XXIV
The luncheon was not a genial meal. Harry had acquired the disgraceful habit of bringing a book to his meals, and he was utterly absorbed in the volume and left Dick and his visitor to carry on a conversation as though he were not present.
Mr. Puttler, who was a man of wide experience, was neither embarrassed by his magnificent surroundings—for Lord Chelford lived in a princely style, three footmen and a butler waiting upon them—nor did he feel it necessary to live up to the state in which he found himself. He was altogether unaffected, had a fund of anecdotes, and could tell funny stories without apparently enjoying them himself, which is the art of amusement. Only once did Dick interrupt his brother’s reading.
“Leslie is coming to tea,” he said. “She ’phoned over just before lunch.”
Harry Chelford looked up and his face fell.
“That is very unfortunate,” he said. “I had promised myself an uninterrupted afternoon with Fra Hickler. I’ve just had a facsimile edition sent to me from Leipzig. Hickler, you remember, Dick, was a cloistered monk in the days of Elizabeth, our abbey being one of the few that was not interfered with by Henry the Eighth or by Elizabeth either; partly, I think, because our particular order of monks were antagonistic to the Jesuits.…”
Dick listened patiently, and when his brother had exhausted the history of the Black Fathers of Chelfordbury—
“You’ll have to be civil and come to tea, and after that I’ve no doubt Leslie will not object to your going back to Fra Hickler, who was a German, I presume?”
“He was a German,” said Harry gravely. “And the circumstances which brought him to Chelfordbury were rather peculiar.”
“The best German I ever read about”—it was Mr. Puttler who interrupted—“was Robinson Crusoe.”
Dick thought it was a crude jest on the part of his guest, but, if it was so, Mr. Puttler was unconscious of his humour. Harry stared at the “accountant.” He took such statements as these very seriously indeed.
“I am not well acquainted with Robinson Crusoe,” he said, “but surely you are wrong in saying that he was a German? I have always regarded such characters as typically English.”
“He was a German,” said Mr. Puttler firmly, “though few people are aware of the fact. If you look at the first page of the story you’ll see these words: ‘My father was a merchant of Bremen,’ and Bremen’s in Germany, or I’m a Dutchman. And if his father was a German, he was a German, because there was no such thing as naturalization in those days.”
Having dropped his literary thunderbolt, Puttler was prepared to take up the subject which Dick had interrupted by his question.
“The trouble with church music, Mr. Alford, is that it’s a little too sugary. It appeals to the senses. I’ve had many an argument with my brother churchwardens——”
“Are you a churchwarden?” asked Dick, in surprise.
Again the gleam of laughter in the man’s deep-set eyes.
“It’s hard to believe,” he said modestly, “but I am.”
Soon after this, Harry left the table, and was gone five minutes when he returned with a fat volume under his arm.
“You’re right, Mr.——”
“Puttler,” suggested Dick.
“You’re right about Robinson Crusoe. What an extraordinary fact, to think that one has lived all one’s life under such a mistaken impression!”
This evidence of literary skill on the part of the visitor brought a remarkable change in Harry’s attitude. Before, Puttler might have had no existence. He was one with the milkman, the grocer, and the village postman.
He took Puttler affectionately by the arm and led him into the library, and there Dick left them, knowing exactly the course of instruction that Mr. Puttler would receive; for Harry’s first act was to unlock his desk and take out the Diary. He was relieved to have Puttler off his hands for an hour or two. Dick that day was experiencing a sense of unbelievable relief. A great burden had been lifted from his shoulders, and one of his more pressing and secret troubles had been half dissipated.
He ran halfway down the drive to meet Leslie’s car, and leapt on the running-board while the car was moving.
“Practising for a tram-conductor,” he said cheerily. “I’ve decided on my profession, when you arrive at Fossaway Manor, mistress of all these demesnes.”
“When will that be, Dick?” she asked, looking steadily ahead.
“Never, I hope.”
In his lightness of heart he had not kept that usual guard on his tongue, and the words were out before he could stop them. Twice he had been taken off his guard, and he would have given anything to unsay his words.
Apparently she did not attach any great significance to them, for she did not turn her head, sending the car spinning to the broad gravelled place before the old porch. He jumped down when she stopped the machine and helped her alight.
“I have to prepare you for a curious bird,” he said, and described Mr. Puttler with more truth than flattery.
“What is he, Dick?”
“He’s an accountant,” said Dick glibly. “He’s also quite an amusing fellow and full of weird information. I’m going to try a little on you. Do you know that Robinson Crusoe was a German?”
“Why, of course, his father lived in Bremen,” she said, and he was still laughing when he took her into the library.
In the presence of his fiancée Lord Chelford exhibited a nervousness and a gaucherie which might have been understandable if he were meeting her for the first time. He had never quite overcome the novelty of his engagement, and his attitude toward her was one of awe rather than of reverence.
“How do you do, Leslie?”
He had never kissed her in his life; now he held her hand for a fraction of a second and dropped it as though it burnt him.
“Do you know Mr. Tuttler?”
“Puttler,” said the other, and Leslie looked into the melancholy eyes and read something in them that Dick had missed, and possibly Mr. Puttler’s closest associate had not seen.
She did not pay him the poor compliment of feeling sorry for him, though she read in those quick-lighting deeps a craving for woman’s sympathy which nature, by her cruel handiwork, had repelled in advance.
“Glad to know you, Miss Gwyn. I know your brother—Mr. Arthur Gwyn, the solicitor, isn’t it? I thought so.”
“Has Arthur come?” asked Harry.
“No,” said Dick. “We’re going to have tea in the drawing-room. Will you come along, Harry?”
“Surely, surely,” he said hastily. “You’ll excuse me, dear——” It was an effort to employ even so banal an expression of affection.
When they reached the beautiful drawing-room, with its windows open to the terrace, and a riot of gorgeous sulphur chrysanthemums showing above the stone balustrade, they found they were alone. Mr. Puttler had melted away as they were passing through the hall. He explained, afterward, that he wanted to stroll through the gardens, but the girl knew that the man’s uncanny instinct had told him that, of all the people in the world, these two were satisfied best with each other’s company.
“Did you sleep?” she asked.
He nodded.
“I didn’t get up till lunch time,” he said. “And you?”
She shook her head.
“No, I couldn’t sleep. Poor Arthur!”
“Did you try beefsteak?” he asked brutally. “Really, the most incongruous company I can imagine is a black eye and Arthur Gwyn!”
“He is awfully shaken,” she said seriously. “I have never known him to be so upset. It was Mr. Gilder.”
“I knew,” said Dick, “or, at least, I guessed. Did you find out the cause of the quarrel?”
She hesitated.
“I don’t know; I think it was something to do with me.”
“What was Gilder doing at your house?”
“Arthur didn’t tell me,” she replied. “From what he said I gather that Mr. Gilder had been watching Arthur and had followed him somewhere.”
“To the Abbey ruins—yes, that is quite possible. And of course your brother objected to that, naturally. Why are they watching each other?”
“Is Arthur watching Gilder?” she asked in surprise.
“It almost looks like it. Leslie, I want to tell you something that nobody else knows, not even Harry. It may bring a little ease to your mind in the dark hours of the night. Puttler is a detective, a Scotland Yard man.”
She stared at him.
“A detective? Why on earth——?”
“Things have been happening that I don’t very much like,” said Dick. “I’ve been worried nearly sick about them, and though I’m quite capable of dealing with most contingencies, the Lord has ordained that I should take seven hours’ rest in every twenty-four, and there must be somebody awake when I’m asleep.”
“The Black Abbot—is that what is worrying you?”
He bit his lip thoughtfully.
“Yes and no. Some aspects of the Black Abbot’s activities trouble me more than I should like to confess. Leslie, do you believe in the treasure?”
“The Chelford treasure?” she asked, in surprise. “And what do you mean by believing in it? It is true that the gold was brought to Fossaway Manor in olden times, isn’t it?”
“Perfectly true,” said Dick, “and perfectly true, I should imagine, that it was taken away. But do you believe that it has any existence, that it can be found? Suppose one dug up every square inch of the park, pulled down this old house of ours, probed into the bowels of the earth, do you think it is possible that the gold could be found? Because, if you don’t, there are other people who do besides Harry.”
“Do you believe?” she challenged.
He heaved a deep sigh.
“Heaven knows, I’m ready to believe anything! And I thought I should never drag down my lofty intelligence to such deeps. But, Leslie, my dear, I am getting——” He paused for a word.
“Convinced?”
“Not exactly convinced, but shaken in my obstinacy. I’ve become a doubter of my own scepticism, and that’s the worst mental condition a man can reach—or almost the worst,” he added.
“Does Harry know you are a convert?” Her fine eyes twinkled with mischief.
“He suspects me,” said Dick gloomily. “If I thought the money was here——”
She regarded him steadily.
“Would it make a big difference to you, Dick?” she asked.
“Me personally?” He shook his head. “Lord, no! It would make a difference to the——” He paused. “To Harry. I was going to say the estate. The estate, to me, is something distinct from any personality. It stands for the agglomeration of dead men’s efforts, the cumulative sum of all their strivings.”
She looked at him for a long time in wonder. She loved him in this serious mood of his.
“You’ve made rather a fetish of Fossaway Manor and the Chelford estates, haven’t you?”
“Have I?” He was genuinely surprised. “I wonder…” And then he laughed. “It isn’t a bad line for a second son to exalt the estates to which he will never succeed, above the personality of the man who will get it! It makes him rather superior to the real heir. Put my fetish worship down to vanity, for the Lord knows I have my share of that.”
“I doubt it,” she said quietly. “Come out on to the terrace. Your flowers are lovely.”
“‘Everything in the garden——’” he began, but she checked him with a warning finger.
“If you get banal I shall go in and find Puttler.”