'The fact that this young man may have a bright future as a potboy,' she said, 'does not seem to me an argument in favour of his marrying my niece. I wish to hear no more about Mr Lister.'
The wish was not fulfilled. There was a patter of feet outside the french windows, and Gally tripped in, looking well satisfied with himself. He did not know what the European record was for a two-hundred-yard dash to a pigsty, the bribing to silence of the pig man and the two-hundred-yard dash back, but he rather fancied that he had clipped a few seconds off it. It seemed to him most improbable that in such a brief period of time anything could have gone wrong with his protégé's affairs, and the first flicker of apprehension which disturbed his equanimity came when he glanced about the room and noted his absence.
'Hullo,' he said. 'Where's Landseer?'
Lady Hermione was looking like a cook about to give notice on the evening of the big dinner party.
'If you are referring to Mr Lister, your public-house friend, he has gone.'
A deep sigh escaped Prudence.
'Aunt Hermione bunged him out, Uncle Gally.'
'What!'
'She found out who he was.'
Gally stared at his sister, stunned by this evidence of what seemed to him a scarcely human penetration.
'How the dickens,' he asked, awed, 'did you do that?'
'Freddie was obliging enough to tell me.'
Gally turned to his nephew, and his monocle shot forth flame.
'You cloth-headed young imbecile!'
It was at this point that Freddie put the two questions to which allusion has been made earlier, and followed them up with the train of reasoning which has already been outlined. He spoke eloquently and well, and as his uncle also spoke eloquently and well at the same time, a certain uproar and confusion resulted. Simultaneously Prudence was adding her mite, protesting in her clear soprano voice that she intended to marry the man she loved, no matter what anybody said and no matter how often her flinty-hearted relatives might see fit to throw the poor angel out on his ear; and Lady Hermione's position became roughly that of a chairman at a stormy meeting of shareholders.
She was endeavouring to restore order by beating on the table with a teaspoon when Veronica came in through the french windows, and at the sight of her the uproar ceased. People who knew her always stopped arguing when Veronica came along, because she was sure to want them to explain what they were arguing about and, when they had explained, to ask them to start at the beginning and explain again. And when nerves are frayed that sort of thing is annoying.
Gally stopped calling Freddie names. Freddie stopped waving his hands and appealing to the other's simple sense of justice. Prudence stopped saying they would all look pretty silly when they found her drowned in the lake one morning. And Lady Hermione stopped hammering on the table with the teaspoon. It was like a lightning strike in a boiler factory.
Veronica was radiant. Not even in the photograph taken after the Pageant in Aid of Distressed Public School Men and showing her as the Spirit of the Playing Fields of Eton had she exhibited a more boneheaded loveliness. She seemed to have developed a sort of elephantiasis of the eyes and front teeth, and her cheeks glowed with the light that never was on land or sea. She was wearing on her right wrist the best bracelet which Shrewsbury could produce at a moment's notice, and there were other ornaments on her person. But she made it plain at once that her thirst for bijouterie was by no means slaked.
'Oh, Fred-dee,' she said, 'has Uncle Clarence got back yet?'
Freddie passed a careworn hand over his brow. He had had the sense of being just about to triumph in the argument which her arrival had brought to a close, and this interruption irked him.
'Eh? Yes, the guv'nor is on the premises. You'll find him in the pigsty, I imagine.'
'Did he bring your present?'
'Oh, the present? The gift? Yes, I have it here. Here you are, with oomps and good wishes.'
'Oh, thank you, Fred-dee,' said Veronica, and withdrew into a corner to inspect it.
As a rule, as has been said, people stopped arguing when this girl came in, and they had done so now. But so gripping were the various subjects on the agenda paper that it was only a moment before the discussion broke out again. At first it was conducted in whispers, but gradually these gathered strength, until presently the boiler factory was in full swing once more.
Gally said that while he had always held a low opinion of his nephew's mentality and would never have cared to risk important money on him in an intelligence contest against a child of three with water on the brain, this latest manifestation of his ingrowing imbecility had come as a profound and painful shock, seeming, as it did, to extend the bounds of possibility. Years ago, he recalled, when shown the infant Frederick in his cradle, he had been seized by a strong conviction that the sensible thing for his parents to have done would have been to write off their losses and drown him in a bucket, and to this view he still adhered. Much misery might thus have been averted.
Freddie said that it began to look to him as if there were no such thing as justice in this world. If ever a fellow had been allowed to wander into a snare through lack of inter-office communication, that fellow was himself. Why had he not been told? Why had he not been put abreast? A simple memo would have done the trick, and no memo had been forthcoming. If the verdict of posterity was not that the whole thing was the fault of his uncle and that he himself was blameless and innocent, he would be surprised and astonished – in fact, amazed and stunned.
Prudence said that the idea of drowning herself in the lake was beginning to grow on her. It had floated into her mind just now as a rather attractive daydream, and the more she examined the project, the better it looked. She would prefer, of course, life as Mrs William Lister, but if that avenue were to be closed and poor darling Bill thrown out on the back of his neck every time he tried to get a couple of words with her, she could not see that there was anything bizarre about wanting to drown herself in the lake. It seemed to her the obvious policy to pursue. She went on to draw rather an interesting picture of Lord Emsworth diving in one morning for his before-breakfast swim and bumping his head against her swollen corpse. She said it would make him think a bit, and no doubt she was right.
Lady Hermione said nothing, but continued to bang the table with the teaspoon.
What results this spoon work might eventually have produced, one cannot say. No doubt ere long the rhythmic thrumming would have influenced the tone of the discussion and done something to restore the decencies of debate. But before it had had time to make its presence felt there cut into the confused welter of competing voices a sudden observation from Veronica.
'EEEEEEEEEEE!!!' said Veronica.
The chronicler has already had occasion to show this girl saying 'EEEEEEEEEEE!!!' and it will not have been forgotten how instantaneously arresting was the effect of the word on her lips. Whatever you were doing when you heard it, your tendency was to drop it and listen.
It was so now. Gally, who had been comparing Freddie to his disadvantage with a half-witted whelk-seller whom he had met at Hurst Park the year Sandringham won the Jubilee Cup, stopped in mid-sentence. Freddie, who by way of giving some idea of what he meant by co-operation, had started to describe the filing system in vogue at the offices of Donaldson's Inc., broke off with a gasp. Prudence, who, still toying with the idea of suicide by drowning, had just remembered the notable precedent of Ophelia and was asking what Ophelia had got that she hadn't got, gave a startled jump and was silent. Lady Hermione dropped her teaspoon.
They all turned and gazed in the speaker's direction, and Freddie uttered a piercing cry.
Veronica, looking like a lovely young mother at the cot side of her newborn child, was holding aloft a superb and expensive diamond necklace.
'Oh, Fred-dee!' she said.
II
The cry which Freddie had uttered had proceeded straight from a strong man's heart. It was, as has been stated, piercing, and it had every
reason to be so.
It is always exasperating for a son who has given his father the clearest possible instructions as to how to proceed in a certain matter to find that the latter has gone and got them muddled up after all, and once again, as had happened during the recent unpleasantness with his Uncle Galahad, Freddie found himself chafing at the apparent impossibility of ever obtaining co-operation in the country of his birth. He sighed for the happier conditions prevailing in the United States of northern America, where you got it at every turn.
But what had seared his soul so agonizingly when he beheld the necklace in Veronica's hands was the thought of the delay which must now inevitably ensue before it could be shipped off to Aggie. As he had explained to Prudence in their conversation in Grosvenor Square, Aggie needed the thing in a hurry. She had said so in her first wire and repeated the statement in her second, third, and fourth wires; and as the days went by and it failed to reach her, an unmistakably peevish note had crept into her communications. Niagara Threepwood (née Donaldson) was the sweetest of women, and there was no argument about her being the light of her husband's life and the moon of his delight, but she had inherited from her father the slightly impatient temper which led the latter at conferences to hammer on the table and shout: 'Come on, come on now!'
Thinking of the fifth wire, which might now be expected at any moment, Freddie found himself shuddering in anticipation. Going by the form book, it should be a pipterino. Even the fourth had been good, fruity stuff.
'Hell's bells!' he cried, deeply moved.
The reactions of the rest of the company to the spectacle of the glittering bauble, though differing from his in their nature, were almost equally pronounced. Gally said: 'Good Lord!' Prudence, forgetting Ophelia for the moment, said: 'Golly!' Lady Hermione said: 'Veronica! Where did you get that lovely necklace?'
Veronica was cooing like a dove in springtime.
'It's Freddie's present,' she explained. 'Oh, Fred-dee! How sur-sweet of you! I never dreamed that you meant to give me anything like this.'
It always pains a chivalrous man to be compelled to dash the cup of joy from the lips of Beauty. The resemblance of his cousin to a young mother crooning over her new-born child had not escaped Freddie, and he was aware that what he had to say would cause chagrin and disappointment. But he did not hesitate. On these occasions the surgeon's knife is best.
'I didn't,' he said crisply. 'Not by a ruddy jugful. What you draw is a pendant.'
'A pendant?'
'A pendant,' said Freddie, who wished to leave no loophole for misunderstanding. 'It will be delivered shortly. Accept it with best wishes from the undersigned.'
Veronica's eyes widened. She seemed perplexed.
'But I'd much rather have this than a pendant. Really I would.'
'I dare say,' said Freddie, regretful but firm. 'So would most people. But that necklace happens to belong to Aggie. The story is a long and complicated one, and throws a blinding light on the guv'nor's extraordinary mentality. Boiling it down, I asked him to have the necklace mailed to Aggie in Paris and to bring back the pendant for you, and he went and got the wires crossed, though having assured me in set terms that he thoroughly understood and that there was no possibility of a hitch in the routine. I may say – and this is official – it's the last time I ever get the guv'nor to do anything for me. I believe if you sent him out to buy apples, he'd come back with an elephant.'
Lady Hermione made a noise like the hissing of fat in a saucepan.
'Isn't that Clarence!' she said, and her brother Galahad agreed that that was Clarence.
'Really,' said Lady Hermione, 'I often think he ought to be certified.'
Freddie nodded. Filial respect had prevented him putting the thought into speech, but it had crossed his mind. There were undoubtedly moments when one felt that the guv'nor's true environment was a padded cell at Colney Hatch.
'Such a disappointment for you, darling,' said Lady Hermione.
'Too bad,' said Gally.
'Tough luck, Vee,' said Prudence.
'Deepest symp,' said Freddie. 'One knows how you feel. Must be agony.'
It was only slowly that anything ever penetrated to Veronica's consciousness, and for some moments she had been standing bewildered, unable to grasp the trend of affairs. But this wave of commiseration seemed to accelerate her thought processes.
'Do you mean,' she said, beginning to understand, 'that I'm not to keep this necklace?'
Freddie replied that that was it in a nutshell.
'Can't I wear it at the County Ball?'
The question caused Lady Hermione to brighten. It seemed to her that the cup of joy need not be dashed completely from her child's lips after all. She might not be in a position to drain it to the bottom, but the arrangement she had suggested would enable her at least to take a sip or two.
'Why, of course,' she said. 'That would be lovely, darling.'
'Splendid idea,' agreed Gally. 'Compromise satisfactory to all parties. Wear it at the County Ball, and then turn it in and Freddie can ship it off.'
'You'll look wonderful in it, Vee,' said Prudence. 'I shan't be there to see you, because I shall have drowned myself in the lake, but I know you'll look marvellous.'
Once more Freddie was reluctantly compelled to apply the surgeon's knife.
'Imposs, I fear,' he said, with a manly pity that became him well. 'I'm sorry, Vee, old girl, but that idea's out too. The jamboree to which you allude does not take place for another fortnight, and Aggie wants the thing at once. She has already wired four times for it, and I am expecting telegram number five to-morrow or the day after. And I don't mind telling you that it promises to be hot stuff. At the thought of what she would say if I kept her waiting another fortnight the imagination boggles.'
The Hon. Galahad snorted sharply. Himself a bachelor, he was unable to understand and sympathize with what seemed to him a nephew's contemptible pusillanimity. There is often this unbridgable gulf between the outlook of single and married men.
'Are you afraid of your wife?' he demanded. 'Are you man or mouse? She can't eat you.'
'She'd have a jolly good try,' said Freddie. 'What you don't appear to realize is that Aggie is the daughter of an American millionaire, and if you'd ever met an American millionaire—'
'I've met dozens.'
'Then you ought to know that they bring their daughters up to expect a certain docility in the male. Aggie got the idea into her nut at about the age of six that her word was law and never lost it, and it was always understood that there was a sort of gentleman's agreement that the bird who married her would roll over and jump through hoops on demand. There are few, if any, sweeter girls on earth than good old Aggie, but if you ask me: "Is she a bit on the imperious side from time to time?" I answer frankly that you have rung the bell and are entitled to the cigar or coco-nut. I love her with a devotion which defies human speech, but if you were to place before me the alternatives of disregarding her lightest behest and walking up to a traffic cop and socking him on the maxillary bone, you would find me choosing the cop every time. And it's no good calling me a bally young serf,' said Freddie, addressing the Hon. Galahad, who had done so. 'That's the posish, and I like it. I fully understood what I was letting myself in for when the registrar was doing his stuff.'
There was a silence. It was broken by Veronica making a suggestion.
'You could tell Aggie you had lent the necklace to me.'
'I could,' agreed Freddie, 'and I would if I wanted hell's foundations to quiver and something like the San Francisco earthquake to break loose. You all seem to have overlooked another important point, which, though delicate, I can touch on as we're all members of the family here. Some silly ass went and told Aggie that Vee and I were once engaged, and ever since she has viewed Vee with concern. She suspects her every move.'
'Ridiculous!' said Lady Hermione. 'A mere boy-and-girl affair.'
'Blew over years ago,' said Gally.
'I dare say,' said Fr
eddie. 'But to listen to Aggie, when the topic crops up, you'd think it had happened yesterday. So I'm jolly well not going to lend you that necklace, Vee, and I will now ask you – regretfully, and fully appreciating your natural disappointment and all that sort of thing – to look slippy and hand it over.'
'Oh, Fred-dee!'
'I'm sorry, but there you are. That's life.'
Veronica's hand stole out. There was a quiver on her lovely lips and moisture in her beautiful eyes, but her hand holding the necklace stole out. When a man trained in eloquence in the testing school of Donaldson's Inc. of Long Island City employs that eloquence at its full voltage, it is enough to make any girl's hand steal out.
'Thanks,' said Freddie.
He had spoken too soon. It was as if some sudden vision of the County Ball had come to Veronica Wedge, with herself in the foreground feeling practically naked without those shining diamonds about her neck. Her lips ceased to quiver and set in a firm and determined line. The moisture left her eyes, to be replaced by a fanatic gleam of defiance. She drew back her hand.
'No,' she said.
'Eh?' said Freddie weakly.
A strange bonelessness had come upon him. The situation was one which he had not anticipated, and he was asking himself how he was going to cope with it. The man of sentiment cannot leap at girls and choke necklaces out of them.
'No,' repeated Veronica. 'You gave me this as a birthday present and I'm going to keep it.'
'Keep it? You don't mean absolutely freeze on to it permanently?'
'Yes, I do.'
'But it's Aggie's!'
'She can buy another.'
This happy solution restored Lady Hermione's composure completely.
'Of course she can. How sensible of you, darling. I'm surprised you didn't think of that, Freddie.'
'Sounds to me an admirable way out,' agreed Gally. 'You can always get round these difficulties if you use your head.'
Freddie's was now reeling as it had not reeled since those bygone nights with Tipton Plimsoll in his pre-Jimpson Murgatroyd period, but he endeavoured to make these people see the light of reason. It amazed him that nobody seemed to realize the spot he was in.