“A person called to see me!” repeated the Duchess of Rantorlie. “He pleaded urgent business, you say?” She glanced at the card presented by her groom-of-the-chambers without taking the trouble to lift it from the salver. “‘Mr. Moss Rubelius.’ I do not know the name—I have no knowledge of any urgent business. You must tell him to go away at once, and not call again.”
“Begging your Grace’s pardon,” remarked the official, “the person seemed to anticipate a message of the kind——”
“Did he? Then,” thought her Grace, “he is not disappointed.”
“And, still begging your Grace’s pardon,” pursued the discreet domestic, “he asked me to hand this second card to your Grace.”
It was rather a shabby card, and dog’s-eared as though it had been carried long in somebody’s pocket; but it was large and feminine, and adorned with a ducal coronet and the Duchess’s own cipher, and scribbled upon it in pencil, in the Duchess’s own handwriting, were two or three words, simple enough, apparently, and yet sufficiently fraught with meaning to make their fair reader turn very pale. She did not replace this card upon the salver, but kept it as she said:
“Bring the person to me at once.”
And when the softly stepping servant had left the room—one of her Grace’s private suite, charmingly furnished as a study—she made haste to tear the card up, 277dropping the fragments into the hottest part of the wood-fire, and thrusting at them with the poker until the last tremulous fragment of gray ash had disappeared. Rising from this exercise with a radiant glow upon her usually colorless cheeks the Duchess became aware that she was not alone. A person of vulgar appearance, outrageously attired in a travesty of the ordinary afternoon costume of an English gentleman, stood three or four feet off, regarding her with an observant and rather wily smile. Not at all discomposed, he was the first to speak.
“Before burnin’ that,” he remarked, in the thick, snuffling accents of the low-bred, “your Grace ought to have asked yourself whether it was any use. Because—I put it to your Grace, as a poker-player, being told the game’s fashionable in your Grace’s set—a man who holds four aces can afford to throw away the fifth card, even if it’s a king. And people of my profession don’t go in for bluff. It ain’t their fancy.”
“What is your profession?” asked the Duchess, regarding with contempt the dark, full-fed, red-lipped, hook-beaked countenance before her.
“Money!” returned Mr. Moss Rubelius. He rattled coin in his trousers-pockets as he spoke, and the superfluity of gold manifested in large, coarse rings upon his thick fingers, the massy chain festooned across his broad chest, the enormous links fastening his cuffs, and the huge diamond pin in his cravat, seemed to echo “Money.”
The Duchess lost no time in coming to the point. She was not guided by previous experience, having hitherto, by grace as well as luck, steered clear of scandal. But, girl of twenty as she was, she asked, as coolly as an intrigante of forty, though her young heart was fluttering wildly against the walls of its beautiful prison, “How did you get that card?”
278“I will be quite plain with your Grace,” returned the money-lender. “When the second lot of cavalry drafts sailed for South Africa early in the year of 1900, our firm, ’aving a writ of ’abeas out against Captain Sir Hugh Delaving of the Royal Red Dragoon Guards—I have reason to believe your Grace knew something of the Captain?”
“Yes,” said the Duchess, turning her cold blue eyes upon the twinkling orbs of Mr. Moss Rubelius, “I knew something of the Captain. You do not need to ask the question. Please go on!”
“The Captain was,” resumed Mr. Rubelius, “for a born aristocrat, the downiest I ever see—saw, I mean. He gave our clerks and the men with the warrant the slip by being ’eaded up in a wooden packin’ case, labeled ‘Officers’ Stores,’ and got away to the Cape, where he was killed in his first engagement.”
“This,” said the Duchess, “is no news to me.”
“No,” said the money-lender; “but it may be news to your Grace that, though we couldn’t lay our ‘ands on the Captain himself, we got hold of all his luggage. Not much there that was of any marketable value, except a silver-gilt toilet-set. But there was a packet of letters in a Russia writin’-case with a patent lock, all of ’em written in the large-sized, square ’and peculiar to the leadin’ female aristocracy, and signed ‘Ethelwyne,’ or merely ‘E.’”
“And this discovery procures me the pleasure of this interview?” remarked the Duchess. “The letters are mine—you come on the errand of a blackmailer. I have only one thing to wonder at, and that is—why you have not come before?”
“Myself and partner thought, as honorable men of business, it would be better to approach the Captain first,” explained the usurer. “His mother died the week he sailed for Africa, and left him ten thousand 279pounds. We ’astened to communicate with him, but——”
“But he had been killed meanwhile,” said the Duchess. “You would have had the money he owed—or did not owe—you, and your price for the letters, had you reached him in time; but you did not, and your goods are left upon your hands. Why, as honorable men of business”—her lovely lip curled—“did you not take them at once to the Duke?”
Mr. Moss Rubelius seemed for the first time a little nonplussed. He looked down at his large, shiny boots, and the sight did not appear to relieve him.
“I will be quite plain with your Grace.”
“Pray endeavor!” said the Duchess.
“The letters are—to put it delicately—not compromising enough. They’re more,” said Mr. Rubelius, “the letters a school-girl at Brighton would write to her music-master, supposing him to be young and possessed of a pair of cavalry legs and a moustache. There’s fuel in ’em for a First-Class Connubial Row,” continued Mr. Rubelius, “but not material for a Domestic Upheaval—followed by an Action for Divorce. As a man, no longer, but once in business—for within this last month our firm has dissolved, and myself and my partner have retired upon our means—this is my opinion with regard to these letters in your Grace’s handwriting, addressed to the late Captain Sir H. Delaving: The Duke, I believe, would only laugh at ’em.”
The Duchess started violently, and seemed about to speak.
“But, still, the letters are worth paying for,” ended Mr. Moss Rubelius. “And your Grace can have em—at my price.”
“What is your price?” asked the Duchess, trying in vain to read in the stolid physiognomy before her the secret purpose of the soul within.
280“Perhaps your Grace wouldn’t mind my taking a chair?” insinuated Mr. Rubelius.
“Do as you please, sir,” said the Duchess, “only be brief.”
“I’ll try,” said the money-lender, comfortably crossing his legs. “To begin—we’re in the London Season and the month of March, and your Grace has a party at Rantorlie for the April salmon-fishing. Angling’s my one vice—my only weakness, ever since I caught minnows in the Regent’s Canal with a pickle-bottle tied to a string. Coarse fishing in the Thames was my recreation in grub times, whenever I ’ad a day away from our office in the Minories. Trout I’ve caught now and then, with a worm on a Stuart tackle—since I became a butterfly. But I’ve never had a slap at a salmon, and the finest salmon-anglin’ in the kingdom is to be ’ad in the Haste, below Rantorlie. Ask me there for April, see that I ’ave the pick of the sport, even if you ’ave a Royal duke to cater for, as you ’ad last year, and, the day I land my first twenty-pounder, the letters are yours.”
The Duchess burst out laughing wildly.
“Ha, ha! Oh!” she cried; “it is impossible to help it.... I can’t!... It is so.... Ha, ha, ha!”
“I shan’t disgrace you,” said Mr. Rubelius. “My kit and turn-out will be by the best makers, and I’ll tip the ’ead gillie fifty pound. I’m a soft-hearted hass to let the letters go so cheap, but——Golly! the chance of catchin’ a twenty-pound specimen of Salmo salar that a Royal ’Ighness ’as angled for in vain!... Look ’ere, your Grace”—his tones were oily with entreaty—“write me the invitation now, on the spot, and you shall ’ave back the first three of those nine letters down on the nail.”
“You have them——?”
“With me!” said Mr. Rubelius, producing a letter-case 281attached to his stout person by a chain. “The others are—say, in retirement for the present.” He extracted from the case three large, square, gray envelopes, their addresses penned in a large, angular, girlish hand. “Write me the invite now,” he said, “and these are yours to burn or show to his Grace—whichever you please. The others shall be yours the day I land my twenty-pounder.”
The Duchess moved to her writing-table and sat down. She chose paper and a pen, and dashed off these few lines:
“900, Berkeley Square,............