Mistress Masham's Repose Read online

  Cook said that she trusted not to make herself an Imposition, being as how as which it would go just as well outside....

  “There! It requires, as you see, a simple sleight of hand. The key has to be inserted upside down, and back to front, owing to some anomaly in the formation of the lock, and then it all goes as smoothly as, as ...”

  “Smooth.”

  “Exactly. And now, Mrs. Noakes, you must step in from the sunlight. You have walked far and fast. Let me see ...

  “I fear,” he continued coyly, “that I am unable to offer you a cup of tea, as I have finished the packet; but there is some excellent boiling water, which can be procured at a moment’s notice, by igniting some of these pieces of wood that I have been making, and ...”

  It was true that he could not offer her the tea, for he had finished the last teaspoon a week before, but it was hardly straight to offer the hot water. He would have had to offer it to anybody else, and he would have done so, but this was not his first visit from Cook. He stood on one leg, looking anxiously at the shopping bag, and continued to say “and ...”

  “Well, there now, Sir! If I did not fortunately think to bring ...”

  He sighed happily.

  “... knowing your ’Abits ...”

  And Mrs. Noakes vanished into the dirty kitchen with her bag, while the Professor peeped through the crack of the door in an agony of anticipation. The whole thing was whether she had brought bloaters or sausages. She always brought one or the other, and today he felt like bloaters. He knew that she would make some tea, out of a screw of paper, and that she would have remembered a bottle of milk and six lumps of sugar, with two buns baked by herself. These were delicious. But, afterward, she always left behind a packet in greased paper, which was either bloaters or sausages, as if she had forgotten it. The Professor never mentioned the packet any more than she did, nor thanked her for it: either because he was too proud, or too shy, or too grateful to thank her properly. He just ate them next day. Meanwhile, he wanted badly to know which it was; but he did not like to ask, could not see through the crack, and was rather ashamed of peeping. So he went back to sit on the soapbox and swallowed rhythmically, because his mouth was watering.

  When Cook had made them an excellent cup of tea, and they had eaten their buns, sitting side by side on the box, she mentioned the reason for her visit. It was that here Miss Maria, Sir, on account of which she was anxious of, being as how there was neither sign nor parable of her to be seen these two days, as which the one what he knowed of, to wit, Miss Brown, though not accustomed to name names, the same what she had referred to notwithstanding, had, though not in the ’Abit of discussing her employers with the Gentry, as the Professor might be sure, on account of her having been bred at Malplaquet from a girl under Mrs. Batterby that was housekeeper to the late Duke, seemingly, if uncharitable to Nourish Suspicions yet Truth will shame the Devil, provided some haction against her, the poor mite, as might be detrementious in a manner of speaking.

  The Professor, who had begun to think of other matters while she was talking, noticed from the silence which followed that it was his turn to say something. He observed resourcefully: “Just fancy!” He had a secret plan for conversations, which consisted in saying either that or else “You don’t say so!”, both of which were foolproof, and could be used in answer to any statement whatever.

  Cook said it was a rare shame, and she had been in such a taking since Friday morning as how she scarcely knew which way to turn, what with the goings on and all, and that here Vicar, for you can’t make a silken purse out of a sow’s ear, not though the Archbishop of Canterbury were to lay his hands on, which she doubted, so it had seemed best that morning, while she was a washing of the dishes, to put the matter before them as was a gentleman born, which you could see was what the Professor was of the stock of, as she would say and had said to any that miscalled him, and to leave the matter in his hands, being as how as which he would surely know what was rightful for to be done.

  A sudden suspicion darted across the Professor’s mind. Cook had been saying ... Surely he had heard ... Something about ...

  “Where is Maria?” he demanded.

  “That’s what I’d give a deal to know. I hant clapped eye on her this two days.”

  “Good gracious!”

  “She’s gone, Sir,” said Cook tearfully. “My Maria. And I always tried to help her little ways.”

  “My dear Mrs. Noakes, but this is most extraordinary! A serious business. Gone? Clapped eye? She cannot have become invisible. Could she be in bed? Under the bed? Up a chimney? At the seaside? Lost? Mislaid somewhere or other? Can she have gone to London? To the British Museum?”

  “That Governess of hers give out that she were gone to visit with an auntie, but no auntie has she got.”

  “And what do you suspect?”

  “She’s in the Palace, yet, Sir. That I’d swear to. But hid. Locked up. She’s in her durance vile.”

  “Dear me. You will, of course, have searched?”

  “There’s rooms, Sir, more than mortal man has counted. I done me best, a-bicycling along the corridors and ringing of my bell.”

  “Well, Mrs. Noakes, you rightly came to me. I will assume the search at once. Some matters are best relegated to the sterner sex. Dear me, dear me! Our poor Maria scotched. Wait till I fetch my hat.”

  The old gentleman hurried upstairs, and returned after some time in a tweed ulster smelling of camphor, with a curious bowler which he had worn as a dandy in the nineties. It had a curly brim. He had to wear the ulster when visiting, however hot it was, in order to cover the holes in his clothes.

  “We will attack,” said he, “this governess in her den. You, Mrs. Noakes, had best return in front of me, using some other path. It would be wise if I might seem to come by chance, inquiring for Maria. We must be exceedingly politic.”

  He bustled her outside the cottage, promising to give her ten minutes’ start, and pushed her off, along the Riding. Two minutes later, he had caught her up.

  “Oh, Mrs. Noakes, excuse me for a moment. You would not have, about you, that is, at your home perhaps, a set of Du Cange?”

  “Well, no, Sir. That I hant. There’s Beeton ...”

  “You refer to the second archbishop of that name, no doubt. Certainly not the Cardinal. The others were unclerkly, as we know.”

  “It’s cooking, Sir.”

  “Indeed? An ancient and a noble art. A continuator of the Goodman, I daresay. But still, you have no volumes of Du Cange?”

  “Not that I know of, Sir.”

  “A pity. Well, well, well, we can’t have everything. But I am keeping you. Good-by, good-by.”

  After another minute he had caught her up again.

  “The word,” he said hopefully, “is Tripharium. You have not come across it in the course of reading, I suppose?”

  “Not as I recollect, Sir, no, I haven’t.”

  “No. Ah, well. We must possess our souls in patience, Mrs. Noakes. The ‘I,’ of course, is optional, as scribes would use their vowels more or less to fancy. ‘Tripharium,’ with a ‘n,’ would do as well?”

  “There’s tripe ...”

  “Tripe,” cried the Professor angrily, “is a Gaelic word. Nothing to do with tripe at all. Good day to you. Good day.”

  And he stalked off in a huff, until he remembered the parcel in the kitchen. This made his anger melt, and he turned to wave to his kind friend if he could, but she did not look back. Then, to give her the start, he hurried back to investigate the parcel itself. It was bloaters, as he had hoped!

  He forgot about Maria and began looking up “bloaters” in a dictionary, to see if they were derived from the Swedish word “blöt,” which they were.

  CHAPTER XX

  AN hour later the Professor tried to scratch his head, found that the hat was in his way, and wondered why he had put it on. He made several attempts to solve this problem, by free suggestion and self-analysis, finally deciding that he had put it o
n because he was going out. He therefore went out, and looked at the sky. It did not seem to have any message for him. So he went in again, found a piece of paper, and wrote on it the first word which occurred to him while concentrating on hats. This was Tripharium. He tore it up and tried again, getting RATTO, which he thought was probably something to do with Bishop Hanno and the rats. So he tried HANNO and got WINDUP, tried WINDUP and got CAPE, tried CAPE and got ULSTER. He discovered that he was wearing his ulster, and was delighted. This was followed by a longish tour through the provinces of Ireland, the Annals of the Four Masters, and so forth, which brought him back to Tripharium. He tried this, and got BLOATERS, which he connected by now entirely with Sweden, took a short circuit through GOTHENBURG, SWEDENBORG, BLAKE, and GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS, and suddenly remembered that he was pledged to find Maria. So he balanced the bottle-green bowler still more carefully upon his head, and trotted off to do his duty.

  It was a basking day.

  The trees trapped the heat until the Ridings were long ovens, the ulster was unbearably hot, the bees droned like aircraft in the sticky leaves of the lime trees, the swallows who had built nests on south walls fanned their babies and gasped for breath, the grass snakes were out in force, making life a misery to the frogs, and the frogs themselves were committing suicide by dozens, under the wheels of any passing motor. The Professor toiled away into the distance, a small industrious beetle under the copper sky, getting smaller and smaller as he plodded off toward Malplaquet.

  He was not sure what to do.

  To search the Palace legally, as he knew from his studies, he would require several writs of Habeas Corpus, together with a De Heretico Comburendo or so, and perhaps a Non Compos Mentis. On the other hand, he also knew that it was possible for two or three people to ramble about in the various corridors for several weeks, without meeting each other; so that there seemed little reason why he should not search in an unofficial way, because nobody was likely to notice whether he was there or not. The easiest thing would have been to find Miss Brown, to face her down, and to demand the release of her pupil. Unfortunately, he had no real proof that Maria was still in the house, and, besides, he was afraid of the Governess. She had once been very rude to him, and he was afraid that the facing down might happen the other way round. He felt unhappy, and tried to cool himself as he went, by waving his hat.

  When he had passed the Grecian Amphitheater, and the sixty-foot pyramid in honor of General Burgoyne, the Valley of Concord opened before him, as Capability Brown had always intended that it should, and there was the vast bulk of the mansion at the end of it. Wren, Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor, Kent, and the rest of them had erected its dozen colonnades; Adam, Patrioli, and others had plastered its hundred ceilings; Sheraton, Heppelwhite, Chippendale, etc., had stuffed it with furniture, since sold; and there it lay before the Professor in the evening sunlight, with more rooms than anybody could remember.

  He let himself in by a ruined door in the west wing, and began to search.

  He searched the Gothick Billiard Room—which had once held a table as big as a swimming bath, and which still had the coat armor of all Maria’s ancestors painted on the imitation wooden tracery of the ceiling. The central achievement had been kindly provided by Horry Walpole, and it had 441 quarterings, including the arms of Boadicea and Herod Antipas. All the bends were sinister and all the wives were on the wrong side of their husbands.

  He searched the Orangery, where Gibbon had scratched out a semicolon in the famous last paragraph of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, before presenting the eighth volume to the Duke of Gloucester—who had observed affably: “Another damned thick book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?”

  He searched the Menagerie, where the Earl of Chesterfield had once been locked by mistake for two days as a monkey, and a pity they did not keep him there for good.

  He searched the Chinese Parlor, into which Rousseau had suddenly rushed in 1768, when he had indignantly read out an interminable and incomprehensible letter from himself to Diderot, leaving all hearers completely stunned.

  He searched the Rent Room, where the Wicked Earl had once run his estate agent through the body—the former claimed during his trial by the Lords that it had been in a duel, but the agent still walked on Tuesday nights, with the hilt of the sword in the small of his back, which was a good argument to the contrary.

  He searched the Chart Room, where one of the viscounts, an admiral, had been accustomed to keep his sextant and other instruments, on retiring from the service after having lost Majorca, Minorca, Bermuda, Goa, Simla, Hecla, and Alabama, in a series of naval engagements.

  He searched the Gun Room, out of whose window the Duke of Orleans had been accustomed to shoot larks with the corks from champagne bottles.

  He searched the Fertilizer Room, where the Master of Malplaquet, who had invented three separate potato grubbers, had been accustomed to store enormous quantities of Hypersuperextrainfraphosphates, for the use of his tenant farmers.

  He even searched the State Room, in which Queen Victoria had held the only Drawing Room ever held outside a royal castle, and in it there was the very chair in which she had sat, with a glass lid over the seat, to preserve the royal imprint.

  The Professor lifted the lid and sat down himself, for he was beginning to feel tired.

  Then he got up with a sigh and went upstairs to the Clock Room in the pediment of the North Front, which had a clock made by Christopher Pinchbeck II, which played “When the Heart of a Man Is Depressed with Cares,” in four parts, one at each quarter—people got over it in time, and stopped listening.

  His quarry was not there.

  The Professor began to lose his head, and to hurry from one floor to another, as the different ideas occurred to him.

  He searched the Butler’s Strong Room, which had at various times held the Derby, Grand National, and Ascot gold cups, as well as an epergne in the shape of a banyan tree which had been presented to the Sixth Duke by the grateful inhabitants of Bombay.

  He tried the stables for 144 horses, the kennels for 144 hounds, the attics for 144 abigails or footmen, and the Card Room, where Charles James Fox had once lost £ 144,000 in a single night, wearing scarlet heels to his shoes and blue powder on his wig.

  He even tried the Armory, which had once housed the accoutrements of the Third Duke’s Own Northamptonshire Fencibles—and also a party of visitors who had been mislaid while being shown round the Palace, in aid of charity, by a forgetful butler, in 1915.

  His hostage was nowhere to be seen.

  The poor Professor sat down on the bare floor of the Armory for a second rest. Then he pulled himself together for a final effort, and searched afresh.

  He searched the Pavilion, where an absent-minded Lord Dudley had once invited Sydney Smith to dinner with the remark: “Dine with me today, and I will get Sydney Smith to meet you”—to which Mr. Sydney Smith had courteously replied that he was engaged to meet him elsewhere.

  He searched the Colonnade, where the great Pope himself had walked with William Broome, on the night when he was persuading the latter to persuade Tonson to publish a letter from Lintot, signed however by Cleland, and purporting to have been written by Bolingbroke, in which Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was accused of having suspected a Mr. Green of persuading Broome to refuse permission to Tonson to publish a letter by Cleland, purporting to have been signed by Lintot, without the knowledge of Bolingbroke, about the personal habits of Dr. Arbuthnot, under the pseudonym of Swift. (On the other hand, a person named Worsdale, a mere tool, calling himself R. Smythe, was to tell Curll that a certain “P. T.,” a secret enemy of Temple, possessed a copy of the correspondence between Lord Hervey and Colley Cibber: with obvious results.)

  He went out of doors at last, and searched the fountain which Boswell had once fallen into, to amuse the Great Lexicographer.

  He even poked about under the equestrain statue of dapper little George II, seated on a horse with no girths, and for that
reason perhaps the very one which had run away with him at Dettingen.

  Maria was nowhere to be seen.

  In the garden, the Professor observed Miss Brown on her knees, doing something venomous to a bed of geraniums. She was wearing a straw hat, wielding a trowel, kneeling on a carpet mat, and singing bitterly to herself. The Schoolmaster’s escape had been discovered.

  The Professor took off his green bowler, and said politely: “Excuse me, Miss Brown.”

  “Oh, it is you, is it. What do you want now?”

  “Well ... nothing. Thank you. I was just ... walking round.”

  “You have a fine day for it,” said she. “The gate is there behind.”

  “The gate? Oh, yes, I see. The gate for going away from. Yes ...

  “Well,” he continued after a bit, “good-by, Miss Brown.”

  “Good-by.”

  “Good-by.”

  “And none of your Nosey-Parkering.”

  “What?”

  “I said: None of your Nosey-Parkering.”

  “No, certainly not. No.”

  He turned his hat round several times, and added bravely: “The geraniums are red?”

  “Do you want me,” cried Miss Brown viciously, swinging round on her knees and pointing the trowel at him, “to set the Vicar on you? Go away. Shut the gate after you. What are you doing here?”

  “I was ... calling on Maria.”

  “Then you can call elsewhere. She’s gone away.”

  “To stay with an aunt?”

  “Who told you so?”

  “I ... I was guessing.”

  “She’s gone away,” said Miss Brown brutally, “to stay with her aunt on Timbuctoo, tee-hee! I suppose you won’t be calling on her there? Buzz off, you bluebottle.”

  The Professor scuttled away while Miss Brown laughed atrociously, and the last he heard of her, as he closed the gate with trembling fingers, blushing all over, was when she settled down to sing some private words once more to her geraniums: