"_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, laddie," 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.
"Well, it's like this, you see," said Bobbie. "Poor Simmons is
worried."
"I'm glad," said Dudley, vindictively. "I wish he would worry himself
into a decline."
"He's afraid that mother may be angry with him when she finds that you
have gone. He doesn't want to lose his place."
"A man who doesn't want to get out of a place like this must be an ass."
"And so, in case mother does cut up rough and dismiss him for not
keeping a better watch over you, he wants to feel that he has something
in hand. He started by asking for a tenner, but I got him down to five.
So hand it over, Dudley, dear, and then we can get action."
Dudley produced a five-pound note and gazed at it with a long,
lingering look of affection and regret.
"Here you are," he said. "I hope the man spends it on drink, gets
tight, trips over his feet, and breaks his neck!"
"Thanks," said Bobbie. "There's just one other trifling condition he
made, but you needn't worry about that."
"What was it?"
"Oh, just something very trifling. Nothing that you have to do. No need
for you to worry at all. You had better start now tying knots in the
sheets."
Dudley stared.
"Knots?" he said. "In the sheets?"
"To climb down by."
It was Dudley's guiding rule in life never, when once he had got it
brushed and brilliantined and properly arranged in the fashionable
back-sweep, to touch his hair; but on this fearful night all the
rules of civilized life were going by the board. He clutched upwards,
collected a handful and churned it about. No lesser gesture could have
expressed his consternation.
"You aren't seriously suggesting that I climb out of window and shin
down a knotted sheet?" he gasped.
"You must, I'm afraid. Simmons insists on it."
"Why?"
"Well----"
Dudley groaned.
"I know why," he said, bitterly. "He's been going to the movies. It's
always the way. You give a butler an evening off and he sneaks out to
a picture-house and comes back with a diseased mind, thinking he's
playing a star part in _The Clutching Hand_ or something. Knotted
sheets, indeed!" Such was his emotion that Dudley very nearly said
"Forsooth"! "The man is simply a drivelling imbecile. Will you kindly
inform me why, in the name of everything infernal, the poor, silly,
dashed fish can't just let me out of the front door like an ordinary
human being?"
"Why, don't you see?" reasoned Miss Wickham. "How could he explain to
mother? She must be made to think that you escaped in spite of his
vigilance."
Disordered though his faculties were, Dudley could dimly see that there
was something in this. He made no further objections. Bobbie beckoned
to the waiting Simmons. Money changed hands. The butler passed amiably
into the room to lend assistance to the preparations.
"A little tighter, perhaps, sir," he suggested, obsequiously, casting
a critical eye upon Dudley's knots. "It would never do for you to fall
and kill yourself, sir, ha, ha!"
"Did you say 'ha, ha'?" said Dudley, in a pale voice.
"I did venture----"
"Don't do it again."
"Very good, sir." The butler ambled to the window and looked out. "I
fear the sheets will not reach quite to the ground, sir. You will have
a drop of a few feet."
"But," added Bobbie, hastily, "you've got the most lovely, soft,
squashy flower-bed to fall into."
It was not till some minutes later, when he had come to the end of
the sheet and had at last nerved himself to let go and complete the
journey after the fashion of a parachutist whose parachute has refused
to open, that Dudley discovered that there was an error in Miss
Wickham's description of the terrain. The lovely soft flower-bed of
which she had spoken with such pretty girlish enthusiasm was certainly
there, but what she had omitted to mention was that along it at regular
intervals were planted large bushes of a hard and spiky nature. It was
in one of these that Dudley, descending like a shooting star, found
himself entangled: and he had never supposed that anything that was
not actually a cactus plant could possibly have so many and such sharp
thorns.
He scrambled out and stood in the moonlight soliloquizing softly. A
head protruded from the window above.
"Are you all right, sir?" inquired the voice of Simmons.
Dudley did not reply. With as much dignity as a man punctured in
several hundred places could muster, he strode off.
He had reached the drive and was limping up it towards the gate which
led to the road which led to the station which led to the milk-train
which led to London, when the quiet of the night was suddenly shattered
by the roar of a gun. Something infinitely more painful than all the
thorns which had recently pierced him smote the fleshy part of his
left leg. It seemed to be red-hot, and its effect on Dudley was almost
miraculous. A moment before he had been slouching slowly along a beaten
and jaded man. He now appeared to become electrified. With one sharp
yell he lowered the amateur record for the standing broad jump, and
then, starting smartly off the mark, proceeded to try to beat the best
professional time for the hundred-yard dash.
* * * * *
The telephone at the side of Dudley's bed had been ringing for some
time before its noise woke him. Returning to his rooms in Jermyn
Street shortly before seven a.m., he had quelled his great hunger with
breakfast and then slipped with a groan between the sheets. It was now,
he saw from a glance at his watch, nearly five in the afternoon.
"Hullo?" he croaked.
"Dudley?"
It was a voice which twenty-four hours ago would have sent sharp
thrills down the young man's spine. Twenty-four hours ago, if he had
heard this voice on his telephone, he would have squealed with rapture.
Hearing it now, he merely frowned. The heart beneath that rose-pink
pyjama jacket was dead.
"Yes?" he said, coldly.
"Oh, Dudley," purred Miss Wickham, "are you all right?"
"As far," replied Mr. Finch, frigidly, "as a bloke can be said to be
all right whose hair has turned white to the roots and who has been
starved and chucked out of windows into bushes with six-inch thorns,
and chivvied and snootered and shot in the fleshy part of the leg----"
An exclamation of concern broke in upon his eloquence.
"Oh, Dudley, he didn't hit you?"
"He did hit me."
"But he promised that he wouldn't aim at you."
"Well, next time he goes shooting visitors, tell him to aim as
carefully as he can. Then they may have a sporting chance."
"Is there anything I can do?"
"Outside of bringing me the blighter's head on a charger, nothing,
thanks."
"He insisted on letting off the gun. That was the condition I said he
had made. You remember?"
"I remember. The trifling condition I wasn't to worry about."
"It was to make the thing seem all right to mother."
"I hope your mother was pleased," said Dudley, politely.
"Dudley, I do wish there was something I could do for you. I'd like to
come up and nurse you. But I'm in disgrace about the car, and I'm not
allowed to come to London just yet. I'm 'phoning from the Wickham Arms.
I believe I shall be able to get up, though, by Saturday week. Shall I
come then?"
"Do," said Dudley, cordially.
"That's splendid! It's the seventeenth. All right, I'll try to get to
London latish in the morning. Where shall we meet?"
"We sha'n't meet," said Dudley. "At lunch-time on the seventeenth I
shall be tooling off to Australia. Good-bye!"
He hung up the receiver and crawled back into bed, thinking imperially.
IX
THE PASSING OF AMBROSE
"Right ho," said Algy Crufts. "Then I shall go alone."
"Right ho," said Ambrose Wiffin. "Go alone."
"Right ho," said Algy Crufts. "I will."
"Right ho," said Ambrose Wiffin. "Do."
"Right ho, then," said Algy Crufts.
"Right ho," said Ambrose Wiffin.
"Right ho," said Algy Crufts.
* * * * *
Few things (said Mr. Mulliner) are more painful than an altercation
between two boyhood friends. Nevertheless, when these occur, the
conscientious narrator must record them.
It is also, no doubt, the duty of such a narrator to be impartial. In
the present instance, however, it would be impossible to avoid bias.
To realize that Algy Crufts was perfectly justified in taking an even
stronger tone, one has only to learn the facts. It was the season of
the year when there comes upon all right-thinking young men the urge to
go off to Monte Carlo: and the plan had been that he and Ambrose should
catch the ten o'clock boat-train on the morning of the sixteenth of
February. All the arrangements had been made--the tickets bought; the
trunks packed; the "One Hundred Systems of Winning At Roulette" studied
from end to end: and here was Ambrose, on the afternoon of February
the fourteenth, calmly saying that he proposed to remain in London for
another fortnight.
Algy Crufts eyed him narrowly. Ambrose Wiffin was always a
nattily-dressed young man, but to-day there had crept into his
outer crust a sort of sinister effulgence which could have but one
meaning. It shouted from his white carnation: it shrieked from his
trouser-crease: and Algy read it in a flash.
"You're messing about after some beastly female," he said.
Ambrose Wiffin reddened and brushed his top-hat the wrong way.
"And I know who it is. It's that Wickham girl."
Ambrose reddened again, and brushed his top-hat once more--this time
the right way, restoring the _status quo_.
"Well," he said, "you introduced me to her."
"I know I did. And, if you recollect, I drew you aside immediately
afterwards and warned you to watch your step."
"If you have anything to say against Miss Wickham...."
"I haven't anything to say against her. She's one of my best pals.
I've known young Bobbie Wickham since she was a kid in arms, and I'm
what you might call immune where she's concerned. But you can take
it from me that every other fellow who comes in contact with Bobbie
finds himself sooner or later up to the Adam's apple in some ghastly
mess. She lets them down with a dull, sickening thud. Look at Roland
Attwater. He went to stay at her place, and he had a snake with him...."
"Why?"
"I don't know. He just happened to have a snake with him, and Bobbie
put it in a fellow's bed and let everyone think it was Attwater who had
done it. He had to leave by the milk-train at three in the morning."
"Attwater had no business lugging snakes about with him to
country houses," said Ambrose primly. "One can readily understand how a
high-spirited girl would feel tempted...."
"And then there was Dudley Finch. She asked him down for the night and
forgot to tell her mother he was coming, with the result that he was
taken for a Society burglar and got shot in the leg by the butler as he
was leaving to catch the milk-train."
A look such as Sir Galahad might have worn on hearing gossip about
Queen Guinevere lent a noble dignity to Ambrose Wiffin's pink young
face.
"I don't care," he said stoutly. "She's the sweetest girl on earth, and
I'm taking her to the Dog Show on Saturday."
"Eh? What about our Monte Carlo binge?"
"That'll have to be postponed. Not for long. She's up in London,
staying with an aunt of sorts, for another couple of weeks. I could
come after that."
"Do you mean to say you have the immortal crust to expect me to hang
about for two weeks, waiting for you?"
"I don't see why not."
"Oh, don't you? Well, I'm jolly well not going to."
"Right ho. Just as you like."
"Right ho. Then I shall go alone."
"Right ho. Go alone."
"Right ho. I will."
"Right ho. Do."
"Right ho, then."
"Right ho," said Ambrose Wiffin.
"Right ho," said Algy Crufts.
* * * * *
At almost exactly the moment when this very distressing scene was
taking place at the Drones Club in Dover Street, Roberta Wickham,
in the drawing-room of her aunt Marcia's house in Eaton Square, was
endeavouring to reason with her mother, and finding the going a bit
heavy. Lady Wickham was notoriously a difficult person to reason with.
She was a woman who knew her mind.
"But, mother!"
Lady Wickham advanced her forceful chin another inch.
"It's no use arguing, Roberta...."
"But, mother! I keep telling you! Jane Falconer has just rung up and
wants me to go round and help her choose the cushions for her new flat."
"And I keep telling you that a promise is a promise. You voluntarily
offered after breakfast this morning to take your cousin Wilfred and
his little friend, Esmond Bates, to the moving-pictures to-day, and you
cannot disappoint them now."
"But if Jane's left to herself she'll choose the most awful things."
"I cannot help that."
"She's relying on me. She said so. And I swore I'd go."
"I cannot help that."
"I'd forgotten all about Wilfred."
"I cannot help that. You should not have forgotten. You must ring your
friend up and tell her that you are unable to see her this afternoon.
I think you ought to be glad of the chance of giving pleasure to these
two boys. One ought not always to be thinking of oneself. One ought to
try to bring a little sunshine into the lives of others. I will go and
tell Wilfred you are waiting for him."
Left alone, Roberta wandered morosely to the window and stood looking
down into the Square. From this vantage-point she was able to observe
a small boy in an Eton suit sedulously hopping from the pavement to
the bottom step of the house and back again. This was Esmond Bates,
next door's son and heir, and the effect the sight of him had on Bobbie
was to drive her from the window and send her slumping onto the sofa,
where for a space she sat, gazing before her and disliking life. It may
not seem to everybody the summit of human pleasure to go about London
choosing cushions, but Bobbie had set her heart on it: and the iron
was entering deeply into her soul when the door opened and the butler
appeared.
"Mr. Wiffin," announced the butler. And Ambrose walked in, glowing with
that holy reverential emotion which always surged over him at the sight
of Bobbie.
Usually, there was blended with this a certain diffidence, unavoidable
in one visiting the shrine of a goddess: but to-day the girl seemed so
unaffectedly glad to see him that diffidence vanished. He was amazed to
note how glad she was to see him. She had bounded from the sofa on his
entry, and now was looking at him with shining eyes like a shipwrecked
mariner who sights a sail.
"Oh, Ambrose!" said Bobbie. "I'm so glad you came."
Ambrose thrilled from his quiet but effective sock-clocks to his
Stacombed hair. How wise, he felt, he had been to spend that long hour
perfecting the minutest details of his toilet. As a glance in the
mirror on the landing had just assured him, his hat was right, his
coat was right, his trousers were right, his shoes were right, his
buttonhole was right, and his tie was right. He was one hundred per
cent., and girls appreciate such things.
"Just thought I'd look in," he said, speaking in the guttural tones
which agitated vocal chords always forced upon him when addressing
the queen of her species, "and see if you were doing anything this
afternoon. If," he added, "you see what I mean."
"I'm taking my cousin Wilfred and a little friend of his to the movies.
Would you like to come?"
"I say! Thanks awfully! May I?"
"Yes, do."
"I say! Thanks awfully!" He gazed at her with worshipping admiration.
"But I say, how frightfully kind of you to mess up an afternoon taking
a couple of kids to the movies. Awfully kind. I mean kind. I mean I
call it dashed kind of you."
"Oh, well!" said Bobbie modestly. "I feel I ought to be glad of the
chance of giving pleasure to these two boys. One ought not always to be
thinking of oneself. One ought to try to bring a little sunshine into
the lives of others."
"You're an angel!"
"No, no."
"An absolute angel," insisted Ambrose, quivering fervently. "Doing a
thing like this is ... well, absolutely angelic. If you follow me. I
wish Algy Crufts had been here to see it."
"Why Algy?"
"Because he was saying some very unpleasant things about you this
afternoon. Most unpleasant things."
"What did he say?"
"He said...." Ambrose winced. The vile words were choking him. "He said
you let people down."
"Did he! Did he, forsooth! I'll have to have a word with young Algernon
P. Crufts. He's getting above himself. He seems to forget," said
Bobbie, a dreamy look coming into her beautiful eyes, "that we live
next to each other in the country and that I know which his room is.
What young Algy wants is a frog in his bed."
"Two frogs," amended Ambrose.
"Two frogs," agreed Bobbie.
The door opened and there appeared on the mat a small boy. He wore
an Eton suit, spectacles, and, low down over his prominent ears, a
bowler hat: and Ambrose thought he had seldom seen anything fouler. He
would have looked askance at Royalty itself, had Royalty interrupted a
_tête-à-tête_ with Miss Wickham.
"I'm ready," said the boy.
"This is Aunt Marcia's son Wilfred," said Bobbie.
"Oh?" said Ambrose coldly.