by Saki
“I shall speak to Cuthbert about it—after the wedding,” said Mrs. Bebberly Cumble.
“The wedding isn’t till next year,” said Vera, in recounting the story to her best girl friend, “and meanwhile old Betsy is living rent free, with soup twice a week and my aunt’s doctor to see her whenever she has a finger ache.”
“But how on earth did you get to know about it all?” asked her friend, in admiring wonder.
“It was a mystery—” said Vera.
“Of course it was a mystery, a mystery that baffled everybody. What beats me is how you found out—”
“Oh, about the jewels? I invented that part,” explained Vera; “I mean the mystery was where old Betsy’s arrears of rent were to come from; and she would have hated leaving that jolly quince tree.”
THE FORBIDDEN BUZZARDS
“IS matchmaking at all in your line?”
Hugo Peterby asked the question with a certain amount of personal interest.
“I don’t specialize in it,” said Clovis; “it’s all right while you’re doing it, but the after-effects are sometimes so disconcerting—the mute reproachful looks of the people you’ve aided and abetted in matrimonial experiments. It’s as bad as selling a man a horse with half a dozen latent vices and watching him discover them piecemeal in the course of the hunting season. I suppose you’re thinking of the Coultemeb girl. She’s certainly jolly, and quite all right as far as looks go, and I believe a certain amount of money adheres to her. What I don’t see is how you will ever manage to propose to her. In all the time I’ve known her I don’t remember her to have stopped talking for three consecutive minutes. You’ll have to race her six times round the grass paddock for a bet, and then blurt your proposal out before she’s got her wind back. The paddock is laid up for hay, but if you’re really in love with her you won’t let a consideration of that sort stop you, especially as it’s not your hay.”
“I think I could manage the proposing part right enough,” said Hugo, “if I could count on being left alone with her for four or five hours. The trouble is that I’m not likely to get anything like that amount of grace. That fellow Lanner is showing signs of interesting himself in the same quarter. He’s quite heartbreakingly rich and is rather a swell in his way; in fact, our hostess is obviously a bit flattered at having him here. If she gets wind of the fact that he’s inclined to be attracted by Betty Coultemeb she’ll think it a splendid match and throw them into each other’s arms all day long, and then where will my opportunities come in? My one anxiety is to keep him out of the girl’s way as much as possible, and if you could help me–”
“If you want me to trot Lanner round the countryside, inspecting alleged Roman remains and studying local methods of bee culture and crop raising, I’m afraid I can’t oblige you,” said Clovis. “You see, he’s taken something like an aversion to me since the other night in the smoking-room.”
“What happened in the smoking-room?”
“He trotted out some well-worn chestnut as the latest thing in good stories, and I remarked, quite innocently, that I never could remember whether it was George II. or James II. who was so fond of that particular story, and now he regards me with politely draped dislike. I’ll do my best for you, if the opportunity arises, but it will have to be in a roundabout, impersonal manner.”
“It’s so nice having Mr. Lanner here,” confided Mrs. Olston to Clovis the next afternoon; “he’s always been engaged when I’ve asked him before. Such a nice man; he really ought to be married to some nice girl. Between you and me, I have an idea that he came down here for a certain reason.”
“I’ve had much the same idea,” said Clovis, lowering his voice; “in fact, I’m almost certain of it.”
“You mean he’s attracted by—” began Mrs. Olston eagerly.
“I mean he’s here for what he can get,” said Clovis.
“For what he can get?” said the hostess with a touch of indignation in her voice; “what do you mean? He’s a very rich man. What should he want to get here?”
“He has one ruling passion,” said Clovis, “and there’s something he can get here that is not to be had for love nor for money anywhere else in the country, as far as I know.”
“But what? Whatever do you mean? What is his ruling passion?”
“Egg-collecting,” said Clovis. “He has agents all over the world getting rare eggs for him, and his collection is one of the finest in Europe; but his great ambition is to collect his treasures personally. He stops at no expense nor trouble to achieve that end.”
“Good heavens! The buzzards, the rough-legged buzzards!” exclaimed Mrs. Olston; “you don’t think he’s going to raid their nest?”
“What do you think yourself?” asked Clovis; “the only pair of rough-legged buzzards known to breed in this country are nesting in your woods. Very few people know about them, but as a member of the league for protecting rare birds that information would be at his disposal. I came down in the train with him, and I noticed that a bulky volume of Dresser’s Birds of Europe was one of the requisites that he had packed in his travelling-kit. It was the volume dealing with short-winged hawks and buzzards.”
Clovis believed that if a lie was worth telling it was worth telling well.
“This is appalling,” said Mrs. Olston; “my husband would never forgive me if anything happened to those birds. They’ve been seen about the woods for the last year or two, but this is the first time they’ve nested. As you say, they are almost the only pair known to be breeding in the whole of Great Britain; and now their nest is going to be harried by a guest staying under my roof. I must do something to stop it. Do you think if I appealed to him—?”
Clovis laughed.
“There is a story going about, which I fancy is true in most of its details, of something that happened not long ago somewhere on the coast of the Sea of Marmora, in which our friend had a hand. A Syrian nightjar, or some such bird, was known to be breeding in the olive gardens of a rich Armenian, who for some reason or other wouldn’t allow Lanner to go in and take the eggs though he offered cash down for the permission. The Armenian was found beaten near to death a day or two later, and his fences levelled. It was assumed to be a case of Mussulman aggression, and noted as such in all the Consular reports, but the eggs are in the Lanner collection. No, I don’t think I should appeal to his better feelings if I were you.”
“I must do something,” said Mrs. Olston tearfully; “my husband’s parting words when he went off to Norway were an injunction to see that those birds were not disturbed, and he’s asked about them every time he’s written. Do suggest something.”
“I was going to suggest picketing,” said Clovis.
“Picketing! You mean setting guards round the birds?”
“No; round Lanner. He can’t find his way through those woods by night, and you could arrange that you or Evelyn or Jack or the German governess should be by his side in relays all day long. A fellow guest he could get rid of, but he couldn’t very well shake off members of the household, and even the most determined collector would hardly go climbing after forbidden buzzards’ eggs with a German governess hanging round his neck, so to speak.”
Lanner, who had been lazily watching for an opportunity for prosecuting his courtship of the Coulterneb girl, found presently that his chances of getting her to himself for ten minutes even were nonexistent. If the girl was ever alone he never was. His hostess had changed suddenly, as far as he was concerned, from the desirable type that lets her guests do nothing in the way that best pleases them, to the sort that drags them over the ground like so many harrows. She showed him the herb garden and the greenhouses, the village church, some water-colour sketches that her sister had done in Corsica, and the place where it was hoped that celery would grow later in the year. He was shown all the Aylesbury ducklings and the row of wooden hives where there would have been bees if there had not been bee disease. He was also taken to the end of a long lane and shown a distant mound whereon local t
radition reported that the Danes had once pitched a camp. And when his hostess had to desert him temporarily for other duties he would find Evelyn walking solemnly by his side. Evelyn was fourteen and talked chiefly about good and evil, and of how much one might accomplish in the way of regenerating the world if one was thoroughly determined to do one’s utmost. It was generally rather a relief when she was displaced by Jack, who was nine years old, and talked exclusively about the Balkan War without throwing any fresh light on its political or military history. The German governess told Lanner more about Schiller than he had ever heard in his life about any one person; it was perhaps his own fault for having told her that he was not interested in Goethe. When the governess went off picket duty the hostess was again on hand with a not-to-be-gainsaid invitation to visit the cottage of an old woman who remembered Charles James Fox; the woman had been dead for two or three years, but the cottage was still there. Lanner was called back to town earlier than he had originally intended.
Hugo did not bring off his affair with Betty Coulterneb. Whether she refused him or whether, as was more generally supposed, he did not get a chance of saying three consecutive words, has never been exactly ascertained. Anyhow, she is still the jolly Coulterneb girl.
The buzzards successfully reared two young ones, which were shot by a local hairdresser.
THE STAKE
“RONNIE is a great trial to me,” said Mrs. Attray plaintively. “Only eighteen years old last February and already a confirmed gambler. I am sure I don’t know where he inherits it from; his father never touched cards, and you know how little I play—a game of bridge on Wednesday afternoons in the winter, for threepence a hundred, and even that I shouldn’t do if it wasn’t that Edith always wants a fourth and would be certain to ask that detestable Jenkinham woman if she couldn’t get me. I would much rather sit and talk any day than play bridge; cards are such a waste of time, I think. But as to Ronnie, bridge and baccarat and poker-patience are positively all that he thinks about. Of course I’ve done my best to stop it; I’ve asked the Norridrums not to let him play cards when he’s over there, but you might as well ask the Atlantic Ocean to keep quiet for a crossing as expect them to bother about a mother’s natural anxieties.”
“Why do you let him go there?” asked Eleanor Saxelby.
“My dear,” said Mrs. Attray, “I don’t want to offend them. After all, they are my landlords and I have to look to them for anything I want done about the place; they were very accommodating about the new roof for the orchid house. And they lend me one of then-cars when mine is out of order; you know how often it gets out of order.”
“I don’t know how often,” said Eleanor, “but it must happen very frequently. Whenever I want you to take me anywhere in your car I am always told that there is something wrong with it, or else that the chauffeur has got neuralgia and you don’t like to ask him to go out.”
“He suffers quite a lot from neuralgia,” said Mrs. Attray hastily. “Anyhow,” she continued, “you can understand that I don’t want to offend the Norridrums. Their household is the most rackety one in the county, and I believe no one even knows to an hour or two when any particular meal will appear on the table or what it will consist of when it does appear.”
Eleanor Saxelby shuddered. She liked her meals to be of regular occurrence and assured proportions.
“Still,” pursued Mrs. Attray, “whatever their own home life may be, as landlords and neighbours they are considerate and obliging, so I don’t want to quarrel with them. Besides, if Ronnie didn’t play cards there he’d be playing somewhere else.”
“Not if you were firm with him,” said Eleanor; “I believe in being firm.”
“Firm? I am firm,” exclaimed Mrs. Attray; “I am more than firm —I am farseeing. I’ve done everything I can think of it to prevent Ronnie from playing for money. I’ve stopped his allowance for the rest of the year, so he can’t even gamble on credit, and I’ve subscribed a lump sum to the church offertory in his name instead of giving him instalments of small silver to put in the bag on Sundays. I wouldn’t even let him have the money to tip the hunt servants with, but sent it by postal order. He was furiously sulky about it, but I reminded him of what happened to the ten shillings that I gave him for the Young Men’s Endeavour League ‘Self-Denial Week.’”
“What did happen to it?” asked Eleanor.
“Well, Ronnie did some preliminary endeavouring with it, on his own account, in connection with the Grand National. If it had come off, as he expressed it, he would have given the League twenty-five shillings and netted a comfortable commission for himself; as it was, that ten shillings was one of the things the League had to deny itself. Since then I’ve been careful not to let him have a penny piece in his hands.”
“He’ll get round that in some way,” said Eleanor with quiet conviction; “he’ll sell things.”
“My dear, he’s done all that is to be done in that direction already. He’s got rid of his wrist-watch and his hunting flask and both his cigarette cases, and I shouldn’t be surprised if he’s wearing imitation-gold sleeve links instead of those his Aunt Rhoda gave him on his seventeenth birthday. He can’t sell his clothes, of course, except his winter overcoat, and I’ve locked that up in the camphor cupboard on the pretext of preserving it from moth. I really don’t see what else he can raise money on. I consider that I’ve been both firm and farseeing.”
“Has he been at the Norridrums lately?” asked Eleanor.
“He was there yesterday afternoon and stayed to dinner,” said Mrs. Attray. “I don’t quite know when he came home, but I fancy it was late.”
“Then depend on it he was gambling,” said Eleanor, with the assured air of one who has few ideas and makes the most of them. “Late hours in the country always mean gambling.”
“He can’t gamble if he has no money and no chance of getting any,” argued Mrs. Attray; “even if one plays for small stakes one must have a decent prospect of paying one’s losses.”
“He may have sold some of the Amherst pheasant chicks,” suggested Eleanor; “they would fetch about ten or twelve shillings each, I dare say.”
“Ronnie wouldn’t do such a thing,” said Mrs. Attray; “and anyhow I went and counted them this morning and they’re all there. No,” she continued, with the quiet satisfaction that comes from a sense of painstaking and merited achievement, “I fancy that Ronnie had to content himself with the rôle of onlooker last night, as far as the card-table was concerned.”
“Is that clock right?” asked Eleanor, whose eyes had been straying restlessly towards the mantelpiece for some little time; “lunch is usually so punctual in your establishment.”
“Three minutes past the half-hour,” exclaimed Mrs. Attray; “cook must be preparing something unusually sumptuous in your honour. I am not in the secret; I’ve been out all the morning, you know.”
Eleanor smiled forgivingly. A special effort by Mrs. Attray’s cook was worth waiting a few minutes for.
As a matter of fact, the luncheon fare, when it made its tardy appearance, was distinctly unworthy of the reputation which the justly treasured cook had built up for herself. The soup alone would have sufficed to cast a gloom over any meal that it had inaugurated, and it was not redeemed by anything that followed. Eleanor said little, but when she spoke there was a hint of tears in her voice that was far more eloquent than outspoken denunciation would have been, and even the insouciant Ronald showed traces of depression when he tasted the rognons Saltikoff.
“Not quite the best luncheon I’ve enjoyed in your house,” said Eleanor at last, when her final hope had flickered out with the savoury.
“My dear, it’s the worst meal I’ve sat down to for years,” said her hostess; “that last dish tasted principally of red pepper and wet toast. I’m awfully sorry. Is anything the matter in the kitchen, Pellin?” she asked of the attendant maid.
“Well, ma’ am, the new cook hadn’t hardly time to see to things properly, coming in so sudden—” commence
d Pellin by way of explanation.
“The new cook!” screamed Mrs. Attray.
“Colonel Norridrum’s cook, ma’ am,” said Pellin.
“What on earth do you mean? What is Colonel Norridrum’s cook doing in my kitchen—and where is my cook?”
“Perhaps I can explain better than Pellin can,” said Ronald hurriedly; “the fact is, I was dining at the Norridrum’s yesterday, and they were wishing they had a swell cook like yours, just for today and tomorrow, while they’ve got some gourmet staying with them; their own cook is no earthly good—well, you’ve seen what she turns out when she’s at all flurried. So I thought it would be rather sporting to play them at baccarat for the loan of our cook against a money stake, and I lost, that’s all. I have had rotten luck at baccarat all this year.”
The remainder of his explanation, of how he had assured the cooks that the temporary transfer had his mother’s sanction, and had smuggled the one out and the other in during the maternal absence, was drowned in the outcry of scandalized upbraiding.
“If I had sold the woman into slavery there couldn’t have been a bigger fuss about it,” he confided afterwards to Bertie Norridrum, “and Eleanor Saxelby raged and ramped the louder of the two. I tell you what, I’ll bet you two of the Amherst pheasants to five shillings that she refuses to have me as a partner at the croquet tournament. We’re drawn together, you know.”