There was plenty of noise to guide her to her goal. Dudley's progress from his bed-room to the dining-room, the fruit and biscuits on the sideboard of which formed his objective, had been far from quiet. Once he had tripped over a chair, and now, as his hostess and her attendant began to descend the stairs, he collided with and upset a large screen. He was endeavouring to remove the foot which he had inadvertently put through this when a quiet voice spoke from above.
'Can you see him, Simmons?'
'Yes, m'lady. Dimly but adequately.'
'Then shoot if he moves a step.'
'Very good, m'lady.'
Dudley wrenched his foot free and peered upwards, appalled.
'I say!' he quavered. 'It's only me, you know!'
Light flooded the hall.
'Only me!' repeated Dudley, feverishly. The sight of the enormous gun in the butler's hands had raised his temperature to a painful degree.
'What,' demanded Lady Wickham, coldly, 'are you doing here, Mr Finch?'
An increased sense of the delicacy of his position flooded over Dudley. He was a young man with the nicest respect for the conventions, and he perceived that the situation required careful handling. It is not tactful, he realized, for a guest for whose benefit a hostess has only a few hours earlier provided a lavish banquet to announce to the said hostess that he has been compelled by hunger to rove the house in search of food. For a moment he stood there, licking his lips; then something like an inspiration came to him.
'The fact is,' he said, 'I couldn't sleep, you know.'
'Possibly,' said Lady Wickham, 'you would have a better chance of doing so if you were to go to bed. Is it your intention to walk about the house all night?'
'No, no, absolutely not. I couldn't sleep, so I – er – I thought I would pop down and see if I could find something to read, don't you know.'
'Oh, you want a book?'
'That's right. That's absolutely it. A book. You've put it in a nutshell.'
'I will show you to the library.'
In spite of her stern disapproval of this scoundrel who wormed his way into people's houses in quest of loot, a slight diminution of austerity came to Lady Wickham as the result of this introduction of the literary note. She was an indefatigable novelist, and it pleased her to place her works in the hands of even the vilest. Ushering Dudley into the library, she switched on the light and made her way without hesitation to the third shelf from the top nearest the fireplace. Selecting one from a row of brightly covered volumes, she offered it to him.
'Perhaps this will interest you,' she said.
Dudley eyed it dubiously.
'Oh, I say,' he protested, 'I don't know, you know. This is one of that chap, George Masterman's.'
'Well?' said Lady Wickham, frostily.
'He writes the most frightful bilge, I mean. Don't you think so?'
'I cannot say that I do. I am possibly biased, however, by the fact that George Masterman is the name I write under.'
Dudley blinked.
'Oh, do you?' he babbled. 'Do you? You do, eh? Well, I mean—' An imperative desire to be elsewhere swept over him. 'This'll do me,' he said, grabbing wildly at the nearest shelf. 'This will do me fine. Thanks awfully. Good night. I mean, thanks, thanks. I mean good night. Good night.'
Two pairs of eyes followed him as he shot up the stairs. Lady Wickham's were cold and hard; the expression in those of Simmons was wistful. It was seldom that the butler's professional duties allowed him the opportunity of indulging the passion for sport which had been his since boyhood. A very occasional pop at a rabbit was about all the shooting he got nowadays, and the receding Dudley made his mouth water. He fought the craving down with a sigh.
'A nasty fellow, m'lady,' he said.
'Quick-witted,' Lady Wickham was forced to concede.
'Full of low cunning, m'lady,' emended the butler. 'All that about wanting a book. A ruse.'
'You had better continue watching, Simmons.'
'Most decidedly, your ladyship.'
Dudley sat on his bed, panting. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before, and for a while the desire for food left him, overcome by a more spiritual misery. If there was one thing in the world that gave him the pip, it was looking like a silly idiot; and every nerve in his body told him that during the recent interview he must have looked the most perfect silly idiot. Staring bleakly before him, he re-lived every moment of the blighted scene, and the more he examined his own share in it the worse it looked. He quivered in an agony of shame. He seemed to be bathed from head to foot in a sort of prickly heat.
And then, faintly at first, but growing stronger every moment, hunger began to clamour once again.
Dudley clenched his teeth. Something must be done to combat this. Mind must somehow be enabled to triumph over matter. He glanced at the book which he had snatched from the shelf, and for the first time that night began to feel that Fate was with him. Out of a library which was probably congested with the most awful tosh, he had stumbled first pop upon Mark Twain's Tramp Abroad, a book which he had not read since he was a kid but had always been meaning to read again; just the sort of book, in fact, which would enable a fellow to forget the anguish of starvation until that milk-train went.
He opened it at random, and found with shock that Fate had but been playing with him.
'It has now been many months, at the present writing' (read Dudley), 'since I have had a nourishing meal, but I shall soon have one – a modest, private affair, all to myself. I have selected a few dishes, and made out a little bill of fare, which will go home in the steamer that precedes me and be hot when I arrive – as follows:–'
Dudley quailed. Memories of his boyhood came to him, of the time when he had first read what came after those last two words. The passage had stamped itself on his mind, for he had happened upon it at school, at a time when he was permanently obsessed by a wolfish hunger and too impecunious to purchase anything at the school shop to keep him going till the next meal. It had tortured him then, and it would, he knew, torture him even more keenly now.
Nothing, he resolved, should induce him to go on reading. So he immediately went on.
'Radishes. Baked apples, with cream.
'Fried oysters; stewed oysters. Frogs.
'American coffee, with real cream.
'American butter.
'Fried chicken, Southern style.
'Porterhouse steak.
'Saratoga potatoes.
'Broiled chicken, American style.'
A feeble moan escaped Dudley. He endeavoured to close the book, but it would not close. He tried to remove his eyes from the page, but they wandered back like homing pigeons.
'Brook trout, from Sierra Nevada.
'Lake trout, from Tahoe.
'Sheephead and croakers, from New Orleans.
'Black bass, from the Mississippi.
'American roast beef.
'Roast turkey, Thanksgiving style.
'Cranberry sauce. Celery.
'Roast wild turkey. Woodcock.
'Canvas-back duck, from Baltimore.
'Prairie hens, from Illinois.
'Missouri partridges, broiled.
'Possum. Coon.
'Boston bacon and beans.
'Bacon and greens, Southern style.'
Dudley rose from the bed. He could endure no more. His previous experience as a prospector after food had not been such as to encourage further efforts in that direction, but there comes a time when a man recks not of possible discomfort. He removed his shoes and tip-toed out of the room. A familiar form advanced to meet him along the now brightly lit corridor.
'Well?' said Simmons, the butler, shifting his gun to the ready and massaging the trigger with a loving forefinger.
Dudley gazed upon him with a sinking heart.
'Oh, hullo!' he said.
'What do you want?'
'Oh – er – oh, nothing.'
'You get back into that room.'
'I say, listen, l
addie,' said Dudley, in desperation flinging reticence to the winds. 'I'm starving. Absolutely starving. I wish, like a good old bird, you would just scud down to your pantry or somewhere and get me a sandwich or two.'
'You get back into that room, you hound!' growled Simmons, with such intensity that sheer astonishment sent Dudley tottering back through the door. He had never heard a butler talk like that. He had not supposed that butlers could talk like that.
He put on his shoes again; and, lacing them up, brooded tensely on this matter. What, he asked himself, was the idea? What was the big thought that lay behind all this? That his hostess, alarmed by noises in the night, should have summoned the butler to bring firearms to her assistance was intelligible. But what was the blighter doing, camping outside his door? After all, they knew he was a friend of the daughter of the house.
He was still wrestling with this problem when a curious, sharp, tapping noise attracted his attention. It came at irregular intervals and seemed to proceed from the direction of the window. He sat up, listening. It came again. He crept to the window and looked out. As he did so, something with hard edges smote him painfully in the face.
'Oh, sorry!' said a voice.
Dudley started violently. Looking in the direction from which the voice had proceeded, he perceived that there ran out from the wall immediately to the left of his window a small balcony. On this balcony, bathed in silver moonlight, Roberta Wickham was standing. She was hauling in the slack of a length of string, to the end of which was attached a button-hook.
'Awfully sorry,' she said. 'I was trying to attract your attention.'
'You did,' said Dudley.
'I thought you might be asleep.'
'Asleep!' Dudley's face contorted itself in a dreadful sneer. 'Does anyone ever get any sleep in this house?' He leaned forward and lowered his voice. 'I say, your bally butler has gone off his onion.'
'What?'
'He's doing sentinel duty outside my door with a whacking great cannon. And when I put my head out just now he simply barked at me.'
'I'm afraid,' said Bobbie, gathering in the button-hook, 'he thinks you're a burglar.'
'A burglar? But I told your mother distinctly that I was a friend of yours.'
Something akin to embarrassment seemed to come upon the not easily embarrassed Miss Wickham.
'Yes, I want to talk to you about that,' she said. 'It was like this.'
'I say, when did you arrive, by the way?' asked Dudley, the question suddenly presenting itself to his disordered mind.
'About half an hour ago.'
'What!'
'Yes. I sneaked in through the scullery window. And the first thing I met was mother in her dressing-gown.' Miss Wickham shivered a little as at some unpleasing memory. 'You've never seen mother in her dressing-gown,' she said, in a small voice.
'Yes, I have,' retorted Dudley. 'And while it may be an experience which every chappie ought to have, let me tell you that once is sufficient.'
'I had an accident coming down here,' proceeded Miss Wickham, absorbed in her own story and paying small attention to his. 'An idiot of a man driving a dray let me run into him. My car was all smashed up. I couldn't get away for hours, and then I had to come down on a train that stopped at every station.'
It is proof, if such were needed, of the strain to which Dudley Finch had been subjected that night that the information that this girl had been in a motor-smash did not cause him that anguished concern which he would undoubtedly have felt twenty-four hours earlier. It left him almost cold.
'Well, when you saw your mother,' he said, 'didn't you tell her that I was a friend of yours?'
Miss Wickham hesitated.
'That's the part I want to explain,' she said. 'You see, it was like this. First I had to break it as gently as I could to her that the car wasn't insured. She wasn't frightfully pleased. And then she told me about you and— Dudley, old thing, whatever have you been doing since you got here? The mater seemed to think you had been behaving in the weirdest way.'
'I'll admit that I brought the wrong bag and couldn't dress for dinner, but apart from that I'm dashed if I can see what I did that was weird.'
'Well, she seems to have become frightfully suspicious of you almost from the start.'
'If you had sent that wire, telling her I was coming—'
Miss Wickham clicked her tongue regretfully.
'I knew there was something I had forgotten. Oh, Dudley, I'm awfully sorry.'
'Don't mention it,' said Dudley, bitterly. 'It's probably going to lead to my having my head blown off by a looney butler, but don't give it another thought. You were saying—'
'Oh, yes, when I met mother. You do see, Dudley dear, how terribly difficult it was for me, don't you? I mean, I had just broken it to her that the car was all smashed up and not insured, and then she suddenly asked me if it was true that I had invited you down here. I was just going to say I had, when she began to talk about you in such a bitter spirit that somehow the time didn't seem ripe. So when she asked me if you were a friend of mine, I—'
'You said I was?'
'Well, not in so many words.'
'How do you mean?'
'I had to be awfully tactful, you see.'
'Well?'
'So I told her I had never seen you in my life.'
Dudley uttered a sound like the breeze sighing in the tree-tops.
'But it's all right,' went on Miss Wickham, reassuringly.
'Yes, isn't it?' said Dudley. 'I noticed that.'
'I'm going to go and have a talk with Simmons and tell him he must let you escape. Then everything will be splendid. There's an excellent milk-train—'
'I know all about the milk-train, thanks.'
'I'll go and see him now. So don't you worry, old thing.'
'Worry?' said Dudley. 'Me? What have I got to worry about?'
Bobbie disappeared. Dudley turned away from the window. Faint whispering made itself heard from the passage. Somebody tapped softly on the door. Dudley opened it and found the ambassadress standing on the mat. Farther down the corridor, tactfully withdrawn into the background, Simmons the butler stood grounding arms.
'Dudley,' whispered Miss Wickham, 'have you got any money on you?'
'Yes, a certain amount.'
'Five pounds? It's for Simmons.'
Dudley felt the militant spirit of the Finches surging within him. His blood boiled.
'You don't mean to say that after what has happened the blighter has the crust to expect me to tip him?'
He glared past her at the man behind the gun, who simpered respectfully. Evidently Bobbie's explanations had convinced him that he had wronged Dudley, for the hostility which had been so marked a short while back had now gone out of his manner.