The Mystery of the Skeleton Key. Bernard Capes

He fouled or missed so many shots that his form presently became a scandal. ‘Phew!’ whistled his opponent, after a peculiarly villainous attempt; ‘what’s gone wrong with you?’

      The young man laughed vexedly; then, in a sudden transition to violence, threw his cue from him so that it clattered on the floor.

      ‘I can’t play for nuts,’ he said. ‘You must get somebody else.’

      ‘Hugh,’ said his friend, after a moment or two of silence, ‘there’s something weighing on your mind.’

      ‘Is there?’ cried the other jeeringly. ‘I wonder.’

      ‘What is it? You needn’t tell me.’

      ‘O! thank you for that. I tell you what, Viv: I dreamed last night I was sitting on a barrel of gunpowder and smoking a cigarette, and the sparks dropped all about. Didn’t I? That’s what I feel, anyhow. Nerves, all nerves, my boy. O! shut up that long mug, and talk of something else. I told you I was off colour when I wrote.’

      ‘I know you did, and I came down.’

      ‘Good man. You’ll be in at the kill. There’s going to be a most infernal explosion—pyrotechnics galore. Or isn’t there? Never mind.’

      He appeared to Bickerdike to be in an extraordinary state, verging on the hysterical. But no more was said, and in a few moments they parted to dress for dinner.

      M. le Baron, coming up to his room about the same time and for the same purpose, was witness of a little stage comedy, which, being for all his bulk a light treader, he surprised. The actors were his valet Louis and an under-housemaid, the latter of whom was at the moment depositing a can of hot water in the washing basin. He saw the lithe, susceptible little Gascon steal from his task of laying ready his master’s dress clothes, saw him stalk his quarry like a cat, pounce, enfold the jimp waist, heard the startled squeal that followed, a smack like a hundred kisses, a spitting sacré chein! from the discomfited assailant, as he staggered back with a face of fury and a hand held to his ear, and, seeing, stood to await the upshot, a questioning smile upon his lips. Both parties realised his presence at the same instant, and checked the issue of hot words which was beginning to join between them. The girl, giving a defiant toss to her chin, hurried past Le Sage and out of the room; M. Louis Cabanis returned to his business with the expression of a robbed wild-cat.

      Le Sage said nothing until he was being presently helped on with his coat, and then suddenly challenging the valet, eye to eye, he nodded, and congratulated him:

      ‘That is better, my friend. It is not logical, you know, for the injurer to nurse the grievance.’

      The Gascon looked at his master gravely.

      ‘Will you tell me who is the injurer, Monsieur?’

      ‘Surely,’ answered Le Sage, ‘it cannot be she, in these first few hours of your acquaintance?’

      ‘But if she had appeared to encourage me, Monsieur?’

      The Baron laughed.

      ‘The only appearance to be trusted in a pretty woman, Louis, is her prettiness.’

      ‘Monsieur, is her ravishing loveliness.’

      ‘Well, well, Louis, as you will. Only bear it no grudge.’

      He turned away from a parting keen scrutiny of the dark, handsome face, and left the room, softly carolling. The little episode had amused rather than surprised him. Certainly it had seemed to point, in respect of time, to a quite record enslavement on the Gascon’s part; but then the provocation to that passionate impressionable nature! For the girl had been really amazingly pretty, with that cast of feature, that Hebe-like beauty of hair and eye and complexion about whose fascination no two properly constituted minds could disagree. She was a domestic servant—and she was a young morning goddess, fresh from the unsullied dawn of Nature, a Psyche, a butterfly, a Cressid like enough. ‘If I were younger,’ thought Le Sage, ‘even I!’ and he carolled as he went down to dinner.

       CHAPTER IV

       I AM INTERESTED IN THE BARON

      (From the Bickerdike MS.)

      I SEEMED conscious somehow, at dinner on the night of our arrival, of a feeling of electricity in the domestic atmosphere. Having no clue, such as the later course of events came to supply, to its origin, I diagnosed it, simply and vulgarly, as the vibrations from a family jar, of the sort to which even the most dignified and well-regulated households cannot always rise superior. Sir Calvin himself, exacting and domineering, could never at the best of times be considered a tactful autocrat: a prey to his hereditary foe, he appeared often to go out of his way to be thought detestable. When such was the case, his habit of harping on grievances could become an exquisite torture, his propensity for persisting in the unwelcome the more he saw it resented a pure malignancy. On this occasion, observing an obvious inclination in his son, my friend, to silence and self-obliteration, he took pleasure in drawing him out, with something of the savagery, I could not but think, of a fisherman who wrenches an obstinate hermit crab from its borrowed shell for bait. I saw how poor Hugh was rasped and goaded, but could do no more than take upon myself, where I could, the burden of response. Believing at the time that this aggravated fencing between the two was a part, or consequence, of some trouble, the serious nature of which might or might not have been implied in my friend’s recent outburst, I made and could make but an inefficient second; yet, even had I known, as I came to know, that my surmise was wrong, and that the father’s persistence was due to nothing but a perverse devil of teasing, it is not clear to me how else I could have helped the situation. I could not have hauled my host by the ears, as I should have liked to do, over his own dining-room table.

      But the sense of atmospheric friction was not confined to these two. In some extraordinary way it communicated itself to the servants, the very butler, our young hostess. I had not seen Audrey at tea, and now greeted her for the first time. She came in late, to find us, by the Bashaw’s directions, already seated, and to suffer a sharp reprimand for her unpunctuality which brought a flush to her young rebellious cheek. Nor did I better things, so far as she was concerned, by an ostentatious display of attentions; she seemed to resent my sympathy even more than the harshness which had provoked it. It is the way of cats and women to tear the hand that would release them from the trap.

      The dinner, in short, began very uncomfortably, with an irascible host, a moody son, and an offended daughter, the butler taking his cue from his master, and the servants from the butler. They waited nervously, and got in one another’s way, only the more flurriedly for their whispered harrying by the exacerbated Cleghorn. I was surprised, I confess, by the change in that usually immaculate dignitary. The very type and pattern of his kind, correct, imperturbable, pontifical, I had never before known Cleghorn to manifest the least sign of human emotion, unless it were when Mr Yockney, the curate from Leighway, had mixed water with his Château Margaux 1907. Now, preposterous as it appeared, I could have believed the great man had been crying. His globous eyes, his mottled cheeks, bore suspicious evidences of the fact; his very side-whiskers looked limp. Surely the domestic storm, if such, which had rocked the house of Kennett must have been demoralising to a hitherto unknown degree.

      It was the Baron who redeemed the situation, winning harmony out of discord. He had, to do him justice, the reconciliatory faculty, chiefly, I think, because he could always find, as one should, a bright interest in differences of opinion instead of a subject for contention. I never knew him, then or thereafter, to be ruffled by opposition or contradiction. He accepted them placidly, as constituting possible rectifications of his own argumentative frontiers.

      His opportunity came with a growl of Sir Calvin’s over the lateness of the evening papers. The General had been particularly curious to hear the result of a local trial, known as the Antonferry Bank robbery case, which was just reaching its conclusion, and it chafed him to be kept waiting.