CHAPTER XXI

HIS LORDSHIP’S WILL

The movement of the vehicle made Lord Polperro drowsy.  In ten minutes he seemed to be asleep, and Gammon had to catch his hat as it was falling forward.  When the four-wheeler jolted more than usual he uttered groans; once he shouted loudly, and for a moment stared about him in terror.  The man of commerce had never made so unpleasant a journey in his life.

On arriving at their destination it was with much difficulty that Gammon aroused his companion, and with still more that he conveyed him from the cab into the building, a house porter (who smiled significantly) assisting in the job.  Lord Polperro, when thoroughly awakened, coughed, groaned, and gasped in a most alarming way.  His flat was on the first floor; before reaching it he began to shed tears, and to beg that his medical man might be called immediately.  The door was opened by a middle-aged woman dressed as a housekeeper, who viewed his lordship with no great concern.  She promised to send a messenger to the doctor’s, and left the two men alone in a room comfortably furnished, but without elegance or expensiveness.  Gammon waited upon the invalid, placed him at ease by the fireside, and reached him a cellaret from a cupboard full of various liquors.  A few draughts of a restorative enabled Lord Polperro to articulate, and he inquired if any letters had arrived for him.

“Look on the writing table, Greenacre.  Any thing there?”

There were two letters.  The invalid examined them with disappointment and tossed them aside.

“Beggars and blackmailers,” he muttered.  “Nobody else writes to me.”

Of a sudden it occurred to him that he was forgetting the duties of hospitality.  He urged his guest to take refreshment; he roused himself, went to the cupboard, brought out half a dozen kinds of beverage.

“And of course you will lunch with me, or will it be dinner?  Yes, yes, luncheon of course.  Excuse me for one moment, I must give some orders.”

He left the room.  Gammon, having tossed off a glass of wine, surveyed the objects about him with curiosity.  An observer of more education would have glanced with peculiar interest at the books; several volumes lay on the table, one of them a recent work on gipsies, another dealing with the antiquities of Cornwall.  For the town traveller these things of course had no significance.  But he remarked a painting on the wall, which was probably a portrait of one of Lord Polperro’s ancestors—­a youngish man (the Trefoyle nose, not to be mistaken) in a strange wild costume, his head bare under a sky blackening to storm, in his hand a sort of hunting knife, and one of his feet resting on a dead wolf.  When his host reappeared Gammon asked him whom the picture represented.

“That?  That’s my father—­years before I was born.  They tell me that he used to say that in his life he had only done one thing to be proud of.  It was in some part of Russia.  He killed a wolf at close quarters—­only a knife to fight with.  He was a fine man, my father.  Looks it, don’t you think?”