Cholmondley, casting a glance of rebuke at Rupert, admonished Mr. Quarles once more. “Go home and sleep on it, Quarles. If you want to fight, fight sober. You’re no match for Vidal else.”

A stout individual dressed in discreet black pushed his way through the knot of men in the doorway. “What’s this, gentlemen?” he said. “Who fired that shot?”

Vidal raised his brows. “You interrupt, Timothy. I fired that shot.”

The stout man looked aghast. “My lord, my lord, what wild work is this? You’ll ruin me, my lord!” He saw the case containing the pistols and made a pounce for them. My lord’s hand shot out and grasped his wrist. Timothy met his eyes for a moment, and said distressfully: “My lord, I beg of you—my lord, don’t do it here!”

He was thrust back. “Damn you, stop whining!” Vidal sprang up, overturning his chair. “Am I to sit here till noon while Mr. Quarles makes up his mind? Name your friends!”

Quarles rolled a hot eye round the circle. No one came forward. “I’ll act for myself since you’re all so shy,” he sneered.

Mr. Comyn, his sedateness quite unimpaired, rose from his seat. “Since it’s my Lord Vidal’s honour that is in question it will be wise to have a gentleman to act for you, sir,” he said.

“To hell with the lot of you!” swore Quarles. “I’ll act for myself.”

“Your pardon, sir,” returned Mr. Comyn smoothly, “but I think you must see that if you doubt his lordship’s good faith, your seconds should carefully examine these pistols, which I apprehend are his lordship’s own. In short, I offer myself at your disposal.”

“Obliged to you,” growled Quarles.

Vidal was leaning on a chair back. “That’s a mighty long speech,” he remarked, with just that faint suggestion of slurring his words together. “Is it to insult me, or not?”

“Such, my lord, is not at the moment my intention,” replied Mr. Comyn.

The Marquis laughed. “Didn’t know you had it in you. You’re devilish correct, ain’t you?”

“I trust I am conversant with the rules governing such affairs as these, my lord. Will you name your friends?”

The Marquis was still looking at him with an amused and not unkindly eye. “Charles, you might act for me,” he said, without turning his head.

Mr. Fox arose, sighing. “Oh, very well, Dominic, if you must behave so damned irregularly.” He went apart with Mr. Comyn, and they inspected the weapons with due solemnity, and pronounced them identical.

Lord Rupert pushed his way unceremoniously to his nephew’s side. “Go put your head in a bucket of water, Vidal!” he said. “Stap me if I ever heard the like of you to-night! Mind you, I don’t say the fellow don’t deserve to have a hole in him, but do the thing decently, my boy, that’s all I ask!” He broke off to hurl somewhat conflicting advice to Captain WraxalL “Move those candles a shade to the left, Wraxall. Must have the light fair to both.”

The table was pushed back. Mr. Fox and Mr. Comyn were measuring the paces.

The pistols were presented. My lord took his in what looked to be an alarmingly slack hold. Apparently his uncle did not think so, for he said urgently: “Don’t kill him, Dominic!”

The seconds stepped back, the word was given. My lord’s pistol hand jerked up swiftly; there was a flash and a report, followed almost instantly by an answering shot. Mr. Quarles’s bullet buried itself in the wall beyond my lord, and Mr. Quarles pitched forward on to his face.

The Marquis tossed his pistol to Mr. Fox. “Give ’em to my man, Charles,” he said, and turned away to pick up his snuff-box, and handkerchief.

“Damn you, Vidal, I believe you have killed him!” Rupert said angrily.

“I’m very nearly sure of it, dear uncle,” said the Marquis.

Mr. Comyn, on his knees beside the fallen man, looked up. “A surgeon should be fetched,” he said. “I do not think that life is extinct.”

“I must be more drunk than I knew, then,” remarked his lordship. “I’m sorry, Charles; I meant to make the place habitable for you.”

Lord Cholmondley started towards him. “Devil take you, Vidal, you’d best be gone. You’ve done enough for one night.”

“I thought so, certainly,” said the Marquis. “Mr. Comyn apparently disagrees.” He glanced at the clock. “Hell and damnation, it’s past five already!”

“You’re surely not driving to Newmarket now?” cried Captain Wraxall, appalled by his callousness.

“Why not?” said Vidal coolly.

Captain Wraxall sought for words, and found none. The Marquis turned on his heel and went out.

Chapter V

it was only a little past noon on the following day when her Grace of Avon, accompanied most unwillingly by Lord Rupert, first called at Vidal’s home. The Marquis’s major-domo responded to his lordship’s anxious look with the smallest of bows. Lord Rupert heaved a sigh of relief. One never knew what might be found in Vidal’s apartments.

“I want my son,” her grace stated flatly.

But it appeared that the Marquis had not returned from Newmarket.

“There, what did I tell you?” said Rupert. “Leave a note for him, my dear. The devil alone knows when he’ll be back, eh, Fletcher?”

“I have no precise knowledge myself, my lord.”

“I shall come back again later,” announced her grace.

“But, Léonie—”

“And again, and again, and again until he has returned,” said her grace obstinately.

She kept her word, but on her last visit, in full ball dress at seven in the evening, she declared that she would enter the house and await her son there.

Lord Rupert followed her weakly into the hall. “Ay, but I’m on my way to Devereaux’s card party,” he expostulated. “I can’t stay here all night!”

The Duchess flung out exasperated hands. “Well, go then!” she said. “I find you fort ennuyant! For me, I must see Dominique, and I do not need you at all.”

“You always were an ungrateful chit,” complained his lordship. “Here am I dancing attendance on you the whole day, and all you can say is that you don’t need me.”

Léonie’s irrepressible dimple peeped out. “But it is quite true, Rupert; I do not need you. When I have seen Dominique I shall take a chair to my party. It is very simple.”

“No, you won’t,” said Rupert. “Not with those diamonds on you.” He followed her into the library, where a small fire burned, and struggled out of his greatcoat. “Where’s that fellow gone off to? Fletcher! What’s his lordship in the cellar that her grace would like?”

The suave Fletcher showed some small signs of perplexity at that. “I will endeavour, my lord ...”

The Duchess had cast off her cloak, and seated herself by the fire. “Ah, bah, I do not want your ratafia, me. I will drink a glass of port with you, mon vieux.”

Lord Rupert scratched his head, tilting his wig slightly askew. “Oh, very well! But it’s not what I’d call a lady’s drink.”

“Me, I am not a lady,” announced her grace. “I have been very well educated, and I will drink port.”

Fletcher withdrew, quite impassive. His lordship remonstrated once more. “Y’know you mustn’t talk like that before servants, Léonie. Ton my soul—”

“If you like,” interrupted Léonie, “I will play piquet with you till Dominique comes!”

Dominic came an hour later. A sulky dashed up the street and stopped outside the house. Léonie flung down her cards, and ran to the window, pulling aside the heavy curtains, but was too late to catch a glimpse of her son. A groom was already driving the sulky away, and inside the house a door slammed, and Fletcher’s discreet voice sounded. A sharper one answered; a quick step trod in the hall, and Vidal came into the library.

He was pale, and his eyes were frowning and tired. Mud had generously splashed his breeches and plain buff coat, and his neckcloth was crumpled and limp. “Ma mère!” he said, surprise in his voice.

Léonie momentarily forgot her mission. She went to him, grasping the lapels of his coat. “Oh, you have not killed yourself! But tell me, Dominique, at once, did you get there in the time?”

His hands covered hers with a gesture rather mechanical.

“Yes, of course. But what are you doing here? Rupert, too? Is anything amiss?”

“Anything amiss,” exploded Rupert. “That’s rich! Ton my soul, that’s rich! Oh, there’s naught amiss, never fear! You’ve only killed that fellow Quarles and set the whole town in a roar.”

“Dead, is he?” said his lordship. He put Léonie from him, and walked to the table. “Well, I thought as much.”

“No, no, he is not dead!” Léonie said vehemently. “You shan’t say so, Rupert!”

“It don’t matter what I say,” responded my lord. “If he ain’t dead now he will be in a day’s time. You fool, Vidal.” The Marquis had poured himself out a glass of wine, but was looking down at the red liquid instead of drinking it. “Runners after me?”

“They will be,” his uncle said grimly. A heavy frown was gathering. The Marquis’s lips tightened. “Damnation!” His glance flickered to Léonie’s troubled face. “Don’t let it disturb you, madame, I beg.”

“Dominique, did you—did you, in effect, mean to kill him?” she asked, her eyes on his face. He shrugged, “Oh, since I fought at all, yes.”

“I do not mind you killing people when you have reason, you know, but—but—was there a reason, mon enfant?” said her grace.

“The fellow was drunk, and you knew it, Vidal!” Rupert said.

“Perfectly.” The Marquis sipped his wine. “But so was I drunk.” Again he looked towards Léonie. What he saw in her face made him say with a kind of suppressed violence: “Why do you look at me like that? You know what I am, do you not? Do you not?”

“Here, Dominic!” his uncle said, in a voice of protest. “You’re talking to your mother, boy.”

Léonie raised an admonishing finger. “Enough, Rupert. Yes, I know, my little one, and I am very unhappy for you.” She blinked away a tear. “You are too much my son.”

“Fiddle!” said Vidal roughly. He put down his glass, the wine in it unfinished. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed the hour, and he looked quickly round at it. “I must go. Why did you come? To tell me Quarles is as good as dead? I knew it.”

“No, not for that,” Léonie replied. “I think—I think there is a billet for you from Monseigneur.”

The Marquis’s laugh held a note of recklessness. “Be sure. I have it in my pocket. Inform him, madame, that I shall wait upon him in the morning.”

There was real trouble in Léonie’s face. “Dominique, you do not seem to me to understand at all. Monseigneur is enraged. He says you must leave the country, and, oh, my dear one, I beg you not to anger him any more! You should wait on him at once.”

“Who told him?” Vidal answered. “You, Rupert?”

“Fiend seize you, do you take me for a tale-bearer? You young fool, he saw it!”

The frowning eyes stared at him. “What the devil do you mean?”

“You’d no sooner got clear of the place—and a pretty turmoil you left behind you, I can tell you—than in walks Avon with Hugh Davenant.” Lord Rupert, apparently overcome by the recollection, mopped his brow with his fine lace handkerchief.

“What, at five o’clock in the morning?” demanded the Marquis.

“It wasn’t as much as that, not but what I thought myself ’twas the wine got into my head when I clapped eyes on him. He’d been at Old White’s all night, d’ye see, playing pharaoh, and the devil put it into his head to call in at Timothy’s, to see what sort of a hell it was that his precious son had honoured with his patronage. ‘And I perceive,’ said he, ‘that it is indeed something beyond the common.’ Now I put it to you, Vidal, isn’t it Avon all over to walk in pat like that?”

The frown was lifting. A gleam shone in the Marquis’s eyes. “Of course it was inevitable. Tell me it all.”

“Lord, I was so rattled, I don’t know what happened. There was young Comyn holding a napkin to the wound you’d blown through Quarles’s chest, and someone splashing water about, and Wraxall shouting for the porter to run for a surgeon, and the rest of us in the devil of a fluster, and all at once I saw Avon standing in the doorway with his glass held up to his eye, and Davenant gaping beside him. Well, you know how it is when your father is about. There was an end to the noise; everyone was watching Avon, save Comyn—I’d say that lad is a cool hand—who went on staunching the blood as calm as you please. If you ask me, Avon saw the whole at a glance, but he chose to look all round, mighty bland, and then down at Quarles. Then he says to Davenant: ‘I was informed, my dear Hugh, that Timothy’s was unlike other hells. And I perceive,’ says he—but I told you that bit. Of course, if I’d had my wits about me, I’d have left by the window, but I don’t deny I had a deal of champagne in me. Well, your father turned his infernal quizzing-glass towards me. I was waiting for that. ‘I suppose,’ says he, ‘I need not ask where is my son.’” Lord Rupert shook his head wisely. “Y’know, he’s devilish acute, Vidal; you must grant him that.”