Hot Water (13 page)

G
ORDON CARLISLE
was a man who in his time had played many parts. Starting at the bottom of the ladder as the genial young fellow who had found a ruby ring in the street and was anxious, as the bally thing was of no use to him, to sell it for what it would fetch, he had worked his way up by sheer talent and application to the top of his profession. To impersonate even a South American hidalgo with title deeds to lands rich in oil and minerals was nowadays a mere nothing to him.

It is not to be supposed, therefore, that the task of depicting a member of the French aristocracy would occasion him any concern. He was glowing with careless confidence. He felt that these people, whoever they were, were seeing him at his best.

Packy, on the other hand, though a young man not easily put out of countenance, was experiencing an attack of something akin to panic. He had not anticipated that he would be called upon to forgather with Ducs. And if this encounter had to take place, he wished fervently that it had not occurred in the presence of Miss Putnam. He knew his Putnam. Unless forcibly prevented, she was very shortly going to say how nice it would be for a Vicomte and a Duc to have somebody with whom they could converse in their own language.

At the moment, she was occupied with greeting the handsome guest.

'How do you do, Duke? I am Mrs Gedge's secretary.'

'Mademoiselle!' said Mr Carlisle, bowing.

Miss Putnam beamed upon this worthy upholder of the
politesse
of the
ancien régime.

'I hope you had a pleasant journey?'

'Most, thank you. The sea was like a...'

'Mill-pond?' said Miss Putnam. A student of crossword puzzles, she was seldom at a loss.

'A meal-pont. Exactly. And this gentleman?'

'This is the Vicomte de Blissac. How nice it will be...'

It seemed to Packy that at the mention of the Vicomte's name some kind of fleeting emotion had shown itself for an instant in the visitor's face, but he was too preoccupied with his own predicament to give it attention. He plunged desperately into small-talk.

'How do you do? Nice to see you.'

'It is to me,' replied Mr Carlisle with his unfailing politeness, 'a great privilege to visit your historic Château. The Château Blissac has figured much in our country's history.'

'You are not from these parts?'

'Ah, no. My estates are in Touraine.'

'Have you come from Paris?'

'From England.'

'By boat?'

'Yais.'

'How nice...' said Miss Putnam.

'So many people,' said Packy quickly, 'fly nowadays.'

'Ah, yais.'

'I am very fond of flying.'

'I also.'

'There is something about flying.'

'Yais.'

'So much quicker.'

'Yais.'

'How nice...'

'Think,' said Packy, 'what a lot of time one wastes on the train and then on the boat, coming to a place like this.'

'Yais.'

'In a 'plane it would have taken you only an hour or two to get here.'

'Yais.'

'Still, you did get here, didn't you, Duke?' said Miss Putnam, smiling in a roguish sort of way. 'And how nice it will be for you, having somebody to talk to in your own language. I was saying to the Vicomte only just now that, however well you speak a foreign language, it is never quite the same.'

A somewhat strained pause followed the delivery of this dictum. For the space of perhaps a quarter of a minute the French aristocrats stared at one another dumbly. Here, you would have said, watching them, were two strong, silent Frenchmen.

Mr Carlisle was the first to rally from the shock.

'Parfaitement,'
he said.

'Alors,'
said Packy.

'Parbleu!'

'Nom d'une pipe!'

There was another pause. It was as if some theme of deep interest had been exhausted. i59

Packy indicated the sky, as something to which he felt the visitor's attention should be directed.

'Le soleil!'

'Mais oui!'

'Beau!'

'Parbleu!'
said Mr Carlisle, rather meanly falling back on old stuff.

They paused again. Packy, except for
'Oo là là!'
which he did not quite know how to bring in, had now shot his bolt.

But Mr Carlisle was made of sterner stuff. If there is much to be said from a moral standpoint against Confidence Trickery as a profession, there is this to be urged in its favour, looking at it from a purely utilitarian point of view – that it undoubtedly breeds in its initiates a certain enviable coolheadedness and enables them to behave with an easy grace in circumstances where the layman would be nonplussed. Mr Carlisle, after what he would have been the first to confess a bad two minutes, was his resourceful self once more.

'But really, my dear fellow,' he said, with a light laugh, 'all this is vairy delightful, but you must not tempt me, no. My English it is not good, and I promise my
instructeur
that always I would speak it only. You understand?'

The interval of silence had enabled Packy to dig up a really hot one.

'C'est vrai,'
he said, with a glance at Miss Putnam which suggested that that, in his opinion, would hold her for awhile.
'Mais, c'est vrai, mon vieux. Oo là là, c'est vrai!
I, also, study the English and do not wish to speak the French.'

He regarded the descendant of the proud Pont-Andemers with an almost doglike devotion. He felt he had never met a more charming, delightful man. A Frenchman, yes – but how nobly he had lived it down by this sturdy refusal to speak or listen to his native tongue. Let him but carry on along these lines, never swerving from his determination, and Packy saw no reason why their mutual visit to the Château Blissac should not result in one of those great friendships you read about.

The departure of Miss Putnam, which occurred at this point, gave him an excuse for tearing himself away. The secretary, apparently losing interest now that the torrent of idiomatic French had dried up, had made one of her silent exits. Packy, well pleased, felt that the time had come for him to proceed to the hammock, where, he considered, he had already kept Jane Opal waiting too long.

'Well, Duc, I'll be seeing you,' he said cheerily. 'I have a date. Good-bye.'

'Au revoir,'
said the Duc de Pont-Andemer.

He watched Packy disappear across the lawn. Then, turning, he strode briskly off down the drive. He wished to have a word with his friend and colleague, Mr Soup Slattery.

He found Mr Slattery, as he had expected to find him, in the cocktail bar of the Hotel des Etrangers.

The safe-blower, his modest day's gambling concluded, was refreshing himself with a Gustave Special.

He looked up as Mr Carlisle approached.

'Hello! you back?'

'Yes, I'm back.'

'How did you make out?'

'Oke. I'm in the Château.'

Respectful admiration shone in Mr Slattery's eyes. He was a man who could give homage where homage was due.

'Nice work, Oily. You're certainly smooth.'

As a rule, Mr Carlisle liked compliments, but he cut these short.

'Listen, Soup. Things aren't so good as you think.'

'How's that?'

'There's another bird in this Château, on the same lay as us.'

'What!'

'That's right. I found him there when I arrived. He says he's the Vicomte de Blissac.'

'I know D. Blissac.'

'So do I. It isn't more than a year since I took a couple of thousand bucks off him one night in London. That's how I know this bird isn't him. It made me jump, I tell you, when that woman points at this guy and says to me: "Shake hands with the Vicomte de Blissac." Right there I was on to him. I've never seen him before. He's a husky guy that looks like a prize-fighter.'

'Was he on to you?'

'No. He thinks I'm a French Duc. We've got to get rid of him.'

Mr Slattery's massive jaw protruded.

'You betcha we've got to get rid of him. And quick. I'm not going to have anyone muscling in on our territory.'

Mr Carlisle nodded, well pleased. Negligible though he considered him as an intellectual force, he had known that he could count on Soup when it came to crude physical action.

'He's too big for me to handle, so it's up to you. What you've got to do is go have a talk with him, and it better be to-night.'

'I'll talk to him. But how,' asked Mr Slattery, the difficulties of the undertaking beginning to impress themselves on his somewhat slow mind, 'do I locate him?'

'I don't know yet where he's sleeping, but I'll find out, and I'll leave a plan of the house under a stone on the right side of the front door steps, so you can get it when you come. And somewhere there'll be a window open for you. Okay?'

'Kayo,' said Mr Slattery shortly.

'You go to this guy, then, and knock the daylights out of him. Make him see it isn't healthy for him around these parts.'

Mr Slattery, without speaking, extended a massive arm and clenched and unclenched the ham-like fist at the end of it. Mr Carlisle, smiling approvingly, bade him farewell and set out for the Château with an easy mind. He felt he had left the matter in good hands.

Mental activity generally expresses itself in correspondingly rapid physical action. Mr Carlisle had started to walk back to the Château at a brisk pace, and as the afternoon sun was now beating down with considerable force it was not long before he became conscious of feeling extremely warm. As he passed up the drive, he was thinking how remarkably pleasant a cold bath would be. And it was just as he had begun to toy with this thought that his eye was attracted by the silver gleam of water through the trees to his left.

It drew him like a magnet. He left the drive and took a crosscountry route in its direction. And presently he found himself on the edge of what was known locally as the lake, but which was in reality a sort of salt-water lagoon connected with the harbour of St Rocque by a narrow channel.

It looked extraordinarily inviting. He glanced modestly to right and left. Thick bushes screened this portion of the lake, almost meeting across the path down which he had come. There appeared to be no eye that could observe him. With a sigh of satisfaction, he removed his coat and tie, and he was just about to slide out of his trousers when there spoke in his immediate rear an austere, maidenly voice.

'Hey!' said the voice.

It seemed to rip through Mr Carlisle like a bullet.

Medway, the maid, on leaving Senator Opal, had taken her book down to the lake. It was a favourite haunt of hers. Here, lying on the soft turf in the pleasant shade, she proceeded to resume the adventures of Janice Devereux, Detective, at the point where she had left off on the previous night. But barely had she had time to read the opening murder of Chapter Eleven when the sound of footsteps told her that her sanctuary had been invaded. Legs passed her and halted on the brink of the water.

Parting the bushes, she peered out. And it was the sight she saw that drew from her the shocked exclamation just recorded.

All the woman in Medway was stirred to its depths.

'Hey!' she cried, and it might have been Mrs Grundy herself speaking. 'What do you think this place is? A bath-house?'

Mr Carlisle was still tottering where he stood. He looked like a gentlemanly poplar swaying in the breeze. The lake and the trees about it had not yet ceased to perform the complicated
adagio
dance into which they had broken. He gasped painfully, and with good reason.

Any feminine voice speaking at such a moment would have startled Mr Carlisle. What rendered this one so peculiarly disintegrating was the fact that he recognized it. Indeed, one might say that it had been ringing in his ears ever since the day, twelve months ago, when it had called him a two-timing piece of cheese – a remark which had been followed almost immediately by the descent on his frontal orbital bone of a large china vase.

It was the voice of his lost Gertie.

The next moment, she had come out of the bushes and was facing him.

'Gertie!' cried Mr Carlisle.

We who have been privileged to peep into Gordon Carlisle's soul can understand his emotion. Although at their parting this girl had beaned him with a vase, and rather a good vase, too, all the old love still remained. The first shock of astonishment over, it was ecstasy that predominated in the bosom which he was now hastily covering with his coat. His trousers, it need scarcely be said, for the code of the Carlisles was rigid, he had hitched up at the first intimation that he was not alone.

'Gertie! At last! After all these long, weary months!'

The girl was looking cold and hard and proud. Ancient grievances still rankled in her bosom, for women do not lightly forget.

'Well, Mr Carlisle,' she said.

It was plain that such icy aloofness at what should have been a lovers' meeting wounded her companion.

'Gertie,' he said, and there was the quiver in his voice which had once extracted a ten-pound subscription to the Home for Brave Ailing Mothers from a man named MacPherson, 'aren't you going to let bygones be bygones?'

'No, I'm not.'

Mr Carlisle gulped. He sought for words that would soften this obduracy.

'You don't know how I've missed you, Gertie.'

'Says you.'

'I've been searching for you everywhere.'

'Says you.'

'Yes, says me!' cried Mr Carlisle passionately. 'What would I be doing over in Europe if I hadn't heard that you had gone there?'

Medway laughed scornfully.

'And I suppose you came to this Château as the Duke de something because you heard I was here? I know all about you. I was there when Miss Putnam was talking to the butler. She was saying put you in the Yellow Room. Personally,' said Medway, speaking with a sort of queenly disdain, 'I'd put you in the ash-can.'

'No,' admitted Mr Carlisle, 'I did not come to the Château because I heard you were here. I'm on a job. And I'll bet it's the same job you're on. You've hired yourself out as a maid to get a chance of grabbing Mrs Gedge's ice.'