"And for me too," said Lady Caroline, dropping his arm. "He is a dear fellow; I hardly know which is greater, my regard for him or my sympathy with you!" And her Ladyship marched upstairs.

Meantime the agent had led Jack aside on the terrace.

"I know who sent that letter," said he. "I had my suspicions all along, and I recognised the disguised hand in a moment. It was Matthew Hunt."

"Well?" said Jack.

"Well, it was meant merely as an annoyance: a petty revenge for the handsome thrashing you gave the fellow six weeks ago--I wish I'd seen it! But that's not the point. The point is that I think I could bring it home to the brute; and I want your Grace to let me try."

"I can't. What's the good? Leave bad alone; we should only make it worse."

"Then mayn't I raise the rent of the Lower Farm?"

"No; not yet, at any rate. I mean to give the fellow a chance."

"And an invitation for the twentieth too?"

"Certainly; he's a tenant, or his father is; we can't possibly leave them out."

"Very well; your Grace knows best."

And the agent went his way.

CHAPTER X

"DEAD NUTS"

It was three o'clock in the early morning of the twentieth of August. A single jet of gas, lighting a torch in the mailed hand of a life-size man-at-arms, burnt audibly in the silent hall; making the worst of each lugubrious feature, like a match struck in a cavern. And Claude Lafont was sitting up alone, in the Poet's Corner, at work upon his birthday offering to Olivia Sellwood.

At three, however, it was finished in the rough. The poet then stretched his fingers, took a clean sheet of paper, and started upon the fair copy in his prettiest hand. It began--

"What songs have I to sing you?

What tales have I to tell?"

And there it stuck, as though these questions were indeed unanswerable; the fact being, there was another still to come, which, however, involved an execrable couplet as it stood. Claude twisted it about for half-an-hour; realised its gratuitous badness; tried not to ask this inane question at all, hunted his rhyming dictionary up and down, and found he must; and finally, with a prayer that it might impose upon Olivia, and another for forgiveness from the Muse, finished his first stanza with--

"What garlands can I bring you From Fancy's fairest dell?

Before the world grew old, dear, The lute was lightlier strung; Now all the tales are told, dear, And all the songs are sung."

It is needless to quote more. The sentiments were superior to their setting. An affectionate _camaraderie_ was employed, with success, as a cloak for those warmer feelings of whose existence in his own bosom the poor poet was now practically convinced. And the lines in themselves were not all or wholly bad; there was a certain knack in them, and here and there some charm. But if infinite pains could have made them a work of genius, that they would have been. It was almost five when Claude made his best signature at the foot of the last verse; yet there were but four of these, or thirty-two lines in all.

He put them in an envelope which he sealed deliberately with his signet-ring. The deliberation of all his private doings was enormous; neither the hour nor an empty stomach could induce briskness at the expense of pains. Yet Claude was exceedingly hungry, and the night had put an edge on his nerves. As he paced the floor the undue distinction between his steps, so soft on the rugs, and so loud on the parquetry, became exaggerated in his nervous ears; and all the silence and all the darkness of the sleeping Towers seemed to press upon that single lamp-lit, sounding room, like fathoms of wide sea upon a diver's helm.

Claude had not thought of such things while he was still at work; he had rather overdone matters, and he poured out a sparing measure of whisky from the decanter upon the table.

There were other gla.s.ses with dregs at the bottom. The air was tainted with stale smoke, and within the fender lay the remains of many cigarettes. This was why Claude was so late. He had been late in making a start. Stubbs and Llewellyn had sat up with him till the small hours.

The Poet's Corner was the one spot in which these young men seemed really at home. Here, by midnight, but seldom before, they could manage to create unto themselves their own element; for their Philistine host went early to his eccentric lair; but there were always his easy-chairs to lounge in, his whisky to drink, and Claude Lafont to listen to their talk.

Not that the poet was so good a listener as he had been once; the truth being, that he found himself a little out of touch with his clever friends--he hardly knew why. It might be the living under one roof with them; he himself would never have asked them down. Or it might be the simultaneous hourly contact with an opposite type of man--the kindly, unaffected dunce--the unburnished nugget, reeking yet of the Australian soil, but with the gold wearing brighter every day.

Certain it was that the benefit of the cousins' close companionship had not been all on one side. If the force of example had toned down some of Jack's pristine roughness of speech and manner, it had taken a like effect upon sundry peculiarities of a converse character in Claude. In a word, there had been an ideal interchange between the two, founded on a mutual liking. The amelioration of the Duke was sufficiently obvious to all; that of Claude struck Olivia especially, who had never been blind to his faults; needless to add, he was himself the last to see how he had changed. Yet he divined something of it now. As he thought of the verses he had just written, and of the critic to whom he would have submitted them in all humility a couple of months ago, he knew that he was no longer as he had been then; for he had not the faintest intention of allowing that critic to see these verses at all.

So Claude calmed his nerves, eating biscuits the while, and sipping soda-water merely tinctured with whisky; until all at once the lamp began to flicker and to smell, and the song of the birds, singing in Olivia's birthday, came at last to his ears through the plate-gla.s.s and rich curtains of the octagonal window. Then he rose; and in half a minute the lamp was out, the curtains drawn, a sash thrown up, and the risen sun shining mercilessly on the dishevelled head and blue chin and battered shirt-front of Claude Lafont.

The cool, fresh scene inspired him with delight; it was indeed a disgraceful novelty to the poet. He thought nothing of rhyming "morn"

with "dawn," and yet of this phenomenon itself he had little or no experience. He would gain some now; he also promised himself the unique pleasure of rousing the early-rising Jack. So he got out of the window, and soaked his feet in the dew, only to meet Jack emerging from his hut, with towels on his arm, as he approached it. Nor was the Duke's surprise very flattering; but his chaff was fair enough. He was himself about to bathe in the creek at the north end of the tank. Would Claude join him and then go back to the hut for an early pannikin of bush tea?

Claude would, and did, feeling (as all felt at Jack's hut) that he had been flashed through the thick of the earth, and come out in the wilds of Australia.

In the hut a log fire had burnt well up by the time they returned with wet towels and glowing skins. Over the flames hung the billy-can, with boiling water throbbing against the side. Jack lifted it down with a stick, and threw a handful of tea among the bubbles. "Shall I sweeten it?" he then asked; and, at Claude's nod, threw in another handful of brown sugar.

"There, that's real bush tea for you," continued the Duke, in a simmer of satisfaction himself as he stirred the mixture with the stick. "Now take the pannikin and dip it in. There's no milk, mind; that wouldn't be the thing at all. Here are some biscuits, and they aren't the thing either. I'd have made you a damper, only I never could strike a camp-oven; it's been trouble enough to raise the plant I've got. What do you think of the tea?"

"Capital!" cried Claude, who was seated on the bunk. And indeed the whole thing appealed to his poetic palate; for he could not forget that this hut was within half a mile of the Towers themselves, in which the Duke took evidently far less pleasure; and the many-sided contrast amused his literary sense, even while it piqued his family pride.

"How I wish it was the real thing!" said Jack, with a sigh. "I'd have a camp-oven, then, and you should have your mutton chop and damper served up hot. I used to be an artist at a damper. Then after breakfast I'd take you with me round the paddocks, and you'd help me muster a mob and drive them to the tank; and you'd hear them bleat and see them start to run when they smelt the water. My colonial oath, I can see 'em and hear 'em now! Then we'd give our mokes a drink in the middle of 'em, and we'd take a pull at our own water-bags. Then we might camp under the nearest hop-bush for a snack, and I should yard you up at the homestead, and make you know my old boss before the day was over. What a day it would be for you! You wouldn't believe the sky could get so blue or your face so red. But it's no use talking--here we are again!" And he set down his empty pannikin with another sigh.

"You wouldn't really prefer that life to this?"

"No; perhaps not; but I like to think of it, as you can see."

"Surely you like your new life best by this time? You wouldn't go back there now?"

"I like my new friends best; I wouldn't go back on them. Olivia and you, for instance."

"It's her birthday," said Claude; but a silence had intervened.

"So it is. G.o.d bless her! I haven't got her anything, because I seemed to make a mull of it with those flowers. Have you?"

"Yes, I have a trifle for her; it's rather a different thing on her birthday, you know. And--and I've written her a few verses; that's what I've been doing all night."

"Clever dog!" said Jack enviously. "See what it is to be a man of genius; here's where it comes in so handy. And has Llewellyn done her something, too?"

"Yes; a portrait of herself."

"Well, let him label it to that effect, or she may put her foot in it like me. He never shows me his blooming drawings now. But I wish you'd let me see your poem."

"It's not all that; it's only verses, and pretty bad ones too; still, you shall hear them if you like, and if I can remember them," said Claude, who would have found much more difficulty in forgetting them so soon. "I only wish they were better! There are some lamentable lines here and there. I tried to iron them out, but they wouldn't all come."

"Go on!" cried Jack, lighting his pipe. "I'll tell you whether they're good or bad. You go ahead!"

And Claude did so, only too glad of a second opinion of any kind; for he had little or no intellectual self-reliance, and was ever ready to think his productions good or bad with their latest critic. On this occasion, however, he would have been better pleased with the general enthusiasm of the Duke, had not the latter proceeded to point out particular merits, when it transpired that the ingenuity of the rhymes was what impressed him most. Knowing where they came from, the poet himself was unable to take much pride in this feature.

"They're splendid!" reiterated Jack. "You ought to be the laureate, old man, and I've a good mind to tell 'em so in the House of Lords. You're far and away ahead of Shakespeare at rhyming; he hardly ever rhymes at all; I know that; because there used to be a copy of him in my old hut.

I say, I like that about the garlands from Fancy's dell; that's real poetry, that is. But do you mind giving me the last four lines again?"