What Monty had written was more a hint of Mrs. Llewellyn's position than an actual statement, but the lines were lines he could read between. 'Mrs. Llewellyn is a tough baby'. 'A joint account, and he can't draw a cheque without her approval . . . play at the tables, which she would never have allowed'. These were not words that conjured up a picture of a man who was master in his own house and ruled one and all with a rod of iron, they were words than convinced the reader that when it came to a clash of wills between him and his wife, Ivor Llewellyn curled up in a ball and said 'Yes, dear'.
But the passage that thrilled Mr. Butterwick was the one near the end. 'She is all for the aristocracy and has got the impression that I am related to half the titled families in England'.
It was enough. It proved beyond possibility of doubt that Montrose Bodkin had done it again. Precisely as had happened before, the young human snake had wriggled his way into the Llewellyn circle by means of what he, the snake, would have described as rannygazoo. It was the sort of thing that made a decent-minded man ask himself what snakes were coming to these days.
'Related to half the titled families in England.' If Mr. Butterwick had been given to colloquialisms, his comment on that would have taken the form of a sardonic 'I don't think'. He knew all about Monty's family. His father had been a solicitor with a small country-town practice, and the aunt who had left him her money had accumulated that money by marrying a Pittsburgh millionaire on one of his visits to London, she being at that time in the chorus of a musical entertainment at the Adelphi theatre. Add her brother Lancelot, who got jugged for passing bad cheques the year Hot Ginger won the Cesarawitch, and the roster of Monty's connections was complete.
Only a short time before we have seen Mr. Butterwick regretting that he had nothing to do. A congenial task had now presented itself to him. We all like exposing snakes, and it was with particular pleasure that he looked forward to exposing Monty. Ten minutes later—the necessity of sniffing at his Friar's Balsam caused a temporary delay—he was at the telephone in communication with Grayce.
Mr. Butterwick was always inclined to be measured in his diction when telephoning.
'I believe, Mrs. Lewellyn, you have in your employment a young man of the name of Bodkin.’
'I have, yes.’
‘I feel I ought to warn you . . . Atishoo.’
The receiver shook in Grayce's hand. That ominous word 'warn', coming so soon after her talk with Mavis, had touched a nerve. For an instant she wondered if this was the police speaking. Those weighty words might well have proceeded from Scotland Yard. With a quaver in her voice she asked:
'What was that you said?'
'I was going to say that I feel I ought to warn you that it would be unwise to repose trust in him.’
Grayce's uneasiness increased.
'Who are you?'
'A friend.’
'Whose? His?'
'No, yours.'
'Are you a Superintendant or something?'
'I am not attached to the police.'
'Oh,' said Grayce, relieved.
'I wish you well.’
'Good for you.'
'My name is Butterwick.’
Patience had never been one of Grayce's virtues.
'I know your name is Butterwick,' she said, checking an impulse to insert the adjective 'god-damned' between the 'your' and the name'. 'What I'm trying to figure out is how you got into the act. Do you know Bodkin?'
'He is engaged to be married—much against my will—to my daughter Gertrude.’
'Oh? And what do you mean, warn me?'
'It has come to my notice . . . It has been drawn to my attention . . . In fact, I have found out that he has ingratiated himself with you by pretending to have aristocratic connections. This is not the case.'
What virtually amounted to the scream of a soul in anguish came over the wire.
'You mean he hasn't?'
'Precisely.'
'My social secretary Miss Miller told me he had titled uncles and cousins in every nook and cranny of England.'
'She was misinformed, no doubt by him. His father was a solicitor, his aunt a chorus girl, and his Uncle Lancelot received an exemplary sentence for passing bad cheques. He has no other relatives.'
The gulp Grayce gave could be heard distinctly in West Dulwich.
'Well, the son of a . . .' she said. The final word was lost in the forceful replacement of the receiver.
Mr. Butterwick returned to his Friar's Balsam, well pleased. Montrose Bodkin he was thinking would not hold down his present post for the twelve months essential for his marital plans. Mrs. Llewellyn had not actually said so, but the trend of their exchanges had left him in no doubt that that young specialist in rannygazoo would soon be at liberty. Indeed, at this very moment he was in all probability being thrown out on his ear. Grayce had struck him as a woman who would resent being deceived and would not be slow to clothe her resentment in action. Gertrude, returning from her committee meeting a few minutes later, would have been delighted with the improvement in her father's general appearance since she had last seen him, had not her thoughts been otherwise occupied.
It was plain to see that these thoughts were not agreeable. Her eyes were flashing, her bosom heaving, her whole aspect that of a girl whose soul had been stirred up by an electric mixer. She looked as if she had been unjustly penalized for some infringement of the rules in the hockey match of the season.
'Father,' she said, too moved to employ her normal 'Daddy', 'I am not going to marry Montrose. I am going to marry Wilfred Chisholm.'
It is not easy to raise joyful eyes to heaven while sniffing Friar's Balsam, but Mr. Butterwick managed it.
'My dear child! This is wonderful news. You could not have made me happier. But what led you to this decision?'
'I found out that Montrose was untrue to me.’
'I suspected as much.'
'He takes girls to low night clubs.'
'This comes as no surprise.'
'I met Wilfred as I was leaving our meeting, and he had a black eye. I asked him how he had got it, and he said it was during a raid on one of those night clubs. He was arresting a man he had been at school with, a man named Monty Bodkin . . .'
'Ha!'
'. . . whom he had found with a girl in the yard outside the kitchen.'
'Ho!'
'And he was just taking him into custody, when—'
'Montrose struck him?'
'No, but the girl emptied a dustbin full of bottles over his head, and one of them blacked his eye. The girl and Montrose then escaped over the wall and Wilfred's sergeant was very angry with him for letting them go. Poor Wilfred was very upset about it, but he bucked up a good deal when I told him I would marry him. Have you a telegraph form?'
‘I have some in my desk. You wish to telegraph to Montrose?'
'Precisely that.’ said Gertrude, her teeth coming together with a click which sounded as if Spanish dancers were brushing up their castanet-playing in the vicinity.
2
Patrons of the cinema may recall a motion picture, which was put on the screen many years ago, though not by the Superba-Llewellyn Corporation, in which the hero, played by Maurice Chevalier, poses as a titled aristocrat and is revealed as the dealer in men's wear he really is. The reaction of the staff at the castle, taking musical form, ran as follows:
'Here's a joke, the great Maurice
Is not a Knight of the Golden Fleece:
The son of a gun is nothing but a tailor.’
It was bitterly ironic, thought Grayce, remembering this comedy, that she should have been amused by it, for now that she was in the same position as that impostor's hostess she could detect nothing humorous in her situation. She was, indeed, in an even worse case than the Duchesse, or whatever she was, in the picture, who had had to embarrass her only a son of a gun who was nothing but a tailor. Between such sons of guns and those who are members of gangs there is no comparison.
As she replaced
the receiver and made her way back to the study, where Mr. Llewellyn, his mind finally at rest, had dozed off again, she was at her most incandescent. The revelation of Monty's perfidy would alone have been enough to wake the fiend that slept in her, but what really put the frosting on the cake, as he himself would have expressed it, was the realization that Mavis had been right and was entitled to say 'I told you so', which she would unquestionably do not once but many times. There are girls, few perhaps but to be found if one searches carefully, who when their advice is ignored and disaster ensues, do not say 'I told you so'. Mavis was not of their number. It was true, a consoling voice whispered in her ear, that disaster had not actually ensued. The jewel case was safe in the study with Mr. Llewellyn watching over it, but the fact remained that against Mavis's warning she had continued to allow the serpent Bodkin to defile Mellingham Hall with his presence, and Mavis would undoubtedly make the most of it.
Her mood, accordingly, was not sunny as she entered the study. She came in like an avenging Fury, closing the door behind her with a bang that brought Mr. Llewellyn out of slumberland with a jerk. He had been having a dream in which he was a spy and was being shot at sunrise, and the bang had synchronized neatly with the activities of the firing squad.
His initial emotion, after he had blinked perhaps fifteen times and regained possession of his senses, was indignation. It seemed to him that if a man was not to be allowed a moment in which to relax, things had come to a pretty pass. He did not, of course, say so, for one glance at Grayce was enough to tell him that the storm cone had been hoisted and that those who spoke to her, even on non-controversial subjects, did so at their own risk.
'Where is Mr. Bodkin?' Grayce asked. Relieved that so harmless a topic had been selected, he replied:
'He was in here a moment ago.’
A simple statement and one which he anticipated would not give offence, but it caused Grayce to gnash her teeth slightly.
'I did not ask where he had been. Where is he now?'
'Ah, that I couldn't say. I guess he must have started.'
'Started?'
'In the car.'
'In the car?'
'For Brighton.’
'Brighton?'
Here was Mr. Llewellyn's opportunity to enquire, as he had enquired of Monty, if she supposed herself to be an echo in the Swiss mountains. He did not avail himself of it, and Grayce continued.
'So he went to Brighton, did he?'
Her manner took on the ponderousness which so many of her circle in Beverly Hills had resented.
'I engaged Mr. Bodkin as your secretary. There was no understanding that he should go off on pleasure jaunts to the sea shore whenever he felt inclined.'
'It was not so much a pleasure jaunt—'
'No doubt he will return invigorated by the sea air, but that is not what I pay him a salary for. Brighton! The idea! Did he bother to ask your permission?'
Mr. Llewellyn saw that she had formed a wrong conclusion. It was perhaps a natural mistake for her to have made, and rather amusing. He ventured on a light chuckle, and she asked him if he would mind not giggling like a half-witted hyena. He pleaded that it was rather funny that she should have said that.
'Yes, he had my permission. Matter of fact, I sent him to Brighton.'
'Might I ask why?'
'To oblige you. To do you a good turn. You wanted your pearls taken to the bank. Adair, who ought to have taken them, had this pain in his inside. So I told Bodkin to take them.’
There had been several occasions in the course of their married life when Grayce, conversing with her husband, had been compelled to register an assortment of mixed emotions, but she had seldom approached the high level of her present performance. If Mr. Llewellyn had not happened to have closed his eyes finding this restful, he would have been appalled.
Something seemed to have gone wrong with Grayce's vocal cords. She gulped once or twice, and when she spoke it was almost in a whisper.
'You have let Bodkin go off with my pearls!'
'Sure.' It occurred to Mr. Llewellyn that it would be a sound move to prepare her for the return of an empty-handed Monty. ‘I hope he'll be safe.'
'Safe!'
'There's one thing I'm not quite easy in my mind about.’ said Mr. Llewellyn. He could not but feel that he was doing this extraordinarily well. Just the right note of anxiety in the voice. 'You're very apt these days to run into gangs of thugs on lonely country roads. I don't want to alarm you, but it's quite possible that young Bodkin on his way to the bank may get held up by hijackers. I ought to have thought of this when you were talking of sending Adair. Taking anything as valuable as those pearls to Brighton ought not to have been entrusted to one man. One should have had a lot of fellows with shot-guns, like they used to have on the Wells-Fargo Express. Hijacking's so easy if you only have one man. A pretty girl is standing at the side of the road with a broken-down car. She waves to Bodkin, probably with tears in her eyes. "Oh, sir, can you fix up my car for me. I can't get it to go. . ." He says he’ll have a look at it. "Probably the sprockets aren't running true with the differential gear," he says, or whatever. He gets out and zowie a gang of thugs come jumping out of the bushes, and next thing you know they're off with your jewel case. I don't say that's what's going to happen to Bodkin, quite possibly he'll get through all right, but I think you ought to be prepared.'
It was an appreciable time before Grayce replied to by far the longest speech her husband had ever been able to address to her. Her emotional upset had suddenly reached the point where fury gives place temporarily to a frozen calm. One sees the same kind of thing in hurricanes, which always take time off at Cape Hatteras to draw a deep breath preparatory to settling down to business. When she spoke, it was plain there had been on her part none of that willing suspension of disbelief of which dramatic critics so often speak.
'Talk sense,’ she said curtly, giving in two words evidence that her disbelief had not come within a million miles of being suspended. 'If Bodkin dares to come back with a story like that, I shall send out a hurry call for every policeman in the country, telling them to come quick and bring their handcuffs, and if they care to use a little police brutality on Mister It-makes-me-sick-to-think-of-him Bodkin, it will be all right with me. Do you know who you handed those pearls over to, you moron? A crook. A Mayfair man. A gangster in good standing who was told by his gang to worm his way in here and get them. And if you want to know what my plans are at the moment. I'm going to go to my room to take three aspirins and lie down.’
And, so saying, Grayce went out, banging the door again.
3
Seated on a rustic bench on the lawn near the garage, Dolly was still a prey to gloom. The victory she had won over Chimp Twist had had its exhilaration, but it had been only momentary. She was a girl whom life had taught to face facts, and the existing facts, when faced, were not cheering. It was plain that her baffling of Chimp was not an end but a beginning. She was now confronted with that question that has chilled so many, the question 'Where do we go from here?'.
She might have found a readier answer to this query had her mind been full of plans and schemes waiting only to be put into operation, but the one which had failed so lamentably on the previous night had left her creative impulse exhausted. As she put it to herself, she had no more ideas than a rabbit, and everyone who had studied these animals knows how devoid they normally are of inspiration. And who could say what subtle plots the opposition might not be weaving? She did not like Chimp, she had never liked him, but she had a solid respect for his brains.
So she sat and mourned, and it was as she plumbed the very depths of despondency that Monty swam into her ken, complete with jewel case. He was swinging it jauntily, not actually singing Tra-la, but giving the distinct impression that he might do so at any moment. The effects of Mr. Lewellyn's pep talk still lingered.
On Dolly the sight of what he carried acted like a double dose of one of those tonics which in addition to iron go i
n largely for Vitamins B and E. She recognized the jewel case as the one she had seen during chats with Grayce in the latter's bedroom, and a far less astute woman would have been able to divine what it was doing in Monty's possession. J. Sheringham Adair had been told to take it to the bank, and when J. Sheringham's unfortunate indisposition had ruled him out as a messenger the assignment had been given to Monty. Not only was this limpidly clear to her, but it had taken her only a few seconds to see how it was to be turned to her advantage.
She hailed Monty with the utmost enthusiasm, an enthusiasm which puzzled him a little, for their relations hitherto had been, if not exactly distant, at any rate on the formal side. That she should be so glad to see him was flattering, but he could not think what had caused this unusual exuberance. The theory that this was her customary form when her husband was not around he dismissed as unworthy. No, it was simply, he decided, that he was particularly fascinating today.
'Hello there, Mr. Bodkin,’ Dolly carolled. 'What lovely weather.’
‘Hullo, Mrs. Molloy. Yes, beautiful.'
'The sun!'
'Yes, I noticed the sun.'
'Are you off somewhere?'
'I am, as a matter of fact.'
'I thought so. You seemed to be headed for the garage.'
'Actually, I'm off to Brighton.'
'Oh, really?'
'I'm taking something there.'
'You couldn't take me, too, could you? I want to go to Brighton to get a hair-do.'
Monty hesitated for a moment. He had not anticipated that he would be taking on passengers, and he was not sure how their society might affect his enterprise. Then he realized that it would be perfectly all right. While she was having her hair-do he could be sauntering along the pier and dropping the jewel case off the end of it into deep water. An even better hiding-place than the brook or river which Mr. Llewellyn had suggested.
'Of course,' he said. 'But I ought to be starting pretty soon. Are you ready?'
'Just got to get my bag from my room. Won't take me a second. You don't mind waiting?'