John ran the Hall's dairy farm, and he was always coming to Mr. Carmody for money to buy exotic machinery which could not, the latter considered, be really necessary. To Mr. Carmody a dairy farm was a straight issue between man and cow. You backed the cow up against a wall, secured its milk, and there you were. John always seemed to want to make the thing so complicated and difficult, and only the fact that he also made it pay induced his uncle ever to accede to his monstrous demands.
Nor was this all that was poisoning a perfect summer day for Mr. Carmody. There was in addition the soul-searing behaviour of Doctor Alexander Twist, of Healthward Ho.
When Doctor Twist had undertaken the contract of making a new Lester Carmody out of the old Lester Carmody, he had cannily stipulated for cash down in advance—this to cover a course of three weeks. But at the end of the second week Mr. Carmody, learning from his nephew Hugo that an American millionaire was arriving at the Hall, had naturally felt compelled to forego the final stages of the treatment and return home. Equally naturally, he had invited Doctor Twist to refund one-third of the fee. This the eminent physician and physical culture expert had resolutely declined to do, and Mr. Carmody, re-reading the man's letter, thought he had never set eyes upon a baser document.
He was shuddering at the depths of depravity which it revealed, when the door opened and John came in. Mr. Carmody beheld him and shuddered. John—he could tell it by his eye—was planning another bad dent in the budget.
"Oh, Uncle Lester," said John.
"Well?" said Mr. Carmody hopelessly.
"I think we ought to have some new Alpha Separators."
"What?"
"Alpha Separators."
"Why?"
"We need them."
"Why?"
"The old ones are past their work."
"What," inquired Mr. Carmody, "is an Alpha Separator?"
John said it was an Alpha Separator.
There was a pause. John, who appeared to have something on his mind these days, stared gloomily at the carpet. Mr. Carmody shifted in his chair.
"Very well," he said.
"And new tractors," said John. "And we could do with a few harrows."
"Why do you want harrows?"
"For harrowing."
Even Mr. Carmody, anxious though he was to find flaws in the other's reasoning, could see that this might well be so. Try harrowing without harrows, and you are handicapped from the start. But why harrow at all? That was what seemed to him superfluous and wasteful. Still, he supposed it was unavoidable. After all, John had been carefully trained at an agricultural college after leaving Oxford and presumably knew.
"Very well," he said.
"All right," said John.
He went out, and Mr. Carmody experienced a little relief at the thought that he had now heard all this morning's bad news.
But dairy farmers have second thoughts. The door opened again.
"I was forgetting," said John, poking his head in.
Mr. Carmody uttered a low moan.
"We want some Thomas tap-cinders."
"Thomas what?"
"Tap-cinders."
"Thomas tap-cinders?"
"Thomas tap-cinders."
Mr. Carmody swallowed unhappily. He knew it was no use asking what these mysterious implements were, for his nephew would simply reply that they were Thomas tap-cinders or that they were something invented by a Mr. Thomas for the purpose of cinder-tapping, leaving his brain in the same addled condition in which it was at present. If John wished to tap cinders, he supposed he must humour him.
"Very well," he said dully.
He held his breath for a few moments after the door had closed once more, then, gathering at length that the assault on his purse was over, expelled it in a long sigh and gave himself up to bleak meditation.
The lot of the English landed proprietor, felt Mr. Carmody, is not what it used to be in the good old times. When the first Carmody settled in Rudge he had found little to view with alarm. He was sitting pretty, and he admitted it. Those were the days when churls were churls, and a scurvy knave was quite content to work twelve hours a day, Saturdays included, in return for a little black bread and an occasional nod of approval from his overlord. But in this Twentieth-Century England's peasantry has degenerated. They expect coddling. Their roofs leak, and you have to mend them; their walls fall down and you have to build them up; their lanes develop holes and you have to restore the surface, and all this runs into money. The way things were shaping, felt Mr. Carmody, in a few years a landlord would be expected to pay for the repairs of his tenants' wireless sets.
He wandered to the window and looked out at the sunlit garden. And as he did so there came into his range of vision the sturdy figure of his guest, Mr. Molloy, and for the first time that morning Lester Carmody seemed to hear, beating faintly in the distance, the wings of the blue bird. In a world containing anybody as rich-looking as Thomas G. Molloy there was surely still hope.
Ronald Fish's prediction that Hugo's uncle would appreciate a visit from so solid a citizen of the United States as Mr. Molloy had been fulfilled to the letter. Mr. Carmody had welcomed his guest with open arms. The more rich men he could gather about him, the better he was pleased, for he was a man of vision, and had quite a number of schemes in his mind for which he was anxious to obtain financial support.
He decided to go and have a chat with Mr. Molloy. On a morning like this, with all Nature smiling, an American millionaire might well feel just in the mood to put up a few hundred thousand dollars for something. For July had come in on golden wings, and the weather now was the kind of weather to make a poet sing, a lover love, and a Scotch business man subscribe largely to companies formed for the purpose of manufacturing diamonds out of coal tar. On such a morning, felt Mr. Carmody, anybody ought to be willing to put up any sum for anything.
IV
Nature continued to smile for about another three and a quarter minutes, and then, as far as Mr. Carmody was concerned, the sun went out. With a genial heartiness, which gashed him like a knife, the plutocratic Mr. Molloy declined to invest even a portion of his millions in a new golf course, a cinema de luxe to be established in Rudge High Street, or any of the four other schemes which his host presented to his notice.
"No, sir," said Mr. Molloy. "I'm mighty sorry I can't meet you in any way, but the fact is I'm all fixed up in Oil. Oil's my dish. I began in Oil and I'll end in Oil. I wouldn't be happy outside of Oil."
"Oh?" said Mr. Carmody, regarding this Human Sardine with as little open hostility and dislike as he could manage on the spur of the moment.
"Yes, sir," proceeded Mr. Molloy, still in lyrical vein, "I put my first thousand into Oil and I'll put my last thousand into Oil. Oil's been a good friend to me. There's money in Oil."
"There is money," urged Mr. Carmody, "in a cinema in Rudge High Street."
"Not the money there is in Oil."
"You are a stranger here," went on Mr. Carmody patiently, "so you have no doubt got a mistaken idea of the potentialities of Rudge. Rudge, you must remember, is a centre. Small though it is, never forget that it lies just off the main road in the heart of a prosperous county. Worcester is only seven miles away, Birmingham only eighteen. People would come in their motors...."
"I'm not stopping them," said Mr. Molloy generously. "All I'm saying is that my money stays in little old Oil."
"Or take Golf," said Mr. Carmody, side-stepping and attacking from another angle. "The only good golf course in Worcestershire at present is at Stourbridge. Worcestershire needs more golf courses. You know how popular Golf is nowadays."
"Not so popular as Oil. Oil," said Mr. Molloy, with the air of one making an epigram, "is Oil."
Mr. Carmody stopped himself just in time from saying what he thought of Oil. To relieve his feelings he ground his heel into the soft gravel of the path, and had but one regret, that Mr. Molloy's most sensitive toe was not under it. Half turning in the process of making this bitter gesture, he perceived that Providence, since the days of Job always curious to know just how much a good man can bear, had sent Ronald Overbury Fish to add to his troubles. Young Mr. Fish was sauntering up behind his customary eleven inches of cigarette holder, his pink face wearing that expression of good-natured superiority which, ever since their first meeting, had afflicted Mr. Carmody sorely.
From the list of Mr. Carmody's troubles, recently tabulated, Ronnie Fish was inadvertently omitted. Although to Lady Julia Fish, his mother, this young gentleman, no doubt, was all the world, Lester Carmody had found him nothing but a pain in the neck. Apart from the hideous expense of entertaining a man who took twice of nearly everything, and helped himself unblushingly to more port, he chafed beneath his guest's curiously patronizing manner. He objected to being treated as a junior—and, what was more, as a half-witted junior—by solemn young men with pink faces.
"What's the argument?" asked Ronnie Fish, anchoring self and cigarette holder at Mr. Carmody's side.
Mr. Molloy smiled genially.
"No argument, brother," he replied with that bluff heartiness which Lester Carmody had come to dislike so much. "I was merely telling our good friend and host here that the best investment under the broad blue canopy of God's sky is Oil."
"Quite right," said Ronnie Fish. "He's perfectly correct, my dear Carmody."
"Our good host was trying to interest me in golf courses."
"Don't touch 'em," said Mr. Fish.
"I won't," said Mr. Molloy. "Give me Oil. Oil's oil. First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of its countrymen, that's what Oil is. The Universal Fuel of the Future."
"Absolutely," said Ronnie Fish. "What did Gladstone say in '88? You can fuel some of the people all the time, and you can fuel all the people some of the time, but you can't fuel all the people all of the time. He was forgetting about Oil. Probably he meant coal."
"Coal?" Mr. Molloy laughed satirically. You could see he despised the stuff. "Don't talk to me about Coal."
This was another disappointment for Mr. Carmody. Cinemasde luxeand golf courses having failed, Coal was just what he had been intending to talk about. He suspected its presence beneath the turf of the park, and would have been glad to verify his suspicions with the aid of someone else's capital.
"You listen to this bird, Carmody," said Mr. Fish, patting his host on the back. "He's talking sense. Oil's the stuff. Dig some of the savings out of the old sock, my dear Carmody, and wade in. You'll never regret it."
And, having delivered himself of this advice with a fatherly kindliness which sent his host's temperature up several degrees, Ronnie Fish strolled on.
Mr. Molloy watched him disappear with benevolent approval. He said to Mr. Carmody that that young man had his head screwed on the right way, and seemed not to notice a certain lack of responsive enthusiasm on the other's part. Ronnie Fish's head was not one of Mr. Carmody's favourite subjects at the moment.
"Yes, sir," said Mr. Molloy, resuming. "Any man that goes into Oil is going into a good thing. Oil's all right. You don't see John D. Rockefeller running round asking for hand-outs from his friends, do you? No, sir! John's got his modest little competence, same as me, and he got it, like I did, out of Oil. Say, listen, Mr. Carmody, it isn't often I give up any of my holdings, but you've been mighty nice to me, inviting me to your home and all, and I'd like to do something for you in return. What do you say to a good, solid block of Silver River stock at just the price it cost me? And let me tell you I'm offering you something that half the big men on our side would give their eye teeth for. Only a couple of days before I sailed I was in Charley Schwab's office, and he said to me, 'Tom,' said Charley, 'right up till now I've stuck to Steel and I've done well. Understand,' he said, 'I'm not knocking Steel. But Oil's the stuff, and if you want to part with any of that Silver River of yours, Tom,' he said, 'pass it across this desk and write your own ticket.' That'll show you."
There is no anguish like the anguish of the man who is trying to extract cash from a fellow human being and suddenly finds the fellow human being trying to extract it from him. Mr. Carmody laughed a bitter laugh.
"Do you imagine," he said, "that I have money to spare for speculative investments?"
"Speculative?" Mr. Molloy seemed to suspect his ears of playing tricks. "Silver River spec——?"
"By the time I've finished paying the bills for the expenses of this infernal estate I consider myself lucky if I've got a few hundred that I can call my own."
There was a pause.
"Is that so?" said Mr. Molloy in a thin voice.
Strictly speaking, it was not. Before succeeding to his present position of head of the family and squire of Rudge Hall, Lester Carmody had contrived to put away in gilt-edged securities a very nice sum indeed, the fruit of his labours in the world of business. But it was his whim to regard himself as a struggling pauper.
"But all this...." Mr. Molloy indicated with a wave of his hand the smiling gardens, the rolling park and the opulent-looking trees reflected in the waters of the moat. "Surely this means a barrel of money?"
"Everything that comes in goes out again in expenses. There's no end to my expenses. Farmers in England to-day sit up at night trying to think of new claims they can make against a landlord."
There was another pause.
"That's bad," said Mr. Molloy thoughtfully. "Yes, sir, that's bad."
His commiseration was not all for Mr. Carmody. In fact, very little of it was. Most of it was reserved for himself. It began to look, he realized, as though in coming to this stately home of England he had been simply wasting valuable time. It was not as if he enjoyed staying at country houses in a purely æsthetic spirit. On the contrary, a place like Rudge Hall afflicted his town-bred nerves. Being in it seemed to him like living in the first-act set of an old-fashioned comic opera. He always felt that at any moment a band of villagers and retainers might dance out and start a drinking chorus.
"Yes, sir," said Mr. Molloy, "that must grind you a good deal."
"What must?"
It was not Mr. Carmody who had spoken, but his guest's attractive young wife, who, having returned from the village, had come up from the direction of the rose garden. From afar she had observed her husband spreading his hands in broad, persuasive gestures, and from her knowledge of him had gathered that he had embarked on one of those high-pressure sales talks of his which did so much to keep the wolf from the door. Then she had seen a shadow fall athwart his fine face, and, scenting a hitch in the negotiations, had hurried up to lend wifely assistance.
"What must grind him?" she asked.
Mr. Molloy kept nothing from his bride.
"I was offering our host here a block of those Silver River shares...."
"Oh, you aren't going to sell Silver Rivers!" cried Mrs. Molloy in pretty concern. "Why, you've always told me they're the biggest thing you've got."
"So they are. But...."
"Oh, well," said Dolly with a charming smile, "seeing it's Mr. Carmody. I wouldn't mind Mr. Carmody having them."
"Nor would I," said Mr. Molloy sincerely. "But he can't afford to buy."
"What!"
"You tell her," said Mr. Molloy.
Mr. Carmody told her. He was never averse to speaking of the unfortunate position in which the modern owner of English land found himself.
"Well, I don't get it," said Dolly, shaking her head. "You call yourself a poor man. How can you be poor, when that gallery place you showed us round yesterday is jam full of pictures worth a fortune an inch and tapestries and all those gold coins?"
"Heirlooms."
"How's that?"
"They're heirlooms," said Mr. Carmody bitterly.
He always felt bitter when he thought of the Rudge Hall heirlooms. He looked upon them as a mean joke played on him by a gang of sardonic ancestors.
To a man, lacking both reverence for family traditions and appreciation of the beautiful in art, who comes into possession of an ancient house and its contents, there must always be something painfully ironical about heirlooms. To such a man they are simply so much potential wealth which is being allowed to lie idle, doing no good to anybody. Mr. Carmody had always had that feeling very strongly.
Unlike the majority of heirs, he had not been trained from boyhood to revere the home of his ancestors, and to look forward to its possession as a sacred trust. He had been the second son of a second son, and his chance of ever succeeding to the property was at the outset so remote that he had seldom given it a thought. He had gone into business at an early age, and when, in middle life, a series of accidents made him squire of Rudge Hall, he had brought with him to the place a practical eye and the commercial outlook. The result was that when he walked in the picture gallery and thought how much solid cash he could get for this Velasquez or that Gainsborough, if only he were given a free hand, the iron entered into Lester Carmody's soul.
"They're heirlooms," he said. "I can't sell them."
"How come? They're yours, aren't they?"
"No," said Mr. Carmody, "they belong to the estate."
On Mr. Molloy, as he listened to his host's lengthy exposition of the laws governing heirlooms, there descended a deepening cloud of gloom. You couldn't, it appeared, dispose of the darned things without the consent of trustees; while even if the trustees gave their consent they collared the money and invested it on behalf of the estate. And Mr. Molloy, though ordinarily a man of sanguine temperament, could not bring himself to believe that a hard-boiled bunch of trustees, most of them probably lawyers with tight lips and suspicious minds, would ever have the sporting spirit to take a flutter in Silver River Ordinaries.
"Hell!" said Mr. Molloy with a good deal of feeling.
Dolly linked her arm in his with a pretty gesture of affectionate solicitude.
"Poor old Pop!" she said. "He's all broken up about this."
Mr. Carmody regarded his guest sourly.
"What's he got to worry about?" he asked with a certain resentment.
"Why, Pop was sort of hoping he'd be able to buy all this stuff," said Dolly. "He was telling me only this morning that, if you felt like selling, he would write you out his cheque for whatever you wanted without thinking twice."
V
Moodily scanning his wife's face during Mr. Carmody's lecture on Heirloom Law, Mr. Molloy had observed it suddenly light up in a manner which suggested that some pleasing thought was passing through her always agile brain; but, presented now in words, this thought left him decidedly cold. He could not see any sense in it.
"For the love of Pete...!" began Mr. Molloy.
His bride had promised to love, honour, and obey him, but she had never said anything about taking any notice of him when he tried to butt in on her moments of inspiration. She ignored the interruption.
"You see," she said, "Pop collects old junk—I mean antiques and all like that. Over in America he's got a great big museum place full of stuff. He's going to present it to the nation when he hands in his dinner pail. Aren't you, Pop?"
It became apparent to Mr. Molloy that at the back of his wife's mind there floated some idea at which, handicapped by his masculine slowness of wit, he could not guess. It was plain to him, however, that she expected him to do his bit, so he did it.
"You betcher," he said.
"How much would you say all that stuff in your museum was worth, Pop?"
Mr. Molloy was still groping in outer darkness, but he persevered.
"Oo," he said, "worth? Call it a million.... Two millions.... Three, maybe."
"You see," explained Dolly, "the place is so full up, he doesn't really know what he's got. But Pierpont Morgan offered you a million for the pictures alone, didn't he?"
Now that figures had crept into the conversation, Mr. Molloy was feeling more at his ease. He liked figures.
"You're thinking of Jake Shubert, honey," he said. "It was the tapestries that Pierp. wanted. And it wasn't a million, it was seven hundred thousand. I laughed in his face. I asked him if he thought he was trying to buy cheese sandwiches at the delicatessen store or something. Pierp. was sore." Mr. Molloy shook his head regretfully, and you could see he was thinking that it was too bad that his little joke should have caused a coolness between himself and an old friend. "But, great guns!" he said, in defence of his attitude. "Seven hundred thousand! Did he think I wanted carfare?"
Mr. Carmody's always rather protuberant eyes had been bulging farther and farther out of their sockets all through this exchange of remarks, and now they reached the farthest point possible and stayed there. His breath was coming in little gasps, and his fingers twitched convulsively. He was suffering the extreme of agony.
It was all very well for a man like Mr. Molloy to speak sneeringly of $700,000. To most people—and Mr. Carmody was one of them—$700,000 is quite a nice little sum. Mr. Molloy, if he saw $700,000 lying in the gutter, might not think it worth his while to stoop and pick it up, but Mr. Carmody could not imitate that proud detachment. The thought that he had as his guest at Rudge a man who combined with a bottomless purse a taste for antiquities and that only the imbecile laws relating to heirlooms prevented them consummating a deal racked him from head to foot.
"How much would you have given Mr. Carmody for all those pictures and things he showed us yesterday?" asked Dolly, twisting the knife in the wound.
Mr. Molloy spread his hands carelessly.
"Two hundred thousand ... three ... we wouldn't have quarrelled about the price. But what's the use of talking? He can't sell 'em."
"Why can't he?"
"Well, how can he?"
"I'll tell you how. Fake a burglary."
"What!"
"Sure. Have the things stolen and slipped over to you without anybody knowing, and then you hand him your cheque for two hundred thousand or whatever it is, and you're happy and he's happy and everybody's happy. And, what's more, I guess all this stuff is insured, isn't it? Well then, Mr. Carmody can stick to the insurance money, and he's that much up besides whatever he gets from you."
There was a silence. Dolly had said her say, and Mr. Molloy felt for the moment incapable of speech. That he had not been mistaken in supposing that his wife had a scheme at the back of her head was now plain, but, as outlined, it took his breath away. Considered purely as a scheme, he had not a word to say against it. It was commercially sound and did credit to the ingenuity of one whom he had always regarded as the slickest thinker of her sex. But it was not the sort of scheme, he considered, which ought to have emanated from the presumably innocent and unspotted daughter of a substantial Oil millionaire. It was calculated, he felt, to create in their host's mind doubts and misgivings as to the sort of people he was entertaining.
He need have no such apprehension. It was not righteous disapproval that was holding Mr. Carmody dumb.
It has been laid down by an acute thinker that there is a subtle connection between felony and fat. Almost all embezzlers, for instance, says this authority, are fat men. Whether this is or is not true, the fact remains that the sensational criminality of the suggestion just made to him awoke no horror in Mr. Carmody's ample bosom. He was startled, as any man might be who had this sort of idea sprung suddenly on him in his own garden, but he was not shocked. A youth and middle age spent on the London Stock Exchange had left Lester Carmody singularly broad-minded. He had to a remarkable degree that specious charity which allows a man to look indulgently on any financial project, however fishy, provided he can see a bit in it for himself.
"It's money for nothing," urged Dolly, misinterpreting his silence. "The stuff isn't doing any good, just lying around the way it is now. And it isn't as if it didn't really belong to you. All what you were saying awhile back about the law is simply mashed potatoes. The things belong to the house, and the house belongs to you, so where's the harm in your selling them? Who's supposed to get them after you?"
Mr. Carmody withdrew his gaze from the middle distance.
"Eh? Oh. My nephew Hugo."
"Well, you aren't worrying about him?"
Mr. Carmody was not. What he was worrying about was the practicability of the thing. Could it, he was asking himself, be put safely through without the risk, so distasteful to a man of sensibility, of landing him for a lengthy term of years in a prison cell? It was on this aspect of the matter that he now touched.
"It wouldn't be safe," he said, and few men since the world began have ever spoken more wistfully. "We would be found out."
"Not a chance. Who would find out? Who's going to say anything? You're not. I'm not. Pop's not."
"You bet your life Pop's not," asserted Mr. Molloy.
Mr. Carmody gazed out over the waters of the moat. His brain, quickened by the stimulating prospect of money for nothing, detected another doubtful point.
"Who would take the things?"
"You mean get them out of the house?"
"Exactly. Somebody would have to take them. It would be necessary to create the appearance of an actual burglary."
"Well, there'll be an actual burglary."
"But whom could we trust in such a vital matter?"
"That's all right. Pop's got a friend, another millionaire like himself, who would put this thing through just for the fun of it, to oblige Pop. You could trust him."
"Who?" asked Mr. Molloy, plainly surprised that any friend of his could be trusted.
"Chimp," said Dolly briefly.
"Oh, Chimp," said Mr. Molloy, his face clearing. "Yes, Chimp would do it."
"Who," asked Mr. Carmody, "is Chimp?"
"A good friend of mine. You wouldn't know him."
Mr. Carmody scratched at the gravel with his toe, and for a long minute there was silence in the garden. Mr. Molloy looked at Mrs. Molloy. Mrs. Molloy looked at Mr. Molloy. Mr. Molloy closed his left eye for a fractional instant, and in response Mrs. Molloy permitted her right eyelid to quiver. But, perceiving that this was one of the occasions on which a strong man wishes to be left alone to commune with his soul, they forebore to break in upon his reverie with jarring speech.
"Well, I'll think it over," said Mr. Carmody.
"Atta-boy!" said Mr. Molloy.
"Sure. You take a nice walk around the block all by yourself," advised Mrs. Molloy, "and then come back and issue a bulletin."
Mr. Carmody moved away, pondering deeply, and Mr. Molloy turned to his wife.
"What made you think of Chimp?" he asked doubtfully.
"Well, he's the only guy on this side that we really know. We can't pick and choose, same as if we were in New York."
Mr. Molloy eyed the moat with a thoughtful frown.
"Well, I'll tell you, honey. I'm not so darned sure that I sort of kind of like bringing Chimp into a thing like this. You know what he is—as slippery as an eel that's been rubbed all over with axle grease. He might double-cross us."
"Not if we double-cross him first."
"But could we?"
"Sure we could. And, anyway, it's Chimp or no one. This isn't the sort of affair you can just go out into the street and pick up the first man you run into. It's a job where you've got to have somebody you've worked with before."
"All right, baby. If you say so. You always were the brains of the firm. If you think it's kayo, then it's all right by me and no more to be said. Cheese it! Here's his nibs back again."
Mr. Carmody was coming up the gravel path, his air that of a man who has made a great decision. He had evidently been following a train of thought, for he began abruptly at the point to which it had led him.
"There's only one thing," he said. "I don't like the idea of bringing in this friend of yours. He may be all right or he may not. You say you can trust him, but it seems to me the fewer people who know about this business, the better."
These were Mr. Molloy's sentiments, also. He would vastly have preferred to keep it a nice, cosy affair among the three of them. But it was no part of his policy to ignore obvious difficulties.
"I'd like that, too," he said. "I don't want to call in Chimp any more than you do. But there's this thing of getting the stuff out of the house."
"What you were saying just now," Mrs. Molloy reminded Mr. Carmody. "It's got to look like an outside job, what I mean."
"As it's called," said Mr. Molloy hastily. "She's always reading these detective stories," he explained. "That's where she picks up these expressions. Outside job, ha, ha! But she's dead right, at that. You said yourself it would be necessary to create the appearance of an actual burglary. If we don't get Chimp, who is going to take the stuff?"
"I am."
"Eh?"
"I am," repeated Mr. Carmody stoutly. "I have been thinking the whole matter out, and it will be perfectly simple. I shall get up very early to-morrow morning and enter the picture gallery through the window by means of a ladder. This will deceive the police into supposing the theft to have been the work of a professional burglar."
Mr. Molloy was regarding him with affectionate admiration.
"I never knew you were such a hot sketch!" said Mr. Molloy. "You certainly are one smooth citizen. Looks to me as if you'd done this sort of thing before."
"Wear gloves," advised Mrs. Molloy.
"What she means," said Mr. Molloy, again speaking with a certain nervous haste, "is that the first thing the bulls—as the expression is—they always call the police bulls in these detective stories—the first thing the police look for is fingerprints. The fellows in the books always wear gloves."
"A very sensible precaution," said Mr. Carmody, now thoroughly in the spirit of the thing. "I am glad you mentioned it. I shall make a point of doing so."
I
The picture gallery of Rudge Hall, the receptacle of what Mrs. Soapy Molloy had called the antiques and all like that, was situated on the second floor of that historic edifice. To Mr. Carmody, at five-thirty on the following morning, as he propped against the broad sill of the window facing the moat a ladder, which he had discovered in one of the barns, it looked much higher. He felt, as he gazed upward, like an inexpert Jack about to mount the longest bean stalk on record.
Even as a boy, Lester Carmody had never been a great climber. While his young companions, reckless of risk to life and limb, had swarmed to the top of apple trees, Mr. Carmody had preferred to roam about on solid ground, hunting in the grass for windfalls. He had always hated heights, and this morning found him more prejudiced against them than ever. It says much for crime as a wholesome influence in a man's life that the lure of the nefarious job which he had undertaken should have induced him eventually after much hesitation to set foot on the ladder's lowest rung. Nothing but a single-minded desire to do down an innocent insurance company could have lent him the necessary courage.
Mind having triumphed over matter to this extent, Mr. Carmody found the going easier. Carefully refraining from looking down, he went doggedly upward. Only the sound of his somewhat stertorous breathing broke the hushed stillness of the summer morning. As far as the weather was concerned, it was the start of a perfect day. But Mr. Carmody paid no attention to the sunbeams creeping over the dewy grass, nor, when the quiet was broken by the first piping of birds, did he pause to listen. He had not, he considered, time for that sort of thing. He was to have ample leisure later, but of this he was not aware.
He continued to climb, using the extreme of caution—a method which, while it helped to ease his mind, necessarily rendered progress slow. Before long, he was suffering from a feeling that he had been climbing this ladder all his life. The thing seemed to have no end. He was now, he felt, at such a distance from the earth that he wondered the air was not more rarefied, and it appeared incredible to him that he should not long since have reached the window sill.
Looking up at this point, a thing he had not dared to do before, he found that steady perseverance had brought about its usual result. The sill was only a few inches above his head, and with the realization of this fact there came to him something that was almost a careless jauntiness. He quickened his pace, and treading heavily on an upper rung snapped it in two as if it had been matchwood.
When this accident occurred, he had been on a level with the sill and just about to step warily on to it. The effect of the breaking of the rung was to make him execute this movement at about fifteen times the speed which he had contemplated. There was a moment in which the whole universe seemed to dissolve, and then he was on the sill, his fingers clinging with a passionate grip to a small piece of lead piping that protruded from the wall and his legs swinging dizzily over the abyss. The ladder, urged outward by his last frenzied kick, tottered for an instant, then fell to the ground.
The events just described, though it seemed longer to the principal actor in them, had occupied perhaps six seconds. They left Mr. Carmody in a world that jumped and swam before his eyes, feeling as though somebody had extracted his heart and replaced it with some kind of lively firework. This substitute, whatever it was, appeared to be fizzing and leaping inside his chest, and its gyrations interfered with his breathing. For some minutes his only conscious thought was that he felt extremely ill. Then becoming by slow degrees more composed, he was enabled to examine the situation.
It was not a pleasant one. At first, it had been agreeable enough simply to allow his mind to dwell on the fact that he was alive and in one piece. But now, probing beneath this mere surface aspect of the matter, he perceived that, taking the most conservative estimate, he must acknowledge himself to be in a peculiarly awkward position.
The hour was about a quarter to six. He was thirty feet or so above the ground. And, though reason told him that the window sill on which he sat was thoroughly solid and quite capable of bearing a much heavier weight, he could not rid himself of the feeling that at any moment it might give way and precipitate him into the depths.
Of course, looked at in the proper spirit, his predicament had all sorts of compensations. The medical profession is agreed that there is nothing better for the health than the fresh air of the early morning: and this he was in a position to drink into his lungs in unlimited quantities. Furthermore, nobody could have been more admirably situated than he to compile notes for one of those Country Life articles which are so popular with the readers of daily papers.
"As I sit on my second-floor window sill and gaze about me," Mr. Carmody ought to have been saying to himself, "I see Dame Nature busy about her morning tasks. Everything in my peaceful garden is growing and blowing. Here I note that most gem-like of all annuals, the African nemesia with its brilliant ruby and turquoise tints; there the lovely tangle of blue, purple, and red formed by the blending shades of delphiniums, Canterbury bells, and the popular geum. Birds, too, are chanting everywhere their morning anthems. I see the Jay (Garrulus Glandarius Rufitergum), theCorvus Monedula Spermologusor Jackdaw, the Sparrow (better known, perhaps, to some of my readers asPrunella Modularis Occidentalis) and many others...."
But Mr. Carmody's reflections did not run on these lines. It was with a gloomy and hostile eye that he regarded the grass, the trees, the flowers, the birds and dew that lay like snow upon the turf: and of all these, it was possibly the birds that he disliked most. They were an appalling crowd—noisy, fussy, and bustling about with a sort of overdone heartiness that seemed to Mr. Carmody affected and offensive. They got on his nerves and stayed there: and outstanding among the rest in general lack of charm was a certain Dartford Warbler (Melizophilus Undatus Dartfordiensis) which, instead of staying in Dartford, where it belonged, had come all the way up to Worcestershire simply, it appeared, for the purpose of adding to his discomfort.
This creature, flaunting a red waistcoat which might have been all right for a frosty day in winter but on a summer morning seemed intolerably loud and struck the jarring note of a Fair Isle sweater in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, arrived at five minutes past six and, sitting down on the edge of Mr. Carmody's window sill, looked long and earnestly at that unfortunate man with its head cocked on one side.
"This can't be real," said the Dartford Warbler in a low voice.
It then flew away and did some rough work among the insects under a bush. At six-ten it returned.
"It is real," it soliloquized. "But if real, what is it?"
Pondering this problem, it returned to its meal, and Mr. Carmody was left for some considerable time to his meditations. It may have been about twenty-five minutes to seven when a voice at his elbow aroused him once more. The Dartford Warbler was back again, its eye now a little glazed and wearing the replete look of the bird that has done itself well at the breakfast table.
"And why?" mused the Dartford Warbler, resuming at the point where he had left off.
To Mr. Carmody, conscious now of a devouring hunger, the spectacle of this bloated bird was the last straw. He struck out at it in a spasm of irritation and nearly overbalanced. The Warbler uttered a shrill exclamation of terror and disappeared, looking like an absconding bookmaker. Mr. Carmody huddled back against the window, palpitating. And more time passed.
It was at half-past seven, when he was beginning to feel that he had not tasted food since boyhood, that there sounded from somewhere below on his right a shrill whistling.
II
He looked cautiously down. It gave him acute vertigo to do so, but he braved this in his desire to see. Since his vigil began, he had heard much whistling. In addition to theGarrulus Glandarius Rufitergumand theCorvus Monedula Spermologus, he had been privileged for the last hour or so to listen to a concert featuring such artists as theDryobates Major Anglicus, theSturnus Vulgaris, theEmberiza Curlus, and theMuscicapa Striata, or Spotted Flycatcher: and, a moment before, he would have said that in the matter of whistling he had had all he wanted. But this latest outburst sounded human. It stirred in his bosom something approaching hope.
So Mr. Carmody, craning his neck, waited: and presently round the corner of the house, a towel about his shoulders, suggesting that he was on his way to take an early morning dip in the moat, came his nephew Hugo.
Mr. Carmody, as this chronicle has shown, had never entertained for Hugo quite that warmth of affection which one likes to see in an uncle toward his nearest of kin, but at the present moment he could not have appreciated him more if he had been a millionaire anxious to put up capital for a new golf course in the park.
"Hoy!" he cried, much as the beleaguered garrison of Lucknow must have done to the advance guard of the relieving Highlanders. "Hoy!"
Hugo stopped. He looked to his right, then to his left, then in front of him, and then, turning, behind him. It was a spectacle that chilled in an instant the new sensation of kindness which his uncle had been feeling toward him.
"Hoy!" cried Mr. Carmody. "Hugo! Confound the boy! Hugo!"
For the first time the other looked up. Perceiving Mr. Carmody in his eyrie, he stood rigid, gazing with opened mouth. He might have been posing for a statue of Young Man Startled By Snake in Path While About to Bathe.
"Great Scot!" said Hugo, looking to his uncle's prejudiced eye exactly like the Dartford Warbler. "What on earth are you doing up there?"
Mr. Carmody would have writhed in irritation, had not prudence reminded him that he was thirty feet too high in the air to do that sort of thing.
"Never mind what I'm doing up here! Help me down."
"How did you get there?"
"Never mind how I got here!"
"But what," persisted Hugo insatiably, "is the big—or general—idea?"
Withheld from the relief of writhing, Mr. Carmody gritted his teeth.
"Put that ladder up," he said in a strained voice.
"Ladder?"
"Yes, ladder."
"What ladder?"
"There is a ladder on the ground."
"Where?"
"There. No, not there. There. There. Not there, I tell you. There. There."
Hugo, following these directions, concluded a successful search.
"Right," he said. "Ladder, long, wooden, for purposes of climbing, one. Correct as per memo. Now what?"
"Put it up."
"Right."
"And hold it very carefully."
"Esteemed order booked," said Hugo. "Carry on."
"Are you sure you are holding it carefully?"
"As in a vise."
"Well, don't let go."
Mr. Carmody, dying a considerable number of deaths in the process, descended. He found his nephew's curiosity at close range even more acute than it had been from a distance.
"What on earth were you doing up there?" said Hugo, starting again at the beginning.
"Never mind."
"But what were you?"
"If you wish to know, a rung broke and the ladder slipped."
"But what were you doing on a ladder?"
"Never mind!" cried Mr. Carmody, regretting more bitterly than ever before in his life that his late brother Eustace had not lived and died a bachelor. "Don't keep saying What—What—What!"
"Well, why?" said Hugo, conceding the point. "Why were you climbing ladders?"
Mr. Carmody hesitated. His native intelligence returning, he perceived now that this was just what the great public would want to know. It was little use urging a human talking machine like his nephew to keep quiet and say nothing about this incident. In a couple of hours it would be all over Rudge. He thought swiftly.
"I fancied I saw a swallow's nest under the eaves."
"Swallow's nest?"
"Swallow's nest. The nest," said Mr. Carmody between his teeth, "of a swallow."
"Did you think swallows nested in July?"
"Why shouldn't they?"
"Well, they don't."
"I never said they did. I merely said...."
"No swallow has ever nested in July."
"I never...."
"April," said our usually well-informed correspondent.
"What?"
"April. Swallows nest in April."
"Damn all swallows!" said Mr. Carmody. And there was silence for a moment, while Hugo directed his keen young mind to other aspects of this strange affair.
"How long had you been up there?"
"I don't know. Hours. Since half-past five."
"Half-past five? You mean you got up at half-past five to look for swallows' nests in July?"
"I did not get up to look for swallows' nests."
"But you said you were looking for swallows' nests."
"I did not say I was looking for swallows' nests. I merely said I fancied I saw a swallow's nest...."
"You couldn't have done. Swallows don't nest in July.... April."
The sun was peeping over the elms. Mr. Carmody raised his clenched fists to it.
"I did not say I saw a swallow's nest. I said I thought I saw a swallow's nest."
"And got a ladder out and climbed up for it?"
"Yes."
"Having risen from couch at five-thirty ante meridian?"
"Will you kindly stop asking me all these questions."
Hugo regarded him thoughtfully.
"Just as you like, Uncle. Well, anything further this morning? If not, I'll be getting along and taking my dip."
III
"I say, Ronnie," said Hugo, some two hours later, meeting his friend en route for the breakfast table. "You know my uncle?"
"What about him?"
"He's loopy."
"What?"
"Gone clean off his castors. I found him at seven o'clock this morning sitting on a second-floor window sill. He said he'd got up at five-thirty to look for swallows' nests."
"Bad," said Mr. Fish, shaking his head with even more than his usual solemnity. "Second-floor window sill, did you say?"
"Second-floor window sill."
"Exactly how my aunt started," said Ronnie Fish.
"They found her sitting on the roof of the stables, playing the ukulele in a blue dressing gown. She said she was Boadicea. And she wasn't. That's the point, old boy," said Mr. Fish earnestly. "She wasn't. We must get you out of this as quickly as possible, or before you know where you are you'll find yourself being murdered in your bed. It's this living in the country that does it. Six consecutive months in the country is enough to sap the intellect of anyone. Looking for swallows' nests, was he?"
"So he said. And swallows don't nest in July. They nest in April."
Mr. Fish nodded.
"That's how I always heard the story," he agreed. "The whole thing looks very black to me, and the sooner you're safe out of this and in London, the better."
IV
At about the same moment, Mr. Carmody was in earnest conference with Mr. Molloy.
"That man you were telling me about," said Mr. Carmody. "That friend of yours who you said would help us."
"Chimp?"
"I believe you referred to him as Chimp. How soon could you get in touch with him?"
"Right away, brother."
Mr. Carmody objected to being called brother, but this was no time for being finicky.
"Send for him at once."
"Why, have you given up the idea of getting that stuff out of the house yourself?"
"Entirely," said Mr. Carmody. He shuddered slightly. "I have been thinking the matter over very carefully, and I feel that this is an affair where we require the services of some third party. Where is this friend of yours? In London?"
"No. He's right around the corner. His name's Twist. He runs a sort of health-farm place only a few miles from here."
"God bless my soul! Healthward Ho?"
"That's the spot. Do you know it?"
"Why, I have only just returned from there."
Mr. Molloy was conscious of a feeling of almost incredulous awe. It was the sort of feeling which would come to a man who saw miracles happening all around him. He could hardly believe that things could possibly run as smoothly as they appeared to be doing. He had anticipated a certain amount of difficulty in selling Chimp Twist to Mr. Carmody, as he phrased it to himself, and had looked forward with not a little apprehension to a searching inquisition into Chimp Twist'sbona fides. And now, it seemed, Mr. Carmody knew Chimp personally and was, no doubt, prepared to receive him without a question. Could luck like this hold? That was the only thought that disturbed Mr. Molloy.
"Well, isn't that interesting!" he said slowly. "So you know my old friend Twist, do you?"
"Yes," said Mr. Carmody, speaking, however, as if the acquaintanceship were not one to which he looked back with any pleasure. "I know him very well."
"Fine!" said Mr. Molloy. "You see, if I thought we were getting in somebody you knew nothing about and felt you couldn't trust, it would sort of worry me."
Mr. Carmody made no comment on this evidence of his guest's nice feeling. He was meditating and did not hear it. What he was meditating on was the agreeable fact that money which he had been trying so vainly to recover from Doctor Twist would not be a dead loss after all. He could write if off as part of the working expenses of this little venture. He beamed happily at Mr. Molloy.
"Healthward Ho is on the telephone," he said. "Go and speak to Doctor Twist now and ask him to come over here at once." He hesitated for a moment, then came bravely to a decision. After all, whatever the cost in petrol, oil, and depreciation of tires, it was for a good object. More working expenses. "I will send my car for him," he said.
If you wish to accumulate, you must inevitably speculate, felt Mr. Carmody.
I
The strange depression which had come upon Pat in the shop of Chas. Bywater did not yield, as these gray moods generally do, to the curative influence of time. The following morning found her as gloomy as ever—indeed, rather gloomier, for shortly after breakfast thenoblesse obligespirit of the Wyverns had sent her on a reluctant visit to an old retainer who lived—if you could call it that—in one of the smaller and stuffier houses in Budd Street. Pensioned off after cooking for the Colonel for eighteen years, this female had retired to bed and stayed there, and there was a legend in the family, though neither by word nor look did she ever give any indication of it, that she enjoyed seeing Pat.
Bedridden ladies of advanced age seldom bubble over with fun andjoie de vivre. This one's attitude toward life seemed to have been borrowed from her favourite light reading, the works of the Prophet Jeremiah, and Pat, as she emerged into the sunshine after some eighty minutes of her society, was feeling rather like Jeremiah's younger sister.
The sense of being in a world unworthy of her—a world cold and unsympathetic and full of an inferior grade of human being, had now become so oppressive that she was compelled to stop on her way home and linger on the old bridge which spanned the Skirme. From the days of her childhood this sleepy, peaceful spot had always been a haven when things went wrong. She was gazing down into the slow-moving water and waiting for it to exercise its old spell, when she heard her name spoken and turned to see Hugo.
"What ho," said Hugo, pausing beside her. His manner was genial and unconcerned. He had not met her since that embarrassing scene in the lobby of the Hotel Lincoln, but he was a man on whom the memory of past embarrassments sat lightly. "What do you think you're doing, young Pat?"
Pat found herself cheering up a little. She liked Hugo. The sense of being all alone in a bleak world left her.
"Nothing in particular," she said. "Just looking at the water."
"Which in its proper place," agreed Hugo, "is admirable stuff. I've been doing a bit of froth-blowing at the Carmody Arms. Also buying cigarettes and other necessaries. I say, have you heard about my Uncle Lester's brain coming unstuck? Absolutely. He's quitenon compos. Mad as a coot. Belfry one seething mass of bats. He's taken to climbing ladders in the small hours after swallows' nests. However, shelving that for the moment, I'm very glad I ran into you this morning, young Pat. I wish to have a serious talk with you about old John."
"John?"
"John."
"What about John?"
At this moment there whirred past, bearing in its interior a weedy, snub-nosed man with a waxed moustache, a large red automobile. Hugo, suspending his remarks, followed it with astonished eyes.
"Good Lord!"
"What about Johnnie?"
"That was the Dex-Mayo," said Hugo. "And the gargoyle inside was that blighter Twist from Healthward Ho. Great Scott! The car must have been over there to fetch him."
"What's so remarkable about that?"
"What's so remarkable?" echoed Hugo, astounded. "What's remarkable about Uncle Lester deliberately sending his car twenty miles to fetch a man who could have come, if he had to come at all, by train at his own expense? My dear old thing, it's revolutionary. It marks an epoch. Do you know what I think has happened? You remember that dynamite explosion in the park when Uncle Lester nearly got done in?"
"I don't have much chance to forget it."
"Well, what I believe has happened is that the shock he got that day has completely changed his nature. It's a well-known thing. You hear of such cases all the time. Ronnie Fish was telling me about one only yesterday. There was a man he knew in London, a money lender, a fellow who had a glass eye, and the only thing that enabled anyone to tell which of his eyes was which was that the glass one had rather a more human expression than the other. That's the sort of chap he was. Well, one day he was nearly konked in a railway accident, and he came out of hospital a different man. Slapped people on the back, patted children on the head, tore up I.O.U.'s, and talked about its being everybody's duty to make the world a better place. Take it from me, young Pat, Uncle Lester's whole nature has undergone some sort of rummy change like that. That swallow's nest business must have been a preliminary symptom. Ronnie tells me that this money lender with the glass eye...."
Pat was not interested in glass-eyed money lenders.
"What were you saying about John?"
"I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going home quick, so as to be among those present when he starts scattering the stuff. It's quite on the cards that I may scoop that five hundred yet. Once a tightwad starts seeing the light...."
"You were saying something about John," said Pat, falling into step with him as he moved off. His babble irked her, making her wish that she could put the clock back a few years. Age, they say, has its compensations, but one of the drawbacks of becoming grown-up and sedate is that you have to abandon the childish practice of clumping your friends on the side of the head when they wander from the point. However, she was not too old to pinch her companion in the fleshy part of the arm, and she did so.
"Ouch!" said Hugo, coming out of his trance.
"What about John?"
Hugo massaged his arm tenderly. The look of a greyhound pursuing an electric hare died out of his eyes.
"Of course, yes. John. Glad you reminded me. Have you seen John lately?"
"No. I'm not allowed to go to the Hall, and he seems too busy to come and see me."
"It isn't so much being busy. Don't forget there's a war on. No doubt he's afraid of bumping into the parent."
"If Johnnie's scared of Father...."
"There's no need to speak in that contemptuous tone. I am, and there are few more intrepid men alive than Hugo Carmody. The old Colonel, believe me, is a tough baby. If I ever see him, I shall run like a rabbit, and my biographers may make of it what they will. You, being his daughter and having got accustomed to his ways, probably look on him as something quite ordinary and harmless, but even you will admit that he's got eyebrows which must be seen to be believed."
"Oh, never mind Father's eyebrows. Go on about Johnnie."
"Right ho. Well, then, look here, young Pat," said Hugo, earnestly, "in the interests of the aforesaid John, I want to ask you a favour. I understand he proposed to you that night at the Mustard Spoon."
"Well?"
"And you slipped him the mitten."
"Well?"
"Oh, don't think I'm blaming you," Hugo assured her. "If you don't want him, you don't. Nothing could be fairer than that. But what I'm asking you to do now is to keep clear of the poor chap. If you happen to run into him, that can't be helped, but be a sport and do your best to avoid him. Don't unsettle him. If you come buzzing round, stirring memories of the past and arousing thoughts of Auld Lang Syne and what not, that'll unsettle him. It'll take his mind off his job and ... well ... unsettle him. And, providing he isn't unsettled, I have strong hopes that we may get old John off this season. Do I make myself clear?"
Pat kicked viciously at an inoffensive pebble, whose only fault was that it happened to be within reach at the moment.
"I suppose what you're trying to break to me in your rambling, woollen-headed way is that Johnnie is mooning round that Molloy girl? I met her just now in Bywater's, and she told me she was staying at the Hall."
"I wouldn't call it mooning," said Hugo thoughtfully, speaking like a man who is an expert in these matters and can appraise subtle values. "I wouldn't say it had quite reached the mooning stage yet. But I have hopes. You see, John is a bloke whom Nature intended for a married man. He's a confirmed settler-down, the sort of chap who...."
"You needn't go over all that again. I had the pleasure of hearing your views on the subject that night in the lobby of the hotel."
"Oh, you did hear?" said Hugo, unabashed. "Well, don't you think I'm right?"
"If you mean do I approve of Johnnie marrying Miss Molloy, I certainly do not."
"But if you don't want him...."
"It has nothing to do with my wanting him or not wanting him. I don't like Miss Molloy."
"Why not?"
"She's flashy."
"I would have said smart."
"I wouldn't." Pat, with an effort, recovered a certain measure of calm. Wrangling, she felt, was beneath her. As she could not hit Hugo with the basket in which she had carried two pounds of tea, a bunch of roses, and a seed cake to her bedridden pensioner, the best thing to do was to preserve a ladylike composure. "Anyway, you're probably taking a lot for granted. Probably Johnnie isn't in the least attracted by her. Has he ever given any sign of it?"
"Sign?" Hugo considered. "It depends what you mean by sign. You know what old John is. One of these strong, silent fellows who looks on all occasions like a stuffed frog."
"He doesn't."
"Pardon me," said Hugo firmly. "Have you ever seen a stuffed frog? Well, I have. I had one for years when I was a kid. And John has exactly the same power of expressing emotion. You can't go by what he says or the way he looks. You have to keep an eye out for much subtler bits of evidence. Now, last night he was explaining the rules of cricket to this girl, and answering all her questions on the subject, and, as he didn't at any point in the proceeding punch her on the nose, one is entitled to deduce, I consider, that he must be strongly attracted by her. Ronnie thinks so, too. So what I'm asking you to do...."
"Good-bye," said Pat. They had reached the gate of the little drive that led to her house, and she turned sharply.
"Eh?"
"Good-bye."
"But just a moment," insisted Hugo. "Will you...."
At this point he stopped in mid-sentence and began to walk quickly up the road; and Pat, puzzled to conjecture the reason for so abrupt a departure, received illumination a moment later when she saw her father coming down the drive. Colonel Wyvern had been dealing murderously with snails in the shadow of a bush, and the expression on his face seemed to indicate that he would be glad to extend the treatment to Hugo.
He gazed after that officious young man with a steely eye. The second post had arrived a short time before, and it had included among a number of bills and circulars a letter from his lawyer, in which the latter regretfully gave it as his opinion that an action against Mr. Lester Carmody in the matter of that dynamite business would not lie. To bring such an action would, in the judgment of Colonel Wyvern's lawyer, be a waste both of time and money.
The communication was not calculated to sweeten the Colonel's temper, nor did the spectacle of his daughter in apparently pleasant conversation with one of the enemy help to cheer him up.
"What are you talking about to that fellow?" he demanded. It was rare for Colonel Wyvern to be the heavy father, but there are times when heaviness in a father is excusable. "Where did you meet him?"
His tone disagreeably affected Pat's already harrowed nerves, but she replied to the question equably.
"I met him on the bridge. We were talking about John."
"Well, kindly understand that I don't want you to hold any communication whatsoever with that young man or his cousin John or his infernal uncle or any of that Hall gang. Is that clear?"
Her father was looking at her as if she were a snail which he had just found eating one of his lettuce leaves, but Pat still contrived with some difficulty to preserve a pale, saintlike calm.
"Quite clear."
"Very well, then."
There was a silence.
"I've known Johnnie fourteen years," said Pat in a small voice.
"Quite long enough," grunted Colonel Wyvern.
Pat walked on into the house and up the stairs to her room. There, having stamped on the basket and reduced it to a state where it would never again carry seed cake to ex-cooks, she sat on her bed and stared, dry-eyed, at her reflection in the mirror.
What with Dolly Molloy and Hugo and her father, the whole aspect of John Carroll seemed to be changing for her. No longer was she able to think of him as Poor Old Johnnie. He had the glamour now of something unattainable and greatly to be desired. She looked back at a night, some centuries ago, when a fool of a girl had refused the offer of this superman's love, and shuddered to think what a mess of things girls can make.
And she had no one to confide in. The only person who could have understood and sympathized with her was Hugo's glass-eyed money lender. He knew what it was to change one's outlook.
II
Mr. Alexander (Chimp) Twist stood with his shoulders against the mantelpiece in Mr. Carmody's study and, twirling his waxed moustache thoughtfully, listened with an expressionless face to Soapy Molloy's synopsis of the events which had led up to his being at the Hall that morning. Dolly reclined in a deep armchair. Mr. Carmody was not present, having stated that he would prefer to leave the negotiations entirely to Mr. Molloy.
Through the open window the sounds and scents of summer poured in, but it is unlikely that Chimp Twist was aware of them. He was a man who believed in concentration, and his whole attention now was taken up by the remarkable facts which his old acquaintance and partner was placing before him.
The latter's conversation on the telephone some two hours ago had left Chimp Twist with an open mind. He was hopeful, but cautiously hopeful. Soapy had insisted that there was a big thing on, but he had reserved his enthusiasm until he should learn the details. The thing, he felt, might seem big to Soapy, but to Alexander Twist no things were big things unless he could see in advance a substantial profit for A. Twist in them.
Mr. Molloy, concluding his story, paused for reply. The visitor gave his moustache a final twist, and shook his head.
"I don't get it," he said.
Mrs. Molloy straightened herself militantly in her chair. Of all masculine defects, she liked slowness of wit least; and she had never been a great admirer of Mr. Twist.
"You poor, nut-headed swozzie," she said with heat. "What don't you get? It's simple enough, isn't it? What's bothering you?"
"There's a catch somewhere. Why isn't this guy Carmody able to sell the things?"
"It's the law, you poor fish. Soapy explained all that."
"Not to me he didn't," said Chimp. "A lot of words fluttered out of him, but they didn't explain anything to me. Do you mean to say there's a law in this country that says a man can't sell his own property?"
"It isn't his own property." Dolly's voice was shrill with exasperation. "The things belong in the family and have to be kept there. Does that penetrate, or have we got to use a steam drill? Listen here. Old George W. Ancestor starts one of these English families going—way back in the year G.X. something. He says to himself, 'I can't last forever, and when I go then what? My son Freddie is a good boy, handy with the battle axe and okay at mounting his charger, but he's like all the rest of these kids—you can't keep him away from the hock shop as long as there's anything in the house he can raise money on. It begins to look like the moment I'm gone my collection of old antiques can kiss itself good-bye.' And then he gets an idea. He has a law passed saying that Freddie can use the stuff as long as he lives but he can't sell it. And Freddie, when his time comes, he hands the law on to his son Archibald, and so on, down the line till you get to this here now Carmody. The only way this Carmody can realize on all these things is to sit in with somebody who'll pinch them and then salt them away somewheres, so that after the cops are out of the house and all the fuss has quieted down they can get together and do a deal."
Chimp's face cleared.
"Now I'm hep," he said. "Now I see what you're driving at. Why couldn't Soapy have put it like that before? Well, then, what's the idea? I sneak in and swipe the stuff. Then what?"
"You salt it away."
"At Healthward Ho?"
"No!" said Mr. Molloy.