The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,
The intertissued robe of gold and pearl,
The farced title, nor the tide of pomp
That beats upon the high shores of the world
that can add any dignity to noble blood. And yet, to have beheld, day after day, the head of one of the oldest and noblest houses in England standing here, cut off from your fellowship, stripped of his historic honors, robed only in the justice of his cause—this cannot have failed to move your pity and indignation.
“My lords, it is your happy privilege to restore to his grace the Duke of Denver these traditional symbols of his exalted rank. When the clerk of this House shall address to you severally the solemn question: Do you find Gerald, Duke of Denver, Viscount St. George, guilty or not guilty of the dreadful crime of murder, every one of you may, with a confidence unmarred by any shadow of doubt, lay his hand upon his heart and say, ‘Not guilty, upon my honor.’ ”
XIX
Who Goes Home?
Drunk as a lord? As a class they are really very sober.
Judge Cluer, in Court
While the Attorney-General was engaged in the ungrateful task of trying to obscure what was not only plain, but agreeable to everybody’s feelings, Lord Peter hauled Parker off to a Lyons over the way, and listened, over an enormous dish of eggs and bacon, to a brief account of Mrs. Grimethorpe’s dash to town, and a long one of Lady Mary’s cross-examination.
“What are you grinning about?” snapped the narrator.
“Just natural imbecility,” said Lord Peter. “I say, poor old Cathcart. She was a girl! For the matter of that, I suppose she still is. I don’t know why I should talk as if she’d died away the moment I took my eyes off her.”
“Horribly self-centered, you are,” grumbled Mr. Parker.
“I know. I always was from a child. But what worries me is that I seem to be gettin’ so susceptible. When Barbara turned me down—”
“You’re cured,” said his friend brutally. “As a matter of fact, I’ve noticed it for some time.”
Lord Peter sighed deeply. “I value your candor, Charles,” he said, “but I wish you hadn’t such an unkind way of putting things. Besides—I say, are they coming out?”
The crowd in Parliament Square was beginning to stir and spread. Sparse streams of people began to drift across the street. A splash of scarlet appeared against the grey stone of St. Stephen’s. Mr. Murbles’s clerk dashed in suddenly at the door.
“All right, my lord—acquitted—unanimously—and will you please come across, my lord?”
They ran out. At sight of Lord Peter some excited bystanders raised a cheer. The great wind tore suddenly through the Square, bellying out the scarlet robes of the emerging peers. Lord Peter was bandied from one to the other, till he reached the center of the group.
“Excuse me, your grace.”
It was Bunter. Bunter, miraculously, with his arms full of scarlet and ermine, enveloping the shameful blue serge suit which had been a badge of disgrace.
“Allow me to offer my respectful congratulations, your grace.”
“Bunter!” cried Lord Peter. “Great God, the man’s gone mad! Damn you, man, take that thing away,” he added, plunging at a tall photographer in a made-up tie.
“Too late, my lord,” said the offender, jubilantly pushing in the slide.
“Peter,” said the Duke. “Er—thanks, old man.”
“All right,” said his lordship. “Very jolly trip and all that. You’re lookin’ very fit. Oh, don’t shake hands—there, I knew it! I heard that man’s confounded shutter go.”
They pushed their way through the surging mob to the cars. The two Duchesses got in, and the Duke was following, when a bullet crashed through the glass of the window, missing Denver’s head by an inch, and ricocheting from the windscreen among the crowd.
A rush and a yell. A big bearded man struggled for a moment with three constables; then came a succession of wild shots, and a fierce rush—the crowd parting, then closing in, like hounds on the fox, streaming past the Houses of Parliament, heading for Westminster Bridge.
“He’s shot a woman—he’s under that bus—no, he isn’t—hi!—murder!—stop him!” Shrill screams and yells—police whistles blowing—constables darting from every corner—swooping down in taxis—running.
The driver of a taxi spinning across the bridge saw the fierce face just ahead of his bonnet, and jammed on the brakes, as the madman’s fingers closed for the last time on the trigger. Shot and tyre exploded almost simultaneously; the taxi slewed giddily over to the right, scooping the fugitive with it, and crashed horribly into a tram standing vacant on the Embankment dead-end.
“I couldn’t ’elp it,” yelled the taxi-man, “ ’e fired at me. Ow, Gawd, I couldn’t ’elp it.”
Lord Peter and Parker arrived together, panting.
“Here, constable,” gasped his lordship; “I know this man. He has an unfortunate grudge against my brother. In connection with a poaching matter—up in Yorkshire. Tell the coroner to come to me for information.”
“Very good, my lord.”
“Don’t photograph that,” said Lord Peter to the man with the reflex, whom he suddenly found at his elbow.
The photographer shook his head.
“They wouldn’t like to see that, my lord. Only the scene of the crash and the ambulance-men. Bright, newsy pictures, you know. Nothing gruesome”—with an explanatory jerk of the head at the great dark splotches in the roadway—“it doesn’t pay.”
A red-haired reporter appeared from nowhere with a notebook.
“Here,” said his lordship, “do you want the story? I’ll give it you now.”
There was not, after all, the slightest trouble in the matter of Mrs. Grimethorpe. Seldom, perhaps, has a ducal escapade resolved itself with so little embarrassment. His grace, indeed, who was nothing if not a gentleman, braced himself gallantly for a regretful and sentimental interview. In all his rather stupid affairs he had never run away from a scene, or countered a storm of sobs with that maddening “Well, I’d better be going now” which has led to so many despairs and occasionally to cold shot. But, on this occasion, the whole business fell
