mean is,” said Mrs. Riversedge, “that when I get maids with unsuitable names I call them Jane; they soon get used to it.”
“An excellent plan,” said the aunt of Clovis coldly; “unfortunately I have got used to being called Jane myself. It happens to be my name.”
She cut short Mrs. Riversedge’s flood of apologies by abruptly remarking:
“The question is not whether I’m to call my maid Florinda, but whether Mr. Brope is to be permitted to call her Florrie. I am strongly of opinion than he shall not.”
“He may have been repeating the words of some song,” said Mrs. Riversedge hopefully; “there are lots of those sorts of silly refrains with girls’ names,” she continued, turning to Clovis as a possible authority on the subject. “‘You mustn’t call me Mary—’”
“I shouldn’t think of doing so,” Clovis assured her; “in the first place, I’ve always understood that your name was Henrietta; and then I hardly know you well enough to take such a liberty.”
“I mean there’s a song with that refrain,” hurriedly explained Mrs. Riversedge, “and there’s ‘Rhoda, Rhoda kept a pagoda,’ and ‘Maisie is a daisy,’ and heaps of others. Certainly it doesn’t sound like Mr. Brope to be singing such songs, but I think we ought to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
“I had already done so,” said Mrs. Troyle, “until further evidence came my way.”
She shut her lips with the resolute finality of one who enjoys the blessed certainty of being implored to open them again.
“Further evidence!” exclaimed her hostess; “do tell me!”
“As I was coming upstairs after breakfast Mr. Brope was just passing my room. In the most natural way in the world a piece of paper dropped out of a packet that he held in his hand and fluttered to the ground just at my door. I was going to call out to him ‘You’ve dropped something,’ and then for some reason I held back and didn’t show myself till he was safely in his room. You see it occurred to me that I was very seldom in my room just at that hour, and that Florinda was almost always there tidying up things about that time. So I picked up that innocent-looking piece of paper.”
Mrs. Troyle paused again, with the self-applauding air of one who has detected an asp lurking in an apple-charlotte.
Mrs. Riversedge snipped vigorously at the nearest rose bush, incidentally decapitating a Viscountess Folkestone that was just coming into bloom.
“What was on the paper?” she asked.
“Just the words in pencil, ‘I love you, Florrie,’ and then underneath, crossed out with a faint line, but perfectly plain to read, ‘Meet me in the garden by the yew.’”
“There is a yew tree at the bottom of the garden,” admitted Mrs. Riversedge.
“At any rate he appears to be truthful,” commented Clovis.
“To think that a scandal of this sort should be going on under my roof!” said Mrs. Riversedge indignantly.
“I wonder why it is that scandal seems so much worse under a roof,” observed Clovis; “I’ve always regarded it as a proof of the superior delicacy of the cat tribe that it conducts most of its scandals above the slates.”
“Now I come to think of it,” resumed Mrs. Riversedge, “there are things about Mr. Brope that I’ve never been able to account for. His income, for instance: he only gets two hundred a year as editor of the Cathedral Monthly, and I know that his people are quite poor, and he hasn’t any private means. Yet he manages to afford a flat somewhere in Westminster, and he goes abroad to Bruges and those sorts of places every year, and always dresses well, and gives quite nice luncheon-parties in the season. You can’t do all that on two hundred a year, can you?”
“Does he write for any other papers?” queried Mrs. Troyle.
“No, you see he specializes so entirely on liturgy and ecclesiastical architecture that his field is rather restricted. He once tried the Sporting and Dramatic with an article on church edifices in famous fox-hunting centres, but it wasn’t considered of sufficient general interest to be accepted. No, I don’t see how he can support himself in his present style merely by what he writes.”
“Perhaps he sells spurious transepts to American enthusiasts,” suggested Clovis.
“How could you sell a transept?” said Mrs. Riversedge; “such a thing would be impossible.”
“Whatever he may do to eke out his income,” interrupted Mrs. Troyle, “he is certainly not going to fill in his leisure moments by making love to my maid.”
“Of course not,” agreed her hostess; “that must be put a stop to at once. But I don’t quite know what we ought to do.”
“You might put a barbed wire entanglement round the yew tree as a precautionary measure,” said Clovis.
“I don’t think that the disagreeable situation that has arisen is improved by flippancy,” said Mrs. Riversedge; “a good maid is a treasure—”
“I am sure I don’t know what I should do without Florinda,” admitted Mrs. Troyle; “she understands my hair. I’ve long ago given up trying to do anything with it myself. I regard one’s hair as I regard husbands: as long as one is seen together in public one’s private divergences don’t matter. Surely that was the luncheon gong.”
Septimus Brope and Clovis had the smoking-room to themselves after lunch. The former seemed restless and preoccupied, the latter quietly observant.
“What is a lorry?” asked Septimus suddenly; “I don’t mean the thing on wheels, of course I know what that is, but isn’t there a bird with a name like that, the larger form of a lorikeet?”
“I fancy it’s a lory, with one ‘r,’” said Clovis lazily, “in which case it’s no good to you.”
Septimus Brope stared in some astonishment.
“How do you mean, no good to me?” he asked, with more than a trace of uneasiness in his voice.
“Won’t rhyme with Florrie,” explained Clovis briefly.
Septimus sat upright in his chair, with unmistakable alarm on his face.
“How did you find out? I mean how did you know I was trying to get a rhyme to Florrie?” he asked sharply.
“I didn’t know,” said Clovis, “I only guessed. When you wanted to turn the prosaic lorry of commerce into a feathered poem flitting through the verdure of a tropical forest, I knew you must be working up a sonnet, and Florrie was the only female name that suggested itself as rhyming with lorry.”
Septimus still looked uneasy.
“I believe you know more,” he said.
Clovis laughed quietly, but said nothing.
“How much do you know?” Septimus asked desperately.
“The yew tree in the garden,” said Clovis.
“There!
