MISS MILLION HAS AN IDEA!
"Whatever in the wide world is young Jim up to now!" exclaimed London's Love, when at last the heavy hall door was closed upon the motoring ladies, the rectory party, and the two girls from across the valley.
Miss Million's face was rather more serious than usual.
"'Ere! I have an idea about that, Vi," she said. "And you, Smith, listen. It's just occurred to me." She glanced about the darkened hall with the stags' heads and the suit of armour.
"You know I shall never be able to trust that Mr. Burke again. He let me down. Now what if he's lettin' all of us down?
"F'rinstance, a young man like that, with heaps of friends with plenty of money, and always able to do as he likes up to now, what's he mean by suddenly taking on a situation as a common shoveer?"
"Ar!" responded England's Premier Comedienne, who has often made the stalls rock with laughter over the concentrated meaning which she can infuse into that one monosyllable long-drawn-out.
"Ar!" She turned upon me the wink that delights the gallery, then said dryly: "What's your idea, Nellie?"
"Why, I believe he's no more nor less than a common robber and burglar! A sort of Raffles, like in that play," declared Miss Million in a soft, excited whisper.
"'Twouldn't surprise me a bit if he'd disguised himself like that, and gone into service with that frosty-face, stuck-up Miss Davis that was calling just because he wanted to get his footing in a wealthy house where there was heaps of valuables, and cetrer.
"Here's this Miss Davis got more than a bit of her own, evident! And did you notice the string o' pearls? She'll have more of those sort of things at home, I bet you," said Million, adding with impressive hoarseness, "I believe that's what he's after. Jewels!!"
"What? Jim?" Miss Vi Vassity gave a slow, enjoying laugh. "Him? Likerly!"
"Ah, he's got round you, Vi. I believe you've got a soft corner for him in your heart still, however much of a rotter the man is, but I'm off, dead off.
"More than that, it wouldn't surprise me," continued my mistress, still in her impressive tone, "if I'm not far off guessing who took the Rattenheimer ruby that me and Smith's in this fix about!"
"Ah, go on!" said Miss Vi Vassity, striking a match for her cigarette against the minnow-shaped sole of her gilt boot. "Are you goin' to go and believe that my pal Jim sneaked that and then saw you and her in trouble for it? Do you believe that, Smithie?"
"I don't," I said, without hesitation.
Miss Million said defiantly: "Think it over! Think it over! He was always in and out of the hotel, was that Mr. Burke. He was hobnobbing with the Rattenheimers and one and another all day long.
"And he wanted the money. We've proof of that! And he's none too particular about how he gets it! Why, you yourself, Vi. You know he owes you pounds and pounds and pounds at this minute that he's 'borrowed,' and goodness knows how he intends to pay you back!
"You know he's got the cheek of the Old Gentleman himself! And," concluded my young mistress, with a look of shrewdness on her face that I imagine must have been inherited from the late Mr. Samuel Million, "if he isn't the one who stole the ruby, who is?"
A violent ring at the hall-door bell made the finish to this peroration.
I opened the door to a small, freckle-faced telegraph boy.
"For Miss Smith," he said in the pretty, up-and-down Welsh accent that is such a rest after Cockney. I took the wire. I wondered if it was Aunt Anastasia again.
It wasn't.
It was something very much more exciting. The wire was signed "Reginald Brace," and it said: "I am coming down by the nine o'clock train to-night. Jewel mystery cleared up."
Oh, how can it have been cleared up? What is the solution of the mystery? To think that at least four and a half hours must elapse before we know!
Really, I do think Mr. Reginald Brace might have had pity on our burning curiosity and anxiety! I do think he might have given some hint, in this wire of his, as to who did really steal that wretched ruby!
"Well, s'long as it's all cleared up that it wasn't us that done it, that ought to be comfort enough to us," said my mistress philosophically, as I was fastening her into the blush-pink tea-gown for dinner. We've put dinner on an hour late since our visitor is coming down so late.
"Though, mark my words, Smith," she continued, "it wouldn't surprise me one bit if that young gentleman of yours from the bank brought down that mute-of-a-funeral from Scotland Yard to tell Miss Davis's new shoveer that he was wanted by the police this time!"
"We'll see," I said, smiling.
For the Honourable Jim's faults may be as thick and as black as the hairs of the Honourable Jim's head. But of this other thing I feel he could not be capable.
"It used to be me that thought you was too hard on that Mr. Burke, Smith. Now here you are turning round and won't hear a word against the man," said my mistress, half laughing. "You're as pigheaded as Vi about it! And, talking about Vi, here's this packet of golden hairpins she's left in here; she was lookin' all over for them this afternoon. Better take them in to her now."
It was on this errand that I entered the spare room that has been assigned to London's Love.
She was sitting in a cerulean-blue dressing-jacket in front of the looking-glass, drawing a tiny brush, charged with lamp-black, across her eyelashes, and using "language," as she calls it, over the absence of electric lights by which to dress.
"I shall look a perfect sketch at dinner, see if I don't. Not that it matters a twopenny dash, me not being the bill-topper in any sense in this revue," said England's Premier Comedienne cheerily. "It's the pretty little lady's-maid's charming scena with the young bank manager. Tell me, Smithie——" Here she turned abruptly round and looked at me sharply. "Been thinking over his proposal, have you? Going to take him, are you?"
"I—er——"
"I—er—shouldn't if I was you!"
"You wouldn't?" I said interestedly. "Why not?"
London's Love put down the make-up brush and scanned her own appearance in the glass. Then she got up as if to fetch a frock out of the wardrobe. But she paused, put a small, highly manicured but capable-looking hand on each of my shoulders, and said, holding me so: "You don't like him, Kiddy."
"Oh! But I do! So much!" I protested. "I think Mr. Brace is everything nice ... I think he would make such a splendid husband! He's so steady, and honourable, and sterling, and straight, and kind, and simple-minded, and reliable, and——"
"Ah! Poppycock!" cried the comedienne, with her loud, indulgent laugh. "You're just stringing off a list of aggravating things that a girl might put up with in a man if—if, mind you!—she was head over ears in love with him as well. But, great Pip! Fancy marrying a man for those things!
"Why, what d'you suppose it would be like? I ought to know," she answered herself before I, rather surprised, could say anything. "One of those 'sterling' young men that never gave his mother an hour's anxiety; one of those reliable, simple-minded fellers that you always knew what he was goin' to say an' do next; always came home to tea on the dot, and 'never cared to wander from his own fireside'—that's what I was talked into marryin' by my aunts when I was a kid of eighteen," said Miss Vi Vassity quite bitterly.
"Oh, were you?" I cried, astonished. "I never knew——"
"Yes, that was my first husband. Answered to the name of Bert—Albert. Very good position in the waterworks in our town at home," said London's Love.
"A real good husband he was. Lor', how he did used to aggravate me! It's a good many years ago, Smithie, and I've almost forgotten what he looked like. I can just call to mind the way he used to snuffle when he had a cold in the head; shocking colds he used to catch, but he would always get up and light the kitchen fire to get me an early cup o' tea, no matter what the weather was. That I will say for him. The man I remember, though—he was pretty different!"
There was a silence in the countrified-looking bedroom that the music-hall artiste had filled with the atmosphere of a theatrical dressing-room. Then England's Premier Comedienne went on in a softer, more diffident voice than I had ever heard from her.
"He was the young man that jilted Vi Vassity a good deal later on. A trick cyclist he was.... Small, but beautifully built fellow, supple as a cat. Bad-tempered as a cat, too! And shifty, and mean in little ways! A cruel little devil, too, but——"
She sighed.
"I fair doted on him!" concluded the Star simply. "Much I cared what sort of a rotter he was! It's the way a woman's got to feel about a man once in a lifetime. If she doesn't, she's been done out of the best that's going."
"But," I suggested, "she misses a good deal of pain?"
"Yes, and of everything else. Nothing else is worth it, Smithie. You can't understand what it was to me just the way his hair grew," said the comedienne who'd loved the trick cyclist. "Cropped close, of course, and black. Looked as if a handful of soot had been rubbed over his head. But soft as velvet to your lips. I used to tell him that. Never a one for talking much himself. He'd a trick of speaking almost as if he grudged you the words; curious, and shy, and my word! wasn't it fascinatin'? Then he'd give a little laugh in the middle of a sentence sometimes. That used to go to my heart, straight as a pebble into a pool. Yes, and it'd stay there, with the ripple stirring above it. Anybody would have loved his voice....
"But! Bless my soul alive!" she broke off into her loud, jovial, everyday tone again. "About time I left off maunderin' about when—other—lips, and threw some glad-rags on to me natural history! I'll wear the marmalade-coloured affair with the dangles.... Well! 'Marry the man you fancy,' as it says in the song, and don't let me go puttin' you off any of 'em, Miss Smith——"
But whether the Star did "put me off" by her reminiscences of her trick cyclist with the charming, reluctant voice, or whether it is that I've slowly been coming round to the conclusion subconsciously in my own mind, I find that, however estimable he may be, I shall never be able to marry Mr. Reginald Brace.
No! Not if I have to go on being Miss Million's or somebody else's lady's-maid until I'm old and grey.
I somehow realised that with the first moment that I opened the door to the tall, mackintoshed figure—it was raining again, of course, outside—Miss Million, very pretty and flushed and eager in her rose-pink tea-gown, followed close upon my heels as I let Mr. Brace in, and behind her came Miss Vi Vassity, sumptuous in the orange satin that she calls "the marmalade-coloured affair."
And all three of us, without even bidding the young bank manager "Good evening," chorused together: "Tell us, for goodness' sake, tell us at once! Who did steal the Rattenheimer ruby?"
"Nobody!" replied Mr. Reginald Brace, in his pleasant but rather precise voice, and with his steady grey eyes fixed on me as I, in my inevitable cap and apron, waited to take his coat.
We all gasped "Nobody? What——Why——"
"The Rattenheimer ruby has not been stolen at all," replied Mr. Reginald Brace, smiling encouragingly upon us.
And then, while we all gaped and gazed upon him, and kept the poor wretched man waiting for his dinner, he went on to tell us the full history of the celebrated ruby.
It appears that an exquisite paste copy has been made of the priceless pendant, which the German-Jewish owners have kept by them to delude possible jewel thieves.
And now it is they themselves who have been deluded by the same wonderful replica of the celebrated gem!
For Mrs. Rattenheimer, it appears, imagined that it was the replica that reposed in her jewel-case, from which the original was missing after that fatal ten minutes of carelessness during which she left that jewel-case and her bedroom door at the Cecil unlocked.
But upon sending that replica to the experts to supplement the description of the missing ruby, she was told that an absurd mistake had been made. This, the supposed "copy," was none other than the celebrated ruby itself!
"And she didn't know her own property?" Vi Vassity's loud, cheerful voice resounded through the hall. "Why, the old girl will be the laughing-stock of London!"
"Yes. I think Mrs. Rattenheimer realises that herself," said Mr. Reginald Brace. "That is why she and her husband now intend to hush the matter up as much as possible; they do not mean to prosecute inquiries as to who took the replica."
"Don't they think we done that, then?" asked Miss Million loudly.
"They are dropping all inquiries," said Mr. Brace.
"Then I've a good mind to sue 'em for libel for the inquiries they made already," said Million heatedly. "I shall consult my——"
Here there was another ring at the bell.
"Talk of angels!" exclaimed my young mistress, as I opened the door to a second masculine figure in a dripping rain-coat, "why here he is, just the very person I was going to pass the remark about! It's my cousin Hiram!" And it was that young American who strode into the feeble light of the oil-lamps in the hall.
"I guess I must have been just a few yards behind you before I took the wrong turning to these antediluvian river-courses that they call roads," said Mr. Hiram P. Jessop to Mr. Brace, while he held Million's little hand with great tenderness. "Good evening, Cousin Nellie and everybody. If I may shed this damp macintaw, I've a few pieces of startling news——"
"For the sake of Lloyd George himself, come into the dinin'-room and let's have 'em while we're feeding," suggested Miss Vassity.
She grabbed an arm of each young man, and ran them into the room to the right that always smells of country churches.
"Part of the news concerns Miss Smith," added Mr. Jessop, over the upholstery of his shoulder.
"Then in the name of the Insurance Act let's all sit down together and hear it. Not so much nonsense about 'the maid.' We'll pretend we're at the 'Refuge,' and stretch for ourselves," decreed Vi Vassity, positively pushing me, in my cap and apron, down into the dining-room chair next to Mr. Reginald Brace in his correct tweeds.
"Now! One mouthful of tomato soup, and out with it—the news, I mean."
"To begin with, I guess they've found the jewel thief," announced Mr. Hiram P. Jessop. "That is, she's owned up. So real disgusted, I guess, to find she hadn't secured the genu-ine ruby.
"I've come straight on from Rats himself, who gave me the whole story. She brought round the other one with her own hands, and said she'd taken it for a bet. She always was eccentric.
"Well, I calculate you've got to believe a lady of title," concluded the young American between two spoonfuls of soup. "If you can't rely upon your old aristocracy to tell the truth in this country, who can you rely on?"
"Better ask the Honourable Jim!" laughed Miss Vi Vassity. "And now tell us who's the lady."
"Another acquaintance of yours, Miss Vassity," announced Mr. Jessop, giving the title with an air. "Lady Haye-Golightly!"
Another little buzz of comment greeted the name of the lady whom I had always called "the cobra-woman."
And then Mr. Jessop turned from this surprising theme to something that seemed nearer still to his heart. "Well, and, Cousin Nellie, here's a bit of good news. I guess that bomb-dropper of mine is a cinch. Your authorities over here are taking it up all right. They're going to use it all right!"
"Oh, are they, Hiram?" said my young mistress in the indulgent tone of a grown-up person discussing its toys with some child. She always adopts this tone towards her cousin's invention. "And what do they think they're goin' to use it for, eh?"
The young American looked round the table at each of the faces turned towards him.
Then, in a detached tone, he made the announcement of that which was to make all the difference in the world to all of us.
"I guess they'll use it—in this coming war!"
Well, of course we'd seen "rumours of wars" in the day-old papers that had reached us in our wet Welsh valley. But a houseful of women recks little of newspaper news—or did reck little. It all seemed as far away, as little to do with us as, say, the report of some railway accident in Northern China!
Now the young inventor's simple words brought it home to us!