“All right, young blighted Albert,” he said briskly. “I’ll go against my better nature this once and chance it. And now, young feller me lad, you just ‘and over that ticket of yours! You know what I’m alloodin’ to! That ticket you ‘ad at the sweep, the one with ‘Mr. X’ on it.”
Albert’s indomitable spirit triumphed for a moment over his stricken body.
“That’s likely, ain’t it!”
Keggs sighed—the sigh of a good man who has done his best to help a fellow-being and has been baffled by the other’s perversity.
“Just as you please,” he said sorrowfully. “But I did ‘ope I shouldn’t ‘ave to go to ‘is lordship and tell ‘im ‘ow you’ve deceived him.”
Albert capitulated. “‘Ere yer are!” A piece of paper changed hands. “It’s men like you wot lead to ‘arf the crime in the country!”
“Much obliged, me lad.”
“You’d walk a mile in the snow, you would,” continued Albert pursuing his train of thought, “to rob a starving beggar of a ha’penny.”
“Who’s robbing anyone? Don’t you talk so quick, young man. I’m doing the right thing by you. You can ‘ave my ticket, marked ‘Reggie Byng’. It’s a fair exchange, and no one the worse!”
“Fat lot of good that is!”
“That’s as it may be. Anyhow, there it is.” Keggs prepared to withdraw. “You’re too young to ‘ave all that money, Albert. You wouldn’t know what to do with it. It wouldn’t make you ‘appy. There’s other things in the world besides winning sweepstakes. And, properly speaking, you ought never to have been allowed to draw at all, being so young.”
Albert groaned hollowly. “When you’ve finished torkin’, I wish you’d kindly have the goodness to leave me alone. I’m not meself.”
“That,” said Keggs cordially, “is a bit of luck for you, my boy. Accept my ‘eartiest felicitations!”
Defeat is the test of the great man. Your true general is not he who rides to triumph on the tide of an easy victory, but the one who, when crushed to earth, can bend himself to the task of planning methods of rising again. Such a one was Albert, the page-boy. Observe Albert in his attic bedroom scarcely more than an hour later. His body has practically ceased to trouble him, and his soaring spirit has come into its own again. With the exception of a now very occasional spasm, his physical anguish has passed, and he is thinking, thinking hard. On the chest of drawers is a grubby envelope, addressed in an ill-formed hand to:
R. Byng, Esq.
On a sheet of paper, soon to be placed in the envelope, are written in the same hand these words:
“Do not dispare! Remember! Fante hart never won fair lady. I shall watch your futur progres with considurable interest. Your Well-Wisher.”
The last sentence is not original. Albert’s Sunday-school teacher said it to Albert on the occasion of his taking up his duties at the castle, and it stuck in his memory. Fortunately, for it expressed exactly what Albert wished to say. From now on Reggie Byng’s progress with Lady Maud Marsh was to be the thing nearest to Albert’s heart.
And George meanwhile? Little knowing how Fate has changed in a flash an ally into an opponent he is standing at the edge of the shrubbery near the castle gate. The night is very beautiful; the banked spots on his hands and knees are hurting much less now; and he is full of long, sweet thoughts. He has just discovered the extraordinary resemblance, which had not struck him as he was climbing up the knotted sheet, between his own position and that of the hero of Tennyson’s Maud, a poem to which he has always been particularly addicted—and never more so than during the days since he learned the name of the only possible girl. When he has not been playing golf, Tennyson’s Maud has been his constant companion.
“Queen rose of the rosebud garden of girls Come hither, the dances are done, In glass of satin and glimmer of pearls. Queen lily and rose in one; Shine out, little head, sunning over with curls To the flowers, and be their sun.”
The music from the ballroom flows out to him through the motionless air. The smell of sweet earth and growing things is everywhere.
“Come into the garden, Maud, For the black bat, night, hath flown, Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone; And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, And the musk of the rose is blown.”
He draws a deep breath, misled young man. The night is very beautiful. It is near to the dawn now and in the bushes live things are beginning to stir and whisper.
“Maud!”
Surely she can hear him?
“Maud!”
The silver stars looked down dispassionately. This sort of thing had no novelty for them.
Chapter 15
Lord Belpher’s twenty-first birthday dawned brightly, heralded in by much twittering of sparrows in the ivy outside his bedroom. These Percy did not hear, for he was sound asleep and had had a late night. The first sound that was able to penetrate his heavy slumber and rouse him to a realization that his birthday had arrived was the piercing cry of Reggie Byng on his way to the bath-room across the corridor. It was Reggie’s disturbing custom to urge himself on to a cold bath with encouraging yells; and the noise of this performance, followed by violent splashing and a series of sharp howls as the sponge played upon the Byng spine, made sleep an impossibility within a radius of many yards. Percy sat up in bed, and cursed Reggie silently. He discovered that he had a headache.
Presently the door flew open, and the vocalist entered in person, clad in a pink bathrobe and very tousled and rosy from the tub.
“Many happy returns of the day, Boots, old thing!”
Reggie burst rollickingly into song.
“I’m twenty-one today! Twenty-one today! I’ve got the key of the door! Never been twenty-one before! And father says I can do what I like! So shout Hip-hip-hooray! I’m a jolly good fellow, Twenty-one today.”
Lord Belpher scowled morosely.
“I wish you wouldn’t make that infernal noise!”
“What infernal noise?”
“That singing!”
“My God! This man has wounded me!” said Reggie.
“I’ve a headache.”
“I thought you would have, laddie, when I saw you getting away with the liquid last night. An X-ray photograph of your liver would show something that looked like a crumpled oak-leaf studded with hob-nails. You ought to take more exercise, dear heart. Except for sloshing that policeman, you haven’t done anything athletic for years.”
“I wish you wouldn’t harp on that affair!”
Reggie sat down on the bed.
“Between ourselves, old man,” he said confidentially, “I also—I myself—Reginald Byng, in person—was perhaps a shade polluted during the evening. I give you my honest word that just after dinner I saw three versions of your uncle, the bishop, standing in a row side by side. I tell you, laddie, that for a moment I thought I had strayed into a Bishop’s Beano at Exeter Hall or the Athenaeum or wherever it is those chappies collect in gangs. Then the three bishops sort of congealed into one bishop, a trifle blurred about the outlines, and I felt relieved. But what convinced me that I had emptied a flagon or so too many was a rather rummy thing that occurred later on. Have you ever happened, during one of these feasts of reason and flows of soul, when you were bubbling over with joie-de-vivre—have you ever happened to see things? What I mean to say is, I had a deuced odd experience last night. I could have sworn that one of the waiter-chappies was that fellow who knocked off your hat in Piccadilly.”
Lord Belpher, who had sunk back on to the pillows at Reggie’s entrance and had been listening to his talk with only intermittent attention, shot up in bed.
“What!”
“Absolutely! My mistake, of course, but there it was. The fellow might have been his double.”
“But you’ve never seen the man.”
“Oh yes, I have. I forgot to tell you. I met him on the links yesterday. I’d gone out there alone, rather expecting to have a round with the pro., but, finding this lad there, I suggested that we might go round together. We did eighteen holes, and he licked the boots off me. Very hot stuff he was. And after the game he took me off to his cottage and gave me a drink. He lives at the cottage next door to Platt’s farm, so, you see, it was the identical chappie. We got extremely matey. Like brothers. Absolutely! So you can understand what a shock it gave me when I found what I took to be the same man serving bracers to the multitude the same evening. One of those nasty jars that cause a fellow’s head to swim a bit, don’t you know, and make him lose confidence in himself.”