Pelham Wodehouse - Spring Fever

He did not hesitate. Tripping over the skirt of his dressing gown and clutching at a pedestal bearing a bust of the late Mr. Gladstone and bringing pedestal and bust with a crash to the ground, he said with quiet nobility:

"It's all right, ma'am. We're engaged!"

As a general rule, given conditions such as prevailed in the library of Beevor Castle at two-thirty on this May morning, no better thing than this can be said. Such a statement clears the air and removes misunderstandings. It smoothes the frown from the knitted brow of censure and brings to the tightened lips of disapproval the forgiving smile. But on this occasion something went wrong with the system, and what caused this hitch was Lady Adela's practical, common-sense outlook.

"Engaged?" she echoed, not in the least soothed; in fact, looking more like Mrs. Grundy than ever. "Don't talk nonsense. How can you be engaged? You met my sister for the first time at dinner tonight."

Then, suddenly, as she paused for a reply, there came to her the recollection of certain babblings which Desborough had inflicted upon her in the privacy of her bedroom that night, while she was creaming her face. Some story about this Mr. Rossiter of Spink's being an impostor; a view, if she recollected rightly, which he had based on the fact that the other had displayed an ignorance about stamps.

At the time she had scouted the notion, it being her habit to scout practically all her husband's notions. But now, gazing at Stanwood, she found herself inclining to a theory which at the time when it was placed before her she had dismissed as absurd. A moment later she was not merely inclining, she had become that theory's wholehearted supporter. Foreign though it was to her policy to admit that Desborough could ever be right about anything, she knew that in this single instance he had not erred.

Nearly a year had passed since, in exile at Harrogate, she had read the second of those reports which she had ordered Mervyn Spink to send her each month, telling of the progress of events at the castle during her absence, but now a sentence in it came vividly to her mind. Mervyn Spink, in his running commentary, had stated that, owing to having broken his spectacles and so rendered it difficult for him to see where he was going, young Mr. Rossiter had had the misfortune to collide with and destroy the large Chinese vase in the hall.

His spectacles!

She fixed Stanwood with a burning eye, which, much as he would have preferred to do so, he could not avoid.

"Where are your spectacles?" she demanded.

"Ma'am?"

"Do you wear spectacles?"

"No, ma'am."

"Then WHO ARE YOU?"

"Stanwood Cobbold, ma'am," said Stanwood, even as Mike had predicted. Beneath that eye he was incapable of subterfuge.

Lady Adela gasped. Whatever she had expected to hear, it was not this.

"Stanwood Cobbold?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Lady Adela, as so often happens in these knotty cases, decided to take a second opinon.

Is this Mr. Cobbold, Terry?"

"Yes."

"Then who-WHO-is the other one?"

"He is a friend of Stanwood's. His name is Cardinal."

A bright flush came into Lady Adela's face. No hostess can be expected to enjoy this sort of thing, and she was the type of hostess who enjoys it least.

"Then why did he come here, saying he was you?" she demanded, turning that incandescent eye upon Stanwood again.

Stanwood cleared his throat. He untied the knot of the cord of his dressing gown and retied it. He passed a hand over his chin, then ran it down the back of his head.

"Well, it was this way—" he began, and so evident was it to Terry that he was about to relate in full detail the story of Lord Shortlands and his cook that she intervened hurriedly.

"Stanwood had some very important business that kept him in London—"

"Yay," said Stanwood, grateful for this kind assistance.

"—so he couldn't come, and—Mr. Cardinal made a sort of bet that he could come instead—"

"Yay," said Stanwood, well pleased with the way the story was shaping.

"—and not be found out. . ."

She paused. It may have been owing to Stanwood's interpolations, but the story sounded to her thin. She passed it under swift review. Yes, thin.

"It was a sort of joke," she said lamely.

Earls' daughters do not snort, but Lady Adela came very near to doing so.

"A joke!"

"And then Stanwood found that he was able to come, after all..."

Terry paused again.

"So he came," she said.

To her amazement she saw that her sister's stony gaze was softening. It was as if a sweeter, kindlier Lady Adela Topping had been substituted for that forbidding statue of sternness and disapproval. The chatelaine of Beevor Castle was actually smiling.

"I think I can guess why he did that," she said archly, and again Terry marvelled. She had never seen Adela arch before. "You found you couldn't keep away from Terry, Mr. Cobbold? Wasn't that it?" that it?"

Stanwood was in poor shape, but he was still equal to saying "Yay," so he said it.

"And Spink suggested your pretending to be Mr. Rossiter?"

"Yay."

"I shall speak to Spink in the morning," said Lady Adela, with a return of her earlier manner. "And this Mr. Cardinal, too. Well, I ought to be very angry with you, Mr. Cobbold."

"Yay."

"But I feel I can't be. And now you had better go to bed."

"Yay."

"I would like a word with Terry. Good night."

"Yay," said Stanwood, and withdrew in disorder.

The word his hostess had with Terry was brief.

"Well, really, Terry!" she said.

Terry did not speak.

"You are the most extraordinary girl. Behaving like this. Still, I won't scold you. I'm so delighted."

Lady Adela folded her sister in a loving embrace. She gave her a long, lingering, congratulatory kiss.

"Desborough says his father's worth MILLIONS!" she said.

The sunshine of another balmy day gilded the ancient walls of Beevor Castle. Nine mellow chimes sounded from the clock over the stables. And Lord Shortlands, entering the breakfast room, heaved a silent sigh as he saw Desborough Topping seated at the table. He had hoped for solitude. Sombre though his thoughts were, he wanted to be alone with them.

"Oh, hello," said Desborough Topping. "Good morning."

"Good morning," said Lord Shortlands.

He spoke dully. He was pale and leaden-eyed and looked like a butler who has come home with the milk, for he had had little sleep. Few things are less conducive to slumber than the sudden collapse of all one's hopes and dreams round about bedtime, and when Augustus Robb in that unfortunate moment of pique had hurled his bag of tools into the moat, he had ruined the fifth earl's chances of a good night's rest. From two o'clock onwards the unhappy peer had tossed on his pillow, dozing only in snatches and waking beyond hope of further repose at about the hour when the knowledgeable bird is starting wormwards.

"Nice day," said Desborough Topping. "Don't touch the bacon,'" he advised. "That girl's scorched it again."

"Oh?" said Lord Shortlands. A tragedy to his son-in-law, who liked his bit of bacon of a morning, the misadventure left him cold.

"To a cinder, darn her. Thank goodness Mrs. Punter comes back this afternoon."

A look of infinite sadness came into Lord Shortlands' eyes. He was aware of Mrs. Punter's imminent return, and last night had hoped to have been able to greet her with the news that he had become a man of capital. Augustus Robb had shattered that dream. He helped himself to coffee—black coffee, but no blacker than his thoughts of Augustus Robb.

Breakfast at Beevor Castle was a repast in the grand old English manner, designed for sturdy men who liked to put their heads down and square their elbows and go to it. It was open to Lord Shortlands, had he so desired, to start with porridge, proceed to kippers, sausages, scrambled eggs and cold ham, and wind up with marmalade: and no better evidence of his state of mind can be advanced than the fact that he merely took a slice of dry toast, for he was a man who, when conditions were right, could put tapeworms to the blush at the morning meal. His prowess with knife and fork had often been noted by his friends. "Shortlands," they used to say, "may have his limitations, but he can breakfast."