His last words had left Mrs. Spottsworth fogged.
"Chasing a foe of the human species?" she queried.
"A blighter of a bookie. A cad of the lowest order with a soul as black as his finger-nails.
I've been after him for hours. And I'd have caught him," said the captain, moodily sipping beer, "if something hadn't gone wrong with my bally car. They're fixing it now at that garage down the road."
"But why were you chasing this bookmaker?" asked Mrs. Spottsworth. It seemed to her a frivolous way for a strong man to be passing his time.
Captain Biggar's face darkened. Her question had touched an exposed nerve.
"The low hound did the dirty on me. Seemed straight enough, too. Chap with a walrus moustache and a patch over his left eye. Honest Patch Perkins, he called himself. "Back your fancy and fear nothing, my noble sportsman," he said.
"If you don't speculate, you can't accumulate," he said. "Walk up, walk up. Roll, bowl or pitch. Ladies half-way and no bad nuts returned," he said. So I put my double on with him."
"Your double?"
"A double, dear lady, is when you back a horse in one race and if it wins, put the proceeds on another horse in another race."
"Oh, what we call a parlay in America."
"Well, you can readily see that if both bounders pull it off, you pouch a princely sum.
I've got in with a pretty knowledgeable crowd since I came to London, and they recommended as a good double for today Lucy Glitters and Whistler's Mother."
The name struck a chord.
"The waiter was telling me that Whistler's Mother won."
"So did Lucy Glitters in the previous race. I had a fiver on her at a hundred to six and all to come on Whistler's Mother for the Oaks. She ambled past the winning post at—"
"Thirty-three to one, the waiter was saying.
My goodness! You certainly cleaned up, didn't you!"
Captain Biggar finished his beer. If it is possible to drink beer like an overwrought soul, he did so.
"I certainly ought to have cleaned up," he said, with a heavy frown. "There was the colossal sum of three thousand pounds two shillings and sixpence owing to me, plus my original fiver which I had handed to the fellow's clerk, a chap in a check suit and another walrus moustache. And what happened? This inky-hearted bookie welshed on me. He legged it in his car with me after him. I've been pursuing him, winding and twisting through the country roads, for what seems an eternity. And just as I was on the point of grappling with him, my car broke down.
But I'll have the scoundrel! I'll catch the louse! And when I do, I propose to scoop out his insides with my bare hands and twist his head off and make him swallow it. After which—"
Captain Biggar broke off. It had suddenly come to him that he was monopolizing the conversation. After all, of what interest could these daydreams of his be to this woman?
"But let's not talk about me any more," he said. "Dull subject. How have you been all these years, dear lady? Pretty fit, I hope? You look right in the pink. And how's your husband? Oh, sorry!"
"Not at all. You mean, have I married again?
No, I have not married again, though Clifton and Alexis keep advising me to. They are sweet about it. So broad-minded and considerate."
"Clifton? Alexis?"
"Mr. Bessemer and Mr. Spottsworth, my two previous husbands. I get them on the ouija board from time to time. I suppose," said Mrs. Spottsworth, laughing a little self-consciously, "you think it's odd of me to believe in things like the ouija board?"
"Odd?"
"So many of my friends in America call all that sort of thing poppycock."
Captain Biggar snorted militantly.
"I'd like to be there to talk to them! I'd astonish their weak intellects. No, dear lady, I've seen too many strange things in my time, living as I have done in the shadow-lands of mystery, to think anything odd. I have seen barefooted pilgrims treading the path of Ahura-Mazda over burning coals. I've seen ropes tossed in the air and small boys shinning up them in swarms. I've met fakirs who slept on beds of spikes."
"Really?"
"I assure you. And think of it, insomnia practically unknown. So you don't catch me laughing at people because they believe in ouija boards."
Mrs. Spottsworth gazed at him tenderly.
She was thinking how sympathetic and understanding he was.
"I am intensely interested in psychical research. I am proud to be one of the little band of devoted seekers who are striving to pierce the veil. I am hoping to be vouchsafed some enthralling spiritual manifestation at this Rowcester Abbey where I'm going. It is one of the oldest houses in England, they tell me."
"Then you ought to flush a spectre or two," agreed Captain Biggar. "They collect in gangs in these old English country houses. How about another gin and tonic?"
"No, I must be getting along. Pomona's in the car, and she hates being left alone."
"You couldn't stay and have one more quick one?"
"I fear not. I must be on my way.
I can't tell you how delightful it has been, meeting you again, Captain."
"Just made my day, meeting you, dear lady," said Captain Biggar, speaking hoarsely, for he was deeply moved. They were out in the open now, and he was able to get a clearer view of her as she stood beside her car bathed in the sunset glow. How lovely she was, he felt, how wonderful, how ... Come, come, Biggar, he said to himself gruffly, this won't do, old chap. Play the game, Biggar, play the game, old boy!
"Won't you come and see me when I get back to London, Captain? I shall be at the Savoy."
"Charmed, dear lady, charmed," said Captain Biggar. But he did not mean it.
For what would be the use? What would it profit him to renew their acquaintance? Just twisting the knife in the wound, that's what he would be doing.
Better, far better, to bite the bullet and wash the whole thing out here and now. A humble hunter with scarcely a bob to his name couldn't go mixing with wealthy widows. It was the kind of thing he had so often heard Tubby Frobisher and the Subahdar denouncing in the old Anglo-Malay Club at Kuala Lumpur. "Chap's nothing but a bally fortune-hunter, old boy," they would say, discussing over the gin pahits some acquaintance who had made a rich marriage. "Simply a blighted gigolo, old boy, nothing more. Can't do that sort of thing, old chap, what? Not cricket, old boy."
And they were right. It couldn't be done. Damn it all, a feller had his code. "Meh nee pan kong bahn rotfai" about summed it up.
Stiffening his upper lip, Captain Biggar went down the road to see how his car was getting on.
Rowcester Abbey—pronounced Roaster—was about ten miles from the Goose and Gherkin. It stood—such portions of it as had not fallen down— just beyond Southmolton in the midst of smiling country. Though if you had asked William Egerton Bamfylde Ossingham Belfry, ninth Earl of Rowcester, its proprietor, what the English countryside had to smile about these days, he would have been unable to tell you. Its architecture was thirteenth century, fifteenth century and Tudor, its dilapidation twentieth century post-World War Two.
To reach the Abbey you turned off the main road and approached by a mile-long drive thickly incrusted with picturesque weeds and made your way up stone steps, chipped in spots, to a massive front door which badly needed a lick of paint. And this was what Bill Rowcester's sister Monica and her husband, Sir Roderick ("Rory") Carmoyle, had done at just about the hour when Mrs. Spottsworth and Captain Biggar were starting to pick up the threads at their recent reunion.
Monica, usually addressed as Moke, was small and vivacious, her husband large and stolid. There was something about his aspect and deportment that suggested a more than ordinarily placid buffalo chewing a cud and taking in its surroundings very slowly and methodically, refusing to be hurried. It was thus that, as they stood on the front steps, he took in Rowcester Abbey.