Priscilla's Spies
dance about with insatiable fury. But it may be the right thing to do
all the same. We ought always to do what’s right, Mr. Geraghty, even if
other people behave like wild boars; that is to say if we are quite sure
that it is right; I think it’s nearly sure to be right to give a baby
to its mother; though there may be times when it’s not. Solomon did, and
that’s a pretty good example; though I don’t suppose that even Solomon
always knew for certain when he was doing the rightest thing there was.
Anyhow, I’ll risk it if you like, Mr. Geraghty. You won’t mind having
the baby on your knee for a bit, will you, Cousin Frank?”
Frank did mind very much. The ordinary healthy-minded, normal prefect
dislikes having anything to do with babies even more than he dislikes
being called a child by maiden ladies.
He looked appealingly at Mr. Geraghty. The baby, misunderstanding
Priscilla’s intentions, yelled louder than before.
Mr. Geraghty, fortunately for Frank, was not a man of the heroic kind.
Abstract right was less to him than expediency and he missed the point
of the comparison between his position and King Solomon’s. He thought
it better that his baby should suffer than that Miss Lentaigne’s anger
should be roused. He declined Priscilla’s offer.
Near the upper end of Rosnacree avenue there is a corner from which
a view of the lawn is obtained. Sir Lucius and another gentleman were
pacing to and fro on the grass when Priscilla and Frank reached the
corner and caught sight of them.
“Stop,” said Frank, suddenly. “Turn back, Priscilla. Go round some other
way.”
Priscilla stopped. The eager excitement of Frank’s tone surprised her.
“Why?” she asked. “It’s only father and that Lord of his. We’ve got to
face them some time or other. We may as well get it over at once.”
“That’s the beast who shoved me over the steamer’s gangway,” said Frank,
“and sprained my ankle.”
Sir Lucius and Lord Torrington turned at the end of the lawn and began
to walk towards Priscilla and Frank.
“Now I can see his face,” said Priscilla, “I don’t wonder at your rather
loathing him. I think you were jolly lucky to get off with a sprained
ankle. A man with a nose like that would break your arm or stab you in
the back.”
Lord Torrington’s nose was fleshy, pitted in places, and of a purple
colour.
“Curious taste the King must have,” said Priscilla, “to make a man like
that a Marquis. You’d expect he’d choose out fairly good-looking people.
But, of course, you can’t really tell about kings. I daresay they have
to do quite a lot of things they don’t really like, on account of being
constitutional. Rather poor sport being constitutional, I should say;
for the King that is. It’s pleasanter, of course, for the other people.”
Frank knew that the present King was blameless in the matter of Lord
Torrington’s marquisate. It was inherited from a great-grandfather,
who may have had an ordinary, possibly even a beautiful nose. But
he attempted no explanation. His anxiety made him disinclined for a
discussion of the advantages of having an hereditary aristocracy.
“Do turn back, Priscilla,” he said.
“If he is the man who sprained your ankle,” she said, “it’s far better
for you to have it out with him now when I’m here to back you up. If you
put it off till dinner time you’ll have to tackle him alone. I’m sure
not to be let in. Anyhow, we can’t go back now. They’ve seen us.”
Lord Torrington and Sir Lucius approached them. Frank plucked nervously
at his tie, unbuttoned and then re-buttoned his coat. He felt that he
had been entirely blameless during the scrimmage on the gangway of the
steamer, but Lord Torrington did not look like a man who would readily
own himself to be in the wrong.
“Your daughter, Lentaigne?” said Lord Torrington. “H’m, fifteen, you
said; looks less. Shake hands, little girl.”
Priscilla put out her right hand demurely. Her eyes were fixed on the
ground. Her lips were slightly parted in a deprecating smile, suggestive
of timid modesty.
“What’s your name?” said Lord Torrington.
“Priscilla Lentaigne.”
Nothing could have been meeker than the tone in which she spoke.
“H’m,” said Lord Torrington, “and you’re Mannix’s boy. Not much like
your father. At school?”
“Yes,” said Frank. “At Haileybury.”
“What are you doing in that bath-chair with the young lady wheeling you?
Is that the kind of manners they teach at Haileybury?”
“Please,” said Priscilla, speaking very gently. “It’s not his fault.”
“He has sprained his ankle,” said Sir Lucius. “He can’t walk.”
“Oh,” said Lord Torrington. “Sprained ankle, is it?”
He turned and walked back to the lawn. Sir Lucius followed him.
“Rather a bear, I call him,” said Priscilla. “But, of course, he may be
one of those cases of a heart of gold inside a rough skin. You can’t
be sure. We did ‘As You Like It’ last Christmas--dramatic club, you
know--and Sylvia Courtney had a bit to say about a toad ugly and
venomous which yet wears a precious jewel in his head. I’d say he’s just
the opposite. If there is a precious jewel--and there may be--it’s
not in his head. Anyhow one great comfort is that he doesn’t remember
spraining your ankle.”
Frank, who recollected Lord Torrington with disagreeable distinctness,
did not find any great comfort in being totally forgotten. He would have
liked, though he scarcely expected, some expression of regret that the
accident had occurred.
“It’ll be all the easier,” said Priscilla, “to pay him back if he hasn’t
any suspicion that we have an undying vendetta against him. I rather
like vendettas, don’t you? There’s something rather noble in the idea of
pursuing a man with implacable vengeance from generation to generation.”
“I don’t quite see,” said Frank, “what good a vendetta is. We can’t do
anything while he’s in your father’s house. It wouldn’t be right.”
“All the same,” said Priscilla, “well score off him. For the immediate
present we’ve got to wait and watch his every movement with glittering
eyes and cynical smiles concealed behind our ingenuous brows. You
needn’t say ‘ingenuous’ isn’t a real word, because it is. I put it in an
English comp. last term and got full marks, which shows that it must be
a good word.”
Priscilla was right in supposing that she would not be allowed to dine
in the dining-room. Frank faced the banquet without her support. It was
not a very pleasant meal for him. Lady Torrington shook hands with him
and asked him whether he were the boy whom she had heard reciting a
prize poem on the last Speech Day at Winchester. Frank told her that he
was at Haileybury.
“I thought it might have been you,” said Lady Torrington, “because I
seem to remember your face. I must have seen you somewhere, I suppose.”
She took no further notice of him during dinner. Lord Torrington took no
notice of him at all. The dinner was long and, in spite of the fact that
he had a good appetite, Frank did not enjoy himself. He was extremely
glad when Lady Torrington and Miss Lentaigne left the dining-room. He
was casting about for a convenient excuse for escape when Sir Lucius
spoke to him.
“You and Priscilla were out on the bay all day, I suppose?”
“Yes,” said Frank, “we started early and sailed about.”
“I daresay you’ll be able to give us some information then,” said
Sir Lucius. “Shall I ask him a few questions, Torrington? The police
sergeant said----”
“The police sergeant is a damned fool,” said Lord Torrington. “She can’t
be going about in a boat. She doesn’t know how to row.”
“Frank,” said Sir Lucius, “did you and Priscilla happen to see anything
of a young lady----”
“You may just as well tell him the story,” said Lord Torrington. “It’ll
be in the papers in a day or two if we can’t find her.”
“Very well, Torrington. Just as you like. The fact is, Frank, that Lord
Torrington is here looking for his daughter, who has----well, a week ago
she disappeared.”
“Disappeared!” said Lord Torrington. “Why not say bolted?”
“Ran away from home,” said Sir Lucius.
“According to your aunt----” said Lord Torrington.
“She’s not my aunt,” said Frank.
“Oh, isn’t she?” Lord Torrington’s tone suggested that this was a
distinct advantage to Frank. “According to Miss Lentaigne then, the girl
has asserted her right to live her own life untrammelled by the fetters
of conventionality. That’s the way she put it, isn’t it, Lentaigne?”
“Lady Isabel,” said Sir Lucius, “came over to Ireland. We know that.”
“Booked her luggage in advance from Euston,” said Lord Torrington,
“under another name. I had a detective on the job, and he worried that
out. Women are all going mad nowadays; though I had no notion Isabel
went in for--well, the kind of thing your sister talks, Lentaigne. I
thought she was religious. She used to be perpetually going to church,
evensong on the Vigil of St. Euphrosyne, and that kind of thing, but
I am told lots of parsons now have taken up these advanced ideas about
women. It may have been in church she heard them.”
“From Dublin,” said Sir Lucius, “she came on here. The police
sergeant----”
“Who’s a dunderheaded fool,” said Lord Torrington.
“He says there’s a young lady going about the bay for the last two days
in a boat.”
“That’s the wrong tack altogether,” said Lord Torrington. “Isabel would
never think of going in a boat. I tell you she can’t row.”
“Now, Frank,” said Sir Lucius, “did you see or hear anything of her?”
Frank would have liked very much to deny that he had seen any lady. His
dislike of Lord Torrington was strong in him. He had been snubbed in
the train, injured while leaving the steamer, and actually insulted
that very afternoon. He felt, besides, the strongest sympathy with any
daughter who ran away from a home ruled by Lord and Lady Torrington. But
he had been asked a straight question and it was not in him to tell a
lie deliberately.
“We did meet a lady,” he said, “in fact we lunched with her today, but
her name was Rutherford.”
“Was she rowing about alone in a boat?” said Lord Torrington.
“She had a boy to row her,” said Frank. “She’d hired the boat. She said
she came from the British Museum and was collecting sponges.”
“Sponges!” said Sir Lucius. “How could she collect sponges here, and
what does the British Museum want sponges for?”
“They weren’t exactly sponges,” said Frank, “they were zoophytes.”
“It’s just possible,” said Lord Torrington, “that she might--Sponges,
you say? I don’t know what would put sponges into her head. But, of
course, she had to say something. What was she like to look at?”
“She had a dark blue dress,” said Frank, “and was tallish.”
“Fuzzy fair hair?” said Lord Torrington.
“I don’t remember her hair.”
“Slim?”
“I’d call Miss Rutherford fat,” said Frank. “At least, she’s decidedly
stout.”
“Not her,” said Lord Torrington. “Nobody could call Isabel fat. That
police sergeant of yours is a fool, Lentaigne. I always said he was.
If Isabel is in this neighbourhood at all she’s living in some country
inn.”
“The sergeant said he’d make inquiries about the lady he mentioned,”
said Sir Lucius. “We shall hear more about her tomorrow.”
“She had a Primus stove with her,” said Frank.
“That’s no help,” said Lord Torrington. “Anybody might have a Primus
stove.”
“She said she’d borrowed it from Professor Wilder,” said Frank.
“Who the devil is Professor Wilder?”
“He’s doing the rotifers,” said Frank. “At least Miss Rutherford said he
was. I don’t know who he is.”
“That’s not Isabel,” said Lord Torrington. “She wouldn’t have the
intelligence to invent a professor who collected rotifers. I don’t
suppose she ever heard of rotifers. I never did. What are they?”
“Insects, I fancy,” said Sir Lucius. “I daresay Priscilla would know.
Shall I send for her?”