“Mr. Bateman,” said George briefly, as one who would pass on to better things.
A serious, palefaced young man bowed.
“And now,” continued George, “I must introduce you to Countess Radzky.”
Countess Radzky had been conversing with Mr. Bateman. Leaning very far back on a sofa, with her legs crossed in a daring manner, she was smoking a cigarette in an incredibly long turquoise-studded holder.
Bundle thought she was one of the most beautiful women she had ever seen. Her eyes were very large and blue, her hair was coal black, she had a matte skin, the slightly flattened nose of the Slav, and a sinuous, slender body. Her lips were reddened to a degree with which Bundle was sure Wyvern Abbey was totally unacquainted.
She said eagerly: “This is Mrs. Macatta—yes?”
On George’s replying in the negative and introducing Bundle, the countess gave her a careless nod, and at once resumed her conversation with the serious Mr. Bateman.
Bundle heard Jimmy’s voice in her ear:
“Pongo is absolutely fascinated by the lovely Slav,” he said. “Pathetic, isn’t it? Come and have some tea.”
They drifted once more into the neighbourhood of Sir Oswald Coote.
“That’s a fine place of yours, Chimneys,” remarked the great man.
“I’m glad you liked it,” said Bundle meekly.
“Wants new plumbing,” said Sir Oswald. “Bring it up to date, you know.”
He ruminated for a minute or two.
“I’m taking the Duke of Alton’s place. Three years. Just while I’m looking round for a place of my own. Your father couldn’t sell if he wanted to, I suppose?”
Bundle felt her breath taken away. She had a nightmare vision of England with innumerable Cootes in innumerable counterparts of Chimneys—all, be it understood, with an entirely new system of plumbing installed.
She felt a sudden violent resentment which, she told herself, was absurd. After all, contrasting Lord Caterham with Sir Oswald Coote, there was no doubt as to who would go to the wall. Sir Oswald had one of those powerful personalities which make all those with whom they come in contact appear faded. He was, as Lord Caterham had said, a human steamroller. And yet, undoubtedly, in many ways, Sir Oswald was a stupid man. Apart from his special line of knowledge and his terrific driving force, he was probably intensely ignorant. A hundred delicate appreciations of life which Lord Caterham could and did enjoy were a sealed book to Sir Oswald.
Whilst indulging in these reflections Bundle continued to chat pleasantly. Herr Eberhard, she heard, had arrived, but was lying down with a nervous headache. This was told her by Mr. O’Rourke, who managed to find a place by her side and keep it.
Altogether, Bundle went up to dress in a pleasant mood of expectation, with a slight nervous dread hovering in the background whenever she thought of the imminent arrival of Mrs. Macatta. Bundle felt that dalliance with Mrs. Macatta was going to prove no primrose path.
Her first shock was when she came down, demurely attired in a black lace frock, and passed along the hall. A footman was standing there—at least a man dressed as a footman. But that square, burly figure lent itself badly to the deception. Bundle stopped and stared.
“Superintendent Battle,” she breathed.
“That’s right, Lady Eileen.”
“Oh!” said Bundle uncertainly. “Are you here to—to—?”
“Keep an eye on things.”
“I see.”
“That warning letter, you know,” said the Superintendent, “fairly put the wind up Mr. Lomax. Nothing would do for him but that I should come down myself.”
“But don’t you think—” began Bundle, and stopped. She hardly liked to suggest to the Superintendent that his disguise was not a particularly efficient one. He seemed to have “police officer” written all over him, and Bundle could hardly imagine the most unsuspecting criminal failing to be put on his guard.
“You think,” said the Superintendent stolidly, “that I might be recognized?”
He gave the final word a distinct capital letter.
“I did think so—yes—” admitted Bundle.
Something that might conceivably have been intended for a smile crossed the woodenness of Superintendent Battle’s features.
“Put them on their guard, eh? Well, Lady Eileen, why not?”
“Why not?” echoed Bundle—rather stupidly, she felt.
Superintendent Battle was nodding his head slowly.
“We don’t want any unpleasantness, do we?” he said. “Don’t want to be too clever—just show any light-fingered gentry that may be about—well, just show them that there’s somebody on the spot, so to speak.”
Bundle gazed at him in some admiration. She could imagine that the sudden appearance of so renowned a personage as Superintendent Battle might have a depressing effect on any scheme and the hatchers of it.
“It’s a great mistake to be too clever,” Superintendent Battle was repeating. “The great thing is not to have any unpleasantness this weekend.”
Bundle passed on, wondering how many of her fellow guests had recognized or would recognize the Scotland Yard detective. In the drawing room George was standing with a puckered brow and an orange envelope in his hand.
“Most vexatious,” he said. “A telegram from Mrs. Macatta to say she will be unable to be with us. Her children are suffering from mumps.”
Bundle’s heart gave a throb of relief.
“I especially feel this on your account, Eileen,” said George kindly. “I know how anxious you were to meet her. The Countess too will be sadly disappointed.”
“Oh, never mind,” said Bundle. “I should hate it if she’d come and given me mumps.”
“A very distressing complaint,” agreed George. “But I do not think that infection could be carried that way. Indeed, I am sure that Mrs. Macatta would have run no risk of that kind. She is a most highly principled woman, with a very real sense of her responsibilities to the community. In these days of national stress, we must all take into account—”
On the brink of embarking on a speech, George pulled himself up short.
“But it must be for another time,” he said. “Fortunately there is no hurry in your case. But the Countess, alas, is only a visitor to our shores.”
“She’s a Hungarian, isn’t she?” said Bundle, who was curious about the Countess.
“Yes. You have heard, no doubt, of the Young Hungarian party. The Countess is a leader of that party. A woman of great wealth, left a widow at an early age, she has devoted her money and her talents to the public service. She has especially devoted herself to the problem of infant mortality—a terrible one under present conditions in Hungary. I—Ah! here is Herr Eberhard.”
The German inventor was younger than Bundle had imagined him. He was probably not more than thirty-three or four. He was boorish and ill at ease. And yet his personality was not an unpleasing one. His blue eyes were more shy than furtive, and his more unpleasant mannerisms, such as the one that Bill had described of gnawing his fingernails, arose, she thought, more from nervousness than from any other cause. He was thin and weedy in appearance and looked anaemic and delicate.
He conversed rather awkwardly with Bundle in stilted English and they both welcomed the interruption of the joyous Mr. O’Rourke. Presently Bill bustled in—there is no other word for it: in the same such way does a favoured Newfoundland make his entrance—and at once came over to Bundle. He was looking perplexed and harassed.
“Hullo, Bundle. Heard you’d got here. Been kept with my nose to the grindstone all the blessed afternoon or I’d have seen you before.”
“Cares of State heavy tonight?” suggested O’Rourke sympathetically.
Bill groaned.
“I don’t know what your fellow’s like,” he complained. “Looks a good-natured, tubby little chap. But Codders is absolutely impossible. Drive, drive, drive, from morning to night. Everything you do is wrong, and everything you haven’t done you ough
t to have done.”
“Quite like a quotation from the prayer book,” remarked Jimmy, who had just strolled up.
Bill glanced at him reproachfully.
“Nobody knows,” he said pathetically, “what I have to put up with.”
“Entertaining the Countess, eh?” suggested Jimmy. “Poor Bill, that must have been a sad strain to a woman hater like yourself.”
“What’s this?” asked Bundle.
“After tea,” said Jimmy with a grin, “the Countess asked Bill to show her round the interesting old place.”
“Well, I couldn’t refuse, could I?” said Bill, his countenance assuming a brick-red tint.
Bundle felt faintly uneasy. She knew, only too well, the susceptibility of Mr. William Eversleigh to female charms. In the hand of a woman like the Countess, Bill would be as wax. She wondered once more whether Jimmy Thesiger had been wise to take Bill into their confidence.
“The Countess,” said Bill, “is a very charming woman. And no end intelligent. You should have seen her going round the house. All sorts of questions she asked.”
“What kind of questions?” asked Bundle suddenly.
Bill was vague.
“Oh! I don’t know. About the history of it. And old furniture. And—oh! all sorts of things.”
At that moment the Countess swept into the room. She seemed a shade breathless. She was looking magnificent in a close-fitting black velvet gown. Bundle noticed how Bill gravitated at once to her immediate neighbourhood. The serious spectacled young man joined him.
“Bill and Pongo have both got it badly,” observed Jimmy Thesiger with a laugh.
Bundle was by no means so sure that it was a laughing matter.
Seventeen
AFTER DINNER
George was not a believer in modern innovations. The Abbey was innocent of anything so up to date as central heating. Consequently, when the ladies entered the drawing room after dinner, the temperature of the room was woefully inadequate to the needs of modern evening clothes. The fire that burnt in the well-furnished steel grate became as a magnet. The three women huddled round it.
“Brrrrrrrrrr!” said the Countess, a fine, exotic foreign sound.
“The days are drawing in,” said Lady Coote, and drew a flowered atrocity of a scarf closer about her ample shoulders.
“Why on earth doesn’t George have the house properly heated?” said Bundle.
“You English, you never heat your houses,” said the Countess.
She took out her long cigarette holder and began to smoke.
“That grate is old-fashioned,” said Lady Coote. “The heat goes up the chimney instead of into the room.”
“Oh!” said the Countess.
There was a pause. The Countess was so plainly bored by her company that conversation became difficult.
“It’s funny,” said Lady Coote, breaking the silence, “that Mrs. Macatta’s children should have mumps. At least, I don’t mean exactly funny—”
“What,” said the Countess, “are mumps?”
Bundle and Lady Coote started simultaneously to explain. Finally, between them, they managed it.
“I suppose Hungarian children have it?” asked Lady Coote.
“Eh?” said the Countess.
“Hungarian children. They suffer from it?”
“I do not know,” said the Countess. “How should I?”
Lady Coote looked at her in some surprise.
“But I understood that you worked—”
“Oh, that!” The Countess uncrossed her legs, took her cigarette holder from her mouth and began to talk rapidly.
“I will tell you some horrors,” she said. “Horrors that I have seen. Incredible! You would not believe!”
And she was as good as her word. She talked fluently and with a graphic power of description. Incredible scenes of starvation and misery were painted by her for the benefit of her audience. She spoke of Buda Pesth shortly after the war and traced its vicissitudes to the present day. She was dramatic, but she was also, to Bundle’s mind, a little like a gramophone record. You turned her on, and there you were. Presently, just as suddenly, she would stop.
Lady Coote was thrilled to the marrow—that much was clear. She sat with her mouth slightly open and her large, sad, dark eyes fixed on the Countess. Occasionally, she interpolated a comment of her own.
“One of my cousins had three children burned to death. Awful, wasn’t it?”
The Countess paid no attention. She went on and on. And she finally stopped as suddenly as she had begun.
“There!” she said. “I have told you. We have money—but no organization. It is organization we need.”
Lady Coote sighed.
“I’ve heard my husband say that nothing can be done without regular methods. He attributes his own success entirely to that. He declares he would never have got on without them.”
She sighed again. A sudden fleeting vision passed before her eyes of a Sir Oswald who had not got on in the world. A Sir Oswald who retained, in all essentials, the attributes of that cheery young man in the bicycle shop. Just for a second it occurred to her how much pleasanter life might have been for her if Sir Oswald had not had regular methods.
By a quite understandable association of ideas she turned to Bundle.
“Tell me, Lady Eileen,” she said; “do you like that head gardener of yours?”
“MacDonald? Well—” Bundle hesitated. “One couldn’t exactly like MacDonald,” she explained apologetically. “But he’s a first-class gardener.”
“Oh! I know he is,” said Lady Coote.
“He’s all right if he’s kept in his place,” said Bundle.
“I suppose so,” said Lady Coote.
She looked enviously at Bundle, who appeared to approach the task of keeping MacDonald in his place so lightheartedly.
“I’d just adore a high-toned garden,” said the Countess dreamily.
Bundle stared, but at that moment a diversion occurred. Jimmy Thesiger entered the room and spoke directly to her in a strange, hurried voice.
“I say, will you come and see those etchings now? They’re waiting for you.”
Bundle left the room hurriedly, Jimmy close behind her.
“What etchings?” she asked, as the drawing room door closed behind her.
“No etchings,” said Jimmy. “I’d got to say something to get hold of you. Come on, Bill is waiting for us in the library. There’s nobody there.”
Bill was striding up and down the library, clearly in a very perturbed state of mind.
“Look here,” he burst out, “I don’t like this.”
“Don’t like what?”
“You being mixed up in this. Ten to one there’s going to be a rough house and then—”
He looked at her with a kind of pathetic dismay that gave Bundle a warm and comfortable feeling.
“She ought to be kept out of it, oughtn’t she, Jimmy?”
He appealed to the other.
“I’ve told her so,” said Jimmy.
“Dash it all, Bundle, I mean—someone might get hurt.”
Bundle turned round to Jimmy.
“How much have you told him?”
“Oh! everything.”
“I haven’t got the hang of it all yet,” confessed Bill. “You in that place in Seven Dials and all that.” He looked at her unhappily. “I say, Bundle, I wish you wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t what?”
“Get mixed up in these sort of things.”
“Why not?” said Bundle. “They’re exciting.”
“Oh, yes—exciting. But they may be damnably dangerous. Look at poor old Ronny.”
“Yes,” said Bundle. “If it hadn’t been for your friend Ronny, I don’t suppose I should ever have got what you call ‘mixed up’ in this thing. But I am. And it’s no earthly use your bleating about it.”
“I know you’re the most frightful sport, Bundle, but—”
“Cut out the compliments. Let’s mak
e plans.”
To her relief, Bill reacted favourably to the suggestion.
“You’re right about the formula,” he said. “Eberhard’s got some sort of formula with him, or rather Sir Oswald has. The stuff has been tested out at his works—very secretly and all that. Eberhard has been down there with him. They’re all in the study now—what you might call coming down to brass tacks.”
“How long is Sir Stanley Digby staying?” asked Jimmy.
“Going back to town tomorrow.”
“H’m,” said Jimmy. “Then one thing’s quite clear. If, as I suppose, Sir Stanley will be taking the formula with him, any funny business there’s going to be will be tonight.”
“I suppose it will.”
“Not a doubt of it. That narrows the thing down very comfortably. But the bright lads will have to be their very brightest. We must come down to details. First of all, where will the sacred formula be tonight? Will Eberhard have it, or Sir Oswald Coote?”
“Neither. I understand it’s to be handed over to the Air Minister this evening, for him to take to town tomorrow. In that case O’Rourke will have it. Sure to.”
“Well, there’s only one thing for it. If we believe someone’s going to have a shot at pinching that paper, we’ve got to keep watch tonight, Bill, my boy.”
Bundle opened her mouth as though to protest, but shut it again without speaking.
“By the way,” continued Jimmy, “did I recognize the commissionaire from Harrods in the hall this evening, or was it our old friend Lestrade from Scotland Yard?”
“Scintillating, Watson,” said Bill.
“I suppose,” said Jimmy, “that we are rather butting in on his preserves.”
“Can’t be helped,” said Bill. “Not if we mean to see this thing through.”
“Then it’s agreed,” said Jimmy. “We divide the night into two watches?”