'Stop that noise and get to bed,' said John.
'Right ho,' said Emily. 'You'll be coming soon, I suppose?'
She charged up the stairs, glad to get to her basket after a busy evening. John lighted his pipe, and began to meditate. Usually he smoked the last pipe of the day to the accompaniment of thoughts about Pat, but now he found his mind turning to this extraordinary delusion of Hugo's that he had caught Doctor Twist, of Healthward Ho, burgling the house.
John had never met Doctor Twist, but he knew that he was the proprietor of a flourishing health-cure establishment and assumed him to be a reputable citizen; and the idea that he had come all the way from Healthward Ho to burgle Rudge Hall was so bizarre that he could not imagine by what weird mental processes his cousin had been led to suppose that he had seen him. Why Doctor Twist, of all people? Why not the vicar or Chas Bywater?
Footsteps sounded on the gravel, and he was aware of the subject of his thoughts returning. There was a dazed expression on Hugo's face, and in his hand there fluttered a small oblong slip of paper.
'John,' said Hugo, 'look at this and tell me if you see what I see. Is it a cheque?'
'Yes.'
'For five hundred quid, made out to me and signed by Uncle Lester?'
'Yes.'
'Then there is a Santa Claus!' said Hugo reverently. 'John, old man, it's absolutely uncanny. Directly I got into the house just now Uncle Lester called me to his study, handed me this cheque, and told me that I could go to London with Ronnie tomorrow and help him start that night-club. You remember me telling you about Ronnie's night-club, the Hot Spot, situated just off Bond Street in the heart of London's pleasure-seeking area? Or did I? Well, anyway, he is starting a night-club there, and he offered me a half-share if I'd put up five hundred. By the way, Uncle Lester wants you to go to London tomorrow, too.'
'Me. Why?'
'I fancy he's got the wind up a bit about this burglary business tonight. He said something about wanting you to go and see the insurance people – to bump up the insurance a trifle, I suppose. He'll explain. But, listen, John. It really is the most extraordinary thing, this. Uncle Lester starting to unbelt, I mean, and scattering money all over the place. I was absolutely right when I told Pat this morning . . .'
'Have you seen Pat?'
'Met her this morning on the bridge. And I said to her . . .'
'Did she – er – ask after me?'
'No.'
'No?' said John hollowly.
'Not that I remember. I brought your name into the talk, and we had a few words about you, but I don't recollect her asking after you.' Hugo laid a hand on his cousin's arm. 'It's no use, John. Be a man! Forget her. Keep plugging away at that Molloy girl. I think you're beginning to make an impression. I think she's softening. I was watching her narrowly last night, and I fancied I saw a tender look in her eyes when they fell on you. I may have been mistaken, but that's what I fancied. A sort of shy, filmy look. I'll tell you what it is, John. You're much too modest. You underrate yourself. Keep steadily before you the fact that almost anybody can get married if they only plug away at it. Look at this man Bessemer, for instance, Ronnie's man that I told you about. As ugly a devil as you would wish to see outside the House of Commons, equipped with number sixteen feet and a face more like a walnut than anything. And yet he has clicked. The moral of which is that no one need ever lose hope. You may say to yourself that you have no chance with this Molloy girl, that she will not look at you. But consider the case of Bessemer. Compared with him, you are quite good-looking. His ears alone . . .'
'Good night,' said John.
He knocked out his pipe and turned to the stairs. Hugo thought his manner abrupt.
VIII
Sergeant-Major Flannery, that able and conscientious man, walked briskly up the main staircase of Healthward Ho. Outside a door off the second landing he stopped and knocked.
A loud sneeze sounded from within.
'Cub!' called a voice.
Chimp Twist, propped up with pillows, was sitting in bed, swathed in a woollen dressing-gown. His face was flushed, and he regarded his visitor from under swollen eyelids with a moroseness which would have wounded a more sensitive man. Sergeant-Major Flannery stood six feet two in his boots: he had a round, shiny face at which it was agony for a sick man to look, and Chimp was aware that when he spoke it would be in a rolling, barrack-square bellow which would go clean through him like a red-hot bullet through butter. One has to be in rude health and at the top of one's form to bear up against the Sergeant-Major Flannerys of this world.
'Well?' he muttered thickly.
He broke off to sniff at a steaming jug which stood beside his bed, and the Sergeant-Major, gazing down at him with the offensive superiority of a robust man in the presence of an invalid, fingered his waxed moustache. The action intensified Chimp's dislike. From the first he had been jealous of that moustache. Until it had come into his life he had always thought highly of his own fungoid growth, but one look at this rival exhibit had taken all the heart out of him. The thing was long and blond and bushy, and it shot heavenwards into two glorious needle-point ends, a shining zareba of hair quite beyond the scope of any mere civilian. Non-army men may grow moustaches and wax them and brood over them and be fond and proud of them, but to obtain a waxed moustache in the deepest and holiest sense of the words you have to be a Sergeant-Major.
'Oo-er!' said Mr Flannery. 'That's a nasty cold you've got.'
Chimp, as if to endorse this opinion, sneezed again.
'A nasty feverish cold,' proceeded the Sergeant Major in the tones in which he had once been wont to request squads of recruits to number off from the right. 'You ought to do something about that cold.'
'I am doing sobthig about it,' growled Chimp, having recourse to the jug once more.
'I don't mean sniffing at jugs, sir. You won't do yourself no good sniffing at jugs, Mr Twist. You want to go to the root of the matter, if you understand the expression. You want to attack it from the stummick. The stummick is the seat of the trouble. Get the stummick right and the rest follows natural.'
'Wad do you wad?'
'There's some say quinine and some say a drop of camphor on a lump of sugar and some say cinnamon, but you can take it from me the best thing for a nasty feverish cold in the head is taraxacum and hops. There is no occasion to damn my eyes, Mr Twist. I am only trying to be helpful. You send out for some taraxacum and hops, and before you know where you are . . .'
'Wad do you wad?'
'I'm telling you. There's a gentleman below – a gentleman who's called,' said Sergeant-Major Flannery, making his meaning clearer. 'A gentleman,' being still more precise, 'who's called at the front door in a nortermobile. He wants to see you.'
'Well, he can't.'
'Says his name's Molloy.'
'Molloy?'
'That's what he said,' replied Mr Flannery, as one declining to be quoted or to accept any responsibility.
'Oh? All right. Send him up.'
'Taraxacum and hops,' repeated the Sergeant-Major, pausing at the door.
He disappeared, and a few moments later returned, ushering in Soapy. He left the two old friends together, and Soapy approached the bed with rather an awestruck air.
'You've got a cold,' he said.
Chimp sniffed – twice. Once with annoyance and once at the jug.
'So would you have a code if you'd been sitting up to your neck in water for half an hour last night and had to ride home tweddy biles wriggig wet on a motor-cycle.'
'Says which?' exclaimed Soapy, astounded.
Chimp related the saga of the previous night, touching disparagingly on Hugo and saying some things about Emily which it was well she could not hear.
'And that leds me out,' he concluded.
'No, no!'
'I'm through.'
'Don't say that.'
'I do say thad.'
'But, Chimpie, we've got it all fixed for you to get away with the stuff tonight.'
> Chimp stared at him incredulously.
'Tonight? You thig I'm going out tonight with this code of mine, to clibe through windows and be run off my legs by . . .'
'But, Chimpie, there's no danger of that now. We've got everything set. That guy Hugo and his friend are going to London this morning, and so's the other fellow. You won't have a thing to do but walk in.'
'Oh?' said Chimp.
He relapsed into silence, and took a thoughtful sniff at the jug. This information, he was bound to admit, did alter the complexion of affairs. But he was a business man.
'Well, if I do agree to go out and risk exposing this nasty, feverish code of mine to the night air, which is the worst thig a man can do – ask any doctor . . .'
'Chimpie!' cried Mr Molloy in a stricken voice. His keen intuition told him what was coming.
'. . . I don't do it on any sigsdy-forty basis. Sigsdy-five–thirty–five is the figure.'
Mr Molloy had always been an eloquent man – without a natural turn for eloquence you cannot hope to traffic successfully in the baser varieties of oil stocks – but never had he touched the sublime heights of oratory to which he soared now. Even the first few words would have been enough to melt most people. Nevertheless, when at the end of five minutes he paused for breath, he knew that he had failed to grip his audience.
'Sigsdy-five–thirty-five,' said Chimp firmly. 'You need me, or you wouldn't have brought me into this. If you could have worked the job by yourself, you'd never have tode me a word about it.'
'I can't work it by myself. I've got to have an alibi. I and the wife are going to a theatre tonight in Birmingham.'
'That's what I'm saying. You can't get alog without me. And that's why it's going to be sigsdy-five–thirty-five.'
Mr Molloy wandered to the window and looked hopelessly out over the garden.
'Think what Dolly will say when I tell her,' he pleaded.
Chimp replied ungallantly that Dolly and what she might say meant little in his life. Mr Molloy groaned hollowly.
'Well, I guess if that's the way you feel . . .'
Chimp assured him it was.
'Then I suppose that's the way we'll have to fix it.'
'All right,' said Chimp. 'Then I'll be there somewheres about eleven, or a little later, maybe. And you needn't bother to leave any window opud this time. Just have a ladder laying around and I'll bust the window of the picture-gallery, where the stuff is. It'll be more trouble, but I dode bide takid a bidder trouble to make thigs look more natural. You just see thad thad ladder's where I can fide it, and then you can leave all the difficud part of it to me.'
'Difficult!'
'Difficud was what I said,' returned Chimp. 'Suppose I trip over somethig id the dark? Suppose I slip on the stairs? Suppose the ladder breaks? Suppose that dog gets after me again? That dog's not goig to London, is it? Well, then! Besides, considering that I may quide ligely get pneumonia and pass in my checks . . . What did you say?'
Mr Molloy had not spoken. He had merely sighed wistfully.
8 TWO ON A MOAT
I
Although anxious thought for the comfort of his juniors was not habitually one of Lester Carmody's outstanding qualities, in planning his nephew John's expedition to London he had been considerateness itself. John, he urged, must on no account dream of trying to make the double journey in a single day. Apart from the fatigue inseparable from such a performance, he was a young man, and young men, Mr Carmody pointed out, are always the better for a little relaxation and an occasional taste of the pleasures which a metropolis has to offer. Let John have a good dinner in London, go to a theatre, sleep comfortably at a first-class hotel and return at his leisure on the morrow.
Nevertheless, in spite of his uncle's solicitude, nightfall found the latter hurrying back into Worcestershire in the Widgeon Seven. He did not admit that he was nervous, yet there had undoubtedly come upon him something that resembled uneasiness. He had been thinking a good deal during his ride to London about the peculiar behaviour of his cousin Hugo on the previous night. The supposition that Hugo had found Doctor Twist of Healthward Ho trying to burgle Rudge Hall was, of course, too absurd for consideration, but it did seem possible that he had surprised some sort of an attempt upon the house. Rambling and incoherent as his story had been, it had certainly appeared to rest upon that substratum of fact, and John had protested rather earnestly to his uncle against being sent to London, on an errand which could have been put through much more simply by letter, at a time when burglars were in the neighbourhood.
Mr Carmody had laughed at his apprehensions. It was most unlikely, he pointed out, that Hugo had ever seen a marauder at all. But assuming that he had done so, and that he had surprised and pursued him about the garden, was it reasonable to suppose that the man would return on the very next night? And if, finally, he did return, the mere absence of John would make very little difference. Unless he proposed to patrol the grounds all night, John, sleeping as he did over the stable-yard, could not be of much help, and even without him Rudge Hall was scarcely in a state of defencelessness. Sturgis, the butler, it was true, must, on account of age and flat feet, be reckoned a non-combatant, but apart from Mr Carmody himself the garrison, John must recollect, included the intrepid Thomas G. Molloy, a warrior at the very mention of whose name Bad Men in Western mining-camps had in days gone by trembled like aspens.
It was all very plausible, yet John, having completed his business in London, swallowed an early dinner and turned the head of the Widgeon Seven homewards.
It is often the man with the smallest stake in a venture who has its interests most deeply at heart. His uncle Lester John had always suspected of a complete lack of interest in the welfare of Rudge Hall; and, as for Hugo, that urban-minded young man looked on the place as a sort of penitentiary, grudging every moment he was compelled to spend within its ancient walls. To John it was left to regard Rudge in the right Carmody spirit, the spirit of that Nigel Carmody who had once held it for King Charles against the forces of the Commonwealth. Where Rudge was concerned, John was fussy. The thought of intruders treading its sacred floors appalled him. He urged the Widgeon Seven forward at its best speed and reached Rudge as the clock over the stables was striking eleven.
The first thing that met his eye as he turned in at the stable-yard was the door of the garage gaping widely open and empty space in the spot where the Dex-Mayo should have stood. He ran the two-seater in, switched off the engine and the lights, and, climbing down stiffly, proceeded to ponder over this phenomenon. The only explanation he could think of was that his uncle must have ordered the car out after dinner on an expedition of some kind. To Birmingham, probably. The only place you ever went to from Rudge after nightfall was Birmingham.
John thought he could guess what must have happened. He did not often read the Birmingham papers himself, but the Post came to the house every morning: and he seemed to see Miss Molloy, her appetite for entertainment whetted rather than satisfied by the village concert, finding in its columns the announcement that one of the musical comedies of her native land was playing at the Prince of Wales. No doubt she had wheedled his uncle into taking herself and her father over there, with the result that here the house was without anything in the shape of protection except butler Sturgis, who had been old when John was a boy.
A wave of irritation passed over John. Two long drives in the Widgeon Seven in a single day had induced even in his whipcord body a certain measure of fatigue. He had been looking forward to tumbling into bed without delay, and this meant that he must remain up and keep vigil till the party's return. Well, at least he would rout Emily out of her slumbers.
'Hullo?' said Emily sleepily, in answer to his whistle. 'Yes?'
'Come down,' called John.
There was a scrabbling on the stairs. Emily bounded out, full of life.
'Well, well, well!' she said. 'You back?'
'Come along.'
'What's up? More larks?'
'Don't
make such a beastly noise,' said John. 'Do you know what time it is?'
They walked out together and proceeded to make a slow circle of the house. And gradually the magic of the night began to soften John's annoyance. The grounds of Rudge Hall, he should have remembered, were at their best at this hour and under these conditions. Shy little scents were abroad which did not trust themselves out in the daytime, and you needed stillness like this really to hear the soft whispering of the trees.
London had been stiflingly hot, and this sweet coolness was like balm. Emily had disappeared into the darkness, which probably meant that she would clump back up the stairs at two in the morning having rolled in something unpleasant and ruin his night's repose by leaping on his chest, but he could not bring himself to worry about it. A sort of beatific peace was upon him. It was almost as though an inner voice were whispering to him that he was on the brink of some wonderful experience. And what experience the immediate future could hold except the possible washing of Emily when she finally decided to come home he was unable to imagine.
Moving at a leisurely pace, he worked round to the back of the house again and stepped off the grass on to the gravel outside the stable-yard. And as his shoes grated in the warm silence a splash of white suddenly appeared in the blackness before him.
'Johnnie?'
He came back on his heels as if he had received a blow. It was the voice of Pat, sounding in the warm silence like moonlight made audible.
'Is that you, Johnnie?'
John broke into a little run. His heart was jumping, and all the happiness which had been glowing inside him had leaped up into a roaring flame. That mysterious premonition had meant something, after all. But he had never dreamed it could mean anything so wonderful as this.
II
The night was full of stars, but overhanging trees made the spot where they stood a little island of darkness in which all that was visible of Pat was a faint gleaming of white. John stared at her dumbly. Only once in his life before could he remember having felt as he felt now, and that was one raw November evening at school at the close of the football match against Marlborough when, after battling wearily through a long half hour to preserve the slenderest of all possible leads, he had heard the referee's whistle sound through the rising mists and had stood up, bruised and battered and covered with mud, to the realization that the game was over and won. He had had his moments since then, but never again till now had he felt that strange, almost awful ecstasy.