Castle Craneycrow Part 18

"Does Lady Jane make an R that looks like a streak of lightning with all sorts of angles?"

"She makes a very fas.h.i.+onable--what do you mean by inspecting my mail? Are you establis.h.i.+ng a censors.h.i.+p?" d.i.c.key was guilty of an unheard of act--for him. He was blus.h.i.+ng.

"My boy, I did not know it was your property until after I had carefully deciphered every letter in the name. I agree with you; she writes a very fas.h.i.+onable alphabet. The envelope looked thick, to say the least. It must contain a huge postscript."

"Or a collection of all the notes I have written to her. I'll go back, if you don't mind, however. I'm curious to know who it's from."

d.i.c.key went back to read his voluminous letter, and Quentin seated himself on a bench in the park. A voice from behind brought him sharply from a long reverie.

"Mr. Quentin, last night, possibly in the heat of excitement, you inferred that I was in some way accountable for the controversy which led to the meeting between Prince Kapolski and your friend. I trust that I misunderstood you."

Quentin was on his feet and facing Prince Ravorelli before the remark was fairly begun, and he was thinking with greater rapidity than he had ever thought before. He was surprised to find Ugo, suave and polite as ever, deliberately, coolly rus.h.i.+ng affairs to a climax. His sudden decision to abandon the friendly spirit exhibited but half an hour before was as inexplicable as it was critical. What fresh inspiration had caused him to alter his position?

"We say many things when we are under stress of excitement," said Phil, sparring for time and his wits. Count Sallaconi was standing deferentially beside the prince. Both gentlemen had their hats in their hands, and the air was pregnant with chill formality.

"Can you recall my words, Prince Ravorelli?"

"You said that you would hold him to account if your friend--" began the count, but Quentin turned upon him coolly.

"My quarrel, if there is one, is with the prince, Count Sallaconi.

Will you kindly allow him to jog his own memory?"

"I do not like your tone, Mr. Quentin," said the count, his eyes flas.h.i.+ngly angrily. Phil's blood was up. He saw it was useless to temporize, and there was no necessity for disguising his true feelings. They had come to the point where all that had lain smothered and dormant was to be p.r.i.c.ked into activity; the mask was to be thrown down with the gauntlet.

"So much the better; you are not in doubt as to what I meant. Now, Prince Ravorelli, may I ask you to speak plainly?"

"Your remark of last night was one that I believe I would be justified in resenting," said the prince, flicking the ash from his cigarette, but not taking his burning eyes from Quentin's face.

There was not a tinge of cowardice in his eyes.

"It is your privilege, sir, and I meant precisely what I said."

"Then I have to demand of you an apology and a satisfctory explanation."

"'I presume it would be travesty on politeness if I were to ask you to be seated, so we may stand up to each other and talk it over. In the first place, I have no apology to make. In the second place, I cannot give an explanation that would be satisfactory to you. Last night I said I would hold you to account if Mr. Savage was hurt. He was not hurt, so I will not carry out my threat, if you choose to call it such."

"You enlarge the insult, Mr. Quentin," said Ugo, with a deadly tone in his voice.

"You may as well know, Prince Ravorelli, that I have long been acquainted with the fact that you bear me no good will. Frankly, you regard me as a man dangerous to your most cherished aspirations, and you know that I heard Giovanni Pavesi sing in days gone by. You have not been manly enough to meet me fairly, up to this instant. I am perfectly well aware that Prince Kapolski was your guest last night for no other purpose than to bring about an affray in which I was to have been the victim of his prowess and your cleverness."

For a moment the two men glared at each other, immovably, unwaveringly. Prince Ugo's composure did not suffer the faintest relaxation under the direct charge of the American.

"My only reply to that a.s.sertion is that you lie," he said, slowly.

"This is a public place, Prince Ugo. I will not knock you down here."

"It is not necessary for me to give you my card. Count Sallaconi will arrange the details with any friend you may name. You shall give me satisfaction for the aspersion you have cast upon my honor."

He was turning away when Quentin stepped quickly in front of him.

"If you mean that you expect me to fight a duel with you, I must say you are to suffer disappointment. I do not believe in duelling, and I believe only in killing a man when there is no other alternative.

To deliberately set about to shoot another man down is not our method of settling an issue. We either murder in cold blood or we fight it out like men, not like stage heroes."

"I will add then, sir, that you are a coward."

"I have been brave enough to refrain from hiring men to do my fighting. We will fight, Prince Ravorelli, but we will not fight with weapons made by man. You call me a coward and I call you a scoundrel. We have hands and arms and with them we shall fight."

"Count Sallaconi is my second, I do not care to hear another word--"

"If Count Sallaconi comes to me with any ridiculous challenge from you, I'll knock him down and kick him across the street. My friend shot the face off of your poor tool last night. I do not care to repeat the tragedy. I shall not strike you here and now, because the act might mean my arrest and detention on no one knows what sort of a trumped-up charge. You need not bother me with any silly twaddle about swords and pistols I shall pay no attention to it. Ordinarily Americans do not delay actual combat. We usually fight it out on the spot and the best man wins. I will, however, give you the chance to deliberate over my proposition to settle our differences with our hands."

Ravorelli calmly heard him to the end. Then he turned and strode away, smiling derisively.

"You are the only American coward I have ever seen. I trust you appreciate, the distinction," he said, his white teeth showing in malicious ridicule. "Your friend, the hero of last night, should be proud of you."

Quentin watched them until they were lost in the crowd near the Palace, his brain full of many emotions. As he walked into the hotel his only thought was of Dorothy and the effect the quarrel would have on their friends.h.i.+p.

"Which will she choose?" he mused, after narrating to Savage the episode of the park. For the first time d.i.c.key noticed the pallor in his face, the despair in his eyes, the wistful lines about his lips.

"There's only one way to find out, old man," said he, and he did not succeed in disguising the hopelessness in his voice.

"Yes, I guess I'm up to the last trench. I'm right where I have to make the final stand, let the result be what it may," said the other, dejectedly.

"Don't give up, Phil. If you are to win, it will take more courage than you are showing now. A bold front will do more than anything else just at this stage. The result depends not entirely on how eager she is to become a princess, but how much she cares for the man who cannot make her a princess."

"There's the rub. Does she care enough for me?"

"Have you asked her how much she cares?"

"No."

"Then, don't ask. Merely go and tell her that you know how much she cares. Go this afternoon, old man. O, by the way, Lady Jane sends her love to you, and wants to know if you will come with me to Ostend to-morrow to meet her and Lady Saxondale."

XVI. THE COURAGE OF A COWARD

"Tell Mr. Quentin I cannot see him," was Miss Garrison's response when his card was sent to her late that afternoon. The man who waited nervously in the hall was stunned by this brief, summary dismissal. If he was hurt, bewildered by the stinging rebuff, his wounds would have been healed instantly had he seen the sender of that cruel message. She sat, weak, pale and distressed, before her escritoire, striving to put her mind and her heart to the note she was writing to him whose card, by strange coincidence, had just come up. An hour ago he was in her thoughts so differently and he was in her heart, how deeply she had not realized, until there came the crash which shattered the ideal. He was a coward!

Prince Ugo had been out of her presence not more than ten minutes, leaving her stunned, horrified, crushed by the story he laughingly told, when Quentin was announced. What she heard from Ugo overwhelmed her. She had wors.h.i.+ped, unknown to herself, the very thing in Philip Quentin that had been destroyed almost before her eyes--his manliness, his courage, his strength. Ugo deliberately told of the duel in his rooms, of Savage's heroism in taking up the battles of his timorous friend, of his own challenge in the morning, and of Quentin's abject, cringing refusal to fight. How deliciously he painted the portrait of the coward without exposing his true motive in doing so, can only be appreciated when it is said that Dorothy Garrison came to despise the object of his ridicule.

She forgot his encounter with the porch visitor a fortnight previous; she forgot that the wound inflicted on that occasion was scarcely healed; she forgot all but his disgraceful behavior in the presence of that company of n.o.bles and his cowardice when called to account by one brave man. And he an American, a man from her own land, from the side of the world on which, she had boasted, there lived none but the valorous. This man was the one to whom, a week ago, she had personally addressed an invitation to the wedding in St. Gudule--the envelope was doubtless in his pocket now, perhaps above his heart--and the writing of his name at that time had brought to her the deadly, sinking realization that he was more to her than she had thought.

"Tell Miss Garrison that, if it is at all possible, I must see her at once," said Quentin to the bearer of the message. He was cold with apprehension, hot with humiliation.

"Miss Garrison cannot see you," said the man, returning from his second visit to the room above. Even the servant spoke with a curtness that could not be mistaken. It meant dismissal, cold and decisive, with no explanation, no excuse.

He left the house with his ears burning, his nerves tingling, his brain whirling. What had caused this astonis.h.i.+ng change? Why had she turned against him so suddenly, so strangely? Prince Ugo! The truth flashed into his mind with startling force, dispelling all uncertainty, all doubt. Her lover had forstalled him, had requested or demanded his banishment and she had acquiesced, with a heartlessness that was beyond belief. He had been mistaken as to the extent of her regard for him; he had misjudged the progress of his wooing; he awoke to the truth that her heart was impregnable and that he had not so much as approached the citadel of her love.