"My poor angel! Was I very haughty?"
"Cleopatra could have taken your correspondence course."
"I'm sorry. The fact is, I don't know my own strength. Still, you deserved it."
"If you're going to freeze me to the marrow every time I deserve it, my future looks pretty bleak."
"Oh, no, it won't happen again. Whatever you do, I shall just say to myself 'Oh, it's only that old idiot Jeff. He can't help it, and he has many good points and I love him.' That will be better?"
"That will be fine. I see a singularly placid and happy married life before us. But, you know, you came very near to losing me."
"You mean, you might have gone off and fallen in love with some other girl?"
"Good Lord, no. How on earth could I fall in love with another girl after I'd seen you? What I meant was that a little more of that iciness of yours, and I'd have been like the chap in Excelsior. That's a bit above your head, of course. You've never heard of Excelsior."
"I have!"
"Extraordinary, that private education of yours. It's like your uncle's memory—you never know when it's going to work."
"It worked all right this time," said Anne ruefully. "I suppose you know the Molloys went off with the diamonds?"
"No, did they? By the way, what's become of your uncle?"
"I don't know. He went out."
"Probably to fetch a grasshopper, so that he could tell what the temperature was. Like the chap in Excelsior, I was saying. They sent out the St. Bernard dogs, and found him lying in the snow, lifeless and beautiful. That's how I should have been."
"Not beautiful."
"You think not?"
"Definitely not, thank goodness. I never want to sec another beautiful man as long as I live. I should call yours a good, honest face, no more."
"Perhaps you're right. Though you aren't seeing me at my best. Being swatted like a fly with tobacco jars does something to a man. It removes the bloom. Still, I knew what you mean. It's pretty tough for girls, isn't it? They start out dreaming that some day they will marry a Prince Charming, and they wind up with fellows like me."
"I have no regrets."
"None?"
"None."
"Anne, you angel," said Jeff, with deep emotion, "if you knew what an angel you were, you would be staggered."
The embrace in which he folded her was one which Lord Uffenham, sternest of critics, would have passed as well up to standard. Anne emerged from it, looking thoughtful.
"You know," she said, with a little sigh, "life's very hard."
Jeff could not agree to this.
"Not a bit. I won't hear a word against life. It's terrific. What do you mean?"
"I told you the Molloys went off with the family diamonds."
"What of it?"
"Well, it's a pity, don't you think?"
Jeff seemed bewildered.
"I can't follow you. You tell me you love me ... You did say that?"
"Yes, I remember saying that."
"And you're going to marry me?"
"Yes."
"And yet you seem to be expecting me to make a song and dance because the Molloys have gone off with a few diamonds."
"I only said it was a pity. Wouldn't you have liked your wife to have brought you a dot?"
"You don't know what dot means? "
"Yes, I do."
"It's amazing. French and everything."
"But wouldn't you?"
"Have liked some dot? Of course not. What's money? Be she never so broke, a pure, sweet English girl is a fitting mate for the highest in the land."
"An English girl can be just as pure and sweet with a bit of stuff in the bank. I must say, dearly as I love him, I could get a good deal of simple pleasure out of hitting my Lord Uffenham with a tobacco jar."
"Well, now's your chance. Here he comes. I dare say he has another jar somewhere that he could lend you."
George, Viscount Uffenham, was a man who always walked heavily, and he was seldom seen without a glassy look in his eyes, but it seemed to Jeff, as he watched him enter the study now, that his tread was even more measured than usual and that the glassiness of his eyes had become a super-glassiness. Except for the fact that his face was covered with coal dust, which at such a ceremony it would not have been, he might have been attending the funeral of a dear friend.
Anne, womanlike, noticed this physical blemish rather than the evidences of a bruised soul.
"Darling! What have you been doing to your face?"
Lord Uffenham's eye lost its glassiness, and became a smouldering eye. It was plain that some memory, some vision of things past, was disturbing him.
"It's not what I have been doing to my dashed face, it's what that little squirt Trumper's been doing to it. He threw coal at me."
"Coal!"
"Excellent stuff for throwing purposes," Jeff assured her. "A good marksman can get a lot of value out of coal. Why was this?" he asked. "Or didn't he say?"
"He didn't like me kissing Mrs. Cork?"
The sensation of having strayed into a rather eccentric dream, which had never quite left Anne this evening, became intensified.
"You kissed Mrs. Cork? Why?"
"I wanted her to marry me."
"So naturally," said Jeff, "he kissed her. The first move when you want someone to marry you is to kiss them. Look at you and me. If it hadn't been for you kissing me, I might never have yielded. I was in two minds."
Anne eyed him coldly.
"I don't know if you know it, young J. G. Miller, but you're in grave danger of having 'Oh?' said to you again."
"Who cares? I'm a very different man from the craven who curled up beneath your eye earlier in the evening. You've no notion how it bucks a fellow up, knowing he's going to marry you. I defy you." He turned to Lord Uffenham. "Pay no attention to this. Just a lovers' tiff. We're engaged."
"Lord-love-a-duck! Are you?"
"We are. You, I take it from something in your manner, are not. Couldn't you draw the Cork? What went wrong?"
"The whole dashed thing went wrong. I opened the cellar door, and she came leaping out, and I kissed her---"
"Did you tell her that you were really the missing Lord Uffenham?"
"Hey? No. Why?"
"It only occurred to me that she might have thought it odd, the butler kissing her."
"Lord-love-a-duck! I never thought of that." Lord Uffenham nodded sagely, like a man to whom all things have been made clear. "That must have been why she said I was tight and told me to go and sleep it off."
"I expect so."
"Not that it mattered, because she had already fixed it up in the cellar that she was going to marry Trumper. That was why he threw coal at me. The upshot of the whole thing was that she sacked me, and I'm leaving first thing to-morrow. Month's wages in lieu of notice, thank goodness. Come in handy, that will."
"Halves, partner. But I thought she couldn't sack you."
"That reminds me of the story of the feller who was in prison, and his friend comes and asks why, and the feller tells him, and the friend says ' Lord-love-a-duck, they can't put you in prison for that.' 'I know they can't,' says the feller, 'but they have.' She says she doesn't care if a million clauses in a million leases say she can't sack me. 'If Lord Uffenham sues me,' she said, 'I shall fight him to the House of Lords.' I doubt if I will, though. Lot of trouble and expense."
Anne, who had been experiencing her usual difficulty in insinuating herself into an Uffenham-Miller duologue, seized the opportunity afforded by a slight pause at this point to speak.
"Poor Anne!" she said. "Poor unfortunate girl! What a future for that sweet creature, with a crazy husband and a gibbering uncle.
“Jeff!"
"My lamb?"
"Will you kindly tell me what all this is about?"
"I will, indeed. There before you stands the whitest man I know." He paused. "No, that was in the circumstances rather unfortunately put. I mean, he's a hero. He's a sort of cross betwee
n a knight of old and a Boy Scout. He was going to marry Mrs. Cork, so as to be in a position to dip into her doubloons and repay you your lost capital."
"Uncle Gee-orge!" cried Anne, overcome.
"Quite all right, my dear," said Lord Uffenham. "Only possible course. Noblesse oblige, you know, noblesse oblige."
His smugness was so intense that Jeff regretted having given hint such a build-up. How often it happens, he felt, that a kindly word of praise proves too beady for its recipient.
"It's all very well, you standing there trying to look like Sidney Carton," he said, coldly administering the corrective. "The necessity for all this self-sacrificing stuff would never have arisen, if you had had one ounce more sense than a coot."
"These are strong words, Jeff," said Lord Uffenham, stung.
Anne agreed with him.
"It looks to me," she said, "as if this Miller had got thoroughly above himself. A haughty, arrogant, domineering blighter, of a type I very much dislike."
"I cannot recede from my position," said Jeff. "I said a coot, and I meant a coot. Why didn't the silly ass put those diamonds in the bank?"
"Are you calling my uncle a silly ass?"
"I am."
"Well, it's about time somebody did," said Anne. "Of course, he doesn't believe in banks."
"So he told me."
"And I suppose, if you don't believe in banks, you hate the idea of them having your diamonds."
"I can't see that it's any worse, a bank having them, than the Molloys."
"There's that, of course."
Lord Uffenham had not been giving his attention to these exchanges. After registering that protest, he had withdrawn into himself, and the twitching of his eyebrows showed that his brain was working. He now came shooting back to his young companions.
"Wait a minute!" he cried. "I believe something's coming. Jeff!"
"My lord?"
"Keep saying 'Bank' for a bit, will yer, my dear feller."
"Bank?"
"He means 'Bank,'" said Anne.
"Oh, does he? Very well. Bank ... Bank ... Bank ... How long has this got to go on?" asked Jeff. "It's making me feel like a bus-conductor."
"I'll tell yer something," said Lord Uffenham. "I'm beginning to have grave doubts as to whether I put those diamonds in that tobacco jar, after all. And yet that word 'pond' still seems significant. So does the word 'bank.' You remember I found it in that diary of mine, entered against the date April the Fourth."
Anne uttered a cry.
"That was the day before you had your accident!"
"Exactly. That's what makes it so dashed significant. Don't speak to me for a moment. I want to think."
He fell into a profound reverie, and Jeff and Anne conversed in low whispers.
"I love you," said Jeff.
"That's the way to talk," said Anne.
"I shall never love anyone but you."
"Better and better."
"Did you know that ants run faster in warm weather?"
"No, really? Faster than what?"
"Faster than other ants in cold weather."
"You wouldn't fool me?"
"Certainly not. I had it from your uncle in person. It appears that they sprint like billy-o in the dog days. I knew you would be glad to hear that. And, I was nearly forgetting to mention it, I love you."
Lord Uffenham heaved himself from his chair. Satisfaction radiated from every feature of his vast face—from the eyebrow, from the nose, from the eyes, from the chin and from the upper lip. Even his ears seemed to be vibrating in silent ecstasy.
"Knew I'd get it," he said. "I never forget anything, not permanently. You just have to give me time and let me concentrate. I did put those diamonds in the bank."
"You did?" cried Jeff.
"What bank?" cried Anne.
"The bank at the far end of the pond," said Lord Uffenham, "just by that lead statue of the naked boy with the large stomach. I remember it distinctly. I was strolling round there, and I had a trowel with me because I'd been doing a bit of weeding in the sunken garden, and it suddenly came over me that here was a good spot. I'll go and get 'em."
He stumped ponderously through the french window, and Jeff and Anne looked at each other with a wild surmise.
Anne was the first to speak.
"Do you think they're really there?"
Jeff shook his head.
"Not a hope."
"You're not very cheerful."
"I'm a realist. You aren't going to make me believe at this late hour that your uncle would ever have chosen a sane, conservative place like the bank of a pond as a repository for diamonds. No, let's face it, this is just another of his false starts. What we have to do is plan out our future quietly and calmly and forget all about those diamonds."
"My dot!"
"Come, come."
"I know, but I did want to bring you a dot."
"I tell you I don't want your dashed dot. It will be a cold day when a Halsey Court Miller cannot support his wife without the help of her money. In modest comfort, of course, not luxury. At first, no doubt, we shall have to live fairly smally. You will cook our simple meals, I shall wash the dishes. No, by Jove, I jolly well shan't. Your uncle shall wash the dishes. He will, of course, come to live with us, and there's no sense in having a well trained butler in the home if you don't set him to work. Here, as I see it, is the set-up. You cook the meals. He washes the dishes, waits at table, answers the door, runs errands, cleans the silver---"
"What silver?"
"I have a small cup which I won at school for proficiency in the quarter-mile."
"And what will you do?"
"I see myself lying on a settee with a pipe and a little something in a glass, generally supervising things."
"You do, do you?"
"Adding, as it were, the Miller Touch."
There came from without the tramp of heavy feet. Lord Uffenham home from the hunt.
He loomed up against the evening sky, and having stood framed in the french window for an instant, as if bestowing a silent benediction, came clumping into the room.
"Here you are," he said. "I told yer so."
And with a careless gesture he started spraying diamonds all over the desk.
Twenty miles away, in a lane off the London road, Dolly Molloy had stopped the two-seater, and was telling her Soapy to fetch out the l'il old jar so that she might take a gander at its contents before proceeding to the metropolis.
She said she felt like a child about to open its Christmas stocking.
THE END
P. G. Wodehouse, Money in the Bank
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