The Snare Part 19

"And this unsympathetic Sir Terence did not explain them to you?"

laughed Samoval.

"Indeed, he did not."

"In fact, I could swear that he locked them away from you at once?" the Count continued on a jocular note.

"Not at once. But he certainly locked them away soon after, and whilst I was still there."

"In your place, then," said Samoval, ever on the same note of banter, "I should have been tempted to steal the key."

"Not so easily done," she a.s.sured him. "It never leaves his person. He wears it on a gold chain round his neck."

"What, always?"

"Always, I a.s.sure you."

"Too bad," protested Samoval. "Too bad, indeed. What, then, should you have done, Miss Armytage?"

It was difficult to imagine that he was drawing information from them, so bantering and frivolous was his manner; more difficult still to conceive that he had obtained any. Yet you will observe that he had been placed in possession of two facts: that the plans of the lines of Torres Vedras were kept locked up in Sir Terence's own room--in the strong-box, no doubt--and that Sir Terence always carried the key on a gold chain worn round his neck.

Miss Armytage laughed. "Whatever I might do, I should not be guilty of prying into matters that my husband kept hidden."

"Then you admit a husband's right to keep matters hidden from his wife?"

"Why not?"

"Madam," Samoval bowed to her, "your future husband is to be envied on yet another count."

And thus the conversation drifted, Samoval conceiving that he had obtained all the information of which Lady O'Moy was possessed, and satisfied that he had obtained all that for the moment he required.

How to proceed now was a more difficult matter, to be very seriously considered--how to obtain from Sir Terence the key in question, and reach the plans so essential to Marshal Ma.s.sena.

He was at table with them, as you know, when Sir Terence and Colonel Grant arrived. He and the colonel were presented to each other, and bowed with a gravity quite cordial on the part of Samoval, who was by far the more subtle dissembler of the two. Each knew the other perfectly for what he was; yet each was in complete ignorance of the extent of the other's knowledge of himself; and certainly neither betrayed anything by his manner.

At table the conversation was led naturally enough by Tremayne to Wellington's general order against duelling. This was inevitable when you consider that it was a topic of conversation that morning at every table to which British officers sat down. Tremayne spoke of the measure in terms of warm commendation, thereby provoking a sharp disagreement from Samoval. The deep and almost instinctive hostility between these two men, which had often been revealed in momentary flashes, was such that it must invariably lead them to take opposing sides in any matter admitting of contention.

"In my opinion it is a most arbitrary and degrading enactment," said Samoval. "I say so without hesitation, notwithstanding my profound admiration and respect for Lord Wellington and all his measures."

"Degrading?" echoed Grant, looking across at him. "In what can it be degrading, Count?"

"In that it reduces a gentleman to the level of the clod," was the prompt answer. "A gentleman must have his quarrels, however sweet his disposition, and a means must be afforded him of settling them."

"Ye can always thrash an impudent fellow," opined the adjutant.

"Thrash?" echoed Samoval. His sensitive lip curled in disdain. "To use your hands upon a man!" He shuddered in sheer disgust. "To one of my temperament it would be impossible, and men of my temperament are plentiful, I think."

"But if you were thrashed yourself?" Tremayne asked him, and the light in his grey eyes almost hinted at a dark desire to be himself the executioner.

Samoval's dark, handsome eyes considered the captain steadily. "To be thrashed myself?" he questioned. "My dear Captain, the idea of having hands laid upon me, soiling me, brutalising me, is so nauseating, so repugnant, that I a.s.sure you I should not hesitate to shoot the man who did it just as I should shoot any other wild beast that attacked me.

Indeed the two instances are exactly parallel, and my country's courts would uphold in such a case the justice of my conduct."

"Then you may thank G.o.d," said O'Moy, "that you are not under British jurisdiction."

"I do," snapped Samoval, to make an instant recovery: "at least so far as the matter is concerned." And he elaborated: "I a.s.sure you, sirs, it will be an evil day for the n.o.bility of any country when its Government enacts against the satisfaction that one gentleman has the right to demand from another who offends him."

"Isn't the conversation rather too bloodthirsty for a luncheon-table?"

wondered Lady O'Moy. And tactlessly she added, thinking with flattery to mollify Samoval and cool his obvious heat: "You are yourself such a famous swordsman, Count."

And then Tremayne's dislike of the man betrayed him into his deplorable phrase.

"At the present time Portugal is in urgent need of her famous swordsmen to go against the French and not to increase the disorders at home."

A silence complete and ominous followed the rash words, and Samoval, white to the lips, pondered the imperturbable captain with a baleful eye.

"I think," he said at last, speaking slowly and softly, and picking his words with care, "I think that is innuendo. I should be relieved, Captain Tremayne, to hear you say that it is not."

Tremayne was prompt to give him the a.s.surance. "No innuendo at all. A plain statement of fact."

"The innuendo I suggested lay in the application of the phrase. Do you make it personal to myself?"

"Of course not," said Sir Terence, cutting in and speaking sharply.

"What an a.s.sumption!"

"I am asking Captain Tremayne," the Count insisted, with grim firmness, notwithstanding his deferential smile to Sir Terence.

"I spoke quite generally, sir," Tremayne a.s.sured him, partly under the suasion of Sir Terence's interposition, partly out of consideration for the ladies, who were looking scared. "Of course, if you choose to take it to yourself, sir, that is a matter for your own discretion. I think,"

he added, also with a smile, "that the ladies find the topic tiresome."

"Perhaps we may have the pleasure of continuing it when they are no longer present."

"Oh, as you please," was the indifferent answer. "Carruthers, may I trouble you to pa.s.s the salt? Lady O'Callaghan was complaining the other night of the abuse of salt in Portuguese cookery. It is an abuse I have never yet detected."

"I can't conceive Lady O'Callaghan complaining of too much salt in anything, begad," quoth O'Moy, with a laugh. "If you had heard the story she told me about--"

"Terence, my dear!" his wife checked him, her fine brows raised, her stare frigid.

"Faith, we go from bad to worse," said Carruthers. "Will you try to improve the tone of the conversation, Miss Armytage? It stands in urgent need of it."

With a general laugh, breaking the ice of the restraint that was in danger of settling about the table, a semblance of ease was restored, and this was maintained until the end of the repast. At last the ladies rose, and, leaving the men at table, they sauntered off towards the terrace. But under the archway Sylvia checked her cousin.

"Una," she said gravely, "you had better call Captain Tremayne and take him away for the present."

Una's eyes opened wide. "Why?" she inquired.

Miss Armytage was almost impatient with her. "Didn't you see? Resentment is only slumbering between those men. It will break out again now that we have left them unless you can get Captain Tremayne away."

Una continued to look at her cousin, and then, her mind fastening ever upon the trivial to the exclusion of the important, her glance became arch. "For whom is your concern? For Count Samoval or Ned?" she inquired, and added with a laugh: "You needn't answer me. It is Ned you are afraid for."

"I am certainly not afraid for him," was the reply on a faint note of indignation. She had reddened slightly. "But I should not like to see Captain Tremayne or any other British officer embroiled in a duel.

You forget Lord Wellington's order which they were discussing, and the consequences of infringing it."