“My dear Torr,” replied the major, “it’s a mistake for you to turn out so early. You’ve tried to quarrel before breakfast every day I’ve been here. It’s the worst morning temper I ever heard of in my life. You ought to have tea and eggs and things brought to you in your room, and not show yourself for at least two hours afterward—you really ought. It isn’t fair to your friends.”
The door opened and still another tall man came in. He nodded to Pirie as he passed him, with a tolerant “Well, major,” and went straight to the dishes by the fire.
“Pirie’s got it into his head we oughtn’t to shoot to-day, Gus,” said Mr. Edward.
The other rose with a dish in his hands.
“It is dark,” he assented, glancing toward the window. “Afraid of pottin’ a beater, major?”
“No—it’s about the duke,” explained Edward. “It seems some of the fellows funk the thing—they think he’ll hear the guns—they want to go to church instead, or something of that sort.”
Augustine Torr, M.P., looked at his brother inquiringly. The tie of blood between them was obvious enough. They were both slender as well as tall; their small round heads merging indistinguishably behind into flat, broad necks, seemed identical in contour; they had the same light coarse hair, the same florid skins, even the same little yellow mustaches. The differences were harder to seek. Edward, though he had borne Her Majesty’s commission for some years, was not so well set up about the shoulders as his younger and civilian brother. Augustine, on the other hand, despite his confident carriage of himself, produced the effect of being Edward’s inferior in simple force of character. It was at once to his credit and his disparagement that he had the more amiable nature of the two.
“How do you mean—the duke?” he asked. “Is there a change?”
Edward put out his closed lips a little, and shook his head. Major Pirie sprinkled salt on his muffin while he explained.
“All there is of it is this,” he said. “There was just an idea that with the—with your grandfather—dyin’ in the house—it might look a little better to give the first the go-by. Nobody’d have a word to say against shootin’ to-morrow.”
“Well, but what the hell”—Augustine groped his way with hesitancy—“I don’t understand—we’ve been shootin’ partridges for a month, and how are pheasants any different? And as for the duke—why, of course one’s sorry and all that—but he’s been dyin’ since June, and the birds have some rights—or rather, I should say—what I mean is—”
“That’s what I said,” put in Edward, to cover the collapse of his brother’s argument.
Major Pirie frowned a little. “Partridges are another matter,” he said testily.
“Damned if I know what you’re driving at,” avowed Augustine. He paused with fork in air at his own words. “Drivin’ at,” he repeated painstakingly. “Drivin’ at pheasants, eh? Not bad, you know. Pass the mustard, Pirie.”
“God!” said the major, with gloom. “You know well enough what I mean. To work through fields miles off—that’s one thing. To shoot the covers here under the duke’s nose, with the beaters messin’ about—that’s quite another. However that’s your affair, not mine.”
“But don’t you see,” urged Augustine, “what difference does a day make? There’ll be just as much racket to-morrow as to-day. It isn’t reasonable, you know.”
“It was merely what you might call a sentiment,” said the major, in the half apologetic tone of a man admitting defeat. He looked the least sentimental of warriors as he went on with his breakfast—a longfaced, weather-beaten, dull-eyed man of the late forties.
Four other men who came in now at brief intervals, with few or no words of salutation to the company, and who lounged about helping themselves to what caught their fancy in the breakfast, were equally removed from the suspicion of adding a sentimental element to the atmosphere. They made little talk of any kind, and no mention whatever of that absurd qualm about the First which had been reported to have germinated among them.
Edward had reached the stage of filling his pipe. Walking to the mantel for a light, it occurred to him to ring the bell first. “Her ladyship breakfastin’ in her room?” he asked the youngster who answered the summons.
“Her ladyship’s woman has just gone up with it, sir,” he replied.
“That’s all right,” said Edward, and forthwith struck the match. “Send in Davis and Morton to me, and ask Barlow for those Brazilian cigars of mine—the small huntin’ ones. What wheels were those I heard on the gravel? If it’s the traps we shan’t want them to-day. We’re walkin’ across.”
“I will make inquiries, sir,” said the domestic, and went out.
The room had brightened perceptibly, and Captain Edward was in a better temper. He moved over to the sideboard and filled a pocket-flask from one of the decanters in the old-fashioned case. As an afterthought, he also filled a small glass, and gulped its contents neat. “We’re off in ten minutes now,” he called out to the men about the table, some of whom had already lit their pipes. “What do you fellows want to take with you? My tip is this rum.”
“Hardly cold enough for rum, is it?” asked one, drifting languidly toward the sideboard. Most of the others had risen to their feet.
A slender, sad-faced, gentlemanly-looking old man in evening clothes had entered the room, and stood now at Captain Edward’s elbow and touched it with his hand. “I—beg—your—pardon—sir,” he said, in the conventional phrase.
Edward, listening to what a companion was saying, turned absent-mindedly to the butler. Then he happened to remember something. “Damn you, Barlow, you get duller every day!” he snapped. “You know perfectly well what cigars I take out of doors!”
“I—beg—your—pardon—sir,” repeated the elderly person. He spoke in a confidential murmur. “I thought you would like to know, sir—Lord Julius has come.”
The young man looked at him, silently revolving the intelligence, a puzzled frown between his pale brows. A furtive something in the butler’s composed expression struck him. “What of it?” he demanded, angrily. “What are you whispering for? He’s old enough to take care of himself, isn’t he?”
The butler thrust out his dry underlip a trifle. “I thought you would like to know, sir,” he reiterated.
“Well, you’re wrong. I don’t like to know!” The man’s tone—an indefinable, lurking suggestiveness in his face and eyes and voice—vexed Mr. Edward exceedingly. It annoyed him still more to note that his companions had tacitly turned their backs, and were affecting great preoccupation in something else.
He kept a wrathful eye on Barlow, as the latter bowed, turned, moved to the door and opened it. Of course, a man musn’t slang servants, his irritated thought ran, but the covert impertinence in this old menial’s manner was something no longer to be borne. The impulse to call the elderly fool back and send him packing on the instant, tingled hotly in the young man’s blood. He even opened his lips to speak, but reflection checked his tongue. It would be bad form, for one thing; for another, perhaps he was not quite in the position
