Uncle Fred in the Springtime Read online

  ‘If you have no objection.’

  ‘You have not come to consult me in my professional capacity, I trust? We have not been suffering from delusions, have we?’

  ‘I never suffer from delusions.’

  ‘No, I should imagine not. Well, come on in. Push off, Basil.’

  ‘He can remain,’ said Baxter sombrely. ‘What I have to say will interest him also.’

  It seemed to Pongo, as he withdrew into the farthest corner of the room and ran a finger round the inside of his collar, that if ever he had heard the voice of doom speak, he had heard it then. To him there was something so menacing in the secretary’s manner that he marvelled at his uncle’s lack of emotion. Lord Ickenham, having scattered the red and spot balls carelessly about the table, was now preparing to execute a tricky shot.

  ‘Lovely evening,’ he said.

  ‘Very. You had a pleasant walk, I hope?’

  ‘That is understating it. Ecstatic,’ said Lord Ickenham, making a dexterous cannon, ‘would be a better word. What with the pure air, the majestic scenery, the old gypsy feeling of tramping along the high road and the Duke’s conversation, I don’t know when I have enjoyed a walk more. By the way, the Duke was telling me that there had been a little friction on your arrival. He said he had handed you the two weeks’ notice because Horace Davenport told him that he had seen you at a Ball in London.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Everything satisfactory now, I hope?’

  ‘Quite. He discovered that he had been misinformed, and apologized. I am continuing in his employment.’

  ‘I’m glad. You wouldn’t want to lose a job like that. A man can stick on a lot of side about being secretary to a Duke. Practically as good as being a Duke himself. I am afraid Basil here has no such excuse for spiritual uplift. Just an ordinary secretary — Basil.’

  ‘A very peculiar one, I should have said.’

  ‘Peculiar? In what respect? In the words of the bridegroom of Antigua, is it manners you mean or do you refer to his figuah?’

  ‘He seems ignorant of the very rudiments of his work.’

  ‘Yes, I fear poor Basil would strike a man like you as something of an amateur. He has not had your wide experience. You were Lord Emsworth’s secretary once, were you not?’

  ‘I was.’

  A flush deepened the swarthiness of Rupert Baxter’s cheek. He had been Lord Emsworth’s secretary several times, and on each occasion his employer, aided by the breaks, had succeeded in throwing him out. He did not care to be reminded of these flaws in a successful career.

  ‘And before that?’

  ‘I was with Sir Ralph Dillingworth, a Yorkshire baronet.’

  ‘Yours has been a very steady rise in the social scale,’ said Lord Ickenham admiringly. ‘Starting at the bottom with a humble baronet — slumming, you might almost call it — you go on to an earl and then to a duke. It does you credit.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Not at all. I think I’ve heard of Dillingworth. Odd sort of fellow, isn’t he?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘There was some story about him shooting mice in the drawing-room with an elephant gun.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Painful for the family. For the mice, too, of course.’

  ‘Most.’

  ‘They should have called me in.’

  ‘They did.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘I say they did.’ ‘I don’t remember it.’ ‘I am not surprised.’

  Rupert Baxter was sitting back in his chair, tapping the tips of his fingers together. It seemed to Pongo, watching him pallidly from afar, that if he had had a different-shaped face and had not worn spectacles he would have looked like Sherlock Holmes.

  ‘It was unfortunate for you that I should have met the real Sir Roderick. When I saw him on the train, he had forgotten me, of course, but I knew him immediately. He has altered very little!’

  Lord Ickenham raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Are you insinuating that I am not Sir Roderick Glossop?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I see. You accuse me of assuming another man’s identity, do you, of abusing Lady Constance’s hospitality by entering her house under false pretences? You deliberately assert that I am a fraud and an impostor?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And how right you are, my dear fellow!’ said Lord Ickenham. ‘How right you are.’ Rupert Baxter continued to tap his fingertips together and to project through his spectacles as stern a glare as they had ever been called upon to filter, but he was conscious as he did so of a certain sense of flatness. Unmasked Guilt, in his opinion, should have taken it rather bigger than this man before him appeared to be doing. Lord Ickenham was now peering at himself in the mirror and fiddling with his moustache. He may have been feeling as if the bottom of his world had dropped out, but he did not look it.

  ‘I don’t know who you are —’

  ‘Call me Uncle Fred.’

  ‘I will not call you Uncle Fred!’ said Rupert Baxter violently.

  He restored his composure with a glance at Pongo. There, he felt, was Unmasked Guilt looking as Unmasked Guilt should look.

  ‘Well, there you are,’ he resumed, becoming calmer. ‘The risk you run, when you impersonate another man, is that you are apt to come up against somebody to whom his appearance is familiar.’

  ‘Trite, but true. Do you like me with my moustache like that? Or like this?’

  Rupert Baxter’s impatient gesture seemed to say that he was Nemesis, not a judge in a male beauty contest.

  ‘Perhaps it would interest you now,’ he said, ‘to hear about the local train service.’

  ‘Is there a milk train?’ asked Pongo, speaking for the first time.

  ‘I expect so,’ said Baxter, giving him a cold look, ‘but probably you would prefer to take the eight-twenty in the morning.’

  Lord Ickenham seemed puzzled.

  ‘You speak as if you were under the impression that we were leaving.’

  ‘That is my impression.’

  ‘You are not going to respect our little secret, then?’

  ‘I intend to expose you immediately.’

  ‘Even if I assure you that we did not come here after the spoons, but rather to do two loving hearts a bit of good?’

  ‘Your motives do not interest me.’

  Lord Ickenham gave his moustache a thoughtful twirl.

  ‘I see. You are a hard man, Baxter.’

  ‘I do my duty.’

  ‘Not always, surely? How about the toot in London?’

  ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘So you won’t talk? Still, you know you went to that Ball at the Albert Hall. Horace Davenport saw you there.’

  ‘Horace! ‘.

  ‘Yes, I admit that at the moment what Horace says is not evidence. But why is it not evidence, Baxter? Simply because the Duke, after seeing him make what appeared to be two bad shots at identifying people this evening, assumes that he must also have been mistaken in thinking that he saw you at the Ball. He supposes that his young relative is suffering from hallucinations. But if you denounce me, my daughter and nephew will testify that they really are the persons he supposed them to be, and it will become clear to the Duke that Horace is not suffering from hallucinations and that when he says he saw you at the Ball he did see you at the Ball. Then where will you be?’

  He paused, and in the background Pongo revived like a watered flower. During this admirably lucid exposition of the state of affairs, there had come into his eyes a look of worshipping admiration which was not always there when he gazed at his uncle.

  ‘At-a-boy!’ he said reverently. ‘It’s a dead stymie.’

  ‘I think so.’

  Rupert Baxter’s was one of those strong, square jaws which do not readily fall, but it had undeniably wavered, as if its steely muscles were about to relax. And though he hitched it up, there was dismay in the eyes behind the spectacles.

  ‘It doesn’t follow at all!’
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  ‘Baxter, it must follow as the night the day.’

  ‘I shall deny —’

  ‘What’s the use? I have not known the Duke long, but I have known him long enough to be able to recognize him as one of those sturdy, tenacious souls, the backbone of England, who when they have once got an idea into their fat heads are not to be induced to relinquish it by any denials. No, if you do not wish to imperil the cordial relations existing between your employer and yourself, I would reflect, Baxter.’

  ‘Definitely,’ said Pongo.

  ‘I would consider.’

  ‘Like billy-o.’

  ‘If you do, you will perceive that we stand or fall together. You cannot unmask us without unmasking yourself. But whereas we, unmasked, merely suffer the passing embarrassment of being thrown out by strong-armed domestics, you lose that splendid post of yours and have to go back to mixing with baronets. And how do you know,’ said Lord Ickenham, ‘that next time it would even be a baronet? It might be some bounder of a knight.’

  He placed a kindly hand on the secretary’s arm, and led him to the door.

  ‘I really think, my dear fellow,’ he said, ‘that we had better pursue a mutual policy of Live and Let Live. Let our motto be that of the great Roi Pausole — Ne nuis pas á ton voisin. It is the only way to get comfortably through life.’

  He closed the door. Pongo drew a deep breath.

  ‘Uncle Fred,’ he said, ‘there have been times, I don’t mind admitting, when I have viewed you with concern —’You mean that afternoon down at Valley Fields?’ ‘I was thinking more of our day at the Dog Races.’ ‘Ah, yes. We did slip up a little there.’ ‘But this time you have saved my life.’ ‘My dear boy, you embarrass me. A mere nothing. It is always my aim to try to spread sweetness and light.’

  ‘I should describe that bird as baffled, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Baffled as few secretaries have ever been, I think. We can look upon him, I fancy, as a spent force. And now, my boy, if you will excuse me, I must leave you. I promised the Duke to drop in on him for a chat round about ten o’clock.’

  12

  In supposing that their heart-to-heart talk would cause Rupert Baxter to abandon his intention of making a public exposure of his machinations, Lord Ickenham had been correct. In his assumption that he had rendered the man behind the steel-rimmed spectacles a spent force, however, he had erred. Baxter’s hat was still in the ring. At Blandings Castle he had a staunch ally in whom he could always confide, and it was to her boudoir that he made his way within five minutes of leaving the billiard-room.

  ‘Could I speak to you for a moment, Lady Constance?’

  ‘Certainly, Mr Baxter.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the secretary, and took a seat.

  He had found Lady Constance in a mood of serene contentment. In the drawing-room over the coffee she had had an extended interview with that eminent brain-specialist, Sir Roderick Glossop, and his views regarding the Duke, she was pleased to find, were in complete accord with her own. He endorsed her opinion that steps must be taken immediately, but assured her that only the simplest form of treatment was required to render His Grace a man who, if you put an egg into his hand, would not know what to do with it.

  And she had been running over in her mind a few of his most soothing pronouncements and thinking what a delightful man he was, when in came Baxter. And within a minute, for he was never a man to beat about the bush and break things gently, he had wrecked her peace of mind as thoroughly as if it had been a sitting-room and he her old friend with a whippy-shafted poker in his hand.

  ‘Mr Baxter!’ she cried.

  From anyone else she would have received the extraordinary statement which he had just made with raised eyebrows and a shrivelling stare. But her faith in this man was the faith of a little child. The strength of his personality, though she had a strong personality herself, had always dominated her completely.

  ‘Mr BAX-ter!’

  The secretary had anticipated some such reaction on her part. This spasm of emotion was what is known in the motion-picture world as ‘the quick take ‘um’, and in the circumstances he supposed that it was inevitable. He waited in stern silence for it to expend itself.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  A flash of steel-rimmed spectacles told her that Rupert Baxter was not a man who made statements without being sure.

  ‘He admitted it to me personally.’

  ‘But he is such a charming man.’

  ‘Naturally. Charm is the chief stock-in-trade of persons of that type.’

  Lady Constance’s mind was beginning to adjust itself to the position of affairs. After all, she reflected, this was not the first time that impostors had insinuated themselves into Blandings Castle. Her nephew Ronald’s chorus-girl, to name one instance, had arrived in the guise of an American heiress. And there had been other cases. Indeed, she might have felt justified in moments of depression in yielding to the gloomy view that her visiting list consisted almost exclusively of impostors. There appeared to be something about Blandings Castle that attracted impostors as cat-nip attracts cats.

  ‘You say he admitted it?’

  ‘He had no alternative.’

  ‘Then I suppose he has left the house?’

  Something of embarrassment crept into Rupert Baxter’s manner. His spectacles seemed to flicker.

  ‘Well, no,’ he said.

  ‘No?’ cried Lady Constance, amazed. Impostors were tougher stuff than she had supposed.

  ‘A difficulty has arisen.

  It is never pleasant for a proud man to have to confess that scoundrels have got him in cleft sticks, and in Rupert Baxter’s manner as he told his tale there was nothing of relish. But painful though it was, he told it clearly.

  ‘To make anything in the nature of an overt move is impossible. It would result in my losing my post, and my post is all-important to me. It is my intention ultimately to become the Duke’s man of affairs, in charge of all his interests. I hope I can rely on you to do nothing that will jeopardize my career.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Lady Constance. Not for an instant did she contemplate the idea of hindering this man’s rise to the heights. Nevertheless, she chafed. ‘But is there nothing to be done? Are we to allow this person to remain and loot the house at his leisure?’

  On this point, Rupert Baxter felt that he was in a position to reassure her.

  ‘He is not here with any motive of robbery. He has come in the hope of trapping Horace Davenport into marriage with that girl.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘He virtually said as much. When I told him that I knew him to be an impostor, he said something flippant about not having come after the spoons but because he was trying to do what he described as “a bit of good to two loving hearts”. His meaning escaped me at the time, but I have now remembered something which had been hovering on the edge of my mind ever since I saw these people at Paddington. I had had one of those vague ideas one gets that I had seen this girl before somewhere. It has now come back to me. She was at that Ball with Horace Davenport. One sees the whole thing quite clearly. In London, presumably, she was unable to make him commit himself definitely, so she has followed him here in the hope of creating some situation which will compel him to marry her.’

  The fiendish cunning of the scheme appalled Lady Constance. ‘But what can we do?’

  ‘I myself, as I have explained, can do nothing. But surely a hint from you to the Duke that his nephew is in danger of being lured into a disastrous marriage —’But he does not know it is a disastrous marriage.’

  ‘You mean that he is under the impression that the girl is the daughter of Sir Roderick Glossop, the brain specialist? But even so. The Duke is a man acutely alive to the existence of class distinctions, and I think that as a wife for his nephew he would consider the daughter of a brain specialist hardly —’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Lady Constance, brightening. ‘I see what you mean. Yes, Alaric is and always has been a perfect sn
ob.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Baxter, glad to find his point taken. ‘I feel sure that it will not be difficult for you to influence him. Then I will leave the matter in your hands.’

  The initial emotion of Lady Constance, when she found herself alone, was relief, and for a while nothing came to weaken this relief. Rupert Baxter, as always, seemed in his efficient way to have put everything right and pointed out with masterly clearness the solution of the problem. There was, she felt, as she had so often felt, nobody like him.

  But gradually, now that this magnetic personality was no longer there to sway her mind, there began to steal over her a growing uneasiness. Specious though the theory was which he had put forward, that the current instalment of impostors at Blandings Castle had no designs on the castle’s many valuable contents but were bent simply on the task of getting Horace Davenport into a morning coat and sponge-bag trousers and leading him up the aisle, she found herself less and less able to credit it.

  To Lady Constance’s mind, impostors were not like that. Practical rather than romantic, as she saw it, they preferred jewellery to wedding bells. They might not actually disdain the ‘Voice That Breathed O’er Eden’, but in their scale of values it ran a very poor second to diamond necklaces.

  She rose from her chair in agitation. She felt. that something must be done, and done immediately. Even in her alarm, of course, she did not consider the idea of finding Rupert Baxter and trying to argue him out of his opinions. One did not argue with Rupert Baxter. What he said, he said, and you had to accept it. Her desire was to buttonhole some soothingly solid person who would listen to her and either allay her fears or suggest some way of staving off disaster. And it so happened that Blandings Castle housed at that moment perhaps the most solid person who had ever said ‘Yoicks’ to a foxhound.

  In the hope that he would also prove soothing, she hurried from the room in quest of her nephew, Lord Bosham.

  Rupert Baxter, meanwhile, feeling in need of fresh air after the mental strain to which he had been subjected, had left the house and was strolling under the stars. His wandering feet had taken him to that velvet lawn which lay outside the Garden Suite. There, pacing up and down, brow knitted and hands clasped behind back, he gave himself up to thought.