“Adam, perhaps.”

“Not he.”

“Then Satan.”

“My dear lord,” concluded Lewis de Duras, “Adam only lent his name.  Poor dupe!  He endorsed the human race.  Man was begotten on the woman by the devil.”

Hugh Cholmondeley, Earl of Cholmondeley, strong in points of law, was asked from the bishops’ benches by Nathaniel Crew, who was doubly a peer, being a temporal peer, as Baron Crew, and a spiritual peer, as Bishop of Durham.

“Is it possible?” said Crew.

“Is it regular?” said Cholmondeley.

“The investiture of this peer was made outside the House,” replied the bishop; “but it is stated that there are precedents for it.”

“Yes.  Lord Beauchamp, under Richard II.; Lord Chenay, under Elizabeth:  and Lord Broghill, under Cromwell.”

“Cromwell goes for nothing.”

“What do you think of it all?”

“Many different things.”

“My Lord Cholmondeley, what will be the rank of this young Lord Clancharlie in the House?”

“My Lord Bishop, the interruption of the Republic having displaced ancient rights of precedence, Clancharlie now ranks in the peerage between Barnard and Somers, so that should each be called upon to speak in turn, Lord Clancharlie would be the eighth in rotation.”

“Really! he—­a mountebank from a public show!”

“The act, per se, does not astonish me, my Lord Bishop.  We meet with such things.  Still more wonderful circumstances occur.  Was not the War of the Roses predicted by the sudden drying up of the river Ouse, in Bedfordshire, on January 1st, 1399.  Now, if a river dries up, a peer may, quite as naturally, fall into a servile condition.  Ulysses, King of Ithaca, played all kinds of different parts.  Fermain Clancharlie remained a lord under his player’s garb.  Sordid garments touch not the soul’s nobility.  But taking the test and the investiture outside the sitting, though strictly legal, might give rise to objections.  I am of opinion that it will be necessary to look into the matter, to see if there be any ground to question the Lord Chancellor in Privy Council later on.  We shall see in a week or two what is best to be done.”

And the Bishop added,—­

“All the same.  It is an adventure such as has not occurred since Earl Gesbodus’s time.”

Gwynplaine, the Laughing Man; the Tadcaster Inn; the Green Box; “Chaos Vanquished;” Switzerland; Chillon; the Comprachicos; exile; mutilation; the Republic; Jeffreys; James II.; the jussu regis; the bottle opened at the Admiralty; the father, Lord Linnaeus; the legitimate son, Lord Fermain; the bastard son, Lord David; the probable lawsuits; the Duchess Josiana; the Lord Chancellor; the Queen;—­all these subjects of conversation ran from bench to bench.

Whispering is like a train of gunpowder.

They seized on every incident.  All the details of the occurrence caused an immense murmur through the House.  Gwynplaine, wandering in the depths of his reverie, heard the buzzing, without knowing that he was the cause of it.  He was strangely attentive to the depths, not to the surface.  Excess of attention becomes isolation.