Mr Mulliner Speaking (10 page)

'Sir?'

'Listen!'

'Yes, sir.'

'What is it?'

'It is Master Willie, I think, sir, taking his Sunday sleep.'

The man heaved himself out of the chair. It was plain that his emotions were too deep for speech. He yawned cavernously, and began to put on his boots.

'Jane!'

'Sir?'

'I have had enough of this. I shall now go and weed the front garden. Where is my hoe?'

'In the hall, sir.'

'Persecution,' said the man bitterly. 'That's what it is, persecution. Top hats . . . window-sashes . . .Master Willie . . .You can argue as much as you like, Jane, but I shall speak out fearlessly. I insist – and the facts support me – that it is persecution . . . Jane!'

A wordless gurgle proceeded from his lips. He seemed to be choking.

'Jane!'

'Yes, sir?'

'Look me in the face!'

'Yes, sir.'

'Now, answer me, Jane, and let us have no subterfuge or equivocation, Who turned this boot yellow?'

'Boot, sir?'

'Yes, boot.'

'Yellow, sir?'

'Yes, yellow. Look at that boot. Inspect it. Run your eye over it in an unprejudiced spirit. When I took this boot off it was black. I close my eyes for a few brief moments and when I open them it is yellow. I am not a man tamely to submit to this sort of thing. Who did this?'

'Not me, sir.'

'Somebody must have done it. Possibly it is the work of a gang. Sinister things are happening in this house. I tell you, Jane, that Seven, Nasturtium Villas has suddenly – on a Sunday, too, which makes it worse – become a house of mystery. I shall be vastly surprised if, before the day is out, clutching hands do not appear through the curtains and dead bodies drop out of the walls. I don't like it, Jane, and I tell you so frankly. Stand out of my way, woman, and let me get at those weeds.'

The door banged, and there was peace in the sitting-room. But not in the heart of Cedric Mulliner. All the Mulliners are clear thinkers, and it did not take Cedric long to recognize the fact that his position had changed considerably for the worse. Yes, he had lost ground. He had come into this room with a top hat and yellow boots. He would go out of it minus a top hat and wearing one yellow boot and one black one.

A severe set-back.

And now, to complete his discomfiture, his line of communications had been cut. Between him and the cab in which he could find at least temporary safety there stood the man with the hoe. It was a situation to intimidate even a man with a taste for adventure. Douglas Fairbanks would not have liked it. Cedric himself found it intolerable.

There seemed but one course to pursue. This ghastly house presumably possessed a back garden with a door leading out into it. The only thing to do was to flit noiselessly along the passage – if in such a house noiselessness were possible – and find that door and get out into the garden and climb over the wall into the next garden and sneak out into the road and gallop to the cab and so home. He had almost ceased to care what the hall-porter at the Albany would think of him. Perhaps he could pass his appearance off with a light laugh and some story of a bet. Possibly a handsome bribe would close the man's mouth. At any rate, whatever might be the issue, upshot or outcome, back to the Albany he must go, and that with all possible speed. His spirit was broken.

Tiptoeing over the carpet, Cedric opened the door and peeped out. The passage was empty. He crept along it, and had nearly reached its end when he heard the sound of footsteps descending the stairs. There was a door to his left. It was ajar. He leaped through and found himself in a small room through the window of which he looked out onto a pleasant garden. The footsteps passed on and went down the kitchen stairs.

Cedric breathed again. It seemed to him that the danger was past and that he could now embark on the last portion of his perilous journey. The thought of the cab drew him like a magnet. Until this moment he had not been conscious of any marked fondness for the driver of the cab, but now he found himself yearning for his society. He panted for the driver as the hart pants after the water-brooks.

Cautiously, Cedric Mulliner opened the window. He put his head out to examine the terrain before proceeding farther. The sight encouraged him. The drop to the ground below was of the simplest. He had merely to wriggle through, and all would be well.

It was as he was preparing to do this that the window-sash descended on the back of his neck like a guillotine, and he found himself firmly pinned to the sill.

A thoughtful-looking ginger-coloured cat, which had risen from the mat at his entrance and had been scrutinizing him with a pale eye, now moved forward and sniffed speculatively at his left ankle. The proceedings seemed to the cat irregular but full of human interest. It sat down and gave itself up to meditation.

Cedric, meanwhile, had done the same. There is, if you come to think of it, little else that a man in his position can do but meditate. And so for some considerable space of time Cedric Mulliner looked down upon the smiling garden and busied himself with his thoughts.

These, as may readily be imagined, were not of the most agreeable. In circumstances such as those in which he had been placed, it is but rarely that the sunny and genial side of a man's mind comes uppermost. He tends to be bitter, and it is inevitable that his rancour should be directed at those whom he considers responsible for his unpleasant situation.

In Cedric's case, there was no difficulty in fixing the responsibility. It was a woman – if one may apply the term to the only daughter of an Earl – who had caused his downfall. Nothing could be more significant of the revolution which circumstances had brought about in Cedric's mind than the fact that, regardless of her high position in Society, he now found himself thinking of Lady Chloe Downblotton in the harshest possible vein.

So moved, indeed, was he that, not content with thoroughly disliking Lady Chloe, he was soon extending his loathing – first to her nearer relations, and finally, incredible as it may seem, to the entire British aristocracy. Twenty-four hours ago – aye even a brief two hours ago – Cedric Mulliner had loved every occupant of Debrett's Peerage, from the premier Dukes right down to the people who scrape in at the bottom of the page under the heading 'Collateral Branches', with a respectful fervour which it had seemed that nothing would ever be able to quench. And now there ran riot in his soul something that was little short of Red Republicanism.

Drones, he considered them, and – it might be severe, but he stuck to it – mere popinjays. Yes, mere thriftless popinjays. It so happened that he had never actually seen a popinjay, but he was convinced by some strange instinct that this was what the typical aristocrat of his native country resembled.

'How long?' groaned Cedric. 'How long?'

He yearned for the day when the clean flame of Freedom, blazing from Moscow, should scorch these wastrels to a crisp, starting with Lady Chloe Downblotton and then taking the others in order of precedence.

It was at this point in his meditations that his attention was diverted from the Social Revolution by an agonizing pain in his right calf.

To the more meditative type of cat there comes at irregular intervals a strange, dreamy urge to stand on its hind legs and sharpen its claws on the nearest perpendicular object. This is usually a tree, but in the present case, there being no tree to hand, the ginger-coloured cat inside the room had made shift with Cedric's right calf. Absently, its mind revolving who knows what abstruse subjects, it blinked once or twice; then, rising, got its claws well into the flesh and pulled them down with a slow, lingering motion.

From Cedric's lips there came a cry like that of some Indian peasant who, wandering on the banks of the Ganges, suddenly finds himself being bitten in half by a crocodile. It rang through the garden like a clarion, and, as the echoes died away, a girl came up the path. The sun glinted on her tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles, and Cedric recognized his secretary, Miss Myrtle Watling.

'Good afternoon, Mr Mulliner,' said Miss Watling.

She spoke in her usual calm, controlled voice. If she was surprised to see her employer and, seeing him, to behold nothing of him except his head, there was little to show it. A private secretary learns at the outset of their association never to be astonished at anything her employer may do.

Yet Myrtle Watling was not altogether devoid of feminine curiosity.

'What are you doing there, Mr Mulliner?' she asked.

'Something is biting me in the leg,' cried Cedric.

'It is probably Mortal Error,' said Miss Watling, who was a Christian Scientist. 'Why are you standing there in that rather constrained attitude?'

'The sash came down as I was looking out of the window.'

'Why were you looking out of the window?'

'To see how far there was to drop?'

'Why did you wish to drop?'

'I wanted to get away from here.'

'Why did you come here?'

It became plain to Cedric that he must tell his story. He was loath to do so, but to refrain meant that Myrtle Watling would stand there till sunset, saying sentences beginning with 'Why?' In a husky voice he told her all.

For some moment after he had finished, the girl remained silent. A pensive expression had come into her face.

'What you need,' she said, 'is someone to look after you.'

She paused.

'Well, it's not everybody's job,' she said reflectively, 'but I don't mind taking it on.'

A strange foreboding chilled Cedric.

'What do you mean?' he gasped. 'What you need,' said Myrtle Watling, 'is a wife. It is a matter which I have been turning over in my mind for some time, and now the thing is quite clear to me. You should be married. I will marry you, Mr Mulliner.'

Cedric uttered a low cry. This, then, was the meaning of that look which during the past few weeks he had happened to note from time to time in his secretary's glass-fringed eyes.

Footsteps sounded in the gravel path. A voice spoke, the voice of the man who had slept in the chair. He was plainly perturbed.

'Myrtle,' he said, 'I am not a man, as you know, to make a fuss about nothing. I take life as it comes, the rough with the smooth. But I feel it my duty to tell you that eerie influences are at work in this house. The atmosphere has become definitely sinister. Top hats appear from nowhere. Black boots turn yellow. And now this cabby here, this cab-driver fellow. . . I didn't get your name. Lanchester? Mr Lanchester, my daughter Myrtle . . .And now Mr Lanchester here tells me that a fare of his entered our front garden some time back and instantly vanished off the face of the earth, and has never been seen again. I am convinced that some little-known Secret Society is at work and that Seven, Nasturtium Villas, is one of those houses you see in the mystery-plays where shrieks are heard from dark corners and mysterious Chinamen flit to and fro making significant gestures and . . .' He broke off with a sharp howl of dismay, and stood staring. 'Good God! What's that?'

'What, father?'

'That. That bodiless head. That trunkless face. I give you my honest word that there is a severed head protruding from the side of the house. Come over where I'm standing. You can see it distinctly from here.'

'Oh, that?' said Myrtle. 'That is my fiancé.'

'Your fiancé?'