She would have left him then, but he stopped her with a smiling interrogation. "Well?" he said.

She waited.

"What about the customary privilege?" he went on.

"What is that?"

"Why, you have not said 'I told you so.'"

She smiled at that. "How stupid of me!" said she. "Oh! but you forgave my Frenchman, and for that I owe you some consideration."

"Did I, faith?" said he. "'Twas mighty near the compounding of a felony, a shocking lapse in a Justice-General. To tell the truth, I was only too glad, in MacTaggart's interest, while he was ill, to postpone disclosures so unpleasant as are now the talk of the country; and like you, I find him infinitely worse in these disclosures than I guessed."

The d.u.c.h.ess went away, the Duke grew grave, reflecting on his duty. What it clearly was he had not decided until it was late in the evening, and then he sent for his Chamberlain.

CHAPTER XL -- THE DAY OF JUDGMENT

Simon went to the library and saw plainly that the storm was come.

"Sit down, Simon, sit down," said his Grace and carefully sharped a pen.

The Chamberlain subsided in a chair; crossed his legs; made a mouth as if to whistle. There was a vexatious silence in the room till the Duke got up and stood against the chimney-piece and spoke.

"Well," said he, "I could be taking a liberty with the old song and singing 'Roguery Parts Good Company' if I were not, so far as music goes, as timber as the table there and in anything but a key for music even if I had the faculty. Talking about music, you have doubtless not heard the ingenious ballant connected with your name and your exploits.

It has been the means of informing her Grace upon matters I had preferred she knew nothing about, because I liked to have the women I regard believe the world much better than it is. And it follows that you and I must bring our long connection to an end. When will it be most convenient for my Chamberlain to send me his resignation after 'twelve years of painstaking and intelligent service to the Estate,' as we might be saying, on the customary silver salver?"

Simon cursed within but outwardly never quailed.

"I know nothing about a ballant," said he coolly, "but as for the rest of it, I thank G.o.d I can be taking a hint as ready as the quickest. Your Grace no doubt has reasons. And I'll make bold to say the inscription it is your humour to suggest would not be anyway extravagant, for the twelve years have been painstaking enough, whatever about their intelligence, of which I must not be the judge myself."

"So far as that goes, sir," said the Duke, "you have been a pattern. And it is your gifts that make your sins the more heinous; a man of a more sluggish intelligence might have had the ghost of an excuse for failing to appreciate the utmost loathsomeness of his sins."

"Oh! by the Lord Harry, if it is to be a sermon--!" cried Simon, jumping to his feet.

"Keep your chair, sir! keep your chair like a man!" said the Duke. "I am thinking you know me well enough to believe there is none of the common moralist about me. I leave the preaching to those with a better conceit of themselves than I could afford to have of my indifferent self. No preaching, cousin, no preaching, but just a word among friends, even if it were only to explain the reason for our separation."

The Chamberlain resumed his chair defiantly and folded his arms.

"I'll be cursed if I see the need for all this preamble," said he; "but your Grace can fire away. It need never be said that Simon MacTaggart was feared to account for himself when the need happened."

"Within certain limitations, I daresay that is true," said the Duke.

"I aye liked a tale to come to a brisk conclusion," said the Chamberlain, with no effort to conceal his impatience.

"This one will be as brisk as I can make it," said his Grace. "Up till the other day I gave you credit for the virtue you claim--the readiness to answer for yourself when the need happened. I was under the delusion that your duel with the Frenchman was the proof of it."

"Oh, d.a.m.n the Frenchman!" cried the Chamberlain with contempt and irritation. "I am ready to meet the man again with any arm he chooses."

"With any arm!" said the Duke dryly. "'Tis always well to have a whole one, and not one with a festering sore, as on the last occasion. Oh yes," he went on, seeing Simon change colour, "you observe I have learned about the old wound, and what is more, I know exactly where you got it."

"Your Grace seems to have trustworthy informants," said the Chamberlain less boldly, but in no measure abashed. "I got that wound through your own hand as surely as if you had held the foil that gave it, for the whole of this has risen, as you ought to know, from your sending me to France."

"And that is true, in a sense, my good sophist. But I was, in that, the unconscious and blameless link in your accursed destiny. I had you sent to France on a plain mission. It was not, I make bold to say, a mission on which the Government would have sent any man but a shrewd one and a gentleman, and I was mad enough to think Simon Mac-Taggart was both.

When you were in Paris as our agent--"

"Fah!" cried Simon, snapping his fingers and drawing his face in a grimace. "Agent, quo' he! for G.o.d's sake take your share of it and say spy and be done with it!"

The Duke shrugged his shoulders, listening patiently to the interruption. "As you like," said he. "Let us say spy, then. You were to learn what you could of the Pretender's movements, and incidentally you were to intromit with certain of our settled agents at Versailles.

Doubtless a sort of espionage was necessary to the same. But I make bold to say the duty was no ign.o.ble one so long as it was done with some sincerity and courage, for I count the spy in an enemy's country is engaged upon the gallantest enterprise of war, using the shrewdness that alone differs the quarrel of the man from the fury of the beast, and himself the more admirable, because his task is a thousand times more dangerous than if he fought with the claymore in the field."

"Doubtless! doubtless!" said the Chamberlain. "That's an old tale between the two of us, but you should hear the other side upon it."

"No matter; we gave you the credit and the reward of doing your duty as you engaged, and yet you mixed the business up with some extremely dirty work no sophistry of yours or mine will dare defend. You took our money, MacTaggart--and you sold us! Sit down, sit down and listen like a man!

You sold us; there's the long and the short of it, and you sold our friends at Versailles to the very people you were sent yourself to act against. Countersap with a vengeance! We know now where Bertin got his information. You betrayed us and the woman Cecile Favart in the one filthy transaction."

The Chamberlain showed in his face that the blow was home. His mouth broke and he grew as grey as a rag.

"And that's the way of it?" he said, after a moment's silence.

"That's the way of it," said the Duke. "She was as much the agent--let us say the spy, then--as you were yourself, and seems to have brought more cunning to the trade than did our simple Simon himself. If her friend Montaiglon had not come here to look for you, and thereby put us on an old trail we had abandoned, we would never have guessed the source of her information."

"I'll be cursed if I have a dog's luck!" cried Simon.

Argyll looked pityingly at him. "So!" said he. "You mind our old country saying, _Ni droch dhuine dan da fein_--a bad man makes his own fate?"

"Do you say so?" cried MacTaggart, with his first sign of actual insolence, and the Duke sighed.

"My good Simon," said he, "I do not require to tell you so, for you know it very well. What I would add is that all I have said is, so far as I am concerned, between ourselves; that's my only tribute to our old acquaintanceship. Only I can afford to have no more night escapades at Doom or anywhere else with my fencibles, and so, Simon, the resignation cannot be a day too soon."

"Heaven forbid that I should delay it a second longer than is desirable, and your Grace has it here and now! A fine _fracas_ all this about a puddock-eating Frenchman! I do not value him nor his race to the extent of a pin. And as for your Grace's Chamberlain--well, Simon MacTaggart has done very well hitherto on his own works and merits."

"You may find, for all that," says his Grace, "that they were all summed up in a few words--'he was a far-out cousin to the Duke.' _Sic itur ad astra_."

At that Simon put on his hat and laughed with an eerie and unpleasant stridency. He never said another word, but left the room. The sound of his unnatural merriment rang on the stair as he descended.

"The man is fey," said the Duke to himself, listening with a startled gravity.

CHAPTER XLI -- CONCLUSION

Simon MacTaggart went out possessed by the devils of hatred and chagrin.

He saw himself plainly for what he was in truth--a p.r.i.c.ked bladder, his career come to an ign.o.ble conclusion, the single honest scheme he had ever set his heart on brought to nought, and his vanity already wounded sorely at the prospect of a contemptuous world to be faced for the remainder of his days. All this from the romantics of a Frenchman who walked through life in the step of a polonaise, and a short season ago was utterly unaware that such a man as Simon MacTaggart existed, or that a woman named Olivia bloomed, a very flower, among the wilds!

At whatever angle he viewed the congregated disasters of the past few weeks, he saw Count Victor in their background--a sardonic, smiling, light-hearted Nemesis; and if he detested him previously as a merely possible danger, he hated him now with every fibre of his being as the cause of his upheaval.