“Captain Dalroy,” said Ivywood, simply, “you seem to be under a misapprehension, which I think it would be hardly honourable to leave undisturbed. Whatever these extraordinary events may mean and whatever be fitting in the case of this gentleman, when I spoke of the police coming, I meant they were coming for you and your confederate.”
“For me!” cried the Captain, with a stupendous air of surprise. “Why, I have never done anything naughty in my life.”
“You have been selling alcohol contrary to Clause V. of the Act of–”
“But I’ve got a sign,” cried Dalroy, excitedly, “you told me yourself it was all right if I’d got a sign. Oh, do look at our new sign! The ‘Sign of the Agile Agent.’”
Mr. Bullrose had remained silent, feeling his position none of the most dignified, and hoping his employer would go away. But Lord Ivywood looked up at him, and thought he had wandered into a planet of monsters.
As he slowly recovered himself Patrick Dalroy said briskly, “All quite correct and conventional, you see. You can’t run us in for not having a sign; we’ve rather an extra life-like one. And you can’t run us in as rogues and vagabonds either. Visible means of subsistence,” and he slapped the huge cheese under his arm with his great flat hand, so that it reverberated like a drum. “Quite visible. Perceptible,” he added, holding it out suddenly almost under Lord Ivywood’s nose. “Perceptible to the naked eye through your lordship’s eyeglasses.”
He turned abruptly, burst open the pantomime door behind him and bowled the big cheese down the tunnel with a noise like thunder, which ended in a cry of acceptation in the distant voice of Mr. Humphrey Pump. It was the last of their belongings left at this end of the tunnel, and Dalroy turned again, a man totally transfigured.
“And now, Ivywood,” he said, “what can I be charged with? Well, I have a suggestion to make. I will surrender to the police quite quietly when they come, if you will do me one favour. Let me choose my crime.”
“I don’t understand you,” answered the other coolly, “what crime? What favour?”
Captain Dalroy unsheathed the straight sword that still hung on his now shabby uniform. The slender blade sparkled splendidly in the moonlight as he pointed it straight at Dr. Gluck.
“Take away his sword from the little pawnbroker,” he said. “It’s about the length of mine; or we’ll change if you like. Give me ten minutes on that strip of turf. And then it may be, Ivywood, that I shall be removed from your public path in a way a little worthier of enemies who have once been friends, than if you tripped me up with Bow Street runners, of whose help every ancestor you have would have been ashamed. Or, on the other hand, it may be–that when the police come there will be something to arrest me for.”
There was a long silence, and the elf of irresponsibility peeped out again for an instant in Dalroy’s mind.
“Mr. Bullrose will see fair play for you, from a throne above the lists,” he said. “I have already put my honour in the hands of Mr. Hibbs.”
“I must decline Captain Dalroy’s invitation,” said Ivywood at last, in a curious tone. “Not so much because–”
Before he could proceed, Leveson came racing across the copse, hallooing, “The police are here!”
Dalroy, who loved leaving everything to the last instant, tore up the sign, with Bullrose literally hanging to it, shook him off like a ripe fruit, and then plunged into the tunnel, the clamorous Quoodle at his heels. Before even Ivywood (the promptest of his party) could reach the spot, he had clashed to the wood door and bolted it across with his wooden staple. He had not had time even to sheath his sword.
“Break down this door,” said Lord Ivywood, calmly. “I noticed they haven’t finished loading their cart.”
Under his directions, and vastly against their will, Bullrose and Leveson lifted the tree-trunk vacated by Hibbs, and swinging it thrice as a battering-ram, burst in the door. Lord Ivywood instantly sprang into the entrance.
A voice called out to him quietly from the other end of the tunnel. There was something touching and yet terrible about a voice so human coming out of that inhuman darkness. If Philip Ivywood had been really a poet, and not rather its opposite, an aesthete, he would have known that all the past and people of England were uttering their oracle out of the cavern. As it was, he only heard a publican wanted by the police.–Yet even he paused, and indeed seemed spellbound.
“My lord, I would like a word. I learned my catechism and never was with the Radicals. I want you to look at what you’ve done to me. You’ve stolen a house that was mine as that one’s yours. You’ve made me a dirty tramp, that was a man respected in church and market. Now you send me where I might have cells or the Cat. If I might make so bold, what do you suppose I think of you? Do you think because you go up to London and settle it with lords in Parliament and bring back a lot of papers and long words, that makes any difference to the man you do it to? By what I can see, you’re just a bad and cruel master, like those God punished in the old days; like Squire Varney the weasels killed in Holy Wood. Well, parson always said one might shoot at robbers, and I want to tell your lordship,” he ended respectfully, “that I have a gun.”
Ivywood instantly stepped into the darkness, and spoke in a voice shaken with some emotion, the nature of which was never certainly known.
“The police are here,” he said, “but I’ll arrest you myself.”
A shot shrieked and rattled through the thousand echoes of the tunnel. Lord Ivywood’s legs doubled and twisted under him, and he collapsed on the earth with a bullet above his knee.
Almost at the same instant a shout and a bark announced that the cart had started as a complete equipage. It was even more than complete, for the instant before it moved Mr. Quoodle had sprung into it, and, as it was driven off, sat erect in it, looking solemn.
CHAPTER XIV
THE CREATURE THAT MAN FORGETS
DESPITE the natural hubbub round the wound of Lord Ivywood and the difficulties of the police in finding their way to the shore, the fugitives of the Flying Inn must almost certainly have been captured but for a curious accident, which also flowed, as it happened, from the great Ivywood debate on Vegetarianism.
The comparatively late hour at which Lord Ivywood had made his discovery had been largely due to a very long speech which Joan had not heard, and which was delivered immediately before the few concluding observations she had heard from Dr. Gluck. The speech was made by an eccentric, of course. Most of those who attended, and nearly all of those who talked, were eccentric in one way or another. But he was an eccentric of great wealth and good family, an M.P., a J.P., a relation of Lady Enid, a man well known in art and letters; in short, a personality who could not be prevented from being anything he chose, from a revolutionist to a bore. Dorian Wimpole had first become famous outside his own class under the fanciful title of the Poet of the Birds. A volume of verse, expanding the several notes or cries of separate song-birds into fantastic soliloquies of these feathered philosophers, had really contained a great deal of ingenuity and elegance. Unfortunately, he was one of those who always tend to take their own fancies seriously, and in whose otherwise legitimate extravagance there is too little of the juice of jest. Hence, in his later works, when he explained “The Fable of the Angel,” by trying to prove that the fowls of the air were creatures higher than man or the anthropoids, his manner was felt to be too austere; and when he moved an amendment to Lord Ivywood’s scheme for the model village called Peaceways, urging that its houses should all follow the more hygienic architecture of nests hung in trees, many regretted that he had lost his light touch. But, when he went beyond birds and filled his poems with conjectural psychology about all the Zoological Gardens, his meaning became obscure; and Lady Susan had even described it as his bad period. It was all the more uncomfortable reading because he poured forth the imaginary hymns, love-songs and war-songs of the lower animals, without a word of previous explanation. Thus, if someone seeking for an ordinary drawing-room song came on lines that were headed “A Desert Love Song,” and which began–