by E. F. Benson
They searched all the garden, but found no trace of the curry-cook: they made guarded enquiries of the servants as to whether he had been seen, but nothing whatever could be learned about him. So when Peppino took a ponderous hammer and a stout chisel from his tool chest and led the way upstairs, they all knew that the decisive moment had come. Perhaps he might be meditating (for indeed it was likely that he had a good deal to meditate about), but perhaps—Peppino called to him in his most sonorous tones, and said that he would be obliged to break his lock if no answer came, and presently the house resounded with knockings as terrible as those in Macbeth, and much louder. Then suddenly the lock gave, and the door was open.
The room was empty, and as they had all conjectured by now, the bed was unslept in. They opened the drawers of the wardrobe and they were as empty as the room. Finally, Peppino unlocked the door of a large cupboard that stood in the corner, and with a clinking and crashing of glass there poured out a cataract of empty brandy bottles. Emptiness: that was the key-note of the whole scene, and blank consternation its effect.
“My brandy!” said Mrs Quantock in a strangled voice. “There are fourteen or fifteen bottles. That accounts for the glazed look in his eyes which you, dear Lucia, thought was concentration. I call it distillation.”
“Did he take it from your cellar?” asked Lucia, too shattered to feel resentment, but still capable of intense curiosity.
“No: he had a standing order from me to order any little things he might want from my tradesmen. I wish I had my bills sent in every week.”
“Yes, dear,” said Lucia.
Georgie’s eyes sought hers.
“I saw him buy the first bottle,” he said. “I remember telling you about it. It was at Rush’s”
Peppino gathered up his hammer and chisel.
“Well, it’s no use sitting here and thinking of old times,” he observed. “I shall ring up the police-station and put the whole matter into their hands, as far as I am concerned. They’ll soon lay hands on him, and he can do his postures in prison for the next few years.”
“But we don’t know that it was he who committed all these burglaries yet,” said Lucia.
No one felt it was worth answering this, for the others had all tried and convicted him already.
“I shall do the same,” said Georgie.
“My tankard,” said Mrs Quantock. Lucia got up.
“Peppino mio,” she said, “and you, Georgie, and you, Daisy, I want you before you do anything at all to listen to me for five minutes. Just consider this. What sort of figure shall we all cut if we put the matter into the hands of the police? They will probably catch him, and it will all come out that we have been the dupes of a curry-cook. Think what we have all been doing for this last month, think of our classes, our exercises, our—everything. We have been made fools of, but for my part, I simply couldn’t bear that everybody should know I had been made a fool of. Anything but that. What’s a hundred pounds compared to that, or a tankard—”
“My Louis XVI snuff-box was worth at least that without the other things,” said Georgie, still with a secret satisfaction in being the greatest sufferer.
“And it was my hundred pounds, not yours, carissima,” said Peppino. But it was clear that Lucia’s words were working within him like leaven.
“I’ll go halves with you,” she said. I’ll give you a cheque for fifty pounds.”
“And who would like to go halves in my tankard?” said Daisy with bitter irony. “I want my tankard.”
Georgie said nothing, but his mind was extremely busy. There was Olga soon coming to Riseholme, and it would be awful if she found it ringing with the tale of the Guru, and glancing across to Peppino, he saw a thoughtful and sympathetic look in his eyes, that seemed to indicate that his mind was working on parallel lines. Certainly Lucia had given them all something to meditate upon. He tried to imagine the whole story being shouted into Mrs Antrobus’s ear-trumpet on the village-green, and could not endure the idea. He tried to imagine Mrs Weston ever ceasing to talk about it, and could not picture her silence. No doubt they had all been taken in, too, but here in this empty bedroom were the original dupes, who encouraged the rest.
After Mrs Quantock’s enquiry a dead silence fell.
“What do you propose, then?” asked Peppino, showing signs of surrender.
Lucia exerted her utmost wiles.
“Caro!” she said. “I want ‘oo to propose. Daisy and me, we silly women, we want ‘oo and Georgie to tell us what to do. But if Lucia must speak, I fink—”
She paused a moment, and observing strong disgust at her playfulness on Mrs Quantock’s face, reverted to ordinary English again.
“I should do something of this sort,” she said. “I should say that dear Daisy’s Guru had left us quite suddenly, and that he has had a call somewhere else. His work here was done; he had established our classes, and set all our feet upon the Way. He always said that something of the sort might happen to him–-“
“I believe he had planned it all along,” said Georgie. “He knew the thing couldn’t last for ever, and when my sisters recognised him, he concluded it was time to bolt.”
“With all the available property he could lay hands on,” said Mrs Quantock.
Lucia fingered her tassel.
“Now about the burglaries,” she said. “It won’t do to let it be known that three burglaries were committed in one night, and that simultaneously Daisy’s Guru was called away—”
“My Guru, indeed!” said Mrs Quantock, fizzing with indignation at the repetition of this insult.
“That might give rise to suspicion,” continued Lucia calmly, disregarding the interruption, “and we must stop the news from spreading. Now with regard to our burglary … let me think a moment.”
She had got such complete control of them all now that no one spoke.
“I have it,” she said. “Only Boaler knows, for Peppino told her not to say a word till the police had been sent for. You must tell her, carissimo, that you have found the hundred pounds. That settles that. Now you, Georgie.”
“Foljambe knows,” said Georgie.
“Then tell her not to say a word about it. Put some more things out in your lovely treasure-case, no one will notice. And you, Daisy.”
“Robert is away,” said she, quite meekly, for she had been thinking things over. “My maid knows.”
“And when he comes back, will he notice the loss of the tankard? Did you often use it?”
“About once in ten years.”
“Chance it, then,” said Lucia. “Just tell your maid to say nothing about it.”
She became deliciously modest again.
“There!” she said. “That’s just a little rough idea of mine and now Peppino and Georgie will put their wise heads together, and tell us what to do.”
That was easily done: they repeated what she had said, and she corrected them if they went wrong. Then once again she stood fingering the tassels of her Teacher’s Robe.
“About our studies,” she said. “I for one should be very sorry to drop them altogether, because they made such a wonderful difference to me, and I think you all felt the same. Look at Georgie now: he looks ten years younger than he did a month ago, and as for Daisy, I wish I could trip about as she does. And it wouldn’t do, would it, to drop everything just because Daisy’s Guru—I mean our Guru—had been called away. It would look as if we weren’t really interested in what he taught us, as if it was only the novelty of having a—a Brahmin among us that had attracted us.”
Lucia smiled benignly at them all.
“Perhaps we shall find, bye and bye, that we can’t progress much all by ourselves,” she said, “and it will all drop quietly. But don’t let us drop it with a bang. I shall certainly take my elementary class as usual this afternoon.”
She paused.
“In my Robe, just as usual,” she said.
Chapter NINE
The fish for which Mrs Weston sent to Brinton every
week since she did not like the look of the successor to Tommy Luton’s mother lay disregarded on the dish, while with fork and fish-slice in her hand, as aids to gesticulation, she was recounting to Colonel Boucher the complete steps that had led up to her remarkable discovery.
“It was the day of Mrs Lucas’s garden-party.” she said, “when first I began to have my ideas, and you may be sure I kept them to myself, for I’m not one to speak before I’m pretty sure, but now if the King and Queen came to me on their bended knee and said it wasn’t so, I shouldn’t believe them. Well—as you may remember, we all went back to Mrs Lucas’s party again about half-past six, and it was an umbrella that one had left behind, and a stick that another had forgotten, and what not, for me it was a book all about Venice, that I wanted to borrow, most interesting I am sure, but I haven’t had time to glance at it yet, and there was Miss Bracely just come!”
Mrs Weston had to pause a moment for her maid, Elizabeth Luton (cousin of Tommy), jogged her elbow with the dishcover in a manner that could not fail to remind her that Colonel Boucher was still waiting for his piece of brill. As she carved it for him, he rapidly ran over in his mind what seemed to be the main points so far, for as yet there was no certain clue as to the purpose of this preliminary matter, he guessed either Guru or Miss Bracely. Then he received his piece of brill, and Mrs Weston laid down her carving implements again.
“You’d better help yourself, ma’am,” said Elizabeth discreetly.
“So I had, and I’ll give you a piece of advice too, Elizabeth, and that is to give the Colonel a glass of wine. Burgundy! I was only wondering this afternoon when it began to turn chilly, if there was a bottle or two of the old Burgundy left, which Mr Weston used to be so fond of, and there was. He bought it on the very spot where it was made, and he said there wasn’t a headache in it, not if you drank it all night. He never did, for a couple of glasses and one more was all he ever took, so I don’t know how he knew about drinking it all night, but he was a very fine judge of wine. So I said to Elizabeth, ‘A bottle of the old Burgundy, Elizabeth,’ Well, on that evening I stopped behind a bit, to have another look at the Guru, and get my book, and when I came up the street again, what should I see but Miss Bracely walking in to the little front garden at ‘Old Place.’ It was getting dark, I know, and my eyes aren’t like Mrs Antrobus’s, which I call gimlets, but I saw her plain enough. And if it wasn’t the next day, it was the day after that, that they began mending the roof, and since then, there have been plumbers and painters and upholsterers and furniture vans at the door day and night.”
“Haw, hum,” said the Colonel, “then do you mean that it’s Miss Bracely who has taken it?”
Mrs Weston nodded her head up and down.
“I shall ask you what you think when I’ve told you all,” she said. “Well! There came a day, and if today’s Friday it would be last Tuesday fortnight, and if today’s Thursday, for I get mixed about it this morning, and then I never get it straight till next Sunday, but if today’s Thursday, then it would be last Monday fortnight, when the Guru went away very suddenly, and I’m sure I wasn’t very sorry, because those breathings made me feel very giddy and yet I didn’t like to be out of it all. Mr Georgie’s sisters went away the same day, and I’ve often wondered whether there was any connection between the two events, for it was odd their happening together like that, and I’m not sure we’ve heard the last of it yet.”
Colonel Boucher began to wonder whether this was going to be about the Guru after all and helped himself to half a partridge. This had the effect of diverting Mrs Weston’s attention.
“No,” she said. “I insist on your taking the whole bird. They are quite small, and I was disappointed when I saw them plucked, and a bit of cold ham and a savoury is all the rest of your dinner. Mary asked me if I wouldn’t have an apple tart as well, but I said ‘No; the Colonel never touches sweets, but he’ll have a partridge, a whole partridge,’ I said, ‘and he won’t complain of his dinner.’ Well! On the day that they all went away, whatever the explanation of that was, I was sitting in my chair opposite the Arms, when out came the landlord followed by two men carrying the settle that stood on the right of the fireplace in the hall. So I said, ‘Well, landlord, who has ordered that handsome piece?’ For handsome it was with it carved arms. And he said, ‘Good morning, ma’am no, good afternoon ma’am, it would be—It’s for Miss—and then he stopped dead and corrected himself, ‘It’s for Mr Pillson.’”
Mrs Weston rapidly took a great quantity of mouthfuls of partridge. As soon as possible she went on.
“So perhaps you can tell me where it is now, if it was for Mr Georgie,” she said. “I was there only two days ago, and it wasn’t in his hall, or in his dining room, or in his drawing room, for though there are changes there, that settle isn’t one of them. It’s his treasure case that’s so altered. The snuff-box is gone, and the cigarette case and the piece of Bow china, and instead there’s a rat-tail spoon which he used to have on his dinner-table, and made a great fuss with, and a bit of Worcester china that used to stand on the mantelpiece, and a different cigarette case, and a bead-bag. I don’t know where that same from, but if he inherited it, he didn’t inherit much that time, I priced it at five shillings. But there’s no settle in the treasure-case or out of it, and if you want to know where that settle is, it’s in Old Place, because I saw it there myself, when the door was open, as I passed. He bought it—Mr Georgie—on behalf of Miss Bracely, unless you suppose that Mr Georgie is going to live in Old Place one day and his own house the next. No; it’s Miss Bracely who is going to live at ‘Old Place’ and that explains the landlord saying ‘Miss’ and then stopping. For some reason, and I daresay that won’t puzzle me long, now I can give my mind to it, she’s making a secret about it, and only Mr Georgie and the landlord of the Arms know. Of course he had to, for ‘Old Place’ is his, and I wish I had bought it myself now, for he got it for an old song.”
“Well, by Jove, you have pieced it together finely,” said Colonel Boucher.
“Wait a bit,” said Mrs Weston, rising to her climax. “This very day, when Mary, that’s my cook as you know, was coming back from Brinton with that bit of brill we’ve been eating, for they hadn’t got an ounce of turbot, which I wanted, a luggage-train was standing at Riseholme station, and they had just taken out of it a case that could have held nothing but a grand piano. And if that’s not enough for you, Colonel, there were two big dress-baskets as well, which I think must have contained linen, for they were corded, and it took two men to move each of them, so Mary said, and there’s nothing so heavy as linen properly packed, unless it’s plate, and there printed on them in black—no, it would be white, because the dress-baskets are black, were two initials, O.B. And if you can point to another O.B. in Riseholme I shall think I’ve lost my memory.”
At this moment of supreme climax, the telephone-bell rang in the hall, shrill through the noise of cracking walnuts, and in came Elizabeth with the news that Mr Georgie wanted to know if he might come in for half-an-hour and chat. If it had been Olga Bracely herself, she could hardly have been more welcome; virtue (the virtue of observation and inference) was receiving its immediate reward.
“Delighted; say I’m delighted, Elizabeth,” said Mrs Weston, “and now, Colonel, why should you sit all alone here, and I all alone in the drawing room? Bring your decanter and your glass with you, and you shall spare me half a glass for myself, and if you can’t guess what one of the questions that I shall ask Mr Georgie is: well–-“
Georgie made haste to avail himself of this hospitality for he was bursting with the most important news that had been his since the night of the burglaries. Today he had received permission to let it be known that Olga was coming to Old Place, for Mr Shuttleworth had been informed of the purchase and furnishing of the house, and had, as expected, presented his wife with it, a really magnificent gift. So now Riseholme might know, too, and Georgie, as eager as Hermes, if not quite so swift, tripped across to Mrs Weston’s
, on his delightful errand. It was, too, of the nature of just such a punitive expedition as Georgie thoroughly enjoyed, for Lucia all this week had been rather haughty and cold with him for his firm refusal to tell her who the purchaser of Old Place was. He had admitted that he knew, but had said that he was under promise not to reveal that, until permitted and Lucia had been haughty in consequence. She had, in fact, been so haughty that when Georgie rang her up just now, before ringing Mrs Weston up, to ask if he might spend an hour after dinner there, fully intending to tell her the great news, she had replied through her parlour-maid that she was very busy at the piano. Very well, if she preferred the second and third movements of the Moonlight Sonata, which she had seriously taken in hand, to Georgie’s company, why, he would offer himself and his great news elsewhere. But he determined not to bring it out at once; that sort of thing must be kept till he said it was time to go away. Then he would bring it out, and depart in the blaze of Success.
He had brought a pretty piece of embroidery with him to occupy himself with, for his work had fallen into sad arrears during August, and he settled himself comfortably down close to the light, so that at the cost of very little eye-strain, he need not put on his spectacles.
“Any news?” he asked, according to the invariable formula. Mrs Weston caught the Colonel’s eye. She was not proposing to bring out her tremendous interrogation just yet.