The Collected Works of D. K. Broster. D. K. Broster

I am henceforward unable to believe a word that you say, sir,” retorted the young man, “it is of small use your pretending ignorance of my father’s identity.”

      “Yet perhaps you are still able to recognise logic when you hear it,” rejoined Ewen with some sharpness, his own temper beginning to stir. “Had I known that the gentleman in the sedan-chair was Lord Stowe—which, if I had planned the attack, I must have known—the merest prudence would have kept me from entering a house in which I was so like to meet you.”

      “Yes,” said Aveling with a bitter little smile, “you would have done better to part sooner from my father after this pretended rescue!”

      “And yet,” said the Highlander, looking at him with a touch of wistfulness in his level gaze, “as chance has brought us together again, is it too much to hope, my lord, that you will at least endeavour to accept my most sincere and humble apologies for what my great necessity forced me to do that evening?”

      “Apologies?” said Viscount Aveling. “No, by heaven, there are no apologies humble enough for what you did!”

      “Then I am ready to give you satisfaction in the way usual between gentlemen,” said Ewen gravely.

      The young man shook his powdered head. “Between gentlemen, yes. But a gentleman does not accept satisfaction of that kind from a highwayman; he has him punished, as I swore I would you. But you doubtless think that by gaining the Earl’s goodwill you have put that out of my power? Let me assure you, Mr. Highwayman, that you have not; the law is still the law!”

      “I doubt if the law can touch me for what I did,” answered Ewen.

      “Not for theft, horse-stealing and assault? Then this must indeed be an uncivilised country! . . . And behind those crimes remains always the question of how my brother really met his end.”

      “That I have already told you, Lord Aveling.”

      “Yes; and I was fool enough to believe you! I am wiser now; I know of what you are capable, Mr. Ewen Cameron!”

      Ewen turned away from the furious young man, who still maintained his position by the door. He was at a loss what to do next. There was no common ground on which they could meet, though once there had seemed so much; but he himself had shorn it away. One of the candles in the massive silver-branched candlesticks which had been deposited upon the table was guttering badly, and, in the strange way in which a portion of the mind will attend to trifles at moments of crisis, he took up the snuffers which lay there in readiness and mended the wick with scarcely the least consciousness of what he was doing.

      His action had an unexpected result. Lord Aveling started a few paces forward, pointing at the hand which had performed this service. “And you still have the effrontery to wear the ring which you took from poor Keith!”

      Ewen laid down the snuffers. “I have the effrontery, since you call it so, to wear the ring he gave me; and I shall wear it until my own dying day.”

      The words, though they were very quietly uttered, rang like a challenge; and as a challenge the young man took them up.

      “Will you?” he asked. “I think not. Here in this house, above all, I have no liking to see my poor brother’s property on your finger. You will kindly surrender it to his family.”

      “Although I take you to be jesting, my lord,” began Ewen very coldly.

      “Jesting!” flashed out Aveling. “No, by God! You will give me back Keith Windham’s signet ring, or——”

      “Or?” questioned Ewen.

      “Or I’ll have it taken from you by the lackeys!”

      “Then you will hardly be in a position to throw my theft of your property in my face!” retorted Ardroy.

      “I had not stolen my pistols and my horse,” riposted Lord Aveling.

      “Nor have I stolen my friend’s ring. He gave it to me, and I give it up to nobody!”

      “I dispute your statement!” cried the young man with passion. “You took that ring, whether you are guilty of my brother’s death or no. You are very capable of such an act; I know that now. Give it up to me, or I shall do what I say. My father has retired by now; do not imagine that he can protect you!”

      “As to that, my lord, you must follow your own instincts,” said Ewen scornfully, “but you’ll not get my friend’s dying gift from me by threats—no, nor by performances either,” he added, as he saw Lord Aveling move towards the bell-pull.

      “Yes, you think they are but threats, and that you can treat them with contempt,” said the young man between his teeth. “I’ll show you in one moment that they are not! I have only to pull this bell, and in two or three minutes a so-called Highland gentleman will go sprawling down the steps of Stowe House. You will not be able to bully half-a-dozen footmen as you bullied me!”

      Ewen stood perfectly motionless, but he had paled. It was quite true that this irate, beautifully dressed young man had the power to carry out this new threat. Of the two he fancied he would almost have preferred the menace which Lord Aveling had uttered at Dalmally, that he would bring his assailant to Newgate. But he put the hand with the ring into his breast and said again, “I can only repeat that you must follow your instincts, my lord. I follow mine; and you do not get this ring from me unless you take it by force!”

      Aveling put his hand to the embroidered Chinese bell-pull hanging by the mantelpiece. Ewen looked at him. It needed a great effort of self-control on his part not to seize the young man and tear it out of his hand before he pulled it, as he could easily have done. And, in view of events in the bedroom at Dalmally, still only too fresh in his mind, this abstention evidently struck the angry Aveling as strange.

      “I observe,” he said tauntingly, still holding the strip of silk, “that you are not so ready to assault me now, Mr. Cameron, when you know that you would instantly have to pay for it!”

      “It was in someone else’s interests that I used violence on you then, my lord. I have no one else’s to serve now,” said Ewen sadly.

      Lord Aveling dropped the bell-pull. “You mean Doctor Cameron. No, you did not benefit him much. You were too late, I imagine.”

      “I was just too late.”

      “And if you had not been,” remarked the young man, “I should not, perhaps, have heard him sentenced this morning.”

      Ewen gave a little exclamation, “You were at the King’s Bench this morning, my lord? You were there—you heard it all? But they cannot, they cannot, mean to carry out so cruel and iniquitous a sentence!”

      Suddenly and oddly reflective, Lord Aveling gazed at him, the tassel of the abandoned bell-pull still moving slowly to and fro across the wall. “I would have given wellnigh all I possess to be in your place, my lord,” went on Ardroy, his own dangerous and unpleasant situation clean forgotten, “to see how he looked . . . though I have heard how well he bore himself. But if the judges knew what manner of man he was, how generous, how kind, how humane, they would not have condemned him on that seven years’ old attainder.”

      Francis Delahaye, Lord Aveling, was a very young man, and he had also been in an extreme of justifiable rage. But even that fury, now past its high-water mark, had not entirely swamped his native intelligence and sensitiveness, which were above the ordinary. He continued to look at Ewen without saying anything, as one in the grip of a perfectly new idea. Then, instead of putting his hand again to the bell-pull, he slowly walked away from its neighbourhood with his head bent, leaving the door unguarded and his threat unfulfilled.

      But Ewen neither took advantage of these facts nor looked to see what his adversary was doing. The full wretchedness of the morning was back upon him; Archie had only three weeks to live. And if only he had not made an enemy of this young man, Lord Stowe, so grateful to his rescuer, might have been induced to use his influence on Archie’s behalf. But it was hopeless to think of that now.

      It