A Poached Peerage Part 45

"Or threaten--' pursued Lady Ormstork.

"A Salolja," he returned, with a Castilian gesture of deprecation, "never threatens. It is only within the last hundred and fifty years that he has condescended to warn."

"We can warn too," retorted the lady doggedly. "Warn the police."

The duke looked quite tickled. "Most gracious lady," he replied, showing his teeth in a grin from which none of his male listeners derived any mirth, "you make me smile. I think the question of your police we have already a.n.a.lysed, I and the excellent Lord Quorn. If your graces have no more notable argument to put forth to arrest the traditions of the Saloljas I will ask your gracious permission to take my leave--for the present."

He accompanied the last three words with a glance which boded battle, murder and sudden death to at least one of his hearers. Then, with a sweeping bow, he turned to the door.

"Stop!" cried Gage in a voice resonant with fear. "You are all making a mistake. I am not Lord Quorn!"

CHAPTER x.x.xV

At the startling declaration the duke swung round and eyed Gage with a glance that seemed capable of penetrating an inch board. Lady Ormstork, surprised for a moment out of her transcendent self-possession, stared aghast at the object of her designs; Ulrica looked half astonished and half relieved; Peckover's mien was one of abject discomfiture; while Quorn's showed grim expectation.

"Not Lord Quorn?" screamed Lady Ormstork incredulously.

"So? Not Lord Quorn?" repeated the duke, prepared to resume the aggressive.

"No, I'm not," Gage declared stoutly. "If I ever was, I've had enough of it. But I never was by rights."

"Not Lord Quorn by rights?" gasped Lady Ormstork.

"Never. At least never no more. So you'll please to consider me out of this little complication."

"This," observed the duke, truculently thoughtful, "is very singular."

"Very," Lady Ormstork agreed. "One would like to have some explanation of such an extraordinary statement."

"We must know how we stand," said the duke, who had a.s.sumed the att.i.tude of a stunted bravo.

"I tell you," Gage maintained, "I am no more Lord Quorn than you are."

There was a short silence. Then Lady Ormstork demanded pointedly, "Then who, may I ask, is Lord Quorn?"

Gage indicated the unwilling Peckover. "This is Lord Quorn. I am plain Peter Gage."

Quorn, the real Quorn, laughed scornfully, and seemed to see light.

Miss Buffkin clapped her hands. "You Lord Quorn? How lovely!" she exclaimed, beaming at Peckover.

"Aha! So you are Lord Quorn?" cried the duke transferring to that person his highly undesirable attention.

"No, I'll be hanged if I am," protested the abnegating Peckover.

"You'll be shot if you are," observed Gage half aloud, with a glance at the highly-stoked little Spaniard, who stood pulling his quill-like moustaches, and whose unswerving glance confirmed the forecast.

Ulrica had jumped up. "There, we've settled it already, dear Lady Ormstork," she cried. "Isn't it lucky!"

"Lucky?" echoed Lady Ormstork, rather non-plussed.

"Yes," Ulrica a.s.sured her. "We've settled it between ourselves. I like him. He's my sort."

From the duke came a deep, rumbling "Oom!" as a grim commentary on the reshuffle of the position.

"But I'm not Lord Quorn," Peckover urged vehemently, beginning to be seriously alarmed.

"You are!" maintained Gage.

"One of you must be," said the duke, as though merely anxious not to make a mistake in the selection of his victim.

"Not me!" To such a state of poverty was Peckover's vocabulary reduced.

"Oh, Percival!" Ulrica exclaimed reproachfully. "Don't deny it."

"He can't," declared Gage, under the influence of the baleful Salolja eyes and moustaches which dominated the scene.

"May I ask," said Lady Ormstork with dignified severity, "how you came to call yourself Lord Quorn?"

"Well," replied Gage frankly, "I thought I'd like to see how it felt to be a lord. And," he added pointedly, "I don't care much for the feeling."

"And may I ask," continued the dowager, addressing herself to the bothered and daunted Peckover, "how it was you came to renounce your t.i.tle?"

"I made it worth his while," Gage explained shortly, determined to be off with the galling honour.

The real Lord Quorn in his corner gave a long whistle of semi-enlightenment.

"I never had it," protested the unhappy Peckover.

The duke, bristling, took a step forward. "Lord Quorn!" he snapped his fingers loudly and contemptuously. "It is no matter. You are at least a suitor of this lady?"

Happily Lady Ormstock saved Peckover from replying to the delicate suggestion. "Not unless he is Lord Quorn," she declared resolutely.

"I tell you," cried Peckover desperately, "I am not Lord Quorn."

"Then you are a fraud," Gage a.s.serted roughly.

"I never said I was Lord Quorn," urged Peckover.

"You never said you weren't," rejoined Gage.

The fiery blood of the Saloljas was beginning to weary of these polemics and to be impatient for its cue. "It is no matter," he said with loud, painfully loud, authority. "I take it"--to Peckover--"that you are Lord Quorn, and you have, for reasons inexplicable to a Spanish n.o.bleman been pleased to divest yourself temporarily of your rank. You have addressed yourself to this lady--as Lord Quorn or by a humbler name, it matters not. I have the honour to request a few words with your excellency in the garden."

His excellency's countenance expressed a strong disinclination to any such _al fresco_ conference. Indeed, so far was he from complying with the duke's haughty and peremptory invitation that he sat down on a chair which stood handy. "Not much," he said vernacularly. "I'm not taking any just at present, thanks all the same." He felt himself comparatively safe where he was. Even a Spanish duke of vindictive and homicidal idiosyncrasies could scarcely have the face to murder him coolly in a room before four non-accessory witnesses.