Meet Mr Mulliner (4 page)

My brother Wilfred (said Mr Mulliner) is
the clever one of the family. Even as a boy he was always messing about with
chemicals, and at the University he devoted his time entirely to research. The
result was that while still quite a young man he had won an established
reputation as the inventor of what are known to the trade as Mulliner’s Magic
Marvels—a general term embracing the Raven Gipsy Face-Cream, the Snow of the
Mountains Lotion, and many other preparations, some designed exclusively for
the toilet, others of a curative nature, intended to alleviate the many ills to
which the flesh is heir.

Naturally, he was a very busy man: and it
is to this absorption in his work that I attribute the fact that, though—like
all the Mulliners—a man of striking personal charm, he had reached his thirty-first
year without ever having been involved in an affair of the heart. I remember
him telling me once that he simply had no time for girls.

But we all fall sooner or later, and these
strong concentrated men harder than any. While taking a brief holiday one year
at Cannes, he met a Miss Angela Purdue, who was staying at his hotel, and she
bowled him over completely.

She was one of these jolly, outdoor girls;
and Wilfred had told me that what attracted him first about her was her
wholesome, sunburned complexion. In fact, he told Miss Purdue the same thing
when, shortly after he had proposed and been accepted, she asked him in her girlish
way what it was that had first made him begin to love her.

“It’s such a pity,” said Miss Purdue, “that
the sunburn fades so soon. I do wish I knew some way of keeping it.”

Even in his moments of holiest emotion
Wilfred never forgot that he was a business man.

“You should try Mulliner’s Raven Gipsy
Face-Cream,” he said. “It comes in two sizes—the small (or half-crown) jar and
the large jar at seven shillings and sixpence. The large jar contains three and
a half times as much as the small jar. It is applied nightly with a small
sponge before retiring to rest. Testimonials have been received from numerous
members of the aristocracy and may be examined at the office by any bona-fide
inquirer.”

“Is it really good?”

“I invented it,” said Wilfred, simply.

She looked at him adoringly.

“How clever you are! Any girl ought to be
proud to marry you.”

“Oh, well,” said Wilfred, with a modest
wave of his hand.

“All the same, my guardian is going to be
terribly angry when I tell him we’re engaged.”

“Why?”

“I inherited the Purdue millions when my
uncle died, you see, and my guardian has always wanted me to marry his son,
Percy.”

Wilfred kissed her fondly, and laughed a
defiant laugh.

“Jer mong feesh der selar,” he said
lightly.

But, some days after his return to London,
whither the girl had preceded him, he had occasion to recall her words. As he
sat in his study, musing on a preparation to cure the pip in canaries, a card
was brought to him.

“Sir Jasper ffinch-ffarrowmere, Bart.,” he
read. The name was strange to him.

“Show the gentleman in,” he said. And
presently there entered a very stout man with a broad, pink face. It was a face
whose natural expression should, Wilfred felt, have been jovial, but at the
moment it was grave.

“Sir Jasper Finch-Farrowmere?” said
Wilfred.

“ffinch-ffarrowmere,” corrected the visitor,
his sensitive ear detecting the capital letters.

“Ah yes. You spell it with two small ‘f’s.”

“Four small f’s.”

“And to what do I owe the honour—”

“I am Angela Purdue’s guardian.”

“How do you do? A whisky-and-soda?”

“I thank you, no. I am a total abstainer.
I found that alcohol had a tendency to increase my weight, so I gave it up. I
have also given up butter, potatoes, soups of all kinds and However,” he broke
off, the fanatic gleam which comes into the eyes of all fat men who are
describing their system of diet fading away, “this is not a social call, and I
must not take up your time with idle talk. I have a message for you, Mr Mulliner.
From Angela.”

“Bless her!” said Wilfred. “Sir Jasper, I
love that girl with a fervour which increases daily.”

“Is that so?” said the baronet. “Well,
what I came to say was, it’s all off.”

“What?”

“All off. She sent me to say that she had
thought it over and wanted to break the engagement.”

Wilfred’s eyes narrowed. He had not
forgotten what Angela had said about this man wanting her to marry his son. He
gazed piercingly at his visitor, no longer deceived by the superficial geniality
of his appearance. He had read too many detective stories where the fat, jolly,
red-faced man turns out a fiend in human shape to be a ready victim to
appearances.

“Indeed?” he said, coldly. “I should
prefer to have this information from Miss Purdue’s own lips.”

“She won’t see you. But, anticipating this
attitude on your part, I brought a letter from her. You recognise the writing?”

Wilfred took the letter. Certainly, the
hand was Angela’s, and the meaning of the words he read unmistakable.
Nevertheless, as he handed the missive back, there was a hard smile on his
face.

“There is such a thing as writing a letter
under compulsion,” he said.

The baronet’s pink face turned mauve.

“What do you mean, sir?”

“What I say.”

“Are you insinuating—”

“Yes, I am.”

“Pooh, sir!”

“Pooh to you!” said Wilfred. “And, if you
want to know what I think, you poor ffish, I believe your name is spelled with
a capital F, like anybody else’s.”

Stung to the quick, the baronet turned on
his heel and left the room without another word.

Although he had given up his life to
chemical research, Wilfred Mulliner was no mere dreamer. He could be the man of
action when necessity demanded. Scarcely had his visitor left when he was on
his way to the Senior Test-Tubes, the famous chemists’ club in St. James’s.
There, consulting Kelly’s
County Families
, he learnt that Sir Jasper’s
address was ffinch Hall in Yorkshire. He had found out all he wanted to know.
It was at ffinch Hall, he decided, that Angela must now be immured.

For that she was being immured somewhere
he had no doubt. That letter, he was positive, had been written by her under
stress of threats. The writing was Angela’s, but he declined to believe that
she was responsible for the phraseology and sentiments. He remembered reading a
story where the heroine was forced into courses which she would not otherwise
have contemplated by the fact that somebody was standing over her with a flask
of vitriol. Possibly this was what that bounder of a baronet had done to Angela.

Considering this possibility, he did not
blame her for what she had said about him, Wilfred, in the second paragraph of
her note. Nor did he reproach her for signing herself “Yrs truly, A. Purdue.”
Naturally, when baronets are threatening to pour vitriol down her neck, a
refined and sensitive young girl cannot pick her words. This sort of thing must
of necessity interfere with the selection of the
mot juste
.

That afternoon, Wilfred was in a train on
his way to Yorkshire. That evening, he was in the ffinch Arms in the village of
which Sir Jasper was the squire. That night, he was in the gardens of ffinch
Hall, prowling softly round the house, listening.

And presently, as he prowled, there came
to his ears from an upper window a sound that made him stiffen like a statue
and clench his hands till the knuckles stood out white under the strain.

It was the sound of a woman sobbing.

Wilfred spent a sleepless night, but by
morning he had formed his plan of action. I will not weary you with a
description of the slow and tedious steps by which he first made the
acquaintance of Sir Jasper’s valet, who was an
habitué
of the village
inn, and then by careful stages won the man’s confidence with friendly words
and beer. Suffice it to say that, about a week later, Wilfred had induced this
man with bribes to leave suddenly on the plea of an aunt’s illness,
supplying—so as to cause his employer no inconvenience—a cousin to take his
place.

This cousin, as you will have guessed, was
Wilfred himself. But a very different Wilfred from the dark-haired, clean-cut
young scientist who had revolutionised the world of chemistry a few months
before by proving that H
₂
O + b3g4z7 - m9z8 = g6f5p3x. Before leaving
London on what he knew would be a dark and dangerous enterprise, Wilfred had
taken the precaution of calling in at a well-known costumier’s and buying a red
wig. He had also purchased a pair of blue spectacles: but for the role which he
had now undertaken these were, of course, useless. A blue-spectacled valet
could not but have aroused suspicion in the most guileless baronet. All that
Wilfred did, therefore, in the way of preparation, was to don the wig, shave
off his moustache, and treat his face to a light coating of the Raven Gipsy
Face-Cream. This done, he set out for ffinch Hall.

Externally, ffinch Hall was one of those
gloomy, sombre country-houses which seem to exist only for the purpose of
having horrid crimes committed in them. Even in his brief visit to the grounds,
Wilfred had noticed fully half a dozen places which seemed incomplete without a
cross indicating spot where body was found by the police. It was the sort of
house where ravens croak in the front garden just before the death of the heir,
and shrieks ring out from behind barred windows in the night.

Nor was its interior more cheerful. And,
as for the personnel of the domestic staff, that was less exhilarating than
anything else about the place. It consisted of an aged cook who, as she bent
over her cauldrons, looked like something out of a travelling company of
Macbeth
,
touring the smaller towns of the North, and Murgatroyd, the butler, a huge,
sinister man with a cast in one eye and an evil light in the other.

Many men, under these conditions, would
have been daunted. But not Wilfred Mulliner. Apart from the fact that, like all
the Mulliners, he was as brave as a Hon, he had come expecting something of
this nature. He settled down to his duties and kept his eyes open, and before
long his vigilance was rewarded.

One day, as he lurked about the dim-lit
passage-ways, he saw Sir Jasper coming up the stairs with a laden tray in his
hands. It contained a toast-rack, a half bot. of white wine, pepper, salt,
veg., and in a covered dish something which Wilfred, sniffing cautiously,
decided was a cutlet.

Lurking in the shadows, he followed the
baronet to the top of the house. Sir Jasper paused at a door on the second
floor. He knocked. The door opened, a hand was stretched forth, the tray
vanished, the door closed, and the baronet moved away.

So did Wilfred. He had seen what he had
wanted to see, discovered what he had wanted to discover. He returned to the
servants’ hall, and under the gloomy eyes of Murgatroyd began to shape his
plans.

“Where you been?” demanded the butler, suspiciously.

“Oh, hither and thither,” said Wilfred,
with a well-assumed airiness.

Murgatroyd directed a menacing glance at
him.

“You’d better stay where you belong,” he
said, in his thick, growling voice. “There’s things in this house that don’t
want seeing.”

“Ah!” agreed the cook, dropping an onion
in the cauldron.

Wilfred could not repress a shudder. But,
even as he shuddered, he was conscious of a certain relief. At least, he
reflected, they were not starving his darling. That cutlet had smelt uncommonly
good: and, if the bill of fare was always maintained at this level, she had
nothing to complain of in the catering.

But his relief was short-lived. What,
after all, he asked himself, are cutlets to a girl who is imprisoned in a
locked room of a sinister country-house and is being forced to marry a man she
does not love? Practically nothing. When the heart is sick, cutlets merely
alleviate, they do not cure. Fiercely Wilfred told himself that, come what
might, few days should pass before he found the key to that locked door and
bore away his love to freedom and happiness.

The only obstacle in the way of this
scheme was that it was plainly going to be a matter of the greatest difficulty
to find the key. That night, when his employer dined, Wilfred searched his room
thoroughly. He found nothing. The key, he was forced to conclude, was kept on
the baronet’s person.

Then how to secure it?

It is not too much to say that Wilfred Mulliner
was non-plussed. The brain which had electrified the world of Science by
discovering that if you mixed a stiffish oxygen and potassium and added a
splash of trinitrotoluol and a spot of old brandy you got something that could
be sold in America as champagne at a hundred and fifty dollars the case, had to
confess itself baffled.

To attempt to analyse the young man’s emotions,
as the next week dragged itself by, would be merely morbid. Life cannot, of
course, be all sunshine: and in relating a story like this, which is a slice of
life, one must pay as much attention to shade as to light: nevertheless, it
would be tedious were I to describe to you in detail the soul-torments which
afflicted Wilfred Mulliner as day followed day and no solution to the problem
presented itself. You are all intelligent men, and you can picture to
yourselves how a high-spirited young fellow, deeply in love, must have felt;
knowing that the girl he loved was languishing in what practically amounted to
a dungeon, though situated on an upper floor, and chafing at his inability to
set her free.