“Well, it’s my form of it, anyhow. I just want to be with you for years and years and years, wondering what you’re going to do next.”
“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do at this moment,” said Sam. “I’m going to kiss you.”
Time passed.
“Kay,” said Sam.
“Yes?”
“Do you know—— No, you’ll laugh.”
“I promise I won’t. What were you going to say?”
“That photograph of you—the one I found in the fishing hut.”
“What about it?”
“I kissed it once.”
“Only once?”
“No,” said Sam stoutly. “If you really want the truth, every day; every blessed single day, and several times a day. Now laugh!”
“No; I’m going to laugh at you all the rest of my life, but not to-night. You’re a darling, and I suppose,” said Kay thoughtfully, “I’d better go and tell uncle so, hadn’t I, if he has got back?”
“Tell your uncle?”
“Well, he likes to know what’s going on around him in the home.”
“But that means that you’ll have to go in.”
“Only for a minute. I shall just pop my head in at the door and say ‘Oh, uncle, talking of Sam, I love him.’”
“Look here,” said Sam earnestly, “if you will swear on your word of honour—your sacred word of honour—not to be gone more than thirty seconds——”
“As if I could keep away from you longer than that!” said Kay.
Left alone in a bleak world, Sam found his thoughts taking for a while a sombre turn. In the exhilaration of the recent miracle which had altered the whole face of the planet, he had tended somewhat to overlook the fact that for a man about to enter upon the sacred state of matrimony he was a little ill equipped with the means of supporting a home. His weekly salary was in his pocket, and a small sum stood to his credit in a Lombard Street bank; but he could not, he realised, be considered an exceptionally good match for the least exacting of girls. Indeed, at the moment, like the gentleman in the song, all he was in a position to offer his bride was a happy disposition and a wild desire to succeed.
These are damping reflections for a young man to whom the keys of heaven have just been given, and they made Sam pensive. But his natural ebullience was not long in coming to the rescue. One turn up and down the garden and he was happy again in the possession of lavish rewards bestowed upon him by beaming bank managers, rejoicing in their hearty City fashion as they saw those missing bonds restored to them after many years. He refused absolutely to consider the possibility of failure to unearth the treasure. It must be somewhere in Mon Repos, and if it was in Mon Repos he would find it—even if, in directcontravention of the terms of Clause 8 in his lease, he had to tear the house to pieces.
He strode, full of a great purpose, to the window of the kitchen. A light shone there, and he could hear the rumbling voice of his faithful henchman. He tapped upon the window, and presently the blind shot up and Hash’s face appeared. In the background Claire, a little flushed, was smoothing her hair. The window opened.
“Who’s there?” said Hash gruffly.
“Only me, Hash. I want a word with you.”
“Ur?”
“Listen, Hash. Tear yourself away shortly, and come back to Mon Repos. There is man’s work to do there.”
“Eh?”
“We’ve got to search that house from top to bottom. I’ve just found out that it’s full of bonds.”
“You don’t say!”
“I do say.”
“Nasty things,” said Hash reflectively. “Go off in your ’ands as likely as not.”
At this moment the quiet night was rent by a strident voice.
“Sam! Hi, Sam! Come quick!”
It was the voice of Willoughby Braddock, and it appeared to proceed from one of the upper rooms of Mon Repos.
WHEN Willoughby Braddock, some ten minutes earlier, had parted from Kay and come out on to the gravel walk in front of San Rafael, he was in a condition of mind which it is seldom given to man to achieve until well through the second quart of champagne. So stirred was his soul, so churned up by a whirlwind of powerful emotions, that he could have stepped straight into any hospital as a fever patient and no questions asked.
For the world had become of a sudden amazingly vivid to Willoughby. After a quarter of a century in which absolutely nothing had occurred to ruffle the placid surface of his somewhat stagnant existence, strange and exhilarating things had begun to happen to him with a startling abruptness.
When he reflected that he had actually stood chatting face to face with a member of the criminal classes, interrupting him in the very act of burgling a house, and on top of that had found Lord Tilbury, a man who was on the committee of his club, violently transformed into a sans-culotte, it seemed to him that life in the true meaning of the word had at last begun.
But it was something that Kay had said that had set the seal on the thrills of this great day. Quitecasually she had mentioned that Mrs. Lippett proposed, as soon as her daughter Claire was married to Hash Todhunter, to go and live with the young couple. It was as if somebody, strolling with stout Balboa, had jerked his thumb at a sheet of water shining through the trees and observed nonchalantly, “By the way, there’s the Pacific.” It was this, even more than the other events of the afternoon, that had induced in Mr. Braddock the strange, yeasty feeling of unreality which was causing him now to stand gulping on the gravel. For years he had felt that only a miracle could rid him of Mrs. Lippett’s limpet-like devotion, and now that miracle had happened.
He removed his hat and allowed the cool night air to soothe his flaming forehead. He regretted that he had pledged himself to dinner that night at the house of his Aunt Julia. Aunt Julia was no bad sort, as aunts go, but dinner at her house was scarcely likely to provide him with melodrama, and it was melodrama that Mr. Braddock’s drugged soul now craved, and nothing but melodrama. It irked him to be compelled to leave this suburban maelstrom of swift events and return to a London which could not but seem mild and tame by comparison.
However, he had so pledged himself, and the word of a Braddock was his bond. Moreover, if he were late, Aunt Julia would be shirty to a degree. Reluctantly he started to move toward the two-seater, and had nearly reached it when he congealed again into a motionless statue. For, even as he prepared to open the gate of San Rafael, he beheld slinking in at the gate of Mon Repos a furtive figure.
In his present uplifted frame of mind a figure required to possess only the minimum of furtiveness to excitement Willoughby Braddock’s suspicions, and this one was well up in what might be called the Class A of furtiveness. It wavered and it crept. It hesitated and it slunk. And as the rays from the street lamp shone momentarily upon its face, Mr. Braddock perceived that it was a drawn and anxious face, the face of one who nerves himself to desperate deeds.
And, indeed, the other was feeling nervous. He walked warily, like some not too courageous explorer picking his way through a jungle in which he suspects the presence of unpleasant wild beasts. Drawn by the lure of gain to revisit Mon Repos, Chimp Twist was wondering pallidly if each moment might not not bring Hash ravening out at him from the shadows.
He passed round the angle of the house, and Willoughby Braddock, reckless of whether or no this postponement of his return to London would make him late for dinner at Aunt Julia’s and so cause him to be properly ticked off by that punctuality-loving lady, flitted silently after him and was in time to see him peer through the kitchen window. A moment later, his peering seeming to have had a reassuring effect, he had opened the back door and was inside the house.
Willoughby Braddock did not hesitate. The idea of being alone in a small semi-detached house with a desperate criminal who was probably armed to the gills meant nothing to him now. In fact, he rather preferred it. He slid silently through the back door in the fellow’s wake; and having removed his shoes, climbed the kitchen stairs. A noise from above toldhim that he was on the right track. Whatever it was that the furtive bloke was doing, he was doing it upstairs.
As for Chimp Twist, he was now going nicely. The operations which he was conducting were swift and simple. Once he had ascertained by a survey through the kitchen window that his enemy, Hash, was not on the premises, all his nervousness had vanished. Possessing himself of the chisel which he had placed in the drawer of the kitchen table in readiness for just such an emergency, he went briskly upstairs. The light was burning in the hall and also in the drawing-room; but the absence of sounds encouraged him to believe that Sam, like Hash, was out. This proved to be the case, and he went on his way completely reassured. All he wanted was five minutes alone and undisturbed, for the directions contained in Mr. Finglass’ letter had been specific; and once he had broken through the door of the top back bedroom, he anticipated no difficulty in unearthing the buried treasure. It was, Mr. Finglass had definitely stated, a mere matter of lifting a board. Chimp Twist did not sing as he climbed the stairs, for he was a prudent man, but he felt like singing.
A sharp cracking noise came to Willoughby Braddock’s ears as he halted snakily on the first landing. It sounded like the breaking open of a door.
And so it was. Chimp, had the conditions been favourable, would have preferred to insinuate himself into Hash’s boudoir in a manner involving less noise; but in this enterprise of his time was of the essence and he had no leisure for niggling at locks with achisel. Arriving on the threshold, he raised his boot and drove it like a battering-ram.
The doors of suburban villas are not constructed to stand rough treatment. If they fit within an inch or two and do not fall down when the cat rubs against them, the architect, builder and surveyor shake hands and congratulate themselves on a good bit of work. And Chimp, though a small man, had a large foot. The lock yielded before him and the door swung open. He went in and lit the gas. Then he took a rapid survey of his surroundings.
Half-way up the second flight of stairs, Willoughby Braddock stood listening. His face was pink and determined. As far as he was concerned, Aunt Julia might go and boil herself. Dinner or no dinner, he meant to see this thing through.
Chimp wasted no time.
“The stuff,” his friend, the late Edward Finglass, had written, “is in the top back bedroom. You’ve only to lift the third board from the window and put your hand in, Chimpie, and there it is.” And after this had come a lot of foolish stuff about sharing with Soapy Molloy. A trifle maudlin old Finky had become on his deathbed, it seemed to Chimp.
And, hurried though he was, Chimp Twist had time to indulge in a brief smile as he thought of Soapy Molloy. He also managed to fit in a brief moment of complacent meditation, the trend of which was that when it comes to a show-down brains will tell. He, Chimp Twist, was the guy with the brains, and the result was that in about another half minute he would be in possession of American-bearer securities to thevalue of two million dollars. Whereas poor old Soapy, who had just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wished to eat, would go through life eking out a precarious existence, selling fictitious oil stock to members of the public who were one degree more cloth-headed than himself. There was a moral to be drawn from this, felt Chimp, but his time was too valuable to permit him to stand there drawing it. He gripped his chisel and got to work.
Mr. Braddock, peering in at the door with the caution of a red Indian stalking a relative by marriage with a tomahawk, saw that the intruder had lifted a board and was groping in the cavity. His heart beat like a motor-bicycle. It gave him some little surprise that the fellow did not hear it.
Presumably the fellow was too occupied. Certainly he seemed like a man whose mind was on his job. Having groped for some moments, he now uttered a sound that was half an oath and half a groan, and as if seized with a frenzy, began tearing up other boards, first one, then another, after that a third. It was as though this business of digging up boards had begun to grip him like some drug. Starting in a modest way with a single board he had been unable to check the craving, and it now appeared to be his intention to excavate the entire floor.
But he was not allowed to proceed with this work uninterrupted. Possibly this wholesale demolition of bedrooms jarred upon Mr. Braddock’s sensibilities as a householder. At any rate, he chose this moment to intervene.
“I say, look here!” he said.
It had been his intention, for he was an enthusiastic reader of sensational fiction and knew the formulæ as well as anyone, to say “Hands up!” But the words had slipped from him without his volition. He hastily corrected himself.
“I mean, Hands up!” he said.
Then backing to the window, he flung it open and shouted into the night.
“Sam! Hi, Sam! Come quick!”
THOSE captious critics who are always on the alert to catch the historian napping and expose in his relation of events some damaging flaw will no doubt have seized avidly on what appears to be a blunder in the incident just recorded. Where, they will ask, did Willoughby Braddock get the revolver, without which a man may say “Hands up!” till he is hoarse and achieve no result? For of all the indispensable articles of costume which the well-dressed man must wear if he wishes to go about saying “Hands up!” to burglars, a revolver is the one which can least easily be omitted.
We have no secrets from posterity. Willoughby Braddock possessed no revolver. But he had four fingers on his right hand, and two of these he was now thrusting earnestly against the inside of his coat pocket. Wax to receive and marble to retain, Willoughby Braddock had not forgotten the ingenious subterfuge by means of which Soapy Molloy had been enabled to intimidate Lord Tilbury, and he employed it now upon Chimp Twist.
“You low blister!” said Mr. Braddock.
Whether this simple device would have been effective with a person of ferocious and hard-boiled temperament, one cannot say; but fortunately Chimp was not of this description. His strength was rather of the head than of the heart. He was a man who shrank timidly from even the appearance of violence; and though he may have had doubts as to the genuineness of Mr. Braddock’s pistol, he had none concerning the latter’s physique. Willoughby Braddock was no Hercules, but he was some four inches taller and some sixty pounds heavier than Chimp, and it was not in Mr. Twist’s character to embark upon a rough-and-tumble with such odds against him.
Indeed, Chimp would not lightly have embarked on a rough-and-tumble with anyone who was not an infant in arms or a member of the personnel of Singer’s Troupe of Midgets.
He tottered against the wall and stood there, blinking. The sudden materialisation of Willoughby Braddock, apparently out of thin air, had given him a violent shock, from which he had not even begun to recover.
“You man of wrath!” said Mr. Braddock.
The footsteps of one leaping from stair to stair made themselves heard. Sam charged in.
“What’s up?”
Mr. Braddock, with pardonable unction, directed his notice to the captive.
“Another of the gang,” he said. “I caught him.”
Sam gazed at Chimp and looked away, disappointed.
“You poor idiot,” he said peevishly. “That’s my odd-job man.”
“What?”
“My odd-job man.”
Willoughby Braddock felt for an instant damped. Then his spirits rose again. He knew little of the duties of odd-job men; but whatever they were, this one, he felt, had surely exceeded them.
“Well, why was he digging up the floor?”
And Sam, glancing down, saw that this was what his eccentric employee had, indeed, been doing; and suspicion blazed up within him.
“What’s the game?” he demanded, eying Chimp.
“Exactly,” said Mr. Braddock. “The game—what is it?”
Chimp’s nerves had recovered a little of their tone. His agile brain was stirring once more.
“You can’t do anything,” he said. “It wasn’t breaking and entering. I live here. I know the law.”
“Never mind about that. What were you up to?”
“Looking for something,” said Chimp sullenly. “And it wasn’t there.”
“Did you know Finglass?” asked Sam keenly.
Chimp gave a short laugh of intense bitterness.
“I thought I did. But I didn’t know he was so fond of a joke.”
“Bradder,” said Sam urgently, “a crook named Finglass used to live in this house, and he buried a lot of his swag somewhere in it.”
“Good gosh!” exclaimed Mr. Braddock. “You don’t say so!”
“Did this fellow take anything from under the floor?”
“You bet your sweet life I didn’t,” said Chimp with feeling. “It wasn’t there. You seem to know all about it, so I don’t mind telling you that Finky wrote me thatthe stuff was under the third board from the window in this room. Whether he was off his damned head or was just stringing me, I don’t know. But I do know it isn’t there. And now I’m going.”
“Oh, no, you aren’t, by Jove!” said Mr. Braddock.
“Oh, let him go,” said Sam wearily. “What’s the use of keeping him hanging round?” He turned to Chimp. His own disappointment was so keen that he could almost sympathise with him. “So you think Finglass really got away with the stuff, after all?”
“Looks like it.”
“Then why on earth did he write to you?”
Chimp shrugged his shoulders.
“Off his nut, I guess. He always was a loony sort of bird, outside of business.”
“You don’t think the other chap found the stuff, Sam?” suggested Mr. Braddock.
Sam shook his head.
“I doubt it. It’s much more likely it was never here at all. We had a friend of yours here this evening,” he said to Chimp. “At least, I suppose he was a friend of yours. Thomas G. Gunn he called himself.”
“I know who you mean—that poor dumb brick, Soapy. He wouldn’t have found anything. If it isn’t here it isn’t anywhere. And now I’m going.”
Mr. Braddock eyed him a little wistfully as he slouched through the doorway. It was galling to see the only burglar he had ever caught walking out as if he had finished paying a friendly call. However, he supposed there was nothing to be done about it. Sam had gone to the window and was leaning out, looking into the night.
“I must go and see Kay,” he said at length, turning.
“I must get up to town,” said Mr. Braddock. “By Jove, I shall be most frightfully late if I don’t rush. I’m dining with my Aunt Julia.”
“This is going to be bad news for her.”
“Oh, no, she’ll be most awfully interested. She’s a very sporting old party.”
“What the devil are you talking about?”
“My Aunt Julia.”
“Oh? Well, good-bye.”
Sam left the room, and Willoughby Braddock, following him at some little distance, for his old friend seemed disinclined for company and conversation, heard the front door bang. He sat down on the stairs and began to put on his shoes, which he had cached on the first landing. While he was engaged in this task, the front doorbell rang. He went down to open it, one shoe off and one shoe on, and found on the steps an aged gentleman with a white beard.
“Is Mr. Shotter here?” asked the aged gentleman.
“Just gone round next door. Mr. Cornelius, isn’t it? I expect you’ve forgotten me—Willoughby Braddock. I met you for a minute or two when I was staying with Mr. Wrenn.”
“Ah, yes. And how is the world using you, Mr. Braddock?”
Willoughby was only too glad to tell him. A confidant was precisely what in his exalted frame of mind he most desired.
“Everything’s absolutely topping, thanks. What with burglars floating in every two minutes and LordTilbury getting de-bagged and all that, life’s just about right. And my housekeeper is leaving me.”
“I am sorry to hear that.”
“I wasn’t. What it means is that now I shall at last be able to buzz off and see life. Have all sorts of adventures, you know. I’m frightfully keen on adventure.”
“You should come and live in Valley Fields, Mr. Braddock. There is always some excitement going on here.”
“Yes, you’re not far wrong. Still, what I meant was more the biffing off on the out-trail stuff. I’m going to see the world. I’m going to be one of those fellows Kipling writes about. I was talking to a chap of that sort at the club the other day. He said he could remember Uganda when there wasn’t a white man there.”
“I can remember Valley Fields when it had not a single cinema house.”
“This fellow was once treed by a rhinoceros for six hours.”
“A similar thing happened to a Mr. Walkinshaw, who lived at Balmoral, in Acacia Road. He came back from London one Saturday afternoon in a new tweed suit, and his dog, failing to recognise him, chased him on to the roof of the summer house.... Well, I must be getting along, Mr. Braddock. I promised to read extracts from my history of Valley Fields to Mr. Shotter. Perhaps you would care to hear them too.”
“I should love it, but I’ve got to dash off and dine with my Aunt Julia.”
“Some other time perhaps?”
“Absolutely.... By the way, that man I was telling you about. He was as near as a toucher bitten by a shark once.”
“Nothing to what happens in Valley Fields,” said Mr. Cornelius patriotically. “The occupant of the Firs at the corner of Buller Street and Myrtle Avenue—a Mr. Phillimore—perhaps you have heard of him?”
“No.”
“Mr. Edwin Phillimore. Connected with the firm of Birkett, Birkett, Birkett, Son, Podmarsh, Podmarsh & Birkett, the solicitors.”
“What about him?”
“Last summer,” said Mr. Cornelius, “he was bitten by a guinea pig.”
IT is a curious fact, and one frequently noted by philosophers, that every woman in this world cherishes within herself a deep-rooted belief, from which nothing can shake her, that the particular man to whom she has plighted her love is to be held personally blameworthy for practically all of the untoward happenings of life. The vapid and irreflective would call these things accidents, but she knows better. If she arrives at a station at five minutes past nine to catch a train which has already left at nine minutes past five, she knows that it is her Henry who is responsible, just as he was responsible the day before for a shower of rain coming on when she was wearing her new hat.
But there was sterling stuff in Kay Derrick. Although no doubt she felt in her secret heart that the omission of the late Mr. Edward Finglass to deposit his ill-gotten gains beneath the floor of the top back bedroom of Mon Repos could somehow have been avoided if Sam had shown a little enterprise and common sense, she uttered no word of reproach. Her reception of the bad news, indeed, when, coming out into the garden, he saw her waiting for him on the lawn ofSan Rafael and climbed the fence to deliver it, was such as to confirm once and for all his enthusiastic view of her splendid qualities. Where others would have blamed, she sympathised. And not content with mere sympathy, she went on to minimise the disaster with soothing argument.
“What does it matter?” she said. “We have each other.”
The mind of man, no less than that of woman, works strangely. When, a few days before, Sam had read that identical sentiment, couched in almost exactly the same words, as part of the speech addressed by Leslie Mordyke to the girl of his choice in the third galley of Cordelia Blair’s gripping serial,Hearts Aflame, he had actually gone so far as to write in the margin the words, “Silly fool!” Now he felt that he had never heard anything not merely so beautiful but so thoroughly sensible, practical and inspired.
“That’s right!” he cried.
If he had been standing by a table he would have banged it with his fist. Situated as he was, in the middle of a garden, all he could do was to kiss Kay. This he did.
“Of course,” he said, when the first paroxysm of enthusiasm had passed, “there’s just this one point to be taken into consideration. I’ve lost my job, and I don’t know how I’m to get another.”
“Of course you’ll get another!”
“Why, so I will!” said Sam, astounded by the clearness of her reasoning. The idea that the female intelligence was inferior to the male seemed to him a gross fallacy. How few men could have thought athing all out in a flash like that.
“It may not be a big job, but that will be all the more fun.”
“So it will.”
“I always think that people who marry on practically nothing have a wonderful time.”
“Terrific!”
“So exciting.”
“Yes.”
“I can cook a bit.”
“I can wash dishes.”
“If you’re poor, you enjoy occasional treats. If you’re rich, you just get bored with pleasure.”
“Bored stiff.”
“And probably drift apart.”
Sam could not follow her here. Loth as he was to disagree with her lightest word, this was going too far.
“No,” he said firmly, “if I had a million I wouldn’t drift apart from you.”
“You might.”
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“I’m only saying you might.”
“But I shouldn’t.”
“Well, anyhow,” said Kay, yielding the point, “all I’m saying is that it will be much more fun being awfully hard up and watching the pennies and going out to the Palais de Dance at Hammersmith on Saturday night, or if it was my birthday or something, and cooking our own dinner and making my own clothes, than—than——”
“——living in a gilded cage, watching love stifle,” said Sam, remembering Leslie Mordyke’s remarks on the subject.
“Yes. So, honestly, I’m very glad it was all a fairy story about that money being in Mon Repos.”
“So am I. Darned glad.”
“I’d have hated to have it.”
“So would I.”
“And I think it’s jolly, your uncle disinheriting you.”
“Absolutely corking.”
“It would have spoiled everything, having a big allowance from him.”
“Everything.”
“I mean, we should have missed all the fun we’re going to have, and we shouldn’t have felt so close together and——”
“Exactly. Do you know, I knew a wretched devil in America who came into about twenty million dollars when his father died, and he went and married a girl with about double that in her own right.”
“What became of him?” asked Kay, shocked.
“I don’t know. We lost touch. But just imagine that marriage!”
“Awful!”
“What possible fun could they have had?”
“None. What was his name?”
“Blenkiron,” said Sam in a hushed voice. “And hers was Poskitt.”
For some moments, deeply affected by the tragedy of these two poor bits of human wreckage, they stood in silence. Sam felt near to tears, and he thought Kay was bearing up only with some difficulty.
The door leading into the garden opened. Light from the house flashed upon them.
“Somebody’s coming out,” said Kay, giving a little start as though she had been awakened from a dream.
“Curse them!” said Sam. “Or rather, no,” he corrected himself. “I think it’s your uncle.”
Even at such a moment as this, he could harbour no harsh thought toward any relative of hers.
It was Mr. Wrenn. He stood on the steps, peering out.
“Kay!” he called.
“Yes?”
“Oh, you’re there. Is Shotter with you?”
“Yes.”
“Could you both come in for a minute?” inquired Mr. Wrenn, his voice—for he was a man of feeling—conveying a touch of apology. “Cornelius is here. He wants to read you that chapter from his history of Valley Fields.”
Sam groaned in spirit. On such a night as this young Troilus had climbed the walls of Troy and stood gazing at the Grecian tents where lay his Cressida, and he himself had got to go into a stuffy house and listen to a bore with a white beard drooling on about the mouldy past of a London suburb.
“Well, yes, I know; but——” he began doubtfully.
Kay laid a hand upon his arm.
“We can’t disappoint the poor old man,” she whispered. “He would take it to heart so.”
“Yes, but I mean——”
“No.”
“Just as you say,” said Sam.
He was going to make a good husband.
Mr. Cornelius was in the drawing-room. From under his thick white brows he peered at them, as they entered, with the welcoming eyes of a man who, loving the sound of his own voice, sees a docile audience assembling. He took from the floor a large brown paper parcel and, having carefully unfastened the string which tied it, revealed a second and lighter wrapping of brown paper. Removing this, he disclosed a layer of newspaper, then another, and finally a formidable typescript bound about with lilac ribbon.
“The matter having to do with the man Finglass occurs in Chapter Seven of my book,” he said.
“Just one chapter?” said Sam, with a touch of hope.
“That chapter describes the man’s first visit to my office, my early impressions of him, his words as nearly as I can remember them, and a few other preliminary details. In Chapter Nine——”
“Chapter Nine!” echoed Sam, aghast. “You know, as a matter of fact, there really isn’t any need to read all that, because it turns out that Finglass never——”
“In Chapter Nine,” proceeded Mr. Cornelius, adjusting a large pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, “I show him accepted perfectly unsuspiciously by the residents of the suburb, and I have described at some length, because it is important as indicating how completely his outward respectability deceived those with whom he came in contact, a garden party given by Mrs. Bellamy-North, of Beau Rivage, in Burberry Road, at which he appeared and spoke a few words on the subject of the forthcoming election for the district council.”
“We shall love to hear that,” said Kay brightly. Her eye, wandering aside, met Sam’s. Sam, who had opened his mouth, closed it again.
“I remember that day very distinctly,” said Mr. Cornelius. “It was a beautiful afternoon in June, and the garden of Beau Rivage was looking extraordinarily attractive. It was larger, of course, in those days. The house which I call Beau Rivage in my history has since been converted into two semi-detached houses, known as Beau Rivage and Sans Souci. That is a change which has taken place in a great number of cases in this neighbourhood. Five years ago Burberry Road was a more fashionable quarter, and the majority of the houses were detached. This house where we are now sitting, for example, and its neighbour, Mon Repos, were a single residence when Edward Finglass came to Valley Fields. Its name was then Mon Repos, and it was only some eighteen months later that San Rafael came into existence as a separate——”
He broke off; and breaking off, bit his tongue, for that had occurred which had startled him considerably. One unit in his audience, until that moment apparently as quiet and well-behaved as the other units, had suddenly, to all appearances, gone off his head. The young man Shotter, uttering a piercing cry, had leaped to his feet and was exhibiting strange emotion.
“What’s that?” cried Sam. “What did you say?”
Mr. Cornelius regarded him through a mist of tears. His tongue was giving him considerable pain.
“Did you say,” demanded Sam, “that in Finglass’ time San Rafael was part of Mon Repos?”
“Yeh,” said Mr. Cornelius, rubbing the wound tenderly against the roof of his mouth.
“Give me a chisel!” bellowed Sam. “Where’s a chisel? I want a chisel!”
“Bleck my soul!” said Mr. Cornelius. He spoke a little thickly, for his tongue was still painful. But its anguish was forgotten under the spell of a stronger emotion. Five minutes had passed since Sam’s remarkable outburst in the drawing-room; and now, with Mr. Wrenn and Kay, he was standing in the top back bedroom of San Rafael, watching the young man as he drew up from the chasm in which he had been groping a very yellowed, very dusty package which crackled and crumbled in his fingers.
“Bleck my soul!” said Mr. Cornelius.
“Good heavens!” said Mr. Wrenn.
“Sam!” cried Kay.
Sam did not hear their voices. With the look of a mother bending over her sleeping babe, he was staring at the parcel.
“Two million!” said Sam, choking. “Two million—count ’em—two million!”
A light of pure avarice shone in his eyes. He looked like a man who had never heard of the unhappy fate of Dwight Blenkiron, of Chicago, Illinois, and Genevieve, his bride,néePoskitt; or who, having heard, did not give a whoop.
“What’s ten per cent on two million?” asked Sam.
Valley Fields lay asleep. Clocks had been wound,cats put out of back doors, front doors bolted and chained. In a thousand homes a thousand good householders were restoring their tissues against the labours of another day. The silver-voiced clock on the big tower over the college struck the hour of two.
But though most of its inhabitants were prudently getting their eight hours and insuring that schoolgirl complexion, footsteps still made themselves heard in the silence of Burberry Road. They were those of Sam Shotter of Mon Repos, pacing up and down outside the gate of San Rafael. Long since had Mr. Wrenn, who slept in the front of that house, begun to wish Sam Shotter in bed or dead; but he was a mild and kindly man, loth to shout winged words out of windows. So Sam paced, unrebuked, until presently other footsteps joined in chorus with his and he perceived that he was no longer alone.
A lantern shone upon him.
“Out late, sir,” said the sleepless guardian of the peace behind him.
“Late?” said Sam. Trifles like time meant nothing to him. “Is it late?”
“Just gone two, sir.”
“Oh? Then perhaps I had better be going to bed.”
“Suit yourself, sir. Resident here, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Then I wonder,” said the constable, “if I can interest you in a concert which is shortly to take place in aid of a charitubulorganisation connection with a body of men to ’oom you as a nouse’older will——”
“Do you believe in palmists?”
“No, sir—— be the first to admit that you owe the safety of your person and the tranquillity of your ’ome—the police.”
“Well, let me tell you this,” said Sam warmly: “Some time ago a palmist told me that I was shortly about to be married, and I am shortly about to be married.”
“Wish you luck, sir. Then perhaps I can ’ave the pleasure of selling you and your good lady to be a couple of tickets for this concert in aid of the Policemen’s Orphanage. Tickets, which may be ’ad in any quantity, consist of the five-shilling ticket——”
“Are you married?”
“Yes sir—— the three-shilling ticket, the half-crown ticket, the shilling ticket, and the sixpenny ticket.”
“It’s the only life, isn’t it?” said Sam.
“That of the policeman, sir, or the orphan?”
“Married life.”
The constable ruminated.
“Well, sir,” he replied judicially, “it’s like most things—’as its advantages and its disadvantages.”
“Of course,” said Sam, “I can see that if two people married without having any money, it might lead to a lot of unhappiness. But if you’ve plenty of money, nothing can possibly go wrong.”
“Have you plenty of money, sir?”
“Pots of it.”
“In that case, sir, I recommend the five-shilling tickets. Say, one for yourself, one for your good lady to be and—to make up the round sovereign—a couple for any gentlemen friends you may meet at the club ’oo may desire to be present at what you can take it from me will be a slap-up entertainment, high classfrom start to finish. Constable Purvis will render Asleep on the Deep——”
“Look here,” said Sam, suddenly becoming aware that the man was babbling about something, “what on earth are you talking about?”
“Tickets, sir.”
“But you don’t need tickets to get married.”
“You need tickets to be present at the annual concert in aid of the Policemen’s Orphanage, and I strongly advocate the purchase of ’alf a dozen of the five-shilling.”
“How much are the five-shilling?”
“Five shillings, sir.”
“But I’ve only got a ten-pound note on me.”
“Bring your change to your ’ome to-morrow.”
Sam became aware with a shudder of self-loathing that he was allowing this night of nights to be marred by sordid huckstering.
“Never mind the change,” he said.
“Sir?”
“Keep it all. I’m going to be married,” he added in explanation.
“Keep the ’ole ten pounds, sir?” quavered the stupefied officer.
“Certainly. What’s ten pounds?”
There was a silence.
“If everybody was like you, sir,” said the constable at length, in a deep, throaty voice, “the world would be a better place.”
“The world couldn’t be a better place,” said Sam. “Good night.”
“Good night, sir,” said the constable reverently.
(THE END)