“Take some!”

I took some, for I was exceedingly hungry; and then the conversation lapsed, began again vaguely, and lapsed again.

We all know that wretched quarter of an hour, or half hour, which unpunctual guests make us pass in famine and fatigue while they keep dinner waiting.  Upon my word, we waited till half-past eleven before dinner was announced.  But for the tea, I must have perished; for, like the butler in Sir George Dasent’s novel, “I likes my meals regular.”

The Duchess had obviously forgotten all about dinner.  There was a spinning-wheel in the room, and she sat and span like an elderly Fate.  When dinner was announced at last, I began to fear it would never end.  The menu covered both sides of the card.  The Duchess ate little, and “hardly anything was drunk.”  At last the ladies left us, about one in the morning.  I saw my chance, and began judiciously to “draw” the chaplain.  It appeared that the Duchess did not always dine at half-past eleven.  The feast was a movable one, from eight o’clock onwards.  The Duchess and the establishment had got into these habits during the old Duke’s time.  A very strange man the old Duke; rarely got up till eight in the evening, often prolonged breakfast till next day.

“But I need not tell you all this, Percy, my old pupil,” said the chaplain; and he winked as a clergyman ought not to wink.

“My dear sir,” cried I, encouraged by this performance, “for Heaven’s sake tell me what all this means?  In this so-called nineteenth century, in our boasted age of progress, what does the Duchess mean by her invitation to me, and by her conduct at large?  Indeed, why is she at large?”

The chaplain drew closer to me.  “Did ye ever hear of a duchess in a madhouse?” said he; and I owned that I never had met with such an incident in my reading (unless there is one in Webster’s plays, somewhere).

“Well, then, who is to make a beginning?” asked the priest.  “The Duchess has not a relation in the world but Miss Birkenhead, the only daughter of a son of the last Duke but one.  The late Duke was a dreadful man, and he turned the poor Duchess’s head with the life he led her.  The drowning of her only son in the Jingo finished the business.  She has got that story about”—­(here he touched the decanter of sherry:  I nodded)—­“she has got that story into her head, and she believes her son is alive; otherwise she is as sane and unimaginative as—­as—­as Mr. Chaplin,” said he, with a flash of inspiration.  “Happily you are an honest man, or you seem like one, and won’t take advantage of her delusion.”