“No, nor any one else,” said Dennis Brown severely. “He is a stranger.”
“To you,” replied Millie Splay, showing fight.
Harold Jupp advanced and planted himself firmly before her.
“Do you know him yourself, Lady Splay?” he asked.
“But of course I do,” the poor lady exclaimed. “How absurd of you, Harold, to ask such a question! I met him at a party when Joan and I were in London at the beginning of this week.” She caught again at her fleeting courage. “So I invited him, and he’s coming this afternoon. I shall send the motor to meet him in an hour from now. So there’s an end of the matter.”
Harold Jupp shook his head sagely.
“We must see that the plate is all locked up safely to-night.”
“There! I knew it would be like this,” cried Millie Splay, wringing her hands. She remembered, from a war correspondent’s article, that to attack is the only successful defence. She turned on Jupp.
“I won’t be bullied by you, Harold! He’s a most charming person, with really nice manners,” she emphasised her praise of the absent guest, “and if only you will study him whilst he is here — all of you, you will be greatly improved at the end of your visit.”
Harold Jupp was quite unimpressed by Millie Splay’s outburst. He remained severely in front of her, judge, prosecutor and jury all in one, and all relentlessly against her.
“And what is his name?”
Lady Splay looked down and looked up.
“Mr. Albany Todd,” she said.
“I don’t like it,” said Harold Jupp.
“No,” added Dennis Brown sadly from a corner. “We can’t like it, Lady Splay.”
Lady Splay turned with her most insinuating smile towards Brown.
“Oh, Dennis, do be nice and remember this isn’t your house,” she cried. “You can be so unpleasant if you find any one here you don’t like. Mr. Albany Todd’s quite a famous person.”
Harold Jupp, of the inquiring mind, still stood looking down on Lady Splay without any softening of his face.
“What for?” he asked.
Lady Splay groaned in despair.
“Oh, I was sure you were going to ask that. You are so unpleasant.” She put her hand to her forehead. “But I know quite well. Yes, I do.” Her face suddenly cleared. “He is a conversationalist — that’s it — a great conversationalist. He is the sort of man,” she spoke as one repeating a lesson, “who would have been welcome at the breakfast table of Mr. Rogers.”
“Rogers?” Harold Jupp asked sternly. “I don’t know him.”
“And probably never will, Harold, I am sorry to say,” said Lady Splay triumphantly. “Mr. Rogers was in heaven many years ago.” She suddenly changed her note and began to implore. “Oh, do be pleasant, you and Dennis!”
Harold Jupp’s mouth began to twitch, but he composed it again, with an effort, to the stern lines befitting the occasion.
“I’ll tell you what I think, Lady Splay,” said he, pronouncing judgment. “Your new guest’s a Plater.”
The dreadful expected word was spoken. Lady Splay broke into appeals, denials, threats. “Oh, he isn’t, he isn’t!” She turned to her husband. “Chichester, exert your authority! He’s not a Plater really. He’s not right down the course. And even if he were, they’ve got to be polite to him.”
Sir Chichester, however, was the last man who could be lured into the expression of a definite opinion.
“My dear, I never interfere in the arrangements of the house. You have your realm. I have mine. I am sure those papers are being kept in the servants’ hall,” and he left the room hurriedly.
“Oh, how mean men are!” cried Millie; and they all began to laugh.
Lady Splay saw a glimpse of hope in their laughter and became much more cheerful.
“As you are not racing, dear,” she said to Joan, “he will be quite a pleasant companion for you.”
Sir Chichester returned with the evening papers. Dennis and Miranda and Harold Jupp rose to go upstairs and change into flannels; and suddenly, a good hour before his time, Harper, the butler, announced:
“Mr. Albany Todd.”
Mr. Albany Todd was a stout, consequential personage, and ovoid in appearance. Thin legs broadened out to very wide hips, and from the hips he curved in again to a bald and shiny head, which in its turn curved inwards to a high, narrow crown. Lady Splay casting a look of appeal towards her refractory young guests hurried forward to meet him.
“This is my husband.” She presented him to the others. “I was going to send the motor-car to meet the seven o’clock train.”
“Oh, thank you, Lady Splay,” Mr. Albany Todd returned in a booming voice. “I have been staying not more than twenty miles from here, with a dear old friend, a rare and inestimable being, Lord Bilberry, and he was kind enough to send me in.”
“What, old man Bilberry,” cried Harold Jupp. “Isn’t he balmy?”
“Balmy, sir?” Mr. Todd asked in surprise. “He takes the air every morning, if that is what you mean.” He turned again to Lady Splay. “He keeps the most admirable table. You must know him, Lady Splay. I will see to it.”
“Thank you,” said Millie Splay humbly.
“Ah, muffins!” said Mr. Albany Todd with glistening eyes. He ate one and took another. “These are really as good as the muffins I ate at a wonderful week-end party a fortnight ago.”
The chatter of the others ceased. The great conversationalist, it seemed, was off. Miranda, Dennis, Harold Jupp, Sir Chichester, even Joan looked up with expectation.
“Yes,” said Lady Splay, encouraging him. She looked around at her guests. “Now you shall see,” she seemed to say.
“How we laughed! What sprightly talk! The fine flavour of that party is quite incommunicable. Just dear old friends, you see, intimate, congenial friends.”
Mr. Albany Todd stopped. It appeared that he needed a question to be put to him. Lady Splay dutifully put it.
“And where did this party take place, Mr. Albany Todd?”
Mr. Albany Todd smiled and dusted the crumbs from his knees.
“At the Earl of Wimborough’s little place in the north. Do you know the Earl of Wimborough? No? You must, dear lady! I will see to it.”
“Thank you,” said Millie Splay.
Harold Jupp looked eagerly at the personage, and said, “I hope Wimborough won’t go jumping this winter.”
“Jumping!” cried Mr. Albany Todd turning indignantly. “I should think not indeed! Jumping! Why, he is seventy-three!”
He was utterly scandalised that any one should attribute the possibility of such wayward behaviour to the venerable Earl. In his agitation he ate another muffin. After all, if the nobleman did go jumping in the winter why should this young and horsey man presume to criticise him.
“Harold Jupp was drawing a distinction between flat racing and steeple-chasing, Mr. Albany Todd,” Sir Chichester suavely explained.
“Oh, I see.” Mr. Albany Todd was appeased. He turned a condescending face upon Joan Whitworth.
“And what are you reading, Miss Whitworth?”
“What ho!” interposed Harold Jupp.
Joan shot at him a withering glance.
“It wouldn’t interest you.” She smiled on Mr. Albany Todd. “It’s Browning.”
“Well, that’s just where you are wrong,” returned Jupp. “Browning’s the only poet I can stick. There’s a ripping thing of his I learnt at school.”
“‘I sprang to the saddle and Joris and he,
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three.’”
“Oh,” exclaimed Miranda eagerly, “a horse race!”
“Nothing of the sort, Miranda. I am thoroughly ashamed of you,” said Harold in reproof. “It’s ‘How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.’”
Here Joan intervened disdainfully.
“But that’s not Browning!”
Lady Splay looked perplexed.
“Are you sure, Joan?”
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Joan tossed her head.
“Of course, it’s Browning all right,” she explained, “but it’s not Browning if you understand me.”
The explanation left that company mystified. Harold Jupp shook his head mournfully at Joan, and tapped his forehead.
“Excessive study, Joan, has turned that little head. The moment I saw you in sandals I said to myself, ‘Joan couldn’t take the hill.’”
Joan wrinkled her nose, and made a grimace at him. What rejoinder she would have made no one was to know. For Mr. Albany Todd finding himself unduly neglected burst into the conversation with a complete irrelevance.
“I am so happy. I shot a stag last autumn.”
Both Dennis Brown and Harold Jupp turned to the great conversationalist with real interest.
“How many stone?” asked Dennis.
“I used a rifle,” replied Mr. Albany Todd coldly. He did not like to be made fun of; and suddenly a ripple of clear laughter broke deliciously from Joan.
Lady Splay looked agitatedly around for succour. Oh, what a mistake she had made in bringing Mr. Albany Todd into the midst of these ribald young people. And after all — she had to admit it ruefully, he was a bit of a Plater. Dennis Brown, however, hurried to the rescue. He came across the room to Joan, and sat down at her side.
“I haven’t had a word with you, Joan.”
“No,” she answered.
“And how’s the little book going on? Do tell me! I won’t laugh, upon my word.”
Joan herself tried not to. “Oh, pig, pig!” she exclaimed, but she got no further in her anathema for Miranda drew up a stool, and sat in admiration before her.
“Yes, do tell us,” she pleaded. “It’s all so wonderful.”
Miranda, however, was never to hear. Mr. Albany Todd leaned forward with an upraised forefinger, and a smile of keen discernment.
“You are writing a book, Miss Whitworth,” he said, as if he had discovered the truth by his own intuition, and expected her to deny the impeachment. “Ah, but you are! And I see that you can write one.”
“Now, how?” asked Harold Jupp.
Mr. Albany Todd waved the question aside. “The moment I entered the hall, and saw Miss Whitworth, I said to myself, ‘There’s a book there!’ Yes, I said that. I knew it! I know women.”
Mr. Albany Todd closed his eyelids, and peeped out through the narrowest possible slits in the cunningest fashion. “Some experience you know. I am the last man to boast of it. A certain almost feminine sensibility — and there you have my secret. I read the character of women in their eyebrows. A woman’s eyebrows. Oh, how loud they speak! I looked at Miss Whitworth’s eyebrows, and I exclaimed, ‘There is a book there — and I will read it!’”
Joan flamed into life. She clasped her hands together.
“Oh, will you?” The question was half wonder, half prayer.
No man could have shown a more charming condescension than did Mr. Albany Todd at this moment.
“Indeed, I will. I read one book a year — never more. A few sentences in bed in the morning, and a few sentences in bed at night. Yours shall be my book for 1923.” He took a little notebook and a pencil from his pocket. “Now what title will it have?”
“‘A Woman’s Heart, and Who Broke It,’” replied Joan, blushing from her temples to her throat.
Miranda repeated the title in an ecstasy of admiration, and asked the world at large: “Isn’t it all wonderful?”
“‘And Who Broke It,’” quoted Mr. Albany Todd as he wrote the title down. He put his pocket-book away.
“The volume I am reading now — —”
“Yes?” said Joan eagerly. With what master was she to find herself in company? She was not to know.
“ —— was given to me exquisitely bound by a very dear friend of mine, now alas! in precarious health! — the Marquis of Bridlington,” said Mr. Albany Todd — an audible groan from Harold Jupp; an imploring glance from Millie Splay, and to her immense relief the butler ushered in Harry Luttrell. He was welcomed by Millie Splay, presented to Sir Chichester, and surrounded by his friends. He was a trifle leaner than of old, and there were lines now where before there had been none. His eyes, too, had the queer, worn and sunken look which was becoming familiar in the eyes of the young men on leave. Joan Whitworth watched him as he entered, carelessly — for perhaps a second. Then her book dropped from her hand upon the carpet — that book which she had so jealously read a few minutes back. Now it lay where it had fallen. She leaned forward, as though above all she wished to hear the sound of his voice. And when she heard it, she drew in a little breath. He was speaking and laughing with Sir Chichester, and the theme was nothing more important than Sir Chichester’s Honorary Membership of the Senga Mess.
“Lucky fellow!” cried Sir Chichester. “No trouble for you to get into the papers, eh! Publicity waits on you like a valet.”
“But that’s just the kind of valet I can’t afford in my profession,” said Harry.
The conversation was all trivial and customary. But Joan Whitworth leaned forward with a light upon her face that had never yet burnt there. Colonel Luttrell was presented to Mr. Albany Todd, who was most kind and condescending. Joan looked suddenly down at her bilious frock, and the horror of her sandals was something she could hardly bear. They would turn to her next. Yes, they would turn to her! She looked desperately towards the great staircase with its broad, shallow steps which ran up round two sides of the hall. Millie Splay was actually beginning to turn to her, when Dennis Brown came unconsciously to her rescue.
“We looked out for you at Gatwick,” he said.
“I only just reached the race course in time for the last race,” said Harry Luttrell. “Luckily for me.”
“Why luckily?” asked Harold Jupp in surprise.
“Because I backed the winner,” replied Luttrell.
The indefatigable race-goers gathered about him a little closer; and Joan Whitworth rose noiselessly from her chair.
“Which horse won?” asked Harold Jupp.
“Loman!” Harold Jupp stared at Dennis Brown. Incredulity held them as in bonds.
“But he couldn’t win!” they both cried in a breath.
“He did, you know, and at a long price.”
“What on earth made you back him?” asked Dennis Brown.
“Well,” Luttrell answered, “he was the only white horse in the race.”
Miranda uttered a cry of pleasure. She recognised a brother. “That’s an awfully good reason,” she cried. But science fell with a crash. Dennis Brown took his “Form at a Glance” from his pocket, and sadly began to tear the pages across. Harold Jupp looked on at that act of sacrilege.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, and offered his invariable consolation. “Flat racing’s no use. We’ll go jumping in the winter.”
But Harold Jupp was never again to go jumping in the winter. Long before steeple chasing began that year, he was lying out on the flat land beyond the Somme, with a bullet through his heart.
Dennis Brown returned “Form at a Glance” to his pocket; and Millie Splay drew Harry Luttrell away from the group.
“I want to introduce you to Joan Whitworth,” she said, and she turned to the chair in which Joan had been sitting a few moments ago.
It was empty.
“Why, where in the world has Joan gone to?” she exclaimed.
“She has fled,” explained Jupp. “Joan saw his ‘Form at a Glance,’ without any book. She saw that he was incapable of the higher Life, and she has gone.”
“Nonsense, Harold,” cried Millicent Splay in vexation. She turned towards the stairs, and she gave a little gasp. A woman was standing on the second step from the floor. But it was not Joan, it was Stella Croyle.
“I thought you had such a bad headache,” said Lady Splay, after a perceptible pause.
“It’s better now, thank you,” said Stella, and coming down the remaining steps, she advanced towards Harry.
“How do you do, Colonel
Luttrell?” she asked.
For a moment he was taken aback. Then with the blood mounting in his face, he took a step forwards and shook hands with her easily.
“So you know one another!” said Lady Splay.
“We have known each other for a long while,” returned Stella Croyle.
So that was why Stella Croyle had proposed herself for the week! Lady Splay had been a little surprised; so persistently had Stella avoided anything in the shape of a party. But this time Stella had definitely wished to come, and Millie Splay in her loyalty had not hesitated to welcome her. But she had been a little curious. Stella’s visit, indeed, was the third, though the least, of her preoccupations. The Ball on the Thursday of next week at the Willoughby’s! Well, Stella was never lacking in tact. That would arrange itself. But as Millie Splay looked at her, recognised her beauty, her eager advance to Harry Luttrell, and Harry Luttrell’s embarrassment, she said to herself, for quite other reasons:
“If I had guessed why she wanted to come, nothing would have persuaded me to have her.”
Millie Splay had more reason to repeat the words before the week was out.
CHAPTER XXI
The Magnolia Flowers
“I HADN’T AN idea that we should find her here,” said Hillyard. “Lady Splay told me so very clearly that Mrs. Croyle always timed her visits to avoid a party.”
Hillyard was a little troubled lest he should be thought by his friend to have concurred in a plot to bring about this meeting.
“I suppose that Hardiman told her you were coming to Rackham Park. I haven’t seen her until this moment, since I returned.”
“That’s all right, Martin,” Luttrell answered.
The two men were alone in the hall. The tennis players had changed, and were out upon the court. Millie Splay had dragged Stella Croyle away with her to play croquet. Luttrell moved to a writing-table.
“You are going to join the tennis players,” he said. Hillyard was already dressed for the game, and carried a racket in his hand. “I must write a letter, then I will come out and watch you.”
“Right,” said Martin, and he left his friend to his letter.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 552