Pelham Wodehouse - The Return of Jeeves

He himself might have his Bulstrode, but at least he could console himself with the thought that his daughter was marrying a man with a butler in the fine old tradition on his payroll. It put heart into him. It made him feel that this was not such a bad little old world, after all.

He mentioned this to Jill when she came in a moment later, looking cold and proud, and Jill tilted her chin and looked colder and prouder. She might have been a Snow Queen or something of that sort.

"I am not going to marry Lord Rowcester," she said curtly.

It seemed to Colonel Wyvern that his child must be suffering from some form of amnesia, and he set himself to jog her memory.

"Yes, you are," he reminded her. "It was in The Times. I saw it with my own eyes. The engagement is announced between—"

"I have broken off the engagement."

That little gleam of light of which we were speaking a moment ago, the one we showed illuminating Colonel Wyvern's darkness, went out with a pop, like a stage moon that has blown a fuse. He stared incredulously.

"Broken off the engagement?"

"I am never going to speak to Lord Rowcester again."

"Don't be an ass," said Colonel Wyvern. "Of course you are. Not going to speak to him again? I never heard such nonsense. I suppose what's happened is that you've had one of these lovers' tiffs."

Jill did not intend to allow without protest what was probably the world's greatest tragedy since the days of Romeo and Juliet to be described in this inadequate fashion. One really must take a little trouble to find the mot juste.

"It was not a lovers' tiff," she said, all the woman in her flashing from her eyes. "If you want to know why I broke off the engagement, it was because of the abominable way he has been behaving with Mrs. Spottsworth."

Colonel Wyvern put a finger to his brow.

"Spottsworth? Spottsworth? Ah, yes.

That's the American woman you were telling me about."

"The American trollop," corrected Jill coldly.

"Trollop?" said Colonel Wyvern, intrigued.

"That was what I said."

"Why do you call her that? Did you catch them— er—trolloping?"

"Yes, I did."

"Good gracious!"

Jill swallowed once or twice, as if something jagged in her throat was troubling her.

"It all seems to have started," she said, speaking in that toneless voice which had made such a painful impression on Bill, "in Cannes some years ago. Apparently she and Lord Rowcester used to swim together at Eden Roc and go for long drives in the moonlight. And you know what that sort of thing leads to."

"I do indeed," said Colonel Wyvern with animation, and was about to embark on an anecdote of his interesting past, when Jill went on, still speaking in that same strange, toneless voice.

"She arrived at the Abbey yesterday. The story that has been put out is that Monica Carmoyle met her in New York and invited her to stay, but I have no doubt that the whole thing was arranged between her and Lord Rowcester, because it was obvious how matters stood between them. No sooner had she appeared than he was all over her ... making love to her in the garden, dancing with her like a cat on hot bricks, and," said Jill nonchalantly, wearing the mask like the Mrs.

Fish who had so diverted Captain Biggar by doing the can-can in her step-ins in Kenya, "coming out of her room at two o'clock in the morning in mauve pyjamas."

Colonel Wyvern choked. He had been about to try to heal the rift by saying that it was quite possible for a man to exchange a few civil remarks with a woman in a garden and while away the long evening by partnering her in the dance and still not be in any way culpable, but this statement wiped the words from his lips.

"Coming out of her room in mauve pyjamas?"

"Yes."

"Mauve pyjamas?"

"Bright mauve."

"God bless my soul!"

A club acquaintance, annoyed by the eccentricity of the other's bridge game, had once told Colonel Wyvern that he looked like a retired member of Sanger's troupe of midgets who for years had been doing himself too well on the starchy foods, and this was in a measure true. He was, as we have said, short and stout.

But when the call to action came, he could triumph over his brevity of stature and rotundity of waistcoat and become a figure of dignity and menace. It was an impressive Chief Constable who strode across the room and rang the bell for Bulstrode.

"Yus?" said Bulstrode.

Colonel Wyvern choked down the burning words he would have liked to utter. He told himself that he must conserve his energies.

"Bulstrode," he said, "bring me my horsewhip."

Down in the forest of pimples on the butler's face something stirred. It was a look of guilt.

"It's gorn," he mumbled.

Colonel Wyvern stared.

"Gone? What do you mean, gone? Gone where?"

Bulstrode choked. He had been hoping that this investigation might have been avoided. Something had told him that it would prove embarrassing.

"To the mender's. To be mended. It got cracked."

"Cracked?"

"Yus," said Bulstrode, in his emotion adding the unusual word "Sir". "I was cracking it in the stable yard, and it cracked. So I took it to the mender's."

Colonel Wyvern pointed an awful finger at the door.

"Get out, you foul blot," he said.

"I'll talk to you later." Seating himself at his desk, as he always did when he wished to think, he drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. "I'll have to borrow young Rowcester's," he said at length, clicking his tongue in evident annoyance.

"Infernally awkward, calling on a fellow you're going to horsewhip and having to ask him for the loan of his horsewhip to do it with. Still, there it is," said Colonel Wyvern philosophically. "That's how it goes."

He was a man who could always adjust himself to circumstances.

Lunch at Rowcester Abbey had been a much more agreeable function than lunch at Wyvern Hall, on a different plane altogether. Where Colonel Wyvern had been compelled to cope with the distressing efforts of a pigtailed incompetent apparently under the impression that she was catering for a covey of buzzards in the Gobi Desert, the revellers at the Abbey had been ministered to by an expert. Earlier in this chronicle passing reference was made to the virtuosity of Bill's O.c. Kitchen, the richly gifted Mrs.

Piggott, and in dishing up the midday meal today she had in no way fallen short of her high ideals.

Three of the four celebrants at the table had found the food melting in their mouths and had downed it with cries of appreciation.

The exception was the host himself, in whose mouth it had turned to ashes. What with one thing and another— the instability of his financial affairs, last night's burglarious interlude and its devastating sequel, the shattering of his romance—Bill was far from being the gayest of all that gay company. In happier days he had sometimes read novels in which characters were described as pushing their food away untasted, and had often wondered, being a man who enjoyed getting his calories, how they could have brought themselves to do it. But at the meal which was now coming to an end he had been doing it himself, and, as we say, what little nourishment he had contrived to take had turned to ashes in his mouth. He had filled in the time mostly by crumbling bread, staring wildly and jumping like a galvanized frog when spoken to.

A cat in a strange alley would have been more at its ease.

Nor had the conversation at the table done anything to restore his equanimity. Mrs.

Spottsworth would keep bringing it round to the subject of Captain Biggar, regretting his absence from the feast, and each mention of the White Hunter's name had had a seismic effect on his sensitive conscience. She did it again now.

"Captain Biggar was telling me—" she began, and Rory uttered one of his jolly laughs.