Page:Leon Wilson - Ruggles of Red Gap.djvu/310



HREE days later came the satisfying answer to my cable message:

"Damn! Sailing Wednesday.—."

Glad I was he had used the cable. In a letter there would doubtless have been still other words improper to a peer of England.

Belknap-Jackson thereafter bore himself with a dignity quite tremendous even for him. Graciously aloof, he was as one carrying an inner light. "We hold them in the hollow of our hand," said he, and both his wife and himself took pains on our own thoroughfare to cut the Honourable George dead, though I dare say the poor chap never at all noticed it. They spoke of him as "a remittance man"—the black sheep of a noble family. They mentioned sympathetically the trouble his vicious ways had been to his brother, the Earl. Indeed, so mysteriously important were they in allusions of this sort that I was obliged to caution them, lest they let out the truth. As it was, there ran through the town an undercurrent of puzzled suspicion. It was intimated that we had something in our sleeves.

Whether this tension was felt by the Honourable George, I had no means of knowing. I dare say not, as he is 296