A Poached Peerage.

by William Magnay.

CHAPTER I

A pretty girl looked out of the low-silled coffee-room window of the _Quorn Arms_ at Great Bunbury, and threw a glance of roguish invitation at a watchful young man who was pretending to be busy in the courtyard.

Then she disappeared. The young man lost no time in throwing down his broom, and, with a manifestly a.s.sumed air of indifference, approached the window. He looked in warily, then glanced round behind him, and next moment had thrown his leg over the sill and was in the room. The girl, with her back to the window, was polishing a bra.s.s candlestick with a vigour which suggested that the occupation left no room for less material thoughts. Also that she was, for a smart young woman, strangely un.o.bservant of the fact that a man had entered by the window, until an arm round her waist brought the fact to her notice. Even then she did not start or cry out, merely disengaging herself from the expected caress by a self-possessed and apparently well practised twist.

"I can't stop a moment, Tom," she remarked coolly; "only I saw you outside. Father's in the bar."

"And I've been hanging about a good half-hour to see you, Mercy," her swain declared impressively. "I say, as time's short, don't let's waste it. Give us a kiss."

For answer Miss Mercy Popkiss turned her head aside at a right angle as though suddenly attracted by something in the street. An att.i.tude of preoccupation does not, however, necessarily imply refusal; under certain circ.u.mstances it even stands for an invitation. As such Mr.

Thomas Sparrow unhesitatingly regarded it.

"One more," he pleaded coaxingly, as Miss Popkiss bent away from his somewhat ravenous embrace.

"Wait a bit," she said. "I've something to tell you. I'm going to leave here."

"What, leave the _Quorn Arms_?" exclaimed Mr. Sparrow blankly.

"Yes, truly. I'm going to be still-room maid at the Towers. You see,"

she went on to explain cheerfully, "father doesn't like my being here, having to wait on the riff-raff as well as the gentry. He says it is not the best training for a young lady; and when father says a thing, that thing's settled. They are all swells at the Towers; lords and ladies and toffs from London. It will be fine."

But Mr. Sparrow was far from sharing her jubilation. "The Towers!" he exclaimed disconsolately. "Why, they be four mile off, or more.

You'll forget me, Mercy, among all them fine folk; lords, flunkeys and valets and butlers and swells like that, with their dashin' London ways."

"Oh, don't you look so silly," the girl remonstrated archly. "n.o.blemen and butlers and all that sort aren't anything particular to me. If you'd smarten yourself up a bit instead of looking like a ploughman, you might get a place there too. Especially now the new Lord Quorn is coming home and Colonel Hemyock will have to turn out."

Mr. Sparrow perked up a little. "Ah," he observed with an air of indifferentism to the warmer subject, "Lord Quorn; he that has been found in Australy. I suppose when her ladyship turns out you'll be off to London with her."

"Time enough to think about that when she goes," Miss Popkiss returned evasively. "Lordship or no lordship, he can't turn her out before her time's up. And then it might suit me to stay on with him. I wonder what he'll be like," she added, with a significant touch of feminine interest.

Mr. Sparrow's prosaic face grew dark. "Oh, Mercy," he cried, gloomily wrathful, "if I was to see another man, lord or lout, making love to you, I'd smash him."

Her words having produced what was precisely the desired effect, Miss Popkiss proceeded to tone it down with a provocative smile. "You can think of smashing when you see it, Tom. And, I say----"

"Yes, dear?" said Tom, inwardly despising himself for being so easily mollified.

"I--I hear father in the bar," she suggested significantly.

Mr. Sparrow took the hint and another kiss. Perhaps his ruffled feelings were responsible for its being a louder osculation than prudence dictated. Anyhow an approaching voice croaked--

"Mercy! Mercy! What are you after?"

"Quick, Tom," the girl directed in a hurried whisper, "slip out of the window."

Mr. Sparrow was already there, with a foot over the sill. Its pa.s.sage to the ground was, however, prevented by the substantial back of some one who was crouching outside the window. The disconcerted Philander swiftly drew his leg back again as though it had been stung, and made a slinking rush for the table under which he crept just as Popkiss _pere_, his rotund face coruscating with suspicion, filled the doorway.

"What are you up to, I ask you?" he demanded of his daughter with what seemed unnecessary vehemence as his small eyes roved in puffy cunning round the room.

"Polishing the candlesticks, father," she answered coolly. "Is there anything else you would prefer me to do?"

Not being ready with a suggestion, Mr. Popkiss merely fell back upon a snort of sagacity, and turned his portly person preparatory to waddling back to the bar. "Come here, I want you," he commanded vaguely by an after-thought, in the hope that by the time he had reached his beery citadel a task might suggest itself to his sluggish invention.

"All right, father," Miss Popkiss replied cheerily, as with more clatter than was absolutely necessary, she replaced the candlestick on its shelf. Then she took a round-about route to the door, preferring it possibly on account of the variety its closer view of the courtyard afforded. As she was about to pause at the window the man crouching outside suddenly raised himself and looked in with a knowing grin.

Miss Popkiss, suppressing a start, deftly changed the amorous look she had prepared into one of haughty displeasure, and swept in a fine carriage of scorn from the room. Whereupon the man surmounted the sill and entered.

He was a curiously nondescript sort of person, with a short, round face, a short nose, short hair, short beard, short arms, short fingers and short legs. His manner also was short, even jerky. He looked round the room with a sharpness and vigilance which seemed quite thrown away upon its commonplace and unsuspicious contents, and absolutely futile in that they failed to detect Mr. Sparrow who lay snug underneath the table. But then self-const.i.tuted keenness is usually ignorant of what is going on under its nose.

"No stranger about," the man muttered. Then he took a telegram from the side pocket of his light overcoat, where it had lain as though ready to his hand for consultation. "My wire from the Yard is explicit. Yet," he mused, as he methodically folded the telegram and dropped it back into his pocket, "if he left the train at Faxfleet he ought to be here by this. It might take him an hour and a half, or two hours. I must find out." He walked softly towards the door. "Better not let old Popkiss see me," he murmured, "he talks too much. But," he chuckled knowingly, "there's the pretty daughter, if I can catch her that's the dodge; I don't know what Sarah would say, but it's all in the way of business." From which observation it is plain that aesthetic shortcomings do not necessarily prevent a man from fancying himself irresistible.

Peeping cautiously through the doorway he saw Miss Mercy alone in the bar, perfunctorily at work upon a task of supererogation which the paternal wisdom had set her.

"Hist!" he signalled, and when she looked up in disdain he beckoned mysteriously and withdrew.

Miss Popkiss, in no amiable humour, was forced as a matter of business to follow him. "What is your order, sir?" she inquired, with a toss of the head. But the man signed to her to come nearer still with such an air of mysterious importance that she was forced to drop something of her haughty manner. "I did not see you come in, sir," she remarked casually, as a first step toward affability.

For reply the man gave a knowing jerk of the head and indicated the window with his thumb. "Hope you are well this morning, my dear," he observed inconsequentially. "It is quite a pleasure to see any one looking so pretty and blooming."

Ignoring the incongruity between the guest's mysterious prelude and his crudely outspoken appreciation of her charms, Miss Popkiss was not above accepting the tribute to her good looks. "Oh, sir," she said with a touch of protest just sufficient to maintain her propriety; and so waited for the order to which the compliment would have been a natural preamble.

The guest pursed his lips and kept his small eyes on her with business-like admiration. "Very busy, eh?" he suggested, absurdly enough, since he appeared to be the only customer in the house. "Any one fresh staying here?" he asked with an obvious affectation of indifference.

"No, we've had no one fresh to-day, sir," Miss Popkiss answered, beginning to lose interest in the colloquy.

"Oh," said the man, blinking his eyes suspiciously. "Are you quite sure? No one been here to-day?"

His manner was so exaggerated in its significance that Miss Popkiss, with Mr. Sparrow's clandestine visit fresh in her mind, grew uneasy under it. "No, sir," she answered, a trifle unconvincingly. "Who should there have been?"

A triumphant gleam shot through her questioner's eyes. He dropped his cross-examiner's manner and said confidentially, "I thought I saw some one come in just now."

So it was Tom. Miss Popkiss flushed a little guiltily.

"By the door?" she suggested evasively.

"Or by the window," he hazarded, with noncommittal sagacity.

Miss Popkiss concluded that further equivocation was futile.

"Well, sir, and if you did, what about it?" she demanded defiantly.

Her cross-examiner saw that he had made a lucky hit. "Oh," he answered, a.s.suming a careless manner "I only looked in to warn you, in case he has been making up to you, that he is a bad lot, a wrong 'un altogether; so don't you have anything to do with him."

Had the speaker's searching little eyes not been attracted elsewhere they must have noticed a peculiar agitation of the table-cloth greater than the draught would account for.

"Why, you don't mean to say he makes love to any one else," Miss Popkiss asked, between wrath and jealousy.