“Hurrah!” I shouted to Rosemary, but looking directly at the Countess. “We’re celebrating!”
Whereupon the girl that was left in the Countess rose to the occasion and she pirouetted with graceful abandon before me, in amazing contrast to my jumping-jack efforts. Only Blake’s reserved and somewhat dampening admonition brought me to my senses.
“Please don’t drop the child, Mr. Smart,” she said. I had the great satisfaction of hearing Rosemary cry when I delivered her up to Blake and started to slink out of the room in the wake of my warm-cheeked hostess. “You would be a wonderful father, sir,” said Blake, relenting a little.
I had the grace to say, “Oh, pshaw!” and then got out while the illusion was still alive. (As I’ve said before, I do not like a crying baby.)
It was the most wonderful dinner in the world, notwithstanding it was served on a kitchen table moved into the living room for the occasion. Imposing candelabra adorned the four corners of the table and the very best plate in the castle was put to use. There were roses in the centre of the board, a huge bowl of short-stemmed Marechal Niel beauties. The Countess’s chair was pulled out by my stately butler, Hawkes; mine by the almost equally imposing footman, and we faced each other across the bowl of roses and lifted an American cocktail to the health of those who were about to sit down to the feast. I think it was one of the best cocktails I’ve ever tasted. The Countess admitted having made it herself, but wasn’t quite sure whether she used the right ingredients or the correct proportions. She asked me what I thought of it.
“It is the best Manhattan I’ve ever tasted,” said I, warmly.
Her eyes wavered. Also, I think, her faith in me. “It was meant to be a Martini,” she said sorrowfully.
Then we both sat down. Was it possible that the corners of Hawkes’ mouth twitched? I don’t suppose I shall ever know.
My sherry was much better than I thought, too. It was deliciously oily. The champagne? But that came later, so why anticipate a joy with realisation staring one in the face?
We began with a marvellous hors-d’oeuvres. Then a clear soup, a fish aspec, a—Why rhapsodise? Let it be sufficient if I say that in discussing the Aladdin-like feast I secretly and faithfully promised my chef a material increase in wages. I had never suspected him of being such a genius, nor myself of being such a Pantegruelian disciple. I must mention the alligator pear salad. For three weeks I had been trying to buy alligator pears in the town hard by. These came from Paris. The chef had spoken to me about them that morning, asking me when I had ordered them. Inasmuch as I had not ordered them at all, I couldn’t satisfy his curiosity. My first thought was that Elsie Hazzard, remembering my fondness for the vegetable—it is a vegetable, isn’t it?—had sent off for them in order to surprise me. It seems, however, that Elsie had nothing whatever to do with it. The Countess had ordered them for me through her mother, who was in Paris at the time. Also she had ordered a quantity of Parisian strawberries of the hot-house, one-franc-apiece variety, and a basket of peaches. At the risk of being called penurious, I confess that I was immensely relieved when I learned that these precious jewels in the shape of fruit had been paid for in advance by the opulent mother of the Countess.
“Have I told you, Mr. Smart, that I am expecting my mother here to visit me week after next?”
She tactfully put the question to me at a time when I was so full of contentment that nothing could have depressed me. I must confess, however, that I was guilty of gulping my champagne a little noisily. The question came with the salad course.
“You don’t say so!” I exclaimed, quite cheerfully.
“That is to say, she is coming if you think you can manage it quite safely.”
“I manage it? My dear Countess, why speak of managing a thing that is so obviously to be desired?”
“You don’t understand. Can you smuggle her into the castle without any one knowing a thing about it? You see, she is being watched every minute of the time by detectives, spies, secret agents, lawyers, and Heaven knows who else. The instant she leaves Paris, bang! It will be like the starter’s shot in a race. They will be after her like a streak. And if you are not very, very clever they will play hob with everything.”
“Then why run the risk?” I ventured.
“My two brothers are coming with her,” she said reassuringly. “They are such big, strong fellows that—”
“My dear Countess, it isn’t strength we’ll need,” I deplored.
“No, no, I quite understand. It is cunning, strategy, caution, and all that sort of thing. But I will let you know in ample time, so that you may be prepared.”
“Do!” I said gallantly, trying to be enthusiastic.
“You are so wonderfully ingenious at working out plots and conspiracies in your books, Mr. Smart, that I am confident you can manage everything beautifully.”
Blatchford was removing my salad plate. A spasm of alarm came over me. I had quite forgotten the two men. The look of warning I gave her brought forth a merry, amused smile.
“Don’t hesitate to speak before Blatchford and Hawkes,” she said, to my astonishment. “They are to be trusted implicitly. Isn’t it true, Hawkes?”
“It is, Madam,” said he.
“Do you mean to say, Countess, that—”
“It has all been quite satisfactorily attended to through Mr. Poopendyke,” she said. “He consulted me before definitely engaging any one, Mr. Smart, and I referred him to my lawyers in Vienna. I do hope Hawkes and Blatchford and Henri, the chef, are quite satisfactory to you. They were recently employed by some one in the British embassy at—”
“Pray rest easy, Countess,” I managed to say, interrupting out of consideration for Hawkes and Blatchford, who, I thought, might feel uncomfortable at hearing themselves discussed so impersonally. “Everything is most satisfactory. I did not realise that I had you to thank for my present mental and gastronomical comfort. You have surrounded me with diadems.”
Hawkes and Blatchford very gravely and in unison said: “Thank you, sir.”
“And now let us talk about something else,” she said complacently, as if the project of getting the rest of her family into the castle were already off her mind. “I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed your last book, Mr. Smart. It is so exciting. Why do you call it ‘The Fairest of the Fair’?”
“Because my publisher insisted on substituting that title for the one I had chosen myself. I’ll admit that it doesn’t fit the story, my dear Countess, but what is an author to do when his publisher announces that he has a beautiful head of a girl he wants to put on the cover and that the title must fit the cover, so to speak?”
“But I don’t consider it a beautiful head, Mr. Smart. A very flashy blonde with all the earmarks of having posed in the chorus between the days when she posed for your artist. And your heroine has very dark hair in the book. Why did they make her a blonde on the cover?”
“Because they didn’t happen to have anything but blonde pictures in stock,” said I, cheerfully. “A little thing like that doesn’t matter, when it comes to literature, my dear Countess. It isn’t the hair that counts. It’s the hat.”
“But I should think it would confuse the reader,” she insisted. “The last picture in the book has her with inky black hair, while in all the others she is quite blonde.”
“A really intelligent reader doesn’t have to be told that the artist changed his model before he got to the last picture,” said I, and I am quite confident she didn’t hear me grate my teeth.
“But the critics must have noticed the error and commented upon it.”
“My dear Countess, the critics never see the last picture in a book. They are much too clever for that.”
She pondered. “I suppose they must get horribly sick of all the books they have to read.”
“And they never have a chance to experience the delicious period of convalescence that persons with less chronic afflictions have to look forward to,” said I, very gently. “They go from o
ne disease to another, poor chaps.”
“I once knew an author at Newport who said he hated every critic on earth,” she said.
“I should think he might,” said I, without hesitation. It was not until the next afternoon that she got the full significance of the remark.
As I never encourage any one who seeks to discuss my stories with me, being a modest chap with a flaw in my vanity, she abandoned the subject after a few ineffectual attempts to find out how I get my plots, how I write my books, and how I keep from losing my mind.
“Would you be entertained by a real mystery?” she asked, leaning toward me with a gleam of excitement in her eyes. Very promptly I said I should be. We were having our coffee. Hawkes and Blatchford had left the room. “Well, tradition says that one of the old barons buried a vast treasure in the cellar of this—”
“Stop!” I commanded, shaking my head. “Haven’t I just said that I don’t want to talk about literature? Buried treasure is the very worst form of literature.”
“Very well,” she said indignantly. “You will be sorry when you hear I’ve dug it up and made off with it.”
I pricked up my ears. This made a difference. “Are you going to hunt for it yourself?”
“I am,” she said resolutely.
“In those dark, dank, grewsome cellars?”
“Certainly.”
“Alone?”
“If necessary,” she said, looking at me over the edge of the coffee cup.
“Tell me all about it,” said I.
“Oh, we sha’n’t find it, of course,” said she calmly. I made note of the pronoun. “They’ve been searching for it for two centuries without success. My—that is, Mr. Pless has spent days down there. He is very hard-up, you know. It would come in very handy for him.”
I glowered. “I’m glad he’s gone. I don’t like the idea of his looking for treasures in my castle.”
She gave me a smile for that.
CHAPTER X
I AGREE TO MEET THE ENEMY
That night I dreamed of going down, down, down into the bowels of the earth after buried treasure, and finding at the end of my hours of travel the countess’s mother sitting in bleak splendour on a chest of gold with her feet drawn up and surrounded by an audience of spiders.
For an hour or more after leaving the enchanted rooms near the roof, I lounged in my study, persistently attentive to the portrait of Ludwig the Red, with my ears straining for sounds from the other side of the secret panels. Alas! those panels were many cubits thick and as staunch as the sides of a battleship. But there was a vast satisfaction in knowing that she was there, asleep perhaps, with her brown head pillowed close to the wall but little more than an arm’s length from the crimson waistcoat of Ludwig the Red,—for he sat rather low like a Chinese god and supported his waistcoat with his knees. A gross, forbidding chap was he! The story was told of him that he could quaff a flagon of ale at a single gulp. Looking at his portrait, one could not help thinking what a pitifully infinitesimal thing a flagon of ale is after all.
Morning came and with it a sullen determination to get down to work on my long neglected novel. I went down to breakfast. Everything about the place looked bleak and dreary and as grey as a granite tombstone. Hawkes, who but twelve hours before had seemed the embodiment of life in its most resilient form, now appeared as a drab nemesis with wooden legs and a frozen leer. My coffee was bitter, the peaches were like sponges, the bacon and rolls of uniform sogginess and the eggs of a strange liverish hue. I sat there alone, gloomy and depressed, contrasting the hateful sunshine with the soft, witching refulgence of twenty-four candles and the light that lies in a woman’s eyes.
“A fine morning, sir,” said Hawkes in a voice that seemed to come from the grave. It was the first time I had ever heard him speak so dolorously of the morning. Ordinarily he was a pleasant voiced fellow.
“Is it?” said I, and my voice sounded gloomier than his. I was not sure of it, but it seemed to me that he made a movement with his hand as if about to put it to his lips. Seeing that I was regarding him rather fixedly, he allowed it to remain suspended a little above his hip, quite on a line with the other one. His elbows were crooked at the proper angle I noticed, so I must have been doing him an injustice. He couldn’t have had anything disrespectful in mind.
“Send Mr. Poopendyke to me, Hawkes, immediately after I’ve finished my breakfast.”
“Very good, sir. Oh, I beg pardon, sir. I am forgetting, Mr. Poopendyke is out. He asked me to tell you he wouldn’t return before eleven.”
“Out? What business has he to be out?”
“Well, sir, I mean to say, he’s not precisely out, and he isn’t just what one would call in. He is up in the—ahem!—the east wing, sir, taking down some correspondence for the—for the lady, sir.”
I arose to the occasion. “Quite so, quite so. I had forgotten the appointment.”
“Yes, sir, I thought you had.”
“Ahem! I daresay Britton will do quite as well. Tell him to—”
“Britton, sir, has gone over to the city for the newspapers. You forget that he goes every morning as soon as he has had his—”
“Yes, yes! Certainly,” I said hastily. “The papers. Ha, ha! Quite right.”
It was news to me, but it wouldn’t do to let him know it. The countess read the papers, I did not. I steadfastly persisted in ignoring the Paris edition of the New York Herald for fear that the delightful mystery might disintegrate, so to speak, before my eyes, or become the commonplace scandal that all the world was enjoying. As it stood now, I had it all to myself—that is to say, the mystery. Mr. Poopendyke reads aloud the baseball scores to me, and nothing else.
It was nearly twelve when my secretary reported to me on this particular morning, and he seemed a trifle hazy as to the results of the games. After he had mumbled something about rain or wet grounds, I coldly enquired:
“Mr. Poopendyke, are you employed by me or by that woman upstairs?” I would never have spoken of her as “that woman,” believe me, if I had not been in a state of irritation.
He looked positively stunned. “Sir?” he gasped.
I did not repeat the question, but managed to demand rather fiercely: “Are you?”
“The countess had got dreadfully behind with her work, sir, and I thought you wouldn’t mind if I helped her out a bit,” he explained nervously.
“Work? What work?”
“Her diary, sir. She is keeping a diary.”
“Indeed!”
“It is very interesting, Mr. Smart. Rather beats any novel I’ve read lately. We—we’ve brought it quite up to date. I wrote at least three pages about the dinner last night. If I am to believe what she puts into her diary, it must have been a delightful occasion, as the newspapers would say.”
I was somewhat mollified. “What did she have to say about it, Fred?” I asked. It always pleased him to be called Fred.
“That would be betraying a confidence,” said he. “I will say this much, however: I think I wrote your name fifty times or more in connection with it.”
“Rubbish!” said I.
“Not at all!” said he, with agreeable spirit.
A sudden chill came over me. “She isn’t figuring on having it published, is she?”
“I can’t say as to that,” was his disquieting reply. “It wasn’t any of my business, so I didn’t ask.”
“Oh,” said I, “I see.”
“I think it is safe to assume, however, that it is not meant for publication,” said he. “It strikes me as being a bit too personal. There are parts of it that I don’t believe she’d dare to put into print, although she reeled them off to me without so much as a blush. ’Pon my soul, Mr. Smart, I never was so embarrassed in my life. She—”
“Never mind,” I interrupted hastily. “Don’t tell tales out of school.”
He was silent for a moment, fingering his big eyeglasses nervously. “It may please you to know that she thinks you are an exceedingly nice man.
”
“No, it doesn’t!” I roared irascibly. “I’m damned if I like being called an exceedingly nice man.”
“They were my words, sir, not hers,” he explained desperately. “I was merely putting two and two together—forming an opinion from her manner not from her words. She is very particular to mention everything you do for her, and thanks me if I call her attention to anything she may have forgotten. She certainly appreciates your kindness to the baby.”
“That is extremely gratifying,” said I acidly.
He hesitated once more. “Of course, you understand that the divorce itself is absolute. It’s only the matter of the child that remains unsettled. The—”
I fairly barked at him. “What the devil do you mean by that, sir? What has the divorce got to do with it?”
“A great deal, I should say,” said he, with the rare, almost superhuman patience that has made him so valuable to me.
“Upon my soul!” was all that I could say.
Hawkes rapped on the door luckily at that instant.
“The men from the telephone company are here, sir, and the electricians. Where are they to begin, sir?”
“Tell them to wait,” said I. Then I hurried to the top of the east wing to ask if she had the least objection to an extension ’phone being placed in my study. She thought it would be very nice, so I returned with instructions for the men to put in three instruments: one in her room, one in mine, and one in the butler’s pantry. It seemed a very jolly arrangement all ’round. As for the electric bell system, it would speak for itself.
Toward the middle of the afternoon when Mr. Poopendyke and I were hard at work on my synopsis we were startled by a dull, mysterious pounding on the wall hard by. We paused to listen. It was quite impossible to locate the sound, which ceased almost immediately. Our first thought was that the telephone men were drilling a hole through the wall into my study. Then came the sharp rat-a-ta-tat once more. Even as we looked about us in bewilderment, the portly facade of Ludwig the Red moved out of alignment with a heart-rending squeak and a long thin streak of black appeared at the inner edge of the frame, growing wider,—and blacker if anything,—before our startled eyes.
The George Barr McCutcheon Megapack: 25 Classic Novels and Stories Page 244