Uncle Fred in the Springtime (30 page)

‘The
what isn’t?’

‘The
quality of mercy. It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place
beneath. It is twice blessed —’

‘How do
you make that out?’

‘It
blesseth him that gives and him that takes,’ explained Lord Ickenham. ‘Never
heard such rot in my life,’ said the Duke. ‘I think you’re potty. Anyhow, you’ll
have to go now. I’m expecting my secretary at any moment for an important
conference. You haven’t seen him anywhere, have you?’

‘I had
a few words with him before dinner, but I have not seen him since. He is
probably amusing himself somewhere.’

‘I’ll
amuse him, when I see him.’

‘No
doubt he has been unable to tear himself away from the fascinations of the
backgammon board or the halma table. Young blood!’

‘Young
blood be blowed.’

‘Ah,
that will be he, no doubt.’

‘Eh?’

‘Someone
knocked.’

‘I didn’t
hear anything.’

The
Duke went to the door and opened it. Lord Ickenham stretched a hand over the
brandy glass and opened it. The Duke came back.

‘Nobody
there.’

‘Ah,
then I was mistaken. Well, if you really wish me to go, I will be leaving you.
If you don’t feel like making the splendid gesture I proposed, there is no more
to be said. Good night, my dear fellow,’ said Lord Ickenham, and withdrew.

It was
perhaps a minute after he had taken his departure that Mr Pott entered the
corridor.

Of all
the residents of Blandings Castle who had been doing a bit of intensive
thinking during dinner — and there were several — Claude Pott was the one who
had been thinking hardest. And the result of his thoughts had been to send him
hastening to the Duke’s room. It was his hope that he would be able to persuade
him to play a hand or two of a game called Slippery Joe.

The evening’s
disaster had left Mr Pott not only out of pocket and humiliated, but full of
the liveliest suspicion. How the miracle had been accomplished, he was unable
to say, but the more he brooded over the Duke’s triumph, the more convinced did
he become that he had been cheated and hornswoggled. Honest men, he told
himself, did not beat him at Persian Monarchs, and he blamed himself for having
selected a game at which it was possible, apparently, for an unscrupulous
opponent to put something over. Slippery Joe was open to no such objection.
Years of experience had taught him that at Slippery Joe he could always deal
himself an unbeatable hand.

He was
just about to turn the corner leading to the Garden Suite, hoping for the best,
when the Duke came round it, travelling well, and ran into him.

For
some moments after Lord Ickenham had left him, the Duke of Dunstable had
remained where he sat, frowning peevishly. Then he had risen. Distasteful and
even degrading though it might be to go running about after secretaries, there
seemed nothing for it but to institute a search for the missing Baxter. He
hastened out, and the first thing he knew he was colliding with the frightful
feller.

Then he
saw that it was not the frightful feller, after all, but another feller, equally
frightful — the chap with the wedding-portion daughter, to wit — a man for
whom, since listening to Lord Ickenham’s remarks, he had come to feel a vivid
dislike. He was not fond of many people, but the people of whom he was least
fond were those who wanted to get money out of him.

‘Gah!’
he said, disentangling himself.

Mr Pott
smiled an ingratiating smile. It was only a sketchy one, for he had had to
assemble it in a hurry, but such as it was he let the Duke have it.

‘Hullo,
your Grace,’ he said.

‘Go to
hell,’ said the Duke and, these brief civilities concluded, stumped off and was
lost to sight.

And
simultaneously a thought came to Mr Pott like a full-blown rose, flushing his
brow.

Until
this moment, Mr Pott’s only desire had been to recover his lost money through
the medium of a game of Slippery Joe. He now saw that there was a simpler and
less elaborate way of arriving at the happy ending. Somewhere in the Duke’s
room there was three hundred pounds morally belonging to himself, and the Duke’s
room was now unoccupied. To go in and help himself would be to avoid a lot of
tedious preliminaries.

Though
stout of build, he could move quickly when the occasion called for speed. He
bounced along the passage like a rubber ball. Only when he had reached his destination
did he find that he need not have hurried. Preoccupied the Duke might have
been, but he had not been too preoccupied to remember to lock his door.

The
situation was one that might have baffled many men, and for an instant it
baffled Mr Pott completely. Then, his native ingenuity asserting itself, he
bethought him that the door was not the only means of access to the room. There
were french windows, and it was just possible that on a balmy evening like this
the Duke might have left them open. Reaching the lawn after a brisk run, rosy
and puffing, he discovered that he had not.

This
time, Mr Pott accepted defeat. He knew men in London who would have made short
work of those windows. They would have produced a bit of bent wire and opened
them as if they had been a sardine tin, laughing lightly the while. But he had
no skill in that direction. Rueful but resigned, with some of the feelings of
Moses gazing at the Promised Land from the summit of Mount Pisgah, he put an
eye to the glass and peered through. There was the dear old room, all ready and
waiting, but for practical purposes it might have been a hundred miles away.
And presently he saw the door open and the Duke came in.

And he
was turning away with a sigh, a beaten man, when from somewhere close at hand a
voice in the night began to sing the ‘Bonny Bonny Banks of Loch Lomond’. And
scarcely had the haunting refrain ceased to annoy the birds roosting in the
trees, when the french windows flew open and the Duke of Dunstable, shooting
out like a projectile, went whizzing across the lawn, crying ‘Hey!’ as he did
so. To Mr Pott, the thing had been just a song, but to the Duke it seemed to
have carried a deeper message.

And
such was indeed the case. The interpretation which he had placed upon that
sudden burst of melody was that it was Baxter who stood warbling without, and
that this was his way of trying to attract his employer’s attention. Why Baxter
should sing outside his room, instead of walking straight in, was a problem
which he found himself at the moment unable to solve. He presumed that the man
must have some good reason for a course of conduct which at first glance seemed
merely eccentric. Possibly, he reflected, complications had arisen, rendering
it necessary for him to communicate with headquarters in this oblique and
secret society fashion. He could vaguely recall having read in his boyhood
stories in which people in such circumstances had imitated the hoot of the
night-owl.

‘Hey!’
he called, trying to combine the conflicting tasks of shouting and speaking in
a cautious undertone. ‘Here! Hi! Hey! Where are you, dash it?’

For his
efforts to establish contact with the vocalist were being oddly frustrated.
Instead of standing still and delivering his report, the other seemed to be
receding into the distance. When the ‘Bonny Banks’ broke out again, it was from
somewhere at the farther end of the lawn. With a muffled oath, the Duke
galloped in that direction like the man in the poem who followed the Gleam, and
Mr Pott, always an excellent opportunist, slid in through the french windows.

He had
scarcely done so, when he heard footsteps. Somebody was approaching across the
grass, and approaching so rapidly that there was no time to be lost if an
embarrassing encounter was to be avoided. With great presence of mind he dived
into the bathroom. And as he closed the door, Lord Ickenham came in.

Lord
Ickenham was feeling well pleased. The artistry of his nephew’s performance had
enchanted him. He had not supposed that the boy had it in him to carry the
thing through with such
bravura.
At the best he had hoped for a timid
piping, and that full-throated baying, a cross between a bloodhound on the
trail and a Scotsman celebrating New Year’s Eve, had been as unexpected as it
was agreeable. Technical defects there may have been in Pongo’s vocalization,
but he had certainly brought the Duke out of the room like a cork out of a
bottle. Lord Ickenham could not remember ever having seen a duke move quicker.

And he
was just settling down to a swift and intensive search for the wedding portion,
when his activities were arrested. From behind the bathroom door, freezing him
in his tracks, there came the sharp, piercing scream of a human being in
distress. The next moment, Mr Pott staggered out, slamming the door behind him.

‘Mustard!’
cried Lord Ickenham, completely at a loss.

‘Coo!’
said Mr Pott, and in a lifetime liberally punctuated by that ejaculation he had
never said it with stronger emphasis.

Normally,
Claude Pott was rather a reserved man. He lived in a world in which if you
showed your feelings, you lost money. But there were some things which could
break down his poise, and one of these was the discovery that he was closeted
in a small bathroom with the largest pig he had ever encountered.

For an
instant, after he had entered his hiding-place, the Empress had been just an
aroma in the darkness. If Mr Pott had felt that it was a bit stuffy in here,
that was all he had felt. Then something cold and moist pressed itself against
his dangling hand, and the truth came home to him.

‘Mustard,
my dear fellow!’

‘Cor!’
said Mr Pott.

He was
shaking in every limb. It is not easy for a man who weighs nearly two hundred
pounds to quiver like an aspen, but he managed to do it. His mind was in a
whirl, from which emerged one coherent thought — that he wanted a drink. An
imperious desire for a quick restorative swept over him, and suddenly he
perceived that there was relief in sight — if only a small relief. That glass
of brandy on the table would be of little real use to him. What he really
needed was a brimming bucketful. But it would at least be a step in the right
direction.

‘Mustard!
Stop!’

Lord
Ickenham’s warning cry came too late. The lethal draught had already passed
down Mr Pott’s throat, and even as he shook his head appreciatively the glass
fell to the floor and he followed it. If twenty pigs had bitten Claude Pott
simultaneously in twenty different places, he could not have succumbed more
completely.

It was
with a sympathetic eye and a tut-tut-ing tongue that Lord Ickenham bent over
the remains. There was nothing, he knew, to be done. Only Time, the great
healer, could make Claude Pott once more the Claude Pott of happier days. He
rose, wondering how best to dispose of the body, and as he did so a voice
spoke behind him.

‘Hullo-ullo-ullo-ullo-ullo!’
it said, and in the words there was an unmistakable note of rebuke.

Faithfully
and well Lord Bosham had followed out his policy of lurking, as outlined to his
Aunt Constance before dinner. He was now standing in the window, his gun comfortably
poised.

‘What
ho, what ho, what ho, what ho, what ho, what, what?’ he added, and paused for a
reply.

This
Lord Ickenham was not able to give. Man of iron nerve though he was, he could
be taken aback. The sudden appearance of Horace Davenport earlier in the
evening had done it. The equally sudden appearance of Lord Bosham did it again.
He found himself at a loss for words, and it was Lord Bosham who eventually
resumed the conversation.

‘Well,
I’m dashed!’ he said, still speaking with that strong note of reproof. ‘Here’s
a nice state of things! So you’ve put it across poor old Pott now, have you? It’s
a bit thick. We engage detectives at enormous expense, and as fast as we get
them in you bowl them over with knock-out drops.’

He
paused, struggling with his feelings. It was plain that he could not trust
himself to say what he really thought about it all. His eye roamed the room,
and lit up as it rested on the door of the cupboard.

‘You
jolly well get in there,’ he said, indicating it with a wave of the gun. ‘Into
that cupboard with you, quick, and no back chat.’

If Lord
Ickenham had had any intention of essaying repartee, he abandoned it. He
entered the cupboard, and the key turned in the lock behind him.

Lord
Bosham pressed the bell. A stately form appeared in the doorway.

‘Oh,
Beach.’

‘M’lord?’

‘Get a
flock of footmen and have Mr Pott taken up to his room, will you?’

‘Very
good, m’lord.’

The
butler had betrayed no emotion on beholding what appeared to be a corpse on the
floor of the Garden Suite. Nor did the two footmen, Charles and Henry, who
subsequently carried out the removal. It was Blandings Castle’s pride that its
staff was well trained. Mr Pott disappeared feet foremost, like a used
gladiator being cleared away from the arena, and Lord Bosham was left to his
thoughts.

These
might have been expected to be exultant, for he had undoubtedly acted with’
dash and decision in a testing situation. But they were only partly so. Mingled
with a victor’s triumph was the chagrin of the conscientious man who sees a
task but half done. That he had properly put a stopper on Impostor A was
undeniable, but he had hoped also to deal faithfully with Impostor B. He was
wondering if the chap was hiding somewhere and if so, where, when there came to
his sensitive ear the sound of a grunt, and he realized that it had proceeded
from the bathroom.