The Saint and the Happy Highwayman (10 page)

“I know,” she said. “It’s Franklin D. Roosevelt.”

“You have a marvellous memory. Do you still eat?”

“Whenever I’m thirsty. Do you?”

“I nibble a crumb now and then. Come out with me tonight and see if we can still take it.”

“Simon, I’d love to; but I’m in the most frantic muddle–-“

“So is the rest of the world, darling. But it’s two years since I’ve seen you, and that’s about seven hundred and thirty days too long. Don’t you realize that I’ve come halfway around the world, surviving all manner of perils and slaying large numbers of ferocious dragons, just to get here in time to take you out to dinner tonight?”

“I know, but— Oh well. It would be so thrilling to see you. Come around about seven and I’ll try to get a bit straightened out before then.”

“I’ll be there,” said the Saint.

He spent some of the intervening time in making himself the owner of. a car, and shortly after half-past six he turned it westwards into the stream of studio traffic homing towards Beverly Hills. Somewhere along Sunset Boulevard he turned off to the right and began to climb one of the winding roads that led up into the hills. The street lights were just beginning to trace their twinkling geometrical network over the vast panorama of cities spread out beneath him, as the car soared smoothly higher into the luminous blue-grey twilight.

He found his way with the certainty of vivid remembrance; and he was fully ten minutes early when he pulled the car into a bay by the roadside before the gate of Jacqueline Laine’s house. He climbed out and started towards the gate, lighting a cigarette as he went, and as he approached it he perceived that somebody else was approaching the same gate from the opposite side. Changing his course a little to the left so that the departing guest would have room to pass him, the Saint observed that he was a small and elderly gent arrayed in clothes so shapeless and ill fitting that they gave his figure a comical air of having been loosely and inaccurately strung together from a selection of stuffed bags of cloth. He wore a discolored Panama hat of weird and wonderful architecture, and carried an incongruous green umbrella furled, but still flapping in a bedraggled and forlorn sort of way, under his left arm; his face was rubicund and bulbous like his body, looking as if it had been carelessly slapped together out of a few odd lumps of pink plasticine.

As Simon moved to the left, the elderly gent duplicated the manoeuvre. Simon turned his feet and swerved politely to the right. The elderly gent did exactly the same, as if he were Simon’s own reflection in a distorting mirror. Simon stopped altogether and decided to economize energy by letting the elderly gent make the next move in the ballet on his own.

Whereupon he discovered that the game of undignified dodging in which he had just prepared to surrender his part was caused by some dimly discernible ambition of the elderly gent’s to hold converse with him. Standing in front of him and blinking short-sightedly upwards from his lower altitude to the Saint’s six foot two, with his mouth hanging vacantly open like an inverted “U” and three long yellow teeth hanging down like stalactites from the top, the elderly gent tapped him on the chest and said, very earnestly and distinctly: “Hig fwmgn glugl phnihklu hgrm skhlglgl?”

“I beg your pardon?” said the Saint vaguely.

“Hig fwmgn,” repeated the elderly gent, “glugl phnihklu hgrm skhlglgl?” Simon considered the point. “If you ask me,” he replied at length, “I should say sixteen.”

The elderly gent’s knobbly face seemed to take on a brighter shade of pink. He clutched the lapels of the Saint’s coat, shaking him slightly in a positive passion of anguish.

“Flogh ghoglu sk,” he pleaded, “klngnt hu ughl-gstghnd?”

Simon shook his head.

“No,” he said judiciously, “you’re thinking of weevils.”

The little man bounced about like a rubber doll. His eyes squinted with a kind of frantic despair.

“Ogmighogho,” he almost screamed, “klngt hu ughglstghnd ? Ik ghln ngmnpp sktlghko 1 Klugt hu hgr ? Ik wgnt hlg phnihkln hgrm skhlglgl!”

The Saint sighed. He was by nature a kindly man to those whom the Gods had afflicted, but time was passing and he was thinking of Jacqueline Laine.

“I’m afraid not, dear old bird,” he murmured regretfully. “There used to be one, but it died. Sorry, I’m sure.”

He patted the elderly gent apologetically upon the shoulder, steered his way around him, and passed on out of earshot of the frenzied sputtering noises that continued to honk despairingly through the dusk behind him. Two minutes later he was with Jacqueline.

Jacqueline Laine was twenty-three; she was tall and slender; she had grey eyes that twinkled and a demoralizing mouth. Both of these temptations were in play as she came towards him; but he was still slightly shaken by his recent encounter.

“Have you got any more village idiots hidden around?” he asked warily, as he took her hands; and she was puzzled.

“We used to have several, but they’ve all got into Congress. Did you want one to take home?”

“My God, no,” said the Saint fervently. “The one I met at the gate was bad enough. Is he your latest boy friend?”

Her brow cleared.

“Oh, you mean the old boy with the cleft palate? Isn’t he marvellous? I think he’s got a screw loose or something. He’s been hanging around all day—he keeps ringing the bell and bleating at me. I’d just sent him away for the third time. Did he try to talk to you?”

“He did sort of wag his adenoids at me,” Simon admitted, “but I don’t think we actually got on to common ground. I felt quite jealous of him for a bit, until I realized that he couldn’t possibly kiss you nearly as well as I can, with that set of teeth.”

He proceeded to demonstrate this.

“I’m still in a hopeless muddle,” she said presently. “But I’ll be ready in five minutes. You can be fixing a cocktail while I finish myself off.”

In the living room there was an open trunk in one corner and a half-filled packing case in the middle of the floor. There were scattered heaps of paper around it, and a few partially wrapped and unidentifiable objects on the table. The room had that curiously naked and inhospitable look which a room, has when it has been stripped of all those intimately personal odds and ends of junk which make it a home, and only the bare furniture is left.

The Saint raised his eyebrows.

“Hullo,” he said. “Are you moving?”

“Sort of.” She shrugged. “Moving out, anyway.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know.”

He realized then that there should have been someone else there, in that room.

“Isn’t your grandmother here any more ?”

“She died four weeks ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“She was a good soul. But she was terribly old. Do you know she was just ninety-seven ?” She held his hand for a moment. “I’ll tell you all about it when I come down. Do you remember where to find the bottles?”

“Templars and elephants never forget.”

He blended bourbon, applejack, vermouth and bitters, skilfully and with the zeal of an artist, while he waited for her, remembering the old lady whom he had seen so often in that room. Also, he remembered the affectionate service that Jacqueline had always lavished on her, cheerfully limiting her own enjoyment of life to meet the demands of an unconscious tyrant who would allow no one else to look after her, and wondered if there was any realistic reason to regret the ending of such a long life. She had, he knew, looked after Jacqueline herself in her time, and had brought her up as her own child since she was left an orphan at the age of three; but life must always belong to the young… . He thought that for Jacqueline it must be a supreme escape, but he knew that she would never say so.

She came down punctually in the five minutes which she had promised. She had changed her dress and put a comb through her hair, and with that seemed to have achieved more than any other woman could have shown for an hour’s fiddling in front of a mirror.-

“You should have been in pictures,” said the Saint, and he meant it.

“Maybe I shall,” she said. “I’ll have to do something to earn a living now.”

“Is it as bad as that?”

She nodded.

“But I can’t complain. I never had to work for anything before. Why shouldn’t I start? Other people have to.”

“Is that why you’re moving out?”

“The house isn’t mine.”

“But didn’t the old girl leave you anything?”

“She left me some letters.”

The Saint almost spilt his drink. He sat down heavily on the edge of the table.

“She left you some letters? After you’d practically been a slave to her ever since you came out of finishing school? What did she do with the rest of her property –leave it to a home for stray cats?”

“No, she left it to Harry.”

“Who?”

“Her grandson.”

“I didn’t know you had any brothers.”

“I haven’t. Harry Westler is my cousin. He’s—well, as a matter of fact he’s a sort of black sheep. He’s a gambler, and he was in prison once for forging a check. Nobody else in the family would have anything to do with him, and if you believe what they used to say about him they were probably quite right; but Granny always had a soft spot for him. She never believed he could do anything wrong—he was just a mischievous boy to her. Well, you know how old she was …”

“And she left everything to him?”

“Practically everything. I’ll show you.”

She went to a drawer of the writing table and brought him a typewritten sheet. He saw that it was a copy of a will, and turned to the details of the bequests.

To my dear granddaughter Jacqueline Laine, who has taken care of me so thoughtfully and unselfishly for four years, One Hundred Dollars and my letters from Sidney Farlance, knowing that she will find them of more value than anything else I could leave her.

To my cook, Eliza Jefferson, and my chauffeur, Albert Gordon, One Hundred Dollars each, for their loyal service.

The remainder of my estate, after these deductions, including my house and other personal belongings, to my dear grandson Harry Westler, hoping that it will help him to make the success of life of which I have always believed him capable.

Simon folded the sheet and dropped it on the table from his finger tips as if it were infected.

“Suffering Judas,” he said helplessly. “After all you did for her—to pension you off on the same scale as the cook and the chauffeur! And what about Harry— doesn’t he propose to do anything about it?”

“Why should he? The will’s perfectly clear.”

“Why shouldn’t he? Just because the old crow went off her rocker in the last days of senile decay is no reason why he shouldn’t do something to put it right. There must have been enough for both of you.”

“Not so much. They found that Granny had been living on her capital for years. There was only about twenty thousand dollars left—and the house.”

“What of it ? He could spare half.”

Jacqueline smiled—a rather tired little smile.

“You haven’t met Harry. He’s—difficult … He’s been here, of course. The agents already have his instructions to sell the house and the furniture. He gave me a week to get out, and the week is up the day after tomorrow. … I couldn’t possibly ask him for anything.”

Simon lighted a cigarette as if it tasted of bad eggs and scowled malevolently about the room.

“The skunk! And so you get chucked out into the wide world with nothing but a hundred dollars.”

“And the letters,” she added ruefully.

“What the hell are these letters?”

“They’re love letters,” she said; and the Saint looked as if he would explode.

“Love letters?” he repeated in an awful voice.

“Yes. Granny had a great romance when she was a girl. Her parents wouldn’t let her get any further with it because the boy hadn’t any money and his family wasn’t good enough. He went abroad with one of these heroic young ideas of making a fortune in South America and coming back in a gold-plated carriage to claim her. He died of fever somewhere in Brazil very soon after, but he wrote her three letters—two from British Guiana and one from Colombia. Oh, I know them by heart—I used to have to read them aloud to Granny almost every night, after her eyes got too bad for her to be able to read them herself. They’re just the ordinary simple sort of thing that you’d expect in the circumstances, but to Granny they were the most precious thing she had. I suppose she had some funny old idea in her head that they’d be just as precious to me.”

“She must have been screwy,” said the Saint. Jacqueline came up and put a hand over his mouth. “She was very good to me when I was a kid,” she said.

“I know, but–-” Simon flung up his arms hopelessly. And then, almost reluctantly, he began to laugh. “But it does mean that I’ve just come back in time. And we’ll have so much fun tonight that you won’t even think about it for a minute.”

Probably he made good his boast, for Simon Templar brought to the solemn business of enjoying himself the same gay zest and inspired impetuosity which he brought to his battles with the technicalities of the law. But if he made her forget, he himself remembered ; and when he followed her into the living room of the house again much later, for a good-night drink, the desolate scene of interrupted packing, and the copy of the will still lying on the table where he had put it down, brought the thoughts with which he had been subconsciously playing throughout the evening back into the forefront of his mind.

“Are you going to let Harry get away with it?” he asked her, with a sudden characteristic directness.

The girl shrugged.

“What else can I do?”

“I have an idea,” said the Saint; and his blue eyes danced with an unholy delight which she had never seen in them before.

Mr Westler was not a man whose contacts with the Law had conspired to make him particularly happy about any of its workings; and therefore when he saw that the card which was brought to him in his hotel bore in its bottom left-hand corner the name of a firm with the words “Attorneys at Law” underneath it, he suffered an immediate hollow twinge in the base of his stomach for which he could scarcely be blamed. A moment’s reflection, however, reminded him that another card with a similar inscription had recently been the forerunner of an extremely welcome windfall, and with this reassuring thought he told the bellboy to bring the visitor into his presence.