He had been right about the offence. All the womanly indignation in Dolly blazed into life. Her eyes glowed and her fingers twitched as if they were reaching for a pistol with which to hit J. Sheringham Adair, private investigator, on the head.
'You're crazy!'
'Just an idea.'
That little bacillus!'
'I thought I'd mention it.'
'Him and his thirty per cent!'
'I know, I know. I'm not saying thirty's much.'
'It's an insult.'
'All the same, you can't say Chimp isn't smart. What I mean is, he may have something up his sleeve about those pearls, and we'd look silly if he got in ahead of us. I think we ought to contact him again and make a deal.'
Dolly was experiencing the complex emotions which might have come to the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo if when he had said 'Up, Guards, and at 'em' he had been told by the Guards that they were not in the mood. She herself was resolution itself, but it was plain to her that her Soapy was weakening. She forced herself to speak calmly and quietly, as if to a fractious child.
'You mustn't talk that way, sweetness.'
'He may have a plan.'
'So have I a plan.'
Soapy brightened. A modest man, he knew himself to be not very gifted outside his lifework of selling nonexistent oil stock, but he had a deep faith in his wife's ingenuity.
"You have?'
'Yessir, and it's a pippin.'
'Why haven't you sprung it?'
'I had to wait till she got back.'
'What is it?'
The sound of the gong broke in on their conference. Dolly rose and made for the door.
'I'll tell you later,' she said. 'No time now.'
3
It was in a mood of complete contentment that Grayce took her place at the head of the dinner table. She had had two cocktails, and these had had their usual beneficent effect, consolidating the conviction she had already formed that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
It seemed to her that all things were working together for good. Doubts regarding Monty no longer troubled her. A brief talk with J. Sheringham Adair on her arrival had left her convinced that there had been no civil disobedience on her husband's part during her absence. And to apply to her felicity what Monty would have called the frosting on the cake there was the thought of what might be happening at this very moment in distant Shropshire.
Nothing had occurred by the time she had left to catch her train, for Mavis had decided that the tender scene she had outlined would go better with the assistance of artificial light and a low-necked dress. But it could not be long, she felt, before the telephone rang, bringing news that all was well, and the prospect of having James Ponder for a son-in-law electrified every red corpuscle in her system.
Until meeting him she had been a little apprehensive, for in spite of what Mavis had told her she had got him mixed up in her mind with the man at Cannes who had worn glasses and made a funny noise when drinking soup. But the first glance had been enough to dispel at least a portion of her fears. James Ponder's eyes were as lustrous as Mavis's, and not a lens to help him see with them. And at dinner the last of her misgivings had vanished. She had sat next to him, and though listening intently through the soup course could detect no trace of a funny noise. Where the man at Cannes had given a vivid impersonation of a mountain torrent rushing over pebbles, James Ponder had taken his nourishment with no sound effects whatsoever.
The more she saw of him, the deeper her thankfulness grew. Her child, who, girls being what they were nowadays, might so easily have brought in and laid on the mat a fiancé with a beard, long hair, sandals, no money and the most appalling family, had chosen for her mate the well-dressed nephew of an Earl who shaved twice a day, wore shoes made to order by the best bootmaker in London and was a partner in one of the great jewellery firms. My cup runneth over, she might have said, if she had been familiar with the expression.
All that was needed now was for the telephone to ring, and as dinner was nearing its end it did. It was placed, as is almost obligatory in an English country house, in the most inconvenient spot, out in the hall near the front door, and Grayce leaped to answer it. Mention was made earlier of Ivor Llewellyn's agility when making for the kitchen during police raids, but he was slow in comparison with his wife. A whirring sound, and she was gone.
Nothing would please the chronicler more at this point, while waiting for Grayce to return, than to be able to fill the hiatus with some of that bright and animated conversation which does so much to enliven the evening meal. All the ingredients were there. Mr. Llewellyn, one would have said, must have had a fund of good stories to tell of life in Llewellyn City. Monty could have entertained with reminiscences of the Drones Club. Dolly and Soapy might have been expected to do their share by speaking of conditions in the business world of America.
It is regrettable, therefore, to have to report that silence, as the expression is, reigned. Mr. Llewellyn was brooding on a recent interview with Chimp Twist, which had culminated in him being charged ten pounds for a pork pie. Monty was endeavouring to hit on a course of action which would free him from his honourable obligations to Gertrude Butterwick without hurting anybody's feelings. Dolly and Soapy were deep in thought, the former musing on her plan, the latter trying to make a guess at what that plan could be. It was to what virtually amounted to an assembly of waxworks that Grayce reentered.
'That was Mavis,' she said.
'Oh?' said Mr. Llewellyn morosely. He was still thinking of that pork pie.
'And I want you all to join me in drinking a toast.'
Here Mr. Llewellyn, whose glass contained water, gave a short, unpleasant laugh.
'To Mavis and James.'
'Who's James?'
'James Ponder. You must remember James Ponder at Cannes.'
'Fellow with a small clipped moustache?'
'That's right. Mavis has just become engaged to him. She's bringing him down here the day after tomorrow. She can't get away before then.'
Chapter Nine
As a general rule after dinner Grayce liked a rubber or two of Bridge, for she was as ardent a player of that game as ever bid four spades on a hand containing the queen of that suit and three small ones, but tonight there was the letter of congratulation to Mavis to write, she having by no means said her say over the telephone, and she went to her room to write it. Monty, released from duty, also withdrew. He wanted to be alone with his thoughts. He did not expect them to be agreeable thoughts, but, such as they were, he wanted to be alone with them.
They were just as unpleasing as he had foreseen that they would be. He had once read a novel by Rosie M. Banks, the gifted authoress who had married his fellow member of the Drones Bingo Little, and it still lingered in his memory. The title, By Honour Bound, had put him off a bit because his tastes lay more in the direction of tales with plenty of blood and lots of gangsters in them, but Bingo had practically forced the thing on him, and to his surprise it had impressed him profoundly. It was about a bloke called Aubrey Carruthers who had met a girl called Sonia Derringford on a P. & O. liner coming back from the East, and had fallen in love with her, and she had fallen in love with him, and they had clicked in the moonlight on the upper deck during the ship's fancy dress dance.
So far, so good, you would have said, because Sonia had laughing blue eyes and hair the colour of ripe wheat and could when amused utter a delicious rippling laugh, but there was a snag. Aubrey was engaged to a girl in England, and it was impossible for him to get out of it because he was in honour bound to her and no Carruthers had ever broken his word.
A dickens of a situation for a fellow to be in, Monty had thought as he read, and he thought it all the more now that he was in a similar jam himself. In the book it had all ended happily, the girl in England getting killed in a motor accident, but no bookie would offer odds shorter than a hundred to eight on that happening in his own case, so he had to choose between givin
g the honour of the Bodkins a kick in the seat of the pants and getting along for the remainder of his life with a broken heart. It was enough to make anybody pensive.
Aubrey Carruthers, faced with the same choice, had spent a good deal of time pacing with tight lips and unseeing eyes, and one supposes that this is the usual form in circumstances like those, for it-was what Monty had been doing since returning to his room.
Aubrey, however, had done his pacing on the deck of a liner with nothing to bump into. Monty, in sharp contradistinction, was operating in a small bedroom. It was not long, accordingly, before his shin collided with the wash-stand, and he was rubbing the wound preparatory to going on pacing, when somebody knocked on the door and limping to open it he saw Sandy.
Many men at such a moment would have frozen with amazement and stood silent and goggle-eyed. Monty was one of them. It was left to Sandy to open the conversation, which she did with her customary 'Hi’.
Monty found speech. It was not much in the way of speech, but the best he could do for the time being. It is difficult for a young man who has been brooding for a considerable time on the girl he loves to become articulate when she suddenly pops up out of a trap at his bedroom door.
'Oh, hullo,' he said.
He was overcome by the poignancy of the situation. Here was a girl who had frankly admitted that in her opinion he was Prince Charming galloping up on his white horse and would have liked nothing better than to be folded in his embrace and hugged till her ribs squeaked, and here was he all eagerness to do the folding and hugging, and no chance of business resulting because the honour of the Bodkins said it mustn't. Beat that for irony, he thought as he rubbed his shin. It was the sort of thing Thomas Hardy would have got a three-volume novel out of.
Sandy was as composed as always. If there burned within her searing passion of the type in which the fifth Mrs. Ivor Llewellyn had specialised earlier in life on the silver screen, she gave no sign of it.
'Excuse informal visit,' she said. *I know it's late.'
'No, no. Any time you're passing.'
'I felt I must see you. Why are you massaging your leg? Rheumatism?'
'I bumped my shin.'
'How did that happen?'
'I was pacing the floor.'
'Why?'
'Oh, I don't know.'
'You must have had a reason.'
'Actually, I was thinking.'
'Always a tricky thing to do. Well, here's some more food for thought for you. I'm worried about Mr. Llewellyn.’
‘Isn't he all right?'
‘Far from it.'
'What's the matter with him?'
'I don't know, but it must be something serious. I looked in on him just now with the remains of the dessert we had for dinner, that creamy stuff, and he wasn't interested.'
'He refused it?' said Monty, amazed. He remembered the creamy stuff as particularly palatable, and it seemed to him incredible that Ivor Llewellyn had not jumped at it like a snowbound wayfarer in the Alps reaching for the St. Bernard dog's keg of brandy.
Apparently this miracle had not taken place. Sandy shook her head.
'No, he accepted it, but in an absentminded sort of way and with a glassy look in his eye, as if he were feeling "Oh, what does creamy stuff matter now?". For all the enthusiasm he showed it might have been diet bread.'
Monty pursed his lips in a soundless whistle.
'I don't like that.'
'Nor did I.'
'Bad. Distinctly bad.'
'That's what I thought, too. Do you think it could be anything to do with his step-daughter getting engaged?'
'How do you mean?'
'Well, you know how devoted step-fathers get to their step-daughters. Look on them as real daughters. He may have been thinking how sad and empty the home would be without her. I happened to be looking at him when Mrs. Llewellyn sprang the news, and there was no getting away from it that it had shaken him.'
'He registered dismay?'
'As if he had sat on a tin tack. I believe he's brooding on his loss.'
'The loss of Mavis?'
'Yes.'
She had touched on a subject on which Monty had inside information from an authorative source. If Mr. Llewellyn was a prey to melancholy, it was not the coming absence from the home of his step-daughter Mavis that was depressing him.
'It can't be that,' he said. 'The girl gives him the willies. His attitude towards her is roughly that of a man confronted with a cobra.'
'How do you know?'
'He told me so in person. She's his main pain in the neck.'
Sandy laughed. She had, in Monty's opinion, a delicious rippling laugh, like Sonia Derringford, and he would have been glad to listen to it as often as she cared to let it ripple.
'Well, that rather rules out my theory, doesn't it. Have you met her?'
'I've met her.'
'When was that?'
Monty hesitated, dubious as to whether it was wise to tell her more. During his stay at the Superba-Llewellyn studio they had made a picture of Shakespeare's Othello and he remembered the disturbing effect Othello's recital of his misadventures had had on Desdemona. Were he to relate the story of what had happened to him on that night of terror, Sandy, already a victim to his fatal charms, could scarcely fail to be plunged even more deeply into hopeless love than she was at present, and he did not want to cause the poor child unnecessary pain.
However, he related it.
'And then she held me up with a whacking great pistol and locked me in the downstairs cupboard,' he concluded.
'Golly.'
'Golly is correct.'
'I see what you mean about her. Not everybody's girl.' 'No.'
'Sort of takes after her mother.'
'And her father. Orlando Mulligan. He starred in those Epics of the West and was always shooting people. He used to walk slowly from one end of the street of the frontier town while the Bad Man walked slowly from the other, and then they both drew their guns and blazed away. Of course the Bad Man hadn't a hope. I can see Mavis carrying on in a similar manner. She'll probably plug James Ponder.'
'Very possibly. After the honeymoon.'
'Oh, yes, after the honeymoon.'
'Still, that's for Mr. Ponder to worry about. Our job is to find out what's wrong with Mr. Llewellyn. He may be sickening for something.'
‘I’ll go and ask him.'
'It would be a kindly act.'
'Will you come too?'
'Better not, I think. He's more likely to confide his symptoms to you if you're alone.'
The moment Mr. Llewellyn's door opened in answer to his knock Monty could see that Sandy's gloomy critique of his condition had been in no way exaggerated. Not only did Mr. Llewellyn appear to be sickening for something, but for something so serious as to occasion the greatest anxiety to his friends and well-wishers. He had the look of a man who was coming down with at least three of the exotic ailments which get written up in special numbers of The Lancet. Monty had seen dead fish on fishmongers' slabs with more sparkle and joie de vivre?
His disposition, too, had taken a turn for the worse. Staring from beneath lowered brows, he was more like the dreaded head of the Superba-Llewellyn studio than the carefree warbler who had so joyously rendered 'Happy Days Are Here Again' and 'Barney Google'. This was the Ivor Llewellyn whom J. B. Butterwick must have seen across the carrots and mock duck at his health restaurant.
'Well?' he said sourly. 'What do you want?'
Monty saw that suavity would be required. Not sure that a jolly all-pals-together smile might not add fuel to the already existing flames, he did not attempt one.
'Sorry to barge in like this.’ he said. It's just that Sandy Miller told me she was in here a few minutes ago, and your aspect scared the pants off her. She came away convinced that your general health had taken the count of ten, and she sent me to make enquiries. Tell me where the pain is mainly. She's worried stiff.’
His words had the effect of bringing about a ma
rked improvement in Mr. Llewellyn's mood. He softened visibly and gave it as his opinion that the half-portion was okay.
'Heart in the right place, and I appreciate her sympathy. But a fat lot of use sympathy is to me. Bodkin, you see before you a broken man.'
'Oh, do I? Why's that?'
'Sit down and I’ll tell you.'
Monty took a seat, and Mr. Llewellyn, after remaining for a space in the Slough of Despond in which he was immersed, struggled to the surface and spoke.
'Bodkin, have you ever been tied to a barrel of gunpowder with a lighted candle on top of it?'
'Not that I remember. Why?'
'Because that's how it is with me. I watch that candle burning lower and lower, and I lie there waiting for the big bang. Nothing can save me. You know those pearls Mrs. Llewellyn wears?'
Monty said he did. He might have added that nobody who had broken bread at the same table as Grayce could have missed them.
'They were a present from Orlando Mulligan, her first husband.'
'Very handsome.’
'Yes, she was at that time. Younger then, of course.’
'I've often admired them.’
'They look all right, I agree. Remarkable considering they're Japanese cultured.'
'Japanese cultured?'
'They are phonies.'
'Phonies?'
‘Fakes.'
'Fakes?'
'Make up your mind, Bodkin, whether you are a man or an echo in the Swiss mountains,' said Mr. Llewellyn with a return of his earlier manner. 'Not that I wonder you're surprised. Grayce will be, too, when she finds out. And what's terrifying me is the thought of what she's going to say when she does.'
Monty was astounded. He remembered Orlando Mulligan as about as tough a guy as guys come, lightninglike on the draw and always able to rout any number of outlaws, but it was hard to believe that any guy could be tough enough to palm off an imitation rope of pearls on a woman like Grayce Llewellyn. Napoleon might have done it, but nobody except Napoleon, and he only when drunk with power and feeling particularly courageous.
Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin Page 11