going to Shonts.”
The Lord Chancellor remained outwardly serene. He reflected for a moment. And then he fell into that snare which is more fatal to great lawyers and judges perhaps than to any other class of men, the snare of the crushing repartee. One had come into his head now—a beauty.
“Then we shall meet there,” he said in his suavest manner.
“Well—rather.”
“It would be a great pity,” said the Lord Chancellor with an effective blandness, using a kind of wry smile that he employed to make things humorous, “it would be a great pity, don’t you think, to anticipate that pleasure.”
And having smiled the retort well home with his head a little on one side, he resumed with large leisurely movements the reading of his Hibbert Journal.
“Got me there,” said the very fair young man belatedly, looking boiled to a turn, and after a period of restlessness settled down to an impatient perusal of Black and White.
“There’s a whole blessed week-end of course,” the young man remarked presently without looking up from his paper and apparently pursuing some obscure meditations. …
A vague uneasiness crept into the Lord Chancellor’s mind as he continued to appear to peruse. Out of what train of thought could such a remark arise? His weakness for crushing retort had a little betrayed him. …
It was, however, only when he found himself upon the platform of Chelsome, which as everyone knows is the station for Shonts, and discovered Mr. and Mrs. Rampound Pilby upon the platform, looking extraordinarily like a national monument and its custodian, that the Lord Chancellor, began to realize that he was in the grip of fate, and that the service he was doing his party by week-ending with the Laxtons was likely to be not simply joyless but disagreeable.
Well, anyhow, he had MacTaggart, and he could always work in his own room. …
§ 3
By the end of dinner the Lord Chancellor was almost at the end of his large but clumsy endurance; he kept his eyebrows furled only by the most strenuous relaxation of his muscles, and within he was a sea of silent blasphemies. All sorts of little things had accumulated. …
He exercised an unusual temperance with the port and old brandy his host pressed upon him, feeling that he dared not relax lest his rage had its way with him. The cigars were quite intelligent at any rate, and he smoked and listened with a faintly perceptible disdain to the conversation of the other men. At any rate Mrs. Rampound Pilby was out of the room. The talk had arisen out of a duologue that had preceded the departure of the ladies, a duologue of Timbre’s, about apparitions and the reality of the future life. Sir Peter Laxton, released from the eyes of his wife, was at liberty to say he did not believe in all this stuff; it was just thought transference and fancy and all that sort of thing. His declaration did not arrest the flow of feeble instances and experiences into which such talk invariably degenerates. His Lordship remained carelessly attentive, his eyebrows unfurled but drooping, his cigar upward at an acute angle; he contributed no anecdotes, content now and then to express himself compactly by some brief sentence of pure Hegelian—much as a Mahometan might spit.
“Why! come to that, they say Shonts is haunted,” said Sir Peter. “I suppose we could have a ghost here in no time if I chose to take it on. Rare place for a ghost, too.”
The very fair young man of the train had got a name now and was Captain Douglas. When he was not blushing too brightly he was rather good looking. He was a distant cousin of Lady Laxton’s. He impressed the Lord Chancellor as unabashed. He engaged people in conversation with a cheerful familiarity that excluded only the Lord Chancellor, and even at the Lord Chancellor he looked ever and again. He pricked up his ears at the mention of ghosts, and afterwards when the Lord Chancellor came to think things over, it seemed to him that he had caught a curious glance of the Captain’s bright little brown eye.
“What sort of ghost, Sir Peter? Chains? Eh? No?”
“Nothing of that sort, it seems. I don’t know much about it, I wasn’t sufficiently interested. No, sort of spook that bangs about and does you a mischief. What’s its name? Plundergeist?”
“Poltergeist,” the Lord Chancellor supplied carelessly in the pause.
“Runs its hand over your hair in the dark. Taps your shoulder. All nonsense. But we don’t tell the servants. Sort of thing I don’t believe in. Easily explained—what with panelling and secret passages and priests’ holes and all that.”
“Priests’ holes!” Douglas was excited.
“Where they hid. Perfect rabbit warren. There’s one going out from the drawing-room alcove. Quite a good room in its way. But you know,”—a note of wrath crept into Sir Peter’s voice—“they didn’t treat me fairly about these priests’ holes. I ought to have had a sketch and a plan of these priests’ holes. When a chap is given possession of a place, he ought to be given possession. Well! I don’t know where half of them are myself. That’s not possession. Else we might refurnish them and do them up a bit. I guess they’re pretty musty.”
Captain Douglas spoke with his eye on the Lord Chancellor. “Sure there isn’t a murdered priest in the place, Sir Peter?” he asked.
“Nothing of the sort,” said Sir Peter. “I don’t believe in these priests’ holes. Half of ’em never had priests in ’em. It’s all pretty tidy rot I expect—come to the bottom of it. …”
The conversation did not get away from ghosts and secret passages until the men went to the drawing-room. If it seemed likely to do so Captain Douglas pulled it back. He seemed to delight in these silly particulars; the sillier they were the more he was delighted.
The Lord Chancellor was a little preoccupied by one of those irrational suspicions that will sometimes afflict the most intelligent of men. Why did Douglas want to know all the particulars about the Shonts ghosts? Why every now and then did he glance with that odd expression at one’s face—a glance half appealing and half amused. Amused! It was a strange fancy, but the Lord Chancellor could almost have sworn that the young man was laughing at him. At dinner he had had that feeling one has at times of being talked about; he had glanced along the table to discover the Captain and a rather plain woman, that idiot Timbre’s wife she probably was, with their heads together looking up at him quite definitely and both manifestly pleased by something Douglas was telling her. …
What was it Douglas had said in the train? Something like a threat. But the exact words had slipped the Lord Chancellor’s memory. …
The Lord Chancellor’s preoccupation was just sufficient to make him a little unwary. He drifted into grappling distance of Mrs. Rampound Pilby. Her voice caught him like a lasso and drew him in.
“Well, and how is Lord Moggeridge now?” she asked.
What on earth is one to say to such an impertinence?
She was always like that. She spoke to a man of the calibre of Lord Bacon as though she was speaking to a schoolboy home for the holidays. She had an invincible air of knowing all through everybody. It gave rather confidence to her work than charm to her manner.
“Do you still go on with your philosophy?” she said.
“No,” shouted the Lord Chancellor, losing all self-control for the moment and waving his eyebrows about madly, “no, I go off with it.”
“For your vacations? Ah, Lord Moggeridge, how I envy you great lawyers your long vacations. I—never get a vacation. Always we poor authors are pursued by our creations, sometimes it’s typescript, sometimes it’s proofs. Not that I really complain of proofs. I confess to a weakness for proofs. Sometimes, alas! it’s criticism. Such undiscerning criticism! …”
The Lord Chancellor began to think very swiftly of some