Mulliner Nights (16 page)

But this was
no time for abstract meditations on the question of right and wrong. He must
hide … hide.

Yet why, you
are asking, should my nephew Sacheverell wish to hide? Had he not in eight easy
lessons from the Leave-It-To-Us School of Correspondence acquired complete
self-confidence and an iron will? He had, but in this awful moment all that he
had learned had passed from him like a dream. The years had rolled back, and he
was a fifteen-year-old jelly again, in the full grip of his Headmaster Phobia.

To dive under
the bed was with Sacheverell Mulliner the work of a moment. And there, as the
door opened, he lay, holding his breath and trying to keep his ears from
rustling in the draught.

Smethurst
(alias
Bognor) was a leisurely undresser. He doffed his gaiters, and then for some
little time stood, apparently in a reverie, humming one of the song-hits from
the psalms. Eventually, he resumed his disrobing, but even then the ordeal was
not over. As far as Sacheverell could see, in the constrained position in which
he was lying, the Bishop was doing a few setting-up exercises. Then he went
into the bathroom and cleaned his teeth. It was only at the end of half an hour
that he finally climbed between the sheets and switched off the light.

For a long
while after he had done so, Sacheverell remained where he was, motionless. But
presently a faint, rhythmical sound from the neighbourhood of the pillows
assured him that the other was asleep, and he crawled cautiously from his lair.

Then, stepping
with infinite caution, he moved to the door, opened it, and passed through.

The relief
which Sacheverell felt as he closed the door behind him would have been less
intense, had he realized that through a slight mistake in his bearings he had
not, as he supposed, reached the haven of the passage outside but had merely
entered the bathroom. This fact was not brought home to him until he had
collided with an unexpected chair, upset it, tripped over a bathmat, clutched
for support into the darkness and brushed from off the glass shelf above the
basin a series of bottles, containing — in the order given — Scalpo (‘It
Fertilizes the Follicles’), Soothine — for applying to the face after shaving,
and Doctor Wilberforce’s Golden Gargle in the large or seven-and-sixpenny
size. These, crashing to the floor, would have revealed the truth to a far
duller man than Sacheverell Mulliner.

He acted
swiftly. From the room beyond, there had come to his ears the unmistakable
sound of a Bishop sitting up in bed, and he did not delay. Hastily groping for
the switch, he turned on the light. He found the bolt and shot it. Only then
did he sit down on the edge of the bath and attempt to pass the situation under
careful review.

He was not
allowed long for quiet thinking. Through the door came the sound of deep
breathing. Then a voice spoke.

‘Who is
they-ah?’

As always in
the dear old days of school, it caused Sacheverell to leap six inches. He had
just descended again, when another voice spoke in the bedroom. It was that of
Colonel Sir Redvers Branksome, who had heard the crashing of glass and had
come, in the kindly spirit of a good host, to make enquiries.

‘What is the
matter, my dear Bishop?’ he asked.

‘It is a
burglar, my dear Colonel,’ said the Bishop.

‘A burglar?’

A burglar. He
has locked himself in the bathroom.’

‘Then how
extremely fortunate,’ said the Colonel heartily, ‘that I should have brought
along this baffle-axe and shot-gun on the chance.’

Sacheverell
felt that it was time to join in the conversation. He went to the door and put
his lips against the keyhole.

‘It’s all
right,’ he said, quaveringly.

The Colonel
uttered a surprised exclamation.

‘He says it’s
all right,’ he reported.

‘Why does he
say it is all right?’ asked the Bishop.

‘I didn’t ask
him,’ replied the Colonel. ‘He just said it was all right.’

The Bishop
sniffed peevishly.

‘It is not all
right,’ he said, with a certain heat. ‘And I am at a .loss to understand why
the man should affect to assume that it is. I suggest, my dear Colonel, that
our best method of procedure is as follows, you take the shot-gun and stand in
readiness, and I will hew down the door with this admirable battle-axe.’

And it was at
this undeniably critical point in the proceedings that something ‘soft and
clinging brushed against Sacheverell’s right ear, causing him to leap again —
this time a matter of eight inches and a quarter. And, spinning round, he
discovered that what had touched his ear was the curtain of the bathroom
window.

There now came
a splintering crash, and the door shook on its hinges. The Bishop, with all the
blood of a hundred Militant Churchmen ancestors afire within him, had started
operations with the axe.

But
Sacheverell scarcely heard the noise. The sight of the open window had claimed
his entire attention. And now, moving nimbly, he clambered through it,
alighting on what seemed to be leads.

For an instant
he gazed wildly about him; then, animated, perhaps, by some subconscious memory
of the boy who bore ‘mid snow and ice the banner with the strange device ‘Excelsior!’
he leaped quickly upwards and started to climb the roof.

Muriel
Branksome, on retiring to her room on the floor above the Blue Suite, had not
gone to bed. She was sitting at her open window, thinking, thinking.

Her thoughts
were bitter ones. It was not that she felt remorseful. In giving Sacheverell
the air at their recent interview, her conscience told her that she had acted
rightly. He had behaved like a domineering sheik of the desert: and a dislike
for domineering sheiks of the desert had always been an integral part of her
spiritual make-up.

But the
consciousness of having justice on her side is not always enough to sustain a
girl at such a time: and an aching pain gripped Muriel as she thought of the
Sacheverell she had loved —the old, mild, sweet-natured Sacheverell who had
asked nothing better than to gaze at her with adoring eyes, removing them only
when he found it necessary to give his attention to the bit of string with
which he was doing tricks. She mourned for this vanished Sacheverell.

Obviously,
after what had happened, he would leave the house early in the morning — probably
long before she came down, for she was a late riser. She wondered if she would
ever see him again.

At this
moment, she did. He was climbing up the slope of the roof towards her on his
hands and knees — and, for one who was not a cat, doing it extremely well. She
had hardly risen to her feet before he was standing at the window, clutching
the sill.

Muriel choked.
She stared at him with wide, tragic eyes.

‘What do you
want?’ she asked harshly.

‘Well, as a
matter of fact,’ said Sacheverell, ‘I was wondering if you would mind if I hid
under your bed for a bit.’

And suddenly,
in the dim light, the girl saw that his face was contorted with a strange
terror. And, at the spectacle, all her animosity seemed to be swept away as if
on a tidal wave, and back came the old love and esteem, piping hot and as fresh
as’ ever. An instant before, she had been wanting to beat him over the head
with a brick. Now, she ached to comfort and protect him. For here once more was
the Sacheverell she had worshipped — the poor, timid, fluttering, helpless
pipsqueak whose hair she had always wanted to stroke and’ to whom she had felt
a strange, intermittent urge to offer lumps of sugar.

‘Come right
in,’ she said.

He threw her a
hasty word of thanks and shot over the sill. Then abruptly he stiffened, and
the wild, hunted look was in his eyes again. From somewhere below there had come
the deep baying of a Bishop on the scent. He clutched at Muriel, and she held
him to her like a mother soothing a nightmare-ridden child.

‘Listen!’ he
whispered.

‘Who are they?’
asked Muriel.

‘Headmasters,’
panted Sacheverell. ‘Droves of headmasters. And colonels. Coveys of colonels.
With baffle-axes and shotguns. Save me, Muriel!’

‘There, there!’
said Muriel. ‘There, there, there!’She directed him to the bed, and he
disappeared beneath it like a diving duck.

‘You will be
quite safe there,’ said Muriel. ‘And now tell me what it is all about.’

Outside, they
could hear the noise of the hue-and-cry. The original strength of the company
appeared to have been augmented’ by the butler and a few sporting footmen. Brokenly,
Sacheverell told her all.

‘But what were
you doing in the Blue Suite?’ asked the girl, when he had concluded his tale. ‘I
don’t understand.’

‘I went to
interview your cousin Bernard, to tell him that he should marry you only over
my dead body.’

‘What an
unpleasant idea!’ said Muriel, shivering a little. ‘And I don’t see how it
could have been done, anyway.’ She paused a moment, listening to the uproar.
Somewhere downstairs, footmen seemed to be falling over one another: and once
there came the shrill cry of a Hunting Bishop stymied by a hat-stand. ‘But what
on earth,’ she asked, resuming her remarks, ‘made you think that I was going to
marry Bernard?’

‘I thought
that that was why you gave me the bird.’

‘Of course it
wasn’t. I gave you the bird because you had suddenly turned into a beastly,
barking, bullying, overbearing blighter.’

There was a
pause before Sacheverell spoke.

‘Had I?’ he
said at length. ‘Yes, I suppose I had. Tell me,’ he continued, ‘is there a good
milk-train in the morning?’

At
three-forty, I believe.’

‘I’ll catch
it.’

‘Must you
really go?’

‘I must,
indeed.’

‘Oh, well,’
said Muriel. ‘It won’t be long before we meet again. I’ll run up to London one
of these days, and we’ll have a bit of lunch together and get married and…’

A gasp came
from beneath the bed.

‘Married! Do
you really mean that you will marry me, Muriel?’

‘Of course I
will. The past is dead. You are my own precious angel pet again, and I love you
madly, passionately. What’s been the matter with you these last few weeks I can’t
imagine, but I can see it’s all over now, so don’t let’s talk any more about
it. Hark!’ she said, holding up a finger as a sonorous booming noise filled the
night, accompanied by a flood of rich oaths in what appeared to be some foreign
language, possibly Hindustani. ‘I think father has tripped over the
dinner-gong.’

Sacheverell
did not answer. His heart was too full for words. He was thinking how deeply he
loved this girl and how happy those few remarks of hers had made him.

And yet,
mingled with his joy, there was something of sorrow. As the old Roman poet has
it,
surgit amari aliquid.
He had just remembered that he had paid the
Leave-It-To-Us Correspondence School fifteen guineas in advance for a course
of twenty lessons. He was abandoning the course after taking eight. And the
thought that stabbed him like a knife was that he no longer had enough
self-confidence and iron will left to enable him to go to Jno. B. Philbrick,
Mgr, and demand a refund.

6 OPEN HOUSE

M
r
Mulliner put away the letter he had been reading, and beamed contentedly on the
little group in the bar-parlour of the Angler’s Rest.

‘Most
gratifying,’ he murmured.

‘Good news?’
we asked.

‘Excellent,’
said Mr Mulliner. ‘The letter was from my nephew Eustace, who is attached to
our Embassy in Switzerland. He has fully justified the family’s hopes.’

‘Doing well,
is he?’

‘Capitally,’
said Mr Mulliner.

He chuckled
reflectively.

‘Odd,’ he
said, ‘now that the young fellow has made so signal a success, to think what a
business we had getting him to undertake the job. At one time it seemed as if
it would be hopeless to try to persuade him. Indeed, if Fate had not taken a
hand…’

‘Didn’t he
want to become attached to the Embassy?’

The idea
revolted him (said Mr Mulliner). Here was this splendid opening, dangled before
his eyes through the influence of his godfather, Lord Knubble of Knopp, and he
stoutly refused to avail himself of it. He wanted to stay in London, he said.
He liked London, he insisted, and he jolly well wasn’t going to stir from the
good old place.

To the rest of
his relations this obduracy seemed mere capriciousness. But I, possessing the
young fellow’s confidence, knew ‘that there were solid reasons behind, his
decision. In the first ‘place, he knew himself to be the favourite nephew of
his Aunt Georgiana, relict of the late Sir Cuthbert Beazley-Beazley, Bart, a
woman of advanced years and more than ample means. And, secondly, he had
recently fallen in love with a girl of the name of Marcella Tyrrwhitt.

A nice sort of
chump I should be, buzzing off to Switzerland,’ he said to me one day when I
had been endeavouring to break down his resistance. ‘I’ve got to stay on the
spot, haven’t I, to give Aunt Georgiana the ‘old oil from time to time? And if
you suppose a fellow can woo a girl like Marcella Tyrrwhitt through the medium
of the post, you are vastly mistaken. Something occurred this morning which
makes me think she’s weakening, and that’s just the moment when the personal
touch is so essential. Come one, come all, this rock shall fly from its firm
base as soon as I,’ said Eustace, who, like so many of the Mulliners, had a
strong vein of the poetic in him.

What had
occurred that morning, I learned later, was that Marcella Tyrrwhitt had rung my
nephew up on the telephone.

‘Hullo!’ she
said. ‘Is that Eustace?’