A Gentleman of Leisure, P. G. Wodehouse [speld decodable readers .TXT] 📗

really is a detective. Spike, you ought to be in some sort of a home, you know.”

The Bowery boy looked disturbed.

“I didn’t t’ink of dat, boss,” he admitted.

“Of course not. One can’t think of everything. Now, if you will just hand me those diamonds, I will put them back where they belong.”

“Put dem back, boss!”

“What else would you propose? I’d get you to do it, only I don’t think putting things back is much in your line.”

Spike handed over the jewels. The boss was the boss, and what he said went. But his demeanour was tragic, telling eloquently of hopes blighted.

Jimmy took the necklace with something of a thrill. He was a connoisseur of jewels, and a fine gem affected him much as a fine picture affects the artistic. He ran the diamonds through his fingers, then scrutinized them again, more closely this time.

Spike watched him with a slight return of hope. It seemed to him that the boss was wavering. Perhaps, now that he had actually handled the jewels, he would find it impossible to give them up. To Spike a diamond necklace of cunning workmanship was merely the equivalent of so many “plunks”; but he knew that there were men, otherwise sane, who valued a jewel for its own sake.

“It’s a boid of a necklace, boss,” he murmured encouragingly.

“It is,” said Jimmy. “In its way I’ve never seen anything much better. Sir Thomas will be glad to have it back.”

“Den you’re going to put it back, boss?”

“I am,” said Jimmy. “I’ll do it just before the theatricals; there should be a chance then. There’s one good thing⁠—this afternoon’s affair will have cleared the air of sleuthhounds a little.”

XXIII Family Jars

Hildebrand Spencer Poyns de Burgh John Hannasyde Coombe-Crombie, twelfth Earl of Dreever, was feeling like a toad under the harrow. He read the letter again, but a second perusal made it no better. Very briefly and clearly Molly had broken off the engagement. She “thought it best”; she was “afraid it could make neither of us happy.” All very true, thought his lordship miserably. His sentiments to a T. At the proper time nothing he would have liked better. But why seize for this declaration the precise moment when he was intending, on the strength of the engagement, to separate his uncle from twenty pounds? That was what rankled. That Molly could have no knowledge of his sad condition did not occur to him. He had a sort of feeling that she ought to have known by instinct. Nature, as has been pointed out, had equipped Hildebrand Spencer Poyns de Burgh with one of those cheap-substitute minds. What passed for brain in him was to genuine grey matter what just-as-good imitation coffee is to real mocha. In moments of emotion and mental distress, consequently, his reasoning, like Spike’s, was apt to be in a class of its own.

He read the letter for the third time, and a gentle perspiration began to form on his forehead. This was awful. The presumable jubilation of Katie, the penniless ripper of the Savoy, when he should present himself to her a free man, did not enter into the mental picture that was unfolding before him. She was too remote. Between him and her lay the fearsome figure of Sir Thomas, rampant, filling the entire horizon. Nor is this to be wondered at. There was probably a brief space during which Perseus, concentrating his gaze upon the monster, did not see Andromeda; and a knight of the Middle Ages, jousting in the gentlemen’s singles for a smile from his lady, rarely allowed the thought of that smile to occupy his whole mind at the moment when his boiler-plated antagonist was descending upon him in the wake of a sharp spear.

So with Spennie Dreever. Bright eyes might shine for him when all was over, but in the meantime what seemed to him more important was that bulging eyes would glare.

If only this had happened later⁠—even a day later! The reckless impulsiveness of the modern girl had undone him. How was he to pay Hargate his money? Hargate must be paid⁠—that was certain; no other course was possible. Lord Dreever’s was not one of those natures which fret restlessly under debt. During his early career at college he had endeared himself to the local tradesmen by the magnitude of the liabilities he had contracted with them. It was not the being in debt that he minded, it was the consequences. Hargate, he felt instinctively, was of a revengeful nature. He had given Hargate twenty pounds’ worth of snubbing, and the latter had presented the bill. If it were not paid things would happen. Hargate and he were members of the same club, and a member of a club who loses money at cards to a fellow member and fails to settle up does not make himself popular with the committee.

He must get the money⁠—there was no avoiding that conclusion⁠—but how?

Financially, his lordship was like a fallen country with a glorious history. There had been a time, during his first two years at college, when he had revelled in the luxury of a handsome allowance. This was the golden age, when Sir Thomas Blunt, being, so to speak, new to the job, and feeling that, having reached the best circles, he must live up to them, had scattered largesse lavishly. For two years after his marriage with Lady Julia he had maintained this admirable standard, crushing his natural parsimony. He had regarded the money so spent as capital sunk in an investment. By the end of the second year he had found his feet, and began to look about him for ways of retrenchment. His lordship’s allowance was an obvious way. He had not to wait long for an excuse for annihilating it. There is a game called poker, at which a man without much control over his features may exceed the limits of the handsomest allowance. His lordship’s face during