'Indeed, sir?'
Soapy felt relieved. There had been no incredulity in the other's gaze – on the contrary, something that looked very much like a sort of senile enthusiasm. He had the air of a butler who has heard good news from home.
'Have you got such a thing as a packing-case or a sugar-box or something like that? And a hatchet?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Then fetch them along.'
'Very good, sir.'
The butler disappeared through his green baize door, and Soapy, to fill in the time of waiting, examined the cupboard. It appeared to be a very ordinary sort of cupboard, the kind that a resolute man can open with one well-directed blow. Soapy felt complacent. Though primarily a thinker, it pleased him to feel that he could be the man of action when the occasion called.
There was a noise of bumping without. Sturgis reappeared, packing-case in one hand, hatchet in the other, looking like Noah taking ship's stores aboard the Ark.
'Here they are, sir.'
'Thanks.'
'I used to keep roberts when I was a lad, sir,' said the butler. 'Oh, dear, yes. Many's the robert I've made a pet of in my time. Roberts and white mice, those were what I was fondest of. And newts in a little aquarium.'
He leaned easily against the wall, beaming, and Soapy, with deep concern, became aware that the Last of the Great Victorians proposed to make this thing a social gathering. He appeared to be regarding Soapy as the nucleus of a salon.
'Don't let me keep you,' said Soapy.
'You aren't keeping me, sir,' the butler assured him. 'Oh, no, sir, you aren't keeping me. I've done my silver. It will be a pleasure to watch you, sir. Quite likely I can give you a hint or two if you've never made a robert-hutch before. Many's the hutch I've made in my time. As a lad, I was very handy at that sort of thing.'
A dull despair settled upon Soapy. It was plain to him now that he had unwittingly delivered himself over into the clutches of a bore who had probably been pining away for someone on whom to pour out his wealth of stored-up conversation. Words had begun to flutter out of this butler like bats out of a barn. He had become a sort of human Topical Talk on rabbits. He was speaking of rabbits he had known in his hot youth – their manners, customs and the amount of lettuce they had consumed per diem. To a man interested in rabbits but too lazy to look the subject up in the Encyclopaedia the narrative would have been enthralling. It induced in Soapy a feverishness that touched the skirts of homicidal mania. The thought came into his mind that there are other uses to which a hatchet may be put besides the making of rabbit-hutches. England trembled on the verge of being short one butler.
Sturgis had now become involved in a long story of his early manhood, and even had Soapy been less distrait he might have found it difficult to enjoy it to the full. It was about an acquaintance of his who had kept rabbits, and it suffered in lucidity from his unfortunate habit of pronouncing rabbits 'roberts', combined with the fact that by a singular coincidence the acquaintance had been a Mr Roberts. Roberts, it seemed, had been deeply attached to roberts. In fact, his practice of keeping roberts in his bedroom had led to trouble with Mrs Roberts, and in the end Mrs Roberts had drowned the roberts in the pond and Roberts, who thought the world of his roberts and not quite so highly of Mrs Roberts, had never forgiven her.
Here Sturgis paused, apparently for comment.
'Is that so?' said Soapy, breathing heavily.
'Yes, sir.'
'In the pond?'
'In the pond, sir.'
Like some Open Sesame, the word suddenly touched a chord in Soapy's mind.
'Say, listen,' he said. 'All the while we've been talking I was forgetting that Mr Carmody is out there on the pond.'
'The moat, sir?'
'Call it what you like. Anyway, he's there, fishing, and he told me to tell you to take him out something to drink.'
Immediately, Sturgis, the lecturer, with a change almost startling in its abruptness, became Sturgis, the butler, once more. The fanatic rabbit-gleam died out of his eyes.
'Very good, sir.'
'I should hurry. His tongue was hanging out when I left him.'
For an instant the butler wavered. The words had recalled to his mind a lop-eared doe which he had once owned, whose habit of putting out its tongue and gasping had been the cause of some concern to him in the late 'seventies. But he recovered himself. Registering a mental resolve to seek out this new-made friend of his later and put the complete facts before him, he passed through the green baize door.
Soapy, alone at last, did not delay. With all the pent-up energy which had been accumulating within him during a quarter of an hour which had seemed a lifetime, he swung the hatchet and brought it down. The panel splintered. The lock snapped. The door swung open.
There was an electric switch inside the cupboard. He pressed it down and was able to see clearly. And, having seen clearly, he drew back, his lips trembling with half-spoken words of the regrettable kind which a man picks up in the course of a lifetime spent in the less refined social circles of New York, Philadelphia and Chicago.
The cupboard contained an old rain-coat, two hats, a rusty golf-club, six croquet balls, a pamphlet on stock-breeding, three umbrellas, a copy of the Parish Magazine for the preceding November, a shoe, a mouse, and a smell of apples, but no suitcase.
That much Soapy had been able to see in the first awful, disintegrating instant.
No bag, box, portmanteau or suitcase of any kind or description whatsoever.
II
Hope does not readily desert the human breast. After the first numbing impact of any shock, we most of us have a tendency to try to persuade ourselves that things may not be so bad as they seem. Some explanation, we feel, will be forthcoming shortly, putting the whole matter in a different light. And so, after a few moments during which he stood petrified, muttering some of the comments which on the face of it the situation seemed to demand, Soapy cheered up a little.
He had had, he reflected, no opportunity of private speech with his host this morning. If Mr Carmody had decided to change his plans and deposit the suitcase in some other hiding-place he might have done so in quite good faith without Soapy's knowledge. For all he knew, in mentally labelling Mr Carmody a fat, pop-eyed, crooked, swindling, pie-faced, double-crossing Judas, he might be doing him an injustice. Feeling calmer, though still anxious, he left the house and started towards the moat.
Half-way down the garden, he encountered Sturgis, returning with an empty tray.
'You must have misunderstood Mr Carmody, sir,' said the butler, genially, as one rabbit-fancier to another. 'He says he did not ask for any drink. But he came ashore and had it. If you're looking for him, you will find him in the boat-house.'
And in the boat-house Mr Carmody was, lolling at his ease on the cushions of the punt, sipping the contents of a long glass.
'Hullo,' said Mr Carmody. 'There you are.'
Soapy descended the steps. What he had to say was not the kind of thing a prudent man shouts at long range.
'Say!' said Soapy in a cautious undertone. 'I've been trying to get a word with you all the morning. But that darned policeman was around all the time.'
'Something on your mind?' said Mr Carmody affably. 'I've caught two perch, a bream and a grayling,' he added, finishing the contents of his glass with a good deal of relish.
Such was the condition of Soapy's nervous system that he very nearly damned the perch, the bream and the grayling, in the order named. But he checked himself in time. If ever, he felt, there was a moment when diplomacy was needed, this was it.
'Listen,' he said, 'I've been thinking.'
'Yes?'
'I've been wondering if, after all, that closet you were going to put the stuff in is a safe place. Somebody might be apt to take a look in it. Maybe,' said Soapy, tensely, 'that occurred to you?'
'What makes you think that?'
'It just crossed my mind.'
'Oh? I thought perhaps you might have been having a lo
ok in that cupboard yourself.'
Soapy moistened his lips, which had become uncomfortably dry.
'But you locked it, surely?' he said.
'Yes, I locked it,' said Mr Carmody. 'But it struck me that after you had got the butler out of the way by telling him to bring me a drink, you might have thought of breaking the door open.'
In the silence which followed this devastating remark there suddenly made itself heard an odd, gurgling noise like a leaking cistern, and Soapy, gazing at his host, was shocked to observe that he had given himself up to an apoplectic spasm of laughter. Mr Carmody's rotund body was quivering like a jelly. His eyes were closed, and he was rocking himself to and fro. And from his lips proceeded those hideous sounds of mirth.
The hope which until this moment had been sustaining Soapy had never been a strong, robust hope. From birth it had been an invalid. And now, as he listened to this laughter, the poor, sickly thing coughed quietly and died.
'Oh dear!' said Mr Carmody, recovering. 'Very funny. Very funny.'
'You think it's funny, do you?' said Soapy.
'I do,' said Mr Carmody sincerely. 'I wish I could have seen your face when you looked in that cupboard.'
Soapy had nothing to say. He was beaten, crushed, routed, and he knew it. He stared out hopelessly on a bleak world. Outside the boat-house the sun was still shining, but not for Soapy.
'I've seen through you all along, my man,' proceeded Mr Carmody, with ungenerous triumph. 'Not from the very beginning, perhaps, because I really did suppose for a while that you were what you professed to be. The first thing that made me suspicious was when I cabled over to New York to make inquiries about a well-known financier named Thomas G. Molloy and was informed that no such person existed.'
Soapy did not speak. The bitterness of his meditations precluded words. His eyes were fixed on the trees and flowers on the other side of the water, and he was disliking these very much. Nature had done its best for the scene, and he thought Nature a washout.
'And then,' proceeded Mr Carmody, 'I listened outside the study window while you and your friends were having your little discussion. And I heard all I wanted to hear. Next time you have one of these board-meetings of yours, Mr Molloy, I suggest that you close the window and lower your voices.'
'Yeah?' said Soapy.
It was not, he was forced himself to admit, much of a retort, but it was the best he could think of. He was in the depths, and men who are in the depths seldom excel in the matter of rapier-like repartee.
'I thought the matter over, and decided that my best plan was to allow matters to proceed. I was disappointed, of course, to discover that that cheque of yours for a million or two million or whatever it was would not be coming my way. But,' said Mr Carmody philosophically, 'there is always the insurance money. It should amount to a nice little sum. Not what a man like you, accustomed to big transactions with Mr Schwab and Pierpont Morgan, would call much, of course, but quite satisfactory to me.'
'You think so?' said Soapy, goaded to speech. 'You think you're going to clean up on the insurance?'
'I do.'
'Then, say, listen, let me tell you something. The insurance company is going to send a fellow down to inquire, isn't it? Well, what's to prevent me spilling the beans?'
'I beg your pardon?'
'What's to keep me from telling him the burglary was a put-up job?'
Mr Carmody smiled tranquilly.
'Your good sense, I should imagine. How could you make such a story credible without involving yourself in more unpleasantness than I should imagine you would desire? I think I shall be able to rely on you for sympathetic silence, Mr Molloy.'
'Yeah?'
'I think so.'
And Soapy, reflecting, thought so, too. For the process of beans-spilling to be enjoyable, he realized, the conditions have to be right.
'I am offering a little reward,' said Mr Carmody, gently urging the punt out into the open, 'just to make everything seem more natural. One thousand pounds is the sum I am proposing to give for the recovery of this stolen property. You had better try for that. Well, I must not keep you here all the morning, chattering away like this. No doubt you have much to do.'
The punt floated out into the sunshine, and the roof of the boat-house hid this fat, conscienceless man from Soapy's eyes. From somewhere out in the great open spaces beyond came the sound of a paddle, wielded with a care-free joyousness. Whatever might be his guest's state of mind, Mr Carmody was plainly in the pink.
Soapy climbed the steps listlessly. The interview had left him weak and shaken. He brooded dully on this revelation of the inky depths of Lester Carmody's soul. It seemed to him that if this was what England's upper classes (who ought to be setting an example) were like, Great Britain could not hope to continue much longer as a first-class power, and it gave him in his anguish a little satisfaction to remember that in years gone by his ancestors had thrown off Britain's yoke. Beyond burning his eyebrows one Fourth of July, when a boy, with a maroon that exploded prematurely, he had never thought much about this affair before, but now he was conscious of a glow of patriotic fervour. If General Washington had been present at that moment Soapy would have shaken hands with him.
Soapy wandered aimlessly through the sunlit garden. The little spurt of consolation caused by the reflection that some hundred and fifty years previously the United States of America had severed relations with a country which was to produce a man like Lester Carmody had long since ebbed away, leaving emptiness behind it. He was feeling very low, and in urgent need of one of those largely advertised tonics which claim to relieve Anaemia, Brain-Fag, Lassitude, Anxiety, Palpitations, Faintness, Melancholia, Exhaustion, Neurasthenia, Muscular Limpness and Depression of Spirits. For he had got them all, especially brain-fag and melancholia; and the sudden appearance of Sturgis, fluttering towards him down the gravel path, provided nothing in the nature of a cure.
He felt that he had had all he wanted of the butler's conversation. Even of the most stimulating society enough is enough, and to Soapy about half a minute of Sturgis seemed a good medium dose for an adult. He would have fled, but there was nowhere to go. He remained where he was, making his expression as forbidding as possible. A motion-picture director could have read that expression like a book. Soapy was registering deep disinclination to talk about rabbits.
But for the moment, it appeared, Sturgis had put rabbits on one side. Other matters occupied his mind.
'I beg your pardon, sir,' he said, 'but have you seen Mr John?'
'Mr who?'
'Mr John, sir.'
So deep was Soapy's preoccupation that for a moment the name conveyed nothing to him.
'Mr Carmody's nephew, sir. Mr Carroll.'
'Oh? Yes, he went off in his car with my daughter.'
'Will he be gone long, do you think, sir?'
Soapy could answer that one.
'Yes,' he said. 'He won't be back for some time.'
'You see, when I took Mr Carmody his drink, sir, he told me to tell Bolt, the chauffeur, to give me the ticket.'
'What ticket?' asked Soapy wearily.
The butler was only too glad to reply. He had feared that this talk of theirs might be about to end all too quickly, and these explanations helped to prolong it. And, now that he knew that there was no need to go on searching for John, his time was his own again.
'It was a ticket for a bag which Mr Carmody sent Bolt to leave at the cloak-room at Shrub Hill station, in Worcester, this morning, sir. I now ascertain from Bolt that he gave it to Mr John to give to Mr Carmody.'
'What!' cried Soapy.
'And Mr John has apparently gone off without giving it to him. However, no doubt it is quite safe. Did you make satisfactory progress with the hutch, sir?'
'Eh?'
'The robert-hutch, sir.'
'What?'
A look of concern came into Sturgis's face. His companion's manner was strange.
'Is anything the matter, sir?'
; 'Eh?'
'Shall I bring you something to drink, sir?'
Few men ever become so distrait that this particular question fails to penetrate. Soapy nodded feverishly. Something to drink was precisely what at this moment he felt he needed most. Moreover, the process of fetching it would relieve him, for a time at least, of the society of a butler who seemed to combine in equal proportions the outstanding characteristics of a porous plaster and a gadfly.
'Yes,' he replied.
'Very good, sir.'
Soapy's mind was in a whirl. He could almost feel the brains inside his head heaving and tossing like an angry ocean. So that was what that smooth old crook had done with the stuff – stored it away in a Left Luggage office at a railway station! If circumstances had been such as to permit of a more impartial and detached attitude of mind, Soapy would have felt for Mr Carmody's resource and ingenuity nothing but admiration. A Left Luggage office was an ideal place in which to store stolen property, as good as the innermost recesses of some Safe Deposit Company's deepest vault.
But, numerous as were the emotions surging in his bosom, admiration was not one of them. For a while he gave himself up almost entirely to that saddest of mental exercises, the brooding on what might have been. If only he had known that John had the ticket...!
But he was a practical man. It was not his way to waste time torturing himself with thoughts of past failures. The future claimed his attention.
What to do?
All, he perceived, was not yet lost. It would be absurd to pretend that things were shaping themselves ideally, but disaster might still be retrieved. It would be embarrassing, no doubt, to meet Chimp Twist after what had occurred, but a man who would win to wealth must learn to put up with embarrassments. The only possible next move was to go over to Healthward Ho, reveal to Chimp what had occurred, and with his co-operation recover the ticket from John.
Soapy brightened. Another possibility had occurred to him. If he were to reach Healthward Ho with the minimum of delay, it might be that he would find both Chimp and John still under the influence of those admirable drops, in which case a man of his resource would surely be able to insinuate himself into John's presence long enough to be able to remove a Left Luggage ticket from his person.