The Just Men of Cordova/Chapter 11

went to Lincoln in an evil frame of mind. He had reserved a compartment, and cursed his luck when he discovered that his reservation adjoined that of Horace Gresham.

He paced the long platform at King’s Cross, waiting for his guests. The Earl of Verlond had promised to go down with him and to bring Lady Mary, and it was no joy to Sir Isaac to observe on the adjoining carriage the label, “Reserved for Mr. Horace Gresham and party.”

Horace came along about five minutes before the train started. He was as cheerful as the noonday sun, in striking contrast to Sir Isaac, whose night had not been too wisely spent. He nodded carelessly to Sir Isaac’s almost imperceptible greeting.

The baronet glanced at his watch and inwardly swore at the old earl and his caprices. It wanted three minutes to the hour at which the train left. His tongue was framing a bitter indictment of the old man when he caught a glimpse of his tall, angular figure striding along the platform.

“Thought we weren’t coming. I suppose?” asked the earl, as he made his way to the compartment. “I say, you thought we weren’t coming?” he repeated, as Lady Mary entered the compartment, assisted with awkward solicitude by Sir Isaac.

“Well, I didn’t expect you to be late.”

“We are not late,” said the earl.

He settled himself comfortably in a corner seat—the seat which Sir Isaac had specially arranged for the girl. Friends of his and of the old man who passed nodded. An indiscreet few came up to speak.

“Going up to Lincoln, Lord Verlond?” asked one idle youth.

“No,” said the earl sweetly, “I am going to bed with the mumps.” He snarled the last word, and the young seeker after information fled.

“You can sit by me, Ikey—leave Mary alone,” said the old man sharply. “I want to know all about this horse. I have £150 on this thoroughbred of yours; it is far more important than those fatuous inquiries you intend making of my niece.”

“Inquiries?” grumbled Sir Isaac resentfully.

“Inquiries!” repeated the other. “You want to know whether she slept last night; whether she finds it too warm in this carriage; whether she would like a corner seat or a middle seat, her back to the engine or her face to the engine. Leave her alone, leave her alone, Ikey. She’ll decide all that. I know her better than you.”

He glared, with that amusing glint in his eyes, across at the girl. “Young Gresham is in the next carriage. Go and tap at the window and bring him out. Go along!”

“He’s got some friends there, I think, uncle,” said the girl.

“Never mind about his friends,” said Verlond irritably. “What the devil does it matter about his friends? Aren’t you a friend? Go and tap at the door and bring him out.”

Sir Isaac was fuming.

“I don’t want him in here,” he said loudly. “You seem to forget, Verlond, that if you want to talk about horses, this is the very chap who should know nothing about Timbolino.”

“Ach!” said the earl testily, “don’t you suppose he knows all there is to be known. What do you think sporting papers are for?”

“Sporting papers can’t tell a man what the owner knows,” said Sir Isaac importantly.

“They tell me more than he knows,” he said. “Your horse was favourite yesterday morning—it isn’t favourite any more, Ikey.”

“I can’t control the investments of silly asses,” grumbled Sir Isaac.

“Except one.” said the earl rudely. “But these silly asses you refer to do not throw their money away—remember that, Ikey. When you have had as much racing as I have had, and won as much money as I have won, you’ll take no notice of what owners think of their horses. You might as well ask a mother to give a candid opinion of her own daughter’s charms as to ask an owner for unbiased information about his own horse.”

The train had slipped through the grimy purlieus of London and was now speeding through green fields to Hatfield. It was a glorious spring day, mellow with sunlight: such a day as a man at peace with the world might live with complete enjoyment.

Sir Isaac was not in this happy position, nor was he in a mood to discuss either the probity of racing men or the general question of the sport itself. He observed with an inward curse the girl rise and walk, apparently carelessly, into the corridor. He could have sworn he heard a tap at the window of the next compartment, but in this, of course, he was wrong. She merely moved across the vision of the little coterie who sat laughing and talking, and in an instant Horace had come out.

“It is not my fault this, really,” she greeted him, with a little flush in her cheeks. “It was uncle’s idea.”

“Your uncle is an admirable old gentleman,” said Horace fervently. “I retract anything I may have said to his discredit.”

“I will tell him,” she said, with mock gravity.

“No, no,” cried Horace, “I don’t want you to do that exactly.”

“I want to talk to you seriously,” said she suddenly. “Come into our compartment. Uncle and Sir Isaac are so busy discussing the merits of Timbolino—is that the right name?” He nodded, his lips twitching with amusement. “That they won’t notice anything we have to say,” she concluded.

The old earl gave him a curt nod. Sir Isaac only vouchsafed a scowl. It was difficult to maintain anything like a confidential character in their conversation, but by manoeuvring so that they spoke only of the more important things when Sir Isaac and his truculent guest were at the most heated point of their argument, she was able to unburden the anxiety of her mind.

“I am worried about uncle,” she said in a low tone.

“Is he ill?” asked Horace.

She shook her head. “No, it isn’t his illness—yet it may be. But he is so contradictory; I am so afraid that it might react to our disadvantage. You know how willing he was that you should… ” She hesitated, and his hand sought hers under the cover of an open newspaper.

“It was marvellous,” he whispered, “wasn’t it? I never expected for one moment that the old dev—that your dear uncle,” he corrected himself, “would have been so amenable.”

She nodded again. “You see,” she said, taking advantage of another heated passage between the old man and the irritated baronet, “what he does so impetuously he can undo just as easily. I am so afraid he will turn and rend you.”

“Let him try,” said Horace. “I am not easily rent.”

Their conversation was cut short abruptly by the intervention of the man they were discussing.

“Look here, Gresham,” snapped the earl shortly, “you’re one of the cognoscenti, and I suppose you know everything. Who are the Four Just Men I hear people talking about?”

Horace was conscious of the fact that the eyes of Sir Isaac Tramber were fixed on him curiously. He was a man who made no disguise of his suspicion.

“I know no more than you,” said Horace. “They seem to me to be an admirable body of people who go about correcting social evils.”

“Who are they to judge what is and what is not evil?” growled the earl, scowling from under his heavy eyebrows. “Infernal cheek! What do we pay judges and jurymen and coroners and policemen and people of that sort for, eh? What do we pay taxes for, and rent for, and police rates, and gas rates, and water rates, and every kind of dam’ rate that the devilish ingenuity of man can devise? Do we do it that these jackanapes can come along and interfere with the course of justice? It’s absurd! It’s ridiculous!” he stormed.

Horace threw out a protesting hand. “Don’t blame me,” he said.

“But you approve of them,” accused the earl. “Ikey says you do, and Ikey knows everything—don’t you, Ikey?”

Sir Isaac shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I didn’t say Gresham knew anything about it,” he began lamely.

“Why do you lie, Ikey; why do you lie?” asked the old man testily. “You just told me that you were perfectly sure that Gresham was one of the leading spirits of the gang.”

Sir Isaac, inured as he was to the brutal indiscretions of his friends, went a dull red. “Oh, I didn’t mean that exactly,” he said awkwardly and a little angrily. “Dash it, Lord Verlond, don’t embarrass a fellow by rendering him liable to heavy damages an all that sort of thing.”

Horace was unperturbed by the other’s confusion. “You needn’t bother yourself,” he said coolly. “I should never think of taking you to a court of justice.”

He turned again to the girl, and the earl claimed the baronet’s attention. The old man had a trick of striking off at a tangent; from one subject to another he leapt like a will-o’-the-wisp. Before Horace had framed half a dozen words the old man was dragging his unwilling victim along a piscatorial road, and Sir Isaac was floundering out of his depths in a morass—if the metaphor be excused—of salmon-fishing, trout-poaching, pike-fishing—a sport on which Sir Isaac Tramber could by no means deem himself an authority.

It was soon after lunch that the train pulled into Lincoln. Horace usually rented a house outside the town, but this year he had arranged to go and return to London on the same night. At the station he parted with the girl.

“I shall see you on the course,” he said. “What are your arrangements? Do you go back to town to-night?”

She nodded. “Is this a very important race for you to win?” she asked, a little anxiously.

He shook his head. “Nobody really bothers overmuch about the Lincolnshire Handicap,” he said. “You see, it’s too early in the season for even the gamblers to put their money down with any assurance. One doesn’t know much, and it is almost impossible to tell what horses are in form. I verily believe that Nemesis will win but everything is against her.

“You see, the Lincoln,” continued Horace doubtfully, “is a race which is not usually won by a filly, and then, too, she is a sprinter. I know sprinters have won the race before, and every year have been confidently expected to win it again; but the averages are all against a horse like Nemesis.”

“But I thought,” she said in wonder, “that you were so confident about her.”

He laughed a little. “Well, you know, one is awfully confident on Monday and full of doubts on Tuesday. That is part of the game; the form of horses is not half as inconsistent as the form of owners. I shall probably meet a man this morning who will tell me that some horse is an absolute certainty for the last race of the day. He will hold me by the buttonhole and he will drum into me the fact that this is the most extraordinarily easy method of picking up money that was ever invented since racing started. When I meet him after the last race he will coolly inform me that he did not back that horse, but had some tip at the last moment from an obscure individual who knew the owner’s aunt’s sister. You mustn’t expect one to be consistent.

“I still think Nemesis will win,” he went on, “but I am not so confident as I was. The most cocksure of students gets a little glum in the face of the examiner.”

The earl had joined them and was listening to the conversation with a certain amount of grim amusement. “Ikey is certain Timbolino will win,” he said, “even in the face of the examiner. Somebody has just told me that the examiner is rather soft under foot.”

“You mean the course?” asked Horace, a little anxiously.

The earl nodded. “It won’t suit yours, my friend,” he said. “A sprinter essaying the Lincolnshire wants good going. I can see myself taking £1,500 back to London to-day.”

“Have you backed Timbolino?”

“Don’t ask impertinent questions,” said the earl curtly. “And unnecessary questions,” he went on. “You know infernally well I’ve backed Timbolino. Don’t you believe me? I’ve backed it and I’m afraid I’m not going to win.”

“Afraid?” Whatever faults the old man had, Horace knew him for a good loser.

The earl nodded. He was not amused now. He had dropped like a cloak the assumption of that little unpleasant leering attitude. He was, Horace saw for the first time, a singularly good-looking old man. The firm lines of the mouth were straight, and the pale face, in repose, looked a little sad.

“Yes. I’m afraid.” he said. His voice was even and without the bitter quality of cynicism which was his everlasting pose. “This race makes a lot of difference to some people. It doesn’t affect me very much,” he said, and the corner of his mouth twitched a little. “But there are people,” he went on seriously, “to whom this race makes a difference between life and death.” There was a sudden return to his usual abrupt manner. “Eh? How does that strike you for good melodrama, Mr. Gresham?”

Horace shook his head in bewilderment. “I’m afraid I don’t follow you at all. Lord Verlond.”

“You may follow me in another way,” said the earl briskly. “Here is my car. Good morning.”

Horace watched him out of sight and then made his way to the racecourse. The old man had puzzled him not a little. He bore, as Horace knew, a reputation which, if not unsavoury, was at least unpleasant. He was credited with having the most malicious tongue in London. But when Horace came to think, as he did, walking along the banks of the river on his way to the course, there was little that the old man had ever said which would injure or hurt innocent people. His cynicism was in the main directed against his own class, his savageness most manifested against notorious sinners. Men like Sir Isaac Tramber felt the lash of his tongue.

His treatment of his heir was, of course, inexcusable. The earl himself never excused it; he persistently avoided the subject, and it would be a bold man who would dare to raise so unpleasant a topic against the earl’s wishes.

He was known to be extraordinarily wealthy, and Horace Gresham had reason for congratulating himself that he had been specially blessed with this world’s goods. Otherwise his prospects would not have been of the brightest. That he was himself enormously rich precluded any suggestion (and the suggestion would have been inevitable) that he hunted Lady Mary’s fortune. It was a matter of supreme indifference to himself whether she inherited the Verlond millions or whether she came to him empty-handed.

There were other people in Lincoln that day who did not take so philosophical a view of the situation.

Sir Isaac had driven straight to the house on the hill leading to the Minster, which Black had engaged for two days. He was in a very bad temper when at last he reached his destination. Black was sitting at lunch. Black looked up as the other entered. “Hullo, Ikey,” he said, “come and sit down.”

Sir Isaac looked at the menu with some disfavour. “Thanks,” he said shortly, “I’ve lunched on the train. I want to talk to you.”

“Talk away,” said Black, helping himself to another cutlet. He was a good trencherman—a man who found exquisite enjoyment in his meals.

“Look here. Black,” said Isaac, “things are pretty desperate. Unless that infernal horse of mine wins to-day I shall not know what to do for money.”

“I know one thing you won’t be able to do,” said Black coolly, “and that is, come to me. I am in as great straits as you.” He pushed back his plate and took a cigar-case from his pocket. “What do we stand to win on this Timbolino of yours?”

“About £25,000,” said Sir Isaac moodily. “I don’t know if the infernal thing will win. It would be just my luck if it doesn’t. I am afraid of this horse of Gresham’s.”

Black laughed softly. “That’s a new fear of yours,” he said. “I don’t remember having heard it before.”

“It’s no laughing matter,” said the other. “I had my trainer, Tubbs, down watching her work. She is immensely fast. The only thing is whether she can stay the distance.”

“Can’t she be got at?” asked Black.

“Got at!” said the other impatiently. “The race will be run in three hours’ time! Where do you get your idea of racing from?” he asked irritably. “You can’t poison horses at three hours’ notice. You can’t even poison them at three days’ notice, unless you’ve got the trainer in with you. And trainers of that kind only live in novels.”

Black was carefully cutting the end of his cigar. “So if your horse loses we shall be in High Street, Hellboro’?” he reflected. “I have backed it to save my life.” He said this in grim earnest.

He rang a bell. The servant came in. “Tell them to bring round the carriage,” he said. He looked at his watch. “I am not particularly keen on racing, but I think I shall enjoy this day in the open. It gives one a chance of thinking.”