“My dear Mrs. Titus,” I murmured in my dismay, “it isn’t to be considered. I am sure you won’t persist in this when I tell you that Tarnowsy’s agents are sure to see you and—”
She laughed. “Tarnowsy’s agents! Why should they be here?”
“They seem to be everywhere.”
“I can assure you there is none within fifty miles of Schloss Rothhoefen. Our men are in the city. Four of them preceded me. This morning I had Mr. Bangs telephone to the hotel where the chief operative is staying—in the guise of an American tourist, and he does it very cleverly for an Englishman, too,—and he assures me that there is absolutely no danger. Even Mr. Bangs is satisfied.”
“I am forced to say that I am by no means satisfied that it is a safe or wise thing to do, Mrs. Titus,” I said, with more firmness than I thought I possessed.
She raised her delicate eyebrows in a most exasperating well-bred, admonitory way.
“I am quite sure, Mr. Smart, that Dillingham is a perfectly trustworthy detective, and—”
“But why take the slightest risk?”
“It is necessary for me to see Dillingham, that is the long and short of it,” she said coldly. “One can’t discuss things over a telephone, you know. Mr. Bangs understands. And, by the way, Mr. Smart, I have taken the liberty of calling up the central office of the telephone company to ask if they can run an extension wire to my dressing-room. I hope you do not mind.”
“Not in the least. I should have thought of it myself.”
“You have so much to think of, poor man. And now will you be good enough to have Hawkes order the man to row me across the—”
“I am very sorry, Mrs. Titus,” said I firmly, “but I fear I must declare myself. I cannot permit you to go into the town today.”
She was thunderstruck. “Are you in earnest?” she cried, after searching my face rather intently for a moment.
“Unhappily, yes. Will you let me explain—”
“The idea!” she exclaimed as she drew herself to her full height and withered me with a look of surpassing scorn. “Am I to regard myself as a prisoner, Mr. Smart?”
“Oh, I beg of you, Mrs. Titus—” I began miserably.
“Please answer my question.”
Her tone cut me like the lash of a whip. My choler rose.
“I do not choose to regard myself as a jailer. My only object in opposing this—”
“I have never known anything so absurd.” Two bright red spots appeared in her cheeks. “Your attitude is most extraordinary. However, I shall go to the city this morning, Mr. Smart. Pray give me the credit of having sense enough to—Ah, Colingraft.”
The two sons approached from the breakfast-room, where they had been enjoying a ten o’clock chop. Colingraft, noting his mother’s attire, accelerated his speed and was soon beside us.
“Going out, Mother?” he enquired, flicking the ash from his cigarette.
“If Mr. Smart will be good enough to withdraw his opposition,” she said icily.
He gave me a sharp look. “What’s up?”
“Mrs. Titus doesn’t seem to realise the risk she runs in—”
“Risk? Do you suppose, Mr. Smart, I would jeopardise my daughter’s—”
“What’s up?” repeated Colingraft insistently.
“Mr. Smart calmly informs me that I am not to go into the city.”
“I don’t see that Mr. Smart has anything to say about it,” said her son coolly. “If he—” He paused, glaring.
I looked him squarely in the eye. If he had possessed the acumen of a pollywog he would have seen that my Dutch was up.
“One moment, Mr. Titus,” I said, setting my jaw. “I have this to say about it. You are guests in my house. We are jointly interested in the effort to protect the Countess Tarnowsy. I consider it to be the height of imprudence for any member of your family to venture into the city, now or at any time during her stay in this castle. I happen to know that Tarnowsy is having me watched for some purpose or other. I don’t think he suspects that the Countess is here, but I greatly fear that he believes I am interested in her cause. He suspects me. You have heard of our recent encounter. He knows my position pretty well by this time. Mrs. Titus says that the man Dillingham assures her there is no danger. Well, I can only say that Dillingham is a fool, and I don’t purpose having my own safety threatened by—”
“Your safety?” exclaimed he. “I like that! What have you got to be afraid of?”
“You seem to forget that I am harbouring a fugitive from justice,” I said flatly.
Mrs. Titus gasped. “How dare you—” “The Countess Tarnowsy is wanted by the authorities for kidnapping, and I think you know the facts quite as well as I do,” I went on harshly. “God knows I am doing my best to protect her. I am risking more than you seem to appreciate. If she is found here, my position isn’t likely to be an enviable one. I am not thinking solely of myself, believe me, but after all I contend that I have a right to assert myself in a crisis that may affect me vitally. I trust you will see my position and act accordingly,—with consideration, if nothing else.”
Mrs. Titus did not take her eyes off mine while I was speaking. There was an expression of utter amazement in them. No one had ever opposed her before in just this way, I gathered. She didn’t know what to make of it.
“I fear you exaggerate the extent of your peril, Mr. Smart,” she said drily. “Of course, I have no desire to put you in jeopardy, but it seems to me—”
“Leaving me out of the case altogether, don’t you think it is a bit unfair to the Countess?” I asked in some heat. “She doesn’t want to go to jail.”
“Jail?” she cried angrily.
“That’s no way to speak about—” began Colingraft furiously.
I broke in rashly. “If you please, Mr. Titus, be good enough to keep your temper. I have no desire to appear harsh and arbitrary, but I can see that it is necessary to speak plainly. There isn’t anything in the world I will not do to help you and the Countess in this unfortunate business, Mrs. Titus. I hope you believe me when I say as much. I am her friend; I want to be yours if you will let me. But I reserve the right to say what shall be and what shall not be done as long as you are under my roof. Just a moment, Mr. Titus! I think we are quite agreed that your sister is to depart from here on the fourteenth of the month. I am to be her escort, so to speak, for a considerable distance, in company with Mr. Bangs. Well, it must be clearly understood that not one of you is to show his or her face outside these walls until after that journey is over. That’s plain-speaking, isn’t it?”
“I shall go where I please, and I’ll go to the town today—” roared Colingraft, getting no farther for the reason that his mother, seeing that I was desperately in earnest, gave vent to a little cry of alarm and clutched her big son by the shoulder. She begged him to listen to reason!
“Reason!” he gasped.
“If you—or any of you—put a foot outside these walls,” I declared, “you will not be allowed to re-enter. That’s flat!”
“By cricky!” fell in fervent admiration from the lips of Jasper, Jr. I glanced at his beaming, astonished face. He positively was grinning! “Good for you! You’re a wonder, Mr. Smart! By cricky! And you’re dead right. We’re darn fools!”
“Jasper!” gasped Mrs. Titus.
“Good for you, Jasper!” I cried warmly, and took the hand he proffered.
“Colingraft, please take me to my room,” murmured the mother. “I—I feel faint. Send for Aline. Ask Mr. Bangs to come to me at once.”
I bowed stiffly. “I am sorry, Mrs. Titus, to have been so harsh, so assertive—”
She held up both hands. “I never was so spoken to in all my life, Mr. Smart. I shall not forget it to my dying day.”
She walked away from me, her pretty head held high and her chin suspiciously aquiver. Colingraft hastened after her, but not without giving me a stare in which rage and wonder struggled for the mastery.
I ran my hand over my moist
brow.
“Gee!” said Jasper, Jr. “You’ve corked her all right, all right.” He followed me into the study and I couldn’t get rid of him for hours.
Later in the forenoon the Countess, with a queer little smile on her lips, told me that her mother considered me the most wonderful, the most forceful character she had ever encountered. I brightened up at that.
But Colingraft was not yet through with me.
CHAPTER XVII
I SEE TO THE BOTTOM OF THINGS
He sought me out just before luncheon. I was in the courtyard, listening patiently to Jasper Jr.’s theories and suggestions concerning the restoration of the entire facade of the castle, and what he’d do if he were in my place. Strange to say, I was considerably entertained; he was not at all offensive; on the contrary, he offered his ideas in a pleasantly ingenuous way, always supplementing them with some such salve as: “Don’t you think so, Mr. Smart?” or “I’m sure you have thought of it yourself,” or “Isn’t that your idea, too?” or “You’ve done wonders with the joint, old man.”
Colingraft came directly up to where we were standing. There was trouble in his eye.
“See here, Mr. Smart,” he began austerely. “I’ve got something to say to you, and I’m not the sort to put it off. I appreciate what you’ve done for Aline and all that sort of thing, but your manner today has been intolerable, and we’ve got to come to an understanding.”
I eyed him closely. “I suppose you’re about to suggest that one or the other of us must—evacuate—get out, so to speak,” said I.
“Don’t talk rubbish. You’ve got my mother bawling her eyes out upstairs, and wishing she were dead. You’ve got to come off this high horse of yours. You’ve got to apologise to her, and damned quick, at that. Understand?”
“Nothing will give me greater joy than to offer her my most abject apology, Mr. Titus, unless it would be her unqualified forgiveness.”
“You’ll have to withdraw everything you said.”
“I’ll withdraw everything except my ultimatum in respect to her putting a foot outside these walls. That still stands.”
“I beg to differ with you.”
“You may beg till you’re black in the face,” said I coolly.
He swallowed hard. His face twitched, and his hands were clenched.
“You are pretty much of a mucker, Mr. Smart,” he said, between his teeth. “I’m sorry my sister has fallen into your hands. The worst of it is, she seems satisfied with everything you do. Good Lord! What she can see in you is beyond my comprehension. Protection! Why you couldn’t protect her from the assault of a chicken.”
“Are you trying to insult me, Mr. Titus?”
“You couldn’t resent it if I were. There never was an author with enough moral backbone to—”
“Wait! You are her brother. I don’t want to have trouble with you. But if you keep on in this strain, Mr. Titus, I shall be compelled to thresh you soundly.”
He fairly gasped. “Th—thresh me!” he choked out. Then he advanced.
Much to his surprise—and, strangely enough, not to my own—I failed to retreat. Instead, I extended my left fist with considerable abruptness and precision and he landed on his back.
I experienced a sensation of unholy joy. Up to that moment I had wondered whether I could do it with my left hand.
I looked at Jasper, Jr. He was staring at me in utter bewilderment.
“Good Lord! You—you’ve knocked him down!”
“I didn’t think I could do it,” said I hazily.
He sprang to his brother’s side, and assisted him to a sitting posture.
“Right to the jaw,” shouted Jasper, with a strange enthusiasm.
“Left,” I corrected him.
Colingraft gazed about him in a stupid, vacant fashion for a moment, and then allowed his glazed eyes to rest upon me. He sat rather limply, I thought.
“Are you hurt, Colly?” cried Jasper, Jr.
A sickly grin, more of surprise than shame, stole over Colingraft’s face. He put his hand to his jaw; then to the back of his head.
“By Jove!” he murmured. “I—I didn’t think he had it in him. Let me get up!”
Jasper, Jr. was discreet. “Better let well enough alone, old—”
“I intend to,” said Colingraft, as he struggled to his feet.
For a moment he faced me, uncertainly.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Titus,” said I calmly.
“You—you are a wonder!” fell from his lips. “I’m not a coward, Mr. Smart. I’ve boxed a good deal in my time, but—by Jove, I never had a jolt like that.”
He turned abruptly and left us. We followed him slowly toward the steps. At the bottom he stopped and faced me again.
“You’re a better man than I thought,” he said. “If you’ll bury the hatchet, so will I. I take back what I said to you, not because I’m afraid of you, but because I respect you. What say? Will you shake hands?”
The surly, arrogant expression was gone from his face. In its place was a puzzled, somewhat inquiring look.
“No hard feeling on my part,” I cried gladly. We shook hands. Jasper, Jr. slapped me on the back. “It’s a most distressing, atavistic habit I’m getting into, knocking people down without rhyme or reason.”
“I daresay you had reason,” muttered Colingraft. “I got what was coming to me.” An eager light crept into his handsome eyes. “By Jove, we can get in some corking work with the gloves while I’m here. I box quite a bit at home, and I miss it travelling about like this. What say to a half-hour or so every day? I have the gloves in one of my trunks. I’m getting horribly seedy. I need stirring up.”
“Charmed, I’m sure,” I said, assuming an enthusiasm I did not feel. Put on the gloves with this strapping, skillful boxer? Not I! I was firmly resolved to stop while my record was good. In a scientific clash with the gloves he would soon find out what a miserable duffer I was.
“And Jappy, here, is no slouch. He’s as shifty as the dickens.”
“The shiftier the better,” said I, with great aplomb. Jasper, Jr., stuck out his chest modestly, and said: “Oh, piffle, Colly.” But just the same I hadn’t the least doubt in my mind that Jasper could “put it all over me.” It was a rather sickening admission, though strictly private.
We made our way to my study, where I mildly suggested that we refrain from mentioning our little encounter to Mrs. Titus or the Countess. I thought Colingraft was especially pleased with the idea. We swore secrecy.
“I’ve always been regarded as a peaceful, harmless grub,” I explained, still somewhat bewildered by the feat I had performed, and considerably shaken by the fear that I was degenerating into a positive ruffian. “You will believe me, I hope, when I declare that I was merely acting in self-defence when I—”
He actually laughed. “Don’t apologise.” He could not resist the impulse to blurt out once more: “By Jove, I didn’t think you could do it.”
“With my left hand, too,” I said wonderingly. Catching myself up, I hastily changed the subject.
A little later on, as Colingraft left the room, slyly feeling of his jaw, Jasper, Jr. whispered to me excitedly: “You’ve got him eating out of your hand, old top.”
Things were coming to a pretty pass, said I to myself when I was all alone. It certainly is a pretty pass when one knocks down the ex-husband and the brother of the woman he loves, and quite without the least suspicion of an inherited pugnacity.
I had a little note from the Countess that afternoon, ceremoniously delivered by Helene Marie Louise Antoinette. It read as follows:
“You did Colingraft a very good turn when you laid him low this morning. He is tiresomely interested in his prowess as a box-maker, or a boxster, or whatever it is in athletic parlance. He has been like a lamb all afternoon and he really can’t get over the way you whacked him. (Is whack the word?) At first he was as mum as could be about it, but I think he really felt relieved when I told him I had seen the whole affair from a window in
my hall. You see it gave him a chance to explain how you got in the whack, and I have been obliged to listen to intermittent lectures on the manly art of self-defence all afternoon, first from him, then from Jappy. I have a headache, and no means of defence. He admits that he deserved it, but I am not surprised. Colly is a sporting chap. He hasn’t a mean drop of blood in his body. You have made a friend of him. So please don’t feel that I hold a grudge against you for what you did. The funny part of it all is that mamma quite agrees with him. She says he deserved it! Mamma is wonderful, really, when it comes to a pinch. She has given up all thought of ‘putting a foot outside the castle.’ Can you have luncheon with us tomorrow? Would it be too much trouble if we were to have it in the loggia? I am just mad to get out-of-doors if only for an hour or two in that walled-in spot. Mr. Poopendyke has been perfectly lovely. He came up this morning to tell me that you haven’t sneezed at all and there isn’t the remotest chance now that you will have a cold. It seems he was afraid you might. You must have a very rugged constitution. Britton told Blake that most men would have died from exposure if they had been put in your place. How good you are to me.
“ALINE T.”
“P. S.—I may come down to see you this evening.”
* * * *
I shall skip over the rather uninteresting events of the next two or three days. Nothing of consequence happened, unless you are willing to consider important two perfectly blissful nights of sleep on my part. Also, I had the pleasure of taking the Countess “out walking” in my courtyard, to use a colloquialism: once in the warm, sweet sunshine, again ’neath the glow of a radiant moon. She had not been outside the castle walls, literally, in more than five weeks, and the colour leaped back into her cheeks with a rush that delighted me. I may mention in passing that I paid particular attention to her suggestion concerning my dilapidated, gone-to-seed garden, although I had been bored to extinction by Jasper, Jr. when he undertook to enlighten me horticulturally. She agreed to come forth every day and assist me in building the poor thing up; propping it, so to speak.
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