The Admirable Tinker Part 19

Dorothy was even more surprised by the sight of Sir Tancred. She had given the matter little thought, but had supposed that she would find Tinker's father a sedate man of some fifty summers. When she found him a young man of thirty, and exceedingly handsome and distinguished at that, she was invaded by no slight doubt as to the wisdom of indulging the spirit of whim which had led her to take the post of Tinker's governess, without going a little more into the matter. This uneasiness made her at first somewhat constrained; but Sir Tancred and Lord Crosland contrived soon to put her at her ease, and presently she was taking her part in the talk without an effort.

When she went away with the children, Lord Crosland lighted a cigarette, and said thoughtfully, "Well, Tinker has made a find. She is a lady."

"I should be inclined to say gentlewoman," said Sir Tancred. "Lady is a word a trifle in disrepute; there are so many of them, and so various, don't you know."

"Gentlewoman be it," said Lord Crosland. "But he's a wonderful young beggar for getting hold of the right thing. What a beautiful creature she is!"

"She is beautiful," said Sir Tancred grudgingly.

"Woman-hater! Va!" said Lord Crosland.

Dorothy found herself admitted to a frank intimacy in this little circle into which whim had led her. She spent most of her time with the children. She gave Elsie two hours' lessons a day, and, since she had a knack of making them interesting, Tinker often enjoyed the benefit of her teaching. After lessons she shared most of their amus.e.m.e.nts, and learned to be a pirate, a brigand, an English sailor, a Boer, and every kind of captive and conspirator. Since she occupied some of Elsie's time, Tinker had once more leisure for mischief; and Dorothy rarely tried to restrain his fondness for pulling the legs of his fellow-creatures, for she found that he had the happiest knack of choosing such fellow-creatures as would be benefited, morally, by the operation. But she was a check upon his more reckless moods, and kept him from one or two outrageous pranks.

For his part, he found the responsibility of looking after her and Elsie not a little sobering; and he was quite alive to the fact that at Monte Carlo, that place of call of the adventurers of the world, one's womankind need a protecting male presence. Quietly and un.o.btrusively Sir Tancred seconded him in this matter; if Dorothy had the fancy to take the air in the gardens after dinner, she found that he or Lord Crosland, or both of them, deserted the tables till she went back to the hotel, and strolled with her and the children. She was growing very friendly with the two men, and beginning to take a far deeper interest in Sir Tancred than she would have cared to admit even to herself. His face of Lucifer, Son of the Morning, his perfect thoughtfulness, his unfailing gentle politeness, his melancholy and his very coldness, attracted her; and always watching him, she had now and again a glimpse of the possibilities of energy and pa.s.sion which underlay the mask of his languor. At times, too, her woman's intuition a.s.sured her that, for all his dislike, or rather distaste, of women, she attracted him.

Unfortunately, but naturally, Sir Tancred and Lord Crosland were not the only men who found her beautiful. Monsieur le Comte Sigismond de Puy-de-Dome, hero of many duels and more scandals, and darling of the Nationalist Press, also saw her beauty. With him to see was to act, and he never pa.s.sed her without a conquering twirl of his waxed moustache, and a staring leer which he fondly believed to be a glance teeming with pa.s.sion. Since even he, conscious as he was of his extraordinary fascination, could hardly mistake her look of annoyance for the glow of responsive pa.s.sion, he resolved on more masterly action. He kept a careful watch, and one afternoon followed her and Tinker and Elsie on one of their walks. They went briskly, and at the end of a mile he was maintaining a continuous, pa.s.sionate monologue in tones charged with heartfelt emotion on the subject of his tight but patent-leather boots.

A mile and a half on the way to Mentone they turned aside down a road into the hills. He followed them for a while over the loose stones and along the ruts of the roadway with considerable pain, and was on the very point of abandoning the pursuit when he came on Dorothy and Elsie sitting in a shady dell by the roadside, from which the wooded slopes of the hills rose steeply. Careless of his boots and of the fact that they had suffused his face with an unbecoming purple, he strode gallantly up to them, and set about making Dorothy's acquaintance. He began by talking, with an airy graciousness, of the charm of the spot in which he had found her, and of how greatly that charm was enhanced by her presence. But soon, seeing that she took not the slightest notice of him, that her eyes, to all seeming, looked through him at the trees on the further side of the dell, he lost his gracious air, and began to halt and stumble in his speech. Then he lost his head and plunged into a detailed account of the pa.s.sion with which Dorothy's beauty had inflamed his heart, wearing the while his finest air of a conqueror dictating terms.

Dorothy surveyed him with a contemptuous wonder, over which her sense of the ludicrous was slowly gaining the mastery; Elsie stared at him.

At last he ended the impa.s.sioned description of his emotions with a yet more impa.s.sioned appeal to Dorothy to fly with him to a far-off sh.o.r.e forever s.h.i.+ning with the golden light of love; and Dorothy laughed a gentle laugh of pure amus.e.m.e.nt.

Count Sigismond flushed purpler; his eyes stood well out of his head; he drew himself up with a superb air--a little spoiled by a wince as his left boot deftly reminded him that he was wearing it, and cried, "Ha! You laugh! You laugh at Sigismond de Puy-de-Dome! Mon Dieu!

You shall learn!" And with a sudden spring he grabbed at her.

She jerked aside, sprang up, and away from him. But he was between her and the exit from the dell; he crouched with the impressive deliberation of a villain in a melodrama for another spring, and Elsie screamed, "Tinker! Tinker!"

Count Sigismond heard a rustling in the bushes above, and looked up to see them parted by an angel child, in white ducks, bearing a bunch of lilies in his hand, who gazed at him with a serious, almost pained face, and leapt lightly down.

With a "Pah! Imbecile!" addressed to himself for delaying, the Count sprang towards Dorothy, was conscious of a swift white streak, and the head of the angel child, impelled by wiry muscles and a weight of seventy-six pounds, smote as a battering ram upon the first and second b.u.t.tons of his waistcoat. He doubled up and sat down hard in one movement; then turned on his side, and gasped and gasped.

[Ill.u.s.tration: As a battering ram upon the first and second b.u.t.tons of his waistcoat.]

"Come along!" cried Tinker in a most imperative tone. "A row is a horrid nuisance when there are women in it!" And he caught his charges, either by an arm, and bustled them out of the dell and down the road.

Dorothy laughed as she ran; never before had she seen vaunting arrogance brought low in so sudden and signal a fas.h.i.+on. At last she stopped, dabbed away the tears of mirth, and said, "Oh, Tinker, I am so much obliged to you! It's all very well to laugh now; but it might have been horrid!"

"It was the simplest thing in the world," said Tinker. Then, rubbing his head ruefully, he added, "I wish those foreigners would not wear gold b.u.t.tons on their white waistcoats in the daytime. They have no more notion of how to dress than a cat--the men haven't."

They hurried along, looking back now and again to see if they were followed. They were not, for Count Sigismond was now sitting up in the shady dell, staring round it with fishy eyes, and wondering dully whether he owed his disaster entirely to an angel child, or whether Mont Pelee had affected the neighbourhood. He gasped still.

As they drew near the town, Tinker grew thoughtful. Suddenly he stopped, and said seriously, "Now, look here, both of you, we mustn't let my father know about this, or he'll certainly thrash that bounding Frenchman; and that wouldn't be good enough, don't you know."

"It would be very good for him," said Dorothy with some vindictiveness.

"Yes, but not for my father," said Tinker very earnestly, indeed. "For all that he looks like a swollen frog, Le Comte de Puy-de-Dome is awfully dangerous with the pistol. He's hurt two men badly in duels already."

"Has he?" said Dorothy quickly, and the colour faded in her cheeks.

"Then we must, indeed, say nothing about it."

"Swear," said Tinker, raising his right hand.

"We swear," said Dorothy and Elsie in one voice, raising their right hands. It was a formality which had to be gone through many times when they played at being conspirators; their words and action were mechanical.

"That's all right," said Tinker with a sigh of relief.

Count Sigismond returned to his hotel in a very hot fury. His outraged pride clamoured for vengeance, and he sought for someone on whom to be revenged. He was surprised at the end of two days to hear nothing of his discomfiture; but his fury lost nothing by growing cool, and on the third night he picked a quarrel with Sir Tancred.

Next morning Sir Tancred asked Dorothy to take the children to Nice for a few days, since he had heard that there was some fever at one of the smaller hotels. He watched over their departure himself, and Tinker was aware of an indefinable something in his manner which puzzled him.

It was, perhaps, that something which gave him a curious, unsettled feeling, as if they were going on a much longer journey. As they left the hotel, Lord Crosland came up from the Condamine carrying a square case under his arm; it did not escape Tinker's observant eye; but in the bustle of their removal he gave it but scant attention. In the evening Dorothy noticed that he was restless and absent-minded, and asked him what was the matter.

"I don't know," he said; "I have a funny feeling as though something was going to happen, and I can't think of anything. It's just as if I'd missed something I ought to have noticed. It always makes me uncomfortable. Yet I can't think what it can be."

She made many suggestions, but to no purpose, and he went to bed dissatisfied. He awoke once or twice in the night--a very rare thing with him; possibly, so close was their kins.h.i.+p, his father's disturbed spirit in some obscure and mysterious fas.h.i.+on was striving to warn him, or prepare him for calamitous tidings. In the early morning he slept soundly, and awoke rather later than was his wont; and, even as he awoke, the square case which Lord Crosland had carried sprang into his mind, and he knew it to be a case of pistols. In a flash everything was clear to him; his father was going to fight Count Sigismond, and had sent him to Nice to be out of the way.

He sprang out of bed, and dashed for his watch; it was two minutes past seven. They would fight at eight; he had nearly an hour. In three minutes he was dressed, and racing down the stairs. He met Dorothy coming up.

"What's the matter?" she cried at the sight of his white face.

"My father--he's fighting Le Comte de Puy-de-Dome, and he's got us out of the way!"

He did not see her turn pale, and clutch the banisters; he was racing out of the hotel. He ran to the coach-house, wheeled his bicycle into the courtyard, mounted, and rode down the street. He went at a moderate pace through the town, but once on the Corniche road, he drove the machine as hard as he could pedal.

He was well on his way before his mind cleared enough for him to think what he was doing; and then his heart sank; he could do nothing. He could not interrupt a duel; that was the last enormity. And if he did interrupt it, it would be but for a few minutes; it would take place all the same. As the sense of his helplessness filled him, two or three great tears forced themselves out of his eyes. He dashed them away with a most unangelic savageness; then, conscious only of a devouring desire to be near his father in his perilous hour, he drove on the machine as hard as he could.

The Corniche is a good road, but all up hill and down dale; and he knew how much more time he lost by jumping off and running his bicycle up a hill than he made by letting it rip down the descent. As he drew near Monaco a kind of hopelessness settled on him. He almost wished, since he could not stop it, that he might find the duel over. Now and again a dry sob burst from his overloaded bosom.

It was ten minutes to eight when he came up the slope from the Condamine. His legs were leaden, but they drove on the machine. At last he came to the path which leads to the half glade, half rocky amphitheatre, in which the gentry of the princ.i.p.ality, and of the rest of the world who chance to be visiting it, settle their affairs of honour, slipped off his machine, and ran down it as fast as his stiff legs would carry him. A few yards from the end of it he turned aside into the bushes, came to the edge of the glade, saw his father and Count Sigismond facing one another some forty yards away; saw a white handkerchief raised in Lord Crosland's hand, and in spite of himself, his pent-up emotion burst from him in one wild eldritch yell.

It still rang on the quivering air when the handkerchief fluttered to the ground, and the pistols flashed together.

Now to those who enjoy an intimacy with Tinker, an eldritch yell is neither here nor there. Piercing as this one was, it barely reached Sir Tancred's consciousness; but it smote sharply on Count Sigismond's tense nerves, and deflected the barrel of his pistol just so much as sent the bullet zip past Sir Tancred's ear, as he received Sir Tancred's bullet in his elbow, and started to traverse the glade in a series of violent but ungainly leaps, uttering squeal on squeal.

Tinker turned and bolted, sobbing, gasping, and choking in the revulsion from his hopeless dread. He seized his bicycle, ran it along the road some fifty yards, turned in among the bushes, flung himself down, and sobbed and cried.

There was confusion on the scene of the duel. Count Sigismond's seconds had to chase him, catch him, and hold him while the doctor dressed his wound. Then they fell to a discussion as to whether the eldritch yell had been uttered by the Count or by someone in the wood round the glade; it had fallen upon very ragged nerves, and for the lives of them they could not be sure. Lord Crosland threw no light at all upon the matter, though he did his best to help their dispute grow acrimonious. Sir Tancred preserved the discreet silence of a princ.i.p.al in a duel; the Count Sigismond only moaned.

At last they turned their attention to him, and carried him to the top of the path. Sir Tancred and Lord Crosland started for the town to send up a cab for him.

When they were out of hearing, Lord Crosland said, "Most likely, that yell saved your life, old chap."

"I should say that there wasn't a doubt about it; but, really, in the case of a sweep like Puy-de-Dome, I can't say that I mind a little irregularity. Besides, my conscience is quite clear. Heaven knows I did my best to keep Tinker in the dark and at a distance."

"It can't be done," said Lord Crosland with conviction.

Tinker heard their voices, and by a violent effort, which did him good, hushed his hysteric sobbing. After a while he heard the cab rattle up, and rattle away.

Twenty minutes later he mounted his machine, and, pa.s.sing through the back streets of Monte Carlo, rode slowly back to Nice. On his way back he washed his face at a spring, and when he mounted his machine again, he said to himself firmly, "I'm _not_ ashamed--not a bit."