“And the lumps she paints for women!” Mrs. Humpage laughed suddenly. “Well, that’s neither here nor there, as they say.”
She jerked a plump thumb toward the dining room.
“They don’t want him to marry her, and you can see why they don’t. There’s too many Americans in England as it is.”
“And is he? . . .” Mr. Pinkerton began, tentatively. He straightened his lozenge-shaped steel-rimmed spectacles nervously. He didn’t want Mrs. Humpage to think he was curious, precisely. Nevertheless. . . . Fortunately Mrs. Humpage was a woman who only wanted a conversational inch promptly to take an ell.
“Indeed, sir, you know what young men are these days.” A certain righteous indignation appeared in her tones. “She’s got him wound round her finger. He’s been coming down here all summer and autumn, sitting in there, sending first Jo and then Kathleen with notes, and her pretending she won’t see him.”
Mrs. Humpage gave a polite snort.
“Not likely, if you hear me, sir. Just leading him on. And him a crashing fool. He’s been here three weeks this time. The phone from London ringing every five minutes, and him not answering it, telling Kathleen to say first he’s in Africa and next he’s in Sweden, and then going in himself and saying they can go to the devil. You’d be surprised, sir, where a woman like that can lead a man to. But here they come, sir.”
3
Mrs. Humpage bustled out into the lounge.
“I hope your ladyship enjoyed your dinner,” she said. She curtseyed very nicely, Mr. Pinkerton thought, in spite of her ample figure, and in spite of everything she had just finished saying.
Sir Lionel Atwater grunted, morosely. Lady Atwater smiled. “Very nice, thank you,” she said. “Shall we sit here, dear, for our coffee?”
Sir Lionel grunted again, and sat down. His daughter-in-law sat beside him on the leather sofa, his wife sat beside him on the other side. Mr. Pinkerton hesitated for just an instant, and then slipped, as quietly as a rabbit, into a chair beside the potted rubber plant in the majolica jardinière that the late Mr. Humpage had bought from a writer who once lived in Rye. He knew that, because Mrs. Humpage had, she told him, watered it with her tears when Humpage fell down the steps by the Ypres Castle public and broke his neck at the bottom.
And being there, he even went so far as to order coffee to retain his seat when the deaf and dumb gentleman, who wasn’t having any, was practically sent to his room by Mrs. Humpage. Another man, the one who had come the evening before with the deaf and dumb gentleman, came in, glanced about the lounge and went along to the dining room. Mrs. Humpage bustled about a moment and followed him. Mr. Pinkerton heard her voice: “It’s a bit nasty out this evening, sir.”
There was not, as Mr. Pinkerton knew, anything but an affirmative answer to that. The man apparently thought no answer at all was needed, because he made none. Mrs. Humpage bustled back in a moment, and put a shovelful of coals on the fire with her own hands. In another moment, the two sons of Sir Lionel and Lady Atwater came out of the dining room and stood in front of the fire, until Sir Lionel thundered at them did they think they were a couple of bloody salamanders. Darcy Atwater grinned and moved. Jeffrey Atwater stayed where he was. As it was really just Mr. Pinkerton and the fire he was standing between, no one complained again.
Mr. Pinkerton, who had not taken his eyes off the three people on the leather sofa, suddenly blinked his eyes and straightened his steel-rimmed spectacles. A small mouse, almost too decrepit to move, poked his head out from under the sofa just at Lady Atwater’s feet. She looked down. Mr. Pinkerton expected her to scream, but she didn’t. She glanced at her husband, slipped her hand into the pocket of her tweed jacket, brought it out, bent down quietly and dropped a bit of biscuit on the floor. The mouse retired, and crept out again.
Suddenly Sir Lionel came to life. “Dammit, madam, are you feeding a mouse?”
He glared at Lady Atwater, and then glared across the room at Mr. Pinkerton. “Dammit, sir, this place is full of mice!”
And at just that moment, as Mr. Pinkerton sat there, completely paralyzed, the door of the Old Angel opened suddenly, and in out of the blustering night came a very large man. He was dressed in a cinnamon-brown tweed suit and overcoat, which gave him rather the appearance of an outsize cinnamon bear, and he had a large and very placid red face with guileless blue eyes and large tawny mustaches.
Mr. Pinkerton, sitting in the shelter of the rubber plant, stared incredulously, tried desperately to still his shaking hands, made an agitated attempt to get to his feet, and found that his knees sagged like catgut that had been a fortnight in the rain.
The large tawny man put down his bag, took off his hat, shaking the rain from it onto the floor, looked calmly round the lounge, his eyes meeting the little Welshman’s paralyzed gaze without the slightest sign of recognition, and stepped with heavy deliberation, bending so as not to shatter the stout oak door beam with his skull, into Mrs. Humpage’s office. Mr. Pinkerton heard him say, rather louder than was necessary, he thought, “Have you got a room, ma’am? Briscoe is the name.”
It occurred to Mr. Pinkerton, for the second time within two hours, that he had lost his wits. He reached his trembling fingers down and gave his leg a sharp pinch just to make sure he was still in possession of his ordinary faculties, and winced. Then, through the office door he saw the large man open the register, glance down it, and sign with a flourish, and heard Mrs. Humpage say, “Jo—show Mr. Briscoe to Number Six. Will you have a bite of supper, sir?”
And then, just as the horrid truth that the best, and indeed the solitary, friend that he had in the world, namely Inspector J. Humphrey Bull of the C. I. D., was deliberately cutting him absolutely and incredibly dead, began to react on the dead fish in pink sauce in Mr. Pinkerton’s grey little stomach with the force of a wicked Channel crossing, the large voice of Sir Lionel Atwater rose.
“Dammit, Jeffrey, is she coming, or isn’t she? Am I expected to cool my heels the rest of the winter?”
And as the cuckoo sprang out of the Swiss clock on the chimney piece and sounded eight smooth notes, the inn door opened again and a young woman with hair the colour of ashy gold in a knot at the nape of her neck came in, in a camel’s-hair coat buttoned up under her pointed chin and a brown felt hat with a little red and green feather in the band. Mr. Pinkerton, his mind torn distressfully between so many things happening all at the same time, looked quickly from the delicate sun-tanned face to her silken ankles and neatly shod feet, and knew instantly that this was the American lady.
She stood there for a moment, her dark eyes meeting Jeffrey Atwater’s across the lounge. Storm warnings that even Mr. Pinkerton could sense went up like tiny flags in every eye in the room, and deepened the alarming purple behind the white walrus fangs of Sir Lionel Atwater. Lady Atwater hastily slipped another bit of biscuit to the old mouse under the sofa, and sat there, a little pale. Mr. Darcy Atwater’s face brightened. “I say!” he exclaimed; and turned quickly as his wife shot him a glance that Mr. Pinkerton could only describe as significant.
Then Jeffrey Atwater moved out to meet the girl. She could not, Mr. Pinkerton thought, be over twenty-two or three, if she was that; though he knew, of course, from the advertisements in the papers that she might be practically in her grave and still not look it.
“This is Mrs. Bruce, Mother,” Jeff Atwater said stiffly. “And my father, Sally. This is my sister-in-law, and this is Darcy.”
Mr. Pinkerton, staring in utter fascination from his place by the rubber plant, noticed that not one of them moved to shake hands with her, except Darcy Atwater—and one look from the big dark Welsh girl made that abortive in the extreme.
Sally Bruce, he decided, must have lived abroad a long time. She didn’t move her chewing gum to the other side of her mouth, because oddly enough she wasn’t chewing any, and she said, “How do you do,” in a slightly