Summer Moonshine (14 page)

'Yes.'

'What did you make of his attitude?'

'I know what you mean. All that out-thrust chin and let-her-sue stuff.'

'Precisely When I was talking to him this morning he was extremely difficult. He appeared to court a breach-of-promise suit. Is he half-witted?'

'Well, you see, the whole thing is that Tubby regards himself as the injured party. His reason for breaking off the engagement was that he had reason to suppose that Miss Whittaker was double-crossing him and receiving presents on the side from a rival, and when I spoke to him, he kept saying that he had never heard of such nerve as his late betrothed was exhibiting and that there was nothing he would like better than to have the thing dragged into the pitiless light of day, so that the world might judge between this woman and him.'

'In that case, we might as well chuck in our hand.'

'Oh, no. I fancy it's all right now. I pointed out to him what would be the effect on our mutual stepmother of his being jerked before a tribunal for breach of promise, and he simmered down considerably. His passion for abstract justice waned.
When I left him, he was seeing reason and had agreed to play ball. You need have no fear of Tubby breaking out.'

Sir Buckstone drew a deep breath.

'Joe,' he began, in a voice that quivered with gratitude. . . .'Oh, hullo, my dear.'

Lady Abbott, limping a little, as marathon walkers will, had reached journey's end.

'Been for a walk, Toots?'

'I've been down seeing Sam.'

Sir Buckstone's face, which had brightened at the sight of her, darkened once more.

'Joe and I were just talking about him. What did he say when you saw him?'

'He said he was like the North-West Mounted Police.'

'He did, did he?'

'Yes, and that the show must go on.'

'He didn't happen to drop any sort of a hint as to what he was planning to do?'

'No. Well, you would hardly expect him to, would you? But I'll bet the little weasel's got something up his sleeve, all right. I told him young Vanringham was sitting under the cedar with a book and wasn't going to stir, but it didn't seem to discourage him. He just grinned, and said something about science. Oh, well, I guess everything'll be all right,' said Lady Abbott, equably. 'All we've got to do is watch out.'

And with these words of cheer, she passed on her way, anxious to get to her settee and put her feet up.

Sir Buckstone, a disciple of the Chinnery, or pessimistic, school of thought, was not greatly uplifted by her prognostication. The picture of the subtle super-plasterer crouching for a spring depressed him. And, as he now observed to Joe, breaking
the moody silence which had followed upon Lady Abbott's departure, the worst thing about the whole infernal business was the suspense, the waiting, the feeling that at any moment the worst might befall.

Joe patted his arm sympathetically.

'You mustn't let it get you down, Buck. But I know just what you mean. Most trying for the nervous system. It must recall to you very vividly, I imagine, the old days when you were a big-game hunter. Many a time, no doubt, as you made your way through the African jungle—'

'There aren't any jungles in Africa.'

'There aren't?'

'No.'

'Negligence somewhere,' said Joe. 'Well, many a time, as you made your way through whatever substitute for jungles they have in Africa, you must have heard hoarse breathing off-stage and realized that you were being stalked by a local leopard, and I'm sure that the worst part of such an experience must have been the uncertainty of it all, the feeling that you could never know just when you were going to get the creature on your back collar stud. And so with this man Bulpitt. What, we ask ourselves, will his next move be?'

'Exactly.'

'And what do we reply? We reply that we're damned if we know. We can but, as Lady Abbott says, be on our guard. How simple,' sighed Joe, 'it would all have been if Peake had not let him have that houseboat.'

Sir Buckstone quivered.

'Joe,' he said, 'the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that you were right about Peake being Bulpitt's accomplice.'

'The evidence does seem to point in that direction.'

There isn't a doubt about it. What brought the man down here? He came to prepare the way for Bulpitt. Why did he take the houseboat? Obviously, so as to ensure Bulpitt a base of operations. There can be no other explanation. Do normal innocent people take houseboats? Of course, they don't. What the devil would anyone want a houseboat for? The
Mignonette
has been a drug in the market since the day it was built.'

'Till Peake came along.'

'Precisely. Twenty years that boat has been sitting there empty, and suddenly, a few days before Bulpitt's appearance, Peake says he wants it. And laid his plans with fiendish cunning, mark you. He appears to have scraped acquaintance with my daughter Jane at some country house, and thus made it possible to worm his way in. Gor!' said Sir Buckstone. 'I'd like to horsewhip the fellow!. . . What is it, Pollen?'

The butler had come out of the house and was moving softly past them, his objective apparently the cedar tree at the end of the terrace, beneath which Tubby was sitting with his book. He halted.

'A telephone call, Sir Buckstone, for Mr Vanringham.'

'Eh? . . . Somebody wants you on the telephone, Joe.'

'The younger Mr Vanringham, Sir Buckstone.'

'What!'

A far less sinister piece of information than this would have been enough to excite suspicion in the Baronet. In these dangerous days, if a fly had come buzzing round Tubby's head, he would have questioned its motives. He started visibly, and shot a meaning glance at Joe. Joe pursed his lips, grave and concerned.

'Who wants him?'

'If I caught the name correctly, Sir Buckstone, it was a Mr Peake.'

There was a sharp whistling sound. It was Sir Buckstone Abbott gasping. His eye, widening, once more encountered Joe's, and read in it a good man's horror at the low-down machinations of the wicked.

He pulled himself together. This was not a time for reeling under blows. It was a time for action.

'All right, Pollen,' he said, with an admirably assumed nonchalance. 'I'll answer it. Mr Vanringham's busy. Don't want to disturb him. . . . Come, Joe.'

The telephone was in the hall. As Sir Buckstone picked up the receiver, the impression Joe got, watching his mauve face, was that he was about to bellow harsh words of violent abuse into it. But he had vastly underestimated the Machiavellian cunning of which members of the British Baronetcy are capable when the occasion calls. His companion's voice, when he spoke, was lowered to a respectful butlerine coo.

'Are you there, sir? I regret that I have been unable to find Mr Vanringham. Could I give him a message?. . . Yes, sir. . . . very good, sir. . . I will inform him.'

He hung up the receiver, puffing emotionally, while Joe stared, amazed at this exhibition of histrionic virtuosity.

'Buck! What an artist!'

Sir Buckstone had no time for compliments.

'He's at the inn!'

'The Goose and Gander?'

'The Goose and Gander. And he wants your brother to go down there at once and see him about something very important.'

Joe whistled.

'Black work!'

'A deliberate trap.'

'Can be nothing else but. What are you going to do?'

Sir Buckstone drew a laboured breath. Then his manner took on an ominous calm, like that of a cyclone gathering itself together before starting operations on the Texas hinterland.

'It will take me a quarter of an hour,' he said, 'to get to the Goose and Gander. Five minutes after that—Look about, my dear fellow, and see if you can see a hunting crop with an ivory handle. You can't mistake it. It should be on that chest over by the—Yes, that is it. Thank you, Joe.'

M
R Samuel Bulpitt
was one of those thinkers whose minds are at their briskest when the body is in gentle motion. He liked to formulate his plans and schemes while strolling to and fro, as if on a quarter-deck, his hands clasped behind his back and some sentimental ballad on his lips. Many of his best coups had been thought out on that bush-bordered gravel path that runs beside the eastern border of Central Park at 59th Street, to the accompaniment of 'Alice Blue Gown' or 'What'll I Do?'

For some considerable time after Lady Abbott had left him, he had been walking up and down the towpath downstream from the houseboat
Mignonette,
crooning the latter of these two melodies. He was still doing so when Sir Buckstone set out on his punitive expedition to the Goose and Gander.

His mood, as he promenaded, was pensive. Bravely though he had scoffed in his sister's presence at the idea that the problem of establishing contact with a Tubby Vanringham who sat tight under distant cedar trees would present any difficulties to the expert mind, he had not really been so confident as he affected to be. The situation which confronted him, he could see, was different from those which he had handled so triumphantly in his native New York. The methods so effective there would not serve him here. It would be necessary to dish out something new.

Mr Bulpitt, as plasterer, resembled Adrian Peake in that he was a man who was at his best in urban surroundings. He liked to shout 'Fire!' on staircases in order to bring his prospects bolting out of the front doors of flats. He liked to bluff his way into offices under the pretence of being an important customer from the West. If a prominent actress happened to be his quarry, no one knew better than he how to wait at the stage door, a bouquet in one hand, the fatal papers behind his back in the other. ('Oh, how sweet! Are these really for me!' 'No, lady, but this is.') Put Mr Bulpitt in the heart of a big city and he could not go wrong.

But in the English countryside things were different. An Englishman's country home is his castle. It possesses stairs, but only those invited to tread them can use them as a base for shouting 'Fire!' It does not welcome customers from the West. Nor has it a stage door.

'What'll I do?' murmured Mr Bulpitt to his immortal soul. 'What'll I do, ti-um ti-um ti-ay?'

And he had fallen to wondering whether, scornfully though he had rejected the suggestion when it had been made, some form of rude disguise might not, after all, be his best plan, when the whole situation, as is so often the way on these occasions, suddenly lost its complexity. Out of the welter of his thoughts, springing fully armed like Minerva from the brow of Jove, there had emerged a scheme, a simple but ingenious device for the undoing of Tubby, which as a student of human psychology, he felt confident, would bring home the bacon.

He smiled contentedly. His crooning took on a gayer note, changing to 'Happy Days Are Here Again'. And it was at this moment that his attention was diverted by the sight of odd things happening upstream.

Until now, Mr Bulpitt had had this sylvan nook of old Berkshire to himself. Since his sister's departure, no human form had come to mar his peaceful solitude. But now there had appeared abruptly on the river-bank, coming from the direction of the village, a lissom, slender figure. It was approaching at a considerable speed and, as it drew nearer, he recognized it as that of the young man, Peake, his niece Jane's lowly suitor. And he was just about to advance in order to meet and introduce himself to one whose acquaintance he had long desired to make, when the other, reaching the houseboat, leaped up the gangplank and disappeared into the saloon.

Mr Bulpitt made for the
Mignonette
at his best pace, a puzzled man. He was at a loss to account for all this activity. He could not know that Adrian's actions, apparently so eccentric, were based on the soundest common sense.

When Sir Buckstone arrived at the Goose and Gander, Adrian had been sitting in the front garden. He had not failed to observe the stocky individual with the flushed face and the purposeful eye who went stumping up the path into the inn, but he had given him only a momentary attention before allowing his thoughts to return to Tubby and the interview which, he trusted, would shortly take place. It was only when he heard a resonant voice from within asking for Mr Peake that he recalled that in the stocky individual's right hand there had been a most formidable hunting crop, and realized that for the first time he had set eyes upon the Sir Buckstone Abbott of whom he had heard so much.

There followed upon the realization a moment of paralysed inaction, and Sir Buckstone was already emerging from the inn and advancing on him like a pink-faced puma before he recovered himself sufficiently to begin the race for life.

When he did act, however, he acted promptly. A jackrabbit of the Western prairies could have picked up some useful hints from him. Before the Baronet's first hoarse bellow had died away on the languid summer air, he was over the low hedge that fringed the garden and out in the road. The gate which separated the road from the water meadows he took almost in his stride. He then settled down to some plain, intensive running.

At first, when starting to run, he had had no fixed plan, merely a sort of vague general desire to get away from it all. Then, just as the unaccustomed exercise was beginning to take its toll, the
Mignonette
came into view, offering a refuge. He supposed it to be still in the possession of Joe Vanringham, and he did not like Joe, but he was in no position to be choosy about refuges. Joe Vanringham might be lacking in many of the finer qualities, but he was sure he was not the man to cast out a fugitive desiring sanctuary. On the
Mignonette,
he felt, he would be safe.

His emotions, accordingly, when, a few moments after he had dived into the saloon and closed the door behind him, he heard a heavy step on the deck outside, accompanied by the puffing of heavy breath, were distressing. Who, he asked himself pallidly, was this man who puffed without? It could not be Joe, for Joe, whatever his spiritual defects, was in excellent physical condition, but – and here he quaked like a blancmange – it might quite well be his pursuer. With a sickening qualm he told himself that Sir Buckstone Abbott, after a brisk spin along a river-bank, would probably be puffing just like that. He looked about him for a safer hiding-place, but found none. The saloon, as has been said, was simply furnished, and had never been intended to afford cover for its occupants.

With leaden heart and with the flesh crawling upon his body as he thought of that hunting crop, he was preparing to meet his doom, when, from the towpath, a voice shouted: 'Hi! You damned Bulpitt!'

Life began to creep back into Adrian's numbed frame. The situation was still of almost the maximum stickiness, but the actual worst had not yet happened. Whoever the man outside the saloon door might be, he was not Sir Buckstone Abbott. The Baronet's voice, raised in anger, was easily recognizable by one who had once heard it. It was Sir Buckstone who was standing on the towpath, shouting: 'Hi! You damned Bulpitt!'

Many men might have been offended at being addressed in this curt fashion, but the mysterious individual on the deck showed no sign of annoyance. His voice, when he replied, was cheery, even cordial.

'Hello, your lordship! Nice day.'

His affability awoke no echo in Sir Buckstone Abbott.

'Never mind what sort of a day it is, and stop calling me "Your lordship", blast you. I'm a Baronet.'

'Isn't a Baronet a lord?'

'No, he isn't.'

The intricacies of the British system of titles seemed to interest the man who answered to the name of Bulpitt. When he next spoke, there was a genuine desire for knowledge in his voice:

'What's the difference?'

The question appeared to act as an irritant.

'Listen, you ghastly Bulpitt,' roared Sir Buckstone, 'I didn't come here to instruct you in the order of precedence. Where's Peake?'

'He's around.'

'Produce him.'

'Why?'

'I am going to thrash him within an inch of his life.'

That unpleasant feeling of bonelessness which he had experienced in the garden of the Goose and Gander surged once more over Adrian. The moment, it was plain, had come. The crux or nub of the situation had been reached, and his fate was now to be decided. With ashen face, he waited. Would Bulpitt yield? Or would Bulpitt stand firm?

Bulpitt stood firm.

'You're going to do nothing of the kind,' he replied severely. 'Don't you know better than that, a Baronet like you? Baronets,' said Mr Bulpitt, quite rightly, 'ought to be setting an example, not going around trying to beat the tar out of young fellows who can't help it if they're in love, can they?'

The rebuke was one which should have abashed the most hardened holder of a hereditary title, but it seemed merely to increase Sir Buckstone's displeasure. His voice rose.

'Stop drivelling, Bulpitt! And,' he continued with a sudden access of vehemence, 'put that plank back!'

The word 'plank' mystified Adrian for a moment. Then he remembered the strip of wood that linked the
Mignonette
with the shore, and understood. This admirable Bulpitt, whoever he might be, acting with a resourcefulness which did him credit, had apparently performed the nautical equivalent of raising the drawbridge.

That this was so was made plain by his next words, which were spoken in a tone of rather unctuous complacency:

'Now, if you want him, you'll have to jump.'

Sir Buckstone's reply was not fully audible, for emotion interfered with the precision of his diction, but Adrian understood him to say that this was precisely the feat which he
proposed to attempt, and he waited anxiously to hear what his preserver would advance in rebuttal.

He need have had no concern. Mr Bulpitt was fully equal to the situation.

'If you do, I'll bop you.'

'You'll what?'

'I'll bop you over the head with this chair.'

'You won't!'

'I will.'

'You bop me over the head with chairs, and I'll summon you for assault.'

'You start jumping aboard my boat and I'll have you pinched for burglary.'

A silence followed this remark. It appeared to have left Sir Buckstone momentarily breathless.

'What the devil are you talking about?' he demanded at length.

'I know the law. A boat's the same as a house. You bust into a boat and you're a burglar.'

'I never heard such dashed nonsense in my life. It's my boat.'

'It's not any such thing, your boat. It's my boat. I'm the tenant. So you be careful. One jump, and I bop.'

The duel of two strong minds was over. Sir Buckstone Abbott was a lion of physical courage, and it was not from any apprehension of chairs descending on his head that he now decided to give up the struggle and leave the field to the enemy.

What swayed him was the fact that a legal point had arisen and that he was uncertain of his standing. He feared no foe in shining armour, but like all respectable Britons, he shrank from getting mixed up with the law. Rather than run any risk of actions and damages, he preferred to sheath the hunting crop.

Possibly he consoled himself, like so many baffled Baronets in the fiction and drama of an earlier age, with the thought that a time would come. At any rate, he moved off, flicking moodily at the meadowsweet with the thong which he had hoped would have been put to a better use, and Mr Bulpitt, flushed with moral victory, lowered his chair and opened the door of the saloon.

'He's gone,' he said, rightly feeling that this was the point on which his guest would desire immediate assurance. 'Yes, sir. Had the sense to quit while the quitting was good.'

He regarded Adrian with a gaze that was not only kindly but full of admiration. Being naturally in ignorance of the motives which had led the young man back into the danger zone, he assumed that what had brought him was the overwhelming desire to be near Jane and he approved of his gallant hardihood. All the sentiment in Mr Bulpitt responded to the thought of the humble suitor braving fearful risks to contact his loved one. Adrian Peake reminded him of Romeo.

Perceiving that the young hero was still somewhat shaken, he went to the cupboard and produced a bottle, from which, before proceeding further, he poured a heartening draught. While Adrian choked over this, he resumed:

'How did you happen to run into his lordship?'

Adrian related briefly the scene in the inn garden. Mr Bulpitt shook his head. While applauding his companion's knightly courage, he seemed to be deploring his recklessness.

'You shouldn't have hung about there, right out in the open. Taking a big chance. Might have known that his lordship would have been tipped off that you were around and would come gunning for you. Got his spies everywhere, I guess. Well, you'll be all right now. He can't get at you here. You heard us chewing
the rag? Well, I meant what I said. If he'd of tried to come aboard, I'd have bopped him. Yessir! It wouldn't have been the first time I'd bopped a guy with a chair. Or with a bottle,' said Mr Bulpitt, his eye dreamy as he mused on the golden past.

It occurred to Adrian that he had not yet thanked his preserver, and he endeavoured now to do so. But Mr Bulpitt waved aside his gratitude with an airy hand.

'Don't give it another thought,' he said. 'I told Imogen I was for you, and I am. It was her that put me wise to your little trouble. I saw you kissing her down here that day, and she told me you were the fellow she was going to marry. I'm her uncle.'

Adrian's eyes widened. The restorative which he had been consuming had been potent, and he was not sure that he had heard aright.

'Her Uncle Sam from America. Mother's brother. Which gets you wondering, maybe, why I'm on this boat, instead of being up at the big house. Well, I'll tell you. There's been a mite of unpleasantness, which we needn't go into now, and they don't seem to kind of want me as one of the family. . . . Have another drink?'

'No, thank you.'

'Sure?'

'No, really; thanks.'