Mr. Twist was the only object in the room that looked in any way disturbed. He had turned an odd greenish colour, and from time to time he swallowed uneasily. Although he had spent a lifetime outside the law, Chimp Twist was essentially a man of peace and accustomed to look askance at any by-product of his profession that seemed to him to come under the heading of rough stuff. This doping of respectable visitors, he considered, was distinctly so to be classified; and only Mr. Molloy's urgency over the telephone wire had persuaded him to the task. He was nervous and apprehensive, in a condition to start at sudden noises.
"What happened?"
"Well, I did what Soapy said. After you left us the guy and I talked back and forth for a while, and then I agreed to knock a bit off the old man's bill, and then I said 'How about a little drink?' and then we have a little drink, and then I slip the stuff you gave me in while he wasn't looking. It didn't seem like it was going to act at first."
"It don't. It takes a little time. You don't feel nothing till you jerk your head or move yourself, and then it's like as if somebody has beaned you one with an iron girder or something. So they tell me," said Dolly.
"I guess he must have jerked his head, then. Because all of a sudden he went down and out," Chimp gulped. "You—you don't think he's ... I mean, you're sure this stuff...?"
Dolly had nothing but contempt for these masculine tremors.
"Of course. Do you suppose I go about the place croaking people? He's all right."
"Well, he didn't look it. If I'd been a life-insurance company I'd have paid up on him without a yip."
"He'll wake up with a headache in a little while, but outside of that he'll be as well as he ever was. Where have you been all your life that you don't know how kayo drops act?"
"I've never had occasion to be connected with none of this raw work before," said Chimp virtuously. "If you'd of seen him when he slumped down on the table, you wouldn't be feeling so good yourself, maybe. If ever I saw a guy that looked like he was qualified to step straight into a coffin, he was him."
"Aw, be yourself, Chimp!"
"I'm being myself all right, all right."
"Well, then, for Pete's sake, be somebody else. Pull yourself together, why can't you. Have a drink."
"Ah!" said Mr. Twist, struck with the idea.
His hand was still shaking, but he accomplished the delicate task of mixing a whisky and soda without disaster.
"What did you with the remains?" asked Dolly, interested.
Mr. Twist, who had been raising the glass to his lips, lowered it again. He disapproved of levity of speech at such a moment.
"Would you kindly not call him 'the remains,'" he begged. "It's all very well for you to be so easy about it all and to pull this stuff about him doing nothing but wake up with a headache, but what I'm asking myself is, will he wake up at all?"
"Oh, cut it out! Sure, he'll wake up."
"But will it be in this world?"
"You drink that up, you poor dumb-bell, and then fix yourself another," advised Dolly. "And make it a bit stronger next time. You seem to need it."
Mr. Twist did as directed, and found the treatment beneficial.
"You've nothing to grumble at," Dolly proceeded, still looking on the bright side. "What with all this excitement and all, you seem to have lost that cold of yours."
"That's right," said Chimp, impressed. "It does seem to have got a whole lot better."
"Pity you couldn't have got rid of it a little earlier. Then we wouldn't have had all this trouble. From what I can make of it, you seem to have roused the house by sneezing your head off, and a bunch of the help come and stood looking over the banisters at you."
Chimp tottered. "You don't mean somebody saw me last night?"
"Sure they saw you. Didn't Soapy tell you that over the wire?"
"I could hardly make out all Soapy was saying over the wire. Say! What are we going to do?"
"Don't you worry. We've done it. The only difficult part is over. Now that we've fixed the remains...."
"Will you please...!"
"Well, call him what you like. Now that we've fixed that guy the thing's simple. By the way, what did you do with him?"
"Flannery took him upstairs."
"Where to?"
"There's a room on the top floor. Must have been a nursery or something, I guess. Anyway, there's bars to the windows."
"How's the door?"
"Good solid oak. You've got to hand it to the guys who built these old English houses. They knew their groceries. When they spit on their hands and set to work to make a door, they made one. You couldn't push that door down, not if you was an elephant."
"Well, that's all right, then. Now, listen, Chimp. Here's the low-down. We...." She broke off. "What's that?"
"What's what?" asked Mr. Twist, starting violently.
"I thought I heard someone outside in the corridor. Go and look."
With an infinite caution born of alarm, Mr. Twist crept across the floor, reached the door and flung it open. The passage was empty. He looked up and down it, and Dolly, whose fingers had hovered for an instant over the glass which he had left on the table, sat back with an air of content.
"My mistake," she said. "I thought I heard something."
Chimp returned to the table. He was still much perturbed.
"I wish I'd never gone into this thing," he said, with a sudden gush of self-pity. "I felt all along, what with seeing that magpie and the new moon through glass...."
"Now, listen!" said Dolly vigorously. "Considering you've stood Soapy and me up for practically all there is in this thing except a little small change, I'll ask you kindly, if you don't mind, not to stand there beefing and expecting me to hold your hand and pat you on the head and be a second mother to you. You came into this business because you wanted it. You're getting sixty-five per cent. of the gross. So what's biting you? You're all right so far."
It was in Mr. Twist's mind to inquire of his companion precisely what she meant by this expression, but more urgent matter claimed his attention. More even than the exact interpretation of the phrase "so far," he wished to know what the next move was.
"What happens now?" he asked.
"We go back to Rudge."
"And collect the stuff?"
"Yes. And then make our getaway."
No programme could have outlined more admirably Mr. Twist's own desires. The mere contemplation of it heartened him. He snatched his glass from the table and drained it with a gesture almost swash-buckling.
"Soapy will have doped the old man by this time, eh?"
"That's right."
"But suppose he hasn't been able to?" said Mr. Twist with a return of his old nervousness. "Suppose he hasn't had an opportunity?"
"You can always find an opportunity of doping people. You ought to know that."
The implied compliment pleased Chimp.
"That's right," he chuckled.
He nodded his head complacently. And immediately something which may have been an iron girder or possibly the ceiling and the upper parts of the house seemed to strike him on the base of the skull. He had been standing by the table, and now, crumpling at the knees, he slid gently down to the floor. Dolly, regarding him, recognized instantly what he had meant just now when he had spoken of John appearing like a total loss to his life-insurance company. The best you could have said of Alexander Twist at this moment was that he looked peaceful. She drew in her breath a little sharply, and then, being a woman at heart, took a cushion from the armchair and placed it beneath his head.
Only then did she go to the telephone and in a gentle voice ask the operator to connect her with Rudge Hall.
"Soapy?"
"Hello!"
The promptitude with which the summons of the bell had been answered brought a smile of approval to her lips. Soapy, she felt, must have been sitting with his head on the receiver.
"Listen, sweetie."
"I'm listening, pettie!"
"Everything's set."
"Have you fixed that guy?"
"Sure, precious. And Chimp, too."
"How's that? Chimp?"
"Sure. We don't want Chimp around, do we, with that sixty-five—thirty-five stuff of his? I just slipped a couple of drops into his highball and he's gone off as peaceful as a lamb. Say, wait a minute," she added, as the wire hummed with Mr. Molloy's low-voiced congratulations. "Hello!" she said, returning.
"What were you doing, honey? Did you hear somebody?"
"No. I caught sight of a bunch of lilies in a vase, and I just slipped across and put one of them in Chimp's hand. Made it seem more sort of natural. Now listen, Soapy. Everything's clear for you at your end now, so go right ahead and clean up. I'm going to beat it in that guy Carroll's runabout, and I haven't much time, so don't start talking about the weather or nothing. I'm going to London, to the Belvidere. You collect the stuff and meet me there. Is that all straight?"
"But, pettie!"
"Now what?"
"How am I to get the stuff away?"
"For goodness' sake! You can drive a car, can't you? Old Carmody's car was outside the stable yard when I left. I guess it's there still. Get the stuff and then go and tell the chauffeur that old Carmody wants to see him. Then, when he's gone, climb in and drive to Birmingham. Leave the car outside the station and take a train. That's simple enough, isn't it?"
There was a long pause. Admiration seemed to have deprived Mr. Molloy of speech.
"Honey," he said at length, in a hushed voice, "when it comes to the real smooth stuff you're there every time. Let me just tell you...."
"All right, baby," said Dolly. "Save it till later. I'm in a hurry."
I
Soapy Molloy replaced the receiver, and came out of the telephone cupboard glowing with the resolve to go right ahead and clean up as his helpmeet had directed. Like all good husbands, he felt that his wife was an example and an inspiration to him. Mopping his fine forehead, for it had been warm in the cupboard with the door shut, he stood for a while and mused, sketching out in his mind a plan of campaign.
The prudent man, before embarking on any enterprise which may at a moment's notice necessitate his skipping away from a given spot like a scalded cat, will always begin by preparing his lines of retreat. Mr. Molloy's first act was to go to the stable yard in order to ascertain with his own eyes that the Dex-Mayo was still there.
It was. It stood out on the gravel, simply waiting for someone to spring to its wheel and be off.
So far, so good. But how far actually was it? The really difficult part of the operations, Mr. Molloy could not but recognize, still lay before him. The knock-out drops nestled in his waistcoat pocket all ready for use, but in order to bring about the happy ending it was necessary for him, like some conjuror doing a trick, to transfer them thence to the interior of Mr. Lester Carmody. And little by little, chilling his enthusiasm, there crept upon Soapy the realization that he had not a notion how the deuce this was to be done.
The whole question of administering knock-out drops to a fellow creature is a very delicate and complex one. So much depends on the co-operation of the party of the second part. Before you can get anything in the nature of action, your victim must first be induced to start drinking something. At Healthward Ho, Soapy had gathered from the recent telephone conversation, no obstacles had arisen. The thing had been, apparently, from the start a sort of jolly carousal. But at Rudge Hall, it was plain, matters were not going to be nearly so simple.
When you are a guest in a man's house, you cannot very well go about thrusting drinks on your host at half-past eleven in the morning. Probably Mr. Carmody would not think of taking liquid refreshment till lunchtime, and then there would be a butler in and out of the room all the while. Besides, lunch would not be for another two hours or more, and the whole essence of this enterprise was that it should be put through swiftly and at once.
Mr. Molloy groaned in spirit. He wandered forth into the garden, turning the problem over in his mind with growing desperation, and had just come to the conclusion that he was mentally unequal to it, when, reaching the low wall that bordered the moat, he saw a sight which sent the blood coursing joyously through his veins once more—a sight which made the world a thing of sunshine and bird song again.
Out in the middle of the moat lay the punt. In the punt sat Mr. Carmody. And in Mr. Carmody's hand was a fishing rod.
Æsthetically considered, wearing as he did a pink shirt and a slouch hat which should long ago have been given to the deserving poor, Mr. Carmody was not much of a spectacle, but Soapy, eyeing him, felt that he had never beheld anything lovelier. He was not a fisherman himself, but he knew all about fishermen. They became, he was aware, when engaged on their favourite pursuit, virtually monomaniacs. Earthquakes might occur in their immediate neighbourhood, dynasties fall and pestilences ravage the land, but they would just go on fishing. As long as the bait held out, Lester Carmody, sitting in that punt, was for all essential purposes as good as if he had been crammed to the brim of the finest knock-out drops. It was as though he were in another world.
Exhilaration filled Soapy like a tonic.
"Any luck?" he shouted.
"Wah, wah, wah," replied Mr. Carmody inaudibly.
"Stick to it," cried Soapy. "Atta-boy!"
With an encouraging wave of the hand he hurried back to the house. The problem which a moment before had seemed to defy solution had now become so simple and easy that a child could have negotiated it—any child, that is to say, capable of holding a hatchet and endowed with sufficient strength to break a cupboard door with it.
"I'm telling the birds, telling the bees," sang Soapy gaily, charging into the hall, "Telling the flowers, telling the trees how I love you...."
"Sir?" said Sturgis respectfully, suddenly becoming manifest out of the infinite.
Soapy gazed at the butler blankly, his wild wood-notes dying away in a guttural gurgle. Apart from the embarrassment which always comes upon a man when caught singing, he was feeling, as Sturgis himself would have put it, stottled. A moment before, the place had been completely free from butlers, and where this one could have come from was more than he could understand. Rudge Hall's old retainer did not look the sort of man who would pop up through traps, but there seemed no other explanation of his presence.
And then, close to the cupboard door, Soapy espied another door, covered with green baize. This, evidently, was the Sturgis bolt-hole.
"Nothing," he said.
"I thought you called, sir."
"No."
"Lovely day, sir."
"Beautiful," said Soapy.
He gazed bulgily at this inconvenient old fossil. Once more, shadows had fallen about his world, and he was brooding again on the deep gulf that is fixed between artistic conception and detail work.
The broad, artistic conception of breaking open the cupboard door and getting away with the swag while Mr. Carmody, anchored out on the moat, dabbled for bream or dibbled for chub or sniggled for eels or whatever weak-minded thing it is that fishermen do when left to themselves in the middle of a sheet of water, was magnificent. It was bold, dashing, big in every sense of the word. Only when you came to inspect it in detail did it occur to you that it might also be a little noisy.
That was the fatal flaw—the noise. The more Soapy examined the scheme, the more clearly did he see that it could not be carried through in even comparative quiet. And the very first blow of the hammer or axe or chisel selected for the operation must inevitably bring Methuselah's little brother popping through that green baize door, full of inquiries.
"Hell!" said Soapy.
"Sir?"
"Nothing," said Soapy. "I was just thinking."
He continued to think, and to such effect that before long he had begun to see daylight. There is no doubt that in time of stress the human mind has an odd tendency to take off its coat and roll up its sleeves and generally spread itself in a spasm of unwonted energy. Probably if this thing had been put up to Mr. Molloy as an academic problem over the nuts and wine after dinner, he would have had to confess himself baffled. Now, however, with such vital issues at stake, it took him but a few minutes to reach the conclusion that what he required, as he could not break open a cupboard door in silence, was some plausible reason for making a noise.
He followed up this line of thought. A noise of smashing wood. In what branch of human activity may a man smash wood blamelessly? The answer is simple. When he is doing carpentering. What sort of carpentering? Why, making something. What? Oh, anything. Yes, but what? Well, say for example a rabbit hutch. But why a rabbit hutch? Well, a man might very easily have a daughter who, in her girlish, impulsive way, had decided to keep pet rabbits, mightn't he? There actually were pet rabbits on the Rudge Hall estate, weren't there? Certainly there were. Soapy had seen them down at one of the lodges.
The thing began to look good. It only remained to ascertain whether Sturgis was the right recipient for this kind of statement. The world may be divided broadly into two classes—men who will believe you when you suddenly inform them at half-past eleven on a summer morning that you propose to start making rabbit hutches, and men who will not. Sturgis looked as if he belonged to the former and far more likeable class. He looked, indeed, like a man who would believe anything.
"Say!" said Soapy.
"Sir?"
"My daughter wants me to make her a rabbit hutch."
"Indeed, sir?"
Soapy felt relieved. There had been no incredulity in the other's gaze—on the contrary, something that looked very much like a sort of senile enthusiasm. He had the air of a butler who had heard good news from home.
"Have you got such a thing as a packing case or a sugar box or something like that? And a hatchet?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then fetch them along."
"Very good, sir."
The butler disappeared through his green baize door, and Soapy, to fill in the time of waiting, examined the cupboard. It appeared to be a very ordinary sort of cupboard, the kind that a resolute man can open with one well-directed blow. Soapy felt complacent. Though primarily a thinker, it pleased him to feel that he could be the man of action when the occasion called.
There was a noise of bumping without. Sturgis reappeared, packing case in one hand, hatchet in the other, looking like Noah taking ship's stores aboard the Ark.
"Here they are, sir."
"Thanks."
"I used to keep roberts when I was a lad, sir," said the butler. "Oh, dear, yes. Many's the robert I've made a pet of in my time. Roberts and white mice, those were what I was fondest of. And newts in a little aquarium."
He leaned easily against the wall, beaming, and Soapy, with deep concern, became aware that the Last of the Great Victorians proposed to make this thing a social gathering. He appeared to be regarding Soapy as the nucleus of a salon.
"Don't let me keep you," said Soapy.
"You aren't keeping me, sir," the butler assured him. "Oh, no, sir, you aren't keeping me. I've done my silver. It will be a pleasure to watch you, sir. Quite likely I can give you a hint or two if you've never made a robert hutch before. Many's the hutch I've made in my time. As a lad, I was very handy at that sort of thing."
A dull despair settled upon Soapy. It was plain to him now that he had unwittingly delivered himself over into the clutches of a bore who had probably been pining away for someone on whom to pour out his wealth of stored-up conversation. Words had begun to flutter out of this butler like bats out of a barn. He had become a sort of human Topical Talk on rabbits. He was speaking of rabbits he had known in his hot youth—their manners, customs, and the amount of lettuce they had consumed per diem. To a man interested in rabbits but too lazy to look the subject up in the encyclopædia the narrative would have been enthralling. It induced in Soapy a feverishness that touched the skirts of homicidal mania. The thought came into his mind that there are other uses to which a hatchet may be put besides the making of rabbit hutches. England trembled on the verge of being short one butler.
Sturgis had now become involved in a long story of his early manhood, and even had Soapy been less distrait he might have found it difficult to enjoy it to the full. It was about an acquaintance of his who had kept rabbits, and it suffered in lucidity from his unfortunate habit of pronouncing rabbits "roberts," combined with the fact that by a singular coincidence the acquaintance had been a Mr. Roberts. Roberts, it seemed, had been deeply attached to roberts. In fact, his practice of keeping roberts in his bedroom had led to trouble with Mrs. Roberts, and in the end Mrs. Roberts had drowned the roberts in the pond and Roberts, who thought the world of his roberts and not quite so highly of Mrs. Roberts, had never forgiven her.
Here Sturgis paused, apparently for comment.
"Is that so?" said Soapy, breathing heavily.
"Yes, sir."
"In the pond?"
"In the pond, sir."
Like some Open Sesame, the word suddenly touched a chord in Soapy's mind.
"Say, listen," he said. "All the while we've been talking I was forgetting that Mr. Carmody is out there on the pond."
"The moat, sir?"
"Call it what you like. Anyway, he's there, fishing, and he told me to tell you to take him out something to drink."
Immediately, Sturgis, the lecturer, with a change almost startling in its abruptness, became Sturgis, the butler, once more. The fanatic rabbit-gleam died out of his eyes.
"Very good, sir."
"I should hurry. His tongue was hanging out when I left him."
For an instant the butler wavered. The words had recalled to his mind a lop-eared doe which he had once owned, whose habit of putting out its tongue and gasping had been the cause of some concern to him in the late 'seventies. But he recovered himself. Registering a mental resolve to seek out this new-made friend of his later and put the complete facts before him, he passed through the green baize door.
Soapy, alone at last, did not delay. With all the pent up energy which had been accumulating within him during a quarter of an hour which had seemed a lifetime, he swung the hatchet and brought it down. The panel splintered. The lock snapped. The door swung open.
There was an electric switch inside the cupboard. He pressed it down and was able to see clearly. And, having seen clearly, he drew back, his lips trembling with half-spoken words of the regrettable kind which a man picks up in the course of a lifetime spent in the less refined social circles of New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago.
The cupboard contained an old raincoat, two hats, a rusty golf club, six croquet balls, a pamphlet on stock-breeding, three umbrellas, a copy of theParish Magazinefor the preceding November, a shoe, a mouse, and a smell of apples, but no suitcase.
That much Soapy had been able to see in the first awful, disintegrating instant.
No bag, box, portmanteau, or suitcase of any kind or description whatsoever.
II
Hope does not readily desert the human breast. After the first numbing impact of any shock, we most of us have a tendency to try to persuade ourselves that things may not be so bad as they seem. Some explanation, we feel, will be forthcoming shortly, putting the whole matter in a different light. And so, after a few moments during which he stood petrified, muttering some of the comments which on the face of it the situation seemed to demand, Soapy cheered up a little.
He had had, he reflected, no opportunity of private speech with his host this morning. If Mr. Carmody had decided to change his plans and deposit the suitcase in some other hiding place he might have done so in quite good faith without Soapy's knowledge. For all he knew, in mentally labelling Mr. Carmody as a fat, pop-eyed, crooked, swindling, pie-faced, double-crossing Judas, he might be doing him an injustice. Feeling calmer, though still anxious, he left the house and started toward the moat.
Half-way down the garden, he encountered Sturgis, returning with an empty tray.
"You must have misunderstood Mr. Carmody, sir," said the butler, genially, as one rabbit fancier to another. "He says he did not ask for any drink. But he came ashore and had it. If you're looking for him, you will find him in the boathouse."
And in the boathouse Mr. Carmody was, lolling at his ease on the cushions of the punt, sipping the contents of a long glass.
"Hullo," said Mr. Carmody. "There you are."
Soapy descended the steps. What he had to say was not the kind of thing a prudent man shouts at long range.
"Say!" said Soapy in a cautious undertone. "I've been trying to get a word with you all the morning. But that darned policeman was around all the time."
"Something on your mind?" said Mr. Carmody affably. "I've caught two perch, a bream, and a grayling," he added, finishing the contents of his glass with a good deal of relish.
Such was the condition of Soapy's nervous system that he very nearly damned the perch, the bream, and the grayling, in the order named. But he checked himself in time. If ever, he felt, there was a moment when diplomacy was needed, this was it.
"Listen," he said, "I've been thinking."
"Yes?"
"I've been wondering if, after all, that closet you were going to put the stuff in is a safe place. Somebody might be apt to take a look in it. Maybe," said Soapy, tensely, "that occurred to you?"
"What makes you think that?"
"It just crossed my mind."
"Oh? I thought perhaps you might have been having a look in that cupboard yourself."
Soapy moistened his lips, which had become uncomfortably dry.
"But you locked it, surely?" he said.
"Yes, I locked it," said Mr. Carmody. "But it struck me that after you had got the butler out of the way by telling him to bring me a drink, you might have thought of breaking the door open."
In the silence which followed this devastating remark there suddenly made itself heard an odd, gurgling noise like a leaking cistern, and Soapy, gazing at his host, was shocked to observe that he had given himself up to an apoplectic spasm of laughter. Mr. Carmody's rotund body was quivering like a jelly. His eyes were closed, and he was rocking himself to and fro. And from his lips proceeded those hideous sounds of mirth.
The hope which until this moment had been sustaining Soapy had never been a strong, robust hope. From birth it had been an invalid. And now, as he listened to this laughter, the poor, sickly thing coughed quietly and died.
"Oh dear!" said Mr. Carmody, recovering. "Very funny. Very funny."
"You think it's funny, do you?" said Soapy.
"I do," said Mr. Carmody sincerely. "I wish I could have seen your face when you looked in that cupboard."
Soapy had nothing to say. He was beaten, crushed, routed, and he knew it. He stared out hopelessly on a bleak world. Outside the boathouse the sun was still shining, but not for Soapy.
"I've seen through you all along, my man," proceeded Mr. Carmody, with ungenerous triumph. "Not from the very beginning, perhaps, because I really did suppose for a while that you were what you professed to be. The first thing that made me suspicious was when I cabled over to New York to make inquiries about a well-known financier named Thomas G. Molloy and was informed that no such person existed."
Soapy did not speak. The bitterness of his meditations precluded words. His eyes were fixed on the trees and flowers on the other side of the water, and he was disliking these very much. Nature had done its best for the scene, and he thought Nature a washout.
"And then," proceeded Mr. Carmody, "I listened outside the study window while you and your friends were having your little discussion. And I heard all I wanted to hear. Next time you have one of these board meetings of yours, Mr. Molloy, I suggest that you close the window and lower your voices."
"Yeah?" said Soapy.
It was not, he forced himself to admit, much of a retort, but it was the best he could think of. He was in the depths, and men who are in the depths seldom excel in the matter of rapier-like repartee.
"I thought the matter over, and decided that my best plan was to allow matters to proceed. I was disappointed, of course, to discover that that cheque of yours for a million or two million or whatever it was would not be coming my way. But," said Mr. Carmody philosophically, "there is always the insurance money. It should amount to a nice little sum. Not what a man like you, accustomed to big transactions with Mr. Schwab and Pierpont Morgan, would call much, of course, but quite satisfactory to me."
"You think so?" said Soapy, goaded to speech. "You think you're going to clean up on the insurance?"
"I do."
"Then, say, listen, let me tell you something. The insurance company is going to send a fellow down to inquire, isn't it? Well, what's to prevent me spilling the beans?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"What's to keep me from telling him the burglary was a put-up job?"
Mr. Carmody smiled tranquilly.
"Your good sense, I should imagine. How could you make such a story credible without involving yourself in more unpleasantness than I should imagine you would desire? I think I shall be able to rely on you for sympathetic silence, Mr. Molloy."
"Yeah?"
"I think so."
And Soapy, reflecting, thought so, too. For the process of bean-spilling to be enjoyable, he realized, the conditions have to be right.
"I am offering a little reward," said Mr. Carmody, gently urging the punt out into the open, "just to make everything seem more natural. One thousand pounds is the sum I am proposing to give for the recovery of this stolen property. You had better try for that. Well, I must not keep you here all the morning, chattering away like this. No doubt you have much to do."
The punt floated out into the sunshine, and the roof of the boathouse hid this fat, conscienceless man from Soapy's eyes. From somewhere out in the great open spaces beyond came the sound of a paddle, wielded with a care-free joyousness. Whatever might be his guest's state of mind, Mr. Carmody was plainly in the pink.
Soapy climbed the steps listlessly. The interview had left him weak and shaken. He brooded dully on this revelation of the inky depths of Lester Carmody's soul. It seemed to him that if this was what England's upper classes (who ought to be setting an example) were like, Great Britain could not hope to continue much longer as a first-class power, and it gave him in his anguish a little satisfaction to remember that in years gone by his ancestors had thrown off Britain's yoke. Beyond burning his eyebrows one Fourth of July, when a boy, with a maroon that exploded prematurely, he had never thought much about this affair before, but now he was conscious of a glow of patriotic fervour. If General Washington had been present at that moment Soapy would have shaken hands with him.
Soapy wandered aimlessly through the sunlit garden. The little spurt of consolation caused by the reflection that some hundred and fifty years ago the United States of America had severed relations with a country which was to produce a man like Lester Carmody had long since ebbed away, leaving emptiness behind it. He was feeling very low, and in urgent need of one of those largely advertised tonics which claim to relieve Anæmia, Brain-Fag, Lassitude, Anxiety, Palpitations, Faintness, Melancholia, Exhaustion, Neurasthenia, Muscular Limpness, and Depression of Spirits. For he had got them all, especially brain-fag and melancholia; and the sudden appearance of Sturgis, fluttering toward him down the gravel path, provided nothing in the nature of a cure.
He felt that he had had all he wanted of the butler's conversation. Even of the most stimulating society enough is enough, and to Soapy about half a minute of Sturgis seemed a good medium dose for an adult. He would have fled, but there was nowhere to go. He remained where he was, making his expression as forbidding as possible. A motion-picture director could have read that expression like a book. Soapy was registering deep disinclination to talk about rabbits.
But for the moment, it appeared, Sturgis had put rabbits on one side. Other matters occupied his mind.
"I beg your pardon, sir," he said, "but have you seen Mr. John?"
"Mr. who?"
"Mr. John, sir."
So deep was Soapy's preoccupation that for a moment the name conveyed nothing to him.
"Mr. Carmody's nephew, sir. Mr. Carroll."
"Oh? Yes, he went off in his car with my daughter."
"Will he be gone long, do you think, sir?"
Soapy could answer that one.
"Yes," he said. "He won't be back for some time."
"You see, when I took Mr. Carmody his drink, sir, he told me to tell Bolt, the chauffeur, to give me the ticket."
"What ticket?" asked Soapy wearily.
The butler was only too glad to reply. He had feared that this talk of theirs might be about to end all too quickly, and these explanations helped to prolong it. And, now that he knew that there was no need to go on searching for John, his time was his own again.
"It was a ticket for a bag which Mr. Carmody sent Bolt to leave at the cloak room at Shrub Hill station, in Worcester, this morning, sir. I now ascertain from Bolt that he gave it to Mr. John to give to Mr. Carmody."
"What!" cried Soapy.
"And Mr. John has apparently gone off without giving it to him. However, no doubt it is quite safe. Did you make satisfactory progress with the hutch, sir?"
"Eh?"
"The robert hutch, sir."
"What?"
A look of concern came into Sturgis's face. His companion's manner was strange.
"Is anything the matter, sir?"
"Eh?"
"Shall I bring you something to drink, sir?"
Few men ever become so distrait that this particular question fails to penetrate. Soapy nodded feverishly. Something to drink was precisely what at this moment he felt he needed most. Moreover, the process of fetching it would relieve him for a time, at least, of the society of a butler who seemed to combine in equal proportions the outstanding characteristics of a porous plaster and a gadfly.
"Yes," he replied.
"Very good, sir."
III
Soapy's mind was in a whirl. He could almost feel the brains inside his head heaving and tossing like an angry ocean. So that was what that smooth old crook had done with the stuff—stored it away in a Left Luggage office at a railway station! If circumstances had been such as to permit of a more impartial and detached attitude of mind, Soapy would have felt for Mr. Carmody's resource and ingenuity nothing but admiration. A Left Luggage office was an ideal place in which to store stolen property, as good as the innermost recesses of some safe deposit company's deepest vault.
But, numerous as were the emotions surging in his bosom, admiration was not one of them. For a while he gave himself up almost entirely to that saddest of mental exercises, the brooding on what might have been. If only he had known that John had the ticket...!
But he was a practical man. It was not his way to waste time torturing himself with thoughts of past failures. The future claimed his attention.
What to do?
All, he perceived, was not yet lost. It would be absurd to pretend that things were shaping themselves ideally, but disaster might still be retrieved. It would be embarrassing, no doubt, to meet Chimp Twist after what had occurred, but a man who would win to wealth must learn to put up with embarrassments. The only possible next move was to go over to Healthward Ho, reveal to Chimp what had occurred, and with his co-operation recover the ticket from John.
Soapy brightened. Another possibility had occurred to him. If he were to reach Healthward Ho with the minimum of delay, it might be that he would find both Chimp and John still under the influence of those admirable drops, in which case a man of his resource would surely be able to insinuate himself into John's presence long enough to be able to remove a Left Luggage ticket from his person.
But if 'twere done, then, 'twere well 'twere done quickly. What he needed was the Dex-Mayo. And the Dex-Mayo was standing outside the stable yard, waiting for him. He became a thing of dash and activity. For many years he had almost given up the exercise of running, but he ran now like the lissom athlete he had been in his early twenties.
And as he came panting round the back of the house the first thing he saw was the tail end of the car disappearing into the stable yard.
"Hi!" shouted Soapy, using for the purpose the last remains of his breath.
The Dex-Mayo vanished. And Soapy, very nearly a spent force now, arrived at the opening of the stable yard just in time to see Bolt, the chauffeur, putting the key of the garage in his pocket after locking the door.
Bolt was a thing of beauty. He gleamed in the sunshine. He was wearing a new hat, his Sunday clothes, and a pair of yellow shoes that might have been bits chipped off the sun itself. There was a carnation in his buttonhole. He would have lent tone to a garden party at Buckingham Palace.
He regarded Soapy with interest.
"Been having a little run, sir?"
"The car!" croaked Soapy.
"I've just put it away, sir. Mr. Carmody has given me the day off to attend the wedding of the wife's niece over at Upton Snodsbury."
"I want the car."
"I've just put it away, sir," said Bolt, speaking more slowly and with the manner of one explaining something to an untutored foreigner. "Mr. Carmody has given me the day off. Mrs. Bolt's niece is being married over at Upton Snodsbury. And she's got a lovely day for it," said the chauffeur, glancing at the sky with something as near approval as a chauffeur ever permits himself. "Happy the bride that the sun shines on, they say. Not that I agree altogether with these old sayings. I know that when I and Mrs. Bolt was married it rained the whole time like cats and dogs, and we've been very happy. Very happy indeed we've been, taking it by and large. I don't say we haven't had our disagreements, but, taking it one way and another...."
It began to seem to Soapy that the staffs of English country houses must be selected primarily for their powers of conversation. Every domestic with whom he had come in contact in Rudge Hall so far had at his disposal an apparently endless flow of lively small-talk. The butler, if you let him, would gossip all day about rabbits, and here was the chauffeur apparently settling down to dictate his autobiography. And every moment was precious!
With a violent effort he contrived to take in a stock of breath.
"I want the car, to go to Healthward Ho. I can drive it."
The chauffeur's manner changed. Up till now he had been the cheery clubman meeting an old friend in the smoking room and drawing him aside for a long, intimate chat, but at this shocking suggestion he froze. He gazed at Soapy with horrified incredulity.
"Drive the Dex-Mayo, sir?" he gasped.
"Over to Healthward Ho."
The crisis passed. Bolt swallowed convulsively and was himself once more. One must be patient, he realized, with laymen. They do not understand. When they come to a chauffeur and calmly propose that their vile hands shall touch his sacred steering-wheel they are not trying to be deliberately offensive. It is simply that they do not know.
"I'm afraid that wouldn't quite do, sir," he said with a faint, reproving smile.
"Do you think I can't drive?"
"Not the Dex-Mayo you can't, sir." Bolt spoke a little curtly, for he had been much moved and was still shaken. "Mr. Carmody don't like nobody handling his car but me."
"But I must go over to Healthward Ho. It's important. Business."
The chauffeur reflected. Fundamentally he was a kindly man, who liked to do his Good Deed daily.
"Well, sir, there's an old push-bike of mine lying in the stables. You could take that if you liked. It's a little rusty, not having been used for some time, but I dare say it would carry you as far as Healthward Ho."
Soapy hesitated for a moment. The thought of a twenty-mile journey on a machine which he had always supposed to have become obsolete during his knickerbocker days made him quail a little. Then the thought of his mission lent him strength. He was a desperate man, and desperate men must do desperate things.
"Fetch it out!" he said.
Bolt fetched it out, and Soapy, looking upon it, quailed again.
"Is that it?" he said dully.
"That's it, sir," said the chauffeur.
There was only one adjective to describe this push-bike—the adjective "blackguardly." It had that leering air, shared by some parrots and the baser variety of cat, of having seen and been jauntily familiar with all the sin of the world. It looked low and furtive. Its handle-bars curved up instead of down, it had gaps in its spokes, and its pedals were naked and unashamed. A sans-culotte of a bicycle. The sort of bicycle that snaps at strangers.
"H'm!" said Soapy, ruminating.
"Yes," said Soapy, still ruminating.
Then he remembered again how imperative was the need of reaching Healthward Ho somehow.
"All right," he said, with a shudder.
He climbed onto the machine, and after one majestic wobble passed through the gates into the park, pedalling bravely. As he disappeared from view, there floated back to Bolt, standing outside the stable yard, a single, agonized "Ouch!"
Chauffeurs do not laugh, but they occasionally smile. Bolt smiled. He had been bitten by that bicycle himself.
IV
It was twenty minutes past one that butler Sturgis, dozing in his pantry, was jerked from slumber by the sound of the telephone bell. He had been hoping for an uninterrupted siesta, for he had had a perplexing and trying morning. First, on top of the most sensational night of his life, there had been all the nervous excitement of seeing policemen roaming about the place. Then the American gentleman, Mr. Molloy, had told him that Mr. Carmody wanted something to drink, and Mr. Carmody had denied having ordered it. Then Mr. Molloy had asked for a drink himself and had disappeared without waiting to get it. And, finally, there was the matter of the cupboard. Mr. Molloy, after starting to build a rabbit hutch, had apparently suspended operations in favour of smashing in the door of the cupboard at the foot of the stairs. It was all very puzzling to Sturgis, and, like most men of settled habit, he found the process of being puzzled upsetting.
He went to the telephone, and a silver voice came to him over the wire.
"Is this the Hall? I want to speak to Mr. Carroll."
Sturgis recognized the voice.
"Miss Wyvern?"
"Yes. Is that Sturgis? I say, Sturgis, what has become of Mr. Carroll? I was expecting him here half an hour ago. Have you seen him about anywhere?"
"I have not seen him since shortly after breakfast, miss. I understand that he went off in his little car with Miss Molloy."
"What!"
"Yes, miss. Some time ago."
There was silence at the other end of the wire.
"With Miss Molloy?" said the silver voice flatly.
"Yes, miss."
Silence again.
"Did he say when he would be back?"
"No, miss. But I understand that he was not proposing to return till quite late in the day."
More silence.
"Oh?"
"Yes, miss. Any message I can give him?"
"No, thank you.... No...! No, it doesn't matter."
"Very good, miss."
Sturgis returned to his pantry. Pat, hanging up the receiver, went out into her garden. Her face was set, and her lips compressed.
A snail crossed her path. She did not tread on it, for she had a kind heart, but she gave it a look. It was a look which, had it reached John, at whom it was really directed, would have scorched him.
She walked to the gate and stood leaning on it, staring straight before her.
I
It had been the opinion of Dolly Molloy, expressed during her conversation with Mr. Twist, that John, on awaking from his drugged slumber, would find himself suffering a headache. The event proved her a true prophet.
John, as became one who prized physical fitness, had been all his life a rather unusually abstemious young man. But on certain rare occasions dotted through the years of his sojourn at Oxford he had permitted himself to relax. As for instance, the night of his twenty-first birthday ... Boat-Race Night in his freshman year ... and, perhaps most notable of all, the night of the university football match in the season when he had first found a place in the Oxford team and had helped to win one of the most spectacular games ever seen at Twickenham. To celebrate each of these events he had lapsed from his normal austerity, and every time had wakened on the morrow to a world full of grayness and horror and sharp, shooting pains. But never had he experienced anything to compare with what he was feeling now.
He was dimly conscious that strange things must have been happening to him, and that these things had ended by depositing him on a strange bed in a strange room, but he was at present in no condition to give his situation any sustained thought. He merely lay perfectly still, concentrating all his powers on the difficult task of keeping his head from splitting in half.
When eventually, moving with exquisite care, he slid from the bed and stood up, the first thing of which he became aware was that the sun had sunk so considerably that it was now shining almost horizontally through the barred window of the room. The air, moreover, which accompanied its rays through the window had that cool fragrance which indicates the approach of evening.
Poets have said some good things in their time about this particular hour of the day, but to John on this occasion it brought no romantic thoughts. He was merely bewildered. He had started out from Rudge not long after eleven in the morning, and here it was late afternoon.
He moved to the window, feeling like Rip van Winkle. And presently the sweet air, playing about his aching brow, restored him so considerably that he was able to make deductions and arrive at the truth. The last thing he could recollect was the man Twist handing him a tall glass. In that glass, it now became evident, must have lurked the cause of all his troubles. With an imbecile lack of the most elementary caution, inexcusable in one who had been reading detective stories all his life, he had allowed himself to be drugged.
It was a bitter thought, but he was not permitted to dwell on it for long. Gradually, driving everything else from his mind, there stole upon him the realization that unless he found something immediately to slake the thirst which was burning him up he would perish of spontaneous combustion. There was a jug on the wash stand, and, tottering to it, he found it mercifully full to the brim. For the next few moments he was occupied, to the exclusion of all other mundane matters, with the task of seeing how much of the contents of this jug he could swallow without pausing for breath.
This done, he was at leisure to look about him and examine the position of affairs.
That he was a prisoner was proved directly he tested the handle of the door. And, as further evidence, there were those bars on the window. Whatever else might be doubtful, the one thing certain was that he would have to remain in this room until somebody came along and let him out.
His first reaction on making this discovery was a feeling of irritation at the silliness of the whole business. Where was the sense of it? Did this man Twist suppose that in the heart of peaceful Worcestershire he could immure a fellow for ever in an upper room of his house?
And then his clouded intellect began to function more nimbly. Twist's behaviour, he saw, was not so childish as he had supposed. It had been imperative for him to gain time in order to get away with his loot; and, John realized, he had most certainly gained it. And the longer he remained in this room, the more complete would be the scoundrel's triumph.
John became active. He went to the door again and examined it carefully. A moment's inspection showed him that nothing was to be hoped for from that quarter. A violent application of his shoulder did not make the solid oak so much as quiver.
He tried the window. The bars were firm. Tugging had no effect on them.
There seemed to John only one course to pursue.
He shouted.
It was an injudicious move. The top of his head did not actually come off, but it was a very near thing. By a sudden clutch at both temples he managed to avert disaster in the nick of time, and tottered weakly to the bed. There for some minutes he remained while unseen hands drove red-hot rivets into his skull.
Presently the agony abated. He was able to rise again and make his way feebly to the jug, which he had now come to look on as his only friend in the world.
He had just finished his second non-stop draught when something attracted his notice out of the corner of his eye, and he saw that in the window beside him were framed a head and shoulders.
"Hoy!" observed the head in a voice like a lorry full of steel girders passing over cobblestones. "I've brought you a cuppertea."
II
The head was red in colour and ornamented half-way down by a large and impressive moustache, waxed at the ends. The shoulders were broad and square, the eyes prawn-like. The whole apparition, in short, one could tell at a glance, was a sample or first instalment of the person of a sergeant-major. And unless he had dropped from heaven—which, from John's knowledge of sergeant-majors, seemed unlikely—the newcomer must be standing on top of a ladder.
And such, indeed, was the case. Sergeant-Major Flannery, though no acrobat, had nobly risked life and limb by climbing to this upper window to see how his charge was getting on and to bring him a little refreshment.
"Take your cuppertea, young fellow," said Mr. Flannery.
The hospitality had arrived too late. In the matter of tea-drinking John was handicapped by the fact that he had just swallowed approximately a third of a jug of water. He regretted to be compelled to reject the contribution for lack of space. But as what he desired most at the moment was human society and conversation, he advanced eagerly to the window.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"Flannery's my name, young fellow."
"How did I get here?"
"In that room?"
"Yes."
"I put you there."
"You did, did you?" said John. "Open this door at once, damn you!"
The Sergeant-Major shook his head.
"Language!" he said reprovingly. "Profanity won't do you no good, young man. Cursing and swearing won't 'elp you. You just drink your cuppertea and don't let's have no nonsense. If you'd made a 'abit in the past of drinking more tea and less of the other thing, you wouldn't be in what I may call your present predicament."
"Will you open this door?"
"No, sir. I will not open that door. There aren't going to be no doors opened till your conduct and behaviour has been carefully examined in the course of a day or so and we can be sure there'll be no verlence."
"Listen," said John, curbing a desire to jab at this man through the bars with the teaspoon. "I don't know who you are...."
"Flannery's the name, sir, as I said before. Sergeant-Major Flannery."
"... but I can't believe you're in this business...."
"Indeed I am, sir. I am Doctor Twist's assistant."
"But this man is a criminal, you fool...."
Sergeant-Major Flannery seemed pained rather than annoyed.
"Come, come, sir. A little civility, if you please. This, what I may call contumacious attitude, isn't helping you. Surely you can see that for yourself? Always remember, sir, the voice with the smile wins."
"This fellow Twist burgled our house last night. And all the while you're keeping me shut up here he's getting away."
"Is that so, sir? What house would that be?"
"Rudge Hall."
"Never heard of it."
"It's near Rudge-in-the-Vale. Twenty miles from here. Mr. Carmody's place."
"Mr. Lester Carmody who was here taking the cure?"
"Yes. I'm his nephew."
"His nephew, eh?"
"Yes."
"Come, come!"
"What do you mean?"
"It so 'appens," said Mr. Flannery, with quiet satisfaction, removing one hand from the window bars in order to fondle his moustache, "that I've seen Mr. Carmody's nephew. Tallish, thinnish, pleasant-faced young fellow. He was over here to visit Mr. Carmody during the latter's temp'ry residence. I had him pointed out to me."
Painful though the process was, John felt compelled to grit his teeth.
"That was Mr. Carmody's other nephew."
"Other nephew, eh?"
"My cousin."
"Your cousin, eh?"
"His name's Hugo."
"Hugo, eh?"
"Good God!" cried John. "Are you a parrot?"
Mr. Flannery, if he had not been standing on a ladder, would no doubt have drawn himself up haughtily at this outburst. Being none too certain of his footing, he contented himself with looking offended.
"No, sir," he said with a dignity which became him well, "in reply to your question, I am not a parrot. I am a salaried assistant at Doctor Twist's health-establishment, detailed to look after the patients and keep them away from the cigarettes and see that they do their exercises in a proper manner. And, as I said to the young lady, I understand human nature and am a match for artfulness of any description. What's more, it was precisely this kind of artfulness on your part that the young lady warned me against. 'Be careful, Sergeant-Major,' she said to me, clasping her 'ands in what I may call an agony of appeal, 'that this poor, misguided young son of a what-not don't come it over you with his talk about being the Lost Heir of some family living in the near neighbourhood. Because he's sure to try it on, you can take it from me, Sergeant-Major,' she said. And I said to the young lady, 'Miss,' I said, 'he won't come it over Egbert Flannery. Not him. I've seen too much of that sort of thing, miss,' I said. And the young lady said, 'Gawd's strewth, Sergeant-Major,' she said, 'I wish there was more men in the world like you, Sergeant-Major, because then it would be a dam' sight better place than it is, Sergeant-Major.'" He paused. Then, realizing an omission, added the words, "she said."
John clutched at his throbbing head.
"Young lady? What young lady?"
"You know well enough what young lady, sir. The young lady what brought you here to leave you in our charge. That young lady."
"That young lady?"
"Yes, sir. The one who brought you here."
"Brought me here?"
"And left you in our charge."
"Left me in your charge?"
"Come, come, sir!" said Mr. Flannery. "Are you a parrot?"
The adroit thrust made no impression on John. His mind was too busy to recognize it for what it was—viz., about the cleverest repartee ever uttered by a non-commissioned officer of His Majesty's regular forces. A monstrous suspicion had smitten him, with the effect almost of a physical blow. Suspicion? It was more than a suspicion. If it was at Dolly Molloy's request that he was now locked up in this infernal room, then, bizarre as it might seem, Dolly Molloy must in some way be connected with the nefarious activities of the man Twist. The links that connected the two might be obscure, but as to the fact there could be no doubt whatever.
"You mean ..." he gasped.
"I mean your sister, sir, who brought you over here in her car."
"What! That was my car."
"No, no, sir, that won't do. I saw her myself driving off in it some hours ago. She waved her 'and to me," said Mr. Flannery, caressing his moustache and allowing a note of tender sentiment to creep into his voice. "Yes, sir! She turned and waved her 'and."
John made no reply. He was beyond speech. Trifling though it might seem to an insurance company in comparison with the loss of Rudge Hall's more valuable treasures, the theft of the two-seater smote him a blow from which he could not hope to rally. He loved his Widgeon Seven. He had nursed it, tended it, oiled it, watered it, watched over it in sickness and in health as if it had been a baby sister. And now it had gone.
"Look here!" he cried feverishly. "You must let me out of here. At once!"
"No, sir. I promised your sister...."
"She isn't my sister! I haven't got a sister! Good heavens, man, can't you understand...."
"I understand very well, sir. Artfulness! I was prepared for it." Sergeant-Major Flannery paused for an instant. "The young lady," he said dreamily, "was afraid, too, that you might try to bribe me. She warned me most particular."
John did not speak. His Widgeon Seven! Gone!
"Bribe me!" repeated Sergeant-Major Flannery, his eyes widening. It was evident that the mere thought of such a thing sickened this good man. "She said you would try to bribe me to let you go."
"Well, you can make your mind easy," said John between his teeth. "I haven't any money."
There was a moment's silence. Then Mr. Flannery said "Ho!" in a rather short manner. And silence fell again.
It was broken by the Sergeant-Major, in a moralizing vein.
"It's a wonder to me," he said, and there was peevishness in his voice, "that a young fellow with a lovely sister like what you've got can bring himself to lower himself to the beasts of the field, as the saying is. Drink in moderation is one thing. Mopping it up and becoming verlent and a nuisance to all is another. If you'd ever seen one of them lantern slides showing what alcohol does to the liver of the excessive drinker maybe you'd have pulled up sharp while there was time. And not," said the Sergeant-Major, still with that oddly querulous note in his voice, "have wasted all your money on what could only do you 'arm. If you 'adn't of give in so to your self-indulgence and what I may call besottedness, you would now 'ave your pocket full of money to spend how you fancied." He sighed. "Your cuppertea's got cold," he said moodily.
"I don't want any tea."
"Then I'll be leaving you," said Mr. Flannery. "If you require anything, press the bell. Nobody'll take any notice of it."
He withdrew cautiously down the ladder, and, having paused at the bottom to shake his head reproachfully, disappeared from view.
John did not miss him. His desire for company had passed. What he wanted now was to be alone and to think. Not that there was any likelihood of his thoughts being pleasant ones. The more he contemplated the iniquity of the Molloy family, the deeper did the iron enter into his soul. If ever he set eyes on Thomas G. Molloy again....
He set eyes on him again, oddly enough, at this very moment. From where he stood, looking out through the bars of the window, there was visible to him a considerable section of the drive. And up the drive at this juncture, toiling painfully, came Mr. Molloy in person, seated on a bicycle.
As John craned his neck and glared down with burning eyes, the rider dismounted, and the bicycle, which appeared to have been waiting for the chance, bit him neatly in the ankle with its left pedal. John was too far away to hear the faint cry of agony which escaped the suffering man, but he could see his face. It was a bright crimson face, powdered with dust, and its features were twisted in anguish.
John went back to the jug and took another long drink. In the spectacle just presented to him he had found a faint, feeble glimmering of consolation.
I
On leaving John, Sergeant-Major Flannery's first act was to go to what he was accustomed to call the orderly room and make his report. He reached it only a few minutes after its occupant's return to consciousness. Chimp Twist had opened his eyes and staggered to his feet at just about the moment when the Sergeant-Major was offering John the cup of tea.
Mr. Twist's initial discovery, like John's, was that he had a headache. He then set himself to try to decide where he was. His mind clearing a little, he was enabled to gather that he was in England ... and, assembling the facts by degrees, in his study at Healthward Ho (formerly Graveney Court), Worcestershire. After that, everything came back to him, and he stood holding to the table with one hand and still grasping the lily with the other, and gave himself up to scorching reflections on the subject of the resourceful Mrs. Molloy.
He was still busy with these when there was a forceful knock on the door and Sergeant-Major Flannery entered.
Chimp's grip of the table tightened. He held himself together like one who sees a match set to a train of gunpowder and awaits the shattering explosion. His visitor's lips had begun to move, and Chimp could guess how that parade-ground voice was going to sound to a man with a headache like his.
"H'rarp-h'm," began Mr. Flannery, clearing his throat, and Chimp with a sharp cry reeled to a chair and sank into it. The noise had hit him like a shell. He cowered where he sat, peering at the Sergeant-Major with haggard eyes.
"Oo-er!" boomed Mr. Flannery, noting these symptoms. "You aren't looking up to the mark, Mr. Twist."
Chimp dropped the lily, feeling the necessity of having both hands free. He found he experienced a little relief if he put the palms over his eyes and pressed hard.
"I'll tell you what it is, sir," roared the sympathetic Sergeant-Major. "What's 'appened 'ere is that that nasty, feverish cold of yours has gone and struck inwards. It's left your 'ead and has penetrated internally to your vitals. If only you'd have took taraxacum and hops like I told you...."
"Go away!" moaned Chimp, adding in a low voice what seemed to him a suitable destination.
Mr. Flannery regarded him with mild reproach.
"There's nothing gained, Mr. Twist, by telling me to get to 'ell out of here. I've merely come for the single and simple reason that I thought you would wish to know I've had a conversation with the verlent case upstairs, and the way it looks to me, sir, subject to your approval, is that it 'ud be best not to let him out from under lock and key for some time to come. True, 'e did not attempt anything in the nature of actual physical attack, being prevented no doubt by the fact that there was iron bars between him and me, but his manner throughout was peculiar, not to say odd, and I recommend that all communications be conducted till further notice through the window."
"Do what you like," said Chimp faintly.
"It isn't what I like, sir," bellowed Mr. Flannery virtuously. "It's what you like and instruct, me being in your employment and only 'ere to carry out your orders smartly as you give them. And there's one other matter, sir. As perhaps you are aware, the young lady went off in the little car ..."
"Don't talk to me about the young lady."
"I was only about to say, Mr. Twist, that you will doubtless be surprised to hear that for some reason or another, having started to go off in the little car, the young lady apparently decided on second thoughts to continue her journey by train. She left the little car at Lowick Station, with instructions that it be returned 'ere. I found that young Jakes, the station-master's son, outside with it a moment ago. Tooting the 'orn, he was, the young rascal, and saying he wanted half a crown. Using my own discretion, I gave him sixpence. You may reimburse me at your leisure and when convenient. Shall I take the little car and put it in the garridge, sir?"
Chimp gave eager assent to this proposition, as he would have done to any proposition which appeared to carry with it the prospect of removing this man from his presence.
"It's funny, the young lady leaving the little car at the station, sir," mused Mr. Flannery in a voice that shook the chandelier. "I suppose she happened to reach there at a moment when a train was signalled and decided that she preferred not to overtax her limited strength by driving to London. I fancy she must have had London as her objective."