'The next man he sent the manuscript to – a blighter named Busby – offered to publish it if Buck would put up the cash. And he couldn't resist the craving to see himself in print. He raised two hundred pounds – where he got it from is more than I can imagine – and that was that. The book duly appeared, all red and gold, with a frontispiece of Buck with a rifle in his hand standing with one foot on a lion.'
'That sounds to me like the happy ending. Came the dawn, is the way I should describe it.'
'It was not an end, but a beginning. Mark the sequel. This morning a totally unexpected extra bill comes in from this hound Busby for ninety-six pounds, three and eleven, for what he calls "incidental expenses connected with the office".'
'Not so hot.'
'It stunned poor old Buck like a blackjack. He came tottering to me with the document. He said he didn't know what the expression "incidental expenses connected with the office" meant, and I explained that it meant ninety-six pounds, three and eleven. He asked me if I could let him have the money as a loan out of my savings from my dress allowance, and I said, "What savings?" And then he said, well, what was he to do, and I said I was going up to London this morning, so give me the bill, I said, and I will go and see this Busby.'
'What can you do?'
'The idea is to try to get him to trim the thing a little.'
'How do you expect to swing that?'
'Oh, I shall plead and weep and clasp my hands. It might work. It does in the movies.'
Tubby was concerned. He had a brotherly, protective affection for this girl.
'But, gosh, Jane, the guy's most likely a fat, double-chinned, pot-bellied son of Belial with pig's eyes and a licentious look. He'll probably try to kiss you.'
'Well, that ought to be good for the three and eleven.'
They started to stroll toward the archway. Tubby stopped short, in the manner of one who slaps his brow.
'Busby? Are you sure it's Busby?'
'Am I sure! The name is graven on my heart. J. Mortimer Busby, with a "Cr" after it. Why?'
'Well, it's rather an odd coincidence. I remember now who was talking to me about publishers. It was my brother Joe. I saw him about a year ago, and he said he was going to work for somebody in the publishing racket. And I'm pretty sure the name was Busby. Unless,' said Tubby, who liked to leave a margin for error, 'it was something else.'
'You seem a bit vague.'
'Well, you know how it is. You meet a guy and he tells you something, and you say, "Oh yes?" and then you go away and forget about it. Besides, I had had a late night. I was half asleep when I met my brother Joe.'
'I didn't know you had a brother Joe.'
'Oh, sure,' said Tubby, with a touch of the smugness of a man of property 'I've got a brother Joe all right.'
'Why haven't I heard of him till now?'
'I guess he just hasn't happened to crop up.'
'Big brother or little brother?'
'Big.'
'Odd I've never heard your stepmother speak of him.'
'Not so odd,' said Tubby. 'She hates his gizzard. He cleared out and left home when he was twenty-one. I've always had the idea that she slung him out. I don't know. I was away when they had the big fight. When I came back, he'd gone.'
'Didn't you make inquiries?'
'Sure, I made inquiries. Until she told me that if I didn't keep my trap shut and mind my own business, I could leave, too, and start in as an office boy in the fish-glue business.'
'That sealed your lips?'
'You bet it sealed my lips. Sealed them good.'
'Well, I hope your brother Joe isn't working for Busby, because Busby would contaminate him.'
'Oh, I don't know,' said Tubby optimistically. 'Probably Joe would contaminate Busby. He's a great guy. As tough as they make 'em.'
They passed through the archway on to the terrace, and found it graced by the presence of Miss Prudence Whittaker. The secretary had come out of the house again to get a breath of air. Observing Tubby, she started to go in, plainly feeling that it was not much use getting breaths of air when that air was polluted. Tubby, on his side, clenched his fists and drew in his breath with a sharp hiss, his face the while taking on a Byronic gloom.
Jane waved a hand.
'Good morning, Miss Whittaker.'
'Good morning, Miss Abbott.'
'I'm going up to London this morning. Anything you want me to do for you?'
'No, thank you, Miss Abbott.'
'No message for Percy?' asked Tubby unpleasantly.
The secretary glided away in disdainful silence. Jane, turning to Tubby to ask who Percy was, for this was the first time she had heard of any Percys in Prudence Whittaker's life, caught sight of his face.
'Golly, Tubby!' she exclaimed. 'What's the matter?'
'I'm all right.'
'Then you deceive the eye.'
'I'm fine,' said the sufferer moodily.
Jane was not to be put off like this:
'You're nothing of the kind. You look like one of those strong, soured men who have a row with the girl and go off and shoot lions in Africa. I expect Buck used to meet them in dozens when— Tubby! Have you and La Whittaker parted brass rags?'
Tubby reeled. This clairvoyant girl had taken his breath away. He had supposed his love a secret locked away behind a masklike face.
'What do you know about me and La— I mean Miss Whittaker?'
'My poor child, it's been sticking out a mile for weeks. Your bulging eyes when you looked at her told their own story.'
'Is that so? Well, they've changed their act.'
'I'm awfully sorry. What happened?'
'Oh, nothing,' said Tubby. A man has his reserves.
'Who's Percy?'
'Nobody you know.'
Jane forbore to press the question. She was longing to hear all about that shadowy – one might say, mystic – figure, whose role seemed to be that of Serpent in the Vanringham-Whittaker Garden of Eden, but she was a tactful girl. Instead, she asked him what he was going to do about it. Tubby replied that he wasn't going to do anything about it. Jane screwed up her blue eyes and looked at the heat mist that flickered over the turf.
'Well, it's a shame,' she said. 'Have you thought of trying homoeopathic treatment?'
'Eh?'
'In cases like this, I always think that another girl should be applied immediately. What you need is plenty of gay feminine society. You're the sort of man who's lost if he hasn't a girl.'
'I can take them or leave them alone.'
'What girls have we? I'm lunching today with six from the old school, headed by Mabel Purvis, at one time president of the Debating Society. Would you care to join us?'
'No, thanks.'
'I thought you mightn't.' Jane paused. 'Of course, you know, Tubby darling,' she said, 'I don't want to seem callous and unsympathetic, but, however rotten it is quarrelling with someone you're fond of, there's a sort of bright spot to this particular bit of trouble.'
'What?' said Tubby, who had missed it.
'Well, but for this rift, you would have had to inform your stepmother, when she got back from America, that you were intending to marry a humble working girl. You know her better than I do, but I wouldn't have said offhand that she was a woman who was frightfully fond of humble working girls.'
This angle of the situation had presented itself to Tubby's notice independently once or twice since the severing of his relations with Miss Whittaker. The Princess von und zu Dwornitzchek – she had married and divorced the holder of this high-sounding title about two years after the death of the late Mr Franklin Vanringham – was, he knew, inclined to be finicky where his matrimonial plans were concerned, and she possessed, unfortunately, the power of the high, the middle and the low justice over him. That is to say, she could at will stop his allowance, and set him to work at the bottom of that fish-glue business of which he had already made mention; a prosperous concern in which she had inherited a large interest from her first husband, a Mr
Spelvin. And though Tubby knew little or nothing of conditions at the bottom of fish-glue businesses, instinct told him that he would not like them.
'I wouldn't have cared about that,' he said sturdily, 'if Prue had been on the level.'
'Of course not,' said Jane, wondering what on earth it could be that the immaculate Miss Whittaker had done. 'Still, it's a point.'
'It is a point,' agreed Tubby. 'She's a tough egg.'
'She must be, if she slung your brother Joe out.'
'And with only ten dollars in his kick, mind you. Joe told me so.'
'Good gracious! What did he do?'
'Oh, all sorts of things. I know he was a sailor on a tramp steamer, and I believe he held down a job for a time as bouncer at some bar. He did a bit of prize-fighting too.'
Jane found herself liking this stalwart. The Princess Dwornitzchek was a woman for whom she had little esteem, and it saddened her at times that Tubby, such a dear in other respects, should allow himself to be so under her thumb. A man who could defy that overpowering millionairess was a man after her own heart.
'I could tell you all sorts of things about Joe.'
'I'd love to hear them, but I'm afraid I can't stop now. I've got to dress. What you had better do, it seems to me, is go and have your swim. That'll buck you up.'
Her words reminded Tubby of the other blow which he had sustained. Not such a wallop, of course, as having one's dreams and ideals knocked for a loop by a woman's treachery, but quite a sock in its way.
'Say, listen, Jane,' he said, 'what's all this I hear about the houseboat being rented?'
'Quite correct. Tenant clocks in today. Name of Peake.'
'Oh, shoot!'
'Why? You can still go on bathing from it.'
'Can I, do you think? Won't this fellow mind?'
'Of course not. Adrian's a great swimmer himself. He'll love to have a little playmate.'
The brightness which had come like a gleam of winter sunshine into Tubby's careworn face faded abruptly.
'Adrian?'
'That's his name.'
'Adrian Peake?'
'That's right. You seem to know him.'
Tubby gave a short, bitter snort. His air was that of a man who realizes that everything is against him.
'I'll say I know him. I haven't been able to move without treading on the fellow for a year and a half. Will I ever forget that time last August when he was on my stepmother's yacht at Cannes. Talk about getting in one's hair!'
Jane had become suddenly rigid, but Tubby did not observe this phenomenon. He continued, unheeding:
'Adrian Peake! My gosh! He's a sort of lapdog of my stepmother's. Trots after her wherever she goes. Marked her down the day she hit London, and has been sponging on her ever since. Adrian by golly Peake, is it? Then the thing's cold. I'm not going to put myself under an obligation to that twerp. Darned gigolo. I shall go and play croquet with Mrs Folsom.'
Jane Abbott's fists were now clenched and her small teeth set. She was looking at Tubby with an eye compared with which even that of Miss Prudence Whittaker had been kindly and sympathetic.
'It may interest you to know,' she said, in a steely voice, 'that Adrian and I are engaged.'
She was right. It interested him extremely. He jumped as if she had hit him.
'Engaged?'
'Yes.'
'You can't be!'
'I must go and dress.'
'But wait. Listen. There must be some mistake. You can't possibly be engaged to Adrian Peake. He's going to marry my stepmother.'
'Don't be an idiot.'
'He is, I tell you. Unless this is a different Adrian Peake. The one I mean is a slimy bird who looks like a consumptive tailor's dummy.'
He paused here, for Jane had begun to speak. For some moments she spoke with an incisive eloquence which made Tubby feel as if the top of his head had come off Then she turned and walked away, leaving him to collect the wreckage.
Her father, whom she passed on the terrace, called to her, but she merely smiled a tight-lipped smile and hurried on. She was in no mood for conversation, even with a fondly loved parent.
CHAPTER 2
SIR Buckstone Abbot was standing on the terrace because it was almost time for his daily conference with Prudence Whittaker, which always took place at this hour and, if the weather was fine, on this spot.
The Baronet was a man of routine. Every day he rose punctually at eight-thirty and, having shaved, bathed and gone through the complicated system of physical jerks which kept his stocky body in such excellent repair, breakfasted with his wife in her sitting-room. At ten-thirty he interviewed Miss Whittaker. The rest of the morning and the early afternoon he devoted to avoiding the paying guests. Between five and seven, he took the dogs for a run.
Unable to induce Jane to stop and chat with him, he resumed the scrutiny of his ancestral home which her passing had interrupted. He always took a look at Walsingford Hall at about this hour, and liked it less every time he saw it. Today's bright sunshine showed up the celebrated eyesore in all its revolting hideousness, and it was with a renewed sense of wonder at the mental processes of that remarkable woman that he remembered that the Princess von und zu Dwornitzchek had once said she thought it cute. Sir Buckstone had often dredged the dictionary for adjectives to describe the home of his fathers, but 'cute' was one which had not occurred to him.
Walsingford Hall had not always presented the stupefying spectacle which it did today Built in the time of Queen Elizabeth on an eminence overlooking the silver Thames, it must, for two centuries and more, have been a lovely place. The fact that it now caused sensitive oarsmen, rounding the bend of the river and seeing it suddenly, to wince and catch crabs was due to the unfortunate circumstance of the big fire, which, sooner or later, seems to come to all English country houses, postponing its arrival until midway through the reign of Queen Victoria, thus giving the task of rebuilding it from the foundations up to Sir Wellington Abbott, at that time its proprietor.
Whatever may be said in favour of the Victorians, it is pretty generally admitted that few of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks, Sir Wellington least of any. He was as virulent an amateur architect as ever grew a whisker. Watching the holocaust in his nightshirt, for he had had to nip rather smartly out of a burning bedroom, he forgot the cold wind blowing about his ankles in the thought that here was his chance to do a big job and do it well. He embarked upon it at the earliest possible moment, regardless of expense.
What Sir Buckstone was now looking at, accordingly, was a vast edifice constructed of glazed red brick, in some respects resembling a French chateau, but, on the whole, perhaps, having more the appearance of one of those model dwellings in which a certain number of working-class families are assured of a certain number of cubic feet of air. It had a huge leaden roof, tapering to a point and topped by a weathervane, and from one side of it, like some unpleasant growth, there protruded a large conservatory. There were also a dome and some minarets.
Victorian villagers gazing up at it, had named it Abbott's Folly, and they had been about right.
The clock over the stables struck the half-hour, and simultaneously, on time as usual, Miss Whittaker came out of the house, note-book in hand.
'Good morning, Sir Buckstone.'
'Morning, Miss Whittaker. Lovely day.'
'Oh, yay-ess, Sir Buckstone. Beautiful.'
'Well, everybody all right? Nobody complaining about anything?'
This, also, was routine. The Baronet's first question at these conferences always had to do with the welfare of his little flock.
Miss Whittaker consulted her note-book.
'Mrs Shepley has been annoyed by the pigeons.'
'What have they been doing to her?'
'They coo outside her window in the morning.'
'Well, I don't see what she expects me to do about that. Can't put silencers on them, what? Anything else?'
'Mr Waugh-Bonner thinks there is a mouse in
his room.'
'Tell him to mew.'
'And Mr Chinnery has been asking for waffles again.'
'Oh, dash his waffles! What the dickens are these waffles he's always whining about?'
'They appear to be an American breakfast food.'
'Well, he's not in America now.'
'But he wants his waffles.'
Sir Buckstone, his brow furrowed, wrestled with his problem.
'Would my wife know how to make the damn things?'
'I have consulted Lady Abbott, Sir Buckstone, and she informs me that she can make a substance called fudge, but not waffles.'
'How about asking young Vanringham?'
The sweet Kensington music of Miss Whittaker's voice became marred by a touch of flatness:
'If you desi-ah that I inqui-ah of Mr Vanringham, I will do so, but—'
'You think he wouldn't know, either? Probably not. Well, old Chinnery will have to go without his waffles. Is that the lot?'
'Yes, Sir Buckstone.'
'Good.'
'There have been two telephone messages. The first was from the secretary of the Princess Dwornitzchek. The Princess is in mid-ocean and will be arriving almost immediately.'
'Good,' said Sir Buckstone again. He welcomed the return of one who could not only look at Walsingford Hall without shuddering but was actually contemplating buying it. 'She's made a quick trip. What was the other telephone message?'
'It was for Lady Abbott, Sir Buckstone. From her brother.'
Sir Buckstone stared.
'From her brother?'
'Yes, Sir Buckstone.'
'But she hasn't got a brother.'
Miss Whittaker was polite but firm.
'I only know what the gentleman said on the telephone, Sir Buckstone. He asked me to inform Lady Abbott that her brother Sam was in London and would be coming to see her as soon as possible.'
'God bless my soul! Well, all right. Thank you, Miss Whittaker.'
For some moments after his secretary had left him, Sir Buckstone Abbott stood in thoughtful mood, digesting this piece of information. It is always disconcerting for a man of regular habits to find his wife unexpectedly presenting him with a bouncing brother-in-law But it was not long before he shelved this subject for meditation in favour of that other, more urgent one from which his mind had been temporarily diverted. Once more in front of his eyes, seeming to be written in letters of flame across the summer sky, appeared those sinister figures £96 3s. 11d. He was contemplating them and wondering moodily if there was any possible chance of his daughter Jane weaving so magic a spell about this Busby that he would consent to a fairly substantial reduction, when his reverie was interrupted by a voice which called his name. At the same time the scent of a powerful cigar floated to his nostrils. He turned, and was shocked to find Mr Chinnery at his side. Only the most intense preoccupation could have caused him to be caught standing like this.