‘No. But I have a feeling. I know she doesn’t like Mr Carmody.’
Lord Emsworth exploded.
‘Perfect nonsense! Utter, absolute, dashed nonsense. What on earth does she find to object to in young Carmody? Most capable, intelligent boy. Leaves me alone. Doesn’t fuss me. I wish to heaven she would . . .’
He broke off, and stared blankly at a handsome woman of middle age who had come out of the house and was crossing the lawn.
‘Why, here she is!’ said Millicent, equally and just as disagreeably surprised. ‘I thought you had gone up to London, Aunt Constance.’
Lady Constance Keeble had arrived at the table. Declining, with a distrait shake of the head, her niece’s offer of the seat of honour by the tea-pot, she sank into a chair. She was a woman of still remarkable beauty, with features cast in a commanding mould and fine eyes. These eyes were at the moment dull and brooding.
‘I missed my train,’ she explained. ‘However, I can do all I have to do in London to-morrow. I shall go up by the eleven-fifteen. In a way, it will be more convenient, for Ronald will be able to motor me back. I will look in at Norfolk Street and pick him up there before he starts.’
‘What made you miss your train?’
Yes,’ said Lord Emsworth, complainingly. ‘You started in good time.’
The brooding look in his sister’s eyes deepened.
‘I met Sir Gregory Parsloe.’ Lord Emsworth stiffened at the name. ‘He kept me talking. He is extremely worried.’ Lord Emsworth looked pleased. ‘He tells me he used to know Galahad very well a number of years ago, and he is very much alarmed about this book of his.’
‘And I bet he isn’t the only one,’ murmured Millicent.
She was right. Once a man of the Hon. Galahad Threep-wood’s antecedents starts taking pen in hand and being reminded of amusing incidents that happened to my dear old friend So-and-So, you never know where he will stop; and all over England, among the more elderly of the nobility and gentry, something like a panic had been raging ever since the news of his literary activities had got about. From Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, of Matchingham Hall, to grey-headed pillars of Society in distant Cumberland and Kent, whole droves of respectable men who in their younger days had been rash enough to chum with the Hon. Galahad were recalling past follies committed in his company and speculating agitatedly as to how good the old pest’s memory was.
For Galahad in his day had been a notable lad about town. A beau sabreur of Romano’s. A Pink ‘Un. A Pelican. A crony of Hughie Drummond and Fatty Coleman; a brother-in-arms of the Shifter, the Pitcher, Peter Blobbs and the rest of an interesting but not strait-laced circle. Bookmakers had called him by his pet name, barmaids had simpered beneath his gallant chaff. He had heard the chimes at midnight. And when he had looked in at the old Gardenia, commissionaires had fought for the privilege of throwing him out. A man, in a word, who should never have been taught to write and who, if unhappily gifted with that ability, should have been restrained by Act of Parliament from writing Reminiscences.
So thought Lady Constance, his sister. So thought Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, his neighbour. And so thought the pillars of society in distant Cumberland and Kent. Widely as they differed on many points, they were unanimous on this.
‘He wanted me to try to find out if Galahad was putting anything about him into it.’
‘Better ask him now,’ said Millicent. ‘He’s just come out of the house and seems to be heading in this direction.’
Lady Constance turned sharply: and, following her niece’s pointing finger, winced. The mere sight of her deplorable brother was generally enough to make her wince. When he began to talk and she had to listen, the wince became a shudder. His conversation had the effect of making her feel as if she had suddenly swallowed something acid.
‘It always makes me laugh,’ said Millicent, ‘when I think what a frightfully bad shot Uncle Gally’s godfathers and godmothers made when they christened him.’
She regarded her approaching relative with that tolerant – indeed, admiring – affection which the young of her sex, even when they have Madonna-like faces, are only too prone to lavish on such of their seniors as have had interesting pasts.
‘Doesn’t he look marvellous?’ she said. ‘It really is an extraordinary thing that anyone who has had as good a time as he has can be so amazingly healthy. Everywhere you look, you see men leading model lives and pegging out in their prime, while good old Uncle Gaily, who apparently never went to bed till he was fifty, is still breezing along as fit and rosy as ever.’
‘All our family have had excellent constitutions,’ said Lord Emsworth.
And I’ll bet Uncle Gaily needed every ounce of his,’ said Millicent.
The Author, ambling briskly across the lawn, had now joined the little group at the tea-table. As his photograph had indicated, he was a short, trim, dapper little man of the type one associates automatically in one’s mind with checked suits, tight trousers, white bowler hats, pink carnations, and race-glasses bumping against the left hip. Though bare-headed at the moment and in his shirt-sleeves, and displaying on the tip of his nose the ink-spot of the literary life, he still seemed out of place away from a paddock or an American bar. His bright eyes, puckered at the corners, peered before him as though watching horses rounding into the straight. His neatly-shod foot had about it a suggestion of pawing in search of a brass rail. A jaunty little gentleman, and, as Millicent had said, quite astonishingly fit and rosy. A thoroughly misspent life had left the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, contrary to the most elementary justice, in what appeared to be perfect, even exuberantly perfect physical condition. How a man who ought to have had the liver of the century could look and behave as he did was a constant mystery to his associates. His eye was not dimmed nor his natural force abated. And when, skipping blithely across the turf, he tripped over the spaniel, so graceful was the agility with which he recovered his balance that he did not spill a drop of the whisky-and-soda in his hand. He continued to bear the glass aloft like some brave banner beneath which he had often fought and won. Instead of the blot on the proud family, he might have been a teetotal acrobat.
Having disentangled himself from the spaniel and soothed the animal’s wounded feelings by permitting it to sniff the whisky-and-soda, the Hon. Galahad produced a black-rimmed monocle, and, screwing it into his eye, surveyed the table with a frown of distaste.
‘Tea?’
Millicent reached for a cup.
‘Cream and sugar, Uncle Gaily?’
He stopped her with a gesture of shocked loathing.
‘You know I never drink tea. Too much respect for my inside. Don’t tell me you are ruining your inside with that poison.’
‘Sorry, Uncle Gaily. I like it.’
‘You be careful,’ urged the Hon. Galahad, who was fond of his niece and did not like to see her falling into bad habits. ‘You be very careful how you fool about with that stuff. Did I ever tell you about poor Buffy Struggles back in ‘ninety-three? Some misguided person lured poor old Buffy into one of those temperance lectures illustrated with coloured slides, and he called on me next day ashen, poor old chap – ashen. “Gaily,” he said. “What would you say the procedure was when a fellow wants to buy tea? How would a fellow set about it?” “Tea?” I said. “What do you want tea for?” “To drink,” said Buffy. “Pull yourself together, dear boy,” I said. “You’re talking wildly. You can’t drink tea. Have a brandy-and-soda.” “No more alcohol for me,” said Buffy. “Look what it does to the common earthworm.” “But you’re not a common earthworm,” I said, putting my finger on the flaw in his argument right away. “I dashed soon shall be if I go on drinking alcohol,” said Buffy. Well, I begged him with tears in my eyes not to do anything rash, but I couldn’t move him. He ordered in ten pounds of the muck and was dead inside the year.’
‘Good heavens! Really?’
The Hon. Galahad nodded impressively.
‘Dead as a door-nail. Got run over by a hansom cab, poor dear old c
hap, as he was crossing Piccadilly. You’ll find the story in my book.’
‘How’s the book coming along?’
‘Magnificently, my dear. Splendidly. I had no notion writing was so easy. The stuff just pours out. Clarence, I wanted to ask you about a date. What year was it there was that terrible row between young Gregory Parsloe and Lord Burper, when Parsloe stole the old chap’s false teeth, and pawned them at a shop in the Edgware Road? ‘96? I should have said later than that – ‘97 or ‘98. Perhaps you’re right, though. I’ll pencil in ‘96 tentatively.’
Lady Constance uttered a sharp cry. The sunlight had now gone quite definitely out of her life. She felt, as she so often felt in her brother Galahad’s society, as if foxes were gnawing her vitals. Not even the thought that she could now give Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe the inside information for which he had asked was able to comfort her.
‘Galahad! You are not proposing to print libellous stories like that about our nearest neighbour?’
‘Certainly I am.’ The Hon. Galahad snorted militantly ‘And, as for libel, let him bring an action if he wants to. I’ll fight him to the House of Lords. It’s the best documented story in my book. Well, if you insist it was ‘96, Clarence . . . I’ll tell you what,’ said the Hon. Galahad, inspired. ‘I’ll say “towards the end of the nineties”. After all, the exact date isn’t so important. It’s the facts that matter.’
And, leaping lightly over the spaniel, he flitted away across the lawn.
Lady Constance sat rigid in her chair. Her fine eyes were now protruding slightly, and her face was drawn. This and not the Mona Lisa’s, you would have said, looking at her, was the head on which all the sorrows of the world had fallen.
‘Clarence!’
‘My dear?’
‘What are you going to do about this?’
‘Do?’
‘Can’t you see that something must be done? Do you realize that if this awful book of Galahad’s is published it will alienate half our friends? They will think we are to blame. They will say we ought to have stopped him somehow. Imagine Sir Gregory’s feelings when he reads that appalling story!’
Lord Emsworth’s amiable face darkened.
‘I am not worrying about Parsloe’s feelings. Besides, he did steal Burper’s false teeth. I remember him showing them to me. He had them packed up in cotton-wool in a small cigar-box.’
The gesture known as wringing the hands is one that is seldom seen in real life, but Lady Constance Keeble at this point did something with hers which might by a liberal interpretation have been described as wringing.
‘Oh, if Mr Baxter were only here!’ she moaned.
Lord Emsworth started with such violence that his pince-nez fell off and he dropped a slice of seed-cake.
‘What on earth do you want that awful feller here for?’
‘He would find a way out of this dreadful business. He was always so efficient.’
‘Baxter’s off his head.’
Lady Constance uttered a sharp exclamation.
‘Clarence, you really can be the most irritating person in the world. You get an idea and you cling to it in spite of whatever anybody says. Mr Baxter was the most wonderfully capable man I ever met.’
Yes, capable of anything,’ retorted Lord Emsworth with spirit. ‘Threw flower-pots at me in the middle of the night. I woke up in the small hours and found flower-pots streaming in at my bedroom window and looked out and there was this feller Baxter standing on the terrace in lemon-coloured pyjamas, hurling the dashed things as if he thought he was a machine-gun, or something. I suppose he’s in an asylum by this time.’
Lady Constance had turned a bright scarlet. Even in their nursery days she had never felt quite so hostile towards the head of the family as now.
‘You know perfectly well that there was a quite simple explanation. My diamond necklace had been stolen, and Mr Baxter thought the thief had hidden it in one of the flower-pots. He went to look for it and got locked out and tried to attract attention by . . .’
‘Well, I prefer to think the man was crazy, and that’s the line that Galahad takes in his book.’
‘His . . .! Galahad is not putting that story in his book?’
‘Of course he’s putting it in his book. Do you think he’s going to waste excellent material like that? And, as I say, the line Galahad takes – and he’s a clear-thinking, level-headed man – is that Baxter was a raving, roaring lunatic. Well, I’m going to have another look at the Empress.’
He pottered off pigwards.
Ill
For some moments after he had gone, there was silence at the tea-table. Millicent lay back in her chair, Lady Constance sat stiffly upright in hers. A little breeze that brought with it a scent of wall-flowers began whispering the first tidings that the cool of evening was on its way.
‘Why are you so anxious to get Mr Baxter back, Aunt Constance?’ asked Millicent.Lady Constance’s rigidity had relaxed. She was looking her calm, masterful self again. She had the air of a woman who has just solved a difficult problem.
‘I think his presence here essential,’ she said.
Uncle Clarence doesn’t seem to agree with you.’
‘Your Uncle Clarence has always been completely blind to his best interests. He ought never to have dismissed the only secretary he has ever had who was capable of looking after his affairs.’
‘Isn’t Mr Carmody any good?’
‘No. He is not. And I shall never feel easy in my mind until Mr Baxter is back in his old place.’
‘What’s wrong with Mr Carmody?’
‘He is grossly inefficient. And,’ said Lady Constance, unmasking her batteries, ‘I consider that he spends far too much of his time mooning around you, my dear. He appears to imagine that he is at Blandings Castle simply to dance attendance on you.’
The charge struck Millicent as unjust. She thought of pointing out that she and Hugo only met occasionally and then on the sly, but it occurred to her that the plea might be injudicious. She bent over the spaniel. A keen observer might have noted a defensiveness in her manner. She looked like a girl preparing to cope with an aunt.
‘Do you find him an entertaining companion?’
Millicent yawned.
‘Mr Carmody? No, not particularly.’
A dull young man, I should have thought.’
‘Deadly.’
‘Vapid.’
‘Vap to a degree.’
‘And yet you went riding with him last Tuesday.’
‘Anything’s better than riding alone.’
‘You play tennis with him, too.’
‘Well, tennis is a game I defy you to play by yourself.’
Lady Constance’s lips tightened.
‘I wish Ronald had never persuaded your uncle to employ him. Clarence should have seen by the mere look of him that he was impossible.’ She paused.
‘It will be nice having Ronald here,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘You must try to see something of him. If,’ said Lady Constance, in the manner which her intimates found rather less pleasant than some of her other manners, ‘Mr Carmody can spare you for a moment from time to time.’
She eyed her niece narrowly. But Millicent was a match for any number of narrow glances, and had been from her sixteenth birthday. She was also a girl who believed that the best form of defence is attack.
‘Do you think I’m in love with Mr Carmody, Aunt Constance?’
Lady Constance was not a woman who relished the direct methods of the younger generation. She coloured.
‘Such a thought never entered my head.’
‘That’s fine. I was afraid it had.’
A sensible girl like you would naturally see the utter impossibility of marriage with a man in his position. He has no money and very little prospects. And, of course, your uncle holds your own money in trust for you and would never dream of releasing it if you wished to make an unsuitable marriage.’
‘So it does seem luc
ky I’m not in love with him, doesn’t it?’
‘Extremely fortunate.’
Lady Constance paused for a moment, then introduced a topic on which she had frequently touched before. Millicent had seen it coming by the look in her eyes.
‘Why you won’t marry Ronald, I can’t think. It would be so suitable in every way. You have been fond of one another since you were children.’
‘Oh, I like old Ronnie a lot.’
‘It has been a great disappointment to your Aunt Julia.’
‘She must cheer up. She’ll get him off all right, if she sticks at it.’
Lady Constance bridled.
‘It is not a question of . . . If you will forgive my saying so, my dear, I think you have allowed yourself to fall into away of taking Ronald far too much for granted. I am afraid you have the impression that he will always be there, ready and waiting for you when you at last decide to make up your mind. I don’t think you realize what a very attractive young man he is.’
‘The longer I wait, the more fascinating it will give him time to become.’
At a moment less tense, Lady Constance would have taken time off to rebuke this flippancy; but she felt it would be unwise to depart from her main theme.
‘He is just the sort of young man that girls are drawn to. In fact, I have been meaning to tell you. I had a letter from your Aunt Julia, saying that during their stay at Biarritz they met a most charming American girl, a Miss Schoonmaker, whose father, it seems, used to be a friend of your Uncle Galahad. She appeared to be quite taken with Ronald, and he with her. He travelled back to Paris with her and left her there.’
‘How fickle men are!’ sighed Millicent.
‘She had some shopping to do,’ said Lady Constance sharply. ‘By this time she is probably in London. Julia invited her to stay at Blandings, and she accepted. She may be here any day now. And I do think, my dear,’ proceeded Lady Constance earnestly, ‘that, before she arrives, you ought to consider very carefully what your feelings towards Ronald really are.’
‘You mean, if I don’t watch my step, this Miss Doopenhacker may steal my Ronnie away from me?’
It was not quite how Lady Constance would have put it herself, but it conveyed her meaning.
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