“You come,” Robin went on regardless of the interruption. “I’ve got six tickets for each. You, and Gladys. Two. Phil, three. Me, four.…”
“Only one girl so far,” Culling interposed. “D’you and Phil dance together? And who has the beads? Some one’s got to wear a bead necklace, you aren’t admitted without it even in Russia. University dancing costume, I believe it’s called.”
“Silly ass!” Robin murmured without heat, but Culling was already depicting two nude gladiators struggling in front of the Town Hall for the possession of an exiguous necklace. The Vice-Chancellor and Hebdomadal Council hurried in horror-stricken file down St. Aldates from Carfax.
“You, Gladys, and Phil,” continued Robin dispassionately. “Sylvia.…”
“Oh, am I coming?” asked Sylvia who had just entered the room, and was unpinning a motor-veil.
“Oh, yes, darling Sylvia!” Robin—I know—was both fond and proud of his sister, but the tone of ad hoc blandishment suggested that experience had taught him to persuade rather than coerce. “You’ll come, if you love me, and bring Mavis,” he added with eyes bashfully averted. “Now another man, and a girl for Mr. Merivale.”
“Is mother included?” asked Sylvia.
“Not if Mr. Merivale comes,” Robin answered in modest triumph. “Who’d you like?” he asked me.
“Keep a spare ticket up your sleeve,” I counselled. “Don’t lay on any one specially for me, I’ve seen my best dancing days. In any case I shouldn’t last the course three nights running. You’ll find me drifting away for a little bridge if I see you’re not getting up to mischief.”
Robin sucked his pencil meditatively, waved to the Seraph who had just entered the room, and turned to his sister.
“Well, who’s it to be?” he asked.
“I don’t yet know if I’m coming,” Sylvia answered.
“Rot! You must!” said Robin in a tone of mingled firmness and misgiving that suggested memories of previous unsuccessful efforts to hustle his sister. “Think it over,” he added more mildly, “but let me know soon, I want the thing fixed up. Whose car, Phil? It’s the driving of Jehu, for he driveth furiously.”
Philip closed a Blue Book, removed his feet from the back of Culling’s chair and strolled to the window. A long green touring car was racing up the drive, cutting all corners.
“The Old Man, by Jove!” he exclaimed.
“Who?”
“Rawnsley. I wonder what he wants.”
Michael, who had at last found a brown leather armchair to accord with the day’s colour scheme, took on himself to explain the Prime Minister’s sudden appearance.
“He’s come to fetch that bloody Nigel away,” he volunteered. “Praise God with a loud voice. Or else it’s a war with Germany.”
“Or the offer of a peerage,” I suggested pessimistically.
“I much prefer the war with Germany,” answered Michael, with the selfishness of youth. “I’ve no use for honourables, and he’d only be a viscount. ’Gad, I wonder if old Gillingham’s handed in his knife and fork! That means the Chancellorship for the guv’nor, and they’ll make him an earl, and you’ll be Lady Sylvia, my adored sister. How perfectly bloody! I shall emigrate.”
We were soon put out of our suspense. The library was in theory the inviolable sanctuary of the Attorney General, and at Philip’s suggestion we began to retreat through the open French windows into the garden. The Seraph and I, however, stood at the end of the file and were caught by Arthur and the Prime Minister before we could escape. Rawnsley had forgotten me during my absence abroad, and we had to be introduced afresh.
“Don’t go for a moment,” said Arthur, as we made another movement towards the window. “You may be able to help us.”
I pulled up a chair and watched Rawnsley fumbling for a spectacle-case. He had aged rather painfully since the day I first met him five-and-twenty years before, as President of the Board of Trade, coming to Oxford to address some political club.
“Sheet of paper? A.B.C., Roden?” he demanded in the quick, staccato voice of a man who is always trying to compress three weeks’ work into three days. He had his son’s ruthless vigour and wilful assurance without any of Nigel’s thin-skinned self-consciousness. “Thanks. Now. My daughter’s missing, Mr. Merivale. You may be able to help. Do you know her by sight?”
I mentioned the glimpse I had caught of her at the theatre.
“Quite enough. She left Downing Street yesterday morning at a quarter to ten and was to call at her dressmaker’s and come down to Hanningford by the eleven-twenty. We’ve only two decent trains in the day, and if she missed that she was to lunch in town and come by the four-ten. You left at eleven-fifteen, from platform five. The eleven-twenty goes from platform four. May I ask if you saw anything of her before you left?”
I said I had not, and added that I was so busily engaged in meeting old friends and being introduced to new ones that I had had neither time nor eyes.…
“Thank you!” he interrupted, turning to the Seraph. “Mr. Aintree, you know my daughter, and Roden tells me you came down by the four-ten yesterday afternoon. The train slips a coach at Longfield, a few miles beyond Hanningford. Did you by any chance see who was travelling by the slip?”
The Seraph was no more helpful than I had been, and Rawnsley shut the A.B.C. with an impatient slap.
“We must try in other directions, then,” he said. “She never left London.”
“Have you tried the dressmaker’s?” I asked.
“Arrived ten, left ten-forty,” said Rawnsley.
“Are any of her friends ill?” I asked. “Is she likely to have been called away suddenly?”
“Oh, I know why she’s disappeared,” Rawnsley answered. “This letter makes that quite plain. I want to find where it took place—with a view to tracing her.”
He threw me over a typewritten letter, with the words, “Received by first delivery today, posted in the late fee box of the South-Western District Office at Victoria.”
The letter, so far as I remember it, ran as follows:
“DEAR SIR,
“This is to inform you that your daughter is well and in safe keeping, but that she is being held as a hostage pending the satisfactory settlement of the Suffrage Question. As you are aware, Sir George Marklake has secured second place in the ballot for Private Member’s Bills. Your daughter will be permitted to communicate with you by post, subject to reasonable censorship; on the day when you promise special facilities and Government support for the Marklake Bill, and again at the end of the Report Stage and Third Reading. The same privilege will be accorded at the end of each stage in the House of Lords, and she will be restored to you on the day following that on which the Bill receives the Royal Assent.
“You will hardly need to be reminded that the Marklake Bill is to be taken on the first Private Member’s night after the Recess. Should you fail to give the assurances we require, it will be necessary for us to take such further steps as may seem best calculated to secure the settlement we desire.”
It took me some minutes to digest the letter before I was in a condition to offer even the most perfunctory condolence. Now that the blow had been struck, I found myself wondering why it had never been attempted before.
“You’ve no clue?” I asked.
Rawnsley inspected the letter carefully and held it up to the light.
“Written with a Remington, I should say. And a new one, without a single defect in type or alignment. And the paper is made by Hitchcock. That’s all I have to go on.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Advise Scotland Yard, I suppose. Then await developments. I don’t wish what I’ve told you this morning to go any further; no good purpose will be served by giving the militants a free advertisement. When I am in town, it is to be understood that Mavis is with her mother at Hanningford; and whe
n I am at Hanningford, Mavis must be at Downing Street.”
One has no business in private life to badger ministers with political questions, but I could not help asking what line Rawnsley proposed to take with the Marklake Bill. His grey eyes flashed with momentary fire.
“It won’t be taken this session,” he declared. “I’m moving to appropriate all Private Members’ time for the Poor Law Bill. And that’s all, I think; I must be getting back to my wife, she’s—a good deal upset. Can you spare Nigel, Roden? I should like to take him if I may. Good-bye, Mr. Merivale. Good-bye, Mr.— Oh, by the way, Roden, remember you’re tarred with the same brush. As soon as the Recess is over, you’ll have to keep a close watch on your family. Harding’s another; I shall have to warn him.”
Rawnsley’s departure left me with a feeling of anti-climax and vague discomfort. Short of assassination, which would have defeated its own object, a policy of abduction was the boldest and most effective that the militants could devise at a time when—in Joyce’s words—all arguments had been exhausted on both sides and war à outrance was declared by women who insisted on a vote against men who refused to concede it. I had every reason to think I knew whose brain had evolved that abduction policy; its reckless simplicity and directness were characteristic. Then and now I wondered, and still wonder, whether the author of that policy had sufficient imagination and perspective to appreciate the enormity of her offence, or the seriousness of the penalty attendant on non-success.
“Ber-luddy day!” exclaimed Michael, rejoining us in the library and delicately brushing occasional drops of moisture from his immaculate person. A heavy downpour of rain was starting, and though I looked like being spared initiation into the mysteries of golf—which I am not yet infirm enough to learn—it was not very clear how we were to kill time between meal and meal. Gladys was spending the morning quietly in her room, Philip wandered to and fro like a troubled spirit, and Sylvia had mysteriously departed.
In time Michael condescended to give us the reason. It appeared that while we were closeted with Rawnsley in the library, Robin had decided that rest and relaxation before his Schools could best be secured by the organisation of an impromptu Calico Ball, to be given that night to all who would come. While he sat at the telephone summoning the County of Hampshire to do his bidding, Sylvia had departed in her little white runabout to purchase masks and a bale of calico from Brandon Junction, and scour the neighbourhood in search of piano, violin, and ’cello. The wet afternoon was to be spent by the women of the party in improvising costumes, by the men in French-chalking the floor of the ball-room.
I took the precaution of calling on Gladys to acquaint her with the day’s arrangements, and beg her to see that I was not compelled to wear any costume belittling to the dignity of a middle-aged uncle. Then after writing a bulletin to catch my brother at Gibraltar, I felt I had earned rest and a cheroot before luncheon. Brandon Court was one of those admirably appointed houses where you could be certain of finding wooden matches in every room; it was not, however, till I got back to the library that I found companionship and the Seraph. He was lying on a sofa writing slowly and painfully with his left hand.
“If that’s volume three,” I said, “I won’t interrupt. If it’s anything else, we’d better smoke and talk. I will do the smoking.”
“I’m only scribbling,” he answered. “There’s no hurry about volume three.”
“Your public—quorum pars non magna sum—is growing impatient.”
“There won’t be any volume three,” he said quietly.
“But why not? I mean, a mere temporary hitch.…”
“It’s not that. If it wasn’t for this hand I could write like, well, like you do write once in a lifetime.”
“What’s to stop you?”
“Nothing. I only said there wouldn’t be a volume three. I shan’t publish it.”
“Why not?”
His big blue eyes looked up at me thoughtfully for a moment from under their long lashes. Then he crumpled up the half-covered sheet of paper, remarking—
“There are some things you can’t make public.”
“But with a nom de plume.…”
“I might let you see it,” he conceded.
There we had to leave the subject, as the library was soon afterwards invaded by zealous seekers after luncheon, first Lady Roden and Gartside, then the rest of the party with the single exception of Sylvia. Lady Roden walked over to the window and gazed in dismay at the unceasing downpour.
“Is Sylvia back yet, does anybody know?” she asked.
“She came in about a quarter of an hour ago,” volunteered the Seraph.
“Was she very wet?”
“I didn’t see her.”
Lady Roden bustled out of the room to make first-hand investigation.
“She took a Burberry with her,” Robin called out; then springing up he seized an ebony paper knife and advanced on Michael who was reclining decoratively on a Chesterfield sofa. “Talking of Burberries,” he went on, with menace in his tone, “what the deuce d’you mean by stealing mine, Michael?”
“Wouldn’t be seen dead in your bloody Burberry,” Michael responded with delicate languor.
The Roden boys were all much of a size, and on the subject of raided and disputed garments a fierce border warfare raged unintermittently round their bedroom doors. It was so invariable a rule with Michael to meet all direct charges with an equally direct denial that his brothers placed but slight reliance on his word.
“What was it doing in your room, then?” persisted Robin, as he applied the paper-knife to the soles of Michael’s feet.
“That was Phil’s,” said Michael ingenuously.
Robin turned to his elder brother with the suggestion of a little disciplinary boiling-oil.
“It’ll be enough if we just ruffle him,” answered the humane Philip. “Keep the door, Pat. Now, Robin!”
The perfect harmony of their attack argued long practice. Almost before I had time to move out of the way, Culling was standing with his back to the door while a scuffling trio on the hearthrug indicated that castigation was already being meted out. Within two minutes the immaculate Michael had been reduced to slim, white nudity, and even as the decorous Gartside proffered a consolatory “Times’ Educational Supplement,” the two brothers and Culling had divided the raiment and taken their centrifugal course through the house, secreting boots, socks, tie and collar in a succession of ingeniously inaccessible places as they went. Then the gong sounded, and Gartside took me in to luncheon.
Such little breezes, as I afterwards discovered, were characteristic of Brandon Court when the three brothers were at home and Philip had forgotten his public dignity. I could have spared the present outbreak, as the inflammatory word “Burberry” had kept me from putting a certain question to the Seraph. At one-thirty he had told Lady Roden that Sylvia had come in about a quarter of an hour before: to be strictly accurate, she had entered the yard as the stable clock struck one-fifteen, and had come into the house three minutes later by a side door and gone straight to her room by a side staircase. The Seraph and I had been sitting in the library since twelve-forty-five. The library looked out over a terrace on to the lawn: stable yard, side door and side staircase were at the diametrically opposite angle of the house. It was impossible for any one, even with the Seraph’s uncannily acute senses, to hear a sound from the stable yard; even had it been possible, he could not have identified it as the sound of Sylvia’s return.
I put my question in the smoking-room after luncheon, but got no satisfactory answer. Meeting Sylvia in the hall a few minutes later, I took my revenge by setting her to find out.
The afternoon was spent in polishing the ball-room floor. Others worked, I offered advice. At one point, Michael, too, showed a tendency to offer advice, but the threat that his young body would be dragged up and down till the bones cut through
the skin and scratched the floor, was effectual in persuading him to swathe his feet in towels and wade through uncharted seas of French chalk to the infinite detriment of the blue colour-scheme he had been forced into adopting for luncheon.
Mrs. Roden, Sylvia and Gladys retired with their three maids and a bale of calico. From time to time one of us would be summoned to have our measurements taken, but no indication was manifested of the guise in which we were to appear. At eight we retired to our rooms with sinking hearts; at eight-thirty a group of sheepish men loitered at the stair-head, waiting for one less self-conscious than the rest to give a lead to the others.
The ball—when it came and found us filled and reckless with dinner—proved an unqualified success. My indistinct memory of it recalls a number of pretty girls who danced well, talked very quickly, and called me—without exception—“my dear.” I sat out two with Sylvia, and was cut three times by Gladys, who disappeared with Philip at an early stage. Further, I supped twice with two creditably hungry girls, discussed the lineage of the county with Lady Roden, and smoked a sympathetic cigarette with a nice-looking shy boy of fifteen, who was always being cut by Gladys when he was not being cut by some one else. His name was Willoughby, and I hope some girl has smiled on him less absent-mindedly than my niece.
In my few spare moments I watched Sylvia dealing with her male guests. Culling approached and was rewarded with a smile and one dance. Gartside followed and received an even sweeter, Tristan-und-Isolde smile, and the same proportion of her programme. The Seraph, arm-in-sling, hung unostentatiously on the outskirts of the crowd, and with much hesitation summoned courage to ask if she could spare him one to sit out. She gave him two, and extended it later to three.
I heard afterwards that at the end of the third he prepared to return to the ball-room.
“Who are you taking this one with?” she asked him.
“No one,” he told her.
“Why not stay here, then?”
“Haven’t you promised it to young Willoughby?”
The Classic Mystery Novel Page 35