Uneasy Money, P. G. Wodehouse [little bear else holmelund minarik txt] 📗

“An obviously trumped-up story. He had heard of Eustace’s escape, and he knew that any story connected with him would be a passport into the house!”

Lady Wetherby turned to Claire.

“You haven’t told us yet if you know the man. He was a big, tall, broad gazook,” said Lady Wetherby. “Very English.”

“He faked the English,” said Dudley Pickering. “That man was no more an Englishman than I am. He acted well, but I could see the Tenderloin sticking out of him.”

“Be patient with him, Claire,” urged Lady Wetherby. “He’s been going to the movies too much, and thinks every man who has had his trousers pressed is a social gangster. This man was the most English thing I’ve ever seen⁠—talked like this.”

She gave a passable reproduction of Bill’s speech. Claire started.

“I don’t know him!” she cried.

Her mind was in a whirl of agitation. Why had Bill come to the house? What had he said? Had he told Dudley anything?

“I don’t recognize the description,” she said quickly. “I don’t know anything about him.”

“There!” said Dudley Pickering triumphantly.

“It’s queer,” said Lady Wetherby. “You’re sure you don’t know him, Claire?”

“Absolutely sure.”

“He said he was living at a place near here called Flack’s.”

“I know the place,” said Dudley Pickering. “A sinister, tumble-down sort of place. Just where he would be living.”

“I thought it was a bee farm,” said Lady Wetherby. “One of the tradesmen told me about it. I saw a most corkingly pretty girl bicycling down to the village one morning, and they told me she was named Boyd and kept a bee farm at Flack’s.”

“A blind!” said Mr. Pickering stoutly. “The girl’s the man’s accomplice. It’s quite easy to see the way they work. The girl comes and settles in the place so that everybody knows her. That’s to lull suspicion. Then the man comes down for a visit and goes about cleaning up the neighboring houses. You can’t get away from the fact that this summer there have been half a dozen burglaries down here; and nobody has found out who did them.”

Lady Wetherby looked at him indulgently.

“And now,” she said, “having got us scared stiff, what are you going to do about it?”

“I am going,” he said with determination, “to take steps.”

He went out quickly, the keen, tense man of affairs.

“Bless him!” said Lady Wetherby. “I’d no idea your Dudley had so much imagination, Claire. He’s a perfect bombshell.”

Claire laughed shakily.

“It is odd, though,” said Lady Wetherby meditatively, “that this man should have said that he knew you, when you don’t⁠—

Claire turned impulsively.

“Polly, I want to tell you something. Promise you won’t tell Dudley. I wasn’t telling the truth just now. I do know this man. I was engaged to him once!”

“What!”

“For goodness’ sake don’t tell Dudley.”

“But⁠—”

“It’s all over now; but I used to be engaged to him.”

“Not when I was in England?”

“No, after that.”

“Then he didn’t know you are engaged to Dudley now?”

“N-no. I⁠—I haven’t seen him for a long time.”

Lady Wetherby looked remorseful.

“Poor man! I must have given him a jolt! But why didn’t you tell me about him before?”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Oh, well, I’m not inquisitive. There’s no rubber in my composition. It’s your affair.”

“You won’t tell Dudley?”

“Of course not. But why not? You’ve nothing to be ashamed of.”

“No, but⁠—”

“Well, I won’t tell him anyway. But I’m glad you told me about him. Dudley was so eloquent about burglars that he almost had me going. I wonder where he rushed off to?”

Dudley Pickering had rushed off to his bedroom and was examining a revolver there. He examined it carefully, keenly. Preparedness was Dudley Pickering’s slogan. He looked rather like a stout sheriff in a film drama.

In the interesting land of India, where snakes abound and scorpions are common objects of the wayside, a native who has had the misfortune to be bitten by one of the latter pursues an admirably commonsense plan. He does not stop to lament, nor does he hang about analyzing his emotions. He runs and runs and runs, and keeps on running until he has worked the poison out of his system. Not until then does he attempt introspection.

Lord Dawlish, though ignorant of this fact, pursued almost identically the same policy. He did not run on leaving Lady Wetherby’s house, but he took a very long and very rapid walk, than which in times of stress there are few things of greater medicinal value to the human mind. To increase the similarity, he was conscious of a curious sense of being poisoned. He felt stifled⁠—in want of air.

Bill was a simple young man and he had a simple code of ethics. Above all things he prized and admired and demanded from his friends the quality of straightness. It was his one demand. He had never actually had a criminal friend, but he was quite capable of intimacy with even a criminal, provided only that there was something spacious about his brand of crime and that it did not involve anything mean or underhand.

It was the fact that Mr. Breitstein, whom Claire had wished him to insinuate into his club, though acquitted of actual crime, had been proved guilty of meanness and treachery, that had so prejudiced Bill against him. The worst accusation that he could bring against a man was that he was not square, that he had not played the game.

Claire had not been square. It was that, more than the shock of surprise at Lady Wetherby’s news, that had sent him striding along the State Road at the rate of five miles an hour, staring before him with unseeing eyes. She had fooled him. She had lied to him. A sudden recollection of their last interview brought a dull flush to Bill’s face and accelerated his speed. He felt physically ill.

It was not immediately that he had arrived at even this sketchy outline of his feelings. For perhaps a mile he walked as the scorpion stung natives ran⁠—blindly, wildly, with nothing in his mind but a desire