with the actress woman?”
The Lord Chancellor made no answer. What he thought was “Great Silly Idiot! How should I know?”
“I think it must be the one—the one who had to leave Portsmouth in disgrace because of the ragging scandal. He did nothing there, they say, but organize practical jokes. Some of them were quite subtle practical jokes. He’s a cousin of our hostess; that perhaps accounts for his presence. …”
The Lord Chancellor’s comment betrayed the drift of his thoughts. “He’d better not try that sort of thing on here,” he said. “I abominate—clowning.”
Drawing-room did not last very long. Even Lady Laxton could not miss the manifest gloom of her principal guest, and after the good-nights and barley water and lemonade on the great landing Sir Peter led Lord Moggeridge by the arm—he hated being led by the arm—into the small but still spacious apartment that was called the study. The Lord Chancellor was now very thirsty; he was not used to abstinence of any sort; but Sir Peter’s way of suggesting a drink roused such a fury of resentment in him that he refused tersely and conclusively. There was nobody else in the study but Captain Douglas, who seemed to hesitate upon the verge of some familiar address, and Lord Woodenhouse, who was thirsty, too, and held a vast tumbler of whisky and soda, with a tinkle of ice in it, on his knee in a way annoying to a parched man. The Lord Chancellor helped himself to a cigar and assumed the middle of the fireplace with an air of contentment, but he could feel the self-control running out of the heels of his boots.
Sir Peter, after a quite unsuccessful invasion of his own hearthrug—the Lord Chancellor stood like a rock—secured the big arm-chair, stuck his feet out towards his distinguished guest and resumed a talk that he had been holding with Lord Woodenhouse about firearms. Mergleson had as usual been too attentive to his master’s glass, and the fine edge was off Sir Peter’s deference. “I always have carried firearms,” he said, “and I always shall. Used properly they are a great protection. Even in the country how are you to know who you’re going to run up against—anywhen?”
“But you might shoot and hit something,” said Douglas.
“Properly used, I said—properly used. Whipping out a revolver and shooting at a man, that’s not properly used. Almost as bad as pointing it at him—which is pretty certain to make him fly straight at you. If he’s got an ounce of pluck. But I said properly used and I mean properly used.”
The Lord Chancellor tried to think about that article on Infinities, while appearing to listen to this fool’s talk. He despised revolvers. Armed with such eyebrows as his it was natural for him to despise revolvers.
“Now, I’ve got some nice little barkers upstairs,” said Sir Peter. “I’d almost welcome a burglar, just to try them.”
“If you shoot a burglar,” said Lord Woodenhouse abruptly, with a gust of that ill-temper that was frequent at Shonts towards bedtime, “when he’s not attacking you, it’s murder.”
Sir Peter held up an offensively pacifying hand. “I know that,” he said; “you needn’t tell me that.”
He raised his voice a little to increase his already excessive accentuations. “I said properly used.”
A yawn took the Lord Chancellor unawares and he caught it dexterously with his hand. Then he saw Douglas hastily pull at his little blond moustache to conceal a smile—grinning ape! What was there to smile at? The man had been smiling all the evening.
Up to something?
“Now let me tell you,” said Sir Peter, “let me tell you the proper way to use a revolver. You whip it out and instantly let fly at the ground. You should never let anyone see a revolver ever before they hear it—see? You let fly at the ground first off, and the concussion stuns them. It doesn’t stun you. You expect it, they don’t. See? There you are—five shots left, master of the situation.”
“I think, Sir Peter, I’ll bid you good-night,” said the Lord Chancellor, allowing his eye to rest for one covetous moment on the decanter, and struggling with the devil of pride.
Sir Peter made a gesture of extreme friendliness from his chair, expressive of the Lord Chancellor’s freedom to do whatever he pleased at Shonts. “I may perhaps tell you a little story that happened once in Morocco.”
“My eyes won’t keep open any longer,” said Captain Douglas suddenly, with a whirl of his knuckles into his sockets, and stood up.
Lord Woodenhouse stood up too.
“You see,” said Sir Peter, standing also but sticking to his subject and his hearer. “This was when I was younger than I am now, you must understand, and I wasn’t married. Just mooching about a bit, between business and pleasure. Under such circumstances one goes into parts of a foreign town where one wouldn’t go if one was older and wiser. …”
Captain Douglas left Sir Peter and Woodenhouse to it.
He emerged on the landing and selected one of the lighted candlesticks upon the table. “Lord!” he whispered. He grimaced in soliloquy and then perceived the Lord Chancellor regarding him with suspicion and disfavour from the ascending staircase. He attempted ease. For the first time since the train incident he addressed Lord Moggeridge.
“I gather, my lord—don’t believe in ghosts?” he said.
“No, Sir,” said the Lord Chancellor, “I don’t.”
“They won’t trouble me to-night.”
“They won’t trouble any of us.”
“Fine old house anyhow,” said Captain Douglas.
The Lord Chancellor disdained to reply. He went on his way upstairs.
§ 4
When the Lord Chancellor sat down before the thoughtful fire in the fine old panelled room assigned to him he perceived that he was too disturbed to sleep. This was going to be an infernal week-end. The worst week-end he had ever had. Mrs. Rampound Pilby maddened him; Timbre, who was a Pragmatist—which stands in the same relation to a Hegelian that a small dog does to a large cat—exasperated him; he loathed Laxton, detested Rampound Pilby and feared—as far as he was capable of fearing anything—Captain Douglas. There was no refuge, no soul in the house to whom he could turn for consolation and protection from these others. Slinker Bond could talk only of the affairs of the party, and the Lord Chancellor, being Lord Chancellor, had long since lost any interest in the affairs of the party; Woodenhouse could talk of nothing. The women were astonishingly negligible. There were practically no pretty women. There ought always to be pretty young women for a Lord Chancellor, pretty young women who can at least seem to listen. …
And he was atrociously thirsty.
His room was supplied only with water—stuff you use to clean your teeth—and nothing else. …
No good thinking about it. …
He decided that the best thing he could do to compose himself before turning in would be to sit down at the writing-table and write a few sheets of Hegelian—about that Infinity article in the Hibbert. There is indeed no better consolation for a troubled mind than the Hegelian exercises; they lift it above—everything. He took off his coat and sat down to this beautiful amusement, but he had scarcely written a page before his thirst became a torment. He kept thinking of that great tumbler Woodenhouse had held—sparkling, golden, cool—and stimulating.
What he wanted was a good stiff whisky and a cigar, one of Laxton’s cigars, the only good thing in his entertainment so far.
And then Philosophy.
Even as a student he had been a worker of the Teutonic type—never abstemious.
He thought