Uncle Fred in the Springtime (29 page)

‘I can
do without your sympathy.’

‘Can
any of us do without sympathy, Baxter, even from the humblest? Mine, moreover,
takes a practical and constructive form. I have here,’ said Lord Ickenham,
producing a white tablet, ‘something which I guarantee will make you forget the
most absorbing stomach-ache. You take it in a little water.’

Baxter
regarded the offering suspiciously. His knowledge of impostors told him that
they seldom act from purely altruistic motives. Examine an impostor’s act of
kindness, and you see something with a string attached to it.

And
suddenly there came to him, causing him momentarily to forget bodily anguish,
an exhilarating thought.

Rupert
Baxter had no illusions about his employer. He did not suppose that the gruff
exterior of the Duke of Dunstable hid a heart of gold, feeling — correctly —
that if the Duke were handed a heart of gold on a plate with watercress round
it, he would not know what it was. But he did credit him with an elementary
sense of gratitude, and it seemed to him that after he, Baxter, had carried
through with success the perilous task of stealing a pig on his behalf, the old
hound could scarcely sack him for having attended a fancy-dress Ball without
permission. In other words, this man before him, beneath whose iron heel he had
been supposing himself to be crushed, no longer had any hold over him and could
be defied with impunity.

‘I see
you have a tumbler there. I place the tablet in it — so. I fill with water —
thus. I stir. I mix. And there you are. Drink it down, and let’s see what
happens.’

Baxter
waved away the cup with a sneer.

‘You
are very kind,’ he said, ‘but there is no need to beat about the bush. It is
obvious that you have come here in the hope of getting round me —’

Lord
Ickenham looked pained.

‘Yours
is a very suspicious nature, Baxter. You would do well to try to overcome this
mistrust of your fellow-men.’

‘You
want something.’

‘Merely
to see you your old bonny self again.’

‘You
are trying to conciliate me, and I know why. You have begun to wonder if the
hold you suppose yourself to have over me is quite as great as you imagined.’

‘Beautifully
expressed. I like the way you talk.’

‘Let me
tell you at once that it is not. You have no hold over me. Since our conversation
in the billiard-room, the whole situation has altered. I have been able to
perform a great service for my employer, with the result that I am no longer in
danger of being dismissed for having gone to that Ball. So I may as well inform
you here and now that it is my intention to have you turned out of the house
immediately. Ouch!’ said Baxter, rather spoiling the effect of a dignified and
impressive speech by clutching suddenly at his midriff.

Lord
Ickenham eyed him sympathetically.

‘My
dear fellow, something in your manner tells me you are in pain. You had better
drink that mixture.’

‘Get
out!’

‘It
will do you all the good in the world.’

‘Get
out!’

Lord
Ickenham sighed.

‘Very
well, since you wish it,’ he said and, turning, collided with Lord Bosham in
the doorway.

‘Hullo!’
said Lord Bosham. ‘Hullo-ullo-ullo! Hullo-ullo-ullo-ullo-ullo!’

He
spoke with a wealth of meaning in his voice. There was, he felt, something
pretty dashed sinister about finding the villain of the piece alone with Baxter
in his room like this. An acquaintance with mystery thrillers almost as
comprehensive as his brother Freddie’s had rendered him familiar with what
happened when these chaps got into rooms. On the thin pretext of paying a
formal call, they smuggled in cobras and left them there to do their stuff. ‘Well,
good afternoon,’ they said, and bowed themselves out. But the jolly old cobra
didn’t blow itself out. It stuck around, concealed in the curtain.

‘Hullo!’
he added, concluding his opening remarks. ‘Want anything?’

‘Only
dinner,’ said Lord Ickenham.

‘Oh?’
said Lord Bosham. ‘Well, it’ll be ready in a minute. What was that bird after?’
he asked tensely, as the door closed.

Baxter
did not reply for a moment. He was engaged in beating his breast, like the
Wedding Guest.

‘I
kicked him out before he could tell me,’ he said, as the agony abated. ‘Ostensibly,
his purpose in coming was to bring me something for my indigestion. A tablet.
He put it in that glass. What he was really leading up to, of course, was a
request that I would refrain from exposing him.’

‘But
you can’t expose him, can you? Wouldn’t you lose your job?’

‘There
is no longer any danger of that.’

‘You
mean, even if he tells old Dunstable that you were out on a bender that night,
you won’t get the boot?’

‘Precisely.’

‘Then
now I know where I stand! Now the shackles have fallen from me, and I am in a
position to set about these impostors as impostors should be set about. That’s
really official, is it?’

‘Quite.
Ouch!’

‘Anguish?’

‘Oo!’

‘If I
were you,’ said Lord Bosham, ‘I’d drink the stuff the blighter gave you. There’s
no reason why it shouldn’t prove efficacious. The fact that a chap is an impostor
doesn’t necessarily mean that he can’t spot a good stomach-ache cure when he
sees one. Down the hatch with it, my writhing old serpent, with a hey nonny
nonny and a hot cha-cha.’

Another
twinge caused Baxter to hesitate no longer. He saw that the advice was good. He
raised the glass to his lips. He did not drain it with a hey nonny nonny, but
he drained it.

It was
then too late for him to say, ‘Hey, nonny nonny,’ even if he had wished to.

Down in the hall, like a
hound straining at the leash, Beach the butler stood with uplifted stick,
waiting for the psychological moment to beat the gong. Lady Constance, as she
came downstairs, caught a glimpse of him over the banisters, but she was not
accorded leisure to feast her eyes on the spectacle, for along the corridor to
her left there came a galloping figure. It was her nephew, Lord Bosham. He
reached her, seized her by the wrist and jerked her into an alcove. Accustomed
though she was to eccentricity in her nephews, the action momentarily took her
breath away.

‘Gee-ORGE!’
she cried, finding speech. ‘Yes, I know, I know. But listen.’

‘Are
you intoxicated?’

‘Of
course I’m not. What a dashed silly idea. Much shaken, but sober to the gills.
Listen, Aunt Connie. You know those impostors? Impostors A, B, and C? Well,
things are getting hot. Impostor A has just laid Baxter out cold with a
knock-out drop.’

‘What!
I don’t understand.’

‘Well,
I can’t make it any simpler. That is the bedrock fact. Impostor A has just
slipped Baxter a Mickey Finn. And what I’m driving at is, that if these birds
are starting to express themselves like this, it means something. It means that
tonight’s the night. It signifies that whatever dirty work they are
contemplating springing on this community will be sprung before tomorrow’s sun
has risen. Ah!’ said Lord Bosham, with animation, as the gong boomed out
below. ‘Dinner, and not before I was ready for it. Let’s go. But mark this,
Aunt Connie, and mark it well — the moment we rise from the table, I get my
good old gun, and I lurk! I don’t know what’s up, and you don’t know what’s up,
but that something is up sticks out a mile, and I intend to lurk like a
two-year-old. Well, I mean to say, dash it,’ said Lord Bosham, with honest
heat, ‘we can’t have this sort of thing, what? If impostors are to be allowed
to go chucking their weight about as if they’d bought the place, matters have
come to a pretty pass!’

19

At twenty minutes past
nine, the Duke of Dunstable, who had dined off a tray in his room, was still
there, waiting for his coffee and liqueur. He felt replete, for he was a good
trencherman and had done himself well, but he was enjoying none of that sensation
of mental peace which should accompany repletion. Each moment that passed found
him more worried and fretful. The failure of Rupert Baxter to report for duty
was affecting him much as their god’s unresponsiveness once affected the
priests of Baal. Here it was getting on for goodness knew what hour, and not a
sign of him. It would have pained the efficient young secretary, now lying on
his bed with both hands pressed to his temples in a well-meant but unsuccessful
attempt to keep his head from splitting in half, could he have known the black
thoughts his employer was thinking of him.

The
opening of the door, followed by the entry of Beach bearing a tray containing
coffee and a generous glass of brandy, caused the Duke to brighten for an
instant, but the frown returned to his brow as he saw that the butler was not
alone. The last thing he wanted at a time like this was a visitor.

‘Good
evening, my dear fellow. I wonder if you could spare me a moment?’

It was
about half-way through dinner that the thought had occurred to Lord Ickenham
that there might be an easier and more agreeable method than that which he had
planned of obtaining from the Duke the money which he was, as it were, holding
in trust for Polly. He had not developed any weak scruples about borrowing it
on the lines originally laid down, but the almost complete absence of
conversation at the dinner-table had given him time to reflect, and the result
of this reflection had been to breed misgivings.

Success
in the campaign which he had sketched out would depend — he had to face it
—largely on the effectiveness of his nephew Pongo’s performance of the part
assigned to him, and he feared lest Pongo, when it came to the pinch, might
prove a broken reed. You tell a young man to stand on a lawn and sing the ‘Bonny
Bonny Banks of Loch Lomond’, and the first thing you know he has forgotten the
tune or gone speechless with stage fright. Far better, it seemed to him, to try
what a simple, straightforward appeal to the Duke’s better feelings would do —
and, if that failed, to have recourse to the equally simple and straightforward
Mickey Finn.

That
glass of brandy there would make an admirable receptacle for the sedative, and
he had taken the precaution, while tapping Mr Pott’s store, to help himself to
a couple of the magic tablets, one of which still nestled in his waistcoat
pocket.

‘It’s
about that money you won from that man — Pott is his name, I believe — this
evening,’ he went on.

The
Duke grunted guardedly.

‘I have
been talking to him, and he is most distressed about it.’

The
Duke grunted again, scornfully this time, and it seemed to Lord Ickenham that
an odd sort of echo came from the bathroom. He put it down to some trick of the
acoustics.

‘Yes,
most distressed. It seems that in a sense the money was not his to gamble with.’

‘Hey?’
The Duke seemed interested. ‘What do you mean? Robbed a till or something, did
he?’

‘No,
no. Nothing like that. He is a man of the most scrupulous honesty. But it was a
sum which he had been saving up for his daughter’s wedding portion. And now it
has gone.’

‘What
do you expect me to do about it?’

‘You
wouldn’t feel inclined to give it back?’

‘Give
it back?’

‘It
would be a fine, generous, heart-stirring action.’

‘It
would be a fine, potty, fatheaded action,’ corrected the Duke warmly. ‘Give it
back, indeed! I never heard of such a thing.’

‘He is
much distressed.’

‘Let
him be.’

It
began to be borne in upon Lord Ickenham that in planning to appeal to the Duke’s
better feelings he had omitted to take into his calculations the fact that he
might not have any. With a dreamy look in his eye, he took the tablet from his
pocket and palmed it thoughtfully.

‘It
would be a pity if his daughter were not able to get married,’ he said.

‘Why?’
said the Duke, a stout bachelor.

‘She is
engaged to a fine young poet.’

‘Then,’
said the Duke, his face beginning to purple — the Dunstables did not easily
forget — ‘she’s jolly well out of it. Don’t talk to me about poets! The scum of
the earth.’

‘So you
won’t give the money back?’

‘No.’

‘Reflect,’
said Lord Ickenham. ‘It is here, in this room — is it not?’

‘What’s
that got to do with it?’

‘I was
only thinking that there it was — handy — and all you would have to do would be
to go to the drawer … or cupboard….’

He
paused expectantly. The Duke maintained a quiet reserve.

‘I wish
you would reconsider.’

‘Well,
I won’t.’

‘The
quality of mercy,’ said Lord Ickenham, deciding that he could not do better
than follow the tested methods of Horace’s Pekinese breeder, ‘is not strained —’