The old man looked at him sharply.
“Are you in love?”
“Madly.”
“Of all the young cuckoos! And I suppose you’ve come to ask for money to get married on?”
“Not at all. I just dropped round to see how you were. Still, as the subject has happened to crop up–“
Sir Aylmer brooded for a moment, snorting in an undertone.
“Who’s the girl?” he demanded.
Freddie coughed, and fumbled with his collar. The crux of the situation, he realized, had now been reached. He had feared from the first that this was where the good old snag might conceivably sidle into the picture. For his Annabel was of humble station, and he knew how rigid were his relative’s views on the importance of birth. No bigger snob ever swallowed a salicylate pill.
“Well, as a matter of fact,” he said, “she’s a conjurer’s stooge.”
“A what?”
“A conjurer’s assistant, don’t you know. I saw her first at a charity matinee. She was abetting a bloke called The Great Boloni.”
“In what sense, abetting?”
“Well, she stood there up-stage, don’t you know, and every now and then she would skip down-stage, hand this chap a bowl of goldfish or something, beam at the audience, do a sort of dance step and skip back again. You know the kind of thing.”
A dark frown had come into Sir Aylmer’s face.
“I do,” he said grimly. “My only nephew has been ensnared by a bally, beaming goldfish-handler! Ha!”
“I wouldn’t call it ensnared exactly,” said Freddie deferentially.
“I would,” said Sir Aylmer. “Get out of here.”
“Right,” said Freddie, and caught the two-thirty-five express back to London. And it was during the journey that an idea flashed upon him.
The last of the Fitch-Fitches was not a great student of literature, but he occasionally dipped into a magazine: and everybody who has ever dipped into a magazine has read a story about a hard-hearted old man who won’t accept the hero’s girl at any price, so what do they do but plant her on him without telling him who she is and, by Jove, he falls under her spell completely, and then they tear off their whiskers and there they are. There was a story of this nature in the magazine which Freddie had purchased at the bookstall at Droitgate Spa Station, and, as he read it, he remembered what his uncle had told him about his nurse handing in her portfolio.
By the time the train checked in at Paddington, his plans were fully formed.
“Listen,” he said to Annabel Purvis, who had met him at the terminus, and Annabel said: “What?”
“Listen,” said Freddie, and Annabel again said: “What?”
“Listen,” said Freddie, clasping her arm tenderly and steering her off in the direction of the refreshment-room, where it was his intention to have a quick one. “To a certain extent I am compelled to admit that my expedition has been a wash-out…”
Annabel caught her breath sharply.
“No blessing?”
“No blessing.”
“And no money?”
“No money. The old boy ran entirely true to stable form. He listened to what I had to say, snorted in an unpleasant manner and threw me out. The old routine. But what I’m working round to is that the skies are still bright and the blue bird on the job. I have a scheme. Could you be a nurse?”
“I used to nurse my Uncle Joe.”
“Then you shall nurse my Uncle Aylmer. The present incumbent, he tells me, has just tuned out, and he needs a successor. I will ‘phone him that I am dispatching immediately a red-hot nurse whom he will find just the same as Mother makes, and you shall go down to Droitgate Spa and ingratiate yourself.”
“But how?”
“Why, cluster round him. Smooth his pillow. Bring him cooling drinks. Coo to him, and give him the old oil. Tell him you are of gentle birth, if that’s the expression I want. And when the time is ripe, when you have entwined yourself about his heart and he looks upon you as a daughter, shoot me a wire and I’ll come down and fall in love with you and he will give us his consent, blessing and the stuff. I guarantee this plan. It works.”
So Annabel went to Droitgate Spa, and about three weeks later a telegram arrived for Freddie, running as follows:
“Have ingratiated self. Come at once. Love and kisses. Annabel”
Within an hour of its arrival, Freddie was on his way to Podagra Lodge, his uncle’s residence. He found Sir Aylmer in his study. Annabel was sitting by his side, reading aloud to him from a recently published monograph on certain obscure ailments of the medulla oblongata. For the old man, though a mere gout patient, had pathetic aspirations towards higher things. There was a cooling drink on the table, and, as Freddie entered, the girl paused in her reading to smooth her employer’s pillow.
“Gaw!” said Sir Aylmer. “You again?”
“Here I am,” said Freddie.
“Well, by an extraordinary chance, I’m glad to see you. Leave us for a moment, Miss Purvis. I wish to speak to my nephew here, such as he is, on a serious and private matter. Did you notice that girl?” he said, as the door closed.
“I did, indeed.”
“Pretty.”
“An eyeful.”
“And as good,” said Sir Aylmer, “as she is beautiful. You should see her smooth pillows. And what a cooling drink she mixes! Excellent family, too, I understand. Her father is a colonel. Or, rather, was. He’s dead.”
“Ah, well, all flesh is as grass.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s nothing of the kind. The two things are entirely different. I’ve seen flesh and I’ve seen grass. No resemblance whatever. However, that is not the point at issue. What I wanted to say was that if you were not a damn fool, that’s the sort of girl you would be in love with.”
“I am.”
“A damn fool?”
“No. In love with that girl.”
“What! You have fallen in love with Miss Purvis? Already?”
“I have.”
“Well, that’s the quickest thing I ever saw. What about your beaming goldfish?”
“Oh, that’s all over. A mere passing boyish fancy.”
Sir Aylmer took a deep swig at his cooling drink, and regarded him in silence for a moment.
“Well,” he said, at length, breathing heavily, “if that’s the airy, casual way in which you treat life’s most sacred emotions, the sooner you are safely married and settled down, the better. If you’re allowed to run around loose much longer, indulging those boyish fancies of yours, I foresee the breach of promise case of the century. However, I’m not saying I’m not relieved. I am relieved. I suppose she wore tights, this goldfish girl?”
“Pink.”
“Disgusting. Thank God it’s all over. Very good, then. You are free, I understand, to have a pop at Miss Purvis. Do you propose to do so?”
“I do.”
“Excellent. You get that sweet, refined, most-suitable-in-all-respects girl to marry you, and I’ll hand over that money of yours, every penny of it.”
“I will start at once.”
“Heaven speed your wooing,” said Sir Aylmer.
And ten minutes later Freddie was able to inform his uncle that his whirlwind courtship had been successful, and Sir Aylmer said that when he had asked Heaven to speed his wooing he had had no notion that it would speed it to quite that extent. He congratulated Freddie warmly and said he hoped that he appreciated his good fortune, and Freddie said he certainly did, because his love was like a red, red rose, and Sir Aylmer said “No, she wasn’t,” and when Freddie added that he was walking on air Sir Aylmer said he couldn’t be—the thing was physically impossible.
However, he gave his blessing and promised to release Freddie’s capital as soon as the necessary papers were drawn up, and Freddie went back to London to see his lawyer about this.
His mood, as the train sped through the quiet countryside, was one of perfect tranquillity and happiness. It seemed to him that his troubles wer
e now definitely ended. He looked down the vista of the years and saw nothing but joy and sunshine. If somebody had told Frederick Fitch-Fitch at that moment that even now a V-shaped depression was coming along which would shortly blacken the skies and lower the general temperature to freezing-point, he would not have believed him.
Nor when, two days later, as he sat in his club, he was informed that a Mr. Rackstraw was waiting to see him in the small smoking-room, did he have an inkling that here was the V-shaped depression in person. His heart was still light as he went down the passage, wondering idly, for the name was unfamiliar to him, who this Mr. Rackstraw might be. He entered the room, and found there a tall, thin man with pointed black moustaches who was pacing up and down, nervously taking rabbits out of his top-hat as he walked.
“Mr. Rackstraw?”
His visitor spun round, dropping a rabbit. He gazed at Freddie piercingly. He had bright, glittering, sinister eyes.
“That is my name. Mortimer Rackstraw.”
Freddie’s mind had flown back to the charity matinee at which he had first seen Annabel, and he recognized the fellow now.
“The Great Boloni, surely?”
“I call myself that professionally. So you are Mr. Fitch? So you are Mr. Fitch? Ha! Fiend!”
“Eh?”
“I am not mistaken. You are Frederick Fitch?”
“Frederick Fitch-Fitch.”
“I beg your pardon. In that case, I should have said ‘Fiend! Fiend!’”
He produced a pack of cards and asked Freddie to take one - any one—and memorize it and put it back. Freddie did so absently. He was considerably fogged. He could make nothing of all this.
“How do you mean—Fiend-Fiend?” he asked.
The other sneered unpleasantly.
“Cad!” he said, twirling his moustache.
“Cad?” said Freddie, mystified.
“Yes, sir. Cad. You have stolen the girl I love.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Then you must be a perfect ass. It’s quite simple, isn’t it? I can’t put it any plainer, can I? I say you have stolen … Well, look here,” said Mortimer Rackstraw. “Suppose this top-hat is me. This rabbit,” he went on, producing it from the lining, “is the girl I love. You come along and—presto—the rabbit vanishes.”
“It’s up your sleeve.”
“It is not up my sleeve. And if it were, if I had a thousand sleeves and rabbits up every one of them, that would not alter the fact that you have treacherously robbed me of Annabel Purvis.”
Freddie began to see daylight. He was able to appreciate the other’s emotion. “So you love Annabel, too?”
“I do.”
“I don’t wonder. Nice girl, what? I see, I see. You worshipped her in secret, never telling your love.”
“I did tell my love. We were engaged.”
“Engaged?”
“Certainly. And this morning I get a letter from her saying that it’s all off, because she has changed her mind and is going to marry you. She has thrown me over.”
“Oh, ah? Well, I’m frightfully sorry—deepest sympathy, and all that, but I don’t see what’s to be done about it, what?”
“I do. There still remains—revenge.”
“Oh, I say, dash it! You aren’t going to be stuffy about it?”
“I am going to be stuffy about it. For the moment you triumph. But do not imagine that this is the end. You have not heard the last of me. Not by any means. You may have stolen the woman I love with your underhand chicanery, but I’ll fix you.”
“How?”
“Never mind how. You will find out how quite soon enough. A nasty jolt you’re going to get, my good fiend, and almost immediately. As sure,” said Mortimer Rackstraw, illustrating by drawing one from Freddie’s back hair, “as eggs are eggs. I wish you a very good afternoon.”
He took up his top-hat, which in his emotion he had allowed to fall to the ground, brushed it on his coat-sleeve, extracted from it a cage of love-birds and strode out.
A moment later, he returned, bowed a few times to right and left and was gone again.
To say that Freddie did not feel a little uneasy as the result of this scene would be untrue. There had been something in the confident manner in which the other had spoken of revenging himself that he had not at all liked. The words had had a sinister ring, and all through the rest of the day he pondered thoughtfully, wondering what a man so trained in the art of having things up his sleeve might have up it now. It was in meditative mood that he dined, and only on the following morning did his equanimity return to him.
Able, now that he had slept on it, to review the disturbing conversation in its proper perspective, he came to the conclusion that the fellow’s threats had been mere bluff. What, after all, he asked himself, could this conjurer do? It was not as if they had been living in the Middle Ages, when chaps of that sort used to put spells on you and change you into things.
No, he decided, it was mere bluff, and with his complacency completely restored had just lighted a cigarette and fallen to dreaming of the girl he loved, when a telegram was brought to him.
It ran as follows:
Come at once. All lost. Ruin stares face. Love and kisses. Annabel.
Half an hour later he was in the train, speeding towards Droitgate Spa.
It had been Freddie’s intention, on entering the train, to devote the journey to earnest meditation. But, as always happens when one wishes to concentrate and brood during a railway journey, he found himself closeted with a talkative fellow-traveller.
The one who interrupted Freddie’s thoughts was a flabby, puffy man of middle age, wearing a red waistcoat, brown shoes, a morning coat and a bowler hat. With such a Grade A bounder, even had his mind been at rest, Freddie would have had little in common, and he sat chafing while the prismatic- fellow prattled on. Nearly an hour passed before he was freed from the infliction of the other’s conversation, but eventually the man’s head began to nod, and presently he was snoring and Freddie was able to give himself up to his reverie.
His thoughts became less and less agreeable as the train rolled on. And what rendered his mental distress so particularly acute was the lack of detail in Annabel’s telegram. It seemed to him to offer so wide a field for uncomfortable speculation.
“All lost,” for instance. A man could do a lot of thinking about a phrase like that. And “Ruin stares face.” Why, he asked himself, did ruin stare face? While commending Annabel’s thriftiness in keeping the thing down to twelve words, he could not help wishing that she could have brought herself to spring another twopence and be more lucid.
But of one thing he felt certain. All this had something to do with his recent visitor. Behind that mystic telegram he seemed to see the hand of Mortimer Rackstraw, that hand whose quickness deceived the eye, and he knew that in lightly dismissing the other as a negligible force he had been to sanguine.
By the time he reached Podagra Lodge, the nervous strain had become almost intolerable. As he rang the bell he was quivering like some jelly set before a diet-patient, and the sight of Annabel’s face as she opened the door did nothing to alleviate his perturbation. The girl was obviously all of a twitter.
“Oh, Freddie!” she cried. “The worst has happened.”
Freddie gulped.
“Rackstraw?”
“Yes,” said Annabel. “But how did you know about him?”
“He came to see me, bubbling over a good deal with veiled menaces and what not,” explained Freddie. He frowned, and eyed her closely. “Why didn’t you tell me you had been engaged to that bird?”
“I didn’t think you would be interested. It was just a passing girlish fancy.”
“You’re sure? You didn’t really love this blighted prestidigitator?”
“No, no. I was dazzled for a while, as any girl might have been when he sawed me in half, but then you came along and I saw that I had been mistaken, and that you were the only man in the world for me.”
&
nbsp; “Good egg,” said Freddie, relieved.
He kissed her fondly and, as he did so, there came to his ears the sound of rhythmic hammering from somewhere below. “What’s that?” he asked.
Annabel wrung her hands. “It’s Mortimer!”
“Is he here?”
“Yes. He arrived on the one-fifteen. I locked him in the cellar.”
“Why?”
“To stop him going to the Pump Room.”
“Why shouldn’t he go to the Pump Room?”
“Because Sir Aylmer has gone there to listen to the band, and they must not meet. If they do, we are lost. Mortimer has hatched a fearful plot.”
Freddie’s heart seemed to buckle under within him. He had tried to be optimistic, but all along he had known that Mortimer Rackstraw would hatch some fearful plot. He could have put his shirt on it. A born hatcher.
“What plot?”
Annabel wrung her hands again.
“He means to introduce Sir Aylmer to my Uncle Joe. He wired Uncle Joe to come to Droitgate Spa. He had arranged to meet him at the Pump Room, and then he was going to introduce him to Sir Aylmer.”
Freddie was a little fogged. It did not seem to him much of a plot.
“Now that I can never be his, all he wants is to make himself unpleasant and prevent our marriage. And he knows that Sir Aylmer will never consent to your marrying me if he finds out that I have an uncle like Uncle Joe.”
Freddie ceased to be fogged. He saw the whole devilish scheme now—a scheme worthy of the subtle brain that could put the ace of spades back in the pack, shuffle, cut three times, and then produce it from the inside of a lemon.
“Is he so frightful?” he quavered.
“Look,” said Annabel simply. She took a photograph from her bosom and extended it towards him with a trembling hand. “That is Uncle Joe, taken in the lodge regalia of a Grand Exalted Periwinkle of the Mystic Order of Whelks.”
Freddie glanced at the photograph and started back with a hoarse cry. Annabel nodded sadly.
“Yes,” she said. “That is how he takes most people. The only faint hope I have is that he won’t have been able to come. But if he has–”