"Mrs. Spottsworth," announced Jeeves from the doorway, and a moment later Bill had done another of those leaps in the air which had become so frequent with him of late.
He stood staring pallidly at the vision that entered.
Mrs. Spottsworth had come sailing into the room with the confident air of a woman who knows that her hat is right, her dress is right, her shoes are right and her stockings are right and that she has a matter of forty-two million dollars tucked away in sound securities, and Bill, with a derelict country house for sale, should have found her an encouraging spectacle. For unquestionably she looked just the sort of person who would buy derelict English country houses by the gross without giving the things a second thought.
But his mind was not on business transactions.
It had flitted back a few years and was in the French Riviera, where he and this woman had met and—he could not disguise it from himself—become extremely matey.
It had all been perfectly innocent, of course—just a few moonlight drives, one or two mixed bathings and hob-nobbings at Eden Roc and the ordinary exchanges of civilities customary on the French Riviera—but it seemed to him that there was a grave danger of her introducing into their relations now that touch of Auld Lang Syne which is the last thing a young man wants when he has a fianc@ee around—and a fianc@ee, moreover, who has already given evidence of entertaining distressing suspicions.
Mrs. Spottsworth had come upon him as a complete and painful surprise. At Cannes he had got the impression that her name was Bessemer, but of course in places like Cannes you don't bother much about surnames. He had, he recalled, always addressed her as Rosie, and she —he shuddered—had addressed him as Billiken.
A clear, but unpleasant, picture rose before his eyes of Jill's face when she heard her addressing him as Billiken at dinner tonight. Most unfortunately, through some oversight, he had omitted to mention to Jill his Riviera acquaintance Mrs. Bessemer, and he could see that she might conceivably take a little explaining away.
"How nice to see you again, Rosalinda," said Monica. "So glad you found your way here all right. It's rather tricky after you leave the main road. My husband, Sir Roderick Carmoyle. And this is—"
"Billiken!" cried Mrs.
Spottsworth, with all the enthusiasm of a generous nature. It was plain that if the ecstasy occasioned by this unexpected encounter was a little one-sided, on her side at least it existed in full measure.
"Eh?" said Monica.
"Mr. Belfry and I are old friends. We knew each other in Cannes a few years ago, when I was Mrs. Bessemer."
"Bessemer!"
"It was not long after my husband had passed the veil owing to having a head-on collision with a truck full of beer bottles on the Jericho Turnpike. His name was Clifton Bessemer."
Monica shot a pleased and congratulatory look at Bill. She knew all about Mrs.
Bessemer of Cannes. She was aware that her brother had given this Mrs. Bessemer the rush of a lifetime, and what better foundation could a young man with a house to sell have on which to build.
"Well, that's fine," she said. "You'll have all sorts of things to talk about, won't you? But he isn't Mr. Belfry now, he's Lord Rowcester."
"Changed his name," explained Rory. "The police are after him, and an alias was essential."
"Oh, don't be an ass, Rory. He came into the title," said Monica. "You know how it is in England. You start out as something, and then someone dies and you do a switch. Our uncle, Lord Rowcester, pegged out not long ago, and Bill was his heir, so he shed the Belfry and took on the Rowcester."
"I see. Well, to me he will always be Billiken. How are you, Billiken?"
Bill found speech, though not much of it and what there was rather rasping.
"I'm fine, thanks—er—Rosie."
"Rosie?" said Rory, startled and, like the child of nature he was, making no attempt to conceal his surprise. "Did I hear you say Rosie?"
Bill gave him a cold look.
"Mrs. Spottsworth's name, as you have already learned from a usually well-informed source—viz.
Moke—is Rosalinda. All her friends—even casual acquaintances like myself—called her Rosie."
"Oh, ah," said Rory. "Quite, quite. Very natural, of course."
"Casual acquaintances?" said Mrs.
Spottsworth, pained.
Bill plucked at his tie.
"Well, I mean blokes who just knew you from meeting you at Cannes and so forth."
"Cannes!" cried Mrs. Spottsworth ecstatically. "Dear, sunny, gay, delightful Cannes! What times we had there, Billiken!
Do you remember—"
"Yes, yes," said Bill. "Very jolly, the whole thing. Won't you have a drink or a sandwich or a cigar or something?"
Fervently he blessed the Mainwarings' Peke for being so confirmed a hypochondriac that it had taken Jill away to the other side of the county. By the time she returned, Mrs. Spottsworth, he trusted, would have simmered down and become less expansive on the subject of the dear old days.
He addressed himself to the task of curbing her exuberance.
"Nice to welcome you to Rowcester Abbey," he said formally.
"Yes, I hope you'll like it," said Monica.
"It's the most wonderful place I ever saw!"
"Would you say that? Mouldering old ruin, I'd call it," said Rory judicially, and was fortunate enough not to catch his wife's eye, "Been decaying for centuries. I'll bet if you shook those curtains, a couple of bats would fly out."
"The patina of Time!" said Mrs.
Spottsworth. "I adore it." She closed her eyes. ""The dead, twelve deep, clutch at you as you go by"," she murmured.
"What a beastly idea," said Rory. "Even a couple of clutching corpses would be a bit over the odds, in my opinion."
Mrs. Spottsworth opened her eyes. She smiled.
"I'm going to tell you something very strange," she said. "It struck me so strongly when I came in at the front door I had to sit down for a moment. Your butler thought I was ill."
"You aren't, I hope?"
"No, not at all. It was simply that I was ... overcome. I realized that I had been here before."
Monica looked politely puzzled. It was left to Rory to supply the explanation.
"Oh, as a sightseer?" he said.
"One of the crowd that used to come on Fridays during the summer months to be shown over the place at a bob a head. I remember them well in the days when you and I were walking out, Moke. The Gogglers, we used to call them. They came in charabancs and dropped nut chocolate on the carpets. Not that dropping nut chocolate on them would make these carpets any worse. That's all been discontinued now, hasn't it, Bill?
Nothing left to goggle at, I suppose. The late Lord Rowcester," he explained to the visitor, "stuck the Americans with all his best stuff, and now there's not a thing in the place worth looking at. I was saying to my wife only a short while ago that by far the best policy in dealing with Rowcester Abbey would be to burn it down."
A faint moan escaped Monica. She raised her eyes heavenwards, as if pleading for a thunderbolt to strike this man. If this was her Roderick's idea of selling goods to a customer, it seemed a miracle that he had ever managed to get rid of a single hose-pipe, lawn-mower or bird-bath.
Mrs. Spottsworth shook her head with an indulgent smile.
"No, no, I didn't mean that I had been here in my present corporeal envelope. I meant in a previous incarnation. I'm a Rotationist, you know."
Rory nodded intelligently.
"Ah, yes. Elks, Shriners and all that.
I've seen pictures of them, in funny hats."