The cook, conducted into the presence, proved also to be one of the younger set. Her age was fifteen.
She bustled in, her pigtails swinging behind her, and Colonel Wyvern gave her an unpleasant look.
"Trelawny!" he said.
"Yus?" said the cook.
This time there was no reticence on the part of the Chief Constable. The Wyverns did not as a rule war upon women, but there are times when chivalry is impossible.
"Don't say "Yus?"', you piefaced little excrescence," he thundered. "Say "Yes, sir?"', and say it in a respectful and soldierly manner, coming smartly to attention with the thumbs on the seam of the trousers. Trelawny, that lunch you had the temerity to serve up today was an insult to me and a disgrace to anyone daring to call herself a cook, and I have sent for you to inform you that if there is any more of this spirit of slackness and laissez faire on your part ..." Colonel Wyvern paused. The "I'll tell your mother", with which he had been about to conclude his sentence, seemed to him to lack a certain something. "You'll hear of it," he said and, feeling that even this was not as good as he could have wished, infused such vigour and venom into his description of underdone chicken, watery brussels sprouts and potatoes you couldn't get a fork into that a weaker girl might well have wilted.
But the Trelawnys were made of tough stuff. They did not quail in the hour of peril.
The child met his eye with iron resolution, and came back strongly.
"Hitler!" she said, putting out her tongue.
The Chief Constable started.
"Did you call me Hitler?"
"Yus, I did."
"Well, don't do it again," said Colonel Wyvern sternly. "You may go, Trelawny."
Trelawny went, with her nose in the air, and Colonel Wyvern addressed himself to Bulstrode.
A proud man is never left unruffled when worsted in a verbal duel with a cook, especially a cook aged fifteen with pigtails, and in the Chief Constable's manner as he turned on his butler there was more than a suggestion of a rogue elephant at the height of its fever. For some minutes he spoke well and forcefully, with particular reference to the other's habit of chewing his sweet ration while waiting at table, and when at length he was permitted to follow Evangeline Trelawny to the lower regions in which they had their being, Bulstrode, if not actually shaking in every limb, was at any rate subdued enough to omit to utter his customary "Whoops!" when tripping over the rug.
He left the Chief Constable, though feeling a little better after having cleansed his bosom of the perilous stuff that weighs upon the soul, still definitely despondent. "Ichabod", he was saying to himself, and he meant it. In the golden age before the social revolution, he was thinking, a gaping, pimpled tripper over rugs like this Bulstrode would have been a lowly hall-boy, if that. It revolted a Tory of the old school's finer feelings to have to regard such a blot on the Southmoltonshire scene in the sacred light of a butler.
He thought nostalgically of his young manhood in London at the turn of the century and of the vintage butlers he had been wont to encounter in those brave days ... butlers who weighed two hundred and fifty pounds on the hoof, butlers with three chins and bulging abdomens, butlers with large, gooseberry eyes and that austere, supercilious, butlerine manner which has passed away so completely from the degenerate world of the nineteen-fifties. Butlers had been butlers then in the deepest and holiest sense of the word. Now they were mere chinless boys who sucked toffee and said "Yus?"' when you spoke to them.
It was almost inevitable that a man living so near to Rowcester Abbey and starting to brood on butlers should find his thoughts turning in the direction of the Abbey's principal ornament, and it was with a warm glow that Colonel Wyvern now began to think of Jeeves. Jeeves had made a profound impression on him. Jeeves, in his opinion, was the goods. Young Rowcester himself was a fellow the Colonel, never very fond of his juniors, could take or leave alone, but this man of his, this Jeeves, he had recognized from their first meeting as something special. Out of the night that covered the Chief Constable, black as the pit—after that disturbing scene with Evangeline Trelawny—from pole to pole, there shone a sudden gleam of light.
He himself might have his Bulstrode, but at least he could console himself with the thought that his daughter was marrying a man with a butler in the fine old tradition on his payroll. It put heart into him. It made him feel that this was not such a bad little old world, after all.
He mentioned this to Jill when she came in a moment later, looking cold and proud, and Jill tilted her chin and looked colder and prouder. She might have been a Snow Queen or something of that sort.
"I am not going to marry Lord Rowcester," she said curtly.
It seemed to Colonel Wyvern that his child must be suffering from some form of amnesia, and he set himself to jog her memory.
"Yes, you are," he reminded her. "It was in The Times. I saw it with my own eyes. The engagement is announced between—"
"I have broken off the engagement."
That little gleam of light of which we were speaking a moment ago, the one we showed illuminating Colonel Wyvern's darkness, went out with a pop, like a stage moon that has blown a fuse. He stared incredulously.
"Broken off the engagement?"
"I am never going to speak to Lord Rowcester again."
"Don't be an ass," said Colonel Wyvern. "Of course you are. Not going to speak to him again? I never heard such nonsense. I suppose what's happened is that you've had one of these lovers' tiffs."
Jill did not intend to allow without protest what was probably the world's greatest tragedy since the days of Romeo and Juliet to be described in this inadequate fashion. One really must take a little trouble to find the mot juste.
"It was not a lovers' tiff," she said, all the woman in her flashing from her eyes. "If you want to know why I broke off the engagement, it was because of the abominable way he has been behaving with Mrs. Spottsworth."
Colonel Wyvern put a finger to his brow.
"Spottsworth? Spottsworth? Ah, yes.
That's the American woman you were telling me about."
"The American trollop," corrected Jill coldly.
"Trollop?" said Colonel Wyvern, intrigued.
"That was what I said."
"Why do you call her that? Did you catch them— er—trolloping?"
"Yes, I did."
"Good gracious!"
Jill swallowed once or twice, as if something jagged in her throat was troubling her.
"It all seems to have started," she said, speaking in that toneless voice which had made such a painful impression on Bill, "in Cannes some years ago. Apparently she and Lord Rowcester used to swim together at Eden Roc and go for long drives in the moonlight. And you know what that sort of thing leads to."
"I do indeed," said Colonel Wyvern with animation, and was about to embark on an anecdote of his interesting past, when Jill went on, still speaking in that same strange, toneless voice.
"She arrived at the Abbey yesterday. The story that has been put out is that Monica Carmoyle met her in New York and invited her to stay, but I have no doubt that the whole thing was arranged between her and Lord Rowcester, because it was obvious how matters stood between them. No sooner had she appeared than he was all over her ... making love to her in the garden, dancing with her like a cat on hot bricks, and," said Jill nonchalantly, wearing the mask like the Mrs.
Fish who had so diverted Captain Biggar by doing the can-can in her step-ins in Kenya, "coming out of her room at two o'clock in the morning in mauve pyjamas."
Colonel Wyvern choked. He had been about to try to heal the rift by saying that it was quite possible for a man to exchange a few civil remarks with a woman in a garden and while away the long evening by partnering her in the dance and still not be in any way culpable, but this statement wiped the words from his lips.