Your lordship will admit that it is really quite simple."
"I suppose it is."
"I am sure that after this try-out the performing fleas to which your lordship alluded a moment ago will have substantially modified their activities."
"They've slowed up a bit, yes. But I'm still nervous."
"Inevitable on the eve of an opening performance, m'lord. I think your lordship should be starting as soon as possible. If 'twere done, then 'twere well 'twere done quickly. Our arrangements have been made with a view to a garden set, and it would be disconcerting were Mrs. Spottsworth to return to the house, compelling your lordship to adapt your technique to an interior."
Bill nodded.
"I see what you mean. Right ho, Jeeves.
Good-bye."
"Good-bye, m'lord."
"If anything goes wrong—"
"Nothing will go wrong, m'lord."
"But if it does ... You'll write to me in Dartmoor occasionally, Jeeves? Just a chatty letter from time to time, giving me the latest news from the outer world?"
"Certainly, m'lord."
"It'll cheer me up as I crack my daily rock. They tell me conditions are much better in these modern prisons than they used to be in the old days."
"So I understand, m'lord."
"I might find Dartmoor a regular home from home. Solid comfort, I mean to say."
"Quite conceivably, m'lord."
"Still, we'll hope it won't come to that."
"Yes, m'lord."
"Yes ... Well, good-bye once again, Jeeves."
"Good-bye, m'lord."
Bill squared his shoulders and strode out, a gallant figure. He had summoned the pride of the Rowcesters to his aid, and it buoyed him up. With just this quiet courage had a Rowcester of the seventeenth century mounted the scaffold at Tower Hill, nodding affably to the headsman and waving to friends and relations in the audience. When the test comes, blood will tell.
He had been gone a few moments, when Jill came in.
It seemed to Jeeves that in the course of the past few hours the young master's betrothed had lost a good deal of the animation which rendered her as a rule so attractive, and he was right. Her recent interview with Captain Biggar had left Jill pensive and inclined to lower the corners of the mouth and stare mournfully. She was staring mournfully now.
"Have you seen Lord Rowcester, Jeeves?"
"His lordship has just stepped into the garden, miss."
"Where are the others?"
"Sir Roderick and her ladyship are still in the library, miss."
"And Mrs. Spottsworth?"
"She stepped into the garden shortly before his lordship."
Jill stiffened.
"Oh?" she said, and went into the library to join Monica and Rory. The corners of her mouth were drooping more than ever, and her stare had increased in mournfulness some twenty per cent. She looked like a girl who is thinking the worst, and that was precisely the sort of girl she was.
Two minutes later, Captain Biggar came bustling in with a song on his lips. Yoga and communion with the Jivatma or soul seemed to have done him good. His eyes were bright and his manner alert. It is when the time for action has come that you always catch these White Hunters at their best.
"Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar, where are you now, where are you now?" sang Captain Biggar. "I ... how does the dashed thing go ...
I sink beneath your spell. La, la, la ...
La, la, la, la. Where are you now? Where are you now? For they're hanging Danny Deever in the morning," he carolled, changing the subject.
He saw Jeeves, and suspended the painful performance.
"Hullo," he said. "Quai hai, my man. How are things?"
"Things are in a reasonably satisfactory state, sir."
"Where's Patch Rowcester?"
"His lordship is in the garden, sir."
"With Mrs. Spottsworth?"
"Yes, sir. Putting his fate to the test, to win or lose it all."
"You thought of something, then?"
"Yes, sir. The spider sequence."
"The how much?"
Captain Biggar listened attentively as Jeeves outlined the spider sequence, and when he had finished paid him a stately compliment.
"You'd do well out East, my boy."
"It is extremely kind of you to say so, sir."
"That is to say if that scheme was your own."
"It was, sir."
"Then you'd be just the sort of fellow we want in Kuala Lumpur. We need chaps like you, chaps who can use their brains. Can't leave brains all to the Dyaks. Makes the blighters get above themselves."
"The Dyaks are exceptionally intelligent, sir?"
"Are they! Let me tell you of something that happened to Tubby Frobisher and me one day when we—" He broke off, and the world was deprived of another excellent story. Bill was coming through the French window.
A striking change had taken place in the ninth Earl in the few minutes since he had gone out through that window, a young man of spirit setting forth on a high adventure. His shoulders, as we have indicated, had then been square. Now they sagged like those of one who bears a heavy weight. His eyes were dull, his brow furrowed. The pride of the Rowcesters appeared to have packed up and withdrawn its support. No longer was there in his bearing any suggestion of that seventeenth-century ancestor who had infused so much of the party spirit into his decapitation on Tower Hill. The ancestor he most closely resembled now was the one who was caught cheating at cards by Charles James Fox at Wattier's in 1782.
"Well?" cried Captain Biggar.
Bill gave him a long, silent mournful look, and turned to Jeeves.
"Jeeves!"
"M'lord?"
"That spider sequence."
"Yes, m'lord?"
"I tried it."
"Yes, m'lord?"
"And things looked good for a moment. I detached the pendant."
"Yes, m'lord?"
"Captain Biggar was right. The clasp was loose. It came off."
Captain Biggar uttered a pleased exclamation in Swahili.
"Gimme," he said.
"I haven't got it. It slipped out of my hand."
"And fell?"
"And fell."
"You mean it's lying in the grass?"
"No," said Bill, with a sombre shake of the head. "It isn't lying in any ruddy grass.
It went down the front of Mrs.
Spottsworth's dress, and is now somewhere in the recesses of her costume."
It is not often that one sees three good men struck all of a heap simultaneously, but anybody who had chanced to stroll into the living-room of Rowcester Abbey at this moment would have been able to observe that spectacle. To say that Bill's bulletin had had a shattering effect on his companions would be, if anything, to understate it. Captain Biggar was expressing his concern by pacing the room with whirling arms, while the fact that two of the hairs of his right eyebrow distinctly quivered showed how deeply Jeeves had been moved. Bill himself, crushed at last by the blows of Fate, appeared formally to have given up the struggle. He had slumped into a chair, and was sitting there looking boneless and despairing. All he needed was a long white beard, and the resemblance to King Lear on one of his bad mornings would have been complete.
Jeeves was the first to speak.
"Most disturbing, m'lord."
"Yes," said Bill dully. "Quite a nuisance, isn't it? You don't happen to have any little-known Asiatic poison on you, do you, Jeeves?"
"No, m'lord."
"A pity," said Bill. "I could have used it."
His young employer's distress pained Jeeves, and as it had always been his view that there was no anodyne for the human spirit, when bruised, like a spot of Marcus Aurelius, he searched in his mind for some suitable quotation from the Emperor's works. And he was just hesitating between "Whatever may befall thee, it was preordained for thee from everlasting" and "Nothing happens to any man which he is not fitted by nature to bear", both excellent, when Captain Biggar, who had been pouring out a rapid fire of ejaculations in some native dialect, suddenly reverted to English.