Chapter SIXTEEN

"I beg your pardon, sir! May I have the honour of a moment's confidential word with you?"

The refined, the courteous phrase, was followed by a discreet cough. The cough was a trifle mechanical, the words a little too rapidly spoken, as is (alas!) the common fate of words learned by heart for a set piece, whether by front benchers or perjuring policemen. What followed was marred by the same slight defect, but it was at least clear. It rattled out--to quote a noble simile from the _Wallet of Kai Lung_--"like a stream of pearls dropped into a bowl of jade."

"There has come to my knowledge sir which would grieve my 'eart to distraction and breaking were it not overcome by the more powerful emotion of gratitude for so many happy years passed under this 'ere roof at Paulings I mean this roof at Paulings and formerly when we had a town house if I may make so bold in one hundred and twelve Curzon Street Mayfair moved by this my 'eart would not let me keep silent. Oh! sir. I know the dread secret and if I come to speak of it it is from loyal affection and no other cause and here and now I put at your service as in duty bound all that has come" ... here Mr. Whaley suddenly clasped a fat right hand against his chest: He ought to have done it at the word "heart," but the brakes had slipped and he had run past the station ... "all that has come to the knowledge of these poor humble ears of mine which would rather have been closed in death than have suffered the agony of them fatal news but told it shall not be to other human soul nor yet only to you for the respect I bear to that 'igh name of Deeboon which saving your honour sir ..."

Humphrey de Bohun put his lean hands on his lean knees, sat up, and stared at this high-geared human gramophone on speed.

"What on earth ..." he began. "Look here, Whaley, have you been drinking? ... Now, mark me, Whaley!" Humphrey de Bohun could speak with astonishing decision when he felt quite secure that the person spoken to was unable to answer back. "I've always made one absolute rule in this house. Any servant of mine who is found the worse for liquor--I don't care _where_," and he swept his feeble head down to the southwest, "I don't care _how_"--he swept it again--"I don't ... damn it, I don't even care on _what_! leaves me there and then!" He leaned back again, somewhat exhausted.

"You wound me, sir," said George Whaley with dignity. "Ah, sir! you wound me! Indeed you do!"

"Wound your what?" said the Home Secretary, without sufficient consideration.

"My honour, sir," said George Whaley. "And a loyal heart."

This time he remembered the connection of the word "heart" with the appropriate gesture, and he planked his hand on his merrythought with the noise of a distant 9.2.

The Home Secretary remembered the lessons of his youth, the high traditions of the de Bohuns.

"I owe you an apology, Whaley," he said, in the appropriate faded-earnest manner. "But the truth is, I can't pretend to follow what you were saying. I don't suggest that you spoke too quickly.... I was in a reverie when you came in. The fault is mine. Proceed."

And in his turn George Whaley proceeded--but the chain was broken; he was thrown back upon impromptu too; and a native terseness, not to say inhibition of speech, returned to him.

"Well, sir," and he coughed, "I'm afraid it's rather a delicate matter," and he looked at the nails of his fingers. "Perhaps I ought to plunge _in medias res_." He sighed. "I've 'eard it's usually the wiser plan in cases like these."

He stood for some fifteen seconds, his bold head with its fringe of grey hair slightly on one side, and gazing at the exalted culprit with infinite compassion. Then did George Whaley begin to shake that head, and there escaped him words unusual to his daily life, but native to his reading of fiction and to his experience on the stage.

"Ah me! Ah me!" he said.

"Look here, Whaley," said his master smartly. "What's the matter? Are you ill? Are you mad? Have you"--in a softer voice--"have you perhaps suffered some sudden bereavement?"

"Only the bereavement of a loyal heart deceived, bewildered," moaned George Whaley, quoting textually from _The Waifs of the Whirlwind_. He linked his hands before his ample waistcoat and hung his saddened head.

"Upon my word!" cried Humphrey de Bohun, moved to unexpected energy by an intolerable boredom, "this kind of thing's got to stop. Speak out, man, and don't make a fool of yourself!" He pulled out his watch. "I've not got all the time there is! Hurry up, now! Surely you can speak plainly!"

"I can," said George Whaley, in tones of gloom, and moved by a mighty resolution. He was standing upright now; he fixed his employer with a steady glance, and each hand was half clenched at his side. "The emerald, sir!"

And he waited for his effect.

"Oh, damn the emerald!" shouted Humphrey de Bohun. "If you think this is the time, after all these two days ..."

"It is the time," said George Whaley firmly, with a reminiscence of the worthy mother who had brought him up in the Countess of Huntingdon's connection and under all the discipline of the Jacobean Scriptures. "Yea, now is the acceptable time."

"By God!" shouted the now inflamed minister, "this has got to stop! I'll have you certified! I'll ... I'll ..."

But he got the thing full in the face. In a key nearly an octave lower than that he had been using for the purposes of the great interview, George Whaley stretched out a rigid solemn arm towards his master and spoke the words of doom.

"I know all... Thou art the man! It is you, sir, that have on you the lost emerald!"

Let me not do Humphrey de Bohun injustice. He had never yet in his life taken an initiative. He had never tackled any one of the human species. But there is a god latent in us all, and his name is Pan.

"The emerald!" he shrieked. "Blackmail, eh, you damned lousy son of a ----!" He sprang at the astonished servitor, seized him round the neck--a dangerous gambit between elderly men, for it leads to strokes on both sides--shook him madly from side to side, then dug his right hand into his collar behind, swerved him round, and gave him one of those enormous kicks which form epochs in the history of Britain. Savagely did the unrestrained elder statesman, all the repressed manhood of half a century bursting forth, plant his foot upon what should properly be called the person of his unfortunate dependant and with a second gesture sent him sprawling through the open door into the hall.

"The emerald!" he kept on shouting, as George Whaley, groaning, pulled himself up miserably, like a wounded sea lion. "When the hell am I to hear the last of the emerald ... you and your emerald! ... all of you and your emeralds! ... I wish to God! ..." A blasphemy was almost on his lips; he had almost said that he wished the emerald had been strangled at birth, and by such a phrase would he have forfeited the luck of the Boneses.

"Get out!" he continued, in a somewhat milder because exhausted tone, as the ill-treated Good Samaritan hobbled towards the door which led to the offices, rubbing the affected portions of his frame. "Out! Out! Out! Never let me see your face again!"

And they parted to meet no more. The conclusion of their mutual relations was concluded by correspondence.

* * * * * * *

It is not with impunity that men between fifty and sixty, especially if they have lived under constant self-repression--which doesn't apply to colonels--let their angry passions rise. The Home Secretary was badly blown. He felt groggy. His exertion was already beginning to make him a little stiff. He halted towards the dining-room and groped for a pint of champagne which he knew to stand by. He pulled the cork with his last strength. He took a mighty draught. He felt better. He took another. Then he saw the world sanely, and he saw it whole--such is the power of the god. There was hardly a drain left. He glanced over his shoulder, found himself alone, put the neck of the bottle to his lips and sucked it down.

"Ah!" said the arbiter of Wormwood Scrubbs and Lord of Pentonville. "That's better."

He felt almost genial--normal, anyhow, at last. Even a trifle super-normal. With sprightlier step he regained that comfortable chair wherein he had been relaxing his overstrained mind when George Whaley had so imprudently intruded.

It was not once in a blue moon that Humphrey de Bohun thought tobacco a boon, but the occasion called for it. For the matter of that, it was not once in a blue moon that he drank more than half a glass of wine at a sitting--let alone of a Sunday morning during church time--and bubbling wine in plenty leads to smoking: hence the fortunes made by Greeks and Egyptians in their sales of hay cigarettes to the young bloods. Humphrey de Bohun groped in his daughter's open box for a cigarette, tapped it, with a surprisingly modern gesture, on his thumbnail, and as he lit it sank back into the chair he had left and wondered whether indeed he had reached repose.

Was there anyone left, he thought drowsily, who could come with yet another story of the blasted gem? He was already half asleep, but there passed before his drooping eyes what seemed a regiment: Galton had been sure of it--he had seen it, seen it on Bill; Bill had been sure of it--he had tested it, tested it on McTaggart; McTaggart had been sure of it--he had got it by second sight, and was absolutely certain of Collop; and Collop--oh well! God bless Collop! For after all he had _produced_ it--snatched from the talons of a fowl. The elderly gentleman's head drooped and nodded; the cigarette fell from his lax fingers; it set fire to the Aubusson carpet, which smouldered in faint wreaths, but did no harm, and soon went out. Thus did the adventure of the Emerald of Catherine the Great end, as all things end, in smoke.

* * * * * * *

Far, far, in the less pretentious but roomy apartments of the East Wing, George Whaley, suffering untold things, sought for and found the Boy, the culprit, Ethelbert.

They met in the passage that leads from the servants' hall to the Yard; but when I say met, I rather mean that their visages encountered the one the other at the turn of a corner separated by a space of some five yards.

The countenance of George Whaley at that moment was not one to inspire confidence in the young. There was blood on his cheek-bone. His collar was torn, and all adrift upon the starboard side; his tie was under his ear; there was a gaping tear in his coat.

"Ow! You young dose of poison!" bawled the injured man, as he lunged forward upon his prey, and with a loud cry Ethelbert fled. He fled through the open door into the coal yard, George Whaley limping after. There stood against the wall of the yard, leaning to its summit, a crazy old ladder. The light boy Ethelbert nipped up it, and at its foot stood the unhappy and ponderous victim of his misleading confidences, shaking an impotent fist.

Security lent courage to the youth.

"You look hot," he said kindly.

"You come down!" hissed Whaley, clenching his teeth, "and I'll flay you alive--slowly--inch by inch!"

"Sounds good," grinned Ethelbert; with thoughtful prevision he kicked the ladder down. Its rotten wood smashed into a dozen pieces as it fell, and the youth was delighted to note that a flying fragment had caught his superior a fine smack on the side of the jaw.

For to him that hath, more shall be added.

Ethelbert feared not the future; his judgment told him, not insecurely, that the butler's powers were at an end.

"Been havin' a scrap?" continued Ethelbert, by way of making conversation. "'Ow's the other man?"

George Whaley's cup was full. "Come down," he groaned stupidly. "Come down!"

"Me come down?" answered his former subaltern with an air. "Why, what can you be thinking of? It's only just over church time yet. You can hear the sweet bells ringing--'ark!" and he lifted an ecstatic forefinger with heavenward-lifted eyes.

The butler put his hand upon the old red brick wall. His adventures were beginning to tell upon him. He felt sick.

"It's all along o' you!" he said thickly, spat, to see whether his lungs were injured, was pleased to find they were not; then, still suffering, repeated, "It's all along o' you! What," he added in a higher key of tragic indignation, "what the burning hell did yer mean by telling me the boss had pinched the emerald?"

"_I_ tell you the boss had pinched the emerald?" sneered Ethelbert from his high place. "Oh, chase me, Ananias!"

"Yes, yer did!" came again from the uplifted purple face. "Yer told me with yer own lips that you knew yerself it was in the 'ands of the 'ighest."

"I never! You dare say I did!" cried the indignant whelp. "Liar! What I may have _thought_ was that his lordship ..."

"His lordship?" groaned the suffering man, a light breaking in upon him.

"Yes, mubbe! Don't you dare go to say as I said so. Otherwise I'll have the lor on yer! So mind your fat feet! I'll be treading on 'em. I never said nuffing. I didn't. 'Sides which, it's all one now. The emerald's been found."

"Found?" gasped Whaley with a stare.

"Yes, found," nodded Ethelbert, from his dominion of vantage loftily.

"Then ..." groaned his unfortunate elder, "I'm done!"

"That's true, anyways! Congrats!"

Whaley had already picked up half a brick, but his tormenter had seen the gesture, and had dropped on the far side of the wall to the high bank below, and was off to rejoin his quarters. He knew that the mighty had fallen and would trouble him no more.

So ends the saga.

TALE-PIECE

It was the custom of our grandfathers and grandmothers--when they had any of them been fool enough to write a novel--to wind it up with a description of what the various characters in the beastly thing were doing at the moment when the book appeared--that is, supposedly, in a future some little while after the closing of the tale.

Those of you who still read the novels of my own youth--and I for one read no others--will remember that they are invariably concerned with a well-to-do young woman of exquisite beauty who marries a manly young fellow of her own status, after various ups and downs. Then the book goes on to tell you that they have twenty-six boys and girls with long curly hair, all gold. And then the band plays.

It is not easy for me to give you an appendix of this kind, because I have always thought it prudent to throw my own novels into the future, lest I should be sent to gaol for insulting the rich. Moreover, even if I did describe the final fate of my characters, I cannot make it a very pleasant one without treason to the realities of human life and the flattering of fools: and rather than flatter fools let me be torn to pieces by wild horses after the fashion of the Merovingian queens.

However, I propose to give you some idea of how the various people you have come across in these pages continued their not too significant lives.

When Marjorie had divorced Galton--having got married to him by way of preliminary--she was herself divorced by Pemberton--who had no further use for Lady Meinz--and then married--only last year--an extraordinarily fleshy man called (at the moment) Henry Munster. They are still happy--at least, she is. The child of the first union--if I may so describe it--is a girl; so that's the end of the Galton peerage.

Aunt Amelia is dead: and high time.

Her brother, the former Home Secretary, has in the interval developed astonishing talents which have fitted him for the Colonial Office, the India Office, and the Treasury, in rapid succession--and would doubtless have fitted him for the Foreign Office but for the determined opposition of the permanent officials. During the four years in which it had been arranged to let the other batch of professional politicians have a suck at the salaries, he acted as President (at £2,500) of the Commission for the Second Reduction of Wages, wrote a book of reminiscences (£3,000 Gubbins & Gubbins 42_s._). He was badly stoned during the progress of the fifth General Strike--some call it the seventh, but I follow the usual numeration. He had been taken by the mob for Henry Gaston, a man nearly forty years younger and twenty times as able--which only shows how important it is to educate the poor, and also, by the way, how important it is not to print in the papers pictures of people taken hundreds of years before the date of their appearance.

William de Bohun is still Professor of Crystallography in the University, where he has still further attained a European reputation. He is now mentioned not only in Swiss papers, but occasionally in German ones. He is not more than seventy-nine, and there is every chance of his retaining the position for a few more years. He has not made it up with the reader in Crystallogy, Mr. Bertran Leader.

I am sorry to say that these two distinguished men actually had a fight in the main street of their academic town, their weapons being umbrellas. Nor would the victory of the younger champion, Mr. B. Leader, have been for a moment doubtful had it not been that the umbrella of the elder, Professor de Bohun, was suddenly blown open by a gust of wind, affording him a sure and certain shield against the frenzied blows of his opponent.

McTaggart has gone under for good. It seems shameful, considering the excellent position on the British Intelligence into which he had been put on a weekly contract at fifteen pounds by the influence of the Home Secretary, who thought some reparation due to him, and still more by the influence of Victoria Mosel, who had squeezed Lord Bernstein's hand. On the other hand it hurts nobody but himself. He is still unmarried.

George Whaley, with his accumulated savings, purchased immediately upon his leaving the service of Humphrey de Bohun, the good will of the Bohun Arms, which I need hardly tell you does not belong to the family, but to a limited company. The pub stands at the gate of the park. Therein he regales the countryside with comic stories of his former employers; the rich middle-class motorists with scandal of the Great; the upper classes who deign to halt there on their way north in their superb cars with obsequience and silence, at a profit of about 30_s._ the bunch. He has done very well indeed, because it is a convenient lunching place for people motoring out from London to the north. His son is in this year's Oxford eight, but his daughter, I very much regret to say, has published, a book of verse--in Chelsea!

Ethelbert, a bright lad of nineteen, ordered by his master into the special constabulary during the third General Strike--I use the conventional numeration--was so unfortunate as to crack smartly upon the head a high dignitary of the Church of England, and was thereupon put in prison at the instance of Lady Sophia--the eminent cleric's wife--who would take no denial. Upon release, the General Strike being still in progress--it was the first of the really _long_ General Strikes, as you will remember, he joined the regular police force, which is ever ready to welcome men of varied experience and initiative. But he never developed the intelligence required for the _agent provocateur_, in which capacity such members of the service as have had personal experience of the cells are commonly employed. He is now past thirty and doing clerical work in the Lost Property Department.

What else remains? The horse, Attaboy, is dead, worn out in faithful labours at the stud. He was the sire of Get-On out of Get-Out. Get-Out, I need hardly tell you, was the sire of Success by Morning Star. Success was the sire of Repetition by Raseuse; and that is how Tabouche won the Oaks. I always did say the little filly would do well, for I have followed the strain--as, long ago, the form--of Attaboy, who now sleeps with his fathers--I means, sires, let alone dams.

As for the parrot, whom I may call the second Attaboy, he is still the cherished, the beloved, of that constant heart, Marjorie; Mrs. Munster, _née_ de Bohun, sometime Lady Galton, as also Mrs. Pemberton--yes, Pemberton. So far as I can remember, she is nothing else--so far. Such a charming woman! Touching upon the lovely confines of middle age with large bulges under rather weary eyes. But her father provides handsomely.

As for that father, the head of the family, Humphrey de Bohun--pronounced Deboon--he looks no older. It would be odd if he could. He feels no older--that would be impossible. But he is inclined to colds in the head. He now tells the same story over and over again, the story of the Emerald. And it always ends, "Now guess who it was?" They do not murder him, they give it up; and he dodders out, "Why! It was a jackdaw!"

Victoria Mosel has, since the date of the great discovery of the Emerald, spent week-ends at Basingthorpe, Prawley, Hammerton, Gainger, Bifford, then again at Hammerton, then again at Gainger, after that at Little Wackham. Then at Bifford again, then at Gainger, and, of course, at Prawley. She also stayed at the Breitzes' place in Silesia for three months, where she shot the bailiff's dog--by accident. May I tell you that she has spent six weeks in every year on the Riviera? Can I deny that, at this very moment of writing, she is stopping at Hammerton, having passed the last week-end at Gainger and purposing to go on to Bifford?

The years leave no mark upon her temporal frame, for the skin was ever tight upon her bones. But she knows that she is getting on--and not in the City sense of that term either. She already envisages the tomb. I am fond of her. I think she will save her soul.

One great asset which endears her to the rich of her circle. Sir William Collop is always ready and even eager to come at her bidding to any country house, and there she puts him through his paces, to the enormous joy of the assembled hosts and guests. But she is a good girl--I use the word of a woman now nearing sixty--and she does him no harm. Only, she _does_ make him dance. And why _not_?

After dinner, in the palaces of the rich, Sir William Collop is compelled to tell quaint stories of the other rich over whom his position in Scotland Yard gives him insight. Nor is he unwilling. They all call him a good fellow, by which they mean that his accent is as thick as cheese. He will be Collop till he dies. His original name is drowned ten fathoms deep; he is just coming into his pension, and he is an O. B. E. of the third crop.

And the emerald? Ah, my friends! My brothers! I will tell you what happened to the emerald!

When Mrs. Pemberton, formerly Lady Galton, then Mrs. Munster[1] _née_ de Bohun, was making the straddle between the Pemberton and the Munster connections--what we call joining the slats--she needed five hundred pounds. It sounds ridiculous. But she did. One often does. She had outrun the constable. She did not want to bother her father, and for the very good reason that he had just got damnably knocked in the Hungarian Phosphates on the erroneous advice of that silly man Mowlem. Well, she had taken the emerald to the man who, Vic had told her, was the best expert in London--Mr. Marlovitch, Junior--and (behold!) he had proved to her by infallible tests that it was _paste_. What is more, he had given her proof out of learned books that no emerald of such size ever had existed, or could exist.

The Bohuns had patriotism in their blood. Marjorie gave the famous trinket to the State--let me say to England!--under very easy conditions which earned her, I am glad to say, the entry of her daughter into Parliament. These conditions were modest: the emerald was to be permanently exhibited, in a very large case all by itself, in the British Museum, with a tablet engraved at the expense of England--I mean the State--describing it as the largest Emerald in the world--which it would have been if it had been an emerald--and assuring the honest public that it had been given by Catherine the Great to that member of the ancient family of de Bohuns who had served the interests of the State--or rather, let me say, of England--at the Court of All the Russias, in those days when the Semiramis of the North was the admiration of Europe.

"What!" you'll exclaim (it's just like you!), "would that regal woman, that generous if somewhat demanding lady, that broad German strong in her nobility, that Monarch of the Snows, Empress of all the Russias, have fallen to deceiving handsome Bill Bones with a piece of paste?"

Not a bit of it. You little understood the nature of those who serve power. She had given her emerald--and an emerald it was--to a man in whom she had the fullest confidence; she had given it him with the order to bestow it at once upon the English captain. But her messenger had preferred his own interest and had substituted that larger and false one round which all this dance has been led.

And, as the Prime Minister said of his colleague on the front bench who got into trouble over the insurance shares, who shall blame him?

Not I.

[Footnote 1: Oh! Yes! I know all about it. She would have gone on calling herself Lady Galton from husband (save the mark!) to husband. No, child! It's already getting doubtful. In the future time of which I write it was unknown.]

THE END