way of comment was the trite formula, "You'll have a gla.s.s of me, Mr. D.?"

Possibly Mr. Doutfire took the offer as a tribute to his professional sagacity; all the same, he declined it. "No, thank you. Must keep my head clear. Can't drink."

"What, not in the way of business?" chuckled Mr. Popkiss with another sub-apoplectic seizure. "One gla.s.s," he urged, perhaps wis.h.i.+ng, in the ticklish position of proprietor of licensed premises to stand well with the representatives of the law.

"Well, just a small one," Mr. Doutfire consented, in a tone which suggested that the blandishments of all the publicans in England should not persuade him to exceed his modic.u.m or his duty.

As they turned towards the bar, Mercy met them. "Father," she said breathlessly, "the carriage from the Towers has just driven into the yard. Colonel Hemyock is asking for you."

"Eh? All right," exclaimed Popkiss, turning down his cuffs in a flurry. "Here, Mercy,"--he ran back--"draw Mr. Doutfire a gla.s.s of anything he fancies." And so he bustled out, a quivering jelly of importance and servility, into the courtyard.

CHAPTER III

Colonel Hemyock, the temporary tenant of Staplewick Towers, was a somewhat blatant specimen of a retired military man with an unbounded sense of his personal dignity and importance, which sense he derived from an aristocratic wife. Never in this world was there anybody more starchily dignified than the gallant Colonel looked as he sat bolt upright in his phaeton; a tall, thin, thread-paper of a man, with his sharp aquiline nose, and brushed out white whiskers, whiskers of which not a hair was ever seen out of line. But that was all. For the rest he might have been a figure from Madame Tussaud's with a phonograph inside.

As behind the horseman is said to be invariably seated Black Care, so behind the gallant driver of that phaeton were sitting the Colonel's two-fold cares, his two daughters. People who affected to know everything--and such are occasionally met with in the country--a.s.serted that it was with a view to getting her daughters off that the scheming Lady Agatha Hemyock had insisted on the family's taking up its abode at the missing Lord Quorn's somewhat derelict place. And the policy had not been entirely without result.

But now with the discovery of the new peer the tenancy came to an end.

It was simply left for the Hemyocks to close it pleasantly, and, some critics said, designingly, by entertaining the new owner for a few days, introducing him to his property, such as it was, and the Misses Ethel and Dagmar Hemyock, such as they were, and then leaving him to his own devices, and the result of theirs.

"Ah--ah, Popkiss," Colonel Hemyock said in his high, thin voice, acknowledging the bustling innkeeper's salute with a limited flourish of his whip. "I just looked in to say that--ah--Lord Quorn" (he spoke the name with absurd emphasis, shaping his mouth into an O twice as he p.r.o.nounced it) "is expected to arrive here this afternoon."

So impressed was Mr. Popkiss by the stiff and immaculate Colonel's pomposity that all he could e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.e was, "Dear me, Colonel! Lord Quorn?"

"Yes," responded the Colonel freezingly, as he stared straight in front of him over his horses' ears; "his lords.h.i.+p has just arrived from Australia."

"I have heard something of it, Colonel," said Mr. Popkiss, regaining his composure; perhaps because his n.o.ble visitor suggested by his att.i.tude that he admitted him to no more human fellows.h.i.+p than the mounting block in the yard. "The late peer's cousin, is he not, Colonel? I trust you will not be giving up the Towers?" he added hypocritically, since the Hemyock establishment could hardly be said to bring two-and-sixpence per annum into the coffers of the _Quorn Arms Hotel_.

"I--ah, don't know," the buckram personage answered, still staring foolishly over his horses' heads. "Anyhow, his lords.h.i.+p will stay at the Towers for some time as my guest."

"Curious; in his own house, Colonel," fatuously remarked Mr. Popkiss, as feeling called to make some comment on the situation.

"It is my place as long as I pay for it," snapped the Colonel loftily.

"Certainly, Colonel; no doubt, Colonel; I beg pardon, Colonel," Popkiss protested abjectly.

A few heavy drops suddenly came pattering down on the gla.s.s roof of the yard.

"It is going to rain," Colonel Hemyock observed in a tone of irritated surprise at the outrage. "We shan't get over to Babbleton this afternoon." This to his daughters, who looked, in antic.i.p.ation of harm to their finery, more discontented, if possible, than before. "We had better put up till Quorn arrives. You can wait here and I will look in at the club."

There was a waiting-room adjoining the archway for the accommodation of the county people who put up their carriages at the _Quorn Arms_ while they shopped in the town. Shown in, with much obsequiousness, by Host Popkiss, the Misses Ethel and Dagmar Hemyock here proposed to spend a tedious and highly uninteresting half-hour. The prospect did not tend to lessen the grievance they entertained against the world in general and certain unappreciative persons of the male s.e.x in particular.

"I wonder," observed Ethel, taking up and throwing down again the current number of the _Bunbury Bulletin_, "if father finds Sharnbrook at the club, whether he will have the sense to let him know we are here."

"It strikes me ignorance is bliss in Sharnbrook's case," replied Dagmar cuttingly, as she stood at the window, peevishly regarding the rain.

"Oh, shut up, Dagmar," her sister returned, with a surprising lack of dignity in one so highly born. "If it clears up we might take him over to Babbleton with us."

"If he'll come," said Dagmar sarcastically.

"He must come," Ethel declared emphatically.

"He has fought shy of us since he proposed to you," Dagmar remarked maliciously.

"And was accepted," put in Ethel decisively.

"Trust you," sneered her sister. "He has the bad taste to put down the proposal to the champagne. Mrs. Wyrley-Byrde told mother so."

"All right," snapped Ethel. "Not even father's champagne ever made any man propose to you."

"A man," retorted Dagmar pointedly, "requires to be in his sober senses to appreciate me. And if he proposed under the influence of Heidsieck, I should not accept him."

"Oh, wouldn't you?" returned Ethel with somewhat over-emphasized incredulity. "Anyhow, I am not going to let John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook slip through my fingers."

"Trust you," Dagmar laughed scornfully. "You'll hold him as tight as he was when he proposed to you."

"As he says he was," Ethel corrected.

"As he must have been," Dagmar maintained unfeelingly. "After all,"

the amiable young lady continued, with a yawn, "who is John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook that he should be exempt from matrimony? Better men than he have submitted to it. Julius Caesar was married--and----"

"And Alexander the Great," Ethel supplied as her sister paused for another notable victim of the marriage tie.

"Yes, I think he was," pursued Dagmar indifferently.

"If he wasn't, he----" she yawned again. "And Maryborough, and Edward the Black Prince were married men."

"So was Henry the Eighth," observed Ethel sententiously.

"Certainly. And Napoleon, and pretty well everybody worth mentioning, and heaps not worth it. And who, pray, is John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook that he should cry off and plead Mumm? n.o.body!"

"He has four thousand a year," Ethel remarked in mitigation of her recalcitrant suitor's total extinction.

"And a pretty taste in fox terriers," supplemented Dagmar, with an air of making every possible point in the unhappy Sharnbrook's favour. "If he jilts you----"

"Impossible," Ethel cried heroically.