The Journeying Boy (22 page)

The element of play-acting commonly discernible in the elder Mr Bolderwood quite evaporated under this dire hint. He sat down heavily and without the intention of creating an effect. ‘You disturb me,’ he said. ‘You disturb me very much.’

Ivor’s eyebrows had dipped beneath his glasses in a thoughtful scowl. ‘The tutor – this Mr Thewless – sounded extremely respectable. But, of course, there might have been a second adventuress waiting to nail
him
. She might have lurked in the tunnel. She might have been disguised as a beautiful nurse and laid on with the ambulance.’

The elder Mr Bolderwood looked momentarily relieved. ‘You ought not to make these jokes,’ he said. ‘I am naturally worried; naturally very worried indeed.’

‘If, of course, this Mr Thewless who has travelled with the boy is the genuine Mr Thewless. We can’t really be sure… Ah – that may tell us something!’

This exclamation was occasioned by the shrill ringing of a telephone bell in a far corner of the room. Ivor Bolderwood made for it, but not before he had ejected his father’s retainers with the gesture of one who drives sheep expertly through a gate. He picked up the receiver. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘…yes. This is Ivor Bolderwood speaking… No, he hasn’t turned up yet. As a matter of fact, we have become a little anxious. One of the servants says he has gone off with a lady… No, I didn’t say there had been something shady. I said that we are told he has gone off with a lady… Yes, we are certainly going to inquire at once. I hope that you yourself… Dear me…
dear
me! Yes, indeed. A most alarming experience… Good lord! Extremely careless… Certainly a stiff letter will be the thing. Can we send the car?… I see. Yes, we look forward to it… Yes, we will start a search now… You think it will be all right? I am so glad. It will allay my father’s anxieties… A prank? Quite possibly… Goodbye.’

Ivor Bolderwood put back the receiver and turned to his father. His eyebrows had risen expressively over the rims of his glasses. ‘Thewless,’ he said. ‘Thewless, as you may have guessed. There really was some sort of accident in the tunnel. He was hit on the head.’

‘In the accident?’

‘It sounded to me more like
after
the accident. And then he was put into an ambulance – so there really was an ambulance – and driven away. Apparently it was a
children’s
ambulance. And when the people in charge of it discovered that
he
was not a child they more or less dropped him like a hot potato and disappeared.’

‘Well I’m damned!’ The elder Mr Bolderwood looked doubtfully at his son. ‘And was he terribly upset when he heard that Humphrey hasn’t turned up?’

‘Not a bit of it. He says it must be some boyish prank.’

‘Bless me! And does he think being carried off in an ambulance was a boyish prank too?’

‘He considers that it was careless – really unpardonably careless. He is going to write a letter about it to the local authorities?’

‘It is certainly a sort of thing that must be stopped.’ Cyril Bolderwood frowned. ‘But, my dear Ivor, this is most disturbing – positively sinister, indeed – whatever this fool of a tutor thinks of it. The lad may be in the hands of Lord knows what set of gangsters or professional kidnappers at this very moment. This Thewless must be a confoundedly casual chap.’

‘He didn’t give me quite that impression.’ And Ivor Bolderwood stared at the telephone as if that instrument might be capable of throwing light on the matter. ‘He struck me as a man who was almost irrationally determined to deny that the universe holds anything dangerous or surprising.’

‘An admirable temperament! I wish I could feel the same.’

Ivor Bolderwood shook his head. ‘I didn’t feel it was a matter of his temperament. The learned tutor is in some rather abnormal state of mind. His ordinary way of taking things may be quite different.’

‘Well, it’s our way of taking things that is the question. What the devil are we to do?’

‘Make sure that the excellent Thewless isn’t right, and that the boy’s disappearance isn’t, in one way or another, a mare’s nest. After that – well, we must send a wire to Bernard Paxton and call in the police.’

‘Oh dear, oh dear!’

‘But do Irish rural policemen believe stories of kidnappers and beautiful decoys? I doubt it.’ And Ivor Bolderwood, disregarding his father’s evident perturbation, placidly chuckled. ‘It would be better – yes, decidedly better – to rescue the boy ourselves. Don’t you think?’

‘I think I’ll get the police station now.’ Cyril Bolderwood rose with sudden resolution and approached the telephone. ‘They may at least tell us something like the truth about the train… Whatever is that?’

From somewhere beyond the precincts of Killyboffin Hall there had come a sound as of the ragged firing of small-arms. It drew nearer and presently disclosed itself as being in the nature of a death-rattle from some internal combustion engine.

‘Tannian’s car!’ exclaimed Ivor. ‘Perhaps it’s the adventuress come to do a deal with us.’ He strode to the window, threw it open, and leant out. There was a moment’s pause and then his laughter floated back into the room. ‘It’s the lady, sure enough. But she’s fifty, if she’s a day. And she’s brought the boy with her.’

Cyril Bolderwood produced his handkerchief and once more mopped his brow. ‘Bewildering,’ he said, ‘really bewildering. One doesn’t at all know what to make of it. And – do you know? – there isn’t a single egg in the place.’

The various anxieties to which Mr Thewless had been subject since accepting the guardianship of Humphrey Paxton had indeed produced very much the effect divined by Ivor Bolderwood over the telephone. He was, he assured himself, a commonplace person who had undertaken commonplace employment. Law, order, and security surrounded him as they had always done, and the only disturbing factor in the situation was the lurid and infectious imagination of his pupil. The affair of the ambulance had certainly been a little out of the way; but this was all the more reason for his being on his guard against treating it as Humphrey would do – as a springboard to some alarming fantasy. Even to write that stiff letter of complaint might be to make too much of the incident. The Irish, after all, were known to be a somewhat erratic people, and the mistake that had been made, although perplexing and vexatious, was not serious. Much more disturbing was the fact that Humphrey, although uninjured in the affair in the tunnel, had made another of his foolish disappearances.

And Mr Thewless (who had found little difficulty in hiring a car which was now carrying him comfortably towards Killyboffin Hall) remembered with mortification the absurd suspicions he had harboured upon the occasion of Humphrey’s vanishing on the Heysham train. Those suspicions had not even held any coherency among themselves. For instance, there had been that muddled idea that the boy travelling with him was an impostor – an idea upon which he might positively have acted (to the vast detriment of poor Humphrey’s nervous balance) but for that fortunate flash-back to the Velazquez in Sir Bernard Paxton’s library. But now the whole of that bad twenty-four hours was behind him; the life of a country-house in this remote region could scarcely be other than tranquil; and once Humphrey had turned up again a quiet and wholesome routine could be established. Unless, indeed, the house-party assembled by Sir Bernard’s cousins was of an order so large, brilliant or – abominable thought! – rackety as to make quiet and study difficult.

But for the moment, at least, complete tranquillity was possible. Mr Thewless’ pipe and tobacco had come safely through his adventures; he employed himself with them comfortably now, while he surveyed a countryside which was quite unfamiliar to him. Ahead were occasional glimpses of an ocean the deep blue of which was beginning to take the glitter of the declining sun; and here and there, too, he had seen cliffs and headlands which hinted at a rugged and deeply indented coast. Behind and on either hand stretched gently undulating country, intensely green, divided by stone dykes into fields and paddocks that grew larger and more ill-defined as they climbed from the valleys towards the higher ground. Sparsely threaded on invisible tracks that ran diagonally up and down the hills were the low white cottages which were almost the sole sign of human occupation. Their doors, windows, and chimneys were so disposed as to make them strongly suggestive of sentient beings, crouched with wide eyes and pricked ears to mark the intruder. Twice the car had passed the burnt-out shell of a large mansion amid abandoned gardens, and Mr Thewless’ driver took it upon himself to explain that this state of affairs dated from the Troubles, and was the work of persons whom he, the driver, held in the strongest reprobation; whom he regarded, indeed, as possessing a reach of wickedness quite beyond even the common large tether of humanity. Mr Thewless, having a strong persuasion that his informant had himself been a handy man with a firebrand, supposed that this political attitude was not unconnected with the amount of the fare he should presently be expected to pay. Perhaps (speculated Mr Thewless, thoughtful for his employer’s pocket) the Bolderwoods would have some idea of what was reasonable. Two shillings would certainly be an adequate tip.

At this moment the car swung sharply and the driver announced that they were on the drive to the big house. Mr Thewless would not have guessed it, but looking back at what appeared to be a cart-track he discerned that they had passed the ruins of a small lodge. These were unblackened by flame, and the mere product, it was to be conjectured, of the effluction of time. The car took another bend and the house was before them. Mr Thewless looked at it with some surprise. For here too time seemed to have been let play almost unimpeded. The mansion, although it was not actually ruinous – having recently received, indeed, a sort of token restoration in the form of much amateurishly applied white paint – was not such as Sir Bernard Paxton’s manner would have prepared one to expect. It contrived to suggest the idea of an immemorial and settled possession, of the confident tenure that comes only with generations; but at the same time there appeared to be whole wings and floors that were deserted, so that the life of the whole place conveyed the notion of a gentle peripheral decay. This effect was enhanced by a long balustraded terrace along the line of which were disposed sundry groups of statuary so drastically decayed as to display little more than a tangle of lower limbs, human and brute, from which an anatomist might possibly have reconstructed the various super-incumbent dramas now missing. Behind this somewhat mournful detritus of classical culture a woman was moving about in what appeared to be the motion of feeding hens.

When he had recovered from his first mild surprise at these unexpected appearances, Mr Thewless was distinctly pleased. There was unlikely to be anything rackety or pretentious here. It seemed to be a very good setting, indeed, for that labour of rehabilitation, both nervous and scholastic, to which he and his charge were dedicated. And, even as he made this reflection, Mr Thewless found further reassurance in an eminently quiet domestic scene. Below the terrace, and upon a large space of ground midway in character between a lawn and a hayfield, an elderly lady and gentleman sat beneath an ancient coloured umbrella the shade of which had crept away from them with the sinking sun. Beside them on a wicker table a silver tea equipage of considerable complication suggested an ordering of things at once sober and substantial. Some fifty yards beyond, and on the farther side of a low hedge, were two other figures whom Mr Thewless could at first distinguish merely as those of a younger man and a boy. These were bent over some object presently invisible; they straightened up and Mr Thewless heard a dull report; their conference was renewed and in a flash its nature became clear. The boy was being instructed in the use of a shot-gun – that same shot-gun which he had been disposed violently to repudiate at Euston. Humphrey had turned up.

Perhaps because he was more relieved than he was prepared to acknowledge, Mr Thewless paid his fare without inquiry. He was then led, by a female servant markedly more disposed to hospitality than deference, across the decaying terrace and into the presence of the persons beneath the umbrella. He had only time to remark, with a twinge of obscure misgiving, that the lady was none other than his old acquaintance, Miss Liberty, when his attention was commanded by the volubility of his host.

‘My dear sir, I’m delighted to see you safe – most delighted. Gracie! bring another pot of tea… Yes, very pleased indeed and I hope you’re not unduly fatigued. Dinner, woman – dinner? Hold your tongue and do as you’re told – am I to be dinnered in my own house when I choose that it shall be tea-time still?… I think you know Miss Liberty. She took charge of Humphrey, you know – a nice lad, Bernard’s boy, and intelligent, I’d be inclined to say – took charge of him, you know, and they went off to search for you in Tannian’s car. But here you are, after the rascals have done their damnedest, eh?’

‘Done their damnedest?’ Mr Thewless was disturbed.

But Mr Bolderwood largely laughed. ‘No animus, of course; nothing directed against you in particular, my dear sir. But first they let fly at you with a railway accident and then with this odd ambulance affair, eh? It’s their stupidity, you know. All the Irish are intensely stupid. Charming, of course; full of poetry and often extremely industrious; religious too – positively religious to a fault.’ Mr Bolderwood paused for a moment, and Mr Thewless conjectured that he was proposing to supply this last statement with some larger theological context. But all he did was to take breath the more effectively to shout across the length of the terrace: ‘Gracie, send out another fruit cake! And tell that woman to stop feeding the fowls.’ Mr Bolderwood turned this time to Miss Liberty. ‘Positively,’ he said, ‘I won’t feed the fowls if the fowls refuse to feed me. Would you believe, now, that there’s not an egg in the place, and that they won’t even send up a dozen – not a dozen, mark you! – from the village? And on a day, as Ivor there would tell you, that I distinctly had it in mind to order an omelette for dinner. By the way, I hope you’ll stop for a meal?’