“Oh, dear, no—Americans. They came over less than a week ago. Pardon? No, I do not at the moment recall the name of the vessel, Mr. Cleek, but whichever one it was it seems to have been a very ill-conditioned affair and gave them a very bad crossing, indeed. That is why I had to render Miss Eastman the service of which I spoke—the sudden recollection of which caused me to lay down the necklace and hurry from the room. I had forgotten all about it until I happened to see the roll of lint on my dressing-table.”
“Lint, Lady Leake? What on earth had lint to do with the matter?”
“I had bought it for Miss Eastman when I was in town this morning. She asked me to, as she had used her last clean bandage yesterday. She had a very bad fall on shipboard, Mr. Cleek, and injured her left hand severely!”
Narkom made a curious sort of gulping sound, whipped out his handkerchief and began to dab his bald spot, and looked round at Cleek out of the tail of his eye. But Cleek neither moved nor spoke nor made any sign—merely pushed his lower lip out over his upper one and stood frowning at the stable door.
And here—just here—a strange and even startling thing occurred. With just one hoarse “Toot-toot!” to give warning of its coming, a public taxi swung round the curve of the road, jerked itself up to a sudden standstill within a rope’s cast of the spot where the four were standing, and immediately there rang forth a rollicking, happy youthful voice crying out, as the owner of it stood up and touched an upright forefinger to his numbered cap, in jolly mimicry of the Hanson cabman of other days: “Keb, sir? Keb, mum? Keb! Keb!” and hard on the heels of that flung out a laughing, “Hullo, mater? Hullo, dad? you dear old Thunder Box! I say! ‘How does this sort of thing get you?’ as Katie Eastman says. Buttons all over me, like a blooming Bobby! What?”
And it needed no more than that to assure Cleek and Mr. Narkom that in the bright-eyed, bonny-faced, laughing young fellow who jumped down from the driver’s seat at this, and stood up straight and strong, and displayed his taxicabman’s livery unabashed and unashamed, they were looking upon Sir Mawson Leake’s eldest son and—heir!
“Henry!” The voice was Lady Leake’s, and there was pain and surprise and joy and terror all jumbled up in it curiously, as she ran to him. “Henry! Is it really you?”
“‘Sure thing!’—to quote Katie again. Just took a spin over to show myself off. Plenty of brass trimmings! What? I thought, dad, you’d like to be sure that I really am done with the clubs at last. Not because they blacklisted me—for they didn’t—but because—oh well, you know. No taxicabmen need apply—that sort of thing. I’ll be invited to resign from every blessed one of them to-morrow, and there’s not a chap connected with any one of ’em who’d be seen taking a match from me to light his cigarette with after this. All the same, though, I go out of them with a clean slate, and that’s all I cared about. I did get that two hundred after all, pater. Curzon and Katie raised it for me between them—out of their own private accounts, you know—and as driving a car is the only thing I really do understand, I’m earning the money to pay them back this way.”
“That’s the stuff, by Jupiter! That’s the stuff!” rapped out Cleek, impulsively. “You ought to have known from the first, Sir Mawson, that they don’t make thieves of this sort of material?”
“Thieves? What do you mean by thieves? And who the dickens are you, anyway? I say, dad, who’s this johnnie? What’s he driving at? What does he mean by talking about thieves?”