“Well, it’s getting on for three in the morning.”
“I was speaking figuratively, you ass. I meant that hope has begun to dawn. About Mary Burgess, you know. Sit down and I’ll tell you all about it.”
“I won’t. I’m going to sleep.”
“To begin with,” said young Bingo, settling himself comfortably against the pillows and helping himself to a cigarette from my special private box, “I must once again pay a marked tribute to good old Jeeves. A modern Solomon. I was badly up against it when I came to him for advice, but he rolled up with a tip which has put me—I use the term advisedly and in a conservative spirit—on velvet. He may have told you that he recommended me to win back the lost ground by busying myself with good works? Bertie, old man,” said young Bingo earnestly, “for the last two weeks I’ve been comforting the sick to such an extent that, if I had a brother and you brought him to me on a sick-bed at this moment, by Jove, old man, I’d heave a brick at him. However, though it took it out of me like the deuce, the scheme worked splendidly. She softened visibly before I’d been at it a week. Started to bow again when we met in the street, and so forth. About a couple of days ago she distinctly smiled—in a sort of faint, saint-like kind of way, you know—when I ran into her outside the Vicarage. And yesterday—I say, you remember that curate chap, Wingham? Fellow with a long nose.”
“Of course I remember him. Your rival.”
“Rival?” Bingo raised his eyebrows. “Oh, well, I suppose you could have called him that at one time. Though it sounds a little far-fetched.”
“Does it?” I said, stung by the sickening complacency of the chump’s manner. “Well, let me tell you that the last I heard was that at the ‘Cow and Horses’ in Twing village and all over the place as far as Lower Bingley they were offering seven to one on the curate and finding no takers.”
Bingo started violently, and sprayed cigarette-ash all over my bed.
“Betting!” he gargled. “Betting! You don’t mean that they’re betting on this holy, sacred—— Oh, I say, dash it all! Haven’t people any sense of decency and reverence? Is nothing safe from their beastly, sordid graspingness? I wonder,” said young Bingo thoughtfully, “if there’s a chance of my getting any of that seven-to-one money? Seven to one! What a price! Who’s offering it, do you know? Oh, well, I suppose it wouldn’t do. No, I suppose it wouldn’t be quite the thing.”
“You seem dashed confident,” I said. “I’d always thought that Wingham——”