Verplank nodded. “I dare say. But not if he had taken your wife.”
The suggestion, penetrating the earl’s placidity, punctured it. He threw back his head. “By George! If he had, I’d kill him.”
“There, you see!”
Silverstairs puffed at his cigar. His placidity now was reforming itself.
“Yes,” he answered. “But then in taking yours, he did it after she was divorced. You can’t have him out for that.”
“All the same there are one too many of us.”
Silverstairs filled his mouth with smoke. Longly, with an air of considering the situation he expelled it. Then he said:
“It is what I call damned awkward. But what the deuce can you do?”
“What can I do?” Verplank with an uplift of the chin repeated. “Why, if only for the manner in which he acted last night—”
“I know,” Silverstairs interrupted. “The missis told me. He behaved like a fidgety Frenchman. I grant you that. But there were no words, nothing that you could put a finger on.”
Through an adjacent door a man strolled in. He had his hat on and in one gloved hand he held a thin umbrella of which the handle was studded with gold nails. With the other hand he smoothed a black moustache. Through a monocle he was surveying the room. He looked careless and cynical.
Deferentially a maître d’hôtel addressed him. Ignoring the man he waved his umbrella at Silverstairs.
Silverstairs waved his hand. He turned to Verplank. “Here’s de Fresnoy. He can put us straight. Let’s ask him to join us.”
Rising, he greeted the Parisian, invited him to the table, introduced Verplank, speaking as he did so in French, with an accent frankly barbarous which de Fresnoy seemed to enjoy.
The latter raised his hat to Verplank, confided it to the maître d’hôtel, gave him the umbrella also, while another waiter drew up for him a chair.
“Thanks,” he said in an interval of these operations. “I see you have breakfasted. If you don’t mind my eating while you smoke—”
Seating himself he turned to the waiter, a man short and stout, completely bald, with large dyed whiskers and an air of repressed satisfaction.
“Listen, Léopold, and note well what I say. To begin with do not attempt to tell me what you wish me to eat. You have heard? Good! Listen again. A dozen Ostendes, an omelette, a pear. Nothing else. Not a crumb. Yes, some Eau de Vals. Allez!”
Léopold bowed. “Perfectly, monsieur le baron. I shall have the honour of serving monsieur le baron with what he has been good enough to be willing to desire.”
Again the waiter bowed. But behind the oleaginousness of his speech a severity had entered, one which intimated that in this preserve of gastronomics such an order was unworthy.
“These gentlemen?” he added, his eyes moving from Verplank to Silverstairs. “Some coffee? A liqueur?”
But now, in fluent French, Verplank was addressing de Fresnoy. “Silverstairs and I have been having an argument. In your quality of Parisian, will you tell us whether a man can have another out for looking impertinently at him?”
De Fresnoy adjusted his collar, patted his neckcloth. “But certainly, most assuredly. To look impertinently at a man constitutes an attack on his self esteem, which in itself is an integral part of his moral wealth. To omit to return a man’s bow, to neglect to take his proffered hand, to regard him in an offensive manner, are one and all so many assaults on his dignity.”
Verplank, pleased with this view of things, smiled. “Thanks. Mine has been assailed and I was in doubt how to rebuke the aggressor.”
“It is simple as ‘Good day.’ You have only to select two representatives and get them to put themselves in communication with him. If then he refuses to have friends of his meet yours, or if, afterward, he will neither apologise or fight, he is outlawed.”
De Fresnoy, as he spoke, made a gesture, a wide movement of the arm which indicated, or was intended to indicate, the uttermost limits of the world.
“It is Barouffski,” Silverstairs, with some idea that de Fresnoy might be aware of the anterior complication, threw out.
“Barouffski!” de Fresnoy repeated, his head held appreciatively a little to one side. “In a bout he is very clever. Barring d’Arcy, Helley-Quetgen”—and myself he was about to add, but throwing the veil he desisted—“I don’t know his equal. How he is on the field, personally I cannot say. But there, the absence of buttons, the absence of masks, the inevitable emotion, the sight of the other man, the consciousness of an injury to be maintained or avenged, the consciousness too of the definite character of any thrust you may give and particularly of any thrust you may receive, these things have such an effect that often the cleverest acts like a fool. On the boards, fencing is an exercise, it is an amusement. On the field, it is another man’s blood—or yours. Though, after all, one is rarely killed except by one’s seconds.”
He turned to Verplank. “You fence? Or is it that you shoot?”
Verplank leaned back in his chair. “Oh, I suppose I can fire a gun.”
Silverstairs laughed. “I say now! You are too modest by half.” He looked at de Fresnoy. “Verplank is one of the crack shots of America.”
De Fresnoy turned again to Verplank. “You should demand pistols then. Barouffski draws well, but at twenty paces he is less sure of himself. Have you selected your seconds?”
“I suppose I may count on Silverstairs for one—”
The young earl nodded. “That’s of course, and perhaps you, de Fresnoy, will act with me.”
The Parisian smoothed his moustache. “I shall be much honoured. In that case, however, as necessary preliminary, I shall have to ask to be made acquainted with all the circumstances.”
But now Léopold, bearing a dish on which were oysters green as stagnant scum, approached and with an air of infinite tenderness, much as though it were a baby, placed it before de Fresnoy.
Leisurely he began to eat.
Verplank, who had been looking out of the window, leaned
