these harsh words. From first to last, he could think of no action of
his that had not been inspired and guided throughout by the dictates of
pure reason. “Who, me?”
“Yes, you! It was a monstrous responsibility to give any man, and I
consented to undertake it only because--er----”
“I know. My uncle told me,” said Sam, to help him out. “You had some
business deal on, and you wanted to keep in with him.”
Lord Tilbury showed no gratitude for this kindly prompting.
“Well,” he said bitterly, “it may interest you to know that the deal to
which you refer has fallen through.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” said Sam sympathetically. “That’s tough
luck. I’m afraid my uncle is a queer sort of fellow to do business
with.”
“I received a cable from him this afternoon, informing me that he had
changed his mind and would be unable to meet me in the matter.”
“Too bad,” said Sam. “I really am sorry.”
“And it is entirely owing to you, you may be pleased to learn.”
“Me? Why, what have I done?”
“I will tell you what you have done. Mr. Pynsent’s cable was in answer
to one from me, in which I informed him that you were in the process of
becoming entangled with a girl.”
“What?”
“You need not trouble to deny it. I saw you with my own eyes lunching
together at the Savoy, and I happen to know that this afternoon you took
her to the theatre.”
Sam looked at him dizzily.
“You aren’t--you can’t by any chance be referring to Miss Derrick?”
“Of course I am referring to Miss Derrick.”
So stupendous was Sam’s amazement that anybody could describe what was
probably the world’s greatest and most beautiful romance as “becoming
entangled with a girl” that he could only gape.
“I cabled to Mr. Pynsent, informing him of the circumstances and asking
for instructions.”
“You did what?” Sam’s stupor of astonishment had passed away, whirled to
the four winds on a tempestuous rush of homicidal fury. “You mean to
tell me that you had the--the nerve--the insolence----” He gulped. Being
a young man usually quick to express his rare bursts of anger in terms
of action, he looked longingly at Lord Tilbury, regretting that the
latter’s age and physique disqualified him as a candidate for assault
and battery. “Do you mean to tell me----” He swallowed rapidly. The
thought of this awful little man spying upon Kay and smirching her with
his loathly innuendoes made mere words inadequate.
“I informed Mr. Pynsent that you were conducting a clandestine love
affair and asked him what I was to do.”
To Sam, like some blessed inspiration, there came a memory of a scene
that had occurred in his presence abaft the fiddley of the tramp steamer
_Araminta_ when that vessel was two days out of New York. A dreamy
able-bodied seaman, thoughts of home or beer having temporarily taken
his mind off his job, had chanced to wander backward onto the foot of
the bos’n while the latter was crossing the deck with a full pot of
paint in his hands. And the bos’n, recovering his breath, had condensed
his feelings into two epithets so elastic and comprehensive that, while
they were an exact description of the able-bodied seaman, they applied
equally well to Lord Tilbury. Indeed, it seemed to Sam that they might
have been invented expressly for Lord Tilbury’s benefit.
A moment before he had been deploring the inadequacy of mere words. But
these were not mere words. They were verbal dynamite.
“You so-and-so!” said Sam. “You such-and-such!”
Sailors are toughened by early training and long usage to bear
themselves phlegmatically beneath abuse. Lord Tilbury had had no such
advantages. He sprang backward as if he had been scalded by a sudden jet
of boiling water.
“You pernicious little bounder!” said Sam. He strode to the door and
flung it open. “Get out!”
If ever there was an occasion on which a man might excusably have said
“Sir!” this was it; and no doubt, had he been able to speak, this was
the word which Lord Tilbury would have used. Nearly a quarter of a
century had passed since he had been addressed in this fashion to his
face, and the thing staggered him.
“Get out!” repeated Sam. “What the devil,” he inquired peevishly, “are
you doing here, poisoning the air?”
Lord Tilbury felt no inclination to embark upon a battle of words in
which he appeared to be in opposition to an expert. Dazedly he flapped
out into the hall, the grey flannel trousers swirling about his feet. At
the front door, however, it suddenly occurred to him that he had not yet
fired the most important shell in his ammunition wagon. He turned at
bay.
“Wait!” he cried. “I may add----”
“No, you mayn’t,” said Sam.
“I wish to add----”
“Keep moving!”
“I insist on informing you,” shouted Lord Tilbury, plucking at the
trousers with a nautical twitch, “of this one thing: Your uncle said in
his cable that you were to take the next boat back to America.”
It had not been Sam’s intention to permit anything to shake the stern
steeliness of his attitude, but this information did it. He stopped
midway in an offensive sniff designed to afford a picturesque
illustration of his view on the other’s air-poisoning qualities and
gazed at him blankly.
“Did he say that?”
“Yes, he did.” Sam scratched his chin thoughtfully. Lord Tilbury began
to feel a little better. “And,” he continued, “as I should imagine that
a young man of your intellectual attainments has little scope for making
a living except by sponging on his rich relatives, I presume that you
will accede to his wishes. In case you may still suppose that you are a
member of the staff of Tilbury House, I will disabuse you of that view.
You are not.”
Sam remained silent; and Lord Tilbury, expanding and beginning to
realise that there is nothing unpleasant about a battle of words
provided that the battling is done in the right quarter, proceeded.
“I only engaged you as a favour to your uncle. On your merits you could
not have entered Tilbury House as an office boy. I say,” he repeated in
a louder voice, “that, had there been no question of obliging Mr.
Pynsent, I would not have engaged you as an office boy.”
Sam came out of his trance.
“Are you still here?” he said, annoyed.
“Yes, I am still here. And let me tell you----”
“Listen!” said Sam. “If you aren’t out of this house in two seconds,
I’ll take those trousers back.”
Every Achilles has his heel. Of all the possible threats that Sam could
have used, this was probably the only one to which Lord Tilbury, in his
dangerously elevated and hostile frame of mind, would have paid heed.
For one moment he stood swelling like a toy balloon, then he slid out
and the door banged behind him.
A dark shape loomed up before Lord Tilbury as he stood upon the gravel
outside the portal of Mon Repos. Beside this shape there frolicked
another and a darker one.
“’Evening, sir.”
Lord Tilbury perceived through the gloom that he was being addressed by
a member of the force. He made no reply. He was not in the mood for
conversation with policemen.
“Bringing your dog back,” said the officer genially. “Found ’er roaming
about at the top of the street.”
“It is not my dog,” said Lord Tilbury between set teeth, repelling Amy
as she endeavoured in her affable way to climb on to his neck.
“Not a member of the ’ousehold, sir? Just a neighbour making a friendly
call? I see. Now I wonder,” said the policeman, “if any of my mates ’ave
approached you on the matter of this concert in aid of a
charitubulorganisation which is not only most deserving in itself but is
connected with a body of men to ’oom you as a nouse’older will----”
“G-r-r-h!” said Lord Tilbury.
He bounded out of the gate. Dimly, as he waddled down Burberry Road, the
grey flannel trousers brushing the pavement with a musical swishing
sound, there came to him, faint but pursuing, the voice of the
indefatigable policeman:
“This charitubulorganisationtowhichIallude----”
Out of the night, sent from heaven, there came a crawling taxicab. Lord
Tilbury poured himself in and sank back on the seat, a spent force.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
SAM HEARS GOOD NEWS
Kay came out into the garden of San Rafael. Darkness had fallen now, and
the world was full of the sweet, wet scents of an autumn night. She
stood still for a moment, sniffing, and a little pang of home-sickness
shot through her. The garden smelled just like Midways. This was how she
always remembered Midways most vividly, with the shadows cloaking the
flower beds, the trees dripping and the good earth sending up its
incense to a starlit sky.
When she shut her eyes she could almost imagine that she was back there.
Then somebody began to whistle in the road and a train clanked into the
station and the vision faded.
A faint odour of burning tobacco came to her, and on the lawn next door
she saw the glow of a pipe.
“Sam!” she called.
His footsteps crunched on the gravel and he joined her at the fence.
“You’re a nice sort of person, aren’t you?” said Kay. “Why didn’t you
come back?”
“I had one or two things to think about.”
“Willoughby dashed in for a minute and told me an incoherent story. So
the man got away?”
“Yes.”
“Poor Lord Tilbury!” said Kay, with a sudden silvery little bubble of
laughter.
Sam said nothing.
“What did he want, by the way?”
“He came to tell me that he had had a cable from my uncle saying that I
was to go back at once.”
“Oh!” said Kay with a little gasp, and there was silence. “Go back--to
America?”
“Yes.”
“At once?”
“Wednesday’s boat, I suppose.”
“Not this very next Wednesday?”
“Yes.”
There was another silence. The night was as still as if the clock had
slipped back and Valley Fields had become the remote country spot of two
hundred years ago.
“Are you going?”
“I suppose so.”
From far away, out in the darkness, came the faint grunting of a train
as it climbed the steep gradient of Sydenham Hill. An odd forlorn
feeling swept over Kay.
“Yes, I suppose you must,” she said. “You can’t afford to offend your
uncle, can you?”
Sam moved restlessly, and there was a tiny rasping sound as his hand
scraped along the fence.
“It isn’t that,” he said.
“But your uncle’s very rich, isn’t he?”
“What does that matter?” Sam’s voice shook. “Lord Tilbury was good
enough to inform me that my only way of making a living was to sponge on
my uncle, but I’m not going to have you thinking it.”
“But--well, why are you going then?”
Sam choked.
“I’ll tell you why I’m going. Simply because I might as well be in New
York as anywhere. If there was the slightest hope that by staying on
here I could get you to--to marry me----” His hand rasped on the fence
again. “Of course, I know there isn’t. I know you don’t take me
seriously. I haven’t any illusions about myself. I know just what I
amount to in your eyes. I’m the fellow who blunders about and trips over
himself and is rather amusing when you’re in the mood. But I don’t
count. I don’t amount to anything.” Kay stirred in the darkness, but she
did not speak. “You think I’m kidding all the time. Well, I just want
you to know this--that I’m not kidding about the way I feel about you. I
used to dream over that photograph before I’d ever met you. And when I
met you I knew one thing for certain, and that was there wasn’t ever
going to be anyone except you ever. I know you don’t care about me and
never will. Why should you? What on earth is there about me that could
make you? I’m just a----”
A little ripple of laughter came from the shadows.
“Poor old Sam!” said Kay.
“Yes! There you are--in a nutshell! Poor old Sam!”
“I’m sorry I laughed. But it was so funny to hear you denouncing
yourself in that grand way.”
“Exactly! Funny!”
“Well, what’s wrong with being funny? I like funny people. I’d no notion
you had such hidden depths, Sam. Though, of course, the palmist said
you had, didn’t she?”
The train had climbed the hill and was now rumbling off into the
distance. A smell of burning leaves came floating over the gardens.
“I don’t blame you for laughing,” said Sam. “Pray laugh if you wish to.”
Kay availed herself of the permission.
“Oh, Sam, you are a pompous old ass, aren’t you? ‘Pray laugh if you wish
to’!... Sam!”
“Well?”
“Do you really mean that you would stay on in England if I promised to
marry you?”
“Yes.”
“And offend your rich uncle for life and get cut off with a dollar or
whatever they cut nephews off with in America?”
“Yes.”
Kay reached up at Sam’s head and gave his hair a little proprietorial
tug.
“Well, why don’t you, Sambo?” she said softly.
It seemed to Sam that in some strange way his powers of breathing had
become temporarily suspended. A curious dry feeling had invaded his
throat. He could hear his heart thumping.
“What?” he croaked huskily.
“I said why--do--you--not, Samivel?” whispered Kay, punctuating the
words with little tugs.
Sam found himself on the other side of the fence. How he had got there
he did not know. Presumably he had scrambled over. A much abraded shin
bone was to show him later that this theory was the correct one, but at
the moment bruised shins had no meaning for him. He stood churning the
mould of the flower bed on which he had alighted, staring at the
indistinct whiteness which was Kay.
“But look here,” said Sam thickly. “But look here----” A bird stirred
sleepily in the tree.
“But look here----”
And then somehow--things were happening mysteriously to-night, and
apparently of their own volition--he found that Kay was in his arms. It
seemed to him also, though his faculties were greatly clouded, that he
was kissing Kay.
“But look here----” he said thickly. They were now, in some peculiar
manner, walking together up the gravel path, and he, unless his senses
deceived him, was holding her hand tucked very tightly under his arm. At
least, somebody, at whom he seemed to be looking from a long distance,
was doing this. This individual, who appeared to be in a confused frame
of mind, was holding that hand with a sort of frenzied determination, as
if he were afraid she might get away from him. “But look here, this
isn’t possible!”
“What isn’t possible?”
“All this. A girl like you--a wonderful, splendid, marvellous girl like
you can’t possibly love”--the word seemed to hold all the magic of all
the magicians, and he repeated it dazedly--“love--love--can’t possibly
love a fellow like me.” He paused, finding the wonder of the thing
oppressive. “It--it doesn’t make sense.”
“Why not?”
“Well, a fellow--a man--a fellow--oh, I don’t know.”
Kay chuckled. It came upon Sam with an overwhelming sense of personal
loss that she was smiling and that he could not see that smile. Other,
future smiles he would see, but not that particular one, and it seemed
to him that he would never be able to make up for having missed it.
“Would you like to to know something, Sam?”
“What?”
“Well, if you’ll listen, I’ll explain exactly how I feel. Have you ever
had a very exciting book taken away from you just when you were in the
middle of it?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Well, I have. It was at Midways, when I was nine. I had borrowed it
from the page boy, who was a great friend of mine, and it was about a
man called Cincinnati Kit, who went round most of the time in a mask,
with lots of revolvers. I had just got half-way in it when my governess
caught me and I was sent to bed and the book was burned. So I never
found out what happened in the little room with the steel walls behind
the bar at the Blue Gulch Saloon. I didn’t get over the disappointment
for years. Well, when you told me you were going away, I suddenly
realised that this awful thing was on the point of happening to me
again, and this time I knew I would never get over it. It suddenly
flashed upon me that there was absolutely nothing worth while in life
except to be with you and watch you and wonder what perfectly mad thing
you would be up to next. Would Aunt Ysobel say that that was love?”
“She would,” said Sam with conviction.
“Well, it’s my form of it, anyhow. I just want to be with you for years
and years and years, wondering what you’re going to do next.”
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do at this moment,” said Sam. “I’m
going to kiss you.”
Time passed.
“Kay,” said Sam.
“Yes?”
“Do you know---- No, you’ll laugh.”
“I promise I won’t. What were you going to say?”
“That photograph of you--the one I found in the fishing hut.”
“What about it?”
“I kissed it once.”
“Only once?”
“No,” said Sam stoutly. “If you really want the truth, every day; every
blessed single day, and several times a day. Now laugh!”
“No; I’m going to laugh at you all the rest of my life, but not
to-night. You’re a darling, and I suppose,” said Kay thoughtfully, “I’d
better go and tell uncle so, hadn’t I, if he has got back?”
“Tell your uncle?”
“Well, he likes to know what’s going on around him in the home.”
“But that means that you’ll have to go in.”
“Only for a minute. I shall just pop my head in at the door and say ‘Oh,
uncle, talking of Sam, I love him.’”
“Look here,” said Sam earnestly, “if you will swear on your word of
honour--your sacred word of honour--not to be gone more than thirty
seconds----”
“As if I could keep away from you longer than that!” said Kay.
Left alone in a bleak world, Sam found his thoughts taking for a while a
sombre turn. In the exhilaration of the recent miracle which had altered
the whole face of the planet, he had tended somewhat to overlook the
fact that for a man about to enter upon the sacred state of matrimony he
was a little ill equipped with the means of supporting a home. His
weekly salary was in his pocket, and a small sum stood to his credit in
a Lombard Street bank; but he could not, he realised, be considered an
exceptionally good match for the least exacting of girls. Indeed, at the
moment, like the gentleman in the song, all he was in a position to
offer his bride was a happy disposition and a wild desire to succeed.
These are damping reflections for a young man to whom the keys of heaven
have just been given, and they made Sam pensive. But his natural
ebullience was not long in coming to the rescue. One turn up and down
the garden and he was happy again in the possession of lavish rewards
bestowed upon him by beaming bank managers, rejoicing in their hearty
City fashion as they saw those missing bonds restored to them after many
years. He refused absolutely to consider the possibility of failure to
unearth the treasure. It must be somewhere in Mon Repos, and if it was
in Mon Repos he would find it--even if, in direct contravention of the
terms of Clause 8 in his lease, he had to tear the house to pieces.
He strode, full of a great purpose, to the window of the kitchen. A
light shone there, and he could hear the rumbling voice of his faithful
henchman. He tapped upon the window, and presently the blind shot up and
Hash’s face appeared. In the background Claire, a little flushed, was
smoothing her hair. The window opened.
“Who’s there?” said Hash gruffly.
“Only me, Hash. I want a word with you.”
“Ur?”
“Listen, Hash. Tear yourself away shortly, and come back to Mon Repos.
There is man’s work to do there.”
“Eh?”
“We’ve got to search that house from top to bottom. I’ve just found out
that it’s full of bonds.”
“You don’t say!”
“I do say.”
“Nasty things,” said Hash reflectively. “Go off in your ’ands as likely
as not.”
At this moment the quiet night was rent by a strident voice.
“Sam! Hi, Sam! Come quick!”
It was the voice of Willoughby Braddock, and it appeared to proceed from
one of the upper rooms of Mon Repos.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
SPIRITED BEHAVIOUR OF MR. BRADDOCK
When Willoughby Braddock, some ten minutes earlier, had parted from Kay
and come out on to the gravel walk in front of San Rafael, he was in a
condition of mind which it is seldom given to man to achieve until well
through the second quart of champagne. So stirred was his soul, so
churned up by a whirlwind of powerful emotions, that he could have
stepped straight into any hospital as a fever patient and no questions
asked.
For the world had become of a sudden amazingly vivid to Willoughby.
After a quarter of a century in which absolutely nothing had occurred to
ruffle the placid surface of his somewhat stagnant existence, strange
and exhilarating things had begun to happen to him with a startling
abruptness.
When he reflected that he had actually stood chatting face to face with
a member of the criminal classes, interrupting him in the very act of
burgling a house, and on top of that had found Lord Tilbury, a man who
was on the committee of his club, violently transformed into a
sans-culotte, it seemed to him that life in the true meaning of the word
had at last begun.
But it was something that Kay had said that had set the seal on the
thrills of this great day. Quite casually she had mentioned that Mrs.
Lippett proposed, as soon as her daughter Claire was married to Hash
Todhunter, to go and live with the young couple. It was as if somebody,
strolling with stout Balboa, had jerked his thumb at a sheet of water
shining through the trees and observed nonchalantly, “By the way,
there’s the Pacific.” It was this, even more than the other events of
the afternoon, that had induced in Mr. Braddock the strange, yeasty
feeling of unreality which was causing him now to stand gulping on the
gravel. For years he had felt that only a miracle could rid him of Mrs.
Lippett’s limpet-like devotion, and now that miracle had happened.
He removed his hat and allowed the cool night air to soothe his flaming
forehead. He regretted that he had pledged himself to dinner that night
at the house of his Aunt Julia. Aunt Julia was no bad sort, as aunts go,
but dinner at her house was scarcely likely to provide him with
melodrama, and it was melodrama that Mr. Braddock’s drugged soul now
craved, and nothing but melodrama. It irked him to be compelled to leave
this suburban maelstrom of swift events and return to a London which
could not but seem mild and tame by comparison.
However, he had so pledged himself, and the word of a Braddock was his
bond. Moreover, if he were late, Aunt Julia would be shirty to a degree.
Reluctantly he started to move toward the two-seater, and had nearly
reached it when he congealed again into a motionless statue. For, even
as he prepared to open the gate of San Rafael, he beheld slinking in at
the gate of Mon Repos a furtive figure.
In his present uplifted frame of mind a figure required to possess only
the minimum of furtiveness to excitement Willoughby Braddock’s
suspicions, and this one was well up in what might be called the Class A
of furtiveness. It wavered and it crept. It hesitated and it slunk. And
as the rays from the street lamp shone momentarily upon its face, Mr.
Braddock perceived that it was a drawn and anxious face, the face of one
who nerves himself to desperate deeds.
And, indeed, the other was feeling nervous. He walked warily, like some
not too courageous explorer picking his way through a jungle in which he
suspects the presence of unpleasant wild beasts. Drawn by the lure of
gain to revisit Mon Repos, Chimp Twist was wondering pallidly if each
moment might not not bring Hash ravening out at him from the shadows.
He passed round the angle of the house, and Willoughby Braddock,
reckless of whether or no this postponement of his return to London
would make him late for dinner at Aunt Julia’s and so cause him to be
properly ticked off by that punctuality-loving lady, flitted silently
after him and was in time to see him peer through the kitchen window. A
moment later, his peering seeming to have had a reassuring effect, he
had opened the back door and was inside the house.
Willoughby Braddock did not hesitate. The idea of being alone in a small
semi-detached house with a desperate criminal who was probably armed to
the gills meant nothing to him now. In fact, he rather preferred it. He
slid silently through the back door in the fellow’s wake; and having
removed his shoes, climbed the kitchen stairs. A noise from above told
him that he was on the right track. Whatever it was that the furtive
bloke was doing, he was doing it upstairs.