The Duke Decides Part 17

Two hours later Azimoolah Khan, lying flattened out like a huge lizard on the parapet of the terrace, and thanking Allah that the rain had ceased, suddenly p.r.i.c.ked up his ears and thanked Allah again that the time for relieving his cramped limbs had come. At first his ears were the only part of his body affected by the slight sound he had heard, but some thirty seconds later, keeping the rest of him motionless, he goggled his eyes round to one of the ground-floor windows and saw-seeing in the dark was one of his accomplishments-a female figure turn from it and flit along the terrace towards the steps leading down to the park.

Waiting till the figure had gained the lower level, he slid from the parapet and gave noiseless chase.

The woman in front spared no precaution to guard against pursuit. She stopped many times and listened; she doubled on her tracks; and as soon as she reached the woodland belt she proved to be an expert in the art of taking cover. But she had to do with probably the most wily exponent of woodcraft at that moment in England, and her pursuer was never at fault. Dark as the night was, Azimoolah never lost her for an instant.

With sinuous movements that never caused a twig to crack, the lithe Pathan was always creeping, gliding, dodging close behind, till he stopped within ten paces of the park wall, and from the shelter of an oak trunk watched his quarry nimbly climb the obstacle. No sooner had she disappeared than he swung himself to the top of the wall, and peered over just as a horse broke into a trot on the other side.

Piercing the gloom, his keen sight distinguished the shape of a fast-receding rubber-tired dog-cart, in which three figures were seated; and, having fulfilled his mission, he dropped back to the ground. In a few minutes he was on the terrace again, hissing like a cobra outside the smoking-room. General Sadgrove opened the French cas.e.m.e.nt.

"The daughter of Sheitan came from the fifth window, and has gone away, even as the sahib predicted, in the cart with two men," Azimoolah reported.

"Which road did they take?"

"To the left-the Senalban road, sahib."

"St. Albans, eh? Then she's going to catch the 3.15 up night mail,"

muttered the General. "Well, good-night, old _jungle-wallah_. You've got your orders," he added, closing and bolting the window.

The next morning there were two absentees from the breakfast-table-General Sadgrove, who by overnight arrangement had breakfasted by himself, so as to be driven to Tarrant Road in time for the nine o'clock train to town, and Mrs. Talmage Eglinton, who was confined to her bed by a bad headache. The news of the indisposition was imparted to Sybil by the maid Rosa at her mistress's door, and was accompanied by a regretful but firm refusal of admission to the patient.

"Madame is so _desolee_ not to receive you, ma'amselle, but she 'ave ze malady too strr-rong for speak even with her dearest friend," was the ultimatum which sent Miss Hanbury from the door with a doleful face, which somehow took quite a different expression when she had turned the corner.

For some mysterious reason her aloofness from her lover vanished that morning, and she and Forsyth were on the best of terms. They spent two hours together wandering in the park, where in one of the more remote glades Azimoolah flitted up to them from the bushes, and, regarding Sybil with awe-struck veneration, made a deep salaam and was gone. The Duke, who had given his word of honor to the General not to go beyond the park gates, pa.s.sed the time partly with his bailiff and partly strolling with Leonie in the gardens and gla.s.s-houses. The friends.h.i.+p between Beaumanoir and his beautiful guest, so promisingly begun on board the _St. Paul_, seemed to have lost ground. Though he was much in her society, he avoided intimate topics, and often puzzled her with a hastily averted look of wistful tenderness in strange contrast to his a.s.siduous but commonplace hospitality.

Half an hour before luncheon General Sadgrove, returning on foot from the station and looking five years older for his run up to London, met the two young couples, who had now joined forces, as they were entering the mansion. Forsyth gave his uncle an anxious glance of inquiry, but the old man pa.s.sed him by unheeding, and addressed the Duke in a tone of icy formality.

"I shall be obliged if your Grace will give me five minutes in the library on a very urgent matter," he said, adding, with significant emphasis, "_I have been with Mr. Ziegler this morning._"

Beaumanoir, gone all pale and tremulous, made a palpable effort at self-control as he replied:

"Come into the library by all means, General. But I am afraid you will find me quite as reticent as I am sure Ziegler was."

The interview lasted till long after the luncheon gong had sounded, and when at length the Duke and the General entered the dining-room two pairs of watchful eyes observed that their relative att.i.tudes had been reversed. The General's usually impa.s.sive face was working so painfully that Mrs. Sadgrove half rose from her chair at sight of her husband, checking herself with difficulty; while the Duke bore himself almost jauntily, and began chaffing Sybil about her devotion to Mrs. Talmage Eglinton, who was still, by latest bulletin from Rosa, "suffering ze grand torments" and unable to leave her room.

The afternoon pa.s.sed without external signs that the house-party was living on the verge of an active volcano. But as it was growing dusk Forsyth, at the risk of being late for dinner, took a solitary walk in the direction of a certain stile, by which the Prior's Tarrant pastures were approached by a short cut across fields from Tarrant Road railway station. He arrived at the stile in the nick of time to give a helping hand to Mrs. Talmage Eglinton, who had just reached the spot from the opposite direction. The hour was the one when the guests at the house might be expected to be dressing for dinner, and it also tallied with the arrival of a London train at the station; but neither alluded to these incidentals of such an obviously chance meeting.

"I trust that your headache is better," said Forsyth, politely.

But the headache, he was a.s.sured, was rather worse than better. The sufferer averred that she had slipped out an hour before, to go for a quiet walk in the meadows in the hope of obtaining relief; but the remedy had been of no avail, and all that remained was to go back to bed.

"Won't you walk back with me?" Mrs. Talmage Eglinton added, devouring the young Scotsman's healthy, good-looking face with eyes of invitation.

"I don't seem ever to get you alone nowadays."

"I am very sorry, but I have to go a little further," replied Forsyth, and, raising his hat, he pa.s.sed on. But it was a very little way further that he had to go, for at the end of the first meadow he turned and followed in the lady's wake back to the mansion, catching, as he did so, a glimpse of Azimoolah moving stealthily in the bushes at the side of the path.

That night the post-bag which one of the Prior's Tarrant grooms conveyed to the office in the village contained a letter addressed to "Clinton Ziegler, Esqre.," at the Hotel Cecil, couched thus:

"_The gentleman interviewed in the Bowery, New York, by Mr.

Jevons on your behalf has reconsidered the matter, and is now prepared to carry out his commitment. He is so shaken by recent occurrences that he does not feel up to coming himself till he has received a.s.surances, but his secretary will call at the hotel on Monday for instructions, which please hand to the secretary in writing and carefully sealed._"

CHAPTER XVI-_A Delicate Mission_

It was on Sunday evening that Mrs. Talmage Eglinton, after a pious pilgrimage to the village church in company with her a.s.siduous friend Sybil Hanbury, sought the Duke and asked if she might have a carriage to take her to the station for the up-train on the following morning. She would return in the evening, she said, but imperative business with her milliner and tailor demanded her presence in London for a few hours.

Beaumanoir, in courteously promising that her request should be attended to, regarded her with a wan smile. "You will have a companion-that is, if you do not mind Mr. Forsyth sharing the station brougham with you,"

he added. "Alec has to go to London to-morrow on my business-leases at the solicitors', isn't it?"

He turned for confirmation to Forsyth, who, with General Sadgrove, had been strolling with him on the terrace.

"Yes, leases at the solicitors'," replied the private secretary, flus.h.i.+ng slightly. The General looked indifferent.

"Really?" said the lady. "There must be a lot of that sort of thing to see to just now, I suppose. Of course, I shall be delighted to have Mr.

Forsyth's escort, provided he drops me at Bond Street. I cannot have a critical male person following me across my tailor's sacred threshold."

She shook a gay finger at the party and disappeared into one of the French windows-a vision of dainty _chiffons_ and rustling silks.

"She's gone to put her prayer-book away," laughed Forsyth, in the nervous manner of one wis.h.i.+ng to cover an awkward situation.

"She needs one," muttered the General under his mustache, shooting a furtive glance at his nephew.

Beaumanoir said nothing, and the three paced on, hardly speaking, till it was time to dress for dinner. Since the General's return from town on the day of Mrs. Talmage Eglinton's headache, not exactly a coolness, but a constraint, had sprung up between them. A suspicion of cross-purposes was in the air, which kept them silent when all together, but communicative enough when any two of them were alone in solitary places.

It was so now, for the General waited till the Duke had left them to go up to his dressing-room before he remarked in a tone of grim humor:

"I told you that you would have her for a traveling companion."

"I don't antic.i.p.ate much pleasure from the journey," Forsyth replied, gloomily, and reddening under the searching gaze with which his uncle raked him.

But with the exception of the short drive to the station, during which Mrs. Talmage Eglinton was unusually preoccupied, he was spared the uncongenial _tete-a-tete_ he had expected. When the train came in the fair American said chaffingly that she knew he was dying to smoke-that, anyhow, she was in a mood for meditation herself, and intended to indulge it in the seclusion of a "ladies' compartment." Forsyth responded with the barest protest demanded by courtesy, and went away to a smoking-carriage, much relieved.

He saw her again at St. Pancras; indeed, he contrived to be near enough to overhear the direction to an address in Bond Street which she gave to her cabman, but he noticed the not unexpected fact that here in London she had no desire for his society. She had hurried into the vehicle without looking round for him, and was driven away at a pace that betokened special instructions to the driver.

Forsyth took another cab and bade his man keep the first cab in sight.

Before long he perceived that the lady was in truth going to Bond Street, and presently he had the satisfaction of seeing her discharge her cab and skip lightly into the shop of a fas.h.i.+onable _modiste_ in that thoroughfare. His complacence was a little marred by uncertainty whether she had observed him or not, but from the quick turn of her head as she crossed the pavement he was rather inclined to think that she had.

"It doesn't matter, really," he reflected. "She knows that we suspect her complicity, or she wouldn't have tried to blind her trail to the hotel by driving here first. Strange, though, that, suspecting that, she should have taken so much trouble."

He ordered his driver to take him to the Hotel Cecil, and at the same time to keep a lookout to see whether they in turn were being followed by the lady whom they had just run to ground. But when he was set down at the main entrance of the great twelve-storied palace he received the a.s.surance that nothing of the sort had occurred.

"Not so keen after you, sir, as you was after her," e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the smart cabman as he whipped up and wheeled round, dissatisfied, after the manner of his kind, with the extra half-crown he had received for his "shadowing job."

Forsyth shuddered. "_Keen_, by George!" he murmured ruefully. "If only my devotion to poor old Charley could have led me into paths untrodden by Mrs. Talmage Eglinton my task would have been a lighter one."

He went into the bureau and inquired if Mr. Clinton Ziegler was in, receiving the stereotyped reply that Mr. Ziegler was _always_ in, being an invalid. Whereupon he sent up his card, first penciling thereon the words, "Private Secretary to the Duke of Beaumanoir."

The bell-boy who took up the card reappeared almost immediately, flying down the grand staircase three steps at a time.