"You wished to see me, your lordship?"
"Yes. Keggs, there are a number of outside men helping here
tonight, aren't there?"
"Indubitably, your lordship. The unprecedented scale of the
entertainment necessitated the engagement of a certain number of
supernumeraries," replied Keggs with an easy fluency which Reggie
Byng, now cooling his head on the lower terrace, would have
bitterly envied. "In the circumstances, such an arrangement was
inevitable."
"You engaged all these men yourself?"
"In a manner of speaking, your lordship, and for all practical
purposes, yes. Mrs. Digby, the 'ouse-keeper conducted the actual
negotiations in many cases, but the arrangement was in no instance
considered complete until I had passed each applicant."
"Do you know anything of an American who says he is the cousin of
the page-boy?"
"The boy Albert did introduce a nominee whom he stated to be 'is
cousin 'ome from New York on a visit and anxious to oblige. I trust
he 'as given no dissatisfaction, your lordship? He seemed a
respectable young man."
"No, no, not at all. I merely wished to know if you knew him. One
can't be too careful."
"No, indeed, your lordship."
"That's all, then."
"Thank you, your lordship."
Lord Belpher was satisfied. He was also relieved. He felt that
prudence and a steady head had kept him from making himself
ridiculous. When George presently returned with the life-saving
fluid, he thanked him and turned his thoughts to other things.
But, if the young master was satisfied, Keggs was not. Upon Keggs a
bright light had shone. There were few men, he flattered himself,
who could more readily put two and two together and bring the sum
to a correct answer. Keggs knew of the strange American gentleman
who had taken up his abode at the cottage down by Platt's farm. His
looks, his habits, and his motives for coming there had formed food
for discussion throughout one meal in the servant's hall; a
stranger whose abstention from brush and palette showed him to be
no artist being an object of interest. And while the solution put
forward by a romantic lady's-maid, a great reader of novelettes,
that the young man had come there to cure himself of some unhappy
passion by communing with nature, had been scoffed at by the
company, Keggs had not been so sure that there might not be
something in it. Later events had deepened his suspicion, which
now, after this interview with Lord Belpher, had become certainty.
The extreme fishiness of Albert's sudden production of a cousin
from America was so manifest that only his preoccupation at the
moment when he met the young man could have prevented him seeing it
before. His knowledge of Albert told him that, if one so versed as
that youth in the art of Swank had really possessed a cousin in
America, he would long ago have been boring the servants' hall with
fictions about the man's wealth and importance. For Albert not to
lie about a thing, practically proved that thing non-existent. Such
was the simple creed of Keggs.