CHAPTER IV
THE DUCAL POINT OF VIEW
THE Daily Comet came out next day with its threatened sensational blazon: the world of London and beyond greedily assimilated the startling tale, and their Graces the Duke and Duchess of Lancashire began to have an exceedingly unpleasant time of it. The Duke especially; since he had the Duchess, as well as the Press and the rest of the world, to encounter. He had done nothing wrong (with the exception of that bribe to the late Dr. Blaydon) or even foolish, he told himself, for his little arrangement with the doctor had been highly expedient; yet the affair had, by the merest chance, taken this unfortunate turn, and he suddenly found his ducal neck and wrists in a moral pillory, with a shower of rotten eggs unpleasantly imminent. Under the circumstances he judged it wise to confine his perambulations within the precincts of Vaux House; happily its grounds were extensive, and for the first time in his life as he dispiritedly paced them, he omitted to regret the waste they represented of colossally remunerative building sites. He simply dared not show his face in the streets—not even the streets that he owned—and as to going into one of his clubs, including the House of Lords, why, he would as soon have walked into the crater of Vesuvius. So he promenaded up and down and around the somewhat dingy gardens of which the sombre and blighted tone was in complete harmony with his feelings. He could hear passers-by talking on the other side of the high wall which secluded his august pleasure-ground from the vulgar world, and wondered if, nay, made sure, they were discussing him and his methods in a spirit of galling irreverence, if they took their tone from that of the more enterprising journals he had read. Yes; it was an uncomfortable position for any one, let alone an old-established Duke; he became sure certain people were watching him from such upper windows as commanded a view of the grounds, since the wall of even an exclusive Duke is subject to certain architectural limitations; and he went indoors. On his way he saw people looking curiously through the great iron gates at the house of mystery and crime. He fancied he heard a murmur as he crossed their sight, but that was probably a symptom of hypertrophied egoism. In his perturbation of mind he flung himself into a room which he had intended to avoid, and found himself alone with the Duchess.
There was something in her eye which forbade retreat.
“Well?” The monosyllable was a challenge: more, it was the first flick of a castigation.
The Duke merely gave a shrug which was the most non-committal answer that occurred to him.
“What is the latest?” the Duchess demanded, in a tone which was not to be trifled with.
“I have heard nothing, dear. I have not been out.”
“I just saw you come in.”
“From the garden.”
“Why don’t you go out?”
The Duke made a stand. “I don’t care to, while this wretched business is in big letters at every corner.”
“What is that to us? You should be above taking notice of these halfpenny rags. If you are afraid of walking on the pavements, have a brougham and drive down to the Carlton. You ought to hear what people are saying.”
“I am,” returned the Duke, with infinite sense, “the last person in town to hear what people are really saying.”
“You can go and tell them what you think about the whole disgusting business,” said the Duchess.
“I’m hanged if I do,” the Duke returned. “If they have any sense they can guess that.”
“Pray what do you expect then I am going to do?” the Duchess demanded.
The Duke intimated by a shrug that he had formed no definite anticipations as to his consort’s line of conduct.
“If you were not a fool,” she said, “you would know that people haven’t any sense. They just accept any ideas that may be given them.”
“Well, I’m not going to run about town giving people ideas,” the Duke declared sullenly.
“You know best how far you are justified in coming to that decision,” the Duchess returned, with a world of meaning behind the mere inoffensive words. “Then you mean to let these abominable papers have it all their own way?”
“I don’t care.”
“But you ought to care.” Her Grace’s temper was rising. “You have no business to be a Duke. You are a disgrace to your order. You’ll get a wigging, my dear boy, when the King hears of it. Don’t expect me to come to the rescue, that’s all. If you don’t face it out, I shall have to leave town in the height of the season, and I won’t leave town, so there!”
“Leave town, Isabel? What in the name of common sense have we done that we should run away?” The Duke was getting exasperated.
“We?” screamed the Duchess. “What have you done? To take trouble and spend money in hushing a thing up, and then to allow it to come out, at a particularly awkward time, too, is the method of an imbecile.”
Like most stupid persons the Duke was sensitive on the subject of nous, and the Duchess knew it.
“Imbecile?” he echoed huskily. “I was clever enough for you to marry.”
“You were clever enough to marry me, if you like,” she returned, with a puff of scorn.
“Clever!” he repeated in turn, in as withering a voice as he could command. “The general opinion at the time, pretty freely expressed, was that I was a fool.”
“General opinion!” she returned with infinite contempt. “The opinion of a lot of women who were mad to be duchesses. What is your general opinion worth to-day in this tiresome affair? As worthless and wrong as usual. No, John, you did a good thing for yourself when you married me, and you know it.”
“I know it?”
“I have made you.”
This was too much. Here was the once Miss Isabel Grendon, a nobody with a pretty face and trim figure to whom he had, after much hesitation, played Cophetua, talking of having made a Duke of eight generations. “Made me!” he cried thickly, in his ducal indignation. “I had an idea that the Dukes of Lancashire were made, as you call it, some hundreds of years before your name appeared on the roll.”
“Made? Yes, I dare say; after a fashion. But you were not worth noticing, even when you had got your coronets on. Before I took you in hand you were nobodies.”
“Nobodies!” the Duke could only echo. In this rarified atmosphere of insult independent argument, and even utterance, were asphyxiated.
“Nobodies,” the Duchess maintained with exasperating insistence. “I’ve seen your mother waiting in Johnson and Maxtons to be served and none of the shop people would notice her. They knew well enough who she was, and that she had come in to spend half an hour in buying a few yards of sevenpence-halfpenny lace to furbish up an old gown which her own housekeeper wouldn’t have looked at except to sell to the dustman to dress his wife in for Hampstead Heath. J’ai changé tout cela.”
“Yes, you have,” assented the Duke, recovering his breath as his wife lost hers. “And if extravagance makes a man, you have made me.”
“One owes something to one’s position,” argued the lady.
“You owe a great deal, my dear, not to say everything,” retorted the Duke, in a happy flash.
“To be Duchess of Lancashire meant next to nothing before my day,” her Grace proceeded, ignoring the hit. “I saw the possibilities of the position.”
“No doubt,” agreed the Duke.
“And have raised it to its proper level in accordance with modern ideas. I found you thrown away in a dusthole, I have polished you up and brought you into the drawing-room.”
“Have you indeed? Very obliging of you,” was all the Duke could say.
“You think,” went on the Duchess, having got again out of the tanglewood into a straight run, “you think that a Duke can go about like an old-clothes man, and his Duchess like a laundress, and be respected. That shows what a fool you are, John. You imagine in your stupidity that people in our position can defy appearances and do just as we like. So we can; but the world very soon takes care to show us that if we like to drop out it won’t detain us. To-day the world thinks exactly as much of us as we show it we think of ourselves. It was all very well while the Feudal System lingered, and there was no moneyed mob to challenge us. In these days of shallow pretension and surface estimation a Duke in a bad hat is thought less of than a bookmaker in a good one; a dowdy Duchess cannot hold her own against a smart milliner. The world to-day does not bother itself to think who you are, and what your ancestors have been and done, in short what that bad hat really covers; it wants you to show unmistakably that you spend your money—or other peoples’—and add to the general amusement. Everything is theatrical nowadays, all glitter and show, and the crowd does not ask itself what the gorgeous scenery looks like from the back. It is as though people preferred a highly coloured landscape in the theatre, just canvas, distemper and limelight, to the real thing on one of our estates. Yes, John, you are a fool not to see what I’ve done for you and your House.”
The Duke accepted the long lecture, not because it convinced him or uprooted his belief in the infallibility of his family ways, but because he was given no chance of interrupting it. When it had come to an end, he said, not unnaturally, “I don’t quite see what all this has to do with the present business. What are we going to do?”
“I have told you,” insisted the Duchess. “Go down to the clubs and face it out.”
“I’m damned if I do,” said the Duke, exasperated to find his patience had gained him nothing.
“If you are going to be vulgar——” began the Duchess.
“I’m not going down to the clubs,” he maintained.
“You’ve got to go, John, and the sooner the better.”
“I tell you I won’t!”
“You prefer to skulk here?”
“If it hadn’t been for your unreasonable folly about that wretched footman——” he began.
“I’m not going to be seen with footmen that don’t match for you or anybody. You’ll be expecting me next to wear odd gloves or shoes or stockings.”
The Duke was relieved from trying for a reply to this unanswerable argument by a knock at the door.
“Mr. Playford is in the blue drawing-room, your Grace.”
The Duke glanced rather helplessly at his wife.
“Show Mr. Playford here,” she said to the man, with decision. “Now we shall hear something of what is being said in the world outside, which you haven’t the pluck to face. Aubrey Playford knows everything.”
Next moment the omniscient one was shaking hands with them, and wondering curiously what sort of a tête-á-tête he had interrupted. As the Duchess was so smiling and the Duke so obviously relieved, he concluded that he had broken up a row.
“Isn’t it too disgustingly provoking, this fuss about that tiresome affair!” the Duchess said, as soon as they had settled down. “These wretched cheap papers.”
“Oh, they must have a sensation,” Playford answered, politely sympathetic. “One comfort is that nobody believes half they read in them.”
No one could be better aware than Aubrey Playford of the falseness of that statement. No one knew better than he, a keen observer of his kind, that people are only too greedy to take in everything, without discount, that can be said or printed to their neighbour’s obloquy, or disadvantage, and more particularly when that neighbour happens to hold a high position. Under some conditions Playford would have been spiteful enough to say so, and indulge in a half-hour of moral vivisection; but that was not his cue nor his purpose to-day.
“It is altogether most provoking,” the Duchess declared. “What are they saying about it, Aubrey? I don’t mean the wretched papers, but at the clubs?”
Playford gave a shrug. “What do they ever say at the clubs beyond what some one tells them to say?” he replied, with a cynical contempt that, coming to him so easily, seemed a characteristic. “I haven’t heard much. Piersfield was full of it, as he would be, but more in the way of collecting than distributing, and, of course, little Roddy Arden was making the most of a new sensation. By the way, it was pretty well known yesterday among what I call the professionals, Dormer Greetland and his school, and they naturally made the most of their twenty-four hours’ start with the news.”
The Duke groaned. “All through a wretched footman. It is terrible to think how mean an instrument it takes to set the world agog and to bring us into unpleasant notoriety.”
“Oh, it is nothing,” said his visitor in a tone between sympathy and indifference. “I certainly should not worry about it if I were you. It won’t be even a nine days’ wonder. The Rullington case comes on next Monday; there will be some pretty disclosures for the mob in that, and I hear that Lady Rullington has her trunks ready packed, and is prepared to skip.”
The Duchess raised her eyebrows. “As bad as that? It is a pity that a presumably sensible woman as Maud Rullington was at one time should have such a vague idea as to where to draw the line.”
The Duke breathed heavily through his set teeth. “These liftings of the curtain for the benefit of the mob are very damaging and regrettable.”
“They are,” Playford agreed. “And the man in the street is getting every day more eager for a peep.”
“The man in the street,” said the Duke, the phrase bringing to his mind an unpleasant reminiscence, “has been waiting outside my gates all day for a peep. I don’t know what we are coming to when our very privacy is invaded.”
“It is a sign of these times of undesirable publicity,” Playford answered, almost with a yawn. He had not come there to listen to his Grace’s platitudinous complaints, and was awaiting his opportunity for something else. As for the Lancashires, why, who can bring himself to sympathize with a Duke and Duchess in their social embarrassments? Are they not considered to stand too high on their pedestals for the sympathy of the crowd below to reach them, and to deserve any little exposure which their exalted position invites? At any rate, they were just now but the king and queen of Aubrey Playford’s chess-board.
“I don’t think you need fear any pointing of scandal’s finger at you,” he observed, with a confidence-imparting smile. “The question which will be agitating everybody’s mind, when once they have arrived at the real bearings of the business, will be, who was the lady?”
“Ah, yes,” exclaimed the Duke, somewhat relieved.
“But, Aubrey,” the Duchess protested, “we are as much in the dark there as anybody else.”
Playford’s dark eyes looked hungrily shrewd. “You have no idea, Duchess?” he asked, with a touch of incredulity.
“Not the remotest,” she replied.
“I wish we had,” chimed in the Duke, and then fell to wondering vaguely exactly what he would do with the information if he had it.
The Duchess had her eyes fixed on her visitor’s shrewd face. “You know, Aubrey?” she demanded, with a look of conviction.
Playford’s astute smile broadened as he shook his head. “Not I, Duchess. But I might perhaps give a guess for what it is worth.”
“Let’s have it,” cried the Duke, all attention.
Playford looked inscrutable. “It is dangerous work guessing,” he returned, “unless one has something to go upon. I was only suggesting it that the hounds of scandal may prefer to follow that fox to this if there should be a cross-scent.”
“Quite so,” the Duke agreed, none the less confidently that the idea had never occurred to him.
The Duchess was reflecting. “We have not much to go upon,” she said slowly. “It was so long ago.”
“You have,” suggested Playford, “the ornament, the diamond hair-pin, was it not, that the man found?”
“Ah, yes.” She turned to him with alert scrutiny.
“That won’t be claimed,” said the Duke, with a short laugh.
“Claimed! How stupid you are, John!” Her impatient exclamation scarcely took her eyes from Playford’s face.
“It will probably be claimed by Scotland Yard,” remarked that gentleman with easy premonition. “I am surprised they have not been here yet. I see, though, they say they have no knowledge of the affair. So like them. Perhaps they expected to be sent for. May I see the thing before it goes?”
“The ornament?” The Duke glanced at his wife in some hesitation. She had taken the tiresome thing and locked it up, being in no mood to pander to an already more than objectionable curiosity. He waited to see how she would refuse, but she rose, and saying, “I will get it,” left the room.
“The Duchess is not going to show it to everybody,” said the Duke, with a, possibly manneristic, touch of patronage.
“No, I shouldn’t,” Playford commented, with a shrewd smile. He thought he knew why he was made the exception, and was not going to take is as a favour.
His manner, with men at least, Dukes included, was rather more brusque than his present host liked, so no word further was spoken till the Duchess returned.
“Here it is,” she said, and unwrapped the tissue paper from the unhappy piece of evidence. There it was. A miniature sword, the blade tarnished gold, the hilt set with diamonds, and the point broken off.
Playford watched its uncovering eagerly. As it was disclosed he put out his hand to take it, and, as he did so, glanced up in the Duchess’s face. He did not mean to tell her anything, yet she saw in his eyes something that said a good deal. Next moment he had turned away to the light and was scrutinizing the little sword closely, eagerly, as a man will who wants to carry in his mind the exact image of an object he may not see again.
The Duke and Duchess stood behind him in expectant silence. But they both looked rather blank when he at length turned to them and affected to be studying a stain of rust on the blade.
“That looks as though it might have been blood,” he said, tapping it with his finger nail.
“Hah: do you think so?” returned the Duke in a non-committal tone.
“Shouldn’t be surprised,” Playford replied in an abominably disappointing way. “But I’m not an analyst.”
“Do you recognize the sword, Aubrey?” asked the Duchess, with manifestly restrained impatience.
Playford looked at her with a fine assumption of surprise. “No. Why? Ought I to?” he asked. “Do you know the owner?”
“I thought you did,” she returned pointedly.
He handed it back with a laugh. “Not I. It is not an uncommon device. I fancy even Scotland Yard will have some trouble in following up that clue. Thanks for letting me see it, Duchess. I’m afraid I have rather a taste for the morbid.”
She was evidently not going to get anything out of him that would pay for the trouble of fetching the corpus delicti, and so her Grace wrapped it up again in no very amiable mood. Her visitor’s reticence was the more exasperating in that her instinct told her he could, if he chose, give a shrewd guess at the owner. Except as a matter of feminine curiosity she did not care much to know what she was convinced Playford might have told her; but she did not consider it consistent with her dignity to be thus made use of, and she felt very much inclined to be rude to her departing guest. And it is given to Duchesses to be very rude when they like. Then a certain idea of the inexpediency of venting her spleen occurred to her just in time; perhaps she realized that Aubrey Playford was a dangerous man for even a Duchess to snub, and she let him go in peace.
But the Duke, who dared not go out, remained to her; and he went to bed that night feeling that the world may be made very unpleasant, even for a Duke.