CHAPTER XVII

THE SERVANT IN THE HOUSE

Long established usage on desert islands has ordered that the first duty of the shipwrecked, after locating the crystal spring and ascertaining that the cocoanuts are ripe and the mango (or bread fruit tree) abounds, is to signal for help. Accordingly, at this first meal after the desolation of Ipping House the sole topic of conversation concerned ways and means of obtaining new servants without delay. But the Merles took no part in the discussion.

From the outset the Reverend Horatio's domestic ministrations had been accepted, in the picnickian spirit of the occasion, as the whim of an eccentric parson and quickly forgotten by all but Harriet in the absorbing topic of the moment.

Harriet watched him now as he moved quietly to and fro, carrying the large silver platter, bending gravely as he held it in turn for each of the chatterers at the table. "Heathens" she reflected bitterly. "They are raging about menials, heedless that they are being served by an angel!"

A rare partisan was Harriet Merle. With her on his side, Horatio might well liken himself to a hero of old armed with an invincible spear. Harriet gloried in opposition, and it was only when opposing forces were equal that there was any doubt in her husband's mind which side she would take. At such times something totally unexpected, weighing with the infinitesimal preponderance of a hair, would sway the balance. So it had been this morning when Horatio had spoken of long ago days and the look of long ago had shone in Horatio's eyes.

An hour before, if the priestly Ezekiel himself had appeared to the curate's wife and prophesied that she would soon be abetting her husband in this, the maddest of his mad ideas, Harriet would in all probability have shown the presentient son of Buzi to the door. (Hiram Baxter would have told him he was talking through his halo.) Yet now that very thing was actually happening, and the strangest part of it was that it did not seem strange to her.

As Horatio stood, with his back to the room, occupied with things on the sideboard, there was to Harriet something solemnly familiar about his attitude, his quiet movements. Nor was the good churchwoman shocked when she realized what it recalled to her mind. It was but an added proof, if such were needed, that to Horatio this was indeed a ritual, and no common service he was performing.

At last, it seemed an age to Harriet, every one had been served. The Spanish omelette, a martyr to its own perfection was no more. Robert Baxter, after paying the highest compliment possible for a mere man to pay to a Spanish omelette, rose from the table and, deputing the countess to act with Mrs. Merle in the matter of engaging servants, excused himself on the plea of letters that must catch the afternoon post.

A moment later Horatio, steeling himself against Harriet's imploring glance and the appeal of his untouched plate, left the room. As one on the brink of a journey, the thought of food repelled him. Also he remembered that Martin Luther had not breakfasted. He would come back later and help Harriet clear away the things.

Kate had lighted a cigarette and was leaning back in her chair watching the sinuous veil dance of the dissolving vapor. Lionel's whole being was concentrated on the ordeal by fire of a perfecto bequeathed to him by the departing Robert.

"By Jove! Where's Mr. Merle?" he asked.

The countess, immediately alert, gave a quick glance round the table. "Go after him, Lionel. He's had nothing to eat!" she cried.

Lionel pushed back his chair and strode out of the room. Some minutes passed before he returned, entering by the French window from the conservatory. He looked flustered.

"I can't find him anywhere," he said quickly, in answer to exclamations from Harriet and Kate. "I've looked all over the beastly house and I'm blest if I know where he can have got to."

"He must have gone out," suggested the countess.

"That's the first thing I thought of. He hadn't two minutes' start of me, and I ran all round the house."

"Did you go to the lodge?" queried Harriet.

"Yes, I went there twice. No one has been through the gate since this morning. By the way," he added, "Mrs. Pottle says she'll come around and see what she can do to help, she and that girl she has there, jolly looking girl,--eyes like a--like a fox terrier----" He stopped abruptly. Kate and Harriet had not waited for particulars about the Storm girl's eyes--the one was speeding toward the kitchen, the other was already half way up stairs.

Search as they would, the Reverend Horatio was nowhere to be found and his black wideawake hat was missing!

"Horatio never went out like that without speaking to me," lamented Harriet.

The afternoon hours dragged by and when dinner time came Horatio was still absent. The long oak dining table had been reduced to the comparatively small circle of its primordial unit. The curtains had not been drawn and, through the tall windows at the end of the room, the ghost of the departed day stared solemnly at the candles that were usurping its place. But the candles only shrugged their flames superciliously--their silver candelabra had once belonged to Charles I. "Anyway," they reflected, "it's better to be a live candle than a dead sun!" A remark which, to be strictly truthful, was not original, having been handed down in the candle family for generations.

The continued absence of the beloved curate cast a damper on the spirits of the diners and made conversation a burden. Even the all important servant question was for the time being forgotten.

"I don't see why we're worrying so," said Kate, after a longer pause than usual. "He's probably lost his way in the woods and is trying to find his way home by that ridiculous compass on his watch chain; he showed it to me once." She smiled at the recollection. "It has no more sense of direction than poor, dear Mr. Merle himself has. I give you my word the wretched thing never pointed twice to the same place. The dear man likes nothing better than to get lost in the woods. He told me so himself," she added, but her voice belied the optimism of her words.

In the silence that followed Hester Storm entered bearing a chocolate blanc-mange, a dark, marble-like edifice of mortuary design imbedded in a snowdrift of whipped cream.

"By Jove, Kate!" cried Lionel, eager to change the subject, "is that the thing you were making when you chucked me out of the kitchen this afternoon?"

Kate was assaulting the quaking monument with a desperate spoon. "It's Mr. Merle's favorite pudding," she said shortly.

Lionel subsided. What was the use? No matter what topic was started, it invariably led to Merle.

The fate of the chocolate blanc-mange hung in the balance for a brief moment. If to eat it would seem to be a slight to the curate, to leave it would be a slight to the countess. The outcome was a compromise in which the honors and the blanc-mange were evenly divided.

Hester was glad when the meal drew to a close. Waiting on the table had been a nerve racking experience for her. Only the thought that she might pick up some chance clue as to the golf bag's whereabouts had nerved her to the undertaking.

Now it was over and nothing had come of it--not a single word about golf or golf bags. All the talk had been about the old parson who was late for dinner. Probably he had fallen into another mole trap or caught his whiskers in a bramble bush!

Hester was startled from these irreverent reflections by the utterance of the very word she had been listening for. The coffee cup she was in the act of handing to the countess shook perilously on its tiny saucer.

"A golf bag is a funny thing for a secretary to be carting about," Robert Baxter was saying, "but there it was, and the day Mother borrowed it----"

"By Jove!" interrupted Lionel, checking his half-raised arm. "That's where the old boy went!"

He drained his cup quickly and put it down. It was coming out in exasperating driblets like a magazine story and Hester, suddenly busy at the sideboard, waited breathlessly for the next instalment.

"I heard Miss Thompson call out to him from the motor," went on Lionel, "just as they were starting this morning, that if he cared to get her golf bag he could use the clubs all he wanted."

There was another maddening pause. Hester had reached the limit of her endurance; she couldn't go on rearranging the silver on the sideboard forever. She had an insane impulse to shriek. Then, suddenly, the suspense was over. Robert supplied the missing link.

"Cousin Horatio could hardly get lost on his way to the club house," he reflected, pushing back his chair as Kate started to rise, "but I'll run round in the car and inquire if he was there this afternoon. Why don't you have a look round the lake?" he turned to Lionel.

They passed into the hall and out through the front door. It was almost dark. Through the moist, warm air came the scent of pale night flowers dimly white against the dark ivy.

"I must be off," said Bob, "or the golf club will be shut. Any one want to go along?"

"I don't think Mrs. Merle should be left alone," said Kate. "I'll try to make her eat something."

Bob started toward the garage as the other two re-entered the dark house. None of the hall lamps had been lighted. In the dining room the candles were burning low, their impish flames casting jerky shadows on the disordered table. The empty chairs, pushed back, had the unquiet stillness of arrested movement. Kate shivered.

"Get some candles," she said. "Quick before these go out!"

On the table was the depressing litter of stained coffee cups, together with sundry plates and glasses overlooked by Hester. The countess began gathering the plates and cups together and piling them on the sideboard. Lionel watched her in silence. Now only the cloth remained.

"Take the other end," she commanded.

Lionel obeyed and together they folded it into its original creases.

"I say, Kate," he said presently. "What about servants--did you telephone?"

The countess was leaving the room to "rout out Mrs. Merle," as she expressed it. She stopped short and came back to Lionel. There was a look on her face that startled him.

"No," she said at length, "I haven't telephoned. I haven't done a thing about it, and what's more, Lionel, I don't believe I will."

"Kate! Do you mean that?"

It was her turn to be startled. She had expected consternation, at the very least disapproval. Lionel's tone was one of joyous relief.

"By Jove, Kate, if that's the way you feel, then I know I'm right. I've been turning it over in my mind ever since this morning," he went on eagerly, "and when I heard the servants had all bolted I said to myself: 'Now's the chance to show that old blighter Baxter that an English Johnny who dates back to the Conqueror--and all that rot--is just as good, when it comes to the scratch, as a self-made American who's only just invented himself and thinks he's the only Johnny on earth that ever did an honest day's work.'"

As he paused for breath his face became suddenly luminous with a new idea. "I say! This must be what the old boy calls 'chucking us into a pond.'"

"Lionel! You don't mean--you can't mean that he dismissed the servants himself?"

"Who? Old Baxter? Not he! He doesn't know a thing about it, that I'll swear to, but----"

"But what?"

Lionel hesitated, then went on quickly. "I got a tip yesterday, and if it wasn't straight from the horse's mouth it was jolly well the next thing to it."

"Well?"

He leaned forward and lowered his voice. "If it hadn't been for us four relatives being here Cousin Hiram would have shut up the house when they went to Brighton."

For a moment there was dead silence. Then Lionel went on. "That means the old boy really is in a tight place, otherwise he'd never have thought of it--and, by Jove, Kate, I'd like to do something to help him if it's only picking cabbages or--blacking boots--there's something I can do." Lionel's face shone with a joyous recollection. "Once I blacked the boots of six people for two weeks."

"You did!" Kate laughed incredulously.

Lionel nodded. "A caravan party in Devonshire, two married women, one flapper just out of school, two husbands, another chap and me. The flapper was the hardest----"

"The hardest?"

"I mean her boots. I couldn't get my hand into them--had to hold 'em by the heel."

"That settles it!" decided the countess. "It's perfectly simple. We'll go on just as we are. I'm cook, you're kitchen boy and boots, and cousin Harriet can be upstairs girl." Kate laughed nervously, then, suddenly her whole manner changed. "Lionel," she said, "I want to tell you something. Ever since luncheon I have been haunted by the picture of that darling old man waiting on the table. There was something in his face that went right through me--I can't tell you what it was, but every time I looked at him I wanted to run and put my arms round his neck and have a good cry. I never felt like such a good for nothing rotter in my life. And when I looked up and found he'd gone----" She stopped speaking and got up quickly. "There! I must go to Mrs. Merle."

Lionel struck his repeater. "By Jove! It's nine o'clock! I must go to the lake."