Uncle Fred In The Springtime by P. G. Wodehouse

Author:P. G. Wodehouse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-09-10T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

In supposing that their heart-to-heart talk would cause Rupert Baxter to abandon his intention of making a public exposure of his machinations, Lord Ickenham had been correct. In his assumption that he had rendered the man behind the steel-rimmed spectacles a spent force, however, he had erred. Baxter’s hat was still in the ring. At Blandings Castle he had a staunch ally in whom he could always confide, and it was to her boudoir that he made his way within five minutes of leaving the billiard-room.

‘Could I speak to you for a moment, Lady Constance?’

‘Certainly, Mr Baxter.’

‘Thank you,’ said the secretary, and took a seat.

He had found Lady Constance in a mood of serene contentment. In the drawing-room over the coffee she had had an extended interview with that eminent brain-specialist, Sir Roderick Glossop, and his views regarding the Duke, she was pleased to find, were in complete accord with her own. He endorsed her opinion that steps must be taken immediately, but assured her that only the simplest form of treatment was required to render His Grace a man who, if you put an egg into his hand, would not know what to do with it.

And she had been running over in her mind a few of his most soothing pronouncements and thinking what a delightful man he was, when in came Baxter. And within a minute, for he was never a man to beat about the bush and break things gently, he had wrecked her peace of mind as thoroughly as if it had been a sitting-room and he her old friend with a whippy-shafted poker in his hand.

‘Mr Baxter!’ she cried.

From anyone else she would have received the extraordinary statement which he had just made with raised eyebrows and a shrivelling stare. But her faith in this man was the faith of a little child. The strength of his personality, though she had a strong personality herself, had always dominated her completely.

‘Mr BAX-ter!’

The secretary had anticipated some such reaction on her part. This spasm of emotion was what is known in the motion-picture world as ‘the quick take ’um’, and in the circumstances he supposed that it was inevitable. He waited in stern silence for it to expend itself.

‘Are you sure?’

A flash of steel-rimmed spectacles told her that Rupert Baxter was not a man who made statements without being sure.

‘He admitted it to me personally.’

‘But he is such a charming man.’

‘Naturally. Charm is the chief stock-in-trade of persons of that type.’

Lady Constance’s mind was beginning to adjust itself to the position of affairs. After all, she reflected, this was not the first time that impostors had insinuated themselves into Blandings Castle. Her nephew Ronald’s chorus-girl, to name one instance, had arrived in the guise of an American heiress. And there had been other cases. Indeed, she might have felt justified in moments of depression in yielding to the gloomy view that her visiting list consisted almost exclusively of impostors. There appeared to be something about Blandings Castle that attracted impostors as cat-nip attracts cats.

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