"But, father, why can"t you simply go to him and say it"s yours and that you must have it back?"
"And have him come back at me by calling off this engagement of yours? Not if I know it! You can"t go about the place charging a man with theft and ask him to go on being willing to have his son marry your daughter, can you? The slightest suggestion that I thought he had stolen this scarab and he would do the Proud Old English Aristocrat and end everything. He"s in the strongest position a thief has ever been in. You can"t get at him."
"I didn"t think of that."
"You don"t think at all. That"s the trouble with you," said Mr.
Peters.
Years of indigestion had made Mr. Peters" temper, even when in a normal mood, perfectly impossible; in a crisis like this it ran amuck. He vented it on Aline because he had always vented his irritabilities on Aline; because the fact of her sweet, gentle disposition, combined with the fact of their relationship, made her the ideal person to receive the overflow of his black moods.
While his wife had lived he had bullied her. On her death Aline had stepped into the vacant position.
Aline did not cry, because she was not a girl who was given to tears; but, for all her placid good temper, she was wounded. She was a girl who liked everything in the world to run smoothly and easily, and these scenes with her father always depressed her.
She took advantage of a lull in Mr. Peters" flow of words and slipped from the room.
Her cheerfulness had received a shock. She wanted sympathy. She wanted comforting. For a moment she considered George Emerson in the role of comforter; but there were objections to George in this character. Aline was accustomed to tease and chat with George, but at heart she was a little afraid of him; and instinct told her that, as comforter, he would be too volcanic and supermanly for a girl who was engaged to marry another man in June. George, as comforter, would be far too p.r.o.ne to trust to action rather than to the soothing power of the spoken word.
George"s idea of healing the wound, she felt, would be to push her into a cab and drive to the nearest registrar"s.
No; she would not go to George. To whom, then? The vision of Joan Valentine came to her--of Joan as she had seen her yesterday, strong, cheerful, self-reliant, bearing herself, in spite of adversity, with a valiant jauntiness. Yes; she would go and see Joan. She put on her hat and stole from the house.
Curiously enough, only a quarter of an hour before, R. Jones had set out with exactly the same object in view.
At almost exactly the hour when Aline Peters set off to visit her friend, Miss Valentine, three men sat in the cozy smoking-room of Blandings Castle.
They were variously occupied. In the big chair nearest the door the Honorable Frederick Threepwood--Freddie to pals--was reading.
Next to him sat a young man whose eyes, glittering through rimless spectacles, were concentrated on the upturned faces of several neat rows of playing cards--Rupert Baxter, Lord Emsworth"s invaluable secretary, had no vices, but he sometimes relaxed his busy brain with a game of solitaire. Beyond Baxter, a cigar in his mouth and a weak highball at his side, the Earl of Emsworth took his ease.
The book the Honorable Freddie was reading was a small paper-covered book. Its cover was decorated with a color scheme in red, black and yellow, depicting a tense moment in the lives of a man with a black beard, a man with a yellow beard, a man without any beard at all, and a young woman who, at first sight, appeared to be all eyes and hair. The man with the black beard, to gain some private end, had tied this young woman with ropes to a complicated system of machinery, mostly wheels and pulleys. The man with the yellow beard was in the act of pushing or pulling a lever. The beardless man, protruding through a trapdoor in the floor, was pointing a large revolver at the parties of the second part.
Beneath this picture were the words: "Hands up, you scoundrels!"
Above it, in a meandering scroll across the page, was: "Gridley Quayle, Investigator. The Adventure of the Secret Six. By Felix Clovelly."
The Honorable Freddie did not so much read as gulp the adventure of the Secret Six. His face was crimson with excitement; his hair was rumpled; his eyes bulged. He was absorbed.
This is peculiarly an age in which each of us may, if we do but search diligently, find the literature suited to his mental powers. Grave and earnest men, at Eton and elsewhere, had tried Freddie Threepwood with Greek, with Latin and with English; and the sheeplike stolidity with which he declined to be interested in the masterpieces of all three tongues had left them with the conviction that he would never read anything.
And then, years afterward, he had suddenly blossomed out as a student--only, it is true, a student of the Adventures of Gridley Quayle; but still a student. His was a dull life and Gridley Quayle was the only person who brought romance into it. Existence for the Honorable Freddie was simply a sort of desert, punctuated with monthly oases in the shape of new Quayle adventures. It was his ambition to meet the man who wrote them.
Lord Emsworth sat and smoked, and sipped and smoked again, at peace with all the world. His mind was as nearly a blank as it is possible for the human mind to be. The hand that had not the task of holding the cigar was at rest in his trousers pocket. The fingers of it fumbled idly with a small, hard object.
Gradually it filtered into his lordship"s mind that this small, hard object was not familiar. It was something new--something that was neither his keys nor his pencil; nor was it his small change. He yielded to a growing curiosity and drew it out. He examined it. It was a little something, rather like a fossilized beetle. It touched no chord in him. He looked at it with amiable distaste.
"Now how in the world did that get there?" he said.
The Honorable Freddie paid no attention to the remark. He was now at the very crest of his story, when every line intensified the thrill. Incident was succeeding incident. The Secret Six were here, there and everywhere, like so many malignant June bugs.
Annabel, the heroine, was having a perfectly rotten time--kidnapped, and imprisoned every few minutes. Gridley Quayle, hot on the scent, was covering somebody or other with his revolver almost continuously. Freddie Threepwood had no time for chatting with his father. Not so Rupert Baxter. Chatting with Lord Emsworth was one of the things for which he received his salary. He looked up from his cards.
"Lord Emsworth?"
"I have found a curious object in my pocket, Baxter. I was wondering how it got there."
He handed the thing to his secretary. Rupert Baxter"s eyes lit up with sudden enthusiasm. He gasped.
"Magnificent!" he cried. "Superb!"
Lord Emsworth looked at him inquiringly.
"It is a scarab, Lord Emsworth; and unless I am mistaken--and I think I may claim to be something of an expert--a Cheops of the Fourth Dynasty. A wonderful addition to your museum!"
"Is it? By Gad! You don"t say so, Baxter!"
"It is, indeed. If it is not a rude question, how much did you give for it, Lord Emsworth? It must have been the gem of somebody"s collection. Was there a sale at Christie"s this afternoon?"
Lord Emsworth shook his head. "I did not get it at Christie"s, for I recollect that I had an important engagement which prevented my going to Christie"s. To be sure; yes--I had promised to call on Mr. Peters and examine his collection of--Now I wonder what it was that Mr. Peters said he collected!"
"Mr. Peters is one of the best-known living collectors of scarabs."
"Scarabs! You are quite right, Baxter. Now that I recall the episode, this is a scarab; and Mr. Peters gave it to me."
"Gave it to you, Lord Emsworth?"
"Yes. The whole scene comes back to me. Mr. Peters, after telling me a great many exceedingly interesting things about scarabs, which I regret to say I cannot remember, gave me this. And you say it is really valuable, Baxter?"
"It is, from a collector"s point of view, of extraordinary value."
"Bless my soul!" Lord Emsworth beamed. "This is extremely interesting, Baxter. One has heard so much of the princely hospitality of Americans. How exceedingly kind of Mr. Peters! I shall certainly treasure it, though I must confess that from a purely spectacular standpoint it leaves me a little cold.
However, I must not look a gift horse in the mouth--eh, Baxter?"
From afar came the silver booming of a gong. Lord Emsworth rose.
"Time to dress for dinner? I had no idea it was so late. Baxter, you will be going past the museum door. Will you be a good fellow and place this among the exhibits? You will know what to do with it better than I. I always think of you as the curator of my little collection, Baxter--ha-ha! Mind how you step when you are in the museum. I was painting a chair there yesterday and I think I left the paint pot on the floor."
He cast a less amiable glance at his studious son.
"Get up, Frederick, and go and dress for dinner. What is that trash you are reading?"
The Honorable Freddie came out of his book much as a sleepwalker wakes--with a sense of having been violently a.s.saulted. He looked up with a kind of stunned plaintiveness.
"Eh, gov"nor?"
"Make haste! Beach rang the gong five minutes ago. What is that you are reading?"
"Oh, nothing, gov"nor--just a book."
"I wonder you can waste your time on such trash. Make haste!"