'But don't you understand? Didn't you grasp what I was saying just now? Aggie will go up in the air like a rocket when she hears I've given Vee – Vee of all people! – her necklace. She'll divorce me.'
'Nonsense.'
'She will, I tell you. American wives are like that. Let the slightest thing ruffle their equanimity, and bingo! Ask Tippy. His mother divorced his guv'nor because he got her to the station at ten-seven to catch a train that had started at seven-ten.'
The Hon. Galahad's eye lit up.
'That reminds me of a rather amusing story—'
But the story of which he had been reminded was not to be told on this occasion – though, knowing Gally, one cannot believe that it was lost to the world for ever. A sharp cough from his sister drew his attention to the fact that Tipton Plimsoll was entering the room.
III
Tipton was unmistakably effervescent, his manner and appearance alike completely exploding his hostess's theory that he must be exhausted after his long drive. His spectacles were gleaming, and he seemed to float on air.
There is a widely advertised patent medicine which promises to its purchasers a wonderful sense of peace, poise, neural solidity and organic integrity, and guarantees to free them from all nervous irritability, finger-drumming, teeth-grinding, and foot-tapping. This specific Tipton Plimsoll might have been taking for weeks, and the poet Coleridge, had he been present, would have jerked a thumb at him with a low-voiced: 'Don't look now, but that fellow over there will give you some idea of what I had in mind when I wrote about the man who on honeydew had fed and drunk the milk of Paradise.'
'Hi, ya!' he cried, the first time he had used the expression in Blandings Castle.
But it has been well said that it is precisely these moments when we are feeling that ours is the world and everything that's in it that Fate selects for sneaking up on us with the rock in the stocking. Scarcely had Tipton floated half a dozen feet when he was brought up short by the sight of Veronica dandling the necklace, and it was as if a blunt instrument had descended on the base of his skull.
'What's that?' he cried, tottering. He did not actually clutch his brow, but anyone could have seen that it was a very near thing. 'Who gave you that?' he demanded tensely.
Lady Hermione awoke to a sudden sense of peril. She had not forgotten the night of her wealthy future son-in-law's arrival at the castle and his strongly-marked reaction to the spectacle of Veronica slapping Freddie on the wrist and telling him not to be so silly, and the look of quick suspicion which he had just cast at the last named told her that he still feared his fatal fascination. Let him learn that this ornate piece of jewellery was a gift from Freddie and who knew what horrors might not ensue? A vision of the owner of the controlling interest in Tipton's Stores stalking out, leaving a broken engagement behind him, made her feel for a moment quite faint.
She was wondering how, without actually drawing her into a corner and slowly and carefully explaining to her for about forty minutes, she could impress upon her child the absolutely vital necessity for secrecy and evasion, when Veronica spoke.
'Freddie gave it me for my birthday,' she said.
From Tipton's lips, starting from the lower reaches of his soul, there came a low, soft, hollow, grunting sound. Lord Emsworth, had he been there to hear, would have recognized it as familiar. It closely resembled the noise which sometimes proceeded from the Empress when she was trying to get a potato which had rolled beyond her reach. He tottered again, more noticeably than the first time.
'Yes, Tip-pee.'
When we last saw Tipton Plimsoll, he was, it will be remembered, all straightened out on the snake question. The frank delight with which Freddie had received the news of his engagement and the hearty manner in which he had shaken his hand had finally dispelled the uneasy suspicions which had been oppressing him for so long. We faded out, it will be recalled, on a medium shot of him erasing the young dog biscuiteer's name from his list of snakes and according to him the honourable status of an innocent cousin.
Now, his heart sinking till it seemed to be all mixed up with his socks, he saw that the slitherer, when exhibiting joy at the news of his engagement, had been but acting a part. The handshake which he had mistaken for that of a pal had been the handshake of a serpent, and of a serpent who had, the moment his back was turned, intended to go on playing the old army game with the girl he loved. No wonder Tipton tottered. Anyone would have tottered.
It was the licentious lavishness of the gift that made the whole ghastly set-up so hideously plain. If Freddie had presented Veronica with a modest wrist watch or a simple pendant, he would have had no criticism to make. Quite in order, he would have said, as from cousin to cousin. But a necklace that must have cost a packet was a very different matter. Cousins do not blow their substance on expensive diamond necklaces and give them to girls on their birthdays. Snakes, in sharp contradistinction, do.
'Cheese!' he muttered, using this expression, too, for the first time on these refined premises.
Freddie, meanwhile, had paled beneath his tan. He could read what was passing in Tipton's mind as clearly as if it had been the top line on an oculist's chart, and the thought that unless prompt steps were taken through the proper channels the exclusive concession which the other, speaking for Tipton's Stores, had granted to Donaldson's Dog-Joy might go west chilled him to the marrow.
'It's my wife's!' he cried.
He would have done better to remain silent. The cynical confession set the seal on Tipton's horror and disgust. For while we may pardon, if only with difficulty, the snake which seeks to undermine a young girl's principles at its own expense, at the snake which swipes its wife's jewellery as a means to this end we look askance, and rightly.
'What I mean—'
A smooth voice cut in on Freddie's broken stammer. It was the voice of one whose suave diplomacy had a hundred times reconciled brawling race-course touts and acted like oil upon troubled waters when feelings ran high between jellied-eel sellers.
'Just a moment, Freddie.'
The Hon. Galahad's was essentially a kindly soul. He was a man who liked to see everybody happy and comfortable. It had not escaped his notice that his sister Hermione was looking like an interested bystander waiting for a time bomb to explode, and it seemed to him that the moment had arrived for a polished man of the world to take the situation in hand.
'What Freddie is trying to say, my dear fellow, is that the thing originally belonged to his wife. Having no more use for it, she handed it over to him to do what he liked with. Why should there be anything to cause remark in the fact that he gave the little trinket to Veronica?'
Tipton stared.
'You call that a little trinket? It must have cost ten thousand smackers.'
'Ten thousand smackers?' There was genuine amusement in the Hon. Galahad's jolly laugh. 'My dear chap! Don't tell me you've got the idea into your mind that it's real? As if any man with Freddie's scrupulous sense of the fitness of things would go giving a ten-thousand-dollar necklace to a girl who has just become engaged to his friend. There are some things that are not done. Mrs Freddie bought that necklace at the five-and-ten-cent store. Or did I misunderstand you when you told me that, Freddie?'
'Perfectly correct, Uncle Gally.'
Tipton's brow became wrinkled.
'She bought it at the five-and-ten-cent store?'
'That's right.'
'Just for a gag, you mean?'
'Exactly. A woman's whim. I wonder if you have ever heard the one about the man whose wife had a whim of iron? He was going down the street one day—'
Tipton was not interested in men with iron-whimmed wives. He was pondering on this new angle and finding the explanation plausible. He had known wealthy female compatriots of his to buy some odd things. Doris Jimpson had once bought twelve coloured balloons, and they had popped them with their cigarettes on the way home in the car. His sombre face began to clear, and one noted a relaxation in the tenseness of his bearing.
br />
It was unfortunate, therefore, that Veronica should have chosen this moment to give tongue. You could generally rely on Veronica to say the wrong thing, and she did so now.
'I'm going to wear it at the County Ball, Tip-pee.'
An instant before, it had seemed as though Tipton Plimsoll were about to become again the carefree soul who had entered the room with a merry 'Hi, ya!' His eye, resting on Freddie, had not had actual brotherly love in it, but it had been reasonably free from horrified suspicion and loathing disgust and seemed likely to become freer. The caveman in Tipton Plimsoll, you would have said, was preparing to put up the shutters and close down.
But at these words his brow darkened once more and a haughty gleam shot from his horn-rimmed spectacles. Veronica had touched his pride.
'Is that so?' he said formidably. 'Wear it at the County Ball, huh? You think I'm going to have my future wife wearing fake five-and-ten-cent store jewellery at any by golly County Ball? I'll say I'm not. I'm the fellow who'll buy you all the stuff you need for the County Ball. Me!' said Tipton, pointing with his left hand at his torso and with his right jerking the necklace from her grasp.
'Hey!' he said.
His eye, sweeping the room, had fallen on Prudence. Wearying of a discussion whose din and uproar were preventing her thinking of lakes, she had begun to move towards the door.
'You off?'
'I am going to my room,' said Prudence.
Tipton stopped her with an imperious gesture.
'Juss-a-moment. You were saying yesterday you needed something for that jumble sale of yours. Take this,' said Tipton.
'Right ho,' said Prudence listlessly. 'Thanks.'
She passed through the door, leaving a throbbing silence behind her.
IV
Prudence's room was at the back of the castle, next door to Tipton Plimsoll's. Its balcony looked down on meadows and trees, and so a few minutes later did Prudence. For on leaving the drawing-room she had gone to lean on the rail, her sad eyes roaming over the spreading woodland, her bruised spirit seeking to obtain some solace from the contemplation of the peaceful scene. She eyed the copses and spinneys from much the same general motives as had led Tipton on a memorable occasion to go and look at the ducks on the Serpentine.
But when a spirit is as bruised as hers, there is not much percentage in gazing at scenery. Presently she went back into the room with a weary sigh, which changed abruptly to a startled squeak. She had seen a human form sitting in the armchair, and it had made her jump.
'Hullo, my dear,' said her Uncle Galahad genially. 'I saw you out there but didn't like to disturb you. Your air was that of a girl deep in meditation. Did you think I was a burglar?'
'I thought you were Freddie.'
'Do I look like Freddie?' said Gally, wounded.
'I thought it was Freddie come for the necklace.'
There was a grave expression on Gally's face as he adjusted his monocle and focused it upon her.
'It is extremely fortunate that it wasn't, considering that you had left the thing lying right out in the open on your dressing-table. You might have ruined everything. Oh, it's all right now. I've got it in my pocket. Don't you realize, my dear child, what the possession of this necklace means to you?'
Prudence made a tired gesture, like a Christian martyr who has got a bit fed up with lions.
'It doesn't mean anything to me. Nothing means anything to me if I can't have Bill.'
Gally rose and patted her on the head. It meant leaving the armchair, which was a very comfortable one, but he did it. A man with a big heart is always ready to put up with discomfort when it is a case of consoling a favourite niece. At the same time he regarded her with frank astonishment. He had supposed her mind to be nimbler than this.
'You're going to have Bill,' he said. 'I fully expect to be dancing at your wedding at an early date. Haven't you grasped the position of affairs yet? Why, you might be Veronica.'
'What do you mean?'
'This necklace is the talisman which is going to unlock the gates of happiness for you. Freeze on to it like flypaper and refuse to give it up no matter what threats and cajoleries may be employed, and all you will have to worry about is where to spend the honeymoon. Can't you understand that you have been handed the whole situation on a plate? What's going to happen when you refuse to part with this necklace? The opposition will have to come to terms, and we shall dictate those terms.'
The Hon. Galahad removed his monocle, breathed on it, polished it with his handkerchief, and put it back.
'Let me tell you,' he said, 'what happened after you left the drawing-room. Plimsoll took Veronica off for a stroll, leaving the rest of us to our general meeting. Freddie was the first to take the floor. He told us rather eloquently what Aggie was going to do to him if she didn't get her necklace. His speech was accorded only a rather tepid reception. Your Aunt Hermione seemed to think that the disaster to which he alluded was exclusively Freddie's headache. My ready wit had saved the situation, leaving Plimsoll soothed and happy, and that was all she cared about. As far as she was concerned, the incident was closed.'
'Well, wasn't it?'
'It might have been, if Freddie had not ripped it wide open again. America's done something to that boy. It's made him think on his feet and get constructive ideas. This time he held his audience spellbound.'
'What did he say?'
'I'll tell you. He threatened, unless the necklace was in his hands by nightfall, to blow the gaff. He said he would tell Plimsoll what it was really worth and add that he had given it to Veronica as a birthday present and leave the rest to him. He said that this would probably mean the loss of some concession or other which Plimsoll had promised him, but that if he was going to have a headache he intended others to share it with him. His remarks caused a sensation. I don't think I have ever seen Hermione so purple. She is convinced that if Plimsoll ever finds out that necklace is genuine he will break off the engagement and stalk out of Veronica's life. It appears that he is madly jealous of Freddie.'
Prudence gave an awed gasp.
'Golly!' she said. 'I see what you mean.'
'I thought you would. Hermione's anguish was painful to witness, and Clarence, who dropped in with your Uncle Egbert just in time to join the conference at this point, put the lid on it by revealing that he had told young Plimsoll that Freddie and Veronica were once engaged. He said Egbert had told him to. Egbert says he told him not to. I left them arguing the point.'
Prudence's eyes had rolled to the ceiling. She seemed to be offering silent thanks to Heaven for a notable display of benevolence to a damsel in distress.
'But, Uncle Gally, this is marvellous!'
'Solves everything.'
'They'll have to let me marry Bill.'
'Exactly. That is our price. We stick to it.'
'We won't weaken.'
'Not an iota. If they come bothering you, refer them to your agent. Tell them I've got the thing.'
'But then they'll bother you.'
'My dear child, mine has been a long life, in the course of which I have frequently been bothered by experts. And always without effect. Bothering passes me by as the idle wind, which I respect not.'
'That's Shakespeare, isn't it?'
'I shouldn't wonder. Most of the good gags are.'
Prudence drew a deep breath.
'You're a great man to have on one's side, Uncle Gally.'
'I like to stick up for my pals.'
'What a bit of luck Bill getting you for a godfather.'
'So I said at the time. There was a school of thought which held otherwise. Well, I'm going to my room to hide the swag.'
'Hide it carefully.'
'I'll put it in a place where no one would dream of looking. After that I thought of going for a saunter in the cool of the evening. Care to join me?'
'I'd love to, but I've got to write to Bill. I say, Uncle Gally,' said Prudence, struck with a sudden thought. 'All this is a bit tough on Freddie, i
sn't it?'
The same thing had occurred to the Hon. Galahad. 'A little, I suppose. Possibly just a trifle. But you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Not Shakespeare,' said the Hon. Galahad. 'One of my own. Unless I heard it somewhere. Besides, Freddie's agony will be only temporary. Hermione will have to throw in the towel. No alternative. I told her so in set terms, and left her to think it over.'
CHAPTER 10
If Prudence had had keener ears – or, rather, if her hearing had not at the moment been dulled by grief- she might have heard, while leaning on the rail of her balcony, a sound from below which would have registered itself on her consciousness as a gasping cry. And if she had been looking more narrowly at the meadows and spinneys – if, that is to say, her eyes had not been blurred with unshed tears – she would have noticed that it proceeded from Bill Lister, who was sitting on a tree stump outside the second spinney to the right.
But being preoccupied she missed him, and Bill, who had sprung to his feet and was about to start waving his arms like a semaphore in the hope of attracting her attention, had the chagrin of seeing her vanish like some goddess in a dream. The best he was able to do was to take careful note of the spot at which she had made her brief appearance and go off to see if he could find a ladder.
In supposing that Bill had left the drawing-room with bowed head during his absence, Freddie had been quite correct. After a rather one-sided exchange of remarks with Lady Hermione he had seen that there was nothing to keep him, and pausing only to knock over a chair and upset the cake table again he had tottered forth into the sunshine. Any anxiety he might have felt about the disposition of his luggage was dispelled by his hostess's assurance that it would be thrown out after him and would in due course find its way to the Emsworth Arms.
The emotions of a man who, arriving at a country house for a long visit, finds himself kicked out at the end of the first twenty minutes are necessarily chaotic, but on one point Bill was pretty clear – that he had plenty of time on his hands. It was not yet six o'clock, and the day seemed to stretch before him endlessly. By way of getting through it somehow he started on a desultory tour of the grounds, and instinctively avoiding those in the front of the house, where the danger of running into Lady Hermione again would be more acute, he had come at length to the second spinney on the right of Prudence's balcony. There he had sat down to review his position and to endeavour to assess his chances of ever seeing again the girl he loved.