"Well, the job I had was too big for me.It needed capital." He grinned slightly again, recalling a phrase of his Western past."I'm afraid I'm down and out.""No, you're not," with cheerful scorn."You're not dead, are you? S'long as a man's not been dead a month, there's always a chance that there's luck round the corner.How did you happen here? Are you piking it?"Momentarily Mount Dunstan was baffled.G.Selden, recognising the fact, enlightened him."That's New York again,"he said, with a boyish touch of apology."It means on the tramp.Travelling along the turnpike.You don't look as if you had come to that--though it's queer the sort of fellows you do meet piking sometimes.Theatrical companies that have gone to pieces on the road, you know.Perhaps--" with a sudden thought, "you're an actor.Are you?"Mount Dunstan admitted to himself that he liked the junior assistant of Jones immensely.A more ingenuously common young man, a more innocent outsider, it had never been his blessed privilege to enter into close converse with, but his very commonness was a healthy, normal thing.It made no effort to wreathe itself with chaplets of elegance; it was beautifully unaware that such adornment was necessary.It enjoyed itself, youthfully; attacked the earning of its bread with genial pluck, and its good-natured humanness had touched him.He had enjoyed his talk; he wanted to hear more of it.He was not in the mood to let him go his way.To Penzance, who was to lunch with him to-day, he would present a study of absorbing interest.
"No," he answered."I'm not an actor.My name is Mount Dunstan, and this place," with a nod over his shoulder, "is mine--but I'm up against it, nevertheless."Selden looked a trifle disgusted.He began to pick up his bicycle.He had given a degree of natural sympathy, and this was an English chap's idea of a joke.
"I'm the Prince of Wales, myself," he remarked, "and my mother's expecting me to lunch at Windsor.So long, me lord," and he set his foot on the treadle.
Mount Dunstan rose, feeling rather awkward.The point seemed somewhat difficult to contend.
"It is not a joke," he said, conscious that he spoke rather stiffly.
"Little Willie's not quite as easy as he looks," was the cryptic remark of Mr.Selden.
Mount Dunstan lost his rather easily lost temper, which happened to be the best thing he could have done under the circumstances.
"Damn it," he burst out."I'm not such a fool as I evidently look.A nice ass I should be to play an idiot joke like that.
I'm speaking the truth.Go if you like--and be hanged."Selden's attention was arrested.The fellow was in earnest.
The place was his.He must be the earl chap he had heard spoken of at the wayside public house he had stopped at for a pot of beer.He dismounted from his bicycle, and came back, pushing it before him, good-natured relenting and awkwardness combining in his look.
"All right," he said."I apologise--if it's cold fact.I'm not calling you a liar.""Thank you," still a little stiffly, from Mount Dunstan.
The unabashed good cheer of G.Selden carried him lightly over a slightly difficult moment.He laughed, pushing his cap back, of course, and looking over the hedge at the sweep of park, with a group of deer cropping softly in the foreground.
"I guess I should get a bit hot myself," he volunteered handsomely, "if I was an earl, and owned a place like this, and a fool fellow came along and took me for a tramp.That was a pretty bad break, wasn't it? But I did say you didn't look like it.Anyway you needn't mind me.I shouldn't get onto Pierpont Morgan or W.K.Vanderbilt, if I met 'em in the street."He spoke the two names as an Englishman of his class would have spoken of the Dukes of Westminster or Marlborough.
These were his nobles--the heads of the great American houses, and entirely parallel, in his mind, with the heads of any great house in England.They wielded the power of the world, and could wield it for evil or good, as any prince or duke might.
Mount Dunstan saw the parallel.
"I apologise, all right," G.Selden ended genially.
"I am not offended," Mount Dunstan answered."There was no reason why you should know me from another man.
I was taken for a gamekeeper a few weeks since.I was savage a moment, because you refused to believe me--and why should you believe me after all?"G.Selden hesitated.He liked the fellow anyhow.
"You said you were up against it--that was it.And--and I've seen chaps down on their luck often enough.Good Lord, the hard-luck stories I hear every day of my life.And they get a sort of look about the eyes and mouth.I hate to see it on any fellow.It makes me sort of sick to come across it even in a chap that's only got his fool self to blame.I may be making another break, telling you--but you looked sort of that way.""Perhaps," stolidly, "I did." Then, his voice warming,"It was jolly good-natured of you to think about it at all.
Thank you."
"That's all right," in polite acknowledgment.Then with another look over the hedge, "Say--what ought I to call you?
Earl, or my Lord?"
"It's not necessary for you to call me anything in particular--as a rule.If you were speaking of me, you might say Lord Mount Dunstan."G.Selden looked relieved.
"I don't want to be too much off," he said."And I'd like to ask you a favour.I've only three weeks here, and Idon't want to miss any chances."
"What chance would you like?"
