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I was returning along the Barkway road from a meadow where I had been to look to the new lambs, in my working dress, when I heard a horse coming behind me. I stepped aside to let him go by, when I heard myself called. "My man," said the voice. "Can you tell me where is Mr. Jermyn's house?" "Yes, sir," I said. "I am going there myself."
Then came Jermyn's answer of "This way, your Majesty." He flung the door wide open, so that the Duke might enter. The two men passed into the room to examine the horrible owl. The Duke chuckled as the machine moved round to him. "How bright he keeps," he said. "Yes," Jermyn answered. "He won't need painting for a long while yet."
Jermyn's Club the previous evening; the other was a miniature set in diamonds of a girl, dark and black-haired, with an insolent piquant beauty. "I've seen that face before somewhere," mused the superintendent. "Green, there's a 'Who's Who' on the desk behind you. I want Sir Ralph Fairfield." Rapidly he scanned the score of lines of small type devoted to the baronet.
The duchess, who had taken her under her protection ever since she had declined placing herself under that of the duke, sounded Jermyn's intentions towards her, and was satisfied with the assurances she received from a man, whose probity infinitely exceeded his merit in love: he therefore let all the court see that he was willing to marry her, though, at the same time, he did not appear particularly desirous of hastening the consummation.
To the initiated, these bills, seemingly innocent, gave warning of the Duke's plan. Most of these thirty knew other loyalists, to whom, when the time came, they gave the word. When the time came we were only about eighty men all told. That is not a large force, is it, for the invasion of a populous kingdom? They talked it out for a little while, making improvements on Mr. Jermyn's plan.
"So you are he. And what is your name, sir?" I told him. "I am Mr. Jermyn's cousin," I said. "And I have been looking after his lambs for him. I would there was some spiritual shepherd who would look after us. We have not heard mass since Christmas." He seemed altogether easier at that. "Why, that can be remedied to-morrow," he said. "If you have an altar stone and linen and vestments.
I replied that I'd heard that he was a Spanish merchant, a friend of Mr. Jermyn's. As for Mr. Jermyn, he knew' an uncle of mine. I had helped him to recover his pocket-book; that was all that I knew of him; that was why he had given me my present post as servant. More I dared not say; for I remembered the Duke's sharp sword on my chest.
It was a favorite boast of his that he once poisoned a whole village; and that he himself tampered with the Lady Jermyn's boats you can take my word, for I have heard him describe how he left it to the last night, and struck the blows during the applause at the concert on the quarter-deck. He said it might have come out about the gold in the gig, during the fire. It was safer to run no risks.
I have all else with me." We had these, and I told him so. "Then you mean to lie at Hare Street to-night, sir?" I said. "I had hoped to do so," he said. "I am come from Lincolnshire; and I was recommended to Mr. Jermyn's if I could not get so far as Standon; and I cannot, for my horse is lame."
In Jermyn's talk, however, and his own simplicity, he soon forgot the strangeness of this her behaviour. To the eyes of Jermyn, Cosmo appeared, mainly from his simplicity, younger than he was, while the doctor's manners, and his knowledge of the world, made Cosmo regard him as a much greater man than, in any sense or direction, he really was.
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