Читать книгу Ancestor Jorico - William J. Locke - Страница 6

Table of Contents

Toby, incongruous genius of the place, sat in his Louis XV office, with sketches of a bridal dress on his table, and on the other side his head-woman displaying gleaming whites and ivories of materials. He had seen the bride to be, and it was for him to select the shade that would suit her colouring; to decide also on the style that would befit her figure. It was quite interesting in its way; indeed, fascinating on its artistic side; and it was also his job. And Toby had been trained to do his job for all it was worth. But when the woman and an attendant satellite went out with lengths of material and sketches, he rubbed his eyes wearily.

A man dressmaker. A rotten life, no matter how lucrative. His secretary entered, note-book in hand. She had been interrupted by the incursion of the head-woman preoccupied by the wedding-dress. With a sigh, Toby took up his letters and dictated replies. He came on a memorandum: “Postpone fitting for Lady Smith as materials have not yet come from Paris.” He threw it impatiently across the table.

“Why do you bother me with this sort of thing? What have I got to do with the postponement of Lady Smith’s fitting? The whole place is going to the devil.”

Toby was in a bad mood. Toby was worried. All sorts of things had conspired to worry him. There was the story of Ancestor Jorico’s fortune; the offered opportunity, if not of an adventure, at least of a two or three months’ life in an atmosphere breathable by man; the entirely penniless condition of his young cousin, Nicholas, who, by knocking down a headmaster had disgraced himself for the only profession for which he was fitted, and who was calling on him by appointment at any moment; and also by an extraordinary request made to him after breakfast by his man, Jones.

Like myself Toby was sceptical as to the Jorico half-million. But he had imagination. With a hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds, he could cut himself adrift from “Palmyre.” He could take guns and things into the Himalayas, places inaccessible to women, and shoot bears for the rest of his natural life. He could also sketch deodars and shikarris and elephants and such-like lusty things. A hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds! Good Lord! He could buy a salmon-river in Norway. He could buy a Field-Marshalship in a South American Republic, and play amusing hell in the place. Dammit, he could fool about Turkestan, a romantic country consecrated to his imagination by his childhood’s reading of Burnaby’s “Ride to Khiva.” He could buy a farm in Berkshire and breed pigs. There were endless possibilities of infinite happiness for the man who had a hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds.

And Binkie was so cocksure. There was no flaw in his argument. The only flaw lay in his conclusion. Where there was some five or six hundred miles of desert coast wherein to hide treasure, why did the old man Jorico bury it, with unimaginable pain and sweat, in the very middle of a virgin tropical forest? Well, there was the map, with the bird, known as the Little Devil bird. There was the chest guarded by a little devil. Binkie triumphed.

Nicholas was announced. He had passed distastefully through the soft-carpeted, scented, woman-pervaded showrooms, like a petulant young god through a nymph-haunted glade. Toby’s inner sanctum seemed to afford him no greater pleasure. Toby’s cordial welcome, however, disarmed him.

“Sit down—here’s a cigarette.” He pushed a box. “Oh yes, you can smoke here, women nearly always do. I have some special things made for me in Alexandria which they can’t get anywhere else. They think there’s dope in ’em. There isn’t. So you’re safe. Well, what about it? Tell me. You’re broke... ?”

“To the wide,” said Nicholas.

“What can you do?”

“Nothing that I’m aware of.”

“Want to do anything?”

The boy flushed, and sat up. “I’m not a rotter,” said he.

Toby laughed. “All right. Hit me over the head if you like. It would be against your own interests of course ... What are you willing to do?”

“Anything to carry on,” said Nicholas. “Hettie has kept me going in her flat for the past week or two. But I can’t stick it much longer. I ought to be looking after her.”

“Quite so,” said Toby. He took his pipe out of his pocket, polished the bowl tenderly on his sleeve and put it back again. “They don’t like pipes,” said he. He waved away the box of cigarettes which the boy, in his turn, offered. “No, thanks.... Tell me, my friend, how does this place strike you? Do you like it? Be honest. You don’t like it.”

“I can’t say I do,” replied Nicholas, uncomfortable.

“But you’ve no Bolshevik desire to smash the windows and make a bonfire of the show and pitch the mannequins into it?”

“No-o,” said Nicholas.

“Well, I have. But I’ve common sense, and I don’t do it.”

“You make lots of money out of it, Cousin Toby,” said the young man, seriously.

“But you really think I’m carrying on the vanity and luxury business that marked the end of all effete civilization—Babylon, Rome, Byzantine ... ?”

“In a way you are—yes,” replied Nicholas, with an uncomfortable air of defiance. “You ask me for it. I don’t mind women being prettily dressed. All the laws of human sexual attraction in all countries since the world began have sanctioned it. But this sort of thing—it’s out of scale with present-day human needs. This and all that goes with it. It makes me sick.”

“Glad to hear you say so,” said Toby cheerfully. “So it does me. We ought to work together very well. My present book-keeper tells me she wants to transfer her incompetence to the management of a hat-shop in Putney Vale. I’ve been giving her five pounds a week. Can you keep books?”

“Never tried.”

“Like to?”

Nicholas reflected. Much as he deprecated and wished to avert the approaching Decline and Fall of the British Empire, he couldn’t achieve his end by ignominiously living on Hettie, or heroically selling toys on the curb ... for the latter he hadn’t even the qualification of being an ex-service man. He surrendered to Toby’s humorous smile. It wasn’t a career, the latter explained; by no manner of means. It was an honest job, as far as it went, that would enable him to carry on until he could find some better opening for a young man of some academical distinction and with vague ambitions.

“You took the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge,” said Toby. “If you’ve mastered the Integral Calculus—the damn stuff with signs like the holes in fiddles ...”

“I did that at school,” said Nicholas.

“Well—all the better. If you can understand that rubbish, you’ll find book-keeping pretty simple. Only I can’t keep an adder-up for you. If you add up wrong you’ll be thrown out. That clear?”

Apparently it was quite clear to the mind of Nicholas. He hoped that in an establishment like “Palmyre” they wouldn’t boggle with farthings. The mathematical and the arithmetical brain are leagues apart. A gentleman may write you the most learned treatise on Differential Functions and the Calculus of Variations, and yet be as unable to tell you correctly the cost of seven and three-quarter yards of silk at seventeen shillings and sevenpence three farthings a yard, as a savage in Central Africa.

Perhaps the figures in my illustration may be laughed at by those who know. As the father of a family, I have an uneasy feeling that I ought to have quoted the price of silk in pounds and not shillings.

But this is by the way.

After a friendly arrangement had been concluded, Toby said:

“There’s one more thing, young man, I must tell you. This isn’t a confectioner’s shop.”

Nicholas regarded him with the wrinkled brow of puzzlement.

“What do you mean?”

“The time-honoured story. The confectioner’s boy allowed at first to eat himself sick with cakes, until he loathes them and won’t be tempted to touch one for anything on earth. This place is full of young women of all sorts and sizes. See? So hands off from the word ‘Go.’ I’ve nothing to do with your morals. Outside these premises you can all go to hell down whatever paths seem pleasantest. But inside, for purely business reasons, efficiency and so on, it has got to be a blooming nunnery. Understand?”

The queer searching look came into Toby’s eyes, and Nicholas understood so well that he was unable to stammer out even the most honest and ingenuous of protests.

“Turn up on Monday at nine o’clock, and Miss Taylor will put you wise.”

So Nicholas went away carrying in his heart both the love of Toby and the Fear of God; an excellent thing for any young man of five-and-twenty.

This was Saturday. Toby settled up affairs perfunctorily and breathed the ordinary sigh of relief as he emerged into the mild early October air of the street.

He had shaken from his feet the delicate yet asphyxiating dust of “Palmyre,” and had relieved his young cousin Nicholas of his immediate necessities. Yet there was one worry left. Jones.

Jones had conducted himself of late in a queer fashion; that is to say, queer for Jones. He had taken to dressing himself up in his best on his afternoons off, and absenting himself to the full limit of his leave. How he managed to get about Toby didn’t inquire. But why Jones, who until recently had contented himself with constitutional walks in Hyde Park and occasional visits to cinema theatres, should have launched out into more remote adventure, was a mystery. At last, when apparently he considered the time had come for an explanation, he gave his master to understand that he had discovered some of his long-lost relations. They lived near Sevenoaks, in Kent. He had gone there several times by train; but only on the last excursion had he found them. Toby wondered how he could have gone by train to Sevenoaks, thereby under-rating the resource of Jones. The booking-clerk at Charing Cross station who, confronted with an obviously deaf-and-dumb man and supplied with a drawing of seven trees with an unmistakable acorn to signify their species, could have no doubt that the man wanted to go to Sevenoaks, and by his gestures that he needed a return ticket. It was as simple as all that. How, unable to read, did he know when he reached his destination? He worried his fellow-passengers with his picture. He seemed hurt by Toby’s questionings. Surely, he declared, in his own way, he was a man of ordinary intelligence. Toby gracefully admitted the fact. It took a lot to defeat Jones. Yet Toby would have liked to know how, by his pictorial method, he could have obtained a ticket for Yeovil or Aberystwyth.

The only worrying part of that Saturday morning’s preoccupation with Jones was his promise to drive the man down to Kent to see these relations. He had sacrificed his usual solitary and soul-cleansing week-end at his Berkshire cottage, near Newbury, where he had a bit of trout-stream to fish in and a useful hack to ride over the downs. If it hadn’t been for Jones, and incidentally Nicholas, he would be there now; for on Saturday mornings “Palmyre” could generally look after itself. And it was such a mellow, windless October day. He could have had a pleasant afternoon’s rough shooting.... But Jones could not be refused the first favour he had ever asked. It would have been inhuman.

We see them, then, after an early and hurried lunch, side by side in Toby’s comfortable two-seater car. Through the dismal tram-defaced thoroughfares of south-eastern London—New Cross, Lewisham, Bromley—the drab suburban world all a-foot or a-wheel; then at last through the leafy avenues of Kent, the sun burnishing the already golden foliage and the russet of the northern slopes. Now and then, attracting Toby’s attention, Jones waved a hand at some wood-embowered manor-house and, grinning, sketched a thought. Toby smiled comprehendingly, and, with a free left-hand, sketched his reply. Yes, it was typical England in the plenitude of her beauty and her bounty—the comfortable and comforting mother of their race.

“Great,” said Toby.

“Makes you feel you want to cry,” said Jones in his lightning pantomime.

Toby felt very near to Jones. There was a curious spiritual appeal and response in him. Perhaps, if he could have talked and heard and written, this well of emotionality might have been dissipated in the common way of life through the ordinary channels of communication. But, thought Toby, the man so definitely cut off from communication with his fellows must have accumulated within himself such an unrelieved well, the pressure of which might account for the many loyalties, the strange eagernesses, the indomitable self-reliance, of the terribly stricken man.

They approached Sevenoaks. Jones made an onward sign. They passed through the old sleepy town with its remaining half-timbered, gabled inns and shops. He directed a course along the Hastings Road. Then, suddenly, he touched Toby. There to the left, a hundred yards away, was a turning. Toby obeyed. A fairly wide road dwindled into a lane. A short distance further was a narrower lane to the right, which Jones decreed should be taken.

“There,” signed Jones.

And there was a little workman’s cottage, embowered in Virginia creeper, standing in about half an acre of ground, a few yards away from the road. There was a rickety gate shutting off a short flagged path, on each side of which straggled a most utilitarian kitchen garden. By the cottage wall a few belated hollyhocks drooped despondent. But the dominating feature, in the middle distance between the rough fence and cottage, was a girl with a spade, digging potatoes.

As the car stopped at the gate, at its sudden cessation of noise she drew herself up, and, with spade carelessly drooping from hand, regarded the newcomers under contracted wide brows.

Jones sprang from his seat, opened both the door of the car and of the gate for his master, and followed him into the garden.

Toby advanced and took off his hat to the girl, who remained rigid and unwelcoming.

“I’m afraid our friend here,” said he pleasantly, “hasn’t been able to explain me. He was with me for a bit during the war, and now he is my confidential servant. My name is Major Boyle.”

The girl looked him up and down. She was nearly as tall as Toby.

“I don’t know what he’s come for, sir,” she said, in a very dignified and yet respectful way. “He was here about a week ago and Mother and I thought he was mad. We were rather frightened.”

Toby smiled and waved away any suggestion of terror.

“He’s the best fellow in the world, and as sane as you or I. The only thing is that he was done in during the war. Mine explosion—so he’s deaf and dumb. A sort of shell-shock; you’ve heard of that, haven’t you?”

“Of course.”

“He’s a case of it.... Well, he and I have made up a sort of sign language of our own, and I gather from him that he thinks he has found some of his relatives here. He asked me to come down and interpret for him.”

“I don’t know of any missing relations,” said the girl, “but perhaps Mother may. Will you come inside?”

She dropped the spade which she had been holding all the time, and dusted her hands on her dark blue print apron. Toby noticed that they were beautifully shaped large hands. He also noticed something else; or rather, became conscious of what hitherto he had been sub-conscious; that she was a young woman physically out of the common of girls that dig in gardens. She was tall, upright, and gave the impression of great strength. She suggested an old etching of Walter Strang’s—a cherished possession of his father—“The Potato Gatherer,” in which a splendid woman in the foreground seemed to scorn the load on her back. She had a calm tanned face—neither beautiful nor coarse-featured, and strange blue eyes. Her hair was black. A type more of Western Ireland than East Anglia. She wore an old jersey, with sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and a stuff skirt.

She pushed the cottage door open for them, and they entered what obviously was the only living-room of the cottage.

An elderly woman, strong and capable-looking, not unlike her daughter, was setting out on the centre table the rough utensils for tea. A kettle simmered on the hob. The woman stared at the newcomers. The girl explained. Toby repeated his assurances of the respectability and good faith of Jones.

“Won’t you sit down, sir?” said the woman.

Toby took the offered chair by the table, but Jones insisted on standing until Toby signified to him that here the rules of the army and of domestic service could be neglected.

Jones sat down on the edge of a straight-backed chair. There was a short and peculiarly awkward silence. The two women were perfectly civil, but on their guard. Toby felt rather a fool. He looked around. It was a commonplace workman’s cottage living-room. A small cooking-range and a dresser with crockery proclaimed it the kitchen. An old stuffed armchair by the fire, a work-table by a window opposite the door with a sewing-machine and a pile of women’s underwear, a three-tier bookcase filled with faded volumes, fixed to the wall, a few cheap prints and photographs, quite a good old mahogany grandfather’s clock in a corner, and a pair of silk stockings thrown over the back of a chair beside the clock gave the impression of homely comfort.

Toby turned helplessly to Jones.

“What about it?” he asked.

Jones sighed rapidly, pointing now to the mother, now to the daughter.

“He says,” Toby at last interpreted, “that he is a nephew of yours—that your sister married his father. Did you have a sister?”

The elder woman’s face became stony.

“I did, sir.”

Toby felt confronted with family trouble.

“You see, Mrs.——?”

“Tellifer.”

“You see, Mrs. Tellifer,” said Toby with his kind smile, “this poor chap since he was knocked out hasn’t been able to tell anybody his name. I’ve tried to get at it, in all sorts of ways. For instance, he knows mine. Boyle. I could convey it to him by the picture of a kettle boiling, and so on. I’ve tried him with pictures of tailors and all kinds of smiths—trades you know—and in fact everything pictorial I could think of—and all no good. How could he give me any idea of your name, now?”

“A gentleman once told me,” said the girl calmly, “that our name came from the Norman French, and meant ‘cut iron.’”

Toby eyed her shrewdly, for she spoke in an educated way.

“I’m afraid,” said he, “that Jones isn’t enough of a French scholar to express it.”

He turned and met Jones’s intelligent yet haunted eyes. He gave him to understand that they wanted him to tell them their names as a guarantee of good faith. He held up pathetically helpless hands. As an experiment Toby drew on the little block which he always carried, a casque half cleft by a sword. Jones sprang up, his pallid face alive with excitement. He made the passes which signified to Toby France, and France only, and, taking the block, sketched the unmistakable outlines of France, and handed it to Mrs. Tellifer. Then, by way of confirmation, he took the knife from the table half-laid for tea, and made as though to cut the kitchen range.

“He knows the name right enough,” said the girl, nodding with some kindness of recognition to the quivering man, who, at her sign, resumed his seat.

“I’m glad that’s fixed anyhow,” said Toby, with a sense of relief. “You see we’re not impostors. What he really wants, I think, is to get at his own name. He knows it, of course, but can’t tell us. Won’t you help, Mrs. Tellifer?”

“I had a sister,” said the woman. “She’s dead now, but I never speak of her. Perhaps you can understand, sir. After all, even if he knows our name, that doesn’t prove he’s my sister’s child, does it?”

It didn’t. Toby glanced somewhat ruefully at the two women. Presently the girl said:

“Shall I bring the album?”

“If you like, Ruth.”

That was the first time Toby had heard her name. He followed her figure as she disappeared through the side door, probably into a bedroom. She vaguely suggested her fore-runner amid the golden corn. She came back almost immediately with an antiquated bursting leather volume with a brass clasp, which she handed to Toby. He opened it idly to find, as he had expected, dreadful cartes de visite, as they used to be called, representing dreary people in impossible attitudes, all stuck into the slips of the album’s embossed pages. As he had nothing to do with the rude fore-fathers and aunts and uncles of the Tellifers, he passed it to Jones. And then, in a minute, came identification.

Jones leaped excitedly to his feet and presented a page to Mrs. Tellifer—in fact, an open double page. On one side was the photograph of a grim elderly man leaning on a broken column, and on the other, that of two little girls. His signs were unmistakable. The man was Mrs. Tellifer’s father. One child was the lady herself. The other was his own mother.

Toby summed up. Mrs. Tellifer yielded. From a hundred old faded photographs in the bursting family album Jones had put an unerring finger on those with which he was concerned.

“Well, well,” she said, with a softened air. “So you’re Sophie’s son.”

Jones, his pale face vividly eager, read her expression and nodded. Toby said cheerily:

“That’s all right, then. Now what’s his name?”

“I wish I could tell you, sir.”

“Do you mean you won’t, or can’t?” Toby asked in his blunt yet pleasant way.

“I can’t—because I don’t know.”

“It means such a lot to the poor fellow,” Toby urged again. “His army record—to say nothing of his life record—is lost. Anything you could do for him ... Even,” he added softly, sensitive of tragedy, “if it gives you ... if it revives painful memories.”

Ruth, who had been hovering about somewhat hazily in Toby’s eyes, said suddenly:

“Will you have a cup of tea, sir?”

He turned with his frank smile.

“I should love one.”

He was half-conscious of the flicker of the transformation of an appraising glance into one of approval. This daughter of the soil—the might-have-been model of Strang’s “Potato Gatherer”—was the least bit disconcerting in her ways.

“I’m sure you’re more than welcome,” said Mrs. Tellifer.

Between the respective social attitudes of mother and daughter there was a subtle difference. Toby looked from one to the other, and Jones, in his patient deafness, did the same. Ruth busied herself with the tea-things, in the preparation of which her mother had been interrupted.

Toby leaned forward. “Do tell me what you can. Perhaps I may be able to make further inquiries.”

“Well, sir, it was like this,” said Mrs. Tellifer.

And it was like a million other pitiful and sordid stories. Her sister Sophie had married a gentleman by the name of Tucker, who carried on a flourishing business as an undertaker at Southampton. There were no children. Then, as Toby said to me, conjecturally, the poor woman, fed up with talk of corpses and coffins at breakfast, dinner, tea and supper, bolted with somebody else; somebody in the service of the Royal Mail Steam Packet Co.; though whether a captain all over gold braid, or a stoker in dungarees, Mrs. Tellifer couldn’t say. Nobody knew his name. Tucker might have found out, had he not caught his death of cold at a Vice-Admiral’s mid-winter funeral when, of course he had to look his non-overcoated best, a day or two after his wife’s elopement. A triumphant pneumonia carried him off before he could mention the name of his betrayer to his hastily summoned and sorrowing relatives. Rumour alone connected him with the R.M.S.P. Co. Thenceforward she had disappeared from the horizon of the Tellifer family, with no member of which did she ever after hold any kind of communication. She may have married her seducer who held some rank between Captain and stoker in the Royal Mail service. On the other hand, she may not. She may have had children, said Mrs. Tellifer. On the other hand, she may not.

Toby conversed with Jones. Mrs. Tellifer regarded them with the bent brows of one who suspects Black Magic. Ruth paused, a hand on the table, her great figure drawn up, and regarded them with some benignity. To the uninitiated onlooker—myself for instance—there was always something uncanny in the intimate Toby-Jones air language. I firmly believe that, had they been Scotsmen, they would have been able to carry on arguments about Predestination and Free Will. Anyhow, they could tell each other all sorts of things. They just sat opposite each other and waved their fingers about.

At last Toby interpreted. His father and mother had been married in the West of England; both were dead. His father, who had followed the sea, when he was a child; and his mother during his youth.

“But hasn’t he got anything to show for it?” asked Mrs. Tellifer.

Toby explained how Jones had fallen, wounded and half naked, into his trench, a hundred years ago. That was all he knew about him.

“Tea’s ready,” said Ruth.

She had put on the table two piles of bread and butter, one thickly cut, one cut daintily. Also a newly opened pot of damson jam.

“I’m sorry there are no cakes and things, sir,” she said with a half-smile.

Toby drew himself, and waved Jones, up to the table.

“But this is lovely. What more could anyone want?”

Mrs. Tellifer poured out the tea in farmhouse way.

“Perhaps Major Boyle doesn’t like milk and sugar, Mother,” said Ruth.

He smiled across at her. “I love both.” He was about to grab a slice of the thick bread and butter, when he caught her calm eyes. He took a thin slice.

“You’re spoiling me, Miss Tellifer.”

She flushed, and said in a low voice:

“I know the kind of tea you’re accustomed to.”

He laughed. “Still, you know, I’m quite hungry.”

He helped himself to the thin bread and butter cut in his honour, and to the damson jam which he declared to be delicious. Jones, pale, mute, yet obviously excited sphinx, ate with studied decorum.

During the meal Mrs. Tellifer gave a general review of family affairs. Her husband had been a market gardener in a fair way of business. He had died leaving her with a daughter, a tiny income, and this cottage and its acre of ground. Usually they had a girl, a distant cousin, to look after her, but she was away ill, and her daughter was taking her place.

“What does she do otherwise?” Toby asked with a smile.

“This is no life for her.”

It had seemed just the very life for her as she had stood, on his first sight of her, in the fresh open air, strong and calmly defiant, spade in hand.

“She’s just putting in time,” the mother continued. “And I don’t want her to go on much longer, as the work is spoiling her fingers.”

Toby glanced at the pile of dainty women’s underwear on the window table.

“I can quite understand,” said he.

A while later he took up the family album. Old photographs and costumes interested him, he said. Ruth cleared away the tea-things, aided simply and efficiently by Jones. She smiled her thanks at him, and Jones’s eyes grew bright.

Suddenly Toby drew from the album a large photograph cut from an illustrated weekly. He held it up with a laugh.

“What’s this doing here?”

“That,” said Ruth turning, “is the Countess of Duffield in Court dress.”

“I know,” said Toby. “I designed it.”

She regarded him perplexed.

“The dress came from ‘Palmyre.’”

“How do you know?”

“I was her ladyship’s maid for five years.”

“Oh,” said Toby. That explained the absence of many rusticities in the general demeanour of the potato digging girl. He laughed. “We’ve each found a guarantee of good faith, apart from Jones. I happen to be ‘Palmyre,’ and to have designed Lady Duffield’s Court dress.”

“Oh!” she said, in her turn; and then, with an air of calm friendliness, “you’re that Major Boyle, are you, sir?”

He nodded somewhat ruefully. “Yes. I’m that Major Boyle.”

“I’ve often heard her ladyship speak of you,” said Ruth.

“Just fancy, now!” exclaimed Mrs. Tellifer.

Toby told Jones of the little discovery. The man expressed his delight, and again Ruth smiled on him. He pointed to heaven, and with his finger sketched to Toby’s practised eye an obvious picture of the veiled Madonna, such as one meets with in any Roman Catholic church or book of devotion.

“My God!” said Toby to himself, “the fellow’s not far out.” But he fell to wondering where the devil he had seen a blue-eyed Madonna of a lady’s maid? He gave it up. It was time to go. He put in, perhaps unnecessarily, a plea for Jones, the waif and stray indubitable cousin. No matter how unskilled they were in sign language, his swift intelligence would soon make communication easy. He was such a good fellow.

Silently and almost imperceptibly Jones had washed up the tea-things, hung the cups on the dresser nails, and tidied up the kitchen grate.

“Will you tell him, sir,” said Mrs. Tellifer, “that he’ll be welcome whenever he likes to come?”

“And you, Miss Tellifer,” said Toby, “perhaps you might give him an hour or two of healthy digging.”

She laughed outright for the first time; for Toby could put now and then a humorous twist on his brown face.

“It would be a godsend, sir.”

“Then all’s well,” said Toby cheerily. “Good-bye. And a thousand thanks for your great kindness and hospitality.”

The women went out to the gate to see them off. They drove away.

Toby told me about all this a day or two later.

“It’s only an unlucky devil like Jones who would be in this position. He has established himself as a cousin of Ruth Tellifer, and neither she nor her mother have any idea of his name.”

“Striking girl, this Ruth Tellifer, you say,” I remarked.

Toby waved an impatient hand.

“I’ve told you about her. How she has carried on in the middle of all this female cat vanity which I’ve got to do with—I know I’m prejudiced, but that’s the side of ’em I’m up against all the time—and the Duffield woman is just hell’s delight in the shop—the worst type—how the girl moulds herself to it is beyond my comprehension.”

“Your ignorance of woman, my dear Toby,” said I, with an air of venerable wisdom, “is colossal.”

“Thank the good and merciful God!” said Toby, pulling out his pipe.