So Mr Carmody, craning his neck, waited: and presently round the corner of the house, a towel about his shoulders, suggesting that he was on his way to take an early-morning dip in the moat, came his nephew Hugo.
Mr Carmody, as this chronicle has shown, had never entertained for Hugo quite that warmth of affection which one likes to see in an uncle towards his nearest of kin, but at the present moment he could not have appreciated him more if he had been a millionaire anxious to put up capital for a new golf-course in the park.
'Hoy!' he cried, much as the beleaguered garrison of Lucknow must have done to the advance guard of the relieving Highlanders. 'Hoy!'
Hugo stopped. He looked to his right, then to his left, then in front of him, and then, turning, behind him. It was a spectacle that chilled in an instant the new sensation of kindliness which his uncle had been feeling towards him.
'Hoy!' cried Mr Carmody. 'Hugo! Confound the boy! Hugo!'
For the first time the other looked up. Perceiving Mr Carmody in his eyrie, he stood rigid, gazing with opened mouth. He might have been posing for a statue of Young Man Startled by Snake in Path While About to Bathe.
'Great Scott!' said Hugo, looking to his uncle's prejudiced eye exactly like the Dartford Warbler. 'What on earth are you doing up there?'
Mr Carmody would have writhed in irritation, had not prudence reminded him that he was thirty feet too high in the air to do that sort of thing.
'Never mind what I'm doing up here! Help me down.'
'How did you get there?'
'Never mind how I got here!'
'But what,' persisted Hugo insatiably, 'is the big idea?'
Withheld from the relief of writhing, Mr Carmody gritted his teeth.
'Put that ladder up,' he said in a strained voice.
'Ladder?'
'Yes, ladder.'
'What ladder?'
'There is a ladder on the ground.'
'Where?'
'There. No, not there. There. There. Not there, I tell you. There. There.'
Hugo, following these directions, concluded a successful search.
'Right,' he said. 'Ladder, long, wooden, one. Correct as per memo. Now what?'
'Put it up.'
'Right.'
'And hold it very carefully.'
'Esteemed order booked,' said Hugo. 'Carry on.'
'Are you sure you are holding it carefully?'
'I'm giving my popular imitation of a vice.'
'Well, don't let go.'
Mr Carmody, dying a considerable number of deaths in the process, descended. He found his nephew's curiosity at close range even more acute than it had been from a distance.
'What on earth were you doing up there?' said Hugo, starting again at the beginning.
'Never mind.'
'But what were you?'
'If you wish to know, a rung broke and the ladder slipped.'
'But what were you doing on a ladder?'
'Never mind!' cried Mr Carmody, regretting more bitterly than ever before in his life that his late brother Eustace had not lived and died a bachelor. 'Don't keep saying What – What – What!'
'Well, why?' said Hugo, conceding the point. 'Why were you climbing ladders?'
Mr Carmody hesitated. His native intelligence returning, he perceived now that this was just what the great public would want to know. It was little use urging a human talking-machine like his nephew to keep quiet and say nothing about this incident. In a couple of hours it would be all over Rudge. He thought swiftly.
'I fancied I saw a swallow's nest under the eaves.'
'Swallow's nest?'
'Swallow's nest.'
'Did you think swallows nested in July?'
'Why shouldn't they?'
'Well, they don't.'
'I never said they did. I merely said . . .'
'No swallow has ever nested in July.'
'I never...'
'April,' said our usually well-informed correspondent.
'What?'
'April. Swallows nest in April.'
'Damn all swallows!' said Mr Carmody. And there was silence for a moment, while Hugo directed his keen young mind at other aspects of this strange affair.
'How long have you been up there?'
'I don't know. Hours. Since half-past five.'
'Half-past five? You mean you got up at half-past five to look for swallows' nests in July?'
'I did not get up to look for swallows' nests.'
'But you said you were looking for swallows' nests.'
'I did not say I was looking for swallows' nests. I merely said I fancied I saw a swallow's nest . . .'
'You couldn't have done. Swallows don't nest in July . . . April.'
The sun was peeping over the elms. Mr Carmody raised his clenched fists to it.
'I did not say I saw a swallow's nest. I said I thought I saw a swallow's nest.'
'And got a ladder out and climbed up for it?'
'Yes.'
'Having risen from couch at five-thirty ante meridian?'
'Will you kindly stop asking me all these questions.'
Hugo regarded him thoughtfully.
'Just as you like, uncle. Well, anything further this morning? If not, I'll be getting along and taking my dip.'
III
'I say, Ronnie,' said Hugo, some two hours later, meeting his friend en route for the breakfast table. 'You know my uncle?'
'What about him?'
'He's loopy.'
'What?'
'Gone clean off his castors. I found him at seven o'clock this morning sitting on a second-floor window-sill. He said he'd got up at five-thirty to look for swallows' nests.'
'Bad,' said Mr Fish, shaking his head with even more than his usual solemnity. 'Second-floor window-sill, did you say?'
'Second-floor window-sill.'
'Exactly how my aunt started,' said Ronnie Fish. 'They found her sitting on the roof of the stables, playing the ukulele in a blue dressing-gown. She said she was Boadicea. And she wasn't. That's the point, old boy,' said Mr Fish earnestly. 'She wasn't. We must get you out of this as quickly as possible, or before you know where you are you'll find yourself being murdered in your bed. It's this living in the country that does it. Six consecutive months in the country is enough to sap the intellect of anyone. Looking for swallows' nests, was he?'
'So he said. And swallows don't nest in July. They nest in April.'
Mr Fish nodded.
'That's how I always heard the story,' he agreed. 'The whole thing looks very black to me, and the sooner you're safe out of this and in London, the better.'
IV
At about the same moment, Mr Carmody was in earnest conference with Mr Molloy.
'That man you were telling me about,' said Mr Carmody. 'That friend of yours who you said would help us.'
'Chimp?'
'I believe you referred to him as Chimp. How soon could you get in touch with him?'
'Right away, brother.'
Mr Carmody objected to being called brother, but this was no time for being finicky.
'Send for him at once.'
'Why, have you given up the idea of getting that stuff out of the house yourself?'
'Entirely,' said Mr Carmody. He shuddered slightly. 'I have been thinking the matter over very carefully, and I feel that this is an affair where we require the services of some third party. Where is this friend of yours? In London?'
'No. He's right around the corner. His name's Twist. He runs a sort of health-farm place only a few miles from here.'
'God bless my soul! Healthward Ho?'
'That's the spot. Do you know it?'
'Why, I have only just returned from there.'
Mr Molloy was conscious of a feeling of almost incredulous awe. It was the sort of feeling which would come to a man who saw miracles happening all round him. He could hardly believe that things could possibly run as smoothly as they appeared to be doing. He had anticipated a certain amount of difficulty in se
lling Chimp Twist to Mr Carmody, as he phrased it to himself, and had looked forward with not a little apprehension to a searching inquisition into Chimp Twist's bona fides. And now, it seemed, Mr Carmody knew Chimp personally and was, no doubt, prepared to receive him without a question. Could luck like this hold? That was the only thought that disturbed Mr Molloy.
'Well, isn't that interesting!' he said slowly. 'So you know my old friend Twist, do you?'
'Yes,' said Mr Carmody, speaking, however, as if the acquaintanceship were not one to which he looked back with any pleasure. 'I know him very well.'
'Fine!' said Mr Molloy. 'You see, if I thought we were getting in somebody you knew nothing about and felt you couldn't trust, it would sort of worry me.'
Mr Carmody made no comment on this evidence of his guest's nice feeling. He was meditating and did not hear it. What he was meditating on was the agreeable fact that money which he had been trying so vainly to recover from Doctor Twist would not be a dead loss after all. He would write it off as part of the working expenses of this little venture. He beamed happily at Mr Molloy.
'Healthward Ho is on the telephone,' he said. 'Go and speak to Doctor Twist now and ask him to come over here at once.' He hesitated for a moment, then came bravely to a decision. After all, whatever the cost in petrol, oil and depreciation of tyres, it was for a good object. More working expenses. 'I will send my car for him,' he said.
If you wish to accumulate, you must inevitably speculate, felt Mr Carmody.
7 A CROWDED NIGHT
I
The strange depression which had come upon Pat in the shop of Chas Bywater did not yield, as these grey moods generally do, to the curative influence of time. The following morning found her as gloomy as ever – indeed, rather gloomier, for shortly after breakfast the Noblesse Oblige spirit of the Wyverns had sent her on a reluctant visit to an old retainer who lived – if you could call it that – in one of the smaller and stuffier houses in Budd Street. Pensioned off after cooking for the Colonel for eighteen years, this female had retired to bed and stayed there, and there was a legend in the family, though neither by word nor look did she ever give any indication of it, that she enjoyed seeing Pat.
Bedridden ladies of advanced age seldom bubble over with fun and joie de vivre. This one's attitude towards life seemed to have been borrowed from her favourite light reading, the works of the Prophet Jeremiah, and Pat, as she emerged into the sunshine after some eighty minutes of her society, was feeling rather like Jeremiah's younger sister.
The sense of being in a world unworthy of her – a world cold and unsympathetic and full of an inferior grade of human being – had now become so oppressive that she was compelled to stop on her way home and linger on the old bridge which spanned the Skirme. From the days of her childhood this sleepy, peaceful spot had always been a haven when things went wrong. She was gazing down into the slow-moving water and waiting for it to exercise its old spell, when she heard her name spoken and turned to see Hugo.
'What ho,' said Hugo, pausing beside her. His manner was genial and unconcerned. He had not met her since that embarrassing scene in the lobby of the Hotel Lincoln, but he was a man on whom the memory of past embarrassments sat lightly. 'What do you think you're doing, young Pat?'
Pat found herself cheering up a little. She liked Hugo. The sense of being all alone in a bleak world left her.
'Nothing in particular,' she said. 'Just looking at the water.'
'Which in its proper place,' agreed Hugo, 'is admirable stuff. I've been doing a bit of froth-blowing at the Carmody Arms. Also buying cigarettes and other necessaries. I say, have you heard about my Uncle Lester's brain coming unstuck? Absolutely. He's quite non compos. Belfry one seething mass of bats. He's taken to climbing ladders in the small hours after swallows' nests. However, shelving that for the moment, I'm very glad I ran into you this morning, young Pat. I wish to have a serious talk with you about old John.'
'John?'
'John.'
'What about John?'
At this moment there whirred past, bearing in its interior a weedy, snub-nosed man with a waxed moustache, a large red automobile. Hugo, suspending his remarks, followed it with astonished eyes.
'Good Lord!'
'What about Johnnie?'
'That was the Dex-Mayo,' said Hugo. 'And the gargoyle inside was that blighter Twist from Healthward Ho. Great Scott! The car must have been over there to fetch him.'
'What's so remarkable about that?'
'What's so remarkable?' echoed Hugo, astounded. 'What's remarkable about Uncle Lester deliberately sending his car twenty miles to fetch a man who could have come, if he had to come at all, by train at his own expense? My dear old thing, it's revolutionary. It marks an epoch. Do you know what I think has happened? You remember that dynamite explosion in the park when Uncle Lester nearly got done in?'
'I don't have much chance to forget it.'
'Well, what I believe has happened is that the shock he got that day has completely changed his nature. It's a well-known thing. You hear of such cases all the time. Ronnie Fish was telling me about one only yesterday. There was a man he knew in London, a moneylender, a fellow who had a glass eye, and the only thing that enabled anyone to tell which of his eyes was which was that the glass one had rather a more human expression than the other. That's the sort of chap he was. Well, one day he was nearly konked in a railway accident, and he came out of hospital a different man. Slapped people on the back, patted children on the head, tore up I.O.U.s, and talked about it being everybody's duty to make the world a better place. Take it from me, young Pat, Uncle Lester's whole nature has undergone some sort of rummy change like that. That swallow's nest business must have been a preliminary symptom. Ronnie tells me that this moneylender with the glass eye . . .'
Pat was not interested in glass-eyed moneylenders.
'What were you saying about John?'
'I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going home quick, so as to be among those present when he starts scattering the stuff. It's quite on the cards that I may scoop that five hundred yet. Once a tight-wad starts seeing the light . . .'
'You were saying something about John,' said Pat, falling into step with him as he moved off. His babble irked her, making her wish that she could put the clock back a few years. Age, no doubt, has its compensations, but one of the drawbacks of becoming grown-up and sedate is that you have to abandon the childish practice of clumping your friends on the side of the head when they wander from the point. However, she was not too old to pinch her companion in the fleshy part of the arm, and she did so.
'Ouch!' said Hugo, coming out of his trance.
'What about John?'
Hugo massaged his arm tenderly. The look of a greyhound pursuing an electric hare died out of his eyes.
'Of course, yes. John. Glad you reminded me. Have you seen John lately?'
'No. I'm not allowed to go to the Hall, and he seems too busy to come and see me.'
'It isn't so much being busy. Don't forget there's a war on. No doubt he's afraid of bumping into the parent.'
'If Johnnie's scared of father . . .'
'There's no need to speak in that contemptuous tone. I am, and there are few more intrepid men alive than Hugo Carmody. The old Col., believe me, is a tough baby. If I ever see him, I shall run like a rabbit, and my biographers may make of it what they will. You, being his daughter and having got accustomed to his ways, probably look on him as something quite ordinary and harmless, but even you will admit that he's got eyebrows which must be seen to be believed.'
'Oh, never mind father's eyebrows. Go on about Johnnie.'
'Right ho. Well, then, look here, young Pat,' said Hugo, earnestly, 'in re the aforesaid John, I want to ask you a favour. I understand he proposed to you that night at the Mustard Spoon.'
'Well?'
'And you slipped him the mitten.'
'Well?'
'Oh, don't think I'm blaming you,' Hugo assured her. 'If you don't wa
nt him, you don't. Nothing could be fairer than that. But what I'm asking you to do now is to keep clear of the poor chap. If you happen to run into him, that can't be helped, but be a sport and do your best to avoid him. Don't unsettle him. If you come buzzing round, stirring memories of the past and arousing thoughts of Auld Lang Syne and what not, that'll unsettle him. It'll take his mind off his job and . . . well . . . unsettle him. And, providing he isn't unsettled, I have strong hopes that we may get old John off this season. Do I make myself clear?'
Pat kicked viciously at an inoffensive pebble, whose only fault was that it happened to be within reach at the moment.
'I suppose what you're trying to break to me in your rambling, woollen-headed way is that Johnnie is mooning round that Molloy girl? I met her just now in Bywater's, and she told me she was staying at the Hall.'
'I wouldn't call it mooning,' said Hugo thoughtfully, speaking like a man who is an expert in these matters and can appraise subtle values. 'I wouldn't say it had quite reached the mooning stage yet. But I have hopes. You see, John is a bloke whom nature intended for a married man. He's a confirmed settler-down, the sort of chap who . . .'
'You needn't go over all that again. I had the pleasure of hearing your views on the subject that night in the lobby of the hotel.'
'Oh, you did hear?' said Hugo, unabashed. 'Well, don't you think I'm right?'
'If you mean do I approve of Johnnie marrying Miss Molloy, I certainly do not.'
'But if you don't want him . . .'
'It has nothing to do with my wanting him or not wanting him. I don't like Miss Molloy.'
'Why not?'
'She's flashy.'
'I would have said smart.'
'I wouldn't.' Pat, with an effort, recovered a certain measure of calm. Wrangling, she felt, was beneath her. As she could not hit Hugo with the basket in which she had carried two pounds of tea, a bunch of roses and a seed cake to her bedridden pensioner, the best thing to do was to preserve a ladylike composure. 'Anyway, you're probably taking a lot for granted. Probably Johnnie isn't in the least attracted by her. Has he ever given any sign of it?'