"Father! You nearly deafened me."
"Spink?" repeated Lord Shortlands, a little more on the piano side, but still loudly.
"Yes. Desborough was talking about the stamp at lunch, and Clare was telling Mr. Blair how she had found the album in a cupboard, and after lunch Spink came to me and explained that it was one which had been given him by Mr. Rossiter, the son of those Americans who took the castle last summer. He said he had been looking for it everywhere."
Lord Shortlands clutched for support at a chair. He was conscious of a feeling that it was very hard that a man with a high blood pressure should be subjected to this kind of thing. He could not forget that it was the death by apoplectic stroke of his uncle Gervase that had enabled him to succeed to the title.
"Spink said that?"
"Yes."
Lord Shortlands suddenly came to life.
"It's a ramp!" he cried passionately.
Every instinct told him that Mervyn Spink's story was a tissue or, putting it another way, a farrago of falsehood. Do Americans who take castles for summers give butlers stamp albums? Of course they don't. They haven't any, to start with, and if they have they don't give them away. What on earth would they give them away for? And who ever heard of a philatelist butler? Preposterous, felt Lord Shortlands.
"It's a bally try-on!" he thundered.
"I don't know what you mean. Spink tells me he has collected stamps since he was a boy, and I see nothing improbable in his story. Anyhow, he claims the thing."
"I don't care if he claims it till he's blue in the face."
Lady Adela's eyebrows rose.
"Well, really, Father, I can't see why you are making such a fuss."
"Fuss!"
"I mean, it isn't as if there were any chance of it being yours. And it must belong to somebody, so why not Spink? No doubt Mr. Rossiter did give it to him. It's just the sort of thing an American would do."
"Well, I strongly protest against your handing this stamp over to Spink till he produces Rossiter. His statement is that Rossiter gave it to him. All right, then, let him produce Rossiter."
"He's going to."
A faint gleam of hope illumined Lord Shortlands' darkness.
"Then you haven't given it to him?"
"Naturally not on his unsupported word. He says he thinks Mr. Rossiter is in London, and he has gone up to try to find him. In the meantime the stamp will be quite safe. I have got it locked away. Ah, tea," said Lady Adela welcomingly.
Lord Shortlands, though generally fond of his cup at this hour, exhibited no corresponding elation. He was staring before him with unseeing eyes and wishing that the kindly Aloysius McGuffy could have been at his side, to start shaking up six or seven of his justly famous Specials.
10
A song on his lips and the sparkle of triumph in his eye, opening his throttle gaily and tooting his horn with a carefree exuberance, Mervyn Spink sped home from London on his motorcycle, his air that of a man who sits on top of the world. Only the necessity of keeping both hands on the handle bars prevented him patting himself on the back.
The world was looking very beautiful to Mervyn Spink. He gazed at the blue skies, the fleecy clouds, the fluttering butterflies, the hedgerows bright with wild flowers and the spreading fields of wheat that took on the appearance of velvet rubbed the wrong way as the light breeze played over them, and approved of them all, in the order named. He did not actually sing "tra-la," but it was a very close thing. In the whole of Kent at that moment you could not have found a more cheerio butler.
The sight of Lord Shortlands standing in the road outside the castle gates increased his feeling of bien-etre. He had been looking forward to meeting Lord Shortlands. A nasty knock, he felt correctly, this stamp sequence would be for his rival, and he wished to gloat on his despair. Mervyn Spink was a man who believed in treating rivals rough.
He braked his motorcycle, removed trousers seat from saddle and alighted.
"Ah, Shortlands," he said.
Lord Shortlands started. His face, already mauve, took on a deeper shade, and his eyes seemed to be suspended at the end of stalks, like those of a snail or prawn.
"How dare you address me like that?"
A frown marred the alabaster smoothness of Mervyn Spink's brow.
"We'd better get this settled once and for all, Shortlands," he said coldly. "Want me to call you 'm'lord,' do you? Well, if we were the other side of those gates, I'd call you 'm'lord' till my eyes bubbled. But when I'm off duty and we meet in the public highway, I am no longer your employee."
It was a nice piece of reasoning, well expressed, but Lord Shortlands continued dissatisfied.
"Yes, you are."
"No, I'm not. We're man and man. If you think otherwise, you can complain to her ladyship. It'll mean telling her the whole story and explaining just how matters stand between us, but I don't mind that, if you don't."
The purple flush died out of Lord Shortlands' face. A man with his consistently high blood pressure could not actually blench, but he came reasonably near to doing so. The picture those words had conjured up had made him feel as if his spine had been suddenly removed and the vacancy filled with gelatine. His manner, which had had perhaps almost too much in it of the mediaeval earl dealing with a scurvy knave or varlet, changed, taking on the suggestion of a cushat dove calling to its mate.
"Well, never mind, Spink. Quite all right. The point is—er—immaterial."
"Okey-doke, Shortlands."
"Just a technicality. And now what's all this about that stamp?"
"What about it?"
"My daughter tells me you've claimed it."
"I have."
"Says you say you were given it by this fellow Rossiter. I don't believe it," cried Lord Shortlands, recapturing something of the first fine careless rapture of his original manner. The spirit of his fighting ancestors was once more strong within him, and if he had been Lady Adela Topping herself he could not have been more resolutely determined to stand no nonsense. "It's a bally swindle!"
It seemed for an instant as though Mervyn Spink, in defiance of the first rule laid down by the Butlers Guild for the guidance of its members, was about to laugh. But he managed to check the impulse and to substitute for the guffaw a quiet smile.
"Listen," he said. "I'll tell you something."
Until now we have seen this butler only at his best, a skilful carrier of malted milk and a man whose appearance would have shed lustre on a ducal home; his only fault, as far as we have been able to ascertain, the venial one of liking to have an occasional ten bob on the two-thirty. He now strips the mask from his face and stands revealed as the modern Machiavelli he was. The typewriter falters as it records his words, and even Lord Shortlands, though he had known all along that dirty work was in progress in some form or other, found himself stunned and amazed.
"You're quite right, Shortlands. It is a bally swindle, and what are you going to do about it? Nothing. Because you can't."
He was right, and Lord Shortlands realized it. However bally the swindle, he could make no move to cope with it. His fear of his daughter Adela held him gagged and bound. Tortured by the humiliating sense of impotence, he uttered a wordless sound at the back of his throat. Augustus Robb, in a similar situation, would have said "Coo!" Both would have meant the same thing.
"Young Rossiter didn't give me that album. I've never seen the thing in my life. But I've a nephew on the stage who plays character parts and doesn't stick at much, so long as he knows there's something in it for him. Well, he's going to play another character part tomorrow. I've just been to see him, and we've fixed everything up."