“This”, Lord Belpher was saying in a determined voice, “settles it. From now on Maud must not be allowed out of our sight.”
Lord Marshmoreton spoke.
“I rather wish”, he said regretfully, “I hadn’t spoken about the note. I only mentioned it because I thought you might think it amusing.”
“Amusing!” Lady Caroline’s voice shook the furniture.
“Amusing that the fellow should have handed me of all people a letter for Maud,” explained her brother. “I don’t want to get Maud into trouble.”
“You are criminally weak,” said Lady Caroline severely. “I really honestly believe that you were capable of giving the note to that poor, misguided girl, and saying nothing about it.” She flushed. “The insolence of the man, coming here and settling down at the very gates of the castle! If it was anybody but this man Platt who was giving him shelter I should insist on his being turned out. But that man Platt would be only too glad to know that he is causing us annoyance.”
“Quite!” said Lord Belpher.
“You must go to this man as soon as possible,” continued Lady Caroline, fixing her brother with a commanding stare, “and do your best to make him see how abominable his behaviour is.”
“Oh, I couldn’t!” pleaded the earl. “I don’t know the fellow. He’d throw me out.”
“Nonsense. Go at the very earliest opportunity.”
“Oh, all right, all right, all right. Well, I think I’ll be slipping out to the rose garden again now. There’s a clear hour before dinner.”
There was a tap at the door. Alice Faraday entered bearing papers, a smile of sweet helpfulness on her pretty face.
“I hoped I should find you here, Lord Marshmoreton. You promised to go over these notes with me, the ones about the Essex branch—”
The hunted peer looked as if he were about to dive through the window.
“Some other time, some other time. I—I have important matters—”
“Oh, if you’re busy—”
“Of course, Lord Marshmoreton will be delighted to work on your notes, Miss Faraday,” said Lady Caroline crisply. “Take this chair. We are just going.”
Lord Marshmoreton gave one wistful glance through the open window. Then he sat down with a sigh, and felt for his reading-glasses.
Chapter 10
Your true golfer is a man who, knowing that life is short and perfection hard to attain, neglects no opportunity of practising his chosen sport, allowing neither wind nor weather nor any external influence to keep him from it. There is a story, with an excellent moral lesson, of a golfer whose wife had determined to leave him for ever. “Will nothing alter your decision?” he says. “Will nothing induce you to stay? Well, then, while you’re packing, I think I’ll go out on the lawn and rub up my putting a bit.” George Bevan was of this turn of mind. He might be in love; romance might have sealed him for her own; but that was no reason for blinding himself to the fact that his long game was bound to suffer if he neglected to keep himself up to the mark. His first act on arriving at Belpher village had been to ascertain whether there was a links in the neighbourhood; and thither, on the morning after his visit to the castle and the delivery of the two notes, he repaired.
At the hour of the day which he had selected the club-house was empty, and he had just resigned himself to a solitary game, when, with a whirr and a rattle, a grey racing-car drove up, and from it emerged the same long young man whom, a couple of days earlier, he had seen wriggle out from underneath the same machine. It was Reggie Byng’s habit also not to allow anything, even love, to interfere with golf; and not even the prospect of hanging about the castle grounds in the hope of catching a glimpse of Alice Faraday and exchanging timorous words with her had been enough to keep him from the links.
Reggie surveyed George with a friendly eye. He had a dim recollection of having seen him before somewhere at some time or other, and Reggie had the pleasing disposition which caused him to rank anybody whom he had seen somewhere at some time or other as a bosom friend.
“Hullo! Hullo! Hullo!” he observed.
“Good morning,” said George.
“Waiting for somebody?”
“No.”
“How about it, then? Shall we stagger forth?”
“Delighted.”
George found himself speculating upon Reggie. He was unable to place him. That he was a friend of Maud he knew, and guessed that he was also a resident of the castle. He would have liked to question Reggie, to probe him, to collect from him inside information as to the progress of events within the castle walls; but it is a peculiarity of golf, as of love, that it temporarily changes the natures of its victims; and Reggie, a confirmed babbler off the links, became while in action a stern, silent, intent person, his whole being centred on the game. With the exception of a casual remark of a technical nature when he met George on the various tees, and an occasional expletive when things went wrong with his ball, he eschewed conversation. It was not till the end of the round that he became himself again.
“If I’d known you were such hot stuff,” he declared generously, as George holed his eighteenth putt from a distance of ten feet, “I’d have got you to give me a stroke or two.”
“I was on my game today,” said George modestly. “Some times I slice as if I were cutting bread and can’t putt to hit a haystack.”
“Let me know when one of those times comes along, and I’ll take you on again. I don’t know when I’ve seen anything fruitier than the way you got out of the bunker at the fifteenth. It reminded me of a match I saw between—” Reggie became technical. At the end of his observations he climbed into the grey car.
“Can I drop you anywhere?”
“Thanks,” said George. “If it’s not taking you out your way.”
“I’m staying at Belpher Castle.”
“I live quite near there. Perhaps you’d care to come in and have a drink on your way?”
“A ripe scheme,” agreed Reggie
Ten minutes in the grey car ate up the distance between the links and George’s cottage. Reggie Byng passed these minutes, in the intervals of eluding carts and foiling the apparently suicidal intentions of some stray fowls, in jerky conversation on the subject of his iron-shots, with which he expressed a deep satisfaction.
“Topping little place! Absolutely!” was the verdict he pronounced on the exterior of the cottage as he followed George in. “I’ve often thought it would be a rather sound scheme to settle down in this sort of shanty and keep chickens and grow a honey coloured beard, and have soup and jelly brought to you by the vicar’s wife and so forth. Nothing to worry you then. Do you live all alone here?”
George was busy squirting seltzer into his guest’s glass.
“Yes. Mrs. Platt comes in and cooks for me. The farmer’s wife next door.”
An exclamation from the other caused him to look up. Reggie Byng was staring at him, wide-eyed.
“Great Scott! Mrs. Platt! Then you’re the Chappie?”
George found himself unequal to the intellectual pressure of the conversation.
“The Chappie?”
“The Chappie there’s all the row about. The mater was telling me only this morning that you lived here.”
“Is there a row about me?”
“Is there what!” Reggie’s manner became solicitous. “I say, my dear old sportsman, I don’t want to be the bearer of bad tidings and what not, if you know what I mean, but didn’t you know there was a certain amount of angry passion rising and so forth because of you? At the castle, I mean. I don’t want to seem to be discussing your private affairs, and all that sort of thing, but what I mean is… Well, you don’t expect you can come charging in the way you have without touching the family on the raw a bit. The daughter of the house falls in love with you; the son of the house languishes in chokey because he has a row with you in Piccadilly; and on top of all that you come here and camp out at the castle gates! Naturally the family are a bit peeved. Only natural, eh? I mean to say, what?”