"I have been---"
"Let me see. Allowing two days for buying my outfit---"
" I have been thinking it over---"
"What should I need? Guns, summer clothing, a solar topee, stout boots, some form of ointment for leopard bites---"
"I have been thinking it over, Mr. Miller," said Mrs. Cork, "and it seems to me that there is really no reason why you should leave Shipley Hall. I still feel that your behaviour in court was most extraordinary---"
"Unpardonable. I regret it all the more because, since I came here, I have had the opportunity of seeing something of your nephew, and his quiet charm has impressed itself upon me very much. I shall be particularly sorry to go, knowing that in another week or so we should have become firm friends. But don't think I don't see how right you are."
"I shall be delighted, if you will remain here."
"You mean that? Well, this is simply too kind of you, Mrs. Cork. I can hardly believe it."
"Miss Benedick, will you go and tell Cakebread not to pack Mr. Miller's things."
"Yes, Mrs. Cork."
"I'll go with you," said Jeff.
"Don't trouble," said Anne.
"No trouble at all," said Jeff.
Out in the corridor, Anne turned. Her face was hard.
"Stop it!" she hissed.
"Stop what?"
"Smirking like that and saying 'Genius, genius!'"
"But it was genius," protested Jeff. "Genius of a high order."
"Good-bye!"
"But half a minute---"
Anne had turned, and had started for the butler's pantry, moving well. Myrtle Shoesmith had made good time down the stairs of Halsey Chambers, but it seemed to Jeff, as he followed, that any handicapper who knew his business would have felt obliged to give her a liberal start in any hundred-yard dash for which Anne, also had entered.
"But listen---" he said.
Few things are more difficult than to pour out your heart to a girl who is racing along a corridor ahead of you. By the time they reached the green baize door, Jeff had merely touched the fringe of his subject, and his case was still only partially stated when they entered Lord Uffenham's presence and roused him from what appeared to be a trance of more than ordinary cataleptic quality.
"Uncle George," said Anne.
"Hey?" said Lord Uffenham, coming slowly to the surface. "Oh, it's you? I wanted to see you, my dear, and you, Jeff. That pond thing is off. I did drop the stuff in the dashed water, attached to a stout string, but I remember now that I took it out again next day."
"Uncle George, Mrs. Cork says you're not to pack Mr. Miller's things."
"Hey? Not pack 'em?"
"No."
"Isn't he leaving?"
"No."
"Splendid," said Lord Uffenham. "Capital. I see what happened. You pleaded for him. Good girl, good girl."
"I did not plead for him!" said Anne, and was out of the door like a fish darting through water. Jeff, blinking as she flashed by, thought he saw now where she had the edge on Myrtle Shoesmith. She was a quicker starter.
Lord Uffenham, too, had been impressed by her mobility. He had seen girls leave rooms like that in the early nineteen hundreds. He nodded sagely.
"She's still ratty."
Jeff shuddered at the adjective, but he could not but admit that, though revolting, it covered the facts.
"Still ratty," he assented.
"Not come round."
"No, not come round."
Lord Uffenham pondered.
"Have you kissed her again?"
"No, I have not."
"Then go and do it."
"I won't."
"It might just turn the scale."
"Listen," said Jeff, patiently. "I told you she spoke to me either not at all or very sparsely. You have now seen for yourself that she has developed a tendency to shoot out of my presence as if released by a spring. This renders it difficult for me to follow your advice."
"Yerss. You'd want her to stay put, of course."
"Exactly."
"Is she always as nippy as that?"
"Sometimes even nippier."
Lord Uffenham pondered once more. It was some moments before he spoke again. When he did, it was to throw out an observation which, while not perhaps of any great help as regarded the matter in hand, was fraught with interest.
"Did you know that ants run faster in warm weather?" he asked.
"Ants?"
"Yerss."
"I thought for a moment you said Anne."
"No, not Anne. Ants. When the weather's warm, they run faster."
For an instant, Jeff eyed the erudite old gentleman fixedly.
"This is wonderful news," he said. "Thank you for telling me. And now shall we return to Anne for a while?"
"You want to know what you ought to do next?"
"Exactly. The situation seems to be at a deadlock, and I should be glad to find a formula."
"Yerss. Yerss, I see. What happened when you saw her after you left me?"
"I tracked her to the drawing-room and tried to start a conversation, but she simply sat and played the piano at me."
"Is that so? Girls are odd."
"Very."
"I knew a girl in---"
Jeff raised a hand. "Not now."
"Hey?"
"Some other time. Later."
" I was only going to say---"
"I know. But don't."
"It was simply that, when she got ratty, she used to play the trombone," said Lord Uffenham, and relapsed into silence.
It was the silence, Jeff could see, of deep thought, and in the hope of stimulating the other's mental processes he drew out his cigarette-case and offered it.
Lord Uffenham shook his head.
"Never smoke now. Gave it up."
"You found it stunted your growth?"
"No. No, didn't stunt my growth. Feller staying here happened to say to me one evening that I hadn't the will power to do it, so I just took the pipe out of my mouth—we were in my study at the time—laid it down—took up the tobacco jar—new half-pound of Pond's Prime Honey-sweet—put it away in the cupboard—put the pipe in the cupboard—and turned the key. And from that day to this I've never touched the stuff."
"That showed great strength of mind."
"Enormous."
"And made your friend look silly, no doubt."
"He looked silly already."
"Sillier than usual, I should have said."
"Yerss," agreed Lord Uffenham. "Yerss."
He seemed about to pass into a coma again, but suddenly, just as his eyes had begun to glaze, he sat up with a startled “Lord-love-a-duck!"
"Jeff!"
"Hullo?"
"Well, dash my wig and buttons!" exclaimed Lord Uffenham, looking like a sibyl about to prophesy. It was plain that his brain had received some abrupt stimulus. You could almost hear the popping. "Jeff, we've come to the end of the long, long trail."
"What do you mean?"
"I'll tell yer what I mean. Pond's Prime Honeysweet! Now I see why the word 'pond' seemed so dashed significant. I put those diamonds at the bottom of that tobacco jar!"
"No!"
"I did. I remember doing it."
Jeff had sprung to his feet. News like this was not to be taken sitting down. "Is this official?"
"Absolutely official. The whole scene rises before my mind's eye. There was I, and there was the tobacco jar and I put the package in it, underneath the dashed tobacco."
"Golly!"
"Yerss."
"We can get it after dinner."
"We'll have to be careful. That Cork woman's always popping in and out of the study."
"But she's giving a lecture on the Ugubus in the drawing-room after dinner."
"She is."
"The coast will be clear."
"Absolutely clear."
"A child could get the stuff."
"A child of ten."
"A child of six."
&n
bsp; "A child of four," boomed Lord Uffenham, now completely infected with his junior's enthusiasm. "Any dashed child, in fact, that wasn't crippled in both legs and both arms and could walk in and turn a key in a door."
"Have you the key?"
"Certainly I have."
The mental vista down which he was looking became more and more beautiful to Jeff.
"And here's another thing," he said. "Once we have those diamonds, Anne will be so thankful and overjoyed and delighted that we shall have no more of this Trappist monk and professional sprinter stuff."
"You mean she'll come round."
"That's what I mean. She'll come round."
"You're right, Jeff! She won't be able to help herself. Three hearty cheers!" said Lord Uffenham.
There was a tap at the door. Dolly Molloy entered.
"Hello, big boy," she said, in her genial way. "Hello, Pop. Got a drop of that port of yours to give a fellow?"
"Certainly, certainly, certainly," said Lord Uffenham, beaming freely. "Sit down, dear lady, and take the weight off yer feet, ha, ha, ha. That's one of her expressions," he explained to Jeff, and noting that the latter was making preparations for departure added: "You off?"
"Yes," said Jeff.
He fixed his old friend with a meaning glance. "Careful!" his eye said.
"The silent tomb!" replied Lord Uffenham's.
CHAPTER XXV
Soapy Molloy, when his wife had suggested to him that he accompany her to Lord Cakebread's pantry and get a quick snootful before the evening meal, had reluctantly declined the invitation. He liked port, but he had to think about his figure. He had remained in their mutual bedroom, taking his ease in a chair with his feet on the window-sill, a mild cigar between his lips.
Fanned by the gentle breeze which stole in from the darkening garden and played about his lofty forehead with a soft caress, he would have been feeling completely happy, but for one crumpled rose leaf. Chimp Twist, although a bedroom of his own had now been assigned to him, had elected to come and keep him company, and Soapy found his presence embarrassing.
True, the little tiff which had resulted from Dolly's impulsiveness had been adjusted by those well-expressed arguments of his, but it had not been, adjusted quite enough. On Chimp's side, it was plain, a coolness still existed. This was made evident by the fact that, almost from the moment he entered the room, he had started to speak to himself in an undertone, as if he had been one of those soliloquising characters in Shakespeare whom Lord Uffenham disliked so much, about low-down double-crossers and people with whom skunks would blush to associate. He did not mention names, but Soapy had no difficulty in identifying the persons whom he had in mind, and his cigar, as he listened, lost much of its power to soothe.
It was a relief to him when the door opened, and Dolly re-entered.
Dolly's vivid face was alive and her eyes sparkling, and it seemed to Soapy, as he gazed on those loved features, that that port of old Cakebread's must be considerable port, to have produced this uplift in such quick time. For an instant, remembering his refusal to sit in at the orgy, he was tortured by the thought of what might have been.
"You seem kind of pepped up, sugar," he said, and Chimp Twist felt the same. Suspending his soliloquy, he eyed Dolly sourly. It offended him to behold such radiance in a woman through whose machinations he had gone through so much. He would have preferred not to see Dolly at all, but if he had to see her he would have liked to do so when she had toothache or had recently been run over by a truck.
Dolly, observing Chimp's presence, for a moment found it, as Soapy had done, unwelcome. She had that to say which she would have preferred to impart to her husband's ear alone. Then it occurred to her that in the enterprise, with the outlines of which her agile brain had been busy since she had left Lord Uffenham's pantry, there would be a part for him to play, and she checked the impulse to ask him why the heck he was sitting there like a bump on a log.
"I'll say I'm pepped up," she cried. "Guess what, pettie. Give you three guesses."
Her words were cryptic, but, taking them in conjunction with the strange, almost febrile vivacity of her demeanour, the two men found them pregnant with meaning. Chimp, sitting with his elbows on his knees and his chin cupped in his hands, straightened sharply, quivering like a blancmange. Soapy, who had been tilting his chair back, tilted it too far and had the misfortune to sustain a nasty blow on the back of the head.
But at a moment like this he could ignore physical pain. He did not even bother to rub the place. Sprawling on the carpet, he gazed up at his wife with bulging eyes.
"You don't mean---"
"Yessir. I've gotten the whole dope."
"From Lord Cakebread?"
"From his own personal lips."
"He told you where the ice was?"
"Just that little thing."
"Well!"
"You may well say 'Well!'"
"I'll tell the world I may well say 'Well!'" said Soapy; rising and clasping her fondly to his bosom. "Honey, you're terrific."
"Well, I'll admit I don't think I'm so bad myself," said Dolly, producing her lipstick and restoring the mouth which her mate's caresses had temporarily obliterated.
There is an unpleasant type of man on whom the spectacle of married love jars. Chimp Twist was such a man. It was with a celibate's moroseness that he surveyed the affectionate couple. Soapy was standing with his arm about Dolly's slim waist, while Dolly, busy with the lipstick, rested her head on his shirt front, and he made it clear that the sight nauseated him.
"Ah, cut it out," he said, peevishly.
A change had taken place in Chimp Twist's manner since Dolly had begun to speak. What had been joyous animation had become the coldness of the sceptic. Second thoughts had warned him that all this was probably just another of those things. Briefly, he feared a trap.
"So he told you where the ice was, did he?"
"I said he did."
"I heard you. And I suppose," said Chimp, giving his moustache a sardonic twirl, "it turns out that it's in his bedroom, after all, and you want me to go there again and have another look around?"
It was only too plain that he spoke satirically, and this re-opening of old sores pained Soapy. He was a man who liked the dead past to bury its dead.
"Now, Chimpie," he protested, "is that the way to talk?"
" I only wanted to know."
Dolly was more offended than pained. She replaced the lipstick and, raising her head, glared balefully.
"One of these days," she said, "I'm going to bean you, Chimp Twist, and bean you good!"
"Now, honey," pleaded the pacific Mr. Molloy.
"Well, what does he want to sit there making cracks like that for, when he ought to be thanking me on his bended knees?"
The reproach had little effect on Mr. Twist. The blush of shame did not mantle his cheek.
"I don't believe the old guy told you a darned thing about where the stuff was."
All the woman in Dolly flashed from her eyes.
"He did, too, tell me where the stuff was. At least---"
Chimp Twist uttered a short laugh, and repeated the last two words in a dry, unpleasant voice. And even Soapy's confidence seemed shaken.
"How do you mean, 'at least,' honey?" he asked anxiously.
"Well, natch'lly he wouldn't come straight out with it. He'd be too cagey for that. Here's what happens. I go in, see, and he's sitting there, chinning with the straw-haired guy. The straw-haired guy fades out soon as he seen me, on account of course he's sore at me for trying to crown him this afternoon with a antique vase, and Lord Cakebread sets 'em up and we both has a glass of port. And pretty soon I seen where he's grinning all over his pan, so I say 'Hello,' I say, 'you're looking mighty peart. Somebody been leaving you money?' And he says, 'It amounts to that, dear lady, it amounts to that.' And then he says he had some little savings, the fruit of years of being a butler, and he stowed them away somewheres and forgot where, and now he remembers they're in Mrs.
Cork's study. And he's going to get them d'rectly alter dinner, he says, soon as this lecture on the Ugubus gets started. Well, I don't know how you feel, but that was good enough for me."
The anxious expression faded from Soapy's face.
"He must have meant the ice."
"Sure, he meant the ice. What else could he have meant?"
Mr. Twist, the heckler, had another question to ask. "Whereabouts in the study?"
Dolly made no attempt to disguise her exasperation.
"Say, listen," she cried, "if you're wanting to know did he give me full written instructions and a map marked with a cross and a team of bloodhounds and a valise to fetch the stuff away in, he didn't. But if it's in the study, and he's going there soon as this lecture starts, there's nothing to it. It's in the bag. All we have to do is you lurk around in the garden, Soapy, outside the window till you see him come in, and when he's gone to the place where the stuff's hid and dug it out, you sim'ly step forward and stick him up."
No instructions from a commander-in-chief could have been simpler or more clearly set forth. It was not lack of comprehension that caused Mr. Molloy's fine forehead to wrinkle. "Me?"
"Sure, you. I and Chimp'll be busy somewheres else."
Mr. Molloy continued to brood doubtfully. In his distaste for the more spirited forms of action, he resembled Lionel Green.
"Stick him up?"
"Yay."
"What with?"
Dolly crossed the room, and took from the drawer of the dressing-table a serviceable-looking pistol.
"Here you are. Here's the old equalizer."
In her husband's gaze, as it lingered on the lethal object, there was both horror and astonishment. He looked at it not only as if it had been a poisonous snake but a poisonous snake which he had not expected to be called upon to meet.
"I didn't know you had a gun, pettie."
"Sure, honeybunch. I always carry it around. You never know when it mayn't come in useful. Put it in your pocket."
Mr. Molloy did so, but with that same brooding expression on his face. He admitted frankly that he did not like guns, and Dolly, ever practical, said that there was no necessity for any such affection on his part.
"All you got to do," she explained, "is push it in the old bimbo's stomach. That's not difficult."