‘Oh, Miss Frere!’ said Mr. Fulton, raising his hat, with a wild gleam of hope in the trouble of his eyes, ‘I have had such a misfortune!’
‘What has happened, Mr. Fulton?’
‘Oh, ma’am, I’ve lost my cook, and me with a dinner-party on to-day.’
‘Lost your cook? Not by death, I hope?’
‘No, ma’am, she has run away, in the very crisis, as I may call it.’
‘With whom?’
‘With nobody. After her cat. In a cab. I am undone. Where can I find a cook? You may know of some one disengaged, though it is late in the day, and dinner at seven. Can’t you help me?’
‘Can you trust me, Mr. Fulton?’
‘Trust you; how, ma’am?’
‘Let me cook your dinner, at least till your cook catches her cat,’ said Miss Frere, smiling.
‘You, don’t mean it, a lady!’
‘But a professed cook, Mr. Fulton, and anxious to help so nobly generous a patron of the art … if you can trust me.’
‘Trust you, ma’am!’ said Mr. Fulton, raising to heaven his obsecrating hands. ‘Why, you’re a genius. It is a miracle, a mere miracle of good luck.’
By this time, of course, a small crowd of little boys and girls, amateurs of dramatic scenes, was gathering.
‘We have no time to waste, Mr. Fulton. Let us go in, and let me get to work. I dare say the cook will be back before I have taken off my gloves.’
‘Not her, nor does she cook again in my house. The shock might have killed a man of my age,’ said Mr. Fulton, breathing heavily, and leading the way up the steps to his own door. ‘Her cat, the hussy!’ he grumbled.
Mr. Fulton kept his word. When Miss Blowser returned, with her saucepan and Rangoon, she found her trunks in the passage, corded by Mr. Fulton’s own trembling hands, and she departed for ever.
Her chase had been a stern chase, a long chase, the cab driven by Trevor had never been out of sight. It led her, in the western wilds, to a Home for Decayed and Destitute Cats, and it had driven away before she entered the lane leading to the Home. But there she found Rangoon. He had just been deposited there, in a seedy old traveller’s fur-lined sleeping bag, the matron of the Home averred, by a very pleasant gentleman, who said he had found the cat astray, lost, and thinking him a rare and valuable animal had deemed it best to deposit him at the Home. He had left money to pay for advertisements. He had even left the advertisement, typewritten (by Miss Blossom).
‘FOUND. A magnificent Siamese Cat. Apply to the Home for Destitute and Decayed Cats, Water Lane, West Hammersmith.’
‘Very thoughtful of the gentleman,’ said the matron of the Home. ‘No; he did not leave any address. Said something about doing good by stealth.’
‘Stealth, why he stole my cat!’ exclaimed Miss Blowser. ‘He must have had the advertisement printed like that ready beforehand. It’s a conspiracy,’ and she brandished her saucepan.
The matron, who was prejudiced in favour of Logan, and his two sovereigns, which now need not be expended in advertisements, was alarmed by the hostile attitude of Miss Blowser. ‘There’s your cat,’ she said drily; ‘it ain’t stealing a cat to leave it, with money for its board, and to pay for advertisements, in a well-conducted charitable institution, with a duchess for president. And he even left five shillings to pay for the cab of anybody as might call for the cat. There is your money.’
Miss Blowser threw the silver away.
‘Take your old cat in the bag,’ said the matron, slamming the door in the face of Miss Blowser.
* * * * *
After the trial for breach of promise of marriage, and after paying the very considerable damages which Miss Blowser demanded and received, old Mr. Fulton hardened his heart, and engaged a male chef.
The gratitude of Mrs. Gisborne, now free from all anxiety, was touching. But Merton assured her that he knew nothing whatever of the stratagem, scarcely a worthy one, he thought, as she reported it, by which her uncle was disentangled.
It was Logan’s opinion, and it is mine, that he had not been guilty of theft, but perhaps of the wrongous detention or imprisonment of Rangoon. ‘But,’ he said, ‘the Habeas Corpus Act has no clause about cats, and in Scottish law, which is good enough for me, there is no property in cats. You can’t, legally, steal them.’
‘How do you know?’ asked Merton.
‘I took the opinion of an eminent sheriff substitute.’
‘What is that?’
‘Oh, a fearfully swagger legal official: you have nothing like it.’
‘Rum country, Scotland,’ said Merton.
‘Rum country, England,’ said Logan, indignantly. ‘You have no property in corpses.’
Merton was silenced.
Neither could foresee how momentous, to each of them, the question of property in corpses was to prove. O pectora cæca!
* * * * *
Miss Blowser is now Mrs. Potter. She married her aged wooer, and Rangoon still wins prizes at the Crystal Palace.
V. THE ADVENTURE OF THE OFFICE SCREEN
It is not to be supposed that all the enterprises of the Company of Disentanglers were fortunate. Nobody can command success, though, on the other hand, a number of persons, civil and military, are able to keep her at a distance with surprising uniformity. There was one class of business which Merton soon learned to renounce in despair, just as some sorts of maladies defy our medical science.
‘It is curious, and not very creditable to our chemists,’ Merton said, ‘that love philtres were once as common as seidlitz powders, while now we have lost that secret. The wrong persons might drink love philtres, as in the case of Tristram and Iseult. Or an unskilled rural practitioner might send out the wrong drug, as in the instance of Lucretius, who went mad in consequence.’
‘Perhaps,’ remarked Logan, ‘the chemist was voting at the Comitia, and it was his boy who made a mistake about the mixture.’
‘Very probably, but as a rule, the love philtres worked. Now, with all our boasted progress, the secret is totally lost. Nothing but a love philtre would be of any use in some cases. There is Lord Methusalem, eighty if he is a day.’
‘Methusalem has been unco “wastefu’ in wives”!’ said Logan.
‘His family have been consulting me—the women in tears. He will marry his grandchildren’s German governess, and there is nothing to be done. In such cases nothing is ever to be done. You can easily distract an aged man’s volatile affections, and attach them to a new charmer. But she is just as ineligible as the first; marry he will, always a young woman. Now if a respectable virgin or widow of, say, fifty, could hand him a love philtre, and gain his heart, appearances would, more or less, be saved. But, short of philtres, there is nothing to be done. We turn away a great