CHAPTER VII

That evening Mr. Archie Millar fulfilled his deferred dinner engagement. He and Charles had a small table in a corner of the huge dining-room of The Luxe. Archie was in very good form-full of virtue, full of bonhomie, full of real affection for Charles.

“I am The Virtuous Nephew out of Tracts for Tiny Tots. This is the seventeenth time this year that I have been summoned to my Aunt Elizabeth’s death-bed. She’s no end bucked because I always come. She isn’t goin’ to die for the next hundred years or so, but it keeps the old dear no end amused to go on sendin’ for me, and alterin’ her will, and givin’ good advice all round. She always tells me about all my little faults and failin’s, and I say ‘Righto’ and she’s no end bucked. Her doctor says it’s a splendid tonic. But I wish she didn’t always send for me when I’m dinin’ with a pal.”

Charles was debating the question of just how much he was going to tell Archie. Margaret-hang Margaret! She did nothing but get in the way. He frowned and broke in on Archie’s flow of conversation with an abrupt question:

“Tell me about the Pelhams. Are they still in 16 George Street?”

Archie laid down his fish-fork.

“Haven’t you heard?”

“Not a word since I left.”

“Mrs. Pelham died six months ago.”

Charles was shocked. Margaret adored her mother. If he had sometimes thought she adored her too much, he admitted the temptation. Esther Pelham, beautiful, emotional, with a charm as potent as it was difficult to define, and never lacked adorers. Charles himself had bent the knee. Unfair, therefore, to complain if Margaret did so too. He was shocked, and showed it.

“Poor old Freddy was awfully cut up. Bit of a bore Freddy Pelham, but everyone’s awfully sorry for him now- no end of a facer for him after takin’ her abroad and all-rotten for him comin’ home alone, poor chap.”

“Did she die abroad?”

Archie nodded.

“Freddy took her off for a long voyage. No one thought she was really ill. Beastly for poor little Freddy comin’ home alone.”

Charles told himself just what he thought of an idiotic reluctance to speak Margaret’s name. He spoke it now:

“Wasn’t Margaret with them?”

“No-it was an awful shock to her.”

Charles prodded himself again.

“She’s married, I suppose?”

“Margaret! Who told you that yarn?”

“No one. I just thought she’d be married.”

“Well, she isn’t-or she wasn’t the last time I saw her, and that was about ten days ago. She isn’t livin’ with Freddy, you know.”

“Why isn’t she?”

“Nobody knows. Girls are so dashed independent nowadays. She went off on her own when Freddy took her mother abroad-and she’s stayed on her own ever since-works for her livin’, and doesn’t look as if it agreed with her. I think it’s a pity myself.” He looked at Charles apologetically. “I always liked Margaret, you know.”

Charles laughed.

“So did I. What’s she doing?”

“Job in a shop-low screw, long hours. Rotten show I should call it. Fancy workin’ when you don’t have to. Girls don’t know when they’re well off.”

“Where’s she living?”

“She told me,” said Archie, “but I’m hanged if I remember. Sort of minute flat affair. She had a little money from her own father, didn’t she?”

“Yes-nothing to speak of.”

“You’re such a beastly plutocrat!”

“She couldn’t live on it.”

“She’s livin’ on it, plus a pound a week.”

Charles exclaimed:

“A pound a week!”

“That’s her screw.”

“Impossible!”

“I told you you were a beastly plutocrat. Pound a week’s her market value. She told me so herself.”

“It’s sweating! What’s her job?”

“Tryin’ on hats for ugly old women who can’t face ’emselves in the glass. Margaret puts on the hat, the old woman thinks she looks a bit of a daisy in it, pays five or ten guineas, and goes away pleased as Punch. Give you my word that’s how it’s done. Amazin’-isn’t it?”

Charles frowned.

“What’s the shop?”

“Place called Sauterelle in Sloane Street -frightfully smart and exclusive.”

Charles detached himself with a jerk from a vision of Margaret trying on hats for other people.

“The Hula-Bula Indians say that a vain woman is like an empty egg-shell,” he observed.

“Women are all vain,” said Archie. “I only once met one that wasn’t, and I give you my word she was a grim proposition. You should see my Aunt Elizabeth’s nightcaps. By the way she’s just made a will leavin’ every farthin’ to a home for decayed parrots. She says the lot of parrots who outlive their devoted mistresses is enough to make a walrus weep. She says she feels a call to provide for their indigent old age. I shall have to marry an heiress-I see it loomin’. I think I’d better make the runnin’ with the Standing girl before there are too many starters.”

“Who’s the Standing girl?”

Archie very nearly dropped his knife and fork.

“My dear old bean, don’t you read the evenin’ papers? Old man Standing was a multi-millionaire who got washed overboard in one of the late weather spasms in the Mediterranean. Beastly place the Mediterranean -nasty cold wind, nasty choppy sea-draughty sort of place. Well, he got washed overboard; and they can’t find any will, and he’s got an only daughter, who scoops the lot. I’m just hesitatin’ on the brink as it were, because they haven’t published her photograph, and that probably means she’s a bit of a nightmare-I mean, think of the photographs they do publish. And my Aunt Elizabeth might alter her will again any day if her parrot bit her, or came out with some of the swear words she thinks she’s broken him of. She told me with tears in her eyes what a reformed bird he was. But you can’t ever tell with parrots.”

Charles had not been attending. He had decided that he would tell Archie just what had happened the other night; only he would leave Margaret out of it. He interrupted an ingenious plan for priming the parrot with something really hair-raising in the way of an expletive.

“The other night, Archie, when you didn’t come, I walked down to have a look at the old house.”

“Did you? Did you go in?”

“Anyone might have walked in,” said Charles drily. “The door into the alley-way was open, and the garden door was open too. I walked in, and I walked upstairs, and I found a cheery sort of criminal conspiracy carrying on like a house of fire in my mother’s sitting-room.”

“I say, is this a joke?”

“No, it isn’t. I saw a light under the door, and I heard voices. You remember the cupboard where we used to play, across the room of the passage between the bedroom and sitting-room?”

“Yes, of course.”

“I got in there and looked through the hole we used to keep corked up, and there was a gentleman in a grey rubber mask and gloves giving orders to a very pretty lot of scoundrels.”

“Charles, you are jokin’.”

“I’m not-it happened.”

“What were they doin’-”

“Well, I rather gathered they’d destroyed a will, and it wouldn’t very much surprise me to hear that they’d made away with the man who’d made it. They seemed to be thinking about murdering his daughter if another will turned up, or some certificate-I didn’t quite understand about that.”

“Charles, you don’t mean to say you’re serious?”

“Absolutely.”

“You weren’t drunk, and you weren’t dreamin’?”

“I was not.”

Archie heaved a sigh.

“Why on earth wasn’t I there? What did you do?-bound from your place of concealment, hissin’ ‘All is discovered,’ or what?”

“I went on listening,” said Charles. He proceeded to give Archie a very accurate account of the things he had listened to and the things he had seen. He left Margaret Langton out of the story, and in consequence found himself making rather a poor figure at the finish.

“You didn’t bound from your place of concealment!” Archie’s tone was incredulous.